The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  “Sitrep,” snaps Williams.

  “Contained and uninjured. Yourself?” Mo raises a hand to her cheek. One finger comes away damp with blood: not uninjured. The pain hasn’t reached her yet.

  “Keep your goggles on and stay in the grid until I say you’re clear.” The smoke is nauseatingly thick. Williams reaches out with the perspex tongs and flips the light switch. “Thaumometer says we’re grounded. Clear to step out of the grid.” He demonstrates. “Damn, what a mess.”

  Mo swallows. “Is there a CCTV track?”

  “What did I tell you earlier about images and computers . . . ? No, but we ought to be able to confirm whether it’s your document.” He sounds unhappy. “Did you get a glimpse of, of whatever that was?”

  She nods. “Been there, done that.”

  “Countermeasures.” Williams makes an obscenity of the word. “Does that tell you anything useful?”

  “Yes.” Mo picks up her handbag from the workbench on the opposite wall, hunting for a tissue. “Whoever’s got the report knows what it is—and they’re willing to fight to keep it.” She draws a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you have a secure voice line? I need to make a call.”

  CLICK-CLACK. “DON’T MOVE.”

  I stand very still. The sound of a shotgun slide being racked at a range of less than three meters is a fairly good indication that your luck has run out—especially if you can’t see where the shooter’s positioned.

  “Very good, Mr. Howard.” The speaker is male, standing somewhere behind me. He’s on the embankment, of course. Even the B-Team learn eventually. (Maybe I should have tried to shoot them the other night. And maybe I should cultivate my inner psychopath some more. Oh well.) “Do what I say and I won’t shoot you. If you understand, nod.”

  I nod like a Churchill dog, thinking furiously. His accent is odd. Welsh? I can’t place it.

  “When I stop speaking I want you to slowly remove your pistol and place it on the ground in front of you. Then I want you to turn around. Do you understand?”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Did I ask you to speak?” His voice is icy. I shut up fast.

  “If you understand, nod,” he repeats. I nod. It’s not my job to disillusion him about my imaginary invisible handgun. Like I said: the B-Team are more dangerous than the A-Team, just like sweating dynamite is more dangerous than Semtex. “Do it,” he says. “Do it very slowly or I’ll shoot you.”

  I very slowly lift the right side of my jacket, and mime unhooking a non-existent pistol from a non-existent belt clip. Then I lean over sideways until I nearly topple, and lower my hand towards the roots of a tree. Finally I straighten up—still moving slowly—and turn round, raising my hands.

  My first reaction is, A man without a face is pointing a shotgun at me. Then I realize that he’s glammed up, his head masked by a shimmer of random snapshots of other people, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Other than that, he’s wearing jeans and a gray hoodie—just like a million other men in and around this great capital city; the only deviant part of the ensemble is the tactical shotgun.

  “Take two steps downhill, until you’re on the path,” he tells me. “Then kneel with your hands on top of your head.”

  My heart, barely under control a minute ago, is pounding, but I do what he tells me to do. Arguing with a shotgun isn’t clever. I manage to kneel with my hands on my head—which is harder than you might think, when the ground’s uneven, you’re amped up on adrenaline, and you’re over thirty—and wait.

  “Don’t move,” he says. The sun beats down on us as we wait in a frozen diorama for almost a minute. Then I hear footsteps, and a jingling sound, from behind. “Don’t move,” repeats Mr. Faceless, as someone takes hold of my left wrist and clips one ring of a pair of handcuffs around it. “Got him, boss,” says another male voice.

  Shit, I think, tensing and ready to make a move if the opportunity presents—but they’re not total idiots and they’ve already got my other wrist.

  “Now lie down,” says Mr. Faceless.

  What can I do? I take a dive, making a controlled sprawl forward on the dusty cycle path. Thinking: They wouldn’t be doing this if they were going to kill—Mr. Faceless’s companion plants one knee on the small of my back and thrusts a sickly sweet-smelling wad of cotton under my nose—me . . .

  The lights go out.

