The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  “What was the previous?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to tell you. You need to take it up through channels – Superintendent Drummond at CNC Sellafield can brief you. The codeword Freudstein said to associate with your name is ‘Infinity Concerto,’ whatever that means.”

  I end the call hyperventilating: Freudstein coming to the attention of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary can’t be good.

  Jim gets there first. “I heard Freudstein…?”

  “Sellafield,” I say bleakly. “Freudstein did something there three days ago. He’s just claimed responsibility and given us a codeword – and he’s hanging it on my neck.”

  “Sellafield?” That’s Karim. He sounds shocked.

  I look at Jim. “We need to get in touch with a Superintendent Drummond. Find out what the hell is going on and why Freudstein wants to talk.” Because they never hand you a codeword unless they want to talk, from a position of strength. “Can you follow this up for me?”

  “Yes.” Jim stands up. “I’ll go make some calls. Looks like Freudstein’s decided to give us some actual insights into the Mad Scientist Menace. Let’s just hope they’re not misleading and deadly.”

  Six o’clock rolls around and I’m still in the office, one ear tuned to the radio – late summer is the Proms season, the mammoth sequence of standing-room-only concerts that are to classical music in London as Wimbledon is to tennis – so there’s a new concert broadcast from the Albert Hall just about every night. I’m using it to try to distract myself from worrying about that call while I update my weekly situation report to the SA. There’s a knock at my office door: “Come in,” I say without looking up.

  “Hello, Dominique. Do you have a few minutes?”

  It’s Jim. “Sure.” I smile tiredly. “I was just about ready to wrap up. Did you get anywhere?”

  “Yes —” He looks around my office. “Yes, I did.” He sounds frustrated. “It’s Freudstein’s work, although they didn’t know it at the time. Three days ago.” He shakes his head, face unreadable.

  “What did Freudstein do?”

  “Tampered with the national plutonium stockpile.”

  “He – What?”

  “He didn’t steal anything: he just wanted to send us a message. A very scary one, in my opinion, but a nuanced one. Pretty much what you’d expect from a Mad Scientist with a genius-level IQ who wanted to rattle our cage. It might have been better in some ways if he had stolen something, frankly: at least we’d have a clear-cut idea of what was going on. The implications are still sinking in, which is why they’re keeping a tight lid on it – DA-Notices on the news media, massive security panic, circular firing squad, the whole nine yards.”

  “He didn’t steal anything —” I stop. “Oh, you said tampering. What kind of tampering?”

  “They’re not entirely certain yet: it’s going to take a full audit of the contents of SPRS – the Sellafield Product and Residues Store – to rule out the possibility that the obvious tampering was a decoy to divert attention from some other nefarious activity. I mean, we know he messed up a bunch of archives at the BL to conceal the theft of manuscripts, but this is worse. Someone who is now tentatively identified as Freudstein or his accomplices broke into SPRS, got into part of the secure plutonium store, and left behind additional storage flasks containing approximately twelve kilograms of mixed-isotope metallic instant sunshine. Just in case nobody noticed, they painted them lime green and sprayed CND symbols and smiley faces on top.” He sighs heavily. “Needless to say they had to get past razor-wire fences, cameras, dog patrols, an electric fence, more cameras, and into a heavily reinforced concrete building patrolled by trigger-happy officers of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary armed with fully automatic weapons and an Army surface-to-air missile battery on top – because when they finish building the annex, it’s going to contain nearly a hundred tons of plutonium. Twelve kilos is enough to build two basic atom bombs… heads are going to roll.”

  “I’ll say.” I hit “save” and shove my keyboard away: the weekly sitrep suddenly seems trivial. “That’s what he broke into? The secure plutonium store? Just to send us a card saying, Hi, I baked you an atom bomb but I eated it?” Butterflies take flight in my stomach. “Jesus.”

