The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  Mo shivers. "That's horrible." She stands up and walks over to inspect the tea. "Hmm, needs more milk." She leans against the counter next to me. "I can't believe Hilbert would have cooperated with the Nazis willingly on that kind of project."

  "He didn't. And when the Allies found out, they, um, demilitarised Germany with extreme prejudice. In the occult field, anyway. None of the Ahnenerbe-SS researchers from the Numerical Analysis Division survived; if the SOE death squads didn't get them, it was the OSS or the NKVD. That's what the Helsinki Protocol was about: nobody wanted to see systematic mass murder of civilians adopted as a technique in strategic warfare, especially given some of the more unpleasant and extreme effects the weapon Ahnenerbe-SS were working on could give rise to. Like collapsing the false vacuum or letting vastly superhuman alien intelligences gain access to our universe. This stuff made atom bombs and ballistic missiles look harmless."

  "Oh." She pauses. "Which is why what happened to me is impossible, right? I think I begin to see. Curiouser and curiouser . . ."

  "I'm going to Amsterdam next Monday, soon as I've booked a flight," I say slowly. "Want to come along?"

  * * * *

  I feel like a real shit. Andy told me I would, and Angleton ground the message home; but it doesn't help any as I tell her half the reasons why I'm going to Amsterdam–the half she's cleared for.

  "The Rijksmuseum has an interesting basement," I say lightly. "It's off-limits to civ–to people who don't have need-to-know on the Helsinki Protocols. Thing is, Holland is part of the EUINTEL agreement, a treaty group that provides for joint suppression operations directed against paranormal threats. I'm not allowed to visit the USA on business without a specific invitation, but Amsterdam is home territory. As long as it's official and I've established a liaison relationship I can call for backup and expect to get it. And if I want to examine the basement library, well, it's the best collated set of Ahnenerbe-SS memorabilia and records this side of Yad Vashem."

  "So if you get a hankering to go look at some old masters and disappear through a side door for a couple of hours–"

  "Exactly."

  "Bullshit, Bob." She frowns at me, eyebrows furrowing. "You've just been lecturing me about the history of this bunch of Nazi necromancers. You obviously think there's some connection with the Middle Eastern guys in Santa Cruz, the one with the weird eyes and the German accent. Your flatmates have just been telling me how safe this house is, and how all the wards have just been updated. If you're afraid of something, why not just sit tight at home?"

  I shrug. "Well, leaving aside that the bastards seem to want you for something–I'm not sure. Look, there's some other stuff I'm not allowed to talk about, but right now Amsterdam looks like the right place to be, if I want to find these idiots before they try and kidnap you again."

  I pull the grill tray out and slide my garbage pizza onto a plate. "Slice of pizza?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  I cut the thing in two pieces and slide one onto another plate, pass it to her. "Look, there's a connection between those goons who kidnapped you in Santa Cruz and something my boss has been keeping an eye on for a couple of years. It turns out that they're connected to the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police; there's a proliferation spin on the whole thing, rogue state trying to get its hands on weapons forbidden by treaty. Right?" She nods, mouth too full to reply. "From that perspective, kidnapping you makes perfect sense. What I don't understand is the sacrifice bit. Or the attempt to kill you. It just doesn't make sense if it's simply a Mukhabarat technology transfer deal. Those guys are vicious but they're not idiots."

  I take a deep breath. "No, the trouble you've got is something related to the Ahnenerbe-SS's legacy. Which is deep, dark shit. I wouldn't put it beyond Saddam Hussein to be dealing in such things–the Ba'ath party of Iraq explicitly modelled their security apparatus on the Third Reich, and they've got a real down on Jews–but it puzzles me. I mean, the possessed guy you saw who wasn't in the flat when the Black Chamber SWAT team stormed it–was he something to do with the Mukhabarat or one of their proxies summoning up some psychotic Nazi death magic or something? If so, the question is who they are, and the answer may be buried in the Rijksmuseum basement. Oh, and there's one other thing."

  "Oh? What would that be?"

  I can't look her in the eye; I just can't. "My boss says he'd value your insight. On an informal basis."

  Which is only half the truth. What I really want to say to her is: It's you they're after. As long as you're here in a Laundry safe house they can't get to you. But if we trail you in front of them, in the middle of a city that happens to be the Mukhabarat's headquarters for Western Europe, we might be able to draw them out. Get them to try again, under the guns of a friendly team. Be our tethered goat, Mo? But I'm chicken. I don't have the guts to ask her to bait my hook. I hold my tongue and I feel about six inches tall, and in my imagination I can see Andy and Derek nodding silent approval, and it still doesn't help. "Given enough pairs of eyes, all problems are transparent," I say, falling back to platitudes. "Besides, it's a great city. We could maybe study etchings together, or something."

  "You need to work on your pickup lines," Mo observes, yanking a particularly limp segment of pizza base loose and holding it up. "But for the sake of argument, consider me charmed. How much will this trip cost?"

