“What about the latex?” asks Oscar.
“I’m still working on it.” Mhari makes a moue of concentration. “Turns out we’re looking for theatrical special-effects cosmetics. I know where to buy it, but getting it right is another matter: we might need to hire a professional makeup artist.” She scribbles a couple of Post-it notes: green for the DONE column, pink for the TO-DO list. “Anyway, that brings us to about the end of our current review. To sum up: we can move fast and heal fast, we’re inflammable in daylight, and we can’t see ourselves in mirrors (but we’re still there and we show up on video). We still need to eat and we can eat garlic, crosses and holy water don’t repel us, we have amazing powers of persuasion but we can’t use them on each other, and, uh, human blood is amazing. Other species, not so much.” Her eyes are wide as she looks down the meeting table, then makes contact with Oscar. “So, boss. Where do we go with this now?”
5.
HOT ZONE
IT’S ABOUT THREE IN THE MORNING AND WE’RE BOTH DEEPLY asleep when the red telephone rings.
It’s not a flashy electronic device with a scrambler; quite the opposite: it’s a 1950s GPO-issue telephone. Which is to say it’s made out of bakelite on a pressed steel base, has a rotary dial, and the ringer is a fucking church bell loud enough to wake the dead. It is connected via a Victorian-era twisted pair line to an electromechanical Strowger exchange in the Dansey House basement, all clicking relays and buzzing motors, guaranteed immune to EMP and other civilization-ending disasters.*
The reason we have this archaic monstrosity in the house is that if someone in Ops needs to declare a Code Blue emergency, the only way to stop it from ringing is to hit it very hard with a sledgehammer. Even popping a nuke over London might not be enough to stop it ringing. Both Mo and I are on The List, under different headings; she’s Agent CANDID, and I’m, well, among my other duties—we’re big on matrix management here—I’m there as personal assistant and understudy to Angleton, the Eater of Souls.
Anyway: the phone rings. At the first bell, I awaken with a shudder but am confused and wonder if it’s one of those curious auditory hallucinations sent to torment the somnolent by disturbing a good night’s sleep with phantom dispatches from the Home Delivery Network. But with the second ring (it’s the traditional British ring-ring, not the long-drawn-out American riiiiing) I’m halfway out of bed before I realize what’s happening, and by the third ring I’m at the bottom of the stairs, swearing and fumbling for the receiver as Mo clatters around behind me, bare-arse naked and clutching her violin case.
“Howard speaking,” I say, forcing the words through a sleep-congested larynx.
“Control here. This is a Code Blue call for Agent CANDID.”
Oh fuck. I look round, see Mo looming over me with sleep-disordered hair, violin case in hand. “It’s for you,” I say, and pass her the phone. We squeeze past each other, and I go back up the hall staircase, shivering in the late-night chill as she takes the call.
“CANDID here,” she says.
I go back to the bedroom and pull her go-bag from the closet. What else? Ah, yes. There’s a spare toilet bag packed and ready to go in the bathroom: I fetch that, too, and carry it downstairs. She’s still on the phone, listening intently, as I squeeze past her to the kitchen, plant the bags, then start prepping the coffee maker. Either she’ll have time for a mug before they pick her up, or I can use it in a few hours’ time: it all depends what kind of job it is.
This happens every month or two. Usually she’s gone for a couple of days, sometimes only for a few hours, but on one notable occasion she disappeared for nearly a month. It’s not her they need so much as her bone-white violin and its human attendant. (I hate that fucking thing.) It’s an Erich Zahn original, one of a double-handful fabricated in Weimar Germany. You can’t get the materials to make any more of them, and you wouldn’t want to unless you were a particularly macabre serial killer. The reason the organization needs it is summed up in the now-tattered sticker Mo added to the case several years ago: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. But to do that, it needs a violinist. And she’s very proficient. Too proficient: if she was less good at it they’d take the thing away from her and give it to some other poor bastard who I wasn’t married to.
Presently I hear the clatter of her hanging up. “Got time for coffee?” I ask as her footsteps come closer.
“I think so,” she says, and I flick the switch on the filter machine. “They’ve booked me onto a six o’clock flight out of London City, but there’s plenty of time. Hand luggage only.” It’s dark in the kitchen, and she’s as pale as a ghost in the twilight glow of the LEDs on the microwave oven. “Speaking of which.”
“I got your bag,” I say as the coffee begins to burble and spit.
“Oh, Bob.” She puts the violin case down on the table, then comes towards me. We embrace awkwardly. She rests her chin on my shoulder. There’s an unpleasant tension in the back of her neck. “I’d better get dressed soon.” She makes no move to pull away.
“Can you say where you’re going? Or how long you’ll be?”
“No, except it’s outside the Schengen Area, meaning I need a passport, and no, but probably not more than two nights. Maybe less. If you need to know more, you can yell at Danny White, or someone else in OpExec.”
