The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Iris looks up. “Morning, dear!” She stands, and Yarisol takes a moment to dredge up the appropriate reaction from Jonquil’s memories. She air-smooches, millimeters away from Iris’s face. “You’re looking rather smart this morning.”

  Yarisol pulls up the right self-deprecating expression from her shadow’s muscle memory. Her face aches with the effort of half-smiling while concealing her teeth: a glamour will only get you so far. “Got to keep up appearances, Mumsy?! Flight to catch, special priority lane and all that?”

  “Yes. About that…” Iris searches her face for some insight, then abruptly turns and presents Jonquil with a china cup of coffee, made exactly the way her daughter likes it. (Yarisol, who hates coffee, forces herself to take an appreciative sip.) “Makeup?”

  Yarisol wails in a corner of her head, but Jonquil thinks on her feet: “Got to hit a TV studio on the way to the airport, Mhari positively insisted, it’s a stupid last-minute scheme of hers to fake some digital point-to-point traffic to confuse the … listeners?”

  It’s a terrifyingly thin excuse, but it seems to satisfy her not-mother, who nods. “Good. And you’re quite clear on our objectives?”

  “You can rely on me?!” Jonquil drops the bright and bubbly tone slightly, allowing the obsidian edge of her commitment to show. Her mother’s eyes harden approvingly. “The sacrifice will be retrieved? The traitors will reap their reward?!”

  “Excellent.” Iris smiles at the face-stealing mage who wears the features of her daughter, evidently not suspecting that the real Jonquil lies mute and stunned in Yarisol’s cell, in the prison camp on Salisbury Plain. She stands. “Before you go, His Majesty asked after you.” She flicks an imaginary piece of lint from her daughter’s lapel. “It’s a great honor and I don’t want you to disgrace me. Come along now!”

  Her five minutes alone with the denizen of Number 10 threatens to make her late, but rank has privileges: Jonquil is whisked off to Heathrow in the back of a blue-light-flaring police car. Consequently she arrives early, breezes through the pre-clear queue with hand luggage only, and flies into the west aboard a British Airways airliner. It is her first trip aboard an urük sky-cart, and it is both delightfully strange and disturbingly half-familiar to her. She drinks the free whisky in business class, becomes giggly and then sleepy, finally recalls that she has not consumed her meal, and makes her way to the toilet to let crimson life bleed across her tongue. Then she dozes the rest of the way to Albuquerque.

  * * *

  Derek’s trip to the Library of Congress is not a self-indulgent act of tourism. But there is such a thing as Need to Know, and Janice, as a back-office operator, doesn’t have as much of it as she thinks she does, so he doesn’t explain. Derek, meanwhile, knows far too much—which is why this is his sole piece of tradecraft on the mission, and very much a training-wheels outing.

  You will meet a tall, dark stranger …

  When Derek asked Forecasting Ops for input on ways to maximize the chances of success for the mission, they recommended a trip to the library and an approach to a particular member of staff. Forecasting Ops are notoriously Delphic, not to mention prone to disappearing in a maze of temporal paradoxes when the shit hits the fan. (They actually vanished completely for three or four months around the installation of the New Management, written out of history so thoroughly that Boris in Mission Support proposed establishing an experimental oracular subdivision.) But something has frightened them back into existence—something even more terrifying than being the subjects of a government led by the Honorable Member of Parliament for Thebes North. They are now being grudgingly cooperative, at least insofar as anyone can make sense of their predictions. And actually telling Derek to go to this place and talk to that man? It’s unprecedented transparency, by their standards.

  Derek directs an Uber to take him to the nearest metro station, then rides the subway into the center of DC. Being a tourist is a great excuse for head-swiveling curiosity, and although it’s a cold winter day by local standards, it’d be a warm spring morning back in London.

  Derek hasn’t been abroad since he was twelve years old—a school trip to Italy was the limit of his travels—so he has only a vague idea of what constitutes normality here, but something, he feels, isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s the silver, life-sized human statues spaced on plinths, or the purple balloons trailing tentacular antennae and clusters of cameras overhead, like so many cyborg Portuguese men-of-war. Or the way the uniformed police march robotically back and forth, wearing badges with a seven-pointed swirling star that sucks the gaze in if it lingers for too long. His ward pulses just slightly faster than his heartbeat, feeling warm and oddly moist. This is not a place to loiter, Derek feels, lest one attract the gaze of hidden watchers.

