“Which ones?” He laughs bitterly for a moment. “Nine point two million down on trading as of close today. We can probably still make it up this quarter if I can get us up and running again by the end of next month, but that all depends on having a full hand of pigs sniffing for truffles, doesn’t it? And that bitch intends to keep us on a tight leash, I’m sure of it.” He looks morose. “There goes my end-of-year target. I’ll be lucky to get a bent paper clip and a shirt button for a bonus. You, too, for that matter.”
Mhari sits down next to him, smoothing her pencil skirt. She sips at the wine, pulls a face: it tastes flat, lifeless and flavorless even though it’s nearly the color of venous blood. “Remember why we’re doing it.”
“Remind me again?”
“You need one of these.” She puts her glass down on the coffee table, then pops her clutch open and pulls out a slim wallet. Flips it open and shows him a photo-ID card within. “A warrant card. This is mine.”
“But that’s—” Oscar pauses thoughtfully. “A warrant card?”
“You tried to tell Emma Dearest what to do, didn’t you?” Mhari smiles sympathetically. “I’m surprised she didn’t shoot you. Oscar, you don’t do that to Laundry personnel. They’re all warded, anyway. But when—if—you’ve got one of these, it’s like the you-gotta-believe-me thing, only better. You can tell someone you work for the government, any department at all, and they’ll simply believe you. I’ve seen their people march into police crime scenes and tell the detectives they work for the Home Office and be believed. Or into military bases. You could tell people you work for the SFO and, well, you saw Mr. Howard, didn’t you?”
“Huh. Didn’t think much of him.”
Mhari leans against Oscar; he raises his arm to make room for her. She compares her memories to the warm and dynamic presence beside her: the idiot ex comes off infinitely worse. “Neither do I, frankly. I don’t know what I saw in him. But he’s going to come in useful along the way, I think. The point is, once the Laundry have us pegged as working for them they’re not going to consider the other possibilities until it’s much too late. They place too much trust in trust—they assume their people are loyal, or at least rendered incapable of rebelling by their coercive geases. You know, the binding oath they made you swear. Do you feel any different?”
Oscar tenses for a moment. “Loyalty has always seemed to be a two-way street to me,” he murmurs, which is music to her ears because it’s exactly what he ought to be saying at this point, even though she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t mean it. Oscar sometimes seems blind to his own mildly suppressed sociopathic tendencies. “By my estimate they owe me at least ten million. If they really wanted my loyalty . . .”
“Exactly.” She turns and nibbles on his earlobe, extracting a sharp intake of breath. “How are Pippa and the kids doing, anyway?”
“How are—? I don’t know and don’t care, frankly. She took them off to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks, something about seeing they spent some time with their grandfather. He refuses to set foot in the UK until it leaves the EU for some reason.” She feels his free hand working its way around her shoulder, outlining her bra strap. “So I’m free for a while. Listen, I’m thirsty and this grape piss simply isn’t cutting the mustard. How about you?”
“I could kill for a drink,” she says wistfully. They’ve been dry for over a week at this point.
“Well then, why don’t we? There are plenty of homeless people out round the back of the hotel who won’t miss a couple of tubes full.”
“I think that’s a great idea. Okay, let’s nip out for a midnight snack. And then . . .”
He stands, rising smoothly to his feet, and offers her a hand. “And then?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Mammals, Discovery Channel, you know the Bloodhound Gang song.” Mhari grins, alive with anticipation, and slides her stockinged feet back into her heels. There’s nothing like a bit of glam to make people let you get close enough to strike, she thinks. That goes for institutions as well as individuals.
“And then,” Oscar slides an arm around her waist as they head towards the door, “we should talk exit strategies.”
12.
GREEN LIME
LIFE GOES ON.
