The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Oh great, I always fancied myself in a long, black leather trench coat. What will Mo think?"

  "She'll think you look the part when you're angry. Are you up for it?"

  "How the fuck could I say no, when you put it that way?"

  "I'm glad you understand. Now, have you got any other questions for me before we wrap this up and send the tape to the auditors?"

  "Uh, yeah. One question. Why me?"

  "Why–well! Hmm. I suppose because you're already on the inside, Bob. And you've got a pretty unique skill mix. Something you overlook is that we don't have many field qualified agents, and most of those we have are old school two-fisted shoot-from-the-hip-with-a-rune-of-destruction field necromancers; they don't understand these modern Babbage engine Internet contraptions like you do. And you've already got experience with basilisk weapons, or did you think we issued those things like toothpaste tubes? So rather than find someone who doesn't know as much, you just happened to be the man on the spot who knew enough and was thought . . . appropriate."

  "Gee, thanks. I'll sleep a lot better tonight knowing that you couldn't find anyone better suited to the job. Really scraping the barrel, aren't we?"

  "If only you knew . . . if only you knew."

  * * * *

  The next morning they put me on the train to Cheltenham–second class of course–to visit a large office site, which appears as a blank spot on all maps of the area, just in case the Russians haven't noticed the farm growing satellite dishes out back. I spend a very uncomfortable half hour being checked through security by a couple of Rottweilers in blue suits who work on the assumption that anyone who is not known to be a Communist infiltrator from North Korea is a dangerously unclassified security risk. They search me and make me pee in a cup and leave my palmtop at the site security office, but for some reason they don't ask me to surrender the small leather bag containing a mummified pigeon's foot that I wear on a silver chain round my neck when I explain that it's on account of my religion. The idiots.

  It is windy and rainy outside so I have no objection to being ushered into an air-conditioned meeting room on the third floor of an outlying wing, being offered institutional beige coffee the same colour as the office carpet, and spending the next four hours in a meeting with Kevin, Robin, Jane, and Phil, who explain to me in turn what a senior operations officer from GCHQ detached for field duty is expected to do in the way of maintaining security, calling on backup, reporting problems, and filling out the two hundred and seventeen different forms that senior operations officers are apparently employed to spend their time filling out. The Laundry may have a bureaucracy surfeit and a craze for ISO-9000 certification, but GCHQ is even worse, with some bizarre spatchcock version of BS5720 quality assurance applied to all their procedures in an attempt to ensure that the Home Office minister can account for all available paper clips in near real-time if challenged in the House by Her Majesty's loyal opposition. On the other hand, they've got a bigger budget than us and all they have to worry about is having to read other people's email, instead of having their souls sucked out by tentacular horrors from beyond the universe.

  "Oh, and you really ought to wear a tie when you're representing us in public," Phil says apologetically at the end of his spiel.

  "And get a haircut," Jane adds with a smile.

  Bastards.

  The Human Resources imps billet me in a bed and breakfast run by a genteel pair of elderly High Tory sociopaths, a Mr. and Mrs. MacBride. He's bald, loafs around in slippers, and reads the Telegraph while muttering darkly about the need for capital punishment as a solution to the problem of bogus asylum seekers; she wears heavy horn-rimmed glasses and the hairdo that time forgot. The corridors are wallpapered with an exquisitely disgusting floral print and the whole place smells of mothballs, the only symptom of the twenty-first century being a cheap and nasty webcam on the hall staircase. I try not to shudder as I slouch upstairs to my room and barricade the door before settling down for the evening phone call to Mo and a game of Civ on my palmtop (which I rescued from Security on my way out). "It could be worse," Mo consoles me, "at least your landlord doesn't have gill slits and greenish skin."

