* * *
I’m not much of one for foreign travel, and I’ve never been to the US before. I don’t like flying, and my first impressions on arrival are not very good at all.
We’re here under cover as tourists, although I’m damned if I can see why. Air fares are still sky-high despite the resumption of international scheduled flights. We probably stand out like sore thumbs and our cover requires sitting in economy seats for more than seven hours, which has not put me in my happy place. Also, Heathrow? Meh. (The one silver lining is that it was possible to arrange for me to stay at least three layers of glass away from daylight at all times until we were aboard, and then to sit in a center-row seat, well away from the windows. Opaque clothes and heavy sunblock will only get you so far, but a VIP pass does the trick.)
I refresh my makeup before we touch down at JFK, and once we reach the terminal we run the gauntlet of a single window-lined corridor before diving into the subterranean guts of the airport and fetching up in a vast, echoing cattle market dominated by a giant flag. On the up side, there is absolutely no death-star radiance to scorch my skin, which would be a bit of a tell. On the downside? It’s another giant airport. Yay.
Fuckboy doesn’t quite get it. I mean, he can tell I’m scratchy and irritable and he knows in the abstract that I’m outside my comfort zone in daylight, but he doesn’t have the gut-deep visceral terror of spontaneous human combustion that I live with. If anything goes wrong, if we have to evacuate the plane using the emergency slides, he’ll be the one carrying my blackened rib cage off the runway. But he doesn’t seem terribly concerned. It’s almost a relief to find myself queuing at passport control in an unfriendly country, under the guns of border patrol agents looking for illegals: at least I know where I stand with them.
It takes us a quarter of an hour to shuffle through the enormous queue to the crappy photo-booth machines, where we present our passports and answer a bunch of tedious questions before being fingerprinted and photographed and given a printout of our details. Then there’s a shorter queue in front of a bored man in uniform who collects our papers, checks them, and stamps our passports—I have no idea why they automated only half the process—but he waves us through as a couple, and then we find ourselves in baggage claim. “When do we hit customs?” I ask.
Fuckboy shrugs. “Isn’t that next?” he asks. “Hey, did you notice the flag?”
I sniff. “No, I didn’t notice the flag.” I need a shower. I deserve a shower. “Why is the flag important?”
“There’s another one over there, past the far baggage belt.” He pitches his voice low. “The stars are wrong.”
“How do you even—” I squint at the flag.
“They’ve got the wrong number of points. Seven each, instead of five.”
“Huh.” Suddenly I have to fight the urge to count them, which is simultaneously the most important thing in the world and an incredibly annoying itch: arithmomania, compulsive counting, is one of the side effects PHANGs like me learn to live with. I force myself to look away, and also to ignore the mirrored observation windows running the length of the hall just below the ceiling. He’s right about the flag, and it’s so disturbing that I almost miss my Louis Vuitton suitcase tumbling down onto the conveyor belt. I grab it, remembering to make a performance—it weighs twenty kilos, which used to be a lot back when my muscles were merely human—then wait patiently for Jim’s bag, which takes considerably longer to emerge. All the while I have an itchy feeling that somebody is watching us, or at least keeping an eye on the travelers in the baggage claim hall. Finally, I take Jim’s arm and he escorts me to the customs desk. Just another sightseeing couple visiting the Big Apple, nothing to pay attention to here.
At five in the afternoon—ten at night, back home—I find myself skulking under an awning while Fuckboy haggles with the driver of a black limousine with tinted rear windows. Not bursting into flames on the drive into Manhattan will totally fly as an expense account item, I figure—at least, it will if I sign off on it myself—and once again I curse His Ghastliness for helpfully ordering me to lead from the front.
I’m traveling under my real name, as is Fuckboy (aka Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Grey) because we’ve got visible public profiles and we have to assume that we’re on a watch list. The safest cover story is to creatively deploy the truth: we’re lovebirds (somewhat true) on vacation together (somewhat false). To add depth and texture I’m wearing an antique Tiffany emerald-and-diamond engagement ring that’ll be returned to the jewelers after the mission. Meanwhile, I’m carrying a burner smartphone faked up by CESG that has a totally plausible address book and an app payload that won’t hemorrhage state secrets if it’s seized. So, the roles we’re playing are a medium-high ranking cop and a medium-high ranking civil servant who are celebrating their engagement with a romantic trip to New York because they are in lurve. Blech.
