I’m bluffing, and Mo knows it. “I’ll text them to you, Bob. Maybe it’ll help you remember, next time?”
Bollocks. She’s right: it’s my fault. “Okay.” It’s my turn to sigh. “I’ll be claiming some hours back. Maybe we can use them for something together—” The tracks begin to vibrate and squeal and I look up. “It’s my train! See you later? Bye . . .”
The train to Cosford is about as old as Angleton: slam doors, wooden partitions, and high-backed seats, powered by a villainously rusted diesel engine slung under its single carriage. Air conditioning is provided by the open louvered windows. I swelter in its oven-like interior for about forty minutes as it rattles and burbles through the countryside, spewing blue smoke and engine oil behind it. Along the way I furtively leave my apologies on Pete and Sandy’s voice mail. Finally, the train wheezes asthmatically to a halt beside a station overlooking a Royal Air Force base, with a cluster of hangars outside the gate and some enormous airliners and transport aircraft gently gathering moss on the lawn outside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I walk up the path to the museum annex and head for the main exhibit hall.
It’s time to go to work . . .
PAY ATTENTION NOW: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN fifteen minutes.
My name is Bob, Bob Howard. At least, that’s the name I use in these memoirs. (True names have power: even if it’s only the power to attract the supernatural equivalent of a Make Money Fast spammer, I’d rather not put myself in their sights, thank you very much.) And I work for the Laundry.
The Laundry is the British Government’s secret agency for dealing with “magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so “magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the . . . things . . . that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job—applied computational demonologist—comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don’t survive to claim it.
Magic being a branch of pure mathematics, and computers being machines that can be used to perform lots of mathematical tasks very fast, it follows that most real practicing magicians start out as computer science graduates. The Laundry, the government agency for handling this stuff, started out as a by-blow of the Second World War code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the people who built the first working programmable computers. And the domestic side of our work—preventing accidental incursions by incomprehensible horrors from beyond spacetime—has been growing rapidly in recent decades. You may have noticed there are more computers around these days, and more computer programmers. Guess what? That means more work for the Laundry!
I have a somewhat embarrassing relationship with Wolverhampton. Back when I was at university in Birmingham I nearly landscaped it by accident. I was trying to develop a new graphics algorithm. Planar homogeneous matrix transformations into dimensions dominated by gibbering horrors tend to attract the Laundry’s attention: they got to me just in time—just before the nameless horrors I was about to unintentionally summon into this world—and made me a job offer I wasn’t allowed to refuse.
(Mo’s history is similar—indeed, I was involved not only in recruiting her, but in keeping her alive until she could be recruited. That was some years ago. Mo and I have been together for, oh, about six years; we tied the knot nearly three years ago, using the urgent need to break a behavioral geas as an excuse to do something we both wanted to do anyway.)
So, I’m here at RAF Cosford, an active air force base which is also home to the Royal Air Force Museum annex, where they keep the stuff that’s too big to fit in their North London site at Duxford. Ostensibly I’m here to examine an aircraft that has been the locus of some disturbing incidents (and to stop those incidents recurring). Also, thanks to Angleton, I’m supposed to take a look at something in Hangar Six.
One of the things you learn fairly fast in the Laundry is that most people in the British civil service and armed forces don’t know you exist. You—your organization, your job, the field you work in—are classified so deeply that the mere knowledge that such a classification level exists is itself a state secret. So, to help me do my job, I carry something that we laughably call a “warrant card.” It’s a form of identification. It comes with certain Powers attached. When you present your warrant card for inspection, in the course of official business, the recipients tend to believe you are who and what you say you are, for the duration of that business. Not only that: you can bind them to silence. Of course, trying to use your card outside official business tends to attract the attention of the Auditors. And having attracted their attention once or twice, I’ve never been too keen on finding out what happens next . . .
