"You're breaking up. Hang in there! See you the day after tomorrow!" She buzzes, then the connection drops.
I stare at the screen for a moment. Then I dry-swallow and press the SERVICE button for the flight attendant. "I need a drink," I say, "vodka and orange oti the rocks." Then some instinct makes me add: "Shaken." Just like me.
I spend a good chunk of the rest of the flight determinedly trying to get drunk. I know you're not supposed to do that sort of thing when flying in a pressurized cabin — you get dehydrated, the hangover's worse — but I don't give a shit.
Somewhere near Iceland Ramona wakes up and snarls at me for polluting her cerebral cortex with cocktail fallout, but either I manage to barricade her out or she decides to give me the day off for bad behavior. I play a drunken round of Quake on my Treo, then bore myself back to sleep by reading a memorandum discussing my responsibility for processing equipment depreciation and write-off claims pursuant to field-expedient containment operations. I don't want to be on the receiving end of a visit from the Auditors over a misfiled form PT-411/E, but the blasted thing seems to be protected by a stupefaction field, and every time I look at it my eyelids slam shut like protective blast barriers .
I wake up half an hour before landing with a throbbing forehead and a tongue that tastes like a mouse died on it. The huge gleaming expanse of Maho Beach is walled with hotels: the sea is improbably blue, like an accident in a chemistry lab. The heat beats down on me like a giant oven as I stagger down the steps onto the concrete next to the terminal building.
Half the passengers are crumblies; the rest are surf Nazis and dive geeks, like extras auditioning for an episode of Baywatch. A strike force of hangover faeries is diving and weaving around me on pocket jet-packs when they're not practicing polo on my scalp with rubber mallets. It's two in the afternoon here, about six o'clock in Darmstadt, and I've been in transit for nearly twelve hours: the business suit I'm wearing from the meeting in the Ramada feels oddly stiff, as if it's hardening into an exoskeleton. I feel, not to put too fine a point on it, like shit; so when I come out of baggage claim I'm deeply relieved to see a crusty old buffer holding up a piece of cardboard upon which is scrawled: HOWARD — CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES.
I head over towards him. "Hi. I'm Bob. You are ..."
He looks me up and down like I'm something he's just peeled off the underside of his shoe. I do a double-take. He's about fifty, very British in a late-imperial, gin-pickled kind of way — in his lightweight tropical suit, regimental tie, and waxwork mustache he looks like he's just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory movie. "Mr. Howard. Your warrant card, please."
"Oh." I fumble with my pocket for a while until I find the thing, then wave it vaguely in his direction. His cheek twitches.
"That'll do. I'm Griffin. Follow me." He turns and strides towards the exit. "You're late."
I'm late? But I only just got here! I hurry after him, trying not to lurch into any walls. "Where are we going?" I ask.
"To the hotel." I follow him outside and he waves an arm peremptorily. An old but well-kept Jaguar XJ6 pulls up and the driver jumps out to open the door. "Get in." I almost fall into the seat, but manage to cushion my briefcase just in time to save the laptop. Griffin shoves the door shut on me then gets into the front passenger seat and raps the dashboard: "To the Sky Tower! Chop-chop."
I can't help it: my eyes slide closed. It's been a long day and my snatch of sleep aboard the airbus wasn't exactly refreshing. My head's spinning as the Jag pulls out onto a freshly resurfaced road. It's oppressively hot, even with the air conditioning running flat-out, and I just can't seem to stay awake. Seemingly seconds later we pull up in front of a large concrete box and someone opens the door for me. "Come on, get out, get out!" I blink, and force myself to stand up.
"Where are we?" I ask.
"The Sky Tower Hotel; I've booked you in and swept the room. Your team will be working out of a rented villa when they arrive — that's in hand, too. Come on." Griffin leads me past reception, past a stand staffed by Barbies giving away free cosmetic samples, into an elevator, and down another anonymous hotel-space passage decorated randomly with cane furniture. We end up in some corporate decorator's vision of a tropical hotel room, all anonymous five-star furniture plus a French door opening onto a balcony exploding with potted greenery. A ceiling fan spins lazily, failing to make any impression on the heat. "Sit down. No, not there, here." I sit, suppress a yawn, and try to force myself to look at him. Either he's frowning or he's worried. "When are they due, by the way?" he asks.