For obvious reasons I had to leave all my work back home. A day of forced inactivity in an economy-class death trap, then running the gauntlet of the US equivalent of Border Force, has put me in a bad mood. Not even the prospect of getting to share a posh hotel suite (and a bed) with Fuckboy quite takes the edge off it, because I’m going to be too tired to get up to much. And then we’ve got a job to do. Also, the traffic on the JFK Expressway is terrifying—and I can take the M25 at rush hour in my stride.
I’m cowering back in my seat and hiding from the windows (even though it’s dusk) when Jim suddenly gasps “Wow!” and sits bolt upright.
“What is it, dear?”
“I saw—” I track his gaze out the tinted window, but there’s just a blur of traffic and concrete and overhead cables. “Damn, missed them.”
“What?”
“I thought I saw a cape,” he says, subsiding. “They flew overhead at about a hundred meters, following the road. Silver bodysuit, no wings or anything.”
I snort. “Probably a traffic cop.” Quietly: “Poor bastard.” There are more soi-disant superheroes in New York City than anywhere else in the world—it’s ahead of LA, Tokyo, and London combined—but they’re all doomed. Sooner or later Krantzberg syndrome will kill them. The thaumic feeders they’re unconsciously invoking may temporarily give them extraordinary powers, but feeders like to chow down on the neural tissue of their summoners, and if they’re not adequately protected, K syndrome—a really nasty early-onset dementia—will get them. I’m immune, thanks to my V-parasites, but V syndrome has its own problems. And now my mood drops like a stone because I can see the yearning on Fuckboy’s face, and it isn’t fair. Because my Fuckboy is a superhero, and if this engagement ring was for real, I could expect to be a widow by the time I’m forty.
“Poor bastard,” Jim echoes quietly. A pensive expression crosses his face. “If only there was another cure.”
I reach over and take his hand. “A better one,” I agree. There is a cure for K syndrome, for ritual magic practitioners and “superheroes” alike. It’s just that the cure is to go PHANG, and to my way of thinking it’s worse than the disease.
* * *
You’re probably wondering what happened between me getting drunk over the weekend, and me flying into JFK with Jim. So let me start with that meeting four weeks ago, in Cabinet Office Briefing Room C:
I looked around the big boardroom-style table that filled the windowless high-security briefing room a stone’s throw from Whitehall. Misery loves company, especially on a Monday morning, and judging by the faces around the table I was definitely part of the “in” crowd.
“Good morning, everyone,” I said, forcing myself to smile over my Caffè Nero latte—it’s never good for morale when the boss is down in the dumps. “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.” Enough with the clichés. “This came right from the top with all our names on it.” I picked up my folder. “Close the door, please—thank you.” Deep breath. “The Prime Minister has instructed me to establish a task force and seconded all of you to it by name, as key personnel.”<
br />
I cleared my throat. “The PM is using an obscure statutory instrument called Henry VIII Powers to reactivate the former Special Operations Executive. Not just Q-Division, but the original sabotage and black-ops organization, founded by Churchill in 1940 to set occupied Europe ablaze. SOE was absorbed by SIS in late 1945. Now it’s being reactivated, given new goals, a budget, and a new reporting chain—direct to Number 10—and a whole raft of existing oversight arrangements have just gone out of the window.” I waited a few seconds while the uneasy shuffling and throat clearing died down. “My understanding of what Number 10 expects from us is unclear”—it would have been more accurate to say the Prime Minister is winging it, but that might scare people—“so for the time being, I’m assuming that His long-term vision for us looks something like”—the lights on the front of an onrushing train—“this.”
I tapped the space bar on my laptop to bring up the first slide: no PowerPoint here, just a boring PDF of some bullet points generated by software with absolutely no power to infiltrate brains. Then I explained the jobs we’d been given. It didn’t take long: about ten minutes, start to finish. And then there was stunned silence.
