All our most significant conversations happen in the kitchen, or over food. It seems to be one of the rules of our relationship. Another rule: don’t even think about lying. It’s difficult to slip one past someone you’ve lived with for a decade at the best of times; unbelievably harder if they’re a practitioner.
Being good at spotting lies also makes one prone to false positives: mistaking truth for falsehood. It’s the besetting curse of counter-espionage. Mo chose, for a few seconds, to believe I was telling the truth. I did not have sex with that woman. Right. But will she still believe me in the cold light of morning?
“She’s a vampire,” says Mo. She sounds almost surprised.
“So is that.” I glance towards the hall door, and she follows my eyes.
“That’s . . . different.”
“The difference is, now it wants me dead.” I suspect it tolerated me previously, as a necessary support for its symbiont. But now . . . with my inner eye I can see it quivering in the darkness, coiled, ready to pounce. “You know that, don’t you?”
“When it turned on you, it was horrible.” Her shoulders are shaking. “Oh God, that was awful.” She peers at me. “Bob, how did you stop it? You shouldn’t have been able to . . .”
“Angleton’s dead.”
“What?”
“The Code Red last night. The intruder was a, an ancient PHANG. He killed Angleton.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” She looks directly at me and actually takes in my face for, I think, the first time since she walked in the door. “Bob. Oh my God.” She reaches out across the table, and I take her hand. It’s shivering like a frightened bird. Bits of white tissue cling to the still-raw slashes that criss-cross the older scars on her fingertips. “You’re him now.”
“Not really.” Not even close. “But I have access to a lot of, of—” I trail off. The files stored in Angleton’s Memex are waiting for me. I’m probably the only person who knows how to use the bloody thing, much less is authorized to use it without spontaneously catching fire. That’s all the knowledge I’ve inherited from him. But knowledge and power aren’t the same thing. “Stuff.”
“What are you going to do?”
I look past her shoulder, at the elephant in the room. Or rather, at the monster in the hallway. With my human eyes, it appears to be a musical instrument, albeit made from unusual (and grotesque) materials. But with my dark-adapted inner eye I can see what it is. It’s the color of all the blood that it’s drunk over the years, bloated and turgid, bulging against the walls and ceiling like a tick sized to feed on tyrannosaurs. It’s not shaped like a violin at all. It’s got too many legs, and a proboscis, and other organs. It’s as alien as a parasitic wasp seen under an electron microscope. And it’s watching me with patient hatred, because it wears a choke chain and leash, and I’m one of the buzzing irritants that keeps its handler from letting it off the lead. Or maybe it just recognizes its own kind.
It’s a naked lunch moment. The instant when you freeze and see for the first time what’s on the end of your fork. Or in my case, Mo’s tuning fork.
“I should destroy that thing.”
She looks at me with pity and cynicism. “They won’t let you. The organization needs it. It’s all I can do to keep squashing the proposals to make more of them.”
“Yes, but if I don’t it’s going to try and kill me again.” I know it’s true the moment the words leave my mouth. It’ll wait. It’s patient. But she has to practice, daily, in an elaborately warded anechoic chamber. And she carries it everywhere, takes it to bed. I don’t think she’s a natural sleepwalker, but I wouldn’t put it past the violin to make her: sometimes she mumbles and cries out in her sleep.
“I can’t let go of it.” She bites her lower lip. “If I let go of it—return it to Supplies, convince them I can’t carry it anymore—they’ll just give it to someone else. Someone inexperienced. It was inactive for years before they gave it to me. Starving and in hibernation. It’s awake now. And the stars are right.”
The picture she’s painting doesn’t bear thinking about. I feel like I’m being backed into a corner by the inexorable logic of the situation. My skin feels clammy and my heart is pounding. “What are we going to do? It wants me dead.”
“If I let go of it a lot of other people will die, Bob. I’m the only thing holding it back. Do you want that? Do you really want to take responsibility for letting it off the leash with an inexperienced handler?”
Our eyes meet. Ten years of love, pity, and regrets are all wrapped up in a single moment: I take a deep breath and say the words that I’ve somehow known were coming for the past few weeks, ever since our sushi date with destiny.
“I’m going to have to move out.”
* During the big Mexico City earthquake in the 1980s, a twelve-story concrete office building collapsed on the Strowger unit in its basement: the damn thing kept working under the rubble for nearly two weeks, until its lead-acid batteries ran down.
* Obtaining a supply of cannulae and sample tubes was easy enough: there’s a small chemist’s in Stratford where the pharmacist is convinced that the supplies she’s ordering for the phlebotomist at the local clinic are entirely legit. Teaching the pigs to use them properly was the hard part. Alex still feels faint at the sight of blood, although he’s getting better; but it took actual threats of bodily violence—accompanied by a brisk lecture on hitherto unconsidered aspects of forensic dentistry—to convince Dick not to use his teeth.
* UCLH is a rare surviving example of old-time NHS architecture. It was founded in 1859, and extended continuously with total contempt for architectural consistency. The result is, to coin a neologism, Gormenghastly: a nineteenth-century workhouse with WWII-era Nissen huts tucked into corners at the bottom of Victorian gothic stairwells, 1960s Brutalist extensions clamped to the roof, and twenty-first-century high-tech side-bays shoe-horned into a First World War–era ward for Shell Shock patients. The porters drive electric buggies and there are signs inside the larger labs to keep the staff who work there from getting lost; they send out search parties for stranded patients on a daily basis.
* OCCULUS is short for Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations—the occult equivalent of a Nuclear Emergency Search Team. They’re staffed by folks from 21/SAS or, these days, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Scary fuckers who you do not mess with, in other words.
* Don’t ask me how we crammed a hundred-meter-long underground firing range into the sixty-meter-long basement of the New Annex; it probably has something to do with ley lines and spatiotemporal distortion.
* The noises you can hear in the distance are all my vegan friends giggling with shocked schadenfreude.
* His cover story: they’re part of the viral marketing campaign promoting a not-yet-announced low budget horror movie.
* Scratch that last: it’s actually all because of BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN, which is arguably our fault. But that’s another story.
* The proposal to flood-fill the building with dark fiber and light it up on demand would be great if it didn’t run headfirst up against the equally high-priority proposal to make the entire place an airtight Faraday-caged box with optical, as well as e/m spectrum, emission control . . .
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