"Aren't they here yet?" I ask. "Say, shouldn't you show me your warrant card"
"Bah." His mustache twitches, but he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a thing that anyone who isn't expecting a warrant card will see as a driving license or a passport. There's a faint smell of sulfur in the air. "You don't know."
"Know what"
He peers at me sharply, then apparently makes his mind up. "They're late," he mutters. "Bloody cock-up." Louder: "Gin and tonic, or whisky soda"
My head's still throbbing. "Have you got a glass of water?" I ask hopefully.
"Bah," he says again, then walks over to the minibar and opens it. He pulls out two bottles and two glasses. Into one of thern he pours a double-finger of clear spirits; the other he puts down next to the tonic water. "Help yourself," he says grudgingly.
This isn't what I'm expecting from a station chief. To tell the truth, I'm not sure what I should be expecting: but antique Jaguars, regimental ties, and gin-tippling in midafternoon isn't it. "Have you been told why I'm here?" I ask tentatively.
He roars so loudly I nearly jump out of my skin. "Of course I have, boy! What do you think I am, another of your goddamn paper-pushing Whitehall pen-pimps?" He glares at me ferociously. "God help you, and God help both of us because nobody back home is going to. Bloody hell, what a mess."
"Mess?" I try to sound as if I know what he's talking about, but there's a quivery edge to my voice and I'm feeling fuzzy about the edges from jet lag. "Look at you." He looks me up and down with evident contempt — or mild disdain, which is worse — in his voice.
"You're a mess. You're wearing trainers and a two-guinea suit, for God's sake you look like a hippie on a job interview, you don't know where your fucking backup team has gotten to, and you're supposed to get into Billington's hip pocket!"
He sounds like Angleton's cynical kid brother. I know I mustn't let him get to me, but this is just too much "Before you go on, you ought to know that I've been up for about thirty hours. I woke up in Germany and I've already crossed six time zones and had a roomful of flesh-eating zombies try to chow down on my brain." I gulp the glass of water. "I'm not in the mood for this shit."
"You're not in the mood?" He laughs like a fox barking.
"Then you can just go to bed without your dinner, boy.
You're not in London anymore and I'm not going to put up with temper tantrums from undisciplined wet-behind-theears amateurs." He puts his glass down. "Listen, let's get one thing absolutely clear: this is my turf. You do not fly in, shit all over the place, squawk loudly, and fly out again, leaving me to pick up the wreckage. While you're here, you do exactly as I say. This isn't a committee exercise, this is the Dutch Antilles and I'm not going to let you fuck up my station."
"Eh?" I shake my head. "Who said anything about..."
"You didn't have to," he says with heavy and sarcastic emphasis. "You turn up six hours behind a FLASH notice from some dog-fucker in Islington who says you're to have the run of the site facilities and I'm to render all necessary et cetera. If you get the opposition stirred up you'll be dead in a gutter within six hours and I'll get landed with the paperwork.
This isn't Camden Matket and I'm not the bloody hotel concierge. I'm the Laundry point man for the Caribbean, and if you put a step wrong on my patch you can bring all the hounds of Hell down on our collective neck, boy, so you're not going to do that. While you're working on my station, if you want to fart yo
u ask me for permission first. Otherwise I'll rip you a new sphincter. For your own good. Got that"
"I guess." I do a double-take. "What's the opposition presence like, hereabouts?" I ask. Actually I want to say, What is this "opposition" you speak of, strange person? — but I figure it'll just make him shout at me again.
Griffin stares at me in disbelief. "Are you trying to tell me they haven't briefed you about the opposition"
I shake my head.
