Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “A wild goose chase?” asks Lockhart.

  “No, that would potentially make things worse, if she can see through it. But . . . don’t over-stress her. The business out east—”

  “Vile, I know.” Lockhart looks at the Senior Auditor. “She should really be on sick leave, you know.”

  “I am aware of that.” The Senior Auditor replaces his spectacles. “But she is dangerously close to indispensable.”

  “We should find a plausible task that is important enough to demand her full attention while being unlikely to generate additional stress in the Howard/O’Brien household. And which takes her away from home while not placing her at such a remove that we can’t call her back in a hurry if we need her.”

  “Yes.” The Auditor falls silent for a moment. “She’s cleared for BLUE HADES, isn’t she? The upcoming treaty renewal negotiations . . .”

  “That’ll do it. Come to think of it, they know her, which gives it even more plausibility.” Angleton is nodding now. “It doesn’t do to show them a weak front. It makes perfect sense for us to send her along with the delegation.”

  Lockhart interrupts: “But if she’s on a disused gas platform in the North Sea—”

  “That’s what helicopters are for.” The Auditor looks at him. “We need to clear the stage for the next act of this little drama, so that the reluctant star can be tempted into the floodlights to deliver his soliloquy.

  “See to it.”

  • • •

  THERE IS A BOOTH AT THE BACK OF THE TURK’S HEAD AND I plant Andy and Pete in it before I go to the bar to retrieve two pints of Adnams, a Diet Coke, and a bowl of olives. Having done my duty as honorary barmaid, I amble around the public rooms, sliding my way between knots of chattering post-work imbibers and idly patrolling past the various other booths and the former smoking room and lounge. The new and thoroughly tested ward I wear on a thong under my tee shirt stays cold and inert, which is good. This one isn’t only sensitive to sympathetic entanglement and glamours, it’s also supposed to pick up most electronic proxies for human malice. Sweeping for bugs in a public space like this is a fool’s errand in the age of the cellphone (all of which, by definition, contain sensitive microphones and radio transmitters), but I can be reasonably certain that nobody in here means to do me harm.

  By the time I get back to the booth, Pete is a couple of centimeters down his Diet Coke and Andy is looking at me curiously. “Is this what I think it is?” he asks, tapping his e-cig on the table.

  “Could be.” I slide into my seat. “I found the photographic negative of a smoking gun. Trouble is, an absence isn’t proof positive. Even if it’s a highly suggestive absence. How about you?”

  “I got nothing.” Andy pauses. “Was it inside?” He glances sidelong at Pete, who is focussing on his glass but clearly paying quiet attention.

  I address my next words to Pete. “If you think something’s smelly in the house, you talk about it outside. And vice versa. What Andy is asking is, do we have an internal problem. You may have noticed me walking around earlier. I was checking for listeners. Didn’t find any, by the way.” I look at Andy. “We had a very thorough monitoring program running for a very long time indeed. But it seems to have been de-prioritized in the late sixties, and cut off in ’69.”

  “Oh, really?” Andy taps his cigarette again. The blue LED in the tip flickers on briefly: he fumbles with it for a moment, hunting the on/off switch, then gives up and takes a furtive hit, shielding it inside his cupped hand like an old lag. “Who do we know who’s been with the organization since 1969? Or earlier?”

  “It’s not Angleton,” I say dismissively. Angleton may be unaging and extremely scary but he’s not a vampire: I’ve seen him in daylight. Besides, I probably know more about the Eater of Souls than anyone else in the Laundry. Certainly enough to rule him out as a suspect.

  “Really?”

  “I can vouch for him.” I glance at Pete, minutely, and Andy nods, getting the picture. “Unless Angleton had some other reason to squelch the old vampire monitoring program, it’s not him. And as he’s on . . .” Andy nods again. Pete has no need to know about BLUE DANDELION. So I change the subject away from sensitive topics. “Pete, what have you discovered so far?”