“Does anybody have any questions?” I asked, and waited expectantly, because that’s what one does.
Colonel Lockhart was the first to surface, a wrinkled tortoise sticking his head out of his shell and peering around myopically for threats. “That’s—” He cleared his throat diplomatically.“Problematic. To say the least.”
“Can he do that?” asked Janice, defensive and prickly in this unfamiliar setting.
Lockhart gave her a frosty side-eye: “He most certainly can.” He tapped his pen on the notepad in front of him. “Civil Contingencies Act and a majority in the House.” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing above the over-tight knot of his regimental tie. “Our questions should center on how, not why.” Another glare. Janice, like me, was a Scrum survivor—our sysadmin/devops deployment expert. She turned PHANG at the same time as the rest of us, survived the murderous attentions of Basil the vampire elder, and of course ended up working for the Laundry. The big difference between us is that she’s not even remotely a people person. I have no idea why He picked her for this job, unless He thought we needed someone to secure our servers. In any event, Lockhart’s disapproval was, to her, like water off a duck’s back. Janice didn’t even notice it.
“Come on, people,” I coaxed. “Derek, how about you? You’re on scenario development, this has got to be right up your alley, yes?” I flashed him a smile full of pearly gnashers.
Derek actually had the decency to look frightened. “Who, me?” I nodded encouragement. “Well, um, we’re supposed to—” He took a deep breath, then another, chest rising and falling so fast I began to worry that he was starting to hyperventilate.“America. Right. I’ve never been to America.”
“Not to worry, you won’t be going there without a minder,” I said, to his visible relief. “You can hunker down in your basement just like a good DM. All I expect from you for now is scenario design and build, timeline management, and the usual contingency planning on top. Oh, and you’ve got VIP access to Forecasting Ops.” I smiled reassuringly. “It’ll be just like running one of your weekend LARPs, only in a different time zone, and if you get it wrong the oppo will dial in a drone strike.” On you, never mind your minions, I didn’t add; there was nothing to be gained by hounding our chief planner into a breakdown.
“Well, that’s all right, then.” Derek said, relieved. He pulled out a cloth and began to polish his horn-rimmed glasses. “Where do I start?”
“You start by planning how to get us home in a hurry if it all goes to shit—that is, the away team and the high-value target—or, failing that, how best to keep everything out of the adversary’s hands. Work backwards from there.” I watched as Derek scribbled hasty notes in pencil. “Got it?”
A throat-clearing sound caught my attention and I glanced round the table. It wasn’t Fuckboy: too high-pitched, and anyway Jim was leaning back in his chair, looking pensive. Beside him, the wiry schoolteacher-y guy from our SRR ancillary team was scribbling notes as if his exam results depended on it. Then—oh, her. The kid. “What is it, Jonquil?” I managed to smile affably.
“Do you really figure this is, like, for real?” she singsonged at me. “It’s, like, not a loyalty test or something?”
Dear Jesus, fuck you very much. I managed to freeze my face just in time, but not everyone else in the meeting was as quick on the uptake, and Janice just about bit her head off: “Of course it’s a fucking loyalty test!” she exploded. “Test to destruction. Do this, do that, oh dear, well at least you died trying to be useful, don’t you get it?”
Silence descended, leaving Janice beetle-browed, casting her glare around the table for support. Meanwhile pretty blonde Jonquil, the office intern from hell, simpered and scribbled something in eldritch shorthand on her jotter. “What do you mean?” Jonquil poked the bruise. “Why do you think He’d give us a—”
I stood up. I hate uptalk, that upward inflection at the end of every sentence that turns a statement into a leading question. I hate it even more when it comes from the mouths of babes and informers. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”
Jonquil saw something in my expression that made her bite her tongue. She stopped dead in mid-flow, her upturned face pale.
“Stop. Harassing. The B-Team,” I warned her.
