The Apocalypse Codex lf-4

by Charles Stross

  Persephone blinked. Uneventful. Boring. Sleepy. That was the problem with trying to cram while leaning back in a recliner with a tumbler of Wild Turkey at forty thousand feet: it was too easy to doze off. Johnny found this stuff interesting (his upbringing had, if nothing else, exposed him to some of the wilder reaches of fundamentalist Christianity) but she was making heavy weather of it, finding their feuds and arguments as arcane and recondite as Trotskyite ontogeny or cultist schismatics. Pay attention now. This stuff was—would be—important. Golden Promise Ministries, the Fellowship, National Organization for Marriage, True Path Publishing, Stone Industries Small Arms, Pillar of Fire International, the Purity Path Pledge League—they were all merging into a whirling tattered spiderweb of Christian Dominionist pressure groups and fund-raising organizations. Deeper connections to shadowy ultra-conservative billionaire sponsors were hinted at but coyly elided—nobody wanted to speak truth to the power to launch a million libel lawsuits.

  Johnny honked, a sluggish bass. Persephone reached out and poked his shoulder.

  “Yes? Duchess.”

  “You were snoring.”

  “Was I? Oh bugger.” He stabbed at the power button on his seat, then waited until it tilted up to Persephone’s level. “Something come up?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” She closed the folder. Quietly, she added: “I make a sky marshal two rows ahead, over to the left, aisle seat. Dead-heading pilot to his right. Four businessmen, a retired couple, one woman and child. Am I missing anyone?”

  By way of reply, Johnny stood up clumsily and stepped across her legs, then walked aft towards the toilets. A couple of minutes later he returned. “I match your count. We’re green.”

  Over the years, Persephone and Johnny had frequently needed to discuss confidential matters in public, so they’d long since worked out a protocol to improvised security. A first-class airliner cabin was pretty good—lots of background white noise, little opportunity for adversaries to plant bugging devices (especially after they’d arranged last-minute seat changes with the cabin crew), an easy environment to monitor for eavesdroppers. By color-coding it green Johnny was agreeing that it was—conditionally—safe to talk.

  Persephone relaxed infinitesimally. “Do we know any forensic accountants on this side of the pond?”

  “Accountants?” Johnny frowned. “We’re going to Denver. If you wanted to pick up an accountant, couldn’t we have stopped on Wall Street?”

  “I didn’t know we’d need one until…” She gestured irritably at the folder. “It’s a real mess. As bad as mafia money laundering, all barter and back-scratching.”

  “You’re assuming this is about cash, Duchess.”

  “It usually is.” She looked pensive. “Except when it’s about power.”

  “What about religion?”

  “Religion is power, to these people. And power is religion, of course. If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? The real believers are running soup kitchens and emptying bedpans, trying to do good while the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel are doing it to keep up the payments on the McMansion and the Roller.”

  She spoke with quiet vehemence, fingers whitening on the spine of the folder. “Power and money. It’s about all of those things, otherwise why is Schiller trying to gain access to the highest levels of government? He’s a fraud and a dabbler, and Mr. Lockhart shall have his evidence.”

  Johnny thought for a while. Then he shook his head slowly. “You’re wrong this time, Duchess. Snark or Boojum. What if he is a true believer, have you thought about that?”

  “A true believer in what? The prosperity gospel? New Republican Jesus who rewards his faithful flock for their faith with the ability to make money fast? That’s self-serving cant, and you know it. Wish-fulfillment as religion.” A twitch of the cheek: Persephone unamused. “Don’t get me started on the gap between the Vatican and their flock.”

  “I know the church I grew up in.” McTavish is silent for a few seconds. “I could smell it on him. He’s one of the unconditionally elect, Duchess, and it’s quite probable that he holds to the old rites.”

  “If it’s a shell, what’s going on under cover of the church?”