  "Ah, now that's the good bit." I drain my mug and push it away from me. "There aren't many perks that come from working for the Laundry, but one of them is that it happens to be possible to get a cheap travel pass. Special arrangement with BA, apparently. All we have to pay is the airport tax and our hotel bill. Know any decent B&Bs out there?"

  Chapter 6

  THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES

  Three days flick by like microfiche cards through the input hopper of Angleton's Memex. Mo has settled into the vacant room on the second floor of our safe house like a long-term resident; as a not very senior academic, her Ph.D. years not long behind her, she probably spent years in flat-shares like this. I focus on my day-to-day work, fixing broken network servers, running a security audit of some service department's kit (two illicit copies of Minesweeper and one MP3 music jukebox to eliminate), and spending the afternoons up in the secure office in the executive suite, learning the bible of field operations by heart. I try not to think about what I'm getting Mo into. In fact, I try not to see her at all, spending long hours into the evening poring over arcane regulations and petty incantations for coordinating joint task-force operations. I feel more than a little bit guilty, even though I'm only obeying orders, and consequently I feel a little bit depressed.

  At least Mhari doesn't try to get in touch.

  The Sunday before we're due to leave I have to stay home because I need to pack my bags. I'm dithering over a stack of T-shirts and an electric toothbrush when someone knocks on my bedroom door. "Bob?"

  I open it. "Mo."

  She steps inside, hesitant, eyes scanning. My room often has that effect on people. It's not the usual single male scattering of clothes on every available surface–aggravated by my packing–so much as the groaning, double-stacked bookcase and the stuff on the walls. Not many guys have anatomically correct life-sized plastic skeletons hanging from a wall bracket. Or a desk made out of Lego bricks, with the bits of three half-vivisected computers humming and chattering to each other on top of it.

  "Are you packing?" she asks, smiling brightly at me; she's dressed up for a night out with some lucky bastard, and here's me wondering when I last changed my T-shirt and looking forward to a close encounter with a slice of toast and a tin of baked beans. But the embarrassment only lasts for a moment, until her wandering gaze settles in the direction of the bookcase. Then: "Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on the top shelf. "Hang on–volume four? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series! Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"

  "Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We–or the Black C
hamber–have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render him metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition–numbered and classified."

  "That's–" She frowns. "May I borrow it? To read?"

  "You're on the inside now; just don't leave it on the bus."

  She pulls the book down, shoves a bundle of crumpled jeans to one side of my bed to make room, and perches on the end of it. Mo in dress-up mode turns out to be a grownup designer version of hippie crossed with Goth: black velvet skirt, silver bangles, ethnic top. Not quite self-consciously pre-Raphaelite, but nearly. Right now she's destroying the effect completely by being 100 percent focussed on the tome. "Wow." Her eyes are alight. "I just wanted to see if you were, like, getting ready? Only now I don't want to go; I'm going to be up all night!"

  "Just remember we need to be out the door by seven o'clock," I remind her. "Allow two hours for getting to Luton and check in . . ."

  "I'll sleep on the plane." She closes the book and puts it down, but keeps one hand on the cover, protectively close. "I haven't seen you around much, Bob. Been busy?"

  "More than you can imagine," I say. Setting up scanners that will slurp through the Laundry's UPI and Reuters news feeds and page me if anything interesting comes up while I'm away. Reading the manual for field operations. Avoiding my guilty conscience . . . "How about you?"

  She pulls a face. "There's so much stuff buried in the stacks, it's unbelievable. I've been spending all my time reading, getting indigestion along the way. It's just such a waste–all that stuff, locked up behind the Official Secrets Act!"

  "Yeah, well." It's my turn to pull a face now. "In principle, I kind of agree with you. In practice . . . how to put it? This stuff has repercussions. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set; play around with it for too long and horrible things can happen to you." I shrug. "And you know what students are like."

  "Yes, well." She stands up, straightening her skirt with one hand and holding the book with the other. "I suppose you've got more experience of that than I have. But, well." She pauses, and gives a little half-smile: "I was wondering if, if you'd eaten yet?"

  Ah. Suddenly I figure it out: I'm so thick. "Give me half an hour?" I ask. Where the hell did I leave that shirt? "Anywhere in particular take your fancy?"

  "There's a little bistro on the high street that I was meaning to check out. If you're ready in half an hour?"

  "Downstairs," I say firmly. "Half an hour!" She slips out of my room and I waste half a minute drooling at the back of the door before I snap out of it and go in search of something to wear that doesn't look too shop-soiled. The sudden realisation that Mo might actually enjoy my company is a better antidepressant than anything I could get on a prescription.

  * * * *

  I'm brought to my senses by the shrill of my alarm clock: it's eight in the morning, the sky's still dark outside, my head aches, and I'm feeling inexplicably happy for someone who this afternoon will be baiting the trap for an unknown enemy.

  I pull on my clothes, grab my bags, head downstairs still yawning vigorously. Mo is in the kitchen, red-eyed and nursing a mug of coffee; there's a huge, travel-stained backpack in the hall. "Been up all night with the book?" I ask. She was thinking about it all through what was otherwise a really enjoyable quiet night out.