  FROM THE VOICE TRANSCRIPT CALL LOG, NEW ANNEXE:

  (Click.) “Angleton.”

  “Angleton? O’Brien here.” (Pause.) “What have you done with him?”

  (Pause.) “What?”

  “Have you checked your email?”

  “I don’t believe—excuse me.”

  (Pause.) “Well?”

  (Dry chuckle.) “He’s a clever boy.”

  “And that’s an interesting distribution list on the second message, isn’t it. What have you set him up for this time?”

  (Pause.) “A task I would perform myself, were I allowed to, my dear.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, you misunderstand. I am no more permitted to read the Fuller Memorandum than you are permitted to read and revise your own articles of service.”

  “But you sent Bob out with a, a fake . . .”

  “Yes. He’s the hare to lure the greyhound—or more accurately the mole—after him. I expect their identity will become clear tomorrow morning, in the course of the BLOODY BARON brown bag session. Which I for one can heartily recommend to you as the cheapest entertainment you’ll see all week—”

  “Angleton. Shut up.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve forgotten something.”

  “Hm, yes?”

  “Bob’s been suspended on pay.”

  (Impatiently.) “Yes?”

  “I called Boris.”

  “And what has that to do with the price of cheese . . . ?”

  “Boris says his firearm was recalled. And he doesn’t have a ward. He left it with me this morning. He’s on the outside and he’s naked. Have you heard from him?”

  “No . . .”

  “I tried to phone him a couple of minutes ago. His number is ringing straight through to voice mail.”

  (Pause.) “Oh.”

  “I think you’d better make sure that your greyhound hasn’t actually caught your hare. Otherwise the Auditors are going to be handling a couple more enquiries.”

  (Icily.) “Are you threatening me?”

  “You know better than that. I merely note that if Bob doesn’t make it home tonight we can assume that CLUB ZERO have him. Which would rather blow the wheels off your little game with the BLOODY BARON committee, wouldn’t it? Not to mention the collateral damage.”

  (Pause.) “Yes.”

  “So.” (Pause.) “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell Major Barnes to put his merry men on notice—those of them who aren’t playing cowboys and indians in the hills above Kandahar. Then I’m going to locate Bob. Alan can take it from there.”

  “I want to come along.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of telling you to stay away, my dear, not with your specialist expertise. The problem is—”

  “What problem?”

  “I was building a waterproof case to hand over to Internal Affairs for prosecution before the Black Assizes. Trying to map the mole’s contacts. Cultists are fragile: if they commit suicide we may never find their accomplices.”

  “Angleton. Would you rather lose Bob?”

  “Hmm. If you must put it that way, no. But remember, in the endgame, we are all expendable.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it.”

  “As for you, would you like to make yourself useful?”

  “How?”

  “This little interruption has, as you reminded me, disrupted certain plans. But not, I hope, irretrievably. On your way to hook up with Alan’s boys and girls, I’d like you to go and have a glass of wine with a friend of mine, and convey a proposition to him. It’ll put me in his debt if he takes it, I’
m afraid, but I think it’s necessary. I’ll email you the details.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Nikolai Panin.”

  (End of call log.)

  I’M DREAMING.

  I’m looking out across a wasteland of rolling ground, gray and crumbly as lunar regolith, beneath a starry sky. There’s no vegetation, not even stunted cacti or lichen crawling across the rocks that dot the ground. In the distance I see a low wall, writhing across the landscape like a dead snake: it’s as gray as the ground, too. The stars—

  I can see at a glance that this is not Earth’s sky.

  A lurid band of orange and green swirls across half the void, bisecting it with a smoky knife a million times brighter than the Milky Way. The stars sprinkled across it are eye-stabbingly visible, several of them as bright and red as Mars. They cast a harsh and pale radiance across the sloping desert floor. This is not the skyscape of a planet quietly orbiting a star in the suburban spiral arms of a regular galaxy—I’m looking at the view from a world much closer to the active core of a galaxy or globular cluster. And it’s an ugly, elderly galactic core, deep in the throes of senescence, a blaze of dust and gas spewing across the heavens from the dying exhalations of supernovae.

