4. EXTERNAL ASSETS



THAT MONDAY MORNING I MAKE A POINT OF SETTING MY ALARM fifteen minutes early, bolting my bowl of muesli, and skidding out the house fast enough to leave trainer burns in the hall carpet. I’m pulling my coat on while Mo is still half-asleep at the cafetière, working on her second mug of the morning. “What’s the big hurry?” she asks blearily.

“Departmental politics,” I tell her. “I’ve been told I’m being temporarily reassigned and I want to get the skinny from Him Downstairs, just in case.”

“Him Downstairs? At nine a.m.?” She shudders. “Rather you than me. Give him my regards.”

“I will.” And with that I’m out the door and double-timing it up to the end of the street and the hidden cycle path which runs along the bed of the former Necropolitan Line that transported corpses to London’s largest graveyard in the late nineteenth century. It’s a useful short-cut, affording those who know how to use it a one-kilometer journey between points that are five kilometers apart on the map. I’d normally get the tube—the ley lines are best used sparingly: human traffic is not all that they carry—but I want to beard the lion in his den before I get sent up to groom the tiger.

Fifteen minutes later I surface in a back alley off a side street a block from the New Annex. I look both ways for feral taxi drivers, cross the road briskly, and insert my passkey in the drab metal panel beside a door at one end of an empty department store frontage.

Welcome to my work.

My department of the Laundry is based in the New Annex for the time being. Dansey House, our headquarters building, is currently a muddy hole in the ground as a public-private partnership scheme rebuilds it. Despite the current round of cuts, our core budget is pretty much inviolate. I heard a rumor that our unseen masters in Mahogany Row found it quite difficult to get the message across to the treasury under the current bunch of clowns, but once fully briefed not even a cabinet of sadomasochistic monetarists would dare downsize the department charged with protecting their arses from CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Unfortunately neither Mahogany Row nor the Audit Department can do anything to make Bob the Builder complete a major new inner-city property development on time. And so we’re nearly two years into a twelve-month relocation, and it’s beginning to feel painfully permanent.

I’m early. The night watchmen have retreated to their crypts in the subbasement, but most of the department are still on their way in to work. I trudge to my office—I have an office all of my own these days, with a door and everything—collect my coffee mug, shuffle to the coffee station, fill it with brown smelly stuff, then head down the back stairs and along a dusty windowless passageway towards an unmarked green door.

I pause for a moment before I knock, and a hollow voice booms from within: “Enter, boy!”

I enter.

Angleton is sitting behind his desk, a huge gunmetal-gray contraption surmounted by something that looks like a microfiche reader as hallucinated by Hieronymus Bosch. (Or perhaps, going by the fat cables that snake under its hood, H. R. Giger.) Tall, pallid, with skin like parchment drawn tight across the bones beneath, he’s the spitting image of every public school master who held the upper fifth in an iron grip of disciplined terror on TV in the 1960s. Which is appropriate, because for some years in what passed for his youth he was indeed a public school master. Only now he’s my boss, and even though I’m well into my third decade he still calls me boy.

“Hi, boss.” I pull out the creaky wooden guest chair and sit down.

It’s a funny thing, but ever since the clusterfuck last summer I’ve lost some of my fear of Angleton. I don’t mean to say that I don’t treat him with respect—I give him exactly the same degree of respect I’d give a live hand grenade with a missing safety pin. It’s just that now that I know exactly what he is, I’ve got something concrete to be terrified of.

Eater of Souls.

“Make yourself at home, Bob, why don’t you.” His glare is watery, a pro forma reprimand delivered with sarcasm but no real sting. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

“Interesting training course at Sunningdale Park.” I bounce up and down on the rusty mainspring of the chair. It must be the coffee, or something. “I ran into an interesting fellow. Name of Gerry Lockhart.” I grin. “He gave me a book.” Bounce, squeak, bounce, squeak.