  Derek is unworldly but not naive. He knows from experience that he has zero aptitude for skullduggery and spycraft, and isn’t terribly good at people things in the first place. But he checked back with Forecasting and asked them to confirm that he had to run this errand himself, and Magic 8-Ball said yes. So here he is, wandering around the pillars and porticoes of a beaux arts building across the road from Congress. There is a leaflet with a map of the public areas of the library available at the front desk. Derek puzzles over it, shuffling along nearsightedly behind a Korean tourist group.

  There is, in spycraft, a type of professional known as a Gray Man, so-called because they’re almost impossible to spot. They’re so unremarkably average and nondescript that a living watcher’s eyes slide straight past them. Machine vision systems capable of doing better in real time are seldom found outside of the lab yet. Derek is not a Gray Man: he is Gray Man’s seldom-spotted sibling, the Man of No Consequence. He is portly, middle-aged, and peers out at the world through thick-lensed glasses perched on a bulbous nose beneath a precarious comb-over. He’s easily spotted, but once spotted he’s almost automatically dismissible. Derek has difficulty getting served in bars, or paying in shops, unless he resorts to waving his arms, telegraphing his distress in semaphore. So despite the fact that he wandered in off the street and attached himself to a wildly dissimilar party, nobody spares him a second glance. If they ever do, they assume that he’s harmlessly lost and leave it to someone else to redirect him to where he should be.

  Nearly forty years in captivity, spent DM’ing a very peculiar role-playing game, has left Derek with an eerie ability to glance at a building’s floor plan and infer the likely layout and functions of the blank parts of the map, the implied spaces where secret rooms and hidden treasures lie. The tourist map is a very abbreviated schematic, showing only the general layout of the parts of the library that are open to visitors, but … yes, Derek thinks, there’s a door labelled “staff only” right about there, fronting that large blank area, and it’s secured by a badge-reading lock.

  Derek ambles over to the door and pulls his warrant card from the breast pocket of his shirt. (He wears it on a lanyard out of long habit.) He taps it on the lock reader, a prickle of cold sweat springing out on the back of his neck. At home, the warrant card opens doors, no questions asked. In this place, who knows? Worst case, alarms may be ringing in a security office. But after barely a second the lock clicks open. Derek pushes through the door and lets it swing shut behind him, then returns the card to his pocket. He hurries onward, following the urgent nudges of a wristband he wears. It’s destiny-entangled with a twin, which is worn by the remote viewer in Forecasting Ops back home who is leading him to his rendezvous.

  Derek makes his way past workrooms identified by number, through fire doors, down a staircase, and along a high-ceilinged subterranean passage roofed with pipes and tubes. He read about the railway that ran down here, once, an early underground line that connected the Library to the Capitol buildings so that senators and congressmen could consult its archives (or, more likely, sneak in and out for a liquid lunch without running the gauntlet of the public at the main entrance). There are many secrets in underground Washington DC, and Derek has an itch to peek
behind some of those closed doors. But he has a job to do, and besides, the wristband is urging him towards a door bearing the promising label, “mail room.”

  Derek opens the mail-room door. A middle-aged man in a short-sleeved shirt and tie is working on a computer at a desk alongside a wall covered in shelving and sorting baskets. He glances up. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  Derek lets the door close. “Are you Gilbert from the Comstock Office?” he asks.

  “Who sent you?” The mailman jumps to his feet, clearly agitated. “What do you want?”

  Derek backs up against the door and smiles nervously. “I’m looking for the President,” he says. “I’m told you can put me in touch with him?”

  * * *

  Morning rolls round soon enough and because part of me is still running on UK time I awaken several hours earlier than I’m happy about—until I roll over and see Fuckboy watching me from the other side of the gigantic bed, wearing a smug grin and a sheet tented over his nether regions. The grin is a challenge, so I snarl and pounce on him. Another hour passes before we tire each other out enough to get up. It’s a very pleasant hour, which is good because today is going to be tiring and annoying—and that’s if everything goes right.