"What a mess. This is the Caribbean: Who do you think the opposition are? Tourists! Wander around, drop in on the casinos and clubs, and what do you see? You see tourists. Half of 'em are Yanks, and maybe half of those are plants. Okay, not half, maybe one in a hundred thousand. But you see, we're about 200 miles from Cuba here, which means they're always trying to sneak assets into the generalissimo's territory.
And you wouldn't want to mess with the smugglers, either. We've got money laundering, we've got the main drug pipeline into Miami via Cuba, and we've got police headaches coming out of our ears before we add the fucking opposition trying to use us as a staging post for their crazyass vodoun pranks." He shakes his head then stares at me. "So you've got to keep one eye peeled for the tourists. If the oppo send an assassin to polish your button they'll be disguised as a tourist, you mark my words. Are you sure they didn't brief you"
"Um." I do my best to consider my next words carefully, but it's difficult when your head feels like it's stuffed with cotton wool: "You are talking about the Black Chamber when you use the term 'opposition,' aren't you? I mean, you're not really trying to tell me that the tourists are all part of some conspiracy — "
"Who the hell else would I be talking about?" He stares at me in disbelief, chugs the rest of his glass back, and thumps it down on the side table.
"Okay, then I've been briefed," I say tiredly. "Listen, I really need to get settled in and catch up on my briefing papers. I don't think they're going to assassinate me, my boss has arranged an, uh, accommodation." I manage to stand up without falling on the ceiling, but my feet aren't responding too well to commands from mission control. "Can we continue this tomorrow"
"Bloody hell." He looks down his nose at me, his expression unreadable. "An accommodation. All right, we'll continue this tomorrow. You'd better be right, kid, because if you guessed wrong they'll eat your liver and lights while you're still screaming." He pauses in the doorway. "Don't call me, I'll call you."
5: HIGH SOCIETY
THE NEXT HOUR PASSES IN A HAZE OP EXHAUSTION.
I lock the door behind Griffin and somehow manage to make it to the bed before I collapse face-first into the deep pile of oblivion. Only strange dreams trouble me — strange because I seem to be dressing up in women's clothing, not because my brain's being eaten by zombies.
An indeterminate time later I'm summoned back to wakefulness by a persistent banging on my door, and a warmly sarcastic voice at the back of my head: **Get up, monkey-boy!** "Go 'way," I moan, clutching the pillow like a life preserver. I want to sleep so badly I can taste it, but Ramona's not leaving me alone.
"Open the door or I'll start singing, monkey-boy. You wouldn't like that."
"Singing?" I roll over. I'm still wearing my shoes, I realize.
And I'm still wearing this fucking suit. I didn't even take it off for the flight — I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie's snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they're not throttling their victims.
"I'll start with D:Ream. 'Things can only get better — "
"Aaaugh!" I flail around for a moment, and manage to fall off the bed. That wakes me up enough to sit up. "Okay, just hold it right there ...
I stumble over to the entrance and open the door. It's Ramona, and for the second time since I arrived here I experience the sense of existential angst that afflicts chewing gum cling-ons on the shoe sole of a higher order. Her supermodel-perfect brow wrinkles as she looks me up and down.
"You need a shower."
"Tell me about it." I yawn hugely. She's dressed up to the nines in a slinky, black strapless gown, with a fortune in diamonds plugged into her ear lobes and wrapped around her throat. Her hairdo looks like it cost more than my last month's salary. "What's up? Planning on dining out"
"Reconnaissance in force." She steps into the room, shoves the door shut behind her, and locks it. "Tell me about Griffin. What did he say?" she demands.
I yawn again. "Let me freshen up while we talk." Pinky said something about a toilet kit in my briefcase, didn't he? I rummage around in it until I come up with a black Yves Saint Laurent bag, then wander through into the bathroom.
The dream was overspill, I realize unhappily. This is going to get even more embarrassing before it's over. I hope like hell Angleton's planning on disentangling me from her as soon as possible — otherwise I'm in danger of turning into a huge unintentional security leak. Nastier possibilities nag at the back of my mind, but I'm determined to ignore them. In this line of work, too much paranoia can be worse than too little.