  “The first step is to make sure nothing else is missing. Freudstein could have played a shell-game on us, after all. Swapped storage flasks around… the second step is, I’m told you can usually identify the production source for these isotopes by looking at their relative abundance. There are several other nations who might take a keen interest in checking their deposits for unauthorized overdrafts. But to do that means confessing your sins to the IAEA, who leak like a garden sprinkler and who will go totally apeshit if they think someone got at the UK stockpile. I mean, we’ll never hear the end of it. Questions in the UN Security Council, ambassadors being called in, that kind of thing. As soon as it hits the press – and it’s too big to hush up – it’s going to go nuclear, if you’ll pardon the expression. And then there’s the question of how Freudstein did it in the first place. On which subject they’re going to want our input.” Jim sounds gloomy.

  “But we’ve barely got anything on him!” I feel like tearing my hair out.

  “Yes, I told them that. But we’re the Home Office supervillain experts. They’re not happy. I reckon we can expect to be carpeted by Her Upstairs no later than Monday. Sooner, if it goes back to COBRA – they were briefed on the original break-in, but the Freudstein angle is new.”

  “Whoop-de-doo. Do we have a report on how he – no, they – got through the security perimeter?”

  “That’s going to be classified, but we can probably get hold of it if you really need it. But. Hmm. Why did you say ‘they’?”

  “Oh, come on. The profiling exercise we’ve been doing – if there is a real Mad Scientist Menace, then it’s probably more accurate to call it a Mad Science Corporate Menace. You don’t brew up pocket death rays in your basement all on your lonesome —”

  “What about the Laundry’s extradimensional summoning devices?” Jim leans forward. “I heard some of your devices are ultra-portable, compact. Programmable. We’re talking laptop-sized, not particle accelerators.”

  “Maybe, maybe, but that stuff’s dangerous. One misplaced semicolon in your program and an extradimensional amoeba shows up inside your brain and cores you from the inside out. Our researchers practice pair programming for a reason – there’s more chance of one of them spotting a lethal bug before they find it the hard way.” I shudder. Leave that stuff to Bob. “Our own equipment and materials are heavily classified and protected by our usual security geas – oath, that is, or maybe curse of obedience. It provides slightly more security than your regular oath to Queen and Country. Meanwhile, if you try to develop a nondeterministic invocation geometry engine from scratch, you run the risk of getting overconfident and finding out the hard way that there’s a memory leak. That’s why progress in the occult sciences was so slow until we developed digital computers and had a war-footing organization working on it.”

  But the thought has a certain nagging consistency. What if Freudstein is an insider? With some level of access to our standard code libraries and some theoretical background, a lone highly intelligent Mad Scientist could play catch-up surprisingly fast. Build a white-room clone of our core tools, working at home on their own time… Worse, what if Freudstein is a front for an entire insider team – a government department that’s gone rogue? I can’t see why such a group would want all the unwelcome publicity Freudstein is drawing down, but just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean there’s no fire concealed behind all the smoke and tabloid headlines. I don’t want to share this last insight with Jim, but it’s definitely something to suggest to Internal Affairs via Dr. Armstrong.

  “It’s getting late,” says Jim. “I was thinking about looking for something to eat. Do you have any plans for dinner?”

  “No, I just need to finish this report and I’m done
—”

  “Let me rephrase: Are you hungry? If so, would you like to accompany me to a restaurant?”

  I blink. This is one of my three-nights-off, and I’ve completely forgotten to make any plans. “I can do dinner, but I need to finish this report first. Give me ten minutes?”

  “Happy to. Lobby in fifteen?” He rises smoothly to his feet and looks at me expectantly.

  “That’ll be great,” I tell him, and I mean it. Then I go back into deep focus. I’ve got a weekly situation report to file, after all; and I can slip my theories about Freudstein in with the rest of it.

  I make my way down to the lobby around six thirty and find Jim cooling his heels there. His face lights up when he sees me. “Mind if I drive?” he asks. “It’ll save me coming back here afterwards.”

  “Happily.” I follow him down to the basement garage, past Ramona’s lurking vehicle of the uncanny – maintaining its white van disguise for the time being – to a silver BMW Z4 roadster. It’s parked with its soft top folded away. “Nice motor. Yours?”

