The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  AT SIX O’CLOCK , ANGLETON EMERGES FROM HIS OFFICE— where he has been inexplicably overlooked by the searchers for the entire duration of his “disappearance”—and stalks the darkening corridors of the New Annexe like the shade of vengeance incarnate. A humming cloud of dread follows him as he passes the empty offices and the taped-over doorway in the vaguely titled Ways and Means Department. My office is, of course, empty: Angleton has rearranged meeting schedules in the departmental Exchange database to ensure that certain players will be elsewhere when he makes his way to Room 366.

  There’s a red light shining over the door, and a ward inscribed on the wood veneer beneath it glows gently green in defiance of the mundane rules of physics. Angleton ignores the DND light and the ward and enters. Faces turn. “James.” Boris’s face is ashen. “What are happen?”

  (Boris isn’t Russian and the accent isn’t a fake; it’s a parting kiss from Krantzberg syndrome, brain damage incurred by performing occult operations on Mark One Plains Ape computing hardware—the human cerebral cortex. Magicians use computers because chips are easier to repair than brains which have had chunks scooped out by the Dee-space entities they accidentally let in when they began to think too hard about those symbols they were manipulating.)

  “The baited trap has been sprung,” Angleton says lightly. He pulls out a chair and collapses into it like a loose bag of bones held together by his dusty suit. “Trouble is, our boy was holding the bait when they grabbed it.”

  “Oh bugger.” Andy, tall and dandelion-haired as the famous graphic artist whose name he uses as an alias, looks distinctly displeased. “Do we know who they are yet?”

  “Not yet.” Angleton plays a scale on the invisible ivories of the tabletop, his fingertips clattering like drumsticks. “I was expecting to reel them in at tomorrow’s BLOODY BARON meeting, but that might be too late.”

  “Where’s Agent CANDID?”

  Angleton grimaces. “I sent her on a little errand, en route to hook up with Alan Barnes and the OCCULUS unit. They’re on station in Black-heath, ready to hit the road as soon as we give them a target. I’ve gone to the Board: they authorized an escalation to Rung Three. I have accordingly put CO15 on notice to provide escort and routing.” CO15 is the Traffic Operational Command Unit of the London Metropolitan Police.

  “MAGINOT BLUE STARS are in the loop and ready to provide covering fire if we need to go above Rung Five.” The notional ladder of escalation’s rungs are denominated in steps looted from Herman Kahn’s infamous theory of strategic conflict: in a good old-fashioned war, Rung Five would mark the first exchange of tactical nuclear weapons.

  “Is it that bad?” Boris asks, needy for reassurance. Even old war horses sometimes balk in the face of a wall of pikes.

  “Potentially.” Angleton stops finger-tapping. “CLUB ZERO is definitely getting ready to perform in London. The new research ‘findings’”—Andy flushes—“are out in the wild and widely believed, and with any luck they’ve swallowed them whole and are going for broke this time. They successfully stole a report on Agent CANDID’s weapon, which I admit I did not anticipate, and they think they’ve stolen the Fuller Memorandum.”

  There’s a sharp intake of breath from Choudhury, whose previous stuffed-shirt demeanor has evaporated. “That’s what the break-in was about?”

  Angleton nods. “As I said, the baited trap has been sprung. They’re going to try and steal the Eater of Souls, bind him to service and use him as a Reaper. I cannot be certain of this, but I believe their logical goal would be to break down the Wall of Pain that surrounds the Sleeper in the Pyramid. With the Squadron grounded we’ve had perilously little recon info on the state of the Sleeper for the past two years—the drone over-flights had to be suspended due to erratic flight control software glitches—and during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, awakening the Sleeper will be an obvious goal for the cultists. Of course, the logical flaws in Dr. Ford’s report will take somewhat longer to come to light, and I am confident that even if they mounted such an attack it would fail, but the collateral civilian damage would be unacceptable to our political masters.” His smile is as ghastly as any nuclear war planner’s.

  “Why has nobody nuked the pyramid?”

  Angleton inclines his head as he considers Choudhury’s question. “There is a contingency plan for the Squadron to fly such an operation,” he admits. “But it probably won’t work, and it might disrupt the Wall of Pain. Can we take this up later? I believe we have an operation to mount—tonight.”

  “Tell us what to do.” Andy lays his hands on the table. They’re white with tension. “Are we going to be able to recover Bob?”

  “I hope so.” Angleton reaches into his pocket and produces a small cardboard box. “Here is a standard paper clip. Until yesterday, it spent nearly five years at the back of a drawer, in close proximity to another paper clip, which is currently attached to the false Fuller Memorandum. The clips were stored in close proximity inside a Casimir amplification grid designed to boost the contagion field. It should be quite receptive right now.” He places it on the conference table and produces a conductive pencil from his breast pocket. “If you will excuse me?”