The RAF Museum is fronted by a shiny new glass-and-steel aircraft hangar of an exhibit hall. I march right up to the front desk (there’s no queue), present my warrant card, and say: “Bob Howard. I’m here to see Mr. Hastings.”
The wooly headed volunteer behind the cash register puts down her knitting and peers up at me over the rim of her bifocals. “Admission is five pounds,” she chirps.
“I’m here to see Mr. Hastings.” I force a smile and adjust my grip on the warrant card.
“Is that a season pass?” She looks confused.
What? I shove the card under her nose. “I have an appointment with Warrant Officer Hastings,” I repeat, trying to keep a note of impatience out of my voice. “I’m from the Department of Administrative Affairs.” It’s a thin bluff—jeans and tee shirt aren’t normal office attire for the civil service, even in this weather—but I’m crossing the fingers of my free hand and trusting my card to untangle enough of her neurons to get the message across. “A meeting to discuss the, ah, business in Hangar Six.”
She blinks rapidly. “Ooh, Hangar Six! That’s a bad job, it hasn’t been the same since Norman had his Health and Safety inspection . . . They used to keep the Whirlwind in there, did you know? You’re wanting Geoffrey, aren’t you?”
“Would that be Warrant Officer Hastings?” I ask, hopefully.
“Oh yes.” She pushes her knitting aside with one liver-spotted hand and picks up the telephone with another. “Geoffrey? Geoffrey? There’s a man here to see you! Who did you say you were? A Mr. Howarth! Yes, to see you now! He’s out front!” She puts the phone down. “Geoffrey will be here in a couple of minutes,” she confides, “he needs to scrub up first.”
I tap my toes and whistle tunelessly as I look around the entrance hall. There’s something casting a weird shadow overhead; I look up, and find myself staring at the bulging ventral fuel tank of an English Electric Lightning interceptor, dangling from the ceiling like a demented model-maker’s pride and joy. It’s enough to stop the foot tapping for a moment—if the cable fails, I’ll be squashed like a bug—but a moment’s consideration tells me that it’s highly unlikely. So I stare wistfully at the Lightning for a couple of minutes. Two missiles, sharply raked razor-thin wings, a huge, pregnant belly full of fuel, and the two screamingly powerful engines that once rammed it from a cold start to a thousand miles per hour in under a minute. Life would be so much simpler if our adversaries could be dealt with by supersonic death on the wing—but alas, Human Resources aren’t so easily defeated.
“Mr. Hogarth?”
I turn round. There’s a bluff-looking middle-aged man in blue overalls standing by the front desk: sandy receding hair, a gingery regulation mustache, and a face creased with questions. I hold up my warrant card. “Mr. Howard,” I say. “Capital Laundry Services. I believe yo
u asked for a visit.”
He does a visible double take. “Eh, yes, I did—” He’s clocking the jeans, tee shirt, and casual linen jacket, and I can see the gears whirring in his head as he wonders if I’m some kind of impostor. Then his eyes reach my warrant card and something clicks behind them and he’s slightly less human than he was a moment before—“sir.”
“I was told your problem is in Hangar Six. Why don’t you take me there? You can explain along the way.”
I put the warrant card back in my pocket. No point in frying him.
“If you’d follow me, please, sir.” He has a pronounced borders accent. He turns and opens a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “Sorry about Helen on the front desk,” he murmurs. “She’s a little slow, but she means well. Only see you, she’s been helping out here since forever, and we run on volunteers.” He shrugs. “I suppose it’s better for her than sitting around an old-age home waiting to die—” He lets the door close behind us before he says anything more. “Bloody rum business, Hangar Six.”
“Tell me about it. In your own words,” I add.
“It’s another of the Lightnings—hull number XR727.” He glances over his shoulder. “It’s been sitting in Hangar Six for years while we were waiting for funding to come through—plan was to restore it for static display in Hall Four when it’s ready. It’s an F. Mark 3, upgraded from F.2A like the one over the front desk.” I’ll take his word for it: I’m not au fait with the model numbers. “We’ve had a few odd incidents.”
