I take a deep breath. “Are her organs all present?”
“Yes.” She frowns. “What are you going to—”
I breathe out, close my outer eyes, and, simultaneously, open the inner one—the one I first became aware of during a traumatic turn of events at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, where a gang of evil muppets tried to sacrifice me in order to bind the Eater of Souls, using my body as a container. (They hadn’t realized that the said Eater of Souls was already incarnated in the shape of Angleton and working for the Laundry, thank you very much.) The trouble with botched summoning rituals is that you can never be sure what’ll happen if there’s a dangling pointer or a memory leak. In this case, they succeeded in summoning me back into my own body and binding me there, but not without side effects. In particular, I have inherited some of the aforementioned Eater of Souls’ abilities. Which is a very mixed blessing, to say the least.
In the red-tinged darkness behind my eyelids, something stirs.
I look around. I can sense bodies around me, breathing, hearts pumping, minds churning. Two stand in close proximity. One of them is warded by a standard-issue self-protection device—that’ll be Andy—the unwarded one is Dr. Wills. The third, on the far side of a partition wall, must be the mortuary attendant. Far more interesting to me are the other bodies, stacked floor to ceiling in a neat grid against one wall. They’re not sleeping. They’re empty, indeed, more than empty: they’re filled with a peculiar kind of vacuum that seems to tug at my attention. There are no feeders of the night nearby, for which I am deeply grateful; nor am I about to call them. None of these bodies are suddenly going to fill with un-life and start banging at the doors, desperate to fill their ravening maws with the taint of humanity. There are no souls present save those of the living. All is as it should be.
But. But.
I turn my attention to the body Dr. Wills identified, and peer at it, and realize that there’s something wrong here. I’m not sure what there is about it that feels abnormal at first, so I compare it with the husks in the drawers to either side of it. Ah. That. The adjacent bodies . . . they’d make good hosts. But this one might as well be made of ash and cardboard. It’s not that it’s unappetizing to that part of me that partakes of the Eater’s nature, so much as that it’s inedible: the necromantic equivalent of shit, fully digested matter containing no residual nutrients. Something or someone got here first.
I open my eyes. “This bod—sorry, Sara Siad’s body. Was this one of the ones you examined by MRI?”
Dr. Wills nods. “We’re not risking a dissection on possible prion sources these days, but we have an older scanner that we use for teaching and lab work on non-living samples.”
“Right.”
“What did you notice?” Andy asks.
“She’s been eaten.” I shiver, and not from the cold of the refrigeration system. “Her brain is so thoroughly chewed-up that you couldn’t make a zombie out of her: if I summoned a feeder here and now I couldn’t convince it to take up occupation. It’s as if she’s already been consumed. I’d guess the brain stem is mostly intact, but the cerebral cortex is like old lace.”
Dr. Wills’s expression is peculiarly intent. “K syndrome never gets that far,” she says. “The patients usually die first. Whatever happened—you’re right about her brain structure—happened very fast, and very thoroughly.”
“Well then. We have needle-stick injuries. And we have something that eats neural networks. Presumably a relative of the feeders in the night, but different: more voracious, faster. If they haven’t been injecting some crazy new street drug—”
Then it hits me.
“What if they weren’t injecting something, but removing samples?” I look at Dr. Wills speculatively. “Are the injection sites consistent with blood donation?”
“Well yes, now that you mention it, but why—”
“Office cleaners. Blood samples. The two with bite marks. And now this.” I close my eyes briefly, recalling Mo’s dismissal: Don’t be silly, Bob, everybody knows vampires don’t exist. I open my eyes. Andy and Dr. Wills are both looking at me expectantly. “I want to know exactly which offices they were all cleaning. Then I’m going to pay a visit.”
• • •
WE DON’T HAVE TO LOOK FAR; MRS. SIAD’S BODY WAS FOUND AT her place of work. But Andy still feels the need to angst at me.