  “Oh, that’s easy!” He looks up. “Would you believe that, of forty-six parishioners informally polled, thirty-six of them believe in the existence of evil incarnate, in the person of the Devil?” He sighs. “Well, their average age was somewhere north of sixty, and they’re self-selected for being frequent attendees at religious services, so there was bound to be an element of literal-mindedness to them. But, taking the Devil as a baseline, the really interesting thing is that forty of them believe in vampires. Over 85 percent! Vampires are out-polling Satan in the bogeyman charts this decade.”

  He takes a mouthful of fizz. “Mind you, I added a couple of control questions. I said they were a self-selected sample? 52 percent of them think gays are going to hell, and 39 percent think the Earth was created late one Saturday night in October of 4004 BC.” He looks pained. “I can see I have some sermons to write on the subject of metaphor and creation myths. And tolerance.”

  “What about the office?” I ask.

  “Well, um, I had a problem there. I emailed the same questionnaire to the entire department and Jack from the Security Office came round to have a little chat about asking questions—”

  “Oh shit,” Andy and I say, nearly simultaneously.

  “No, no, it was quite all right!” Pete looks startled at our reaction. “I explained that I was sending out the poll because you’d asked me to.” I tense. “Then I asked if he really believed in vampires or Satan? So we had a good chuckle and he went away. Answer was ‘no’ and ‘no,’ by the way.”

  The cold sweat that began to spring up the instant Pete mentioned Jack from Security is drying. I share a knowing look with Andy. Mentally I’m kicking myself. Tasking Pete with asking questions of his church parishioners? That’s totally fine. Pete asking questions of random passers-by in a secret government security organization is another matter entirely. I should have seen this coming—by nature he’s an organizer, so of course he’d mailbomb the entire department, and of course Security would prick up their ears the instant someone not on their radar began asking questions. Even innocent-sounding ones. Demarcation and Chinese Walls and OPSEC and need-to-know rule our procedures. Those of us who are on the ladder and have worked together for over a decade sometimes cut corners to get things done, but a new inductee is another matter entirely.

  Luckily, everyone in the Laundry knows that Satan doesn’t exist. (We have worse nightmares to keep us awake in the dark.)

  “Pete,” Andy says, calmly enough, “I don’t think you should get into the habit of asking questions on unclassified mailing lists. In fact, before you do that again, just make a point of checking if it’s okay with me or Bob, right? We wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

  “Oh. Um. I see.” Pete is subdued, perhaps a little surprised at how scared we both looked for a moment. Not realizing that we’re not scared for us, we’re scared for him.

  “Did you get any results?” I ask, leaning forward.

  “Um, yes!” Pete brightens. “Mostly from junior staff and new inductees—I included a time-of-service question and the median was fifteen months. It turns out that of the eighteen responses I got, nobody at all believes in Satan and only two believe in vampires. Those two were recent inductees, by the way, time of service less than twelve months. Age is much more representative than the church survey, averaging thirty-two, outliers as young as twenty-one and as old as, well, one joker wrote in that they were two hundred and thirty-one and what was my blood group, please?”

  Pete stops and stares at me. Then at Andy. “That was a joke, right?” he asks uncertainly. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Do you still have the responses?” I ask, tryi
ng to keep my voice level and even and unfrightening.

  “Sure: they’re in a mail archive I created for them . . .”

  “What do you think?” I ask Andy.

  “I think”—Andy looks as worried as I feel—“it’s probably a joke. Probably.”

  “Well, then,” I say, pushing my mostly undrunk pint glass away: “Let’s go and find out, shall we?” I stand up.

  “What, right now?” asks Pete.

  “When better?”

  • • •

  BUT WHEN WE GET BACK TO PETE’S OFFICE HE CAN’T FIND HIS mailbox full of survey responses.