Over the next week, Mo gradually recovers some of her usual humor and level-headedness: a couple of visits to the security-cleared therapist are approved, and a discreet prescription or two. I try to do the supportive husband thing, with mixed results: I also request my own visits with the security-cleared therapist. Meanwhile, back in the office, I throw myself into the mundane administrivia of life: mentoring Pete (who in turn is mentoring Alex), minuting meetings of COBWEB MAZE and BLOODY BARON, helping Andy fill out the forms necessary to justify assigning him a permanent new office, writing up critical reports on the proposed network infrastructure of the Dansey House redevelopment,* and trying to find time to schedule my annual training workload in the middle of all this.
I’m also taking extended lunch breaks, because unfortunately Sally Carlyle made her little make-work (it was clearly—let’s be honest about this—a “get Bob out of my hair” gambit) stick to the minutes. So I’m spending a not insignificant portion of my time reading vampire novels. There’s a stack a meter deep in the corner of my office, expensed from Waterstones.
I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.
The giant hairball of nodes, names, and lines in different colors (labelled “drinks,” “fucks,” “turns,” “fights,” and “author is confused”) is growing into a mammoth file on my computer. I must confess it’s mildly distracting, and not too onerous a chore, but oy! the misconceptions. Ancient solitary predatory creatures of the night, my ass. Fashion sense, my ass. (I’ve had Dick in my office. When he’s not trying to cause maximum eyeball trauma while staying just within the envelope defined by the bank’s dress code, he looks like a hipster. A trailing edge hipster, if such a thing is possible; as deliberately uncool as an experimental fusion reactor.)
But at least the project means that whenever Sally sends me a needling email asking for an ETA on my report, I’m able to say: “2,891 pages down and graphed, 3,385 to go.” And when she says, “Why can’t you automate it?” I can point to the memo forbidding us from selling our personally identifying data to the Big River Corporation, whose terms and conditions of service are incompatible with our security policy. Check mate.
The next Wednesday I make my way into the office on foot, as usual. I take the shortcut along the ley line. It’s late enough in the autumn that there’s a distinct chill in the air; so close to the BST/GMT clock change that I approach the side door in the wan, predawn gloom. Wrapped up in worries about the upcoming weekly DRESDEN RICE meeting this afternoon, I barely notice at first when my ward—worn on a cord around my neck—throbs. Once for a warning: someone or something is watching me.
Then it throbs again. That gets my attention. I spin round, scanning for threats, and open my inner eye and feel hunger. Then I look down. “Oh. You again. Go away.” It’s the cat that’s been hanging around the dumpsters for the past couple of weeks. At least, I think it’s the same one. Small and black, it’s looking rather damp and miserable right now. It gazes up at me and chirps like a bird. “No, really, you don’t want to follow me in here. The night staff would eat you.”
I look away—eye contact only encourages them—and punch in the keycode. But as I step inside the darkened lobby I feel something brush against my leg. Stupid animal! The door slams behind me and I pull out my torch and head towards the stairs, then a pang of conscience prompts me to hesitate.
I hear shuffling footsteps approa
ching from beyond the nearest fire doors. “Here, puss. Puss?” It’ll be the night staff, coming to eat the intruders. I fumble my warrant card out of an inside pocket, transfer it to the hand holding the torch. “Cat? Puss? Here—”
“Grraaaah . . .”
I look around, inner eye wide open. Hunger and fear. A body limned in balefire hunches towards me, arms outstretched, as the fuzzy nexus of deprivation that got my ward’s attention hurtles away from it with a startled hiss and runs up my leg.
“Fuuuck!”
That’s me, screaming. I am not a fan of impromptu body piercings, and the stupid little hairball is sharp. Luckily I’m wearing jeans and a padded coat against the cold, so once the self-propelled barbed wire makes it past my belt line it’s just a weight. It gloms onto my chest, shivering, and I wrap an arm around it as I raise my warrant card and tell the night watchman to piss off. Starving, cold, and the cat’s just met a zombie: I resign myself to an inevitable trip to the Battersea Cats and Dogs Home at lunchtime. Maybe I can delegate it to someone . . .