I’m bluffing, of course. They kept me so damn busy I didn’t have time to read more than the first couple of chapters—but I checked the Wikipedia entry, just in case.

“Do stop that, there’s a good boy.” The wrinkles around his eyes deepen into a scowl. “What precisely was the book, may I ask?”

“Oh, some potboiler about a wild man who used to work for the Dustbin, back in the day.” MI5. “Reds under the bed, that kind of thing.”

I wait for a few seconds. Angleton continues to stare at me, his expression icy. Finally, he thaws—but only by a degree or two.

“Peter Wright.” The way he pronounces the name I’m pretty sure he intends it to rhyme with Wrong. “A dangerous crank.”

“Oh, really? I suppose you knew him?” Never mind that Wright retired in 1976; Angleton’s been with the Laundry for a very long time indeed. “What exactly did Wright do wrong?” What lesson am I meant to draw from this book? in other words. (See, I’m not above cheating at homework.)

Angleton closes his eyes, then leans back in his chair. “Crazies and loose cannons,” he mutters. Then he opens his eyes again. “Bob. The cold war ended in 1991. How old were you?”

Huh? “I was fourteen. I saw it on telly; I remember being scared of a nuclear war when I was a toddler. Afraid of my ma being burned to a crisp if Maggie or Reagan were serious about the ‘bombing in fifteen minutes’ thing.”

“I see.” I see Angleton contemplating the situation from a very different perspective, trying to work out how to explain something to someone so impossibly young that the Vietnam War was ancient history before he was born and men haven’t walked on the moon in his lifetime. “That was indeed one aspect of the confrontation. But only in the later stages. Earlier on, things were, if anything, crazier. And today we are required to work within the constraints established to keep the bad crazy, as you youngsters would call it, from breaking out again.”

“The bad crazy?”

“In the early 1960s—you’ve heard of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean?”

Toothpaste or spy? “Yes.” At least, I’ve heard of them since I read Lockhart’s book.

“Then, in light of recent events you will appreciate just how…crazy…MI5 went in the aftermath of their exposure as Soviet moles. Yes?”

I shudder. “Yes.” Eight months ago our own mole problem broke surface. I rub my right upper arm with my left hand. It aches savagely for a moment, then subsides. Moles are voracious underground predators; they’re poisonous and they’ll eat anything. Some of the latest crop even tried to eat me.

“There were excesses,” Angleton says blandly. “Then they went too far. Wright was on the FLUENCY committee, investigating possible Soviet moles that had been missed. They began seeing spies everywhere, especially after someone upstairs who shall remain nameless gave them access to GREY CADAVER remote viewing intel. Trade union leaders, senior civil servants, television comedians, politicians, cabinet ministers. It went right to the top. They forced out a junior health minister who was suspected of spying for Czech intelligence. Then they branched out into the broader media. They bugged the FBI team who were bugging The Beatles. Some say that Mary Whitehouse got her start as one of their junior inquisitors. By 1968 they’d commissioned a study on installing a pyre in the former Star Chamber in Whitehall so they could burn witches—using North Sea gas, of course. It was a terribly British witch hunt. Their paranoia knew no bounds—they wrangled the BBC into canceling the fifth series of Monty Python because they thought the canned laugh tracks might contain coded messages to KGB sleeper agents.

“Finally, they began to investigate the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson, Wright was convinced, was a KGB agent.” I’m nodding along like a metronome at this point. “There was a group, a cabal if you like, of MI5 officers. About thirty of them. They actually planned a coup d’état in 1972. They were going to stick Lord Louis Mountbatten in charge of a provisional military government, herd all the suspected spies into Wembley Stadium, and shoot them. They were even going to replace the House of Commons with Daleks.”

I roll my eyes. I can tell when Angleton is yanking my chain: “Even the tea lady?”

“Yes, Bob. Even the tea lady.” Angleton looks at me gravely. “When will you learn to read your briefing documents?”