That tears it. OpExec don’t deal with trivial stuff, paranormal parking tickets and the like: if she’s working for them on this assignment, then she’s probably going to come home with her heart—if not her sanity—in pieces. (Assuming she does come home, but that’s a given in our line of work, for both of us: it’s not a risk-free occupation.) Most likely she’s on her way to one of the less-well-equipped countries—the UK has an unusually large and proficient OCCINT service—to help disinfect an ulcer in the skin of reality. There will be plenty of backup and support, but she’s still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don’t understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them. Innocent bystanders, collateral damage, victims the monsters just haven’t gotten around to eating yet—and the monsters themselves. She has to deal with them all. And here she is, shivering naked in the kitchen at dead of night, and not just with the cold.
“When it’s over, I want to schedule some quality time. A vacation, somewhere safe. A spa weekend, maybe. Would you like that?”
“Yes, Bob.” I hear her, but her heart isn’t in it. She’s gazing inwards again, already thinking herself into the frame she’s got to be in to do her job properly. “We can talk about it when I get back.” I let my arms drop and she steps backwards, away from me. Closer to the kitchen table, so that her left hand is within reach of the violin case. It’s instinctive, she always does that: like a hit man ensuring he knows where his pistol is, so that he can reach it without thinking, using muscle memory in the dark. “I’d better go and get dressed. Are you going to stay up?”
I nod. “I’ll see you off.”
It’s not as if I’ll be able to get back to sleep again.
• • •
ONCE MO’S TAXI COMES TO WHISK HER AWAY, THERE DOESN’T seem to be much point in sitting around the house brooding. Everything here serves to remind me of her absence, like a jaw from which a tooth has unexpectedly disappeared. So I force myself to make some breakfast, eat it in silence—it’s too early for the Today program on Radio 4, my usual breakfast-time distraction—and I leave for the office around the time Mo’s flight is pushing back for departure. Dawn is breaking as I reach the front door and let myself in. I go straight to my office, fire off a couple of terse, ill-tempered emails to various people (by way of pissing on the fire hydrant to let them know that I’m on the job even earlier than they are), and head to the coffee station for the first in-flight refueling of what promises to be a very long day.
Pete, bless his cotton socks, is either running late or has wangled a day off for
pastoral duties. Consequently, I’m on my own in the office when Andy knocks on my door around ten o’clock. Obviously he’s gotten the memo I sent out at oh dark o’clock. I let him in. “So, what do you think?” I ask expectantly.
Andy lowers himself gingerly into the guest chair and puts his feet up on the stack of dysfunctional laptops. “About your proposed methodology?”
“That, and the targets.”
He purses his lips and inflates his cheeks like a gerbil, then allows the whistling exhalation to escape. “Let’s see. Silver nitrate in styptic pencils, allergic reactions to. Hirsutism. Anemia and photophobia. A bunch of synonyms you dug out of a medical thesaurus. And you expect to find something?”
“I don’t expect, Andy. But it’d be good to eliminate the obvious, wouldn’t it? It’s sound protocol to ensure we’re not getting false positives, and it will hopefully conceal what we’re really looking for.”
“Which I was just getting to . . .”
“Krantzberg syndrome.”
“Yes, that.” He looks doubtful. “You think you can find it in the population at large?”
Krantzberg syndrome haunts me because it’s a personal bête noire. Magic is a side effect of certain classes of mathematics, notably theorem proving. Sensible magicians—like me—use computers. But if you’re smart and agile you can perform some types of invocation in your head. The trouble is, just as our symbol manipulating machines attract the attention of extradimensional agencies (demons, you might say), so do such DIY invocations. If you perform ritual magic regularly, some of the things you invoke will chew microscopic holes in your gray matter. At first it’s not too bad, but the dizziness, numbness and tingling in the periphery, memory problems, and lack of coordination are irreversible and frequently progressive. The end result, Krantzberg syndrome, bears a rather unpleasant resemblance to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—not to mention that other happy fun prion disease, Kuru (which you can only contract by eating the brains of someone who had the condition).
Krantzberg syndrome is what people like me die of if the monsters don’t get us first.
“There’s a blood test for new variant CJD”—Mad Cow Disease, to you—“so what I’m going to look for is cases of CJD diagnosed at post-mortem that test negative for nvCJD. Testing CJD cases for nvCJD is routine and gets reported to the Core Data Service as part of the program for tracking Mad Cow Disease; I’m going to see if I can pull out a geographical plot,” I explain.
“What do you expect it to tell you?” Andy leans forward.
“It’s too early to tell. For all I know, I’m going to draw a negative. Actually, I hope to draw a negative—finding a Krantzberg syndrome hotspot in the community wouldn’t be good.” (This is an understatement, to say the least: depending on how big a hotspot and where it was located, it could range in severity from a rain of boiling frogs to the End Of The World. File under Apocalypses and just hope it doesn’t happen.) “It’s got to be done. The vampire/werewolf cross-check is just a control, really.” (Which is what Mo latched onto a month ago and wouldn’t let me finish explaining, dammit.)
“How long do you think it’ll take to get results?” he asks.