  The next morning I elbow my way onto an early train to London, struggle through the rush hour crush, and somehow manage to weasel my way into a seat on a train to Milton Keynes; it's full of brightly clad German backpackers and irritated businessmen on their way to Luton airport, but I get off before there and catch a taxi to the cop shop. "There is nothing better in life than drawing on the sole of your slipper with a biro instead of going to the pub on a Saturday night," the lead singer of Half Man Half Biscuit sings mournfully on my iPod, and I am inclined to agree, subject to the caveat that Saturday nights at the pub are functionally equivalent to damp Thursday mornings at the police station. "Is Inspector Sullivan available?" I ask at the front desk.

  "Just a moment." The moustachioed constable examines my warrant card closely, gives me a beady-eyed stare as if he expects me to break down and confess instantly to a string of unsolved burglaries, then turns and ambles into the noisy back office round the corner. I have just enough time to read the more surreal crime prevention posters for the second time ("Are your neighbours foxhunting reptiles from the planet of the green wellies? Denounce them here, free of charge!") when the door bangs open and a determined-looking woman in a grey suit barges in. She looks how Annie Lennox would look if she'd joined the constabulary, been glassed once or twice, and had a really dodgy curry the night before.

  "Okay, who's the joker?" she demands. "You." A bony finger points at me. "You're from–" she sees the warrant card "–oh shit." Over her shoulder: "Jeffries, Jeffries, you rat bastard, you set me up! Oh, why do I bother." Back in my direction: "You're the spook who got me out of bed the day before yesterday after a graveyard shift. Is this your mess?"

  I take a deep breath. "Mine and yours both. I'm just back down from"–I clear my throat–"and I've got orders to find an Inspector J. Sullivan and drag him into an interview room." Mentally crossing my fingers: "What's the J stand for?"

  "Josephine. And it's Detective Inspector, while you're about it." She lifts the barrier. "You'd better come in then." Josephine looks tired and annoyed. "Where's your other card?"

  "My other–oh." I shrug. "We don't flash them around; might be a bit of a disaster if one went missing." Anyone who picked it up would be in breach of Section Three, at the very least. Not to mention in peril of their immortal soul.

  "It's okay, I've signed the Section, in blood." She raises an eyebrow at me.

  "Paragraph two?" I ask, just to be sure she's not bluffing.

  She shakes her head. "No, paragraph three."

  "Pass, friend." And then I let her see the warrant card as it really is, the way it reaches into your head and twists things around so you want to throw up at the mere thought of questioning its validity. "Satisfied?"

  She just nods: a cool customer for sure. The trouble with Section Three of the Official Secrets Act is that it's an offense to know it exists without having signed it–in blood. So us signatories who are in theory cleared to talk about such supersecret national security issues as the Laundry's tea trolley rota are in practice unable to broach the topic directly. We're supposed to rely on introductions, but that breaks down rapidly in the field. It's a bit like lesbian sheep; as ewes display their sexual arousal by standing around waiting to be mounted, it's hard to know if somebody else is, well, you know. Cleared. "Come on," she adds, in a marginally less hostile tone, "we can pick up a cup of coffee on the way."

  Five minutes later we're sitting down with a notepad, a telephone, and an antique tape recorder that Smiley probably used to debrief Karla, back when men were real men and lesbian sheep were afraid. "This had better be important," Josephine complains, clicking a frighteningly high-tech sweetener dispenser repeatedly over her black Nescafe. "I've got a persistent burglar, two rapes, a string of car thefts, and a phantom pisser who keeps breaking into department stores to
deal with, then a bunch of cloggies from West Yorkshire who're running some kind of computer audit–your fault, I believe. I need to get bogged down in X-Files rubbish right now like I need a hole in my head."

  "Oh, it's important all right. And I hope to get it off your desk as soon as possible. I'd just like to get a few things straight first."

  "Hmm. So what do you need to know? We've only had two flying saucer sightings and six alien abductions this year so far." She raises one eyebrow, arms crossed and shoulders set a trifle defensively. Who'd have thought it? Being interviewed by higher authorities makes the alpha female detective defensive. "It's not like I've got all day: I'm due in a case committee briefing at noon and I've got to pick up my son from school at four."