  Angleton places a sheet of plain paper on the tabletop, then rapidly sketches an oddly warped pentacle, with curves leading off from its major vertices. Next, he shakes the paper clip from its box into the middle of the grid. Then he produces a sterile needle and expresses a drop of blood from his left little finger’s tip, allowing it to fall on the paper clip. Finally he closes his eyes.

  “Somewhere on Norroy . . . Road,” he says slowly. “Off Putney High Street.” Then he opens his eyes. The glow from his retinas spills sickly green across the paper, but fades rapidly.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to use a GPS tracker?” carps Andy.

  MEANWHILE: A WOMAN WITH A VIOLIN WALKS INTO A PUB.

  An hour and a half has passed since Mo spoke to Angleton. She’s been home to get changed and collect her go-bag, but still makes the meeting in a popular wine bar off New Oxford Street with time to spare, thanks to her warrant card and a slightly confused police traffic patrol. (External Liaison will raise hell about it tomorrow, but tomorrow can fend for itself.)

  The middle-aged man in the loose-cut Italian suit is already there and waiting for her, sitting in the middle of a silent ring of empty tables while his dead-eyed bodyguards track the access routes.

  “Mrs. O’Brien,” says Panin. “Welcome.”

  She pulls out a chair and releases her bulky messenger bag, dropping it between her feet as she sits. She has her violin case slung across her chest, like a soldier’s rifle.

  “Добрый вечер, как ты?”

  Panin’s lips quirk. “Quite well, thank you. If you would prefer to continue in English ...”

  “My Russian is very limited,” Mo admits. “My employers are more interested in Arabic—not to mention Enochian—these days.”

  “Well, let us consider drinking to the bad old days, may they never return.” He raises an eyebrow. “What’s your poison?”

  His English is very good. Mo shakes her head. “A lemonade. I don’t use alcohol before an operation.”

  Panin glances over his shoulder. “A lemonade for the lady. And a glass of the house red for me.”

  “I didn’t know they had table service here.”

  “They don’t. Rank has its privileges.”

  They wait for a surprisingly short time. The minder delivers the drinks, as ordered, and retreats to his stool in the corner. “Angleton told you he was sending me,” she says, tentatively laying out the terms of discussion.

  “He did.” Panin nods. “We share a common interest. Other agencies of our two great nations continue to bicker like bad-tempered children, but we must rise above, perforce. Alas, all is not always clear-cut.” He reaches into his inside pocket and brings out a wallet, then produces a small portrait photo. “Do you recognize this man?”

  Mo stares at the frozen face for several sec
onds, then raises her eyes to meet Panin’s gaze.

  “I’m not going to start by lying to you,” she says.

  Panin relaxes minutely—it is not evident in his face, but the tension in his shoulders slackens slightly. “He left a widow and two young children behind,” he says quietly. “But he was dead before you met him.”

  “Before . . . ?”

  “He was one of ours. I emphasize, was. Abducted two weeks ago, not thereafter seen until he appeared on your doorstep, possessed and controlled—we would say превратилась, turned—a tool of the enemy.”

  “Whose enemy?”

  Panin gives her a look. “Yours. And mine. James advised me to tell you that I have been involved in CLUB ZERO from another angle. The Black Brotherhood do not only fish in British waters.”

  “That’s not news. Nevertheless, I hope you will excuse me for saying that if your illegals are taken while working overseas, blaming the local authorities is not—”

  “He disappeared in St. Petersburg.”

  “Oh. Oh, my sympathies.”

  “I take it you can see the problem?”

  “Yes.” Mo takes a sip of lemonade, looks apprehensive. “I’d be very grateful if you could tell me everything you know about this particular incident. Did Ang—James—explain why it’s of particular interest to us right now?”

  “One of your mid-level controllers has been taken, no?”

  “Not definitely, yet.” Her fingers tense on the glass. “But he’s out of contact, and there are indications that something has gone badly wrong, very recently. We’ve got searchers looking for him right now. Anything you can tell me before I brief the extraction team ...”

  “You are briefing—” Panin’s eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. “Oh, I see.” He eyes her warily. “What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?”

  “As much as anybody on the outside—not enough. Let’s see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian émigré radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They’re the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They’re not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that’s the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them.”

  “Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated—some say, founded—the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America . . . the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States—it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously—but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high—they tend to be poor, with large families—and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we’ve been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these—the blood libel is very old and very ugly—but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that those practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary ...”