  I try to turn my head, but my neck doesn’t want to work. It’s very strange—I can’t feel my body. I don’t seem to be breathing, or blinking, and I can’t feel my heartbeat—but I’m not afraid. Maybe I’m dead?

  In the distance, so far away that I can barely see it, low down and close to the horizon, the landscape takes a rectilinear turn. A shallow pyramid or volcanic mound as symmetrical as Mount Fuji reaches for the sky. I’ve got no way of telling how high it is, but instinct tells me it’s vast, rising kilometers from the center of the flatlands. Something about it creeps me out, almost as much as the murdered sky. I’ve got a feeling about it, a sense of dreadful immanence. There’s something inside the pyramid, something that has no right to exist in this or any other universe. I shouldn’t be here, but the thing in the pyramid is even more out of its place and time. It’s contained, that I know, but why it might need to be contained—

  “—Told you not to overdo the ether! Can’t you get anything right? If he’s dead—”

  The words buzz around my ears like meaningless insects, distracting me from the watch on the sleeper. The sleeper needs watching, demands witnesses who will collapse its quantum states and render it inert, incarnate in bosonic mass. I’m here because I’m part of the watch. They’re scattered to either side of me, the White Baron’s victims, impaled on stainless steel spikes, dead and yet undead, watching the sleeper. A massive sacrifice planned by the architect of terror to keep—

  “—Got the smelling salts? Good—”

  I can feel the pain gnawing at my abdomen, a deep and terrible burning pressure, and I’m on the edge of understanding that something awful has been done to me just as a horrible stench of cat piss steals up my nostrils and I feel a twitching in my eyelids.

  “Is he responding?”

  I understood that.

  Abruptly, the dead plateau and the nightmare watchers and the sleeper in the pyramid are a million lightyears away from the headache that’s stabbing at the back of my eyes, and the stench of ammoniacal smelling salts tickles my nose harshly, evoking a sneeze.

  “Ah, that looks promising. Hello, Mr. Howard? Can you hear me?”

  Fuck.

  Suddenly wisps of memory slot into place. I find myself wishing I was back on the plateau, just another mummified corpse, another upright fencepost in the necromantic wall that hems in the pyramid. “Yuuuuh . . .” My mouth isn’t working right; I’m slobbering like an out-of-control drunk, drooling incontinently. I blink, and the buzzing I’ve only just noticed recedes as I sense light and movement and chaos and an outside world that is acquiring color again.

  “He’s awake.” The woman’s voice is heavy with satisfaction. “All-Highest will be most pleased.” As words to wake to, those leave something to be desired; but beggars can’t be choosers. A boot nudges me in the vicinity of my right kidney. “You. Say something.”

  “S-s-something.”

  It’s not as classy as you’ll never get away with this or if it wasn’t for you interfering kids . . . but I have an idea that I wouldn’t enjoy Ms. Boot renewing her acquaintance with Mr. Kidney, and if there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.

  “Ow.” That’s for my head, which is now telling me in no uncertain terms that I’m nursing a ten-vodka hangover. Oh, and my wrists are handcuffed in front of me. I blink again, trying to see where I am.

  I’m lying on my side on a thin foam mattress that’s seen better days, in a small room with walls painted in that peculiar rotted cream color that landlords like to call Magnolia. They’ve removed my jacket while I was out for the count. There’s a cheap IKEA chest of drawers and wardrobe, and a sash window half-masked by thin cotton curtains. Apart from the lack of a bed it could be just about any anonymous rented room in a shared flat—that and the two B-Team goons. Mr. Headless-Shotgun—who has left his trench broom somewhere else—nudges me in the back; another guy (young, blond, probably the friend with the handcuffs) is watching from the far side of the room, while the woman from the cycle path the other night squats in front of me, peering at my face. She’s a twenty-something rosy-cheeked embryonic Sloane Ranger—the anti-goth incarnate—with bouncy ponytail and plumped-up lips quirking with humor beneath eyes utterly devoid of anything resembling pity. She probably shops in Harvey Nicks and dotes on her pony.