“Ah, well, that’s a good question.” I smirk unashamedly and fondle the shiny new smart card reader next to my keyboard. “Shall we see?”
“What, here and now?”
“When else?”
I start mousing around.
Now pay attention:
The NHS central data warehouse is one of those hideous, sprawling IT projects that aren’t cleared for take-off until the stack of documentation exceeds the height of the Eiffel Tower. It stores tens of millions of patient records (hopefully in something resembling a valid XML schema) in a monstrous distributed database. There’s a hideously ugly Windows application called the Standard Extract Mart which theoretically lets you run searches and pull reports out of the warehouse. In practice, it’s sluggish and if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you’re supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help. And if you go dumpster diving for cabinet ministers or rock stars, you can expect the boys in blue to come knocking at your door toot sweet.
But we are the Laundry. We have almost as L33T hacking skillz as GCHQ. We also have access to some other data warehouses that I’m not allowed to talk about, even in classified internal documents such as this memoir, although if I mumble unpronounceable acronyms like CESG and GCHQ and MTI/CCDP and recommend that you speculate along such lines you probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark. This particular database is run by a small and highly specialized group called the Home Office Demographic Profiling Group, which is sort of the twenty-first-century descendant of those nineteenth-century criminologists who thought you could infer the likelihood of someone’s descent into criminality by measuring the bumps on their skull.
HO-DPG do not explicitly share their jealously guarded extracts of the SUS database with us. But they do make their source code repository available to other arms of the government, and I am more than happy to borrow the computer-assisted phrenology department’s data mining toolkit and point it at the NHS data warehouse using my own login credentials. Which, as far as the NHS are concerned, belong to a very peculiar GP’s surgery inside a silver-roofed toroidal office building in Cheltenham, whose inhabitants are allowed to snoop around the nation’s medical records at will without any questions being asked—just in case spying turns out to be a notifiable disease.
It’s taken me a few weeks to get the appropriate authorizations, and another few days to draw up the search queries I’m going to run, but now I’ve got an audience I can bash out a theatrical-looking arpeggio on the keyboard, grin maniacally at Andy, and say, “This is going to take a few minutes. How about we get some coffee?” Because I always grin like a loon when I’m wired on legal stimulants.
“I don’t see why not . . .”
Ten minutes later, when we get back to my office, I find a new piece of email waiting in my inbox. It’s from a software bot and it has an attachment—about 36Mb of Excel data. (It’s formatted for a two-versions-obsolete version of the spreadsheet that has known bugs and everybody is trying to move on from, except that it has a couple of hundred million users going back nearly ten years. Consequently it’s the file format from hell that refuses to die.)
“Okay, let’s see what we can pull out of this,” I say, and instead of firing up Microsoft Office I save the spreadsheet and feed it into a hairball of Python scripts I kluged together—because my programming skills are as obsolescent as Andy’s, but a generation more recent.
“What are you looking for?”
“Severe early onset dementias. Sudden strokes. Neurological stuff, with or without hallucinations. We really need a doctor on the case”—I hesitate to suggest any of the staff from St. Hilda’s—“to help us work out what questions we should be asking. But for now, I’ve got this dump of everything that’s happened in the Greater London area in the past three months, and a script to suck it all into a bunch of MySQL tables. The patient data is supposed to be anonymized but I pulled in their postcodes so we can localize them to within about a hundred meters, pivoted the results on our Criminal Records Bureau and National Insurance database mirrors to get the place of work for everyone who’s on the books, and the pre-processor is turning that into grid reference data so we can plot them on a map or query for areas where the rate of that’s funny . . .”
“What’s funny?” Andy stands up and tries to squint at the monitor: a good trick if he can manage it, given that I’ve got a privacy filter clipped to the front. I’m not paying attention to his contortions, though.
“There’s something wrong with the data. Or I messed up the postcode-to-grid location mapping. This can’t be right.”
I scroll back through the logfile I had my script barf up in a terminal window. CJD, and it’s cousin nvCJD—the cause of Bovine Spon
giform Encephalopathy, aka Mad Cow Disease—is pretty rare; the UK, despite its positively suicidal attempt at ignoring the epidemic in the early ’90s, still only generates about two cases per million people per year. The whole Greater London area, with fifteen million souls in its catchment area, should show about thirty cases a year, or two to three a month. And indeed, three months ago there were two cases. Two months ago there was one case. But in the most recent month for which I have data—last month—I’m seeing twelve.
“What am I looking at?” Andy demands.
“This.” I turn the monitor towards him, then pull off the privacy screen. “CJD detected at autopsy, a four hundred percent spike last month. Um. You know what? This has got to be a coincidence. Or a case of creeping data corruption. If the rate of CJD had rocketed like that earlier in the year we’d have been reading about it in the newspapers, there’d be questions in parliament. In fact—”
I hit up the map view. “Oh. Oh dear.” A rash of red spots flicker across the map of London like a bad case of chickenpox. “Hmm, that’s indexed by home address. But we can also look at their medical practice, or their place of work, see if anything jumps out at us—oh. Oh shit.”
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