I open the toilet bag and poke around until I come up with a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. **Griffin's nuts,** I send to her while I'm scrubbing away at the inside of my lower jaw. **He's completely paranoid about you guys. He also insists that he gets a veto over my actions, which is more than somewhat inconvenient.** I switch to my upper front teeth. **Have you been fucking with his head?**
**You wish.** I can almost feel her disdainful sniff.
**We've got him pegged as a loose cannon who's been put out to pasture to keep him out of your agency's internal politics. He's stuck in the 1960s, and not the good bits.**
**Well.** I carefully probe my molars, just in case Angleton's planted a microdot briefing among them to tell me how to handle situations like this. **I can't comment on Laundry operational doctrine and overseas deployments in the Caribbean — ** (because I don't know anything about them: Could that be why they picked me for this op? Because I'm a designated mushroom, kept m the dark and fed shit?) ** — but I would agree with your assessment of Griffin. He's a swivel-eyed nutter.** I step into the shower and dial it all the way up to Niagara. I'm supposed to report to Angkton while letting Griffin think he's in my chain of command: What should this tell me about the home game Angleton's playing here? I shake my head. I'm not up to playing Laundry politics right now.
I focus on showering, then get out and dry myself. **One question deserves another. Why did you get me out of bed?**
**Because I wanted to fuck with your head, not Griffin's.** She sends me a visual of herself pouting, which is a bloody distracting thing to see in the mirror when you're trying to shave. **I got news from my ops desk that Billington flew in a few hours ago. He's probably going to visit his casino before — **
**His casino?**
**Yeah. Didn't you know? He owns this place.**
**Oh. So — **
**He's downstairs right now.** I flinch, and discover the hard way that it is indeed possible to cut yourself on an electric razor if you try hard enough. I finish off hurriedly and open the door. Ramona thrusts a bulky carrier bag at me.
"Put this on."
"Where did you get this?" I pull out a tuxedo jacket, neatly folded; there's more stuff below it.
"It was waiting for you at the front desk." She smiles tightly. "You have to look the part if we're going to carry this off"
"Shit." I duck back into the bathroom and try to figure out what goes where. The trousers have odd fasteners in strange places and I've got no idea what to do with the red silk scarf-like thing, but at least they cheated on the bow tie.
When I open the door Ramona is sitting in the chair by the bed, carefully reloading cartridges into the magazine of an extremely compact automatic pistol. She looks at me and frowns. "That's supposed to go around your waist," she says.
"I've never worn one of these before."
"It shows. Let me." She makes the gun vanish then comes over and adj
usts my appearance. After a minute she steps back and looks at me critically. "Okay, that'll do for now. In a dim light, after a couple of cocktails. Try not to hunch up like that, it makes you look like you need to sue your orthopedic surgeon."
"Sorry, it's the shoes. That, and you managed to land a critical hit on my geek purity score. Are you sure I can't just wear a tee shirt and jeans"
"No, you can't." She grins at me unexpectedly. "Monkeyboy isn't comfortable in a monkey suit? Consider yourself lucky you don't have to deal with underwire bras."
"If you say so." I yawn, then before my hindbrain can start issuing shutdown commands again I go over to my briefcase and start gathering up the necessaries Boris issued to me: a Tag Heuer wristwatch with all sorts of strange dials (at least one of which measures thaumic entropy levels — I'm not sure what the buttons do) a set of car keys with a fob concealing a teensy GPS tracker, a bulky old-fashioned cellphone ...
"Hey, there's something fishy about this phone! Isn't it — " I pick it up " — a bit heavy"
I suddenly realize that Ramona is standing behind me.
"Switch it off!" she hisses. "The power switch is the safety catch."
"Okay already! I'm switching it off!" I put it in my inside pocket and she relaxes. "Boris didn't say anything about — what does it do?" Then the penny drops. "Holy fuck."
"That's what you'd get if you switched it on, pointed it at the pope, and dialed 1-4-7-star," she agrees. "It takes nine millimeter ammunition. Are you okay with that?" She raises one perfectly sketched eyebrow at me.
The Jennifer Morgue l-3 Page 10