  “Well.” Johnny shuffles uncomfortably. “You know about the five points of Calvinism, yes? Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Up in the western isles they take it all too damn seriously. That, and the, uh, cousins under the sea. They hold that they’re unconditionally elect; and that the bloodline of the elect are going to usher in the new age and summon Jesus back to earth—but only when he’s good and ready, you understand. Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it? But anyway, that’s what we could be looking at, worst case.”

  “So you think they’re a cover for a cell of cultists who are planning on raising something?”

  “If you pray to Jesus on the cosmic party line and something at the other end picks up the receiver, because you happen to have an affinity for the uncanny and your prayers attract attention, what are you going to assume?” Johnny shuffles again. “But they’re not cultists in the regular sense, Duchess. Quite possibly they’re just your regular prosperity gospel preaching televangelists. There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re trying to summon up the elder gods.”

  “In which case we’re back to money again.” She smiles triumphantly.

  “Some of these Pentecostalists, Duchess, they’re not all con men. From 3 John: ‘I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.’ Suppose rather than passing the plate in church, they get a radio show and pass the plate and half a million listeners donate. Isn’t that going to convince a preacher that it’s all true? Wealth comes to the faithful, that’s the message they’re going to take. An’ I never yet met a con man who wasn’t the better at the job for believing his own spiel.”

  “That’s not…untrue. But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it. He might have started out as a true believer, but money has a way of taking over. A church is a business, after all, and those employees or executives who are good at raising money are promoted by their fellows.”

  Johnny shrugged, helpless in the face of her conviction. “I still reckon you shouldn’t discount belief, Duchess. They may be after the money as well, but they’re motivated primarily by faith. I know Schiller’s kind: I was born and raised to be one of the elect.”

  “But you broke out,” she observed. “And that was a couple of decades ago, and you don’t know Schiller personally. He’s an American cousin, not one of your relatives.”

  “All true.”

  “So. We’ve got a situation to investigate. Is Schiller fronting a cult or merely making money? That’s worth knowing, but what we really want to find out is why he’s putting so much effort into getting in deep in the UK. Recruiting hands and doing breakfast with VIPs.”

  “So you’ve got a plan?”

  “Not much of one.” Persephone’s lips wrinkled. “The provisional plan is that there is no plan. First we scope the site and designate accessible dead-letter drops. Then I go in, I do the course, and I come out. You’ll be sitting on the outside monitoring the message drops—I won’t make contact directly unless I want to abort. Gerry’s little helper will make contact with you while I’m inside; if I learn anything, pass it on to him. I think it’d be useful to customize a penetration toolkit for the job, and have two escape routes planned in case things go really off the rails. But I’m not expecting any trouble. It’s a residential retrea
t and bible study course aimed at recruiting new blood, not a Gulag or an army base.”

  “What kind of penetration toolkit do you want? You planning on worming their computers?”

  “Yes. You can research the religious angle if you want, but I think we’ll have difficulty getting access and working out what they’re trying to do if Schiller really is running an inner circle. We’re under time pressure here, so I’m aiming for the low-hanging fruit: if it’s about money or power there’ll be an audit trail. So I’m thinking in terms of installing a back door, and after the course is over and I’m out of the zone we will use it to take a look inside Schiller’s email inbox.”

  “Hmm.” Johnny thought for a moment. “I think there’s an updated release of the Zeus toolkit I can use to knock something suitable up with. We’ll need to buy a new zero-day exploit, but that’s affordable. What’s your level one cover story if they catch you?”

  “I keep my email on a memory stick. There’ll be an infected message in my inbox, so when I plug it into one of their computers it’ll auto-run. If I’m caught, I’m just an ignorant, technically illiterate socialite with an infected email set-up—the security trail can lead back to a spear phishing attack on my bank account. Victim not perp, in other words.”

  “That sounds very good. So…you go in, read your email, finish the course, leave, then we have a party with his email. Hmm. Exit strategies?”