  Over the hotel breakfast—which is weird as fuck: Why do they call the scones “biscuits” and smother them in white sauce and call it “gravy”?—I observe Jim across the table. He’s unshaven, his hair spiked with sweat, and he’s wearing yesterday’s travel clothes because he showers after breakfast. He’s an unselfconscious mess and so gorgeous I can’t take my eyes off him. So I don’t even bother to pretend not to stare, because it’s consistent with our cover story, and I’m suddenly desperate to commit this moment to memory. I am, I gradually realize, happy. And with this happiness comes a terrible apprehension that it’s all going to be ripped away from us. It’s going to come to a painful end sooner rather than later, because we’re doomed.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” he asks over the rim of his coffee mug.

  “DC today,” I say, sticking strictly to work instead of the conversation we really need to have, the one about us. Or the other one, about the traitors and the informers and the deep game the mad gods are playing with screaming chess pieces who bleed. “We should check the train timetables, I guess, but I think they run hourly or more often from Penn Station.” Wherever that is: there’s a map app for that. “I’ll wear a hoodie and pretend to sleep.”

  “Isn’t that a bit risky?” he asks.

  I shrug, uncomfortable. “It’s daytime, everything is risky.” We could hire a van and I could hide from the sunlight in the back, but roads are riskier than rail or air travel. Or I could crouch in a suitcase and Jim could carry me as luggage—he’s monstrously strong, when he needs to be—but four hours in a suitcase would be hellish, and carries other risks besides. “I’ll do the sunblock thing and stick to shadows, and we can time it so we arrive after 6 p.m. Does that work for you?”

  I chug my glass of orange juice. Hunger is a mild buzzing behind my eyeballs: I fed to the point of discomfort the day before yesterday, fed like a leech until I felt like I was ballooning dizzily towards a splattering explosion. Trying all the while not to think about what—who—I was feeding on. I overfed because I didn’t know when I’d be able to feed again, fed because I was going on a mission overseas and other people’s lives depended on me. Not because the hot red life trickling down my throat tickles like the onset of the most ecstatic orgasm ever, not because the sense of warmth and happy tranquility when my V-parasites are well-fed is like an opiate afterglow. (Even though it is.) I fed strictly for duty—I blink. Jim is watching me intently. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says, in a tone that means the opposite.

  So here’s what happens:

  We finish breakfast, go upstairs, and agree that he’s going to hit the shower while I check in with head office—we have prearranged codes—but I look up while Fuckboy’s stripping off and I can’t help myself. We jump in the shower together and hump frantically until the water threatens to run cold (this is a big hotel: the water never runs cold) and we have to get out. Jim gets dressed, but pauses in the doorway on his way out while I’m online confirming our arrival and verifying that everyone else is in position. I pretend not to notice the frank, lingering look he gives me, but I’d be offended if he didn’t stare at me sitting naked and cross-legged on a towel.

  After he leaves I dry and get dressed. My own outfit mostly consists of the one-piece bodysuit. With the hood rolled down around my neck and the gloves stashed up the sleeves it looks like I’m wearing tights and a layered turtleneck, just right for late February. I pull a black dress on over it, then a winter coat and hat for outdoors. I glance at the slatted blinds that keep the thin winter sun-glare off my skin. I’ll be fine, I fret, as long as nothing goes wrong. So then I retreat into the bathroom and set up my smartphone’s front camera to serve as a mirror while I apply lip gloss and war paint that make it look as if I’m wearing too much makeup rather than factor-100 sunblock.

  It’s after eleven and I’m beginning to get worried when Jim finally slips back through the door. “Mission accomplished,” he says. “Two first-class tickets on the Acela from Penn Station to Union Station, departing at 3 p.m., arriving just before six. Paid for with cash.” He flourishes two tickets like airline boarding passes. “You’re looking very smart,” he remarks appreciatively.