“Ooh, isn’t she cute?” I blink at Trish as I pass the reception area. She’s in work uncharacteristically early. “I didn’t know you had a pet, Mr. Howard!”
“I don’t,” I tell her, and feel like a shit as her face falls. “It just followed me inside.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.” Trish blinks a couple of times. “Do you think she’s a stray?”
“Might be, it’s been haunting the dumpsters out back for the past few weeks. I think it’s feral. I was going to take her to the Cat and Dog Home at lunchtime . . .”
“But it’s October! And look, she’s all black.” Trish looks alarmed. “Don’t you know what the bad kids do to black cats at Hallowe’en?”
I can live without this. “Listen, I’ve got a meeting later this morning. I’ll put her—him, it, whatever—in my office for now. Do you think you could scare up a bowl and fill it with water? And a file box and an old tee shirt or blanket or something. She—it’s—pretty damp.”
“Yes! I’ll see what I can do.”
I head for my office. My passenger is still clinging to my coat, breathing fast. When I close the door I notice there’s an odd buzzing noise coming from somewhere in my office. It takes me a while to work out that the electrics are just fine and it’s the cat. So I sit down at my desk to check the email and figure out what to do about this added minor complication, and that’s when my calendar pops up a reminder. The DRESDEN RICE meeting time has changed: it’s been brought right forward and starts in half an hour.
What a way to begin the day!
• • •
LEAVING THE HAIRY GRIFTER TO TRISH’S TENDER MERCIES, I gather up the necessary file folders and shuffle off to the meeting by way of the nearest coffee station. I am sub-optimally prepared to face two hours of vacuous inanity, senile discursive rants, passive-aggressive office politics, and jokes in questionable taste; but at least I’ve resisted the temptation to borrow Harry the Horse’s AA-12 assault shotgun and a couple of fragmentation grenades. I am carrying a vampire novel with malice in mind, in case it should become necessary to telegraph extreme boredom and disdain in the middle of the meeting. (I have a theory that they can’t reasonably censure you for pointedly doing something they tasked you with.) But my main goal for this morning’s session is simply to come away from it with my sanity intact and no additional make-work tasks. And I’ll count it as a bonus if, when I get back to it, my office doesn’t smell of cat piss . . .
I’m a minute or two early and it’s a Wednesday morning, so I’m not surprised to find myself the second person present. Sally has beaten me to it—this committee is her little red wagon—but if her face was any longer she’d need a handcart to hold it off the floor. “So you’ve come to gloat, have you?” she asks, before I even have a chance to put my coffee mug and papers down. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself!”
“Um, what?”
“Going behind my back, playing politics, that’s what, Mr. Howard. You’ve got your way, but don’t think this is the end of it!” She gives me the evil eye, then goes back to shuffling together printed hardcopies of the minutes from the last meeting, the agenda of the coming one, and some other random crap that she obviously thinks is too important to trust to the secure email system.
I pull out my chair, sit down heavily, and say: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Sally rounds on me: “Oh yes you do! If not you, who else went to Mahogany Row whining to have me replaced as chair?” Now her anger is palpable: I recoil, and it takes me a second or two to realize that she might actually be right. The door opens: other people begin filtering in. Bill, Basil, Doris, Katie from Facilities . . . If Lockhart delivered, I think hopefully, then the new chair will at least have clearance for OPERA CAPE, and we can start work on a reality-based policy— “Here she is,” Sally says quietly (and more than a trifle bitterly): “Meet our latest greasy pole dance—er, climber.”