“When they don’t land on my head disguised as a pulp bestseller when I’m in the middle of an intensive training course.” I sit up. “So, the 1960s and early 1970s: deeply paranoid, or merely full of obsessive-compulsive witch hunters? How does this affect us now?”

Angleton leans across his desk and makes a steeple of his fingers: “The point, boy, is that ever since that time of unbound paranoia the one unbreakable law of the British secret services has been: Thou shalt not snoop on Number Ten. Because we are not in the business of generating policy—it’s not a task for which agencies like ours are suited, and in those countries where spooks set policy, it always ends in tears. We vet politicians on the way up—that’s an entirely different matter—but by the time they’re moving into Number Ten they should already be above suspicion; if they aren’t, we haven’t been doing our job properly. And that’s very important because we are ultimately answerable to them. Our loyalty is to the Crown; the Prime Minister, as leader of the government, is the person in whose office that authority is vested. He or she issues our marching orders. So we obey Rule One at all times. Are you with me so far?”

“Um. I guess so. All very sensible, I suppose. Except…” I frown. “What has this got to do with me?”

“Well, boy…” Angleton fixes me with a bright, elfin smile—and I am abruptly terrified. “What do you think happens when an investigation in progress runs into the Prime Ministerial exclusion zone?”


TWO HOURS LATER AND TWO FLOORS UP IN ANOTHER WING OF the New Annex I knock on another door. It’s a wider and much more imposing door, with a brass nameplate screwed firmly to the wood: LOCKHART, G. And there’s a red security lamp and a speaker beside it.

The speaker buzzes. “Enter.” It’s like a visit to the dentist. I go inside, unsure of the ailment I’m here to have diagnosed—just gripped by an unpleasant certainty that it’s going to hurt.

Gerry Lockhart rates a big corner office with a window, decent carpet, and oil paintings. I have no bloody idea where those come from—presumably Facilities have a sharing arrangement with the Government Art Collection—but it’s a new one on me; aside from the always-empty offices on Mahogany Row, nobody in this organization rates any kind of eyeball candy unless it’s a Health and Safety or Security poster. When the door opens he’s sitting, poring over some papers on his desk; he hastily flips a black velvet cloth over the documents, slips off his half-moon reading glasses, then stands and extends a hand.

Gosh. He’s offering to shake hands. For a moment I hesitate and almost glance over my shoulder to see who’s behind me: then we shake.

“I trust you had a good weekend, Mr. Howard? Recovered from last week’s dog and pony show?”

I roll my eyes. “It was very educational.” I am officially educated: it says so right there on my personnel record. I’m not sure I learned anything, but that wasn’t exactly the object of the exercise. “It’s good to be back at work.”

He gestures at one of the visitor chairs—opposite his desk, not off to one side, I note. “Have a seat.” I sit down; it’s better than standing. “I suppose you’re probably wondering what this is about. And if you’ve got any sense, you’re wondering why it involves you. Aren’t you?”

His manner is precise, fussy with an edge of ex-military discipline to it. But thanks to last Monday evening’s encounter I knew what to expect, so I ironed my trousers and wore a clean and un-scuffed pair of trainers. I see the ghost of a frown of disapproval at my lack of a tie, but he’s almost making a point of not mentioning it. Which is interesting in its own right. “Yes, I’m curious. I’ve never been assigned to Externalities before. Or worked with your people.” I draw the line at asking What exactly is it that you do? Sometimes people can be a bit touchy about that sort of thing.

“Your reluctance to sound ignorant does you credit, but there really is no reason to dissemble, Mr. Howard.” Lockhart’s cheek twitches, nudging the hindquarters of the hairy caterpillar that is sleeping on his upper lip. “There’s no reason for you to have heard of Externalities, and every reason why you shouldn’t; need to know and all that.” He clears his throat. “You’ve been to see Angleton, of course. What did he tell you about me?”

That’s easy: “He didn’t.”

“Good.” Lockhart’s sudden smile is feral. “And what does that tell you? Feel free to speculate.”