  “Mine,” he confirms as he zaps it awake with his keyfob. “I have to do a lot of driving.”

  I slide my violin into the narrow gap behind the passenger seat, then climb in. I find it a snug fit; Jim wears his car like a glove. He glances over his shoulder and gooses it to life, backs out of his slot, then screeches up the exit ramp before giving way to pedestrians who are crossing the entrance. Clearly he’s no Steve McQueen. The sky is gray and threatens us with rain, but he drives with the roof down. I hunch behind the windscreen, very glad I tied my hair back. He drives aggressively (everyone in London drives aggressively), but attentively, sticking to speed limits and paying a lot of attention to his mirrors. “Cyclists,” he explains, while stopped at a traffic signal: “They’re the biggest hazard right now, especially at dusk. Most drivers are blind to them, especially if they’re running without lights. But if you don’t spot one coming up in your blind spot…”

  “I get it,” I say. Bob and I don’t own a car, although we both have driving licenses. “We didn’t discuss where we were going.”

  He gives me a sidelong grin, then the lights change and his eyes go back to their hazard perception scan as he flings the sports car around a road pillow and a chicane and nails the needle to the speed limit. (Which is only thirty, but it feels a lot faster with wind in your hair and bugs in your teeth.) “Trust me?” he asks.

  “Okay…”

  It is an early autumn evening in London and for an instant I’m back in my early twenties again, a time when I was in love with a strong, witty man who had a sports car and wanted to impress me (that was a more innocently dangerous time, two decades ago). It was a time of naive pleasure, when all life’s possibilities seemed open to me, before we married and subsequently divorced. I’m older now, but Jim is not only strong and witty, but a whole lot wiser than David ever was – and I suspect more dangerous in a fight (for all that David did military service in Israel). So the flash of déjà vu is not unwelcome. But I’m older now, and I recognize certain warning signs, starting with the pocket rocket whose passenger seat I’m now strapped into.

  “So, Jim, I take it you’re not paying your kids’ university fees?” I prod.

  “Nope.” I wonder for a moment if he’s being terse because he’s looking for a narrow turnoff from Victoria Embankment, or because I struck an exposed nerve, but then he explains: “Sally lives with Liz, and Liz out-earns me – she’s a QC. She got the house, I got what she calls the mid-life penis extension.” He pats the steering wheel affectionately. “That was three years ago. Time flies.” Then his head swivels rapidly as he stops and reverses rapidly into a snug parking space. “I’ll worry about the university tuition when Sally gets a place – she’s sixteen.”

  So my guess was right. “Was it the job?” I ask.

  “Which one? We both took our chances in a relationship-eating profession.” He looks morose for a moment, then his expression clears: “Come on, I need to put the hood up before we go eat. It’d be a shame if it rained.”

  The restaurant turns out to be a trattoria near Covent Garden Market, a short walk from our parking space. Jim holds the door open for me, a slightly old-fashioned gesture I wasn’t expecting. “Reservation for two, name of Grey,” he tells the maître d’, and insists I go first as that worthy leads us to a table with a commanding view of the London Transport Museum. We’re not far from the Strand, and the presence of the concrete-blocked Aldwych tube station nags at my attention like a loose tooth. “If you want wine, be my guest,” he offers. “I’m strictly on the wagon when I’m driving.”

  “And I’ve got a meeting tomorrow at nine o’clock,” I say, trying not to wince at the thought. “Maybe some other time.” I pick up the menu. “Do you have any suggestions?” Do you come here often?

  “I’m told it’s all good, you can’t go wrong.” He studies his menu for a bit. “But I think I’ll keep it simple: the bruschetta followed by the lasagne.”

  I roll the mental dice, decide to try the mozzarella and tomato salad, then the spaghetti aglio e olio. “I wish I could keep my life as simple as this menu.”

  A waiter turns up to take our order. After he’s gone Jim starts up the conversation again, with a leading question: “I can’t help noticing you spend an inordinate number of hours in the office.” I can imagine him continuing: And one of your colleagues mentioned a tense domestic situation. Because offices leak.