Odd incidents? “Define odd.”
“Frosty patches on the hangar floor, mysterious oil leaks—under hydraulic pipes that were drained more than twenty years ago when it was taken out of service—nothing really unusual, seeing where it came from, if you follow my drift. But then there was the business with Marcia and the instrument panel, and I thought it might be a good idea to call you chappies directly.”
Clunk. A domino slips into place in my mental map. This enquiry didn’t come through the RAF, this came direct from Hastings. “You’ve worked with us before.”
“Not exactly . . .” He pauses beside an anonymous door, and extracts a fat key chain: “But I was with the Squadron, on ground crew. Once you’re in, you never really leave.” Click. “They like to stay in touch.”
What squadron? I wonder, annoyed but afraid to display my ignorance. “Tell me about Marcia,” I prompt, as he opens the door to reveal another prefab tunnel between buildings, this one windowless and stifling.
“Volunteer airframe conservator Marcia Moran. Age twenty-nine, completed her short service enlistment, then signed up with BAE Systems maintenance division when the defense review came down—she’s solid. Was solid.”
He took a deep breath. “She should never have been allowed to work on XR727’s cockpit instruments. We had them round the back, under padlock and warded by a class two repulsion geas. She shouldn’t even have been able to see them. She’d have twigged straight off that it wasn’t a normal F.3 integrated flight system and weapons control board. She wasn’t qualified to work on it.”
He falls silent as he trudges along the passage.
“What happened to her?” I repeat.
Hastings shook his head. “You’d have to ask the doctors. I’m not sure they know; they say she might be safe to release next month, but they said that last month too.”
Another domino. “XR727 was one of the, uh, Squadron’s planes. Yes?”
“They didn’t brief you?” He doesn’t sound surprised. “In here, Mr. Houghton.” I don’t bother to correct him as he shoves open a side door and steps into an echoing, gloomy cavern of a room. “See for yourself.”
The room we’re in resembles an aircraft hangar the way a mausoleum in a graveyard resembles a bedroom. It’s dimly lit, daylight filtering through high windows, and the light reveals the mummified skeletons of half a dozen fast jets littering the oil-stained concrete floor. Their severed limbs are stacked in jigs and frames, their viscera embalmed in the canopic jars of parts bins—patiently awaiting resurrection, or at least reassembly into the semblance of life. There’s junk everywhere, toolboxes, rodent control traps, workbenches piled high with parts. Closest to the door hulks the fuselage of a Lightning. Its tail is missing, as are its outboard wing segments and the conical spike of its nose radar, but it’s substantially intact. Close up, the size of the thing is apparent: a pit bull to the chihuahua of an old Russian MiG—squat, brutal, built for raw speed. It’s big, too—the wing root high enough overhead to walk under without stooping.
Something about it makes me feel profoundly uneasy, as if a black cat has walked half the length of my grave, paused furtively, taken a crap, and been about its business before anyone noticed.
“This is Airframe XR727. According to the official records it was scrapped in 1983. Unofficially . . . it ended up here, because of its history: it’s a ringer, it was on the books with 23 squadron and 11 squadron, but they never saw it. It was working for you people. In the Squadron.” I shiver. The hangar’s weirdly, incongruously cold, given the bright summer afternoon outside. “It logged 280 hours on the other side, escorting the white elephants.”
Angleton mentioned a white elephant, didn’t he? I glance at the shadows under XR727’s belly. The concrete is stained and greasy with fluid, whorls and lines and disconnected nodes that swim before my eyes. Clonk. The final domino slides into place.
“Jesus, Angleton,” I mutter, and pull out my PDA. Tap-click-boing and I pull up the thaumograph utility running on the rather nonstandard card in its second expansion slot. I point it at the swirling directed graph that the phantom hydraulic leak has dribbled across the concrete apron and the display flashes amber.
I take a slow step back from the airframe, and motion Hastings over. “I don’t want to alarm you,” I murmur. “But did you know your airframe is hot?”