“I see what you’re saying, Bob, but don’t you think we should take this a step at a time?”
I lean against the corridor wall. “Andy. Andy. What do all these deaths have in common?”
“Well, they’re all K syndrome, or something like it? And they mostly have these needle marks? And you think someone’s been taking blood samples and then they’ve been dying . . . ? Which somehow means you have to go rob a bank.” He grins widely. “Simples!”
“You’d make a lousy meerkat. No, Andy. If you noticed the time of death, Mrs. Siad was found at two in the morning. And I happened to note a pronounced nocturnal association with the others in the spreadsheet, as well. And they’ve all lost blood.”
“But there’s no mechanism for—”
“Andy, I am thinking of the law of sympathy. As in, if you’ve got body tissues or fluids from someone, you’ve got an occult link back to their body. And I am thinking that it is just past noon, which means—if I’m right—now is the safest time to go break down the doors. But if we wait, it won’t be. And at the rate this is increasing, we’re going to have more dead bodies on our hands because if I take it to the oversight committee and they kick it upstairs we won’t get an answer before tomorrow morning at the earliest, now.”
“Hang on.” He raises his hands. “Sympathetic links? Via the blood samples? So what you’re saying is, someone is taking blood samples, and the donors are subsequently having their brains chowed down on by what, something related to the feeders?”
I nod tiredly. “I’m not talking about Dracula here, Andy. I know damn well there’s not enough nutritional content in human blood to live off. But someone’s taking these blood samples and I want to know why, and more importantly what they’re doing with them. It looks like some kind of necromantic ritual to me. And the nocturnal fatality thing is, um, well. It doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. I’m thinking in terms of a cultist group who have fucked up by not spreading their net wide enough.”
Andy straightens. “Oh, if you put it that way . . . okay, I’m convinced. We’re going back to the ops room, right now.”
“Hey! If we do that—”
“Bob.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Do you want Mo to kill me?”
“Eh? No! What’s Mo got to do with this?”
“Because she will kill me if I let you rush in without backup—especially when backup is available. See? I am aware that you are, to say the least, somewhat better able to handle yourself in field operations than I am. But you’re not omnipotent and it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve run into something you couldn’t handle by yourself. Also, the good news is, if you’re right and it’s cultists then it is not some sort of contagious prion disease. So we’re not looking at it exponentiating, going pandemic, and de-populating London. There’s time for us to go back to the office to touch base, and then you can go and visit this cleaning agency or the bank or whatever with a full OCCULUS team* for backup.”
I nod, reluctantly. “But time is critical—”
“Yes. Which is why we’re going back to the office right now. Are you with me?”
“Shit.”
“Good man.”
8.
CONFRONTATION!
BY TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, ANDY AND I HAVE RETURNED to the New Annex briefing room, made our report, and learned (by way of one of Jez’s gophers) that the cleaning outfit is a subsidiary of G4S and all the victims of the K syndrome outbreak were indeed working in the same skyscraper, and, furthermore, were all on the night shif
t. Which is excellent progress. Angleton has been called away to deal with some other bush fire; Lockhart’s in the driving seat. Unfortunately that’s where the good news ends. The skyscraper in question—well, at forty-five stories it’s a skyscraper by British standards—is the headquarters of a major British financial institution; indeed, a household name as prominent and honorable as Northern Rubble and RatWest. Unlike the aforementioned institutions, this one didn’t end up in public ownership in 2008. But it’s not somewhere we can just go barging into mob-handed without attracting all sorts of unwelcome attention. Not to mention spooking the cultists. So we’re going to have to deploy our minions Stealth and Misdirection for this job.
“Can you handle a mop and bucket?” asks Lockhart.
“I don’t know. Can you impersonate a bank manager?” I fire back (which is unkind and unfair because he always dresses the part).