  “It speaks,” she declares, in a home-counties accent so sharp you could cut glass with it. “Pharaoh be praised.”

  Pharaoh? Bollocks. She’s an initiate. Inner circle, then, which means I am potentially in a tanker-load of trouble. I try to clear my throat, but my head’s throbbing and I still don’t have full muscle control back. (Ether is vile stuff, as Hunter Thompson noted.) “W-w-water.”

  “Do you want some water?” Her face is instantly concerned. I try to nod. She gets the message. “Julian, fetch Mr. Howard some water.” She doesn’t look at Mr. Headless-Shotgun as she issues the order: she’s focusing on me, with a strangely concerned look. “We wouldn’t want him to get dehydrated.”

  “Yah. Er, Jonquil, should I fetch . . . ?”

  His hesitant question brings a smile to her face. “Yes, a little aperitif would be good. Bring it.”

  Aperitif? I clear my throat as Julian Headless-Shotgun leaves through a door I can’t see. “Drinking before you take me to the All-Highest? Isn’t that a bit unwise?” It’s a calculated risk, but her pink court shoes are a bit less likely to do Mr. Kidney an injury than Julian’s size-twelve DMs.

  “Oh, I’m not going to get drunk.” She gives a little giggle.

  Mr. Blond clears his throat: “You’re the one who’s going to be drunk.”

  “Oh do shut up, Gareth,” Jonquil says tiredly.

  “I’m just trying to explain—”

  “Yes, you’re very trying.” Her world-weary tone suggests to me that Mr. Blond is definitely from the B-Team—unlike Jonquil, who has proven frighteningly competent, so far. “Why don’t you go through Mr. Howard’s jacket pockets instead, in case he’s carrying any nasty surprises for us?”

  “Yes, Dark Mistress. I live only to obey.”

  I must be slow today because it takes several seconds for the coin to drop. “You’re not vampires, are you?” I ask, trying to stay calm; the prospect of falling into the clutches of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh is quite bad enough without accidentally crossing the streams with a bunch of live-action Vampire: The Masquerade fans—and you can never be too sure. (Cultists aren’t usually noted for their tight grip on reality.)

  “No!” She giggles again. “Vampires don’t exist! We’re just going to drink your blood and eat a teeny-tiny bit of your flesh, silly.”

  I can’t
help myself: I try and wriggle away from her. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as there’s a wall about half a meter behind my back I don’t get very far. “Why?” I manage to ask as Julian the Blood-Drinking Shotgun-Toting Cultist reappears with a bottle of Perrier, a scalpel, and a pair of unpleasantly fat syringes.

  “Transubstantiation: it’s not just for Christians anymore!” She sits on my back to stop me squirming away from Julian, then takes the scalpel and lays my left sleeve open from cuff to elbow. “Be a good boy and I’ll let you have the water afterwards. This won’t hurt much, if you don’t struggle.”

  She sticks me on the inside of the elbow with the first needle, and pokes around for a vein with expertise that is clearly born of much practice. I grit my teeth. “Won’t your All-Highest take exception to you sampling the buffet?”

  “Mummy won’t mind,” she announces airily. “Next tube, Julian darling.” She stabs me again, and this time there’s a brief spark of searing pain as she nails a nerve. “It was her idea, actually,” she says confidingly. “If your active service units find us and try to set up a geas to immobilize everyone but you, the law of contagion will keep us moving.”

  “Yeah,” echoes Gareth from the other side of the room, doing his dimwitted best to keep up with the program.

  I boggle slightly. “Would it change your mind if I said I was HIVPOSITIVE?”

  She pauses for a moment, then points her nose in the air. “No,” she says dismissively. “Mummy’s seen your medical records, she’d have said. Don’t tell lies, Mr. Howard, it will only get you into trouble.” She passes the second syringe—turgid with purplish-red blood—up to Julian, then raises the scalpel. “Now this will hurt!” she announces as she bends over me with a curiously intent expression.

  I swear for a few seconds. Then I give in and scream.

  13.

  THINGS THAT EAT US