  I spend a fruitless and frustrating hour digging around with some forensics tools and groveling over logfiles. And finally I work out what happened. Pete did indeed save all his survey responses to a mail archive. But he stashed it on the local drive of the PC he was working on. Which is, of course, connected to our NAS. And for some reason when he logged out the VM image he was working on didn’t get uploaded back to the storage array. So when we came storming back into the office and Pete logged himself in for me, he downloaded a stale copy of the VM he’d been working with, which scribbled all over the local copy with the mail archive. And because we are the Laundry and we are hip to the whole INFOSEC thing, these days our desktop PCs store everything local in a rather expensive PCIe RAM disk card (not even Flash—Flash memory retains data when you pull the plug) with whole disk encryption. And it’s soldered to the PC’s chassis, precisely because we don’t want random interlopers to be able to trivially retrieve erased files.

  Somewhere in the guts of the departmental mail server there’s a logfile recording the origin and destination of every email message that was delivered to Pete’s desktop client. (Or anybody else’s, for that matter.) But somehow I don’t expect to find Pete’s joker listed in it.

  In the process of confirming that belief in vampires is bizarrely, implausibly low within the organization, and that an active surveillance program was discontinued more than forty years ago, we’ve blundered into a tripwire.

  And now they know we know.

  14.

  THE HUNT IS ON

  DESPITE MY DEEP FOREBODING OVER THE ENTIRE FANG FUCKER fiasco, life goes on.

  Work: I attend committee meetings, write reports, and continue to grind on the bid acceptance process for the networking infrastructure in Dansey House (which is running eight months behind schedule already, and losing ground by approximately forty days per elapsed month of calendar time). I also get to go off-site a couple of times because I am supposed to be taking a self-defense course. Not that I’ve ever been much into unarmed martial arts—my general response to people trying to kill me is to scream and run away as fast as I can: I don’t like pain—but some REMF in HR has expressed concern about my ability to look after myself without a basilisk gun and a Hand of Glory. And after my run-in with Alex and Janice, I have to admit that they have a point. So it’s off to the dojo I go-go, dammit. (Where I am signed off as somewhere between “cannon fodder” and “zombie bait,” but that’s another story.)

  Play: at the weekend, Mo and I visit my parents again. They’ve stopped taking every available opportunity to ask when they can expect to hear the patter of tiny feet, which is a minor blessing, but our inability to talk about work and their inability to talk about work (because Dad’s recently retired and his idea of a hobby is watching EastEnders) are leading to increasingly uncomfortable gaps in the conversation. Mum insists on baking cakes, and Dad discovered one of the secrets of a happy marriage early on (never criticize your spouse’s culinary skills) and applies it as a religious observance. So, let’s just say Mum’s cakes are sub-optimal and leave it at that, shall we?

  Despite the lack of children there is a new and exciting presence in our life. When we get home, we discover that Spooky has expressed her displeasure at being left all alone in the dark in typical feline fashion, right in the middle of the front hall. Mo waits outside in the cold while I deal with it, and it takes considerable effort to persuade her that she doesn’t actually want a new fiddle right now. In other news from the Fur Kids Department, the expensive new cat-tree goes unused, the living room sofa receives the Spooky imprimatur of best scratching post ever, and every open cardboard box in the house receives a mysterious lining of shed hairs. Spooky is a graduate of the “if I fits, I sits” school of feline furnishings. (If Mo ever gets serious about getting rid of the cat, all she needs to do is to leave an open FedEx shipping box on the kitchen table.)

  Spooky has also developed a bad habit of waking up in the middle of the night and screaming that she’s being attacked by an axe murderer (“Help! I’m all alone in the dark! Where are you?”), then haughtily ignoring me when I go downstairs to see what all the fuss is about.

  And don’t get me started on vet bills. Let’s just say that civil service salaries and pet ownership are two lifestyle flavors that really do not go well together.

  The following Monday I get up at my accustomed time to find Mo is in the kitchen, suited and booted and double-checking her go-bag. “Jesus, what is it now?” I ask. “I thought we were supposed to be looking for a spa break?”