  On second thought, maybe she really is busy. "To start with, did you get any witness reports or CCTV records from the scene? And have you identified the cow, and worked out how it got there?"

  "No eyewitnesses, not until three o'clock, when Vernon Thwaite was out walking his girlfriend's toy poodle which had diarrhoea." She pulls a face, which makes the scar on her forehead wrinkle into visibility. "If you want we can go over the team reports together. I take it that's what pulled you in?"

  "You could say that." I dip a cheap IKEA spoon in my coffee and check cautiously after a few seconds to see if the metal's begun to corrode. "Helicopters make me airsick. Especially after a night out when I was expecting a morning lie-in." She almost smiles before she remembers she's officially grumpy with me. "Okay, so no earlier reports. What else?"

  "No tape," she says, flattening her hands on the tabletop to either side of her cup and examining her nail cuticles. "Nothing. One second it's zero zero twenty-six, the next it's zero seven fourteen. Numbers to engrave in your heart. Dennis, our departmental geek, was most upset with MKSG–they're the public-private partners in the regional surveillance outsourcing sector."

  "Zero zero twenty-six to zero seven fourteen," I echo as I jot them down on my palmtop. "MKSG. Right, that's helpful."

  "It is?" She tilts her head sideways and stares at me like I'm a fly that's landed in her coffee.

  "Yup." I nod, then tell myself that it'd be really stupid to wind her up without good reason. "Sorry. What I can tell you is, I'm as interested in anything that happened to the cameras as the cow. If you hear anything about them–especially about them being tampered with–I'd love to know. But in the meantime–Daisy. Do you know where she came from?"

  "Yes." She doesn't crack a smile but her shoulders unwind slightly. "Actually, she's number two six three from Emmett-Moore Ltd, a dairy factory out near Dunstable. Or rather, she was two six three until three days ago. She was getting along a bit, so they sold her to a local slaughterhouse along with a job lot of seven other cows. I followed-up on the other seven and they'll be showing up in your McHappy McMeal some time next month. But not Daisy. Seems a passing farmer in a Range Rover with a wagon behind it dropped by and asked if he could buy her and cart her away for his local family butcher to deal with."

  "Aha!"

  "And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you." She takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and strafes it with sweeteners again. Responding on autopilot I try a mouthful of my own and burn my tongue. "Turns out that there's no such farmer Giles of Ham Farm, Bag End, The Shire, on record. Mind you, they had a camera on their stockyard and we nailed the Range Rover. It turned up abandoned the next day on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard and it's flagged as stolen on HOLMES2. Right now it's sitting in the pound down the road; they smoked it for prints but it came up clean and we don't have enough money to send a SOCO and a forensics team to do a full workup on every stolen car we run across. However, if you twist my arm and promise me a budget and to go to the mat with my boss I'll see what I can lay on."

  "That may not be necessary: we have ways and means. But can you get someone to drive me down there? I'll take some readings and get out of your face–except for the business with Daisy. How are you covering that?"

  "Oh, we'll find something. Right now it's filed under 'F' for Fucking Fortean Freakery, but I was thinking of announcing it's just an old animal that had been dumped illegally by a farmer who didn't want to pay to have it slaughtered."

  "That sounds about right." I nod slowly. "Now, I'd like to play a random word-association game with you. Okay? Ten seconds. When I say the words tell me what you think of. Right?"

  She looks puzzled. "Is this–"

  "Listen. Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. By the authority vested in me by the emissaries of Y'ghonzzh N'hai I have the power to bind and to release, and your tongue be tied of these matters of which we have spoken until you hear these words again: Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. Got that?"

  She looks at me cross-eyed and mouths something, then looks increasingly angry until finally she gets it together to burst out with: "Hey, what is this shit?"

  "Purely a precaution," I say, and she glares at me, gobbling for a moment while I finish my coffee until she figures out that she simply can't say a word about the subject. "Right," I say. "Now. You've got my permission to announce that the cow was dumped. You have my permission to talk freely to me, but to nobody else. Anyone asks any questions, refer them to me if they won't take no for an answer. This goes for your boss, too. Feel free to tell them that you can't tell them, nothing more."