“Oh?” Now I glance round, just in case a couple of blue suits from Operational Oversight have sneaked in behind me. “Well…Externalities is a really suggestive name for a small subdepartment, isn’t it? Utterly ambiguous—meaningless, really. There’s a box on the org chart under Facilities, and a couple of dotted lines leading to Ways and Means and Human Resources, and that’s it. Small staff, boringly mundane subdivision of the paperclip police. Nobody would ever look twice at it, except…”

“Yes?”

I take a deep breath. “You’re borrowing Angleton’s assistant. I think that says it all, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t get above yourself, Mr. Howard.” His smug expression belies his tone. “Just so that you know where you stand, everything I am about to tell you about this particular asset is classified BASHFUL INCENDIARY. Dr. Angleton is on the approved list, and—now—so are you. Your line manager (that would be Mr. Hinchliffe this month, would it not?) is not so cleared. Neither are your barber, your wife, or your pet cat, and I’d appreciate your cooperation in not spreading the magic circle. Under pain of your oath of office.”

I nod, jerkily. This is some heavy shit he’s drawing down. The oath of office here in the Laundry is rather draconian: forfeiting your eternal soul is only the beginning. “Uh. You asked for me for a reason. Can I ask why?”

“Hmm. I did not ask for you. You were recommended, and after due discussion it was agreed that you were eminently qualified for, and in need of the management experience that you can gain in, this posting.”

Management experience? I feel an oh-shit moment coming on. “Um. Question mark?”

“Here in Externalities, we monitor organizational assets that are largely outside the usual lines of control—beyond regular management.” Lockhart smiles blandly.

“Paperclips? Attached to interdepartmental memos?” That’s improbable enough on the face of it. Most intelligence agencies are fanatical about locking down the hardware, banning phones and USB sticks and iPods from the premises. The Laundry takes a different approach, and focuses on securing the people, not the property—although sometimes this leads to, shall we say, misunderstandings in our dealings with other agencies.

“Paperclips, other assets.” Lockhart waves dismissively. “People on external assignment, for example. We provide support for senior executives on request. And it goes both ways. We also keep track of external contractors.”

“External what?” I stumble into disbelieving silence. External contractors? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Not here, not in an agency that promiscuously hires anyone and everyone who stumbles across the truth—makes them a job offer they can’t refuse, inducts them under the authority of an appallingly strong geas, and keeps them busy chasing paper until it’s time to retire. “But we don’t employ external contractors! Do we?”

“No, we don’t. Not as such.” His expression is so arch you could hang a suspension bridge from it. “Tell me, Mr. Howard, have you eaten recently?”

“No—”

“Then you’ll have no objection to accompanying me to lunch at a restaurant, will you? The organization’s paying.”

I boggle. “Isn’t that against accounting regs or something?”

“Not when I’m briefing a pair of contractors, Mr. Howard. Your job is to sit tight, ears wide, and listen. When we get back here afterwards there will be an exam. If you pass, then I shall explain what I want you to do for the next couple of weeks.”

“And if I don’t pass?”

“Then you go back to Dr. Angleton with a recommendation for some more training courses. And I shall have to do the job myself.” His cheek twitches at the prospect. I am beginning to get a handle on the code. That is an unhappy twitch: the caterpillar has indigestion. “However, that would not be an ideal outcome, because the job in question appears to be well-matched to your strengths.”

Damn him, he’s clearly been taking lessons from Angleton on best practice for baiting the Bob-hook. “Okay, I’ll bite. Lunch with a contractor, then an exam. Where do I start?”

“Right here.” And Lockhart folds back his black cloth, picks up a slim dossier headlined BASHFUL INCENDIARY, and watches vigilantly while I read it.


AFTER AN HOUR’S READING, MY HEAD IS SPINNING. MIDWAY through the dossier, Lockhart—evidently satisfied by my absorption—tiptoes out of the office for a quick fag or something. I hear the door lock click behind him. Luckily I don’t need a toilet break. The file is quite slim, but the contents—or rather, their implications—are explosive.