“I’ll have you—”
“You’ll have nothing. People,” I looked around the table, “just to make things totally clear to those of you who aren’t political, Jonquil here reports to her mother”—bemused expressions from those for whom the penny hadn’t dropped yet—“Mrs. Carpenter, the High Priestess of Number 10.” That was a bitchy put-down, but not untrue. “Jonquil has no official rank within SOE, but she’s a SPAD from Party Central Office and you should treat her with the respect she deserves.” A Special Political Advisor to the Prime Minister himself, in other words, imposed on the team to monitor ideological compliance with the New Management. Impossible to keep out of the office, and as deserving of respect as a spitting cobra with rabies. If snakes could get rabies. “She’s not in our reporting chain so much as she is our reporting chain.” I point a finger at her: “But that doesn’t give you license to fuck with my personnel, especially when the officer in question is here because the PM expressly requested her participation. If you start a witch hunt, you’ll fatally undermine our efficacy before we even get started, and I’m pretty sure He’ll take a dim view of that. He wants results, or none of us would be here. Am I understood?”
To my surprise, Jonquil backed down. “I’m sorry, Baroness?” she said with downcast gaze, folding her hands in her lap. “Please accept my apologies?”
I made a mental note to check my bedroom for concealed UV flashbulbs and poisonous spiders, then nodded and moved on. “Here—” I opened my red box and pulled out a clipboard and a pile of sealed envelopes—“are your initial individual orders. Paper only, no electronic copies permitted, sign and fingerprint on the attendance list—we’ll break for coffee and reading time, then reconvene in half an hour to discuss execution and matters arising.” The clipboard circulated, the pile of envelopes diminishing as my team picked them up. “Oh, and Derek? A word with you—I’ve got a little errand to run tomorrow and I want you to come along.”
THREE
WE’RE ONLY MAKING PLANS FOR JAR-JAR
I’m tired, itchy, and bad-tempered by the time our taxi pulls up on a street in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from Times Square. Twilight has fallen and the frontage of our hotel is entirely concealed by scaffolding, so I leave Jim to get a receipt from the cabbie while I haul our suitcases into the lobby. We’re staying in a boutique hotel which most certainly does not fit within our normal travel allowance policy, but which is perfect for our cover story. The door is green-tarnished brass scrollwork and crystal-polished glass panels. And the lobby is all chilly Italian marble and black velvet, with pre
tty young things in sharp suits staffing the check-in desk.
Sally from Guest Services is handing me my room card and explaining about the complementary wine tasting every evening when her gaze slides sideways and focuses on something behind me: Fuckboy, I realize, as Jim rests a hand on my shoulder. She manages to tear her eyes away from him without prompting, so I keep my smile businesslike: “I’ll let you know if we need anything else—” To Jim—“Help me with the baggage, dear?” He trails after me without so much as a backward glance. “Well, that was life-affirming,” I remark as I lean against the mirrored back wall of the elevator.
“What?” He looks baffled.
“Nothing.” The elevator dings and the doors open on a surprisingly narrow corridor. I gather hotels in Manhattan, even upscale luxury boutique hotels suitable for an upwardly mobile couple on their naughty prenup honeymoon, are just as cramped as those in London. (Mo’s husband insists that all hotel corridors join up eventually via those doors labelled EMPLOYEES ONLY in a hyperdimensional manifold he calls Hotelspace, but he’s always been a few screws short of a full set, and I’ve long since given up trying to figure him out—not my problem anymore.) We find our suite without too much trouble and it turns out it’s actually smaller than my living room, which is remarkable, although there’s a bathroom with whirlpool bath, and no less than three TV screens.
“Huh,” says Jim, lining up our suitcases and carry-on bags against one wall as if they’re on parade. “Where are the, uh…”
“I’ll sort them out.” I pick up the room telephone. “Housekeeping? This is room 1214, I believe there should be some mail waiting for us—parcels? I mean, packages? Can you have someone bring them up, please? Thanks everso.” I hang up, then sit down on the end of the aircraft-carrier-sized bed and bounce up and down experimentally. It’s a good thing I call Jim Fuckboy, is all I can say.
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