He looks at me with ill-concealed distaste. “We’ve sorted you out a way in,” he says. “They’re couriering a uniform over here right now. You’re down on the roster as Sara Siad’s replacement on this evening’s shift; Sara’s supervisor, Eva Kadir, can show you where Mrs. Siad’s body was found. Just try not to mess things up.”
“What else?” I ask.
“You’ll be wearing a wire and the OCCULUS brick outside will be monitoring the feed from their truck. In event of trouble you’ll have two extraction paths: one is via the police—we’ll have our liaison in SCO1 ready to dispatch a team to ‘arrest’ you if you get into trouble, and they’ll be pre-briefed that you’re doing a black bag job for SIS. The other is the OCCULUS team themselves, but . . . we don’t want to do that. Do you understand?”
I nod soberly. An OCCULUS extraction in Docklands would be visible all the way from six different TV studios and a couple of newspaper newsrooms. Nobody wants to be the subject matter of a COBRA briefing to the Prime Minister and cabinet, due to the tower of smoke rising to the east of Downing Street: that kind of thing can be a career-limiting move, especially if the existence of the organization you work for is a state secret the PM hasn’t been cleared for. So the availability of a full OCCULUS team outside the bank HQ isn’t about rescuing my sorry ass if I run into something I can’t handle: it’s about saving London if it turns out there’s the thaumaturgic equivalent of a nuke in the basement.
“Okay, I’d better go visit Harry,” I say. “Page me when the G4S package arrives.”
Harry the Horse is our in-house armorer. One-eyed, with a manner he acquired from studying The Long Good Friday, he’s an ex-cop or ex-soldier or ex-something that allowed him to acquire an alarming amount of expertise about killing people in the course of his profession. He hangs out in a cubbyhole in the basement, with a walk-in gun safe and a firing range.*
“’Ello, my son,” he says as I stick my head round the door. “What brings you down here today?”
“A Code Blue,” I say, which gets his attention instantly. “I’ve got to go poke my nose around an office this evening. Police and OCCULUS backup outside, but it’s a low-key investigation: we don’t want to attract attention. So I need arms and armor for self-defense, but nothing I can’t conceal inside a cleaner’s overall.”
“Awright.” He puts down the copy of Grenade Fancier’s Monthly he’s reading and unlocks the vault door. “Follow me.”
Shortly thereafter I’m equipped with a new extra-shiny protective ward and an ultra-thin anti-stab vest—breastplate and back protector—suitable for wearing under outer layers. “Can I interest you in a little something for the weekend?” he wheedles. “Just a little one?”
“You know I don’t like guns,” I complain as Harry hauls out a Glock 17 in standard police spec. I rub my right upper arm. “I don’t have the upper arm strength to hold a pistol one-handed for long.” Not since that business when the Wandsworth Cell of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh dined out on Bob sashimi, adding cannibalism to their charge sheet: the dent in my arm is a souvenir of the occasion. Also, in event of a police extraction, I really do not want them calling down SCO19 on my ass by mistake: those guys shoot first and ask questions later.
“Well then, let me see.” Harry puts the Glock back and has a rummage in the drawers. “How about this?”
He pulls out something that looks at first glance like a silver knuckle duster, until I see that it’s only got one ring, with some sort of crown on it—whatever it is, you’re supposed to grip it in your fist. “What’s that?” I ask.
“Stunner. You wrap your hand round the battery and capacitor and punch, like so. But it’s also a wave guide: see these markings?” (I peer at the indicated runes.) “Class four banishment charge. If someone tries to summon a nasty on your ass, this’ll send it right back where it came from.”
“Okay, that I like.” I pick up the taser-cum-banishment-charge. “I think we’re about done here. I’ll just make sure my camera’s got a full charge.” (It’s a new one, a replacement for the one I totaled when we closed out Andy’s office.) And with that, I head back to the briefing room, where a package containing one G4S cleaner’s uniform has arrived.
• • •
MEANWHILE:
“Hello? This is Mhari Murphy checking in. I’d like to speak to Alison White in Human Resources. Yes, I’ll hold.”