  I wrinkle my nose. “My husband and I both work for the Laundry. No children, not that it matters. Yes, things have been tense lately. He’s, um, living elsewhere at the moment. Trial separation.” The words somehow make it sound more final than it is.

  “I’m sorry.” His pro forma apology closes off that line of conversation before I can succumb to the temptation to use him as a shoulder to unload on – highly unprofessional, I know. “All I can say is, I hope it gets better for you.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m too busy to notice right now.” Bob’s bouncing all over the map, I’ve managed to cut back to working only seventy hours a week, and I don’t have time to deal right now. “I’ve been walking the all-work-and-no-play treadmill for a while. I really ought to get out more.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? It’s a start.”

  “Yes, but I haven’t been to a concert or a theater or the opera for months. I haven’t even tried to score tickets to any of the Proms.” Even before the current crisis I was withdrawing: the panic attacks I get in public places with no cover and too many people had been growing for a long time. If anything they’re a little better these days, since Agent CANDID went on the shelf and Dr. O’Brien the Bureaucratic Functionary came out of the closet. And some of the mythological tropes… they cut too close to the bone. The bone violin. The – “How about you?”

  “Now that you mention it, hmm. I was spending too much time in Aberdeen and Fishguard earlier in the year. Wonderful places, but not exactly capital-city-grade cultural beacons,” he says drily. (When he’s thinking, he goes very still, I notice. Bob gets twitchy.) “Just as the whole three-sigma superpower thing blew up out of virtually nowhere, in a matter of months. Which ate all my spare time especially after I discovered I was…” He looks rueful. “I haven’t been spending enough weekends with Sally. Liz has been nagging me to pull my weight, and I’m afraid she’s right.”

  “I imagine looking after a sixteen-year-old must be a bit of a headache.”

  “Oh, it’s mostly about building trust. She’s still in the ugh, parents, uncool stage, but she’s self-aware enough to know that it’s just something she’s going through. So I’m trying to give her enough space that she doesn’t feel the need to burn bridges she might want to maintain later. The best thing you can do is provide them with a support framework rather than a cage. Don’t try to micromanage and overprotect them, let them know they can come to you when they’ve got problems, and as long as they’ve got a reasonably level head, that’s what they’ll do.” He pauses. �
�And I try to keep a poker face whenever she introduces me to a boyfriend.”

  His expression does something to me: I grin at him, then giggle, and he chuckles, and we end up laughing at each other. In my case it’s at the vision of a typical teenage male’s reaction at being invited home to meet the girlfriend’s parents for the first time and discovering that Daddy is Robocop; I’m not so sure what Jim is laughing at.

  “I try to go easy on them,” he adds when the chuckles subside. “We were all young once.”

  “Oh, I know some people who weren’t,” I say carelessly, thinking of Angleton. It brings up an incongruous sense of absence, the missing-tooth outline of a vacated life. “Um.” I pick up my water glass. “To absent friends.”

  “Absent friends,” he echoes with a clink of glassware and a quizzical expression. “Someone close?”

  “Co-worker,” I say automatically. “Known him for nearly ten years. Died a couple of months ago.”

  “Oh, that incident… I’m sorry for your loss.” And he does indeed look genuinely, respectfully concerned.

  Food happens, and so does conversation that is amusing and intelligent and that steers clear of the two pitfalls of work (not safe for conversation in public) and messy personal entanglements (not safe for conversation in private). I actually enjoy myself, so I’m a little sad to see the dessert menu and realize that my eyes are larger than my stomach. “This isn’t going to work,” I sigh. “I can’t stay here forever. And anyway, I’ve got that nine o’clock meeting tomorrow.”

  “Not to worry, I’ll give you a ride home.” Jim starts looking to catch the waiter’s eye. I’ve been trying for a few minutes, fruitlessly – the invisibility thing is particularly infuriating in restaurants – but he has the middle-aged alpha male Gaze of Waiter Summoning down pat, and the maître d’ is over in a split second. “My treat,” Jim says, brandishing his plastic.