  "Wanker," she hisses, and if looks could kill I'd be a small pile of smouldering ashes on the interview room floor.

  "Hey, I'm under a geas, too. If I don't spread it around my head will explode."

  I don't know whether she believes me or not but she stops fighting it and nods tiredly. "Tell me what you want then get the hell out of my patch."

  "I want a lift to the car pound. A chance to sit behind the wheel of that Range Rover. A book of poetry, a jug of wine, a date tree, and–sorry, wrong question. Can you manage it?"

  She stands up. "I'll take you there myself," she says tersely. We go.

  * * * *

  I get to endure twenty-five minutes of venomous silence in the back seat of an unmarked patrol car driven by one Constable Routledge, with DI Sullivan in the front passenger seat treating me with the warmth due a serial killer, before we arrive at the pound. I'm beyond introspective self-loathing by now–you lose it fast in this line of work. Angleton will have my head for a key-ring fob if I don't take care to silence any possible leaks, and a tongue-twisting geas is more merciful than most of the other tools at my disposal–but I still feel like a shit. So it comes as a great relief to get out of the car and stretch my legs on the muddy gravel parking lot in the pouring rain.

  "So where's the car?" I ask, innocently.

  Josephine ignores me. "Bill, you want to head over to Bletchley Way

  and pick up Dougal's evidence bag for the Hayes case. Then come back to pick us up," she tells the driver. To the civilian security guard: "You, we're looking for BY 476 ERB. Came in yesterday, Range Rover. Where is it?"

  The bored security goon leads us through the mud and a maze of cars with POLICE AWARE stickers glued to their windshields then gestures at a half-empty row. "That's it?" Josephine asks, and he passes her a set of keys. "Okay, you can piss off now." He takes one look at her face and beats a hasty retreat. I half-wish I could join him–whether she's a detective inspector or not, and therefore meant to be behaving with the gravitas of a senior officer in public, DI Sullivan looks to be in a mood to bite the heads off chickens. Or Laundry field agents, given half an excuse.

  "Right, that's it," she says, holding out the keys and shaking them at me impatiently. "You're done, I take it, so I'll be pushing off. Case meeting to run, mystery shopping centre pisser to track down, and so on."

  "Not so fast." I glance round. The pound is surrounded by a high wire fence and there's a decrepit Portakabin office out front by the gate: a camera sits on a motorised mount on a pole sticking up from the roof. "Who's on the other end of that thing?"

  "The gate guard,
probably," she says, following my finger. The camera is staring at the entrance, unmoving.

  "Okay, why don't you open up the car." She blips the remote to unlock the door and I keep my eyes on the camera as she takes the handle and tugs. Could I be wrong? I wonder as the rain trickles down my neck. I shake myself when I notice her staring, then I pull out my palmtop, clamber up into the driver's seat, and balance the pocket computer on the steering wheel as I tap out a series of commands. What I see makes me shake my head. Whoever stole the car may have wiped for fingerprints but they didn't know much about paranormal concealment–they didn't use the shroud from a suicide, or get a paranoid schizophrenic to drive. The scanner is sensitive to heavy emotional echoes, and the hands I'm looking for are the most recent ones to have chilled from fright and fear of exposure. I log everything and put it away, and I'm about to open the glove locker when something makes me glance at the main road beyond the chainlink fence and–

  "Watch out! Get down!" I jump out and go for the ground. Josephine is looking around so I reach out and yank her ankles out from under her. She yells, goes down hard on her backside, and tries to kick me, then there's a loud whump from behind me and a wave of heat like an open oven door. "Shit, fuck, shit–" I take a moment to realise the person cursing is me as I fumble at my throat for the bag and rip it open, desperately trying to grab the tiny claw and the disposable cigarette lighter at the same time. I flick the lighter wheel and right then something like a sledgehammer whacks into the inside of my right thigh.