  "Here. Help yourself." She points to the café tire. She yawns. "This is all your fault." I glance at her in time to catch a brief grin. "Ready to go?"

  "After this." I pour a mug, add milk, shudder, yawn again, and begin to work on it. "Somehow I'm not hungry this morning."

  "I think that place goes on the visit-again list," she agrees. "I must try the couscous next time . . ." She mounts another attack on her mug and I decide that she's just as attractive wearing jeans and sweat shirt and no warpaint first thing in the morning as in the evening. I'll pass on the red eyes, though. "Got your passport?"

  "Yeah. And the tickets. Shall we go?"

  "Lead on."

  Some hours later we've emerged from Arrivals at Schiphol, caught the train to the Centraal Station, grappled with the trams, and checked into a cutesy family-run hotel with a theme of hot and cold running philosophers–Hegel on the breakfast room place mats, Mo in the Plato room on the top floor, and myself relegated to the Kant basement. By early afternoon we're walking in the Vondelpark, between the dark green grass and the overcast grey sky; a cool wind is blowing in off the channel and for the first time I'm able to get the traffic fumes out of my lungs. And we're out of sight of Nick and Alan who, until the hotel, tailed us all the way from the safe house to the airport and then onto our flight–I suppose they're part of the surveillance team. It's bad practice to acknowledge their presence and they made no attempt to talk to me; as far as I can tell, Mo doesn't suspect anything.

  "So where is this museum then?" asks Mo.

  "Right there." I point. At one end of the park, a neoclassical lump of stonework rears itself pompously toward the sky. "Let's check in and get our restricted area passes validated, huh? Give it an hour or so and we can try and find somewhere to eat."

  "Only a couple of hours?"

  "Everywhere closes early in Amsterdam, except the bars and coffee shops," I explain. "But don't go in a coffee shop and order a coffee or they'll laugh at you. What we call a cafe is an Eethuis, and what they call a cafe we call a pub. Got it?"

  "Clear as mud." She shakes her head. "Good thing for me everyone seems to speak English."

  "It's a common affliction." I pause. "Just don't let it make you feel too secure. This isn't a safe house."

  We walk past a verdigris-covered statue while she considers this. "You have another agenda for coming here," she says finally.

  My guts feel cold. "Yes," I admit. I've been dreading this moment.

  "Well." Unexpectedly she reaches out and takes my hand. "I assume you're prepared for the shit to hit the fan, right?"

  "All feco-ventilatory intersections are covered. They assure me."

  "They." She shrugs, uncomfortably. "This was their idea?"

  I glance round, keeping a vague eye on the other wanderers in the park; a couple of elderly pensioner types, a kid on a skateboard, that's about it. Of course that doesn't mean we aren't being tailed–a raven that's had its central nervous system hijacked by a demonic imperative, a micro-UAV cruising silent a hundred metres overhead with cameras focussed–but at least you can do something about human tradecraft, as opposed to the esoteric or electronic kinds.

  "They're not keen on letting whoever's tracking you get a chance to say 'third time lucky,' " I try to explain. "This is a setup. We're on friendly territory and if anyone tries to grab you, I'm not the only one on your case."

  "That's nice to know." I look at her sharply but she's got her innocent face on, the absent-minded professor musing over a theorem rather than focussing on the world, the flesh, and the devils of Interpol's most-wanted list.

  "You never did tell me about the Thresher," I comment as we cross the road to the museum.

  "Oh, what? The submarine? I didn't think you were interested."

  "Huh." I lead her along the side of the building instead of climbing the steps, and I keep an eye open for the side entrance I'm looking for. "Of course I'm interested."

  "I was kidding, you know." She flashes me a grin. "Wanted to see if it would make you pull your finger out. You spooks are just so focussed."

  There's a blank door set between two monolithic granite slabs that form one flank of the museum; I rap on it thrice and it opens inward automatically. (There's a camera in the ceiling of this entrance tunnel: unwanted visitors will not be made welcome.) "What is this?" Mo asks, "Hey, that's the first secret door I've seen!"

  "Nah, it's just the service entrance," I say. The door closes behind us and I lead her forward, round
a bend, and up to the security desk. "Howard and O'Brien from the Laundry," I say, placing my hand on the counter.

  The booth is empty, but there are two badges waiting on the counter and the door ahead of us opens anyway. "Welcome to the Archive," says a speaker behind the counter. "Please take your ID badges and wear them at all times except when visiting the public galleries."

  I take them and pass one to Mo. She inspects it dubiously. "Is this solid silver? What's the language? This isn't Dutch."

  "It probably came from Indonesia. Don't ask, just wear it." I pin mine on my belt, under the hem of my T-shirt–it doesn't need to be visible to human guards, after all. "Coming?"

  "Yeah."

  * * * *

  The cellars under the Rijksmuseum remind me of an upmarket version of the Stacks at Dansey House–huge tunnels, whitewashed and air-conditioned, chock-full of shelves. There's a difference: almost all the contents at Dansey House are files. Here there are boxes, plastic or wooden, full of evidence, left over from the trials that followed a time of infinite horrors.