“Hello, everybody!” says our new member. “I’ve been assigned the chair of this committee!” Her teeth gleam as she looks around the room, making eye contact with everybody except me. “I’d like to thank Sally for her sterling work in getting the process started, but her talents are in too much demand to waste on a peripheral planning exercise like this, so I’ve been parachuted in to hold the fort for her while she focusses on higher priorities! So”—she briskly taps her papers into shape in front of her, looking as terrifyingly efficient as a front bench government minister—“I’d like to start by going once around the room clockwise, asking everybody to introduce themselves and give a thirty-second rundown of what they’ve achieved since the last session. I’ll begin as I’ve nothing to report other than my name: Mhari Murphy! And I’m looking forward to working with you all. Now you, Ms. Greene? I believe you hold the Health and Safety brief on this working group. What deliverables have you achieved since last Wednesday . . . ?”
• • •
I STUMBLE BACK TO MY OFFICE IN A HAZE OF CONFUSION AND mild misery, tempered only by the mild schadenfreude I feel at seeing Sally get her just desserts.
Watching Mhari run the meeting was . . . well, it was enlightening. She’s sharper than when I knew her a decade ago, and also more mature, more in control, more . . . everything, really. Authoritative. Charismatic. She’s blossomed into a truly formidable committee warrior, and if I didn’t know better, if I’d met her for the first time today, I’d assess her as a very promising hotshot who is destined for executive-level advancement in the very near term. She didn’t just run it on wheels, she ran it like a TGV: blasting through the minutes of the previous meeting, then switching track seamlessly onto an any-other-business siding that pared away at the dead wood, soothing egos as she dismissed the chair-fillers and time-servers back to their regular duties, thanking them and relieving them of the need to attend future sessions.
Sally would have taken most of two hours and barely gotten anything done. Mhari, in contrast, rips through the agenda in under forty minutes.
In the end we are down to four people: Mhari, Katie from Facilities, Sally from HR, and me. And then she lays her cards on the table.
“Katie, Sally, I’d like to thank you for your work so far. However, as you probably know, this committee is a false flag operation and whoever set the terms of reference failed to require a certain codeword clearance from everybody concerned. So I’d like to ask you to go back to your offices and request clearance for OPERA CAPE before the next meeting. It’s a limited-confidential clearance, not secret or higher, so you’ll probably get it—but until you’re on the distribution list I can’t discuss our business further. The only people who’re currently cleared for it are myself and Mr. Howard, so this concludes the non-confidential part of our meeting for today. If you’d like to go? No, not you, Bob.”
There is shuffling of papers, and dark muttering, and a little bit of well I never, bu
t even without the vampire mind control thing Mhari is good at getting her way. Two minutes later we’re alone in the meeting room, sizing each other up like strange cats.
“You stage-managed that coup remarkably well,” I admit.
I am, let’s face it, a little bit uncomfortable. Mhari has—had—my number, or my younger alter-ego’s number, or something like that. But I’m ten years older and a lot wiser these days. And on the other hand, she shows every sign of having done a lot of growing up, too.
“I’ve spent a decade managing boardrooms full of would-be sharks, Bob. You learn to lead them by the nose or they eat you. ‘3,385 pages to go,’” Mhari mimics, then smiles. “I can’t believe you let Sally dump that on you!”
I shrug. “It’s quite relaxing, actually.”
“Makes a change from laying cables?”
“Something like that.”
“So you’ve spent the past decade managing servers, laying cables, and being a doormat.” I can tell she doesn’t believe this—office tech support drones don’t get sent to probe nests of vampires—but she’s on a fishing expedition and I have no intention of giving her any ammunition.
“You could say that.” I smile, but I don’t show her my teeth because I’m using them to hold my tongue in place. “Working my way towards retirement one day at a time, that’s what I’m doing.” (By lying to ex-girlfriends. Don’t you feel proud of yourself, Bob?) “But that’s not important. Mhari, what are you trying to achieve here?”
“I’d have thought it was perfectly obvious.” She gives me a wide-eyed look, emphasized by the subtly applied eye shadow—not something the old Mhari would have bothered with. (She may have matured and gained depth along the way, but she’s lost something as well.) “I’m just a girl trying to make ends meet and get by in a harsh, uncaring world.”
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