Eva leads me past a familiar-looking door that screams server room at me. It’s secured by a keypad, with warning notices and a breeze blowing from around it. I spot a prominent red handle under a perspex cover, beside a notice warning of the risk of asphyxiation in event of a halon dump. I pause and check my OFCUT readout again. There’s a very faint yellow warning, barely budging the needle: but that’s enough to get my attention. “Why are you dawdling?” demands Eva, glaring at me. “We’ve got offices to clean!”
The server room’s reading barely above background level. I follow Eva along a corridor that leads past it. There are signs of new construction here. I see raw sections of wall punctuated by open panels where new cable runs are being installed, converging on a cabinet with a patch panel. And then there’s a door with a sign on it: THE SCRUM, subtitled: KEEP OUT. My thaumometer, needless to say, is pointing straight towards it.
Eva goes in.
• • •
I MAKE NO JUDGMENT UPON THE SCRUM AT THIS POINT, OTHER than to note that they clearly rate a much higher grade of office furniture than the janitorial and other staff who occupy the basement of the bank. The door opens on a room that looks like an outer office that’s being turned into an access-control corridor. There’s a door at either end of it, and something that looks like a half-assembled airport metal detector gate (or perhaps an excessively paranoid retailer’s anti-shoplifting gizmo) standing between them, powered down and with neatly taped-up cables dangling beside an empty equipment rack. Curious, I think, and check my thaumometer again. This time it’s reading amber: I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore. “Are you getting this?” I mutter into my lapel. “I’m in Basement Level B, office with a sign saying ‘The Scrum’ on the door, and I’m getting a three-sigma signal.”
“Sara cleaned in here yesterday,” Eva tells me. “She was in the next office along. I thought she was asleep at first and was very angry but she wasn’t—”
“You’d better go away,” I tell her. “You don’t need to clean in here tonight.”
“But I, but, you—”
“Leave this suite and finish your round,” I repeat. She gets the message after a moment, nods jerkily, then turns and leaves, nearly stomping on my foot as she goes. She takes the cleaning cart with her.
There is the stench of the occult about this place. Something or someone is messing with the substrate of reality, and my magical mystery detector is picking up the overspill. It would be best to get some idea of what I’m up against before I open the next door. I take a deep breath then do the close-my-eyes-and-open-the-other-one thing, trying not to think how much I hate this. (A few months ago I had to do it in a hotel suite in Colorado Springs. Two men—well, they’d started out as men—paid for it with their lives using what was left of their souls as currency: I’m a necromancer, and the guy I’m apprenticed to isn’t called the Eater of Souls for nothing.)
Against the dark background of my eyelids the world around me is tinted with faintly luminous green blobs. X-ray vision for the occult. One of them moves—
“Who are you and what do you think you’re doing there? Who let you in?”
I open my eyes. A skinny guy in an ill-fitting but clearly expensive suit has just come through the door at the other end of the room and is staring at me with an oddly intent expression, like a ferret sizing up a rat for breakfast. He’s not ugly but he can’t be much past his early twenties and the skin around his jawline is cratered with the extinct volcanic debris of late adolescent acne. My inner eye pegs him for a practitioner the instant I clap eyes on him.
I hold up my warrant card and smile cynically. “Serious Fraud Office, my son. What’s your story?”
“Oh God oh no oh God oh—” He starts off on a very promising meltdown: it’s quite gratifying to watch, for about the first three seconds as he stumbles towards me. But then he trips over his own tongue and, as he comes forward, focusses on my ID, and does a double take.
“Wait. That’s not a—” He straightens up and I do a double take as I realize he’s way too close. He comes at me, raising one arm to grab the card. I pull it back out of reach, and we do a clumsy two-step for a moment, which ends with him grabbing my right arm. Despite looking like a weed, he grips like he’s been taking arm-wrestling lessons from an industrial robot. Whether by design or by accident he’s got hold of my bad bicep.
“Hey!” I squawk involuntarily, stick my left hand in my pocket, and pull out Harry’s nasty little gadget. “Let go!”
“Are you a journalist?” he demands. “What are you doing here? What are you looking for?”
“Let go now,” I warn him, and that’s when he realizes I’ve got something in my left hand. “Identify yourself!”
He loosens his grip, as if it’s dawning on him that it might be foolhardy to grab an intruder waving a warrant card and claiming to be a cop. I hold the zapper against his stomach but don’t push the button. “You’re not SFO,” he accuses.
“I’m asking the questions. Who are you?”
“Alex Schwartz. That’s Doctor Alex Schwartz to you. You’re making a big mistake busting in here. We have security—”
“Jolly good, Doctor Schwartz. Is this your office suite?”
“You’re making a—”
“Because if so, I think we ought to sit down, de-escalate this, and have a little heart-to-heart.”
“But you’re making a”—he backs up a few centimeters, then a few more, until he’s moving towards the inner door—“mistake! We don’t have anything to do with money here. We’re the algorithm development support group for the quantitative trading desks, we don’t actually have anything to do with—”
Picture a light bulb going on over my head, and make it a five million lumen floodlight.