  “Got an email this morning,” she tells me. “Actually Gerry Lockhart forwarded it on Friday evening but we’d already left the office and Facilities were taking the mail server down for maintenance.” I startle guiltily: that was probably me, going through the server logs with fire and the sword in search of Pete’s joker. “Calm down, Bob, it’s not OpExec this time. Turns out the negotiation team for BLUE HADES—it’s the once-a-decade Benthic Treaty renewal fish-fest—are down one sorcerer: Julie Warren’s got pneumonia, so Gerry asked me if I could go along to bulk up the front-facing team. You know how They get if They think we aren’t taking Them seriously.”

  They are the Deep Ones, the ancient alien water-world types who own about 70 percent of the planet’s usable surface area (the bits that are below the crush depth of our nuclear-powered submarines). We have an agreement with them: we agree not to piss them off (by, for example, building the Underwater City of Tomorrow! or otherwise intruding on their territory without prior arrangement) and they agree not to exterminate us. The bilateral agreements need to be renewed regularly by just about every nation with a coastline and a submarine, and BLUE HADES tend to get stroppy if they think we’re taking the piss or getting blasé about them. So every decade a bunch of our more powerful occult offensive operatives get to hole up on a disused North Sea accommodation rig and play bodyguard to the folks from the Foreign Office (Non-human Affairs Department).

  “How long are you going to be gone this time?” I ask, relaxing slightly.

  “I have to be on a chopper out of RAF Lossiemouth at about six o’clock tomorrow morning, which means catching the morning flight to Aberdeen, then an onward flight this afternoon. Then I’ll be with the negotiating team for, hopefully, a day or two, and back home again. Don’t worry, love, I just have to hang around and look professionally formidable.”

  “But if things go wrong—”

  “I said don’t worry, dear. Nothing is going to go wrong.” She smiles at me, a trifle sadly.

  “But—” I shut up.

  What she actually means is that everything will be all right unless someone on our team fucks up and offends BLUE HADES so badly that no conceivable apology is acceptable. In which case, the first we’ll know about it is when the Storegga Shelf and Cumbre Vieja simultaneously collapse. You won’t be reading about it in the newspapers because the combined hundred-meter super-tsunamis will wash the British Isles clean (killing everybody who lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast on both sides of the North Atlantic, just for an encore). The devastation will make a strategic nuclear war look like a lovers’ quarrel.

  “Well, good luck, or break a leg, or whatever.” I stand up and she walks towards me and we hug. “And say ‘hi’ to you-know-who if you see her.”

&
nbsp; “Unlikely.” She hugs me again, then lets go. “Be good while I’m gone, okay? And stroke the cat for me.”

  Then she leaves.

  • • •

  “DUDES, THIS IS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR! WHERE’S MY tuxedo? Where is my license to kill? Where are the hot Bond Babes? This sucks!”

  Evan juggles his furry dice while he complains before an audience of one: Alex. Evan used to be able to keep three or four in the air for a couple of minutes before he dropped them. Now he’s casually keeping eight at a time airborne without even tracking them with his eyes. There’s a fat ring-bound training manual on the chipped utilitarian desk, and every ten seconds or so his left hand zips sideways to flip a page as he speed-reads, swinging back in time to catch a falling die.

  Alex hunches in on himself, hugging his stomach. “She warned us,” he points out. “I wish this hunger would go away. I’m starving.” He’s mildly feverish: the pangs and the hot chills running through him won’t let up no matter how much he eats. A stack of wrappers from all-day breakfast sandwiches litter the floor under his desk.

  “It’s not fucking James Bond; who knew? I bet Oscar and Mhari aren’t being handled like this.”

  “What, shoved off into an office with a bunch of health and safety manuals to memorize?” Alex considers for a moment: “I very much suspect that they are. This isn’t an accident, Evan. They’re—”

  “They’re trying to bore us to death.” Evan gives up on his juggling, guides the stack of dice down to a safe landing in an eight-cube tower.

  A couple of weeks ago it had been an impressive trick; now it strikes Alex as a distraction. He fingers the small, sealed locket they’ve given him to hang around his neck. The thing itches pretty much all the time now. “They don’t work the same way as an investment bank. Boredom is part of the process, at least at first: they’re trying to see if we act up. Didn’t you read section two?”