  “Dress for the fugitive head of state you want to impress,” I shoot back, although he’s not wrong: with the right accessories and a pair of heels I could be on my way to a posh reception somewhere. “How about you?”

  He shrugs. Under his top coat he’s wearing a dark suit and an open-collared white shirt. I feel another flash of lust, even though there’s not enough time to get up to anything. “We’ve got a couple of hours to kill. I was thinking we could do lunch and act like tourists? Then a last-minute dash for the station.”

  I nod. “Let’s do it.”

  We’ve paid for the room for a week, money up front. Our luggage is a decoy in case anyone is watching us—it’s intended to suggest we’ll return for it. News flash—we’re not coming back here. Passport, warrant, and credit cards go in a travel pouch under my dress. We’re wearing or carrying everything we expect to need. Anything else we can buy along the way.

  Jim shoves his own necessities into a briefcase, then puts on a smart tie. We take the elevator to the lobby and I put on my hat and sunglasses as we walk into the sun glare, looking like just another pair of lawyers or bankers stepping out for lunch. Then reality bites and the skin on the back of my left hand stings. Damn. I pull my gloves on with inelegant haste and the stinging subsides to a dull burn.

  “You okay?” he asks as I hurry to catch up.

  “Forgot my gloves,” I say, tight-lipped. Between the broad-brimmed hat and my sunblock the rest of me is fine.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Not your fault. Where are we going?”

  Jim leads me downtown and east towards Fifth Avenue. I decide I like the canyonlike cross-streets. They’re shady at ground level. The north-south avenues of Manhattan are another matter: they’re a killing ground for unprepared PHANGs. I let Jim take point as we head due south, skulking in his broad-shouldered shadow.

  Eventually he stops. “I thought this looked like it’d be a good place for lunch,” he says, waving me towards a menu stand just inside one of those canvas awnings they hang over the doors to keep the wind out. (It’s above freezing today, but the breeze has a raw edge.)

  I glance at it. “Seems okay,” I agree. French bistro grub. It’s nothing I can’t get back home and the prices are outrageous, but that’s not the point.

  “After you.”

  We get a table as far away from the window as possible, with good lines of sight. Jim keeps an eye on the front door while I watch the stairs leading down to the kitchen and bathroom—our bug-out route. It’s lunchtime but the restaurant is only half-full. The diner
s are mostly up-market office workers. The real finance action is all the way down south, but they come uptown to spend their loot, so we blend in. I smile at him as he rereads the menu, and he meets my gaze with a grin of his own. I’m pretty sure he’s imagining me sitting on that hotel towel: in fact I’ll be most disappointed if he isn’t, and I don’t give a shit whether this is unprofessional behavior. “They do an oyster platter,” he remarks, and I just barely manage not to snicker.

  “Let’s not get carried away?” Fuckboy spots the waiter approaching. I manage to keep a straight face as we place an order. No oysters, just the lunch special and a small glass of wine for each of us. I feel obscurely disappointed, so I pinch myself and remember, this is just a cover story. We’re friends with benefits, that’s all. The engagement bling and lovey-dovey shit isn’t real and there’s no happy-ever-after waiting for us. Let’s get real: he’s a middle-aged divorcee with a teenaged daughter and a red sports car, and he’s going to die of early onset dementia in a couple of years. Meanwhile, I’m a state executioner living under my own suspended sentence of death, a carrier of the most vile blood-borne disease imaginable. The nation we serve is ruled by a sadistic clown-god who is building a glass-and-chrome skull-rack on Marble Arch and uses human sacrifice as an instrument of state policy. And we’re playing spy games in a city on a continent where something even worse is tapping hungrily at the window, waiting to come in. Doomed lovers in late Weimar Germany had it easy in comparison.

  But when he looks at me like that I can still kid myself that I’m happy.

  We make inconsequential chitchat until the food arrives, then eat in appreciative silence. It really is quite good. The restaurant continues to fill up, but we have a couple of hours to kill before we make our way to Penn Station. I’m most of the way through the main course (I decided to pig out and go for the duck cassoulet) when Jim tenses infinitesimally, lowers his cutlery, and begins to track something behind me.