  Mo shudders. “Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else’s.”

  “You have evidence of this?” Panin leans towards her eagerly.

  “I’ve seen it.” Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. “Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point—they had been thoroughly possessed—”

  “That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?”

  Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. “Yes.”

  “Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo—it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer’s own will to violate—”

  Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. “I don’t need that lecture right now.”

  “All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?”

  “What?”

  “You appear unduly upset ...”

  “Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.”

  Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Yes.” She raises her glass and drains it, then puts it back on the table with a hard clack. “You can tell me anything you’re at liberty to say, about why the Free Church attracted your attention. And what you think they’re doing.” She glances round. “Now might be a good time to check your wards.” The bar is filling up, but the other after-hours drinkers are all crowding away from the table Mo and Panin share, as if a glass sphere encloses them.

  Panin nods. “The ward is adequate,” he assures her. “As for the Church, I need to tell you a story of the Revolution.

  “During our civil war—the war that split families and slew the spirit of a nation, ending with Lenin’s victory in 1922—many factions fought against the Reds; and as the traditional White leadership collapsed, strange opportunists sprang to prominence. In Siberia, there was a very strange, very wicked man, a Baron by birth, of German ancestry: Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, or Ungern Von Sternberg as he styled himself. Sternberg was a monster. An early obsession with Eastern mysticism warped his mind permanently, and then he found something . . . He was a personal friend of the Bogd Khan, a mass poisoner and coincidentally the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. During the civil war, Sternberg ran an extermination camp near Dauria, east of Lake Baikal. The Whites used to send the death trains to Sternberg, and he used their cargo for his own horrible ends. It’s said that there was a hillside in the woods above Dauria where his men used to kill their Red prisoners by tying them to saplings and quartering them alive. In summer, Sternberg used to go to that hill and camp there under the stars, surrounded by the bones and dismembered bloody pieces of his enemies. It was said by his soldiers that it was the only time he was at peace. He was a terrible man, even by the standards of a time of terror.”

  Mo is nodding. “Was he a member of the Brotherhood?”

  Panin licks his lips. “Sternberg was not a worshiper of lath-Hotep; whenever he found such he slew them, usually by flogging until the living flesh fell from their bones. As a matter of fact, we don’t really know what he was. We know what he did, though. It was one of the great works of pre-computational necromancy, and it took the priests of the Black Buddha to achieve it, fed by the blood and gore of Sternberg’s victims.

  “There are places where the wall between the worlds is thin. Many of these are to be found in central Asia. The Bogd Khan�
��s gruesome midnight rituals—the ones he drank to forget, so heavily that he went blind—there was true seeing there, visions of the ancient plateau on an alien world where the Sleeper in the Pyramid lies sightless and undead. The Bogd was terrified. When his friend Ungern Sternberg offered him the sole currency that would buy relief from these visions—the lives of tens of thousands of victims—the Holy Shining One, eighth incarnation of the Bogd Gegen and Khan of Mongolia, fell upon his shoulder and wept bloody tears as he promised eternal friendship.

  “The priests of the Bogd’s court worked with Ungern Sternberg’s torturers to build a wall around the pyramid, sent death squads shambling into the chilly, thin air on the Sleeper’s Plateau to erect a fence of impaled sacrificial victims. No countermeasure to the Sleeper was created on such a scale for many years, not until your Air Force began their occult surveillance program in the 1970s. As for Sternberg”—Panin shrugs—“he went on to back the wrong side in a civil war. But that does not concern us.”

  “What an interesting story.”

  “Is it?” Panin looks at her sharply.

  She shrugs. “I suppose if I say ‘not really’ you’ll tell me why I’m wrong.”

  “If you insist.” He snaps his fingers. “Another round, please.” To Mo: “It is important. You see”—he waits for his minder to depart in the direction of the bar—“one of the tools used by the monks was a preta, a hungry ghost; a body in its custody could function on the Sleeper’s Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg’s men, who had a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours. The hungry ghost needed bodies to occupy, though its kind is far more intelligent and powerful than the run-of-the-mill possession case. This particular hungry ghost knows the transitive order in which the Death Fence around the Sleeper’s Pyramid was constructed—by implication, the order in which it must be de-constructed if the Sleeper is ever to be released. It was summoned by a ritual that Sternberg documented and sent west, for translation by the only woman he ever trusted: a trust that was misplaced, as it happens, because the document vanished into your organization’s archives and has never been seen since. If the Black Brotherhood could get their hands on the document—I believe you call it the Fuller Memorandum—they might well imagine they could bind the hungry ghost into a new body, compel it to service, and order it to begin dismantling the Death Fence.”