“Blood,” I say. Which is exactly the worst possible thing that could come out of my mouth at that moment.
Alex’s pupils dilate and he grimaces, lips pulling back from his teeth. He begins to lean towards me and the ward on the silver chain I’m wearing under my shirt suddenly heats up painfully and begins to throb. “Freeze,” he says, “be calm, everything is all right.” Leaning closer, he reaches towards my shoulders: “Everything is— Ouch!”
Fifty thousand volts of happy juice throws him halfway across the room, flailing and twitching. I yank the camera out of my other pocket, whimpering slightly as I put too much effort into my right arm, and hit the power button. The rear screen lights up gratifyingly fast. I step over Alex while he’s busy twitching and kick the inner door open, basilisk device raised and ready.
I get a moment to gawp at the Scrum’s lair. There’s a big open-plan office with glass-fronted smaller offices opening off it to all sides, and directly opposite me there’s a huge whiteboard covered in multicolored Post-it notes. And that’s all I get before a spike-haired woman in a black trouser suit leaps out from behind the door I just opened and does something extremely painful to my right wrist, at which point I drop the camera, scream, and reflexively try to eat her soul.
Ever got that sensation when you bit into a pitted olive and discovered a stone? Keep a grip on that feeling. Now imagine that instead of doing it with your teeth, you just did it with your brain.
While I’m staggering in sudden agony, Spikey the Wonder-Banker yanks my arm round into a half-nelson and snarls, “Krav Maga, baby, I knew that self-defense course would come in handy sooner or later!” Then she gives me the bum’s rush towards the boardroom at the opposite end of the office. It’s like she didn’t even feel my attempt at killing her. I’m still processing the oh shit moment and winding up to kill her to death all over again (Why didn’t it work the first time? a little corner of me is gibbering) when my feet touch the ground and I see what’s in front of me and the bottom drops out of my universe.
Two office workers, one male and one female, are sitting opposite me at the far end of a boardroom table. The woman
looks worryingly familiar. “Bob?” she says, while her companion (an intense-looking bald guy in heavy horn-rimmed spectacles) is working his way up to a puzzled expression. “What on earth do you think you’re doing here? Put him down, Janice, how often do I have to tell you it’s bad manners to play with your food?” Then she gives me a familiar and half-contemptuous smile that tells me in no uncertain terms that (a) my fly is at half-mast, (b) she can see right through me, and (c) I’m fucked.
“Mhari?” I ask.
Then Doctor Schwartz grabs me by the opposite arm with an inarticulate growl.
“No, Alex, do not rip his head off,” Mhari says irritably. “Both of you, back off! Sit him down at the table and give him a bottle of Perrier. We’ve got a lot of forms to fill out.” She taps a pile of papers in front of her suggestively and glances sidelong at Intensity Boy, who nods, then stares at me with pursed lips. They’re all staring at me. I’m getting a horrible sinking feeling, because Intensity Boy is exchanging knowing looks with Mhari in a manner suggestive of mutual understanding, while Janice and Alex are breathing down my neck and sizing each other up like I’m the last slice of pizza in the Hunger Games. Well fuck me sideways with a wooden stake, I realize dismally, I’ve fallen in a wunch of vampires.
My experience of Mhari, albeit a decade out of date, leads me to believe that anyone who can see eye to eye with her like that is quite possibly as batshit crazy as she is. Now her partner in crime opens his mouth.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what this is all about,” he says calmly. “Chair, Alex. Where are your good manners?” Janice is still holding me with a grip like a JCB. Alex grudgingly pulls a chair out from the table and shoves it under my arse while Janice pushes me down onto it until my knees buckle. Somewhere along the way the camera ends up on the table. Ha ha, very funny. It’s like an anxiety dream. You know the kind where you find yourself sitting an exam in the school gym hall again, and you’re naked? This is the other one, the adult workplace version where you’re hauled up before a committee for a damning performance appraisal and it’s chaired by your psycho ex from hell. And the rest of the committee are vampires or something. “Mhari, if you could explain? This is sufficiently unfamiliar that I do not want to risk misstating the situation.”
“It may be unfamiliar but it’s very simple, Oscar.” Mhari glances at him again, almost fondly (which by itself almost makes me lose my lunch), then turns back to me. The past years have been good for her, insofar as she seems to have grown some kind of glossy high-powered captain-of-industry shell, with added stingers and venom glands. “Whatever fire drill you’ve called you can damn well call it off, Bob, because we’re all colleagues here.”
She hauls out a suspiciously shiny looking card wallet and flips it across the table at me. It’s a warrant card. It’s got her name and a rather out-of-date photograph on it. I pick it up and turn it over and it tingles just right, as indeed it should; in the small print the “Valid From” field contains today’s date. I flick it back towards her. It stops halfway, then starts again, gradually picking up speed until it whizzes back into her hand. (That’s a new feature, I note absently; mine doesn’t do that.)
She pats the pile of paperwork by her elbow. “Actually, it’s a good thing you turned up. Now you’re here you can make yourself useful by helping me fill out their in-processing assessments for HR. Alison White is expecting them on her desk at nine o’clock sharp to begin induction profiling.”