  “I want you to buy three cars and locate two safe houses downtown. If I need to run I’ll signal you, then drive out, swap plates and wheels, pick up new ID, and keep driving. I’ll charge up the NetJets account to cover seats on standby and we can prepare an evac plan via the nearest airports—but that’s conspicuous. Much better to just drop off the map and turn up in Utah or New Mexico twenty-four hours later. Then revert to regular ID and fly commercial.”

  “Okay, three cars, two pads. One escape car, plus a remount and a decoy? We’ll be sourcing proper motors, for appearances sake?”

  “Perfect: you read my mind.”

  “Okay. So let’s make that a hot four-by-four with off-road capability for the escape car, then two boring mom taxis with tuned-up engines. Why not a bike?”

  “Too conspicuous. Also, hard to ride one in heels and a skirt. I’m a well-dressed society matron in this scenario, don’t forget.”

  “Noted. You’re going to do this unarmed?”

  “Johnny—” She smiled. “I’m a foreign VIP guest; they’d smell a rat if I went with concealed carry.”

  “Okay, field-expedient gear only. May I say that I don’t like this, Duchess? Whether or not you trust Gerry, you don’t know what these cults can be like—you’ve never been in one. You’re going to be totally exposed if anything goes wrong—”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong.” Her self-assurance was complete. “I’m a VIP guest on a study retreat week, not an armed intruder, and you’ll just be a lonely foreign tourist taking in some church services. The deadliest thing I’ll be carrying will be a corrupted email box on a memory stick. Unless they turn out to be a front for the Red Skull Cult or the Malaysian Presidential Guard, it should be a walk in the park.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Johnny said gloomily.

  “So we’ll just have to liven things up in round two.” Persephone grinned, impishly: “Once we know for sure who we’re dealing with.”

  HOTELSPACE IS A PARTICULAR SUBSPECIES OF HYPERSPACE that links the service corridors and bland, beige-carpeted halls of chain hotels. I’ve always had an uneasy feeling that if I open the wrong Staff Only door and turn a corner, I could find myself stepping out of the vending machine room on the seventh floor of a Hilton in Munich or a Sheraton in Osaka. At about 8 p.m. local time—or three in the morning back home—I find myself padding along one of the aforementioned dim, soundproofed corridors in the center of Denver, this time on the thirtieth floor, towing a suitcase behind me and clutching my room keycard in my other hand. (All arranged by the concierge service on my magic credit card, of course.)

  Along the way I have a minor flash of déjà vu, echoing a check-in in Darmstadt many years ago that segued into a near-disastrous encounter in the hotel bar. My collisions with the Black Chamber over the years have not been happy; luckily the odds of me running into certain past acquaintances are low. Nevertheless, I’m as awake as I can be with my hindbrain telling my eyelids it’s half past sleepy time.

  Approaching my room’s door, I haul out my phone and poke tiredly at it. OFCUT works like a charm. There’s no sign of tampering anywhere up or down the corridor, and the lock’s clean: no wards, no geases, no nasty little hidden surprises. Relieved, I stick my card in the lock, shove the door open, and tow my bag after me. Welcome to slumberland.

  What can I say about the generic American hotel room? External Assets punch well above the usual Laundry expenses budget: I’ve got a decent king-sized room rather than the usual broom closet. The bed is the size of a small aircraft carrier, piled invitingly high with pillows, and pulses in my travel-stressed vision like some kind of carnivorous cotton plant. There’s a desk, a clinically tiled bathroom, a TV set, an ethernet jack—

  Ethernet.

  Even before the door has swung shut behind me I’m into my travel bag to haul out the small and rather naff Dell that Facilities issued me with. The contents of the hard disk are carefully designed to look as if the laptop belongs to a mid-ranking idiot with a heavy Plants v. Zombies habit, and there is nothing remotely confidential about the machine. Laptops are an inherent security risk—they’re too easy to steal—so the classified stuff all sits on a thumb drive. It has a fingerprint reader, the contents are encrypted, and if someone who isn’t me tries to use my severed thumb to log in, then may dead alien gods have mercy on their soul (because the guardians of the Laundry email system won’t).