Hastings shakes his head sadly. “Figures.” He shrugs. “Do you want to look at the cockpit instrumentation?”
I nod. “Just point me at it. Is it still where Marcia had her incident?”
“I haven’t moved it.” He gestures towards a canvas screen, surrounded by a circle of traffic cones with hazard tape strung between them. “Do you need any help?”
“I’m afraid I’m probably beyond help . . .” I advance on the traffic cones, PDA held in front of me. It begins to bleep and warble immediately. Edging sideways, I look round the canvas screen. There’s a workbench bearing a stack of black metal boxes, wires dangling, needles and dials glowing eerie blue—blue? Glowing? I check my PDA and swear under my breath. If this was a radiation leak I’d be backing away and reaching for the lead-lined underwear right now: but it’s not, it’s just thaumic resonance, albeit at levels you don’t usually see outside of a summoning grid—what the ignorant persist in calling a pentacle. “Scratch that. Do you have any conductive tape? A soldering iron? Some blue chalk?”
“You’re going to exorcise it,” states Hastings. “Right?”
“Right—”
“Got a field exorcism kit in the mess hut. Squadron issue, rev three, and I keep everything in date. Want me to fetch it?”
“I think that would be a very good idea,” I say with feeling, thinking, Field exorcism kit? Squadron issue? “By the way, what was the Squadron’s unit number?”
Hastings stares at me. “Triple-six. Didn’t they tell you anything?”
HERE IS HOW YOU GO ABOUT EXORCISING A HAUNTED JET fighter, latterly operated by the more-than-somewhat-secret 666 Squadron, RAF:• You can explosively disassemble the airframe, if it’s in the middle of a desert and there are no neighbors within a couple of miles.
• You can violate any number of HSE directives and outrage public opinion by dumping it at sea—shallow waters only, we don’t want to annoy the owners by violating the Benthic Treaties—and wait for time (and electrolytes) to wash the memories away.
• You can truck it to a special hazardous waste certified recycling site in Wales, where they have a very
special degaussing coil for exactly this purpose.
• Or, if you believe in living dangerously, you can do it with a soldering iron, a stopwatch, a grounding strap, and a good pair of running shoes in case you screw up.
Guess what Muggins here does?
Look, it’s a museum piece. They don’t exactly grow on trees: blowing it up and drowning it aren’t on the menu; shipping it to Wales would cost . . . Well, it wouldn’t fit on my discretionary expense worksheet: too many zeros (more than two). That leaves the grounding strap and the running shoes. So if you were in my place, what would you do?
I approach the anti-static point beside the nosewheel bay very cautiously: holding one end of a grounding strap at arm’s length in front of me, the other fist clutching the stopwatch behind my back, legs tensed, ready to run. The grounding strap is basically a long conductive wire; the other end is attached to a villainous black signal generator Hastings pulled from the field exorcism kit—all bakelite and flickering needles on dials, like something out of a 1950s Hammer Horror flick. There’s a small but bizarre diorama occupying the middle of the hastily cleared workbench it sits on: a model airplane from the souvenir shop, a rabbit’s foot, a key-ring fob skull pendant, and a diagram carefully sketched in conductive ink.
Look, this isn’t quite as spontaneously suicidal as it sounds. I don’t go anywhere these days without a defensive ward on a chain round my neck that’ll short out a class three offensive invocation, and Hastings is safely tucked away inside a grounded pentacle with Thoth-Lieberman geometry—he’s safe as houses, at least houses that aren’t sitting on top of a fault line wound up to let rip with a Richter 6.0 earthquake. As it happens, I do this kind of thing regularly, every week or so. It’s about as safe as a well-equipped fireman going into a smoldering inflammables store to spray cooling water across the overheating propane tank in the corner next to the mains power distribution board. Piece of cake, really—as long as somebody’s shut off the power.
The Fuller Memorandum Page 2