“But, but”—I force myself to stop flapping—“you can’t unilaterally recruit them! They’re vampires! You’re all vampires!”
Mhari looks at me pityingly. “Nonsense, Bob, everybody knows vampires don’t exist. They’re just extremely gifted mathematicians who have pioneered a new and fertile area of category theory that is undoubtedly of interest to the organization. I’d be the last to deny that there have been some odd side effects, but if you keep insisting your new co-workers are mythical monsters you’ll have only yourself to blame when HR starts to question your sanity . . .”
• • •
WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES.
In our youth, if we survive them, they’re called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical.
Mhari was one of my learning experiences.
(I’m not sure what I was, from her side of the looking glass: roadkill, perhaps. Or a useful idiot. Something like that. But let’s not go there . . .)
Rewind to the late nineties/early noughties. There’s me, Bob Howard, working on a postgrad CS degree. This means I’m putting in roughly eighty hours a week on the books and in front of the computer screen, in a field where the proportion of women is roughly what you’d expect of a sixteenth-century Benedictine monastery. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, single. I then managed to bring myself to the attention of the Laundry by means too embarrassing to relate. (Well, okay: I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton by accident, because that’s what happens when your funky new realtime rendering algorithm that uses a really neat logical shortcut you can’t believe nobody invented before turns out to be an open and ungrounded summoning grid. Which is the extradimensional equivalent of a fast food joint with a buzzing neon sign that says: GOOD EATS HERE. Can we move on, please?)
So, the organization made me a job offer I couldn’t—wasn’t allowed to—refuse. And then they stuck me behind a desk to rot for a few years, or at least until I’d been thoroughly studied and quantified and got sufficiently bored to ask for something more interesting to do instead. During which period I found myself working elbow-to-elbow with a whole raft of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met, mostly in similar straits (they saw something uncanny, heard something go bump in the night, and got swept up in the dragnet when they were found to be useful), some of whom had no Y chromosomes and were also single.
Like I said, Mhari was a learning experience for me. Do you really want to hear about our doomed on-again/off-again car-crash relationship? The immediate nature of the teachable moment for little old twenty-something me was, as a drunken friend of mine questionably phrased it sometime later, “Do not stick your dick in the bad crazy.” It took a lot longer, and a whole lot more perspective (not to mention being married for several years to someone who most certainly was not the “bad crazy”) for me to work out what was actually going on in our dysfunctional relationship, which alternated between bouts of hot primal monkey sex and screaming pan-throwing arguments. What I think was happening was that the “me” that Mhari was alternately fucking and throwing things at was not me, but some sort of demented, revenge-rebound placeholder for a previous boyfriend of many years and some commitment. She’d split up with him acrimoniously less than six months before we first so much as snogged, and he’d done a beautiful gaslight number on her in the process. (Either that or she was bipolar with a topping of psycho special sauce: but resentful rebound relationships are a hell of a lot commoner, and I’ll go with Occam’s razor this time.) The net result was that she was a walking bomb, primed to take out all her existential resentment on whatever man she next took up with, because Bill (I think he was a Bill) had convinced her that all men were fundamentally untrustworthy bastards who would lie to her at the drop of a hat. And I, having recently emerged blinking into the light from a quasi-monastic existence, was simply a convenient cuddly punchbag.
Basically our relationship was doomed to be toxic from the get-go, if only I had possessed the experience to recognize it. Luckily . . . well, I got lucky: I met Mo, and then had a decade-long healing and maturation process because Mo was both older and smarter than me, and patient enough to wait for me to get my head out of my arse. As for Mhari, her instability got back to HR, who politely offered her an out-placement—sworn to secrecy on a permanent sabbatical, file marked DO NOT REACTIVATE EXCEPT IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, and discreet help in building a new life that didn’t press
all her broken buttons on a daily basis by rubbing her nose in the transience and irrationality of human life and the underlying horror of the things waiting for us at the bottom of the world.
So picture my joy at walking into that boardroom and being smiled at by my toxic ex from hell, in blonde highlights and a black suit with sharp shoulder pads, a pile of HR forms on hand for me to countersign, and the assurance that once again I’d be working with her.
No, time does not heal all wounds . . .
• • •
PHONE CALLS, EMAILS, AND PAPERWORK ENSUE. THE OCCULUS team is told to stand down, the ops room are sheepishly informed that there’s nothing to see here, the Code Blue is cancelled, and I get a huge black mark for budget overspend on my departmental project matrix. There’s even a post-mortem meeting scheduled for the day after tomorrow, to rub it in: INCIDENT 2911.1-A CODE BLUE/MISIDENTIFICATION WALK-THROUGH pops up in my calendar.
The thing is, it is technically a misfire; very nearly a blue-on-blue incident. Mhari and her charismatically intense boss Oscar assure me that there is no ongoing campaign of exsanguination and hemophagia by the Scrum. Everything is copacetic with HR regarding their induction as the Laundry’s newest and most sparkly high-end formal logic brains trust. Even though her little playmates have developed super-strength and a disturbing tendency to burst into flames if they go outdoors in daylight, who am I to shout “vampire!” in a crowded graveyard?
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