  I dash off a quick “arrived alive” message to Lockhart’s publicly visible email address, then catch myself yawning. A quick glance at the bedside alarm radio tells me it’s only half past eight. Shit. If I succumb to sleep before 10 o’clock I’ll be up with the birds, which is not exactly my kind of lark—I should really go downstairs and get some food and hang out in the bar. Except both food and alcohol, in my current condition, will make me sleepy. If I want to stay awake, I need company. It’s way too late to phone Mo, but—

  Aha.

  My IronKey is loaded with an address book. I send a quick email to Johnny McTavish, attaching my US phone number and hotel room: Are you on site yet? Need to meet stat. It’s the tattoos: I should have passed them over before they left—but he and BASHFUL INCENDIARY lit out for the Golden Promise Ministries’ bible study and brainwashing B&B too soon. But there’s still a chance he can get one to her before she checks in, if I get them to him immediately.

  Clearly McTavish is on the ball, because I’m listening to the coffee maker gurgling and choking into a mug five minutes later when my phone rings.

  “McTavish here.” He sounds alert.

  “Howard.”

  “I’m in Denver.”

  “You are? Me, too. We need to meet up as soon as possible.”

  “Huh.” A pause. “Meet me at the corner of Colfax and Fourteenth. Half an hour?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Luckily I have Google Maps on the JesusPhone…

  “Over and out.”

  He cuts the call. I guess I’m not the only one around here who finds jet lag eats away at the social veneer.

  Colfax turns out to be the main east-west drag in town—the nearest thing to a high street in central Denver, all wall-to-wall shops and daytime diners. My hotel in the central business district is only about half a kilometer away, and while the weather’s a bit chilly by my standards it’s moving out of the depths of winter—the sidewalks are scraped bare of snow, and there’s only the odd grimy mound in the gutters to remind me that I’m in the middle of a continental deep-freeze. So I pull the overcoat out of my suitcase, drag my shoes and jacket back on, stuff the book of tats and Pinky’s fu
nky little camera in my jacket pockets, and head downstairs to pound pavement.

  We’re on a plateau halfway up a mountain range, and I can feel it on my chest before I’ve gone three blocks. It’s dusk: the cloud base overhead is low, and a lazy wind cuts through the streets, working its way through my coat. I’m wishing for a hat by the time I pass Thirteenth and start looking for Johnny. There aren’t many people out, and traffic is light: either the center of Denver on a spring evening with a smell of snow in the air isn’t the best place to hang out, or I’m missing a big ball game.

  “Wotcher, Bob.” I nearly jump out of my skin; for someone who’s most of two meters tall and built like a brick shithouse Johnny is surprisingly hard to notice.

  “Yo,” I manage, glancing round quickly. I see no sign of anyone tailing us, and relax slightly. “There’s something I need to fill you in on. Got ten minutes for a coffee?”

  “This way,” he says, and disappears into the murk between street lights. I do my best to follow him.

  He leads me to a small indie coffee shop that, for a miracle, is both open and hasn’t turned itself into a restaurant in time for dinner. We find a booth with padded vinyl seats and a good view of the doorway and slide in. I unzip my coat and rub my hands together. I’m cold; I didn’t realize it until we got indoors. A waitress ambles over while I’m still shivering. “What’ll it be?”

  “Mug of Joe,” grunts Johnny.

  “Mocha venti with an extra shot for me, no cream,” I add.

  “Anything else?”

  I shake my head and she wanders off. Johnny looks suspicious. “Since when do you speak Starbucks?”

  I shrug. “It’s not as if I can help it; they’ve got our office surrounded, and they don’t like it if you try to order in English.”

  We wait in silence until our coffees arrive and the waitress departs again. Then Johnny asks, “What’s the problem?”