Mhari reclines her chair and catches Oscar’s eye. She nods minutely. He picks up the handset on his voice terminal and mutes it, then listens in.
“Hi, Alison? Long time no see! Yes I’m fine, how about you? How’s Steve doing?” (She listens for a while, with appropriate verbal punctuation.) “The reason I’m calling is, I need a little favor. It’s, um, yes, it’s a Laundry problem. I’ve stumbled over something unusual and I need your help in tidying it up . . .”
• • •
IT’S SIX O’CLOCK, I’VE HAD A VERY LONG DAY ALREADY, AND I’M coming down in the world. That’s the only reason I can think of why I’m standing here, keeping my mouth shut, while a middle-aged shift boss bitches at me.
“I don’t believe this! I ask them for replacement cleaner who has corporate experience and they send me you! What are they thinking of in HR? You’re useless!” She’s pacing up and down in the breeze-block-walled janitorial room, pausing to periodically glare at me. “This is very exacting job! This customer is very critical! Why do they send me a man with no previous experience?”
We’ve got off to a great flying start, Eva and me.
“I can empty bins, vacuum, and dust,” I offer. “What more do you want?”
“You have no security pass!” Eva rounds on me. “Why have you not got a CRB check? You can’t clean bank offices without CRB! It say here you don’t have CRB!” She brandishes a dog-eared stack of forms at me.
“Oh, that.” Of course I haven’t been checked by the Criminal Records Bureau prior to employment by G4S Cleaning. I’m subject to Developed Vetting as a regular, recurring part of the security clearance for my job; as far as the CRB is concerned I don’t even exist. “Will this do?” I ask, hauling out my warrant card.
“What—” Eva stops in mid-flow.
“You will see that this warrant card identifies me as a plain-clothes detective inspector from the Metropolitan Police,” I tell her, extemporizing on the spot. “I am here as part of an official investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. You will not ask me any questions about why I am here or what I am doing. You will take me around the offices that Sara Siad cleaned on her last shift. If anybody asks about me, I am a new trainee and you are showing me the ropes. Do you understand?”
“But—but”—she runs down after a few seconds—“we don’t have trainees here!”
“Doesn’t matter.” They’ll believe I’m a trainee if I tell them to: that’s the beauty of the card, it’s official ID with a class four geas attached, and as long as I’m using it on official business it will draw on the full authority of the organization to convince anyone I present i
t to that I’m on, shall we say, whatever official business it is in the best interests of the organization for them to believe I’m engaged in. The only people it won’t fool are other Laundry staff and seriously powerful sorcerers. I don’t like using it on civilians, but it’s less hassle than calling the ops room to yell at her boss, and more merciful than the other options I have up my sleeve. “I need to see Sara’s route. This is official police business.”
“I’ll take you there. (Never heard such a thing . . .)” She leads off, muttering to herself and periodically glancing back at me with angry-eyed suspicion, clearly disturbed by the impact my lack of office cleaning chops is going to have on her workload.
I follow Eva into the maze of twisty little corridors and open-plan cubicle areas that comprise the back-office IT support section of the bank. There are no windows—we’re below ground level here—but there’s an omnipresent dull roar of air conditioning that paradoxically makes everything sound muted: I guess it swamps other noises. Most of the offices are relatively spartan and cheaply furnished. Employees with the status to rate a window view don’t generally work down here. And it’s largely deserted. The market’s closing bell has long since rung, and most of the staff have long since gone home or buggered off to the wine bar. With a sinking feeling I begin to wonder if I’ve left it too late—if the brain-eating phantasm I’m searching for comes and goes with the day shift. I have a smartphone loaded with our OFCUT suite and a suitably bluetoothy sensor, and I periodically check to see if it’s picked up anything: but no, there’s not so much as a haunted print server down here, much less a nest of don’t-be-silly-Bob.
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