Here’s the rub. The Laundry runs on three inviolate rules:

1) We make a point of recruiting—conscripting, really—everyone who learns the truth. That’s how I ended up here. We have a place for everyone (and make sure everyone knows their place).

2) It is a corollary of the preceding rule that we never employ external contractors. There are no independents.

3) Finally, and most importantly, the security services—of which we are one—do not snoop on Number Ten.

But all of these rules come with a sanity clause.

Take the first rule. It’s how everyone I know (Angleton excepted) came to work for the Laundry. We stumbled across something ghastly that we couldn’t handle, and before it could apply the Tabasco sauce and find us crunchy but good with fries the Laundry came and rescued us, then made us a job offer we weren’t allowed to refuse.

In my case, I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton with an unfortunate experimental rendering algorithm. (For my sins, they stuck me in IT Support for three years; on the flip side, I didn’t die.)

The B-team players we hire so we can keep an eye on them and protect them from the consequences of their own actions. The A-team players end up doing the protecting—both for the second-raters and for the Crown—defending the realm against things with too many tentacles and eye-stalks.

As for the second rule: if we employ everyone in the field, so to speak, then it follows that there are no external contractors. Anyway, external contractors would be a security risk. So even if there were external contractors, we couldn’t put them on the payroll without them taking the oath of allegiance, going the whole nine yards, etcetera. At which point, they wouldn’t be external.

As for the third rule…I’m guessing that’s where I come in. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself at this point.


HALF AN HOUR LATER LOCKHART COMES BACK AND REMOVES the dossier from my nerveless fingers: “Are you coming?”

“Uh? Lunch? Sure.” I struggle to my feet. “I’ll just get my coat.”

He picks up the dossier, adds it to another that he’s carrying—I spot the subject JOHNNY PRINCE on the cover before I force myself to stop—and turns to stash them in his large and exceedingly secure-looking office safe. I make myself scarce.

We meet downstairs, just outside the empty department store window. Lockhart flags down a passing taxi. We ride in silence: fifteen or twenty minutes to Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Pocketing a receipt, Lockhart leads me through the crowd of shoppers to a surprisingly familiar destination, if only because it’s infamous: the Wong Kei. “We’re meeting here?” I ask.

“Where better?” Lockhart says ironically as he leads me inside. It’s lunchtime and deafeningly loud inside the landmark restaurant. I’m expecting us to end up queuing, but no: as if by magic Lockhart flags down a waiter, mutters something, and we’re whisked through a Staff Only door, into a cramped lift that squeals and grinds its way up to the third floor, then along a narrow passageway to a private dining room. He pauses before we enter. “The budget will only stretch so far.” But my reading of his mustache is getting better, and right now it spells: caterpillar is hungry for Cantonese.

The room is cramped, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes and a tiny window outside which throbs a bank of kitchen extractor fans. But the table is already laid out with chairs for four and a pot of jasmine tea on the lazy Susan. “Remember what I said,” Lockhart warns me, “keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Within reason. Understood?”

I nod, and mime a zipper. I’d normally put up more of a fight, but after reading the BASHFUL INCENDIARY file I find myself curiously uninterested in making a target of myself: she might turn me into a toad or something.

A minute later—I’ve just filled both our cups with steaming hot tea—the door opens again. Lockhart stands, and I follow suit. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hazard.” The caterpillar is delighted. “Ah, and the estimable Mr. McTavish! How are you today?”

Handshakes and smiles all round. I take stock, then succumb to a brisk flashback: a disturbing sense that I’ve met these people before.

McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what the sidelong flat stare and the ridges on the sides of his hands mean. He reminds me of Scary Spice, one of Alan Barnes’s little helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbitholes full of blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight something else about him as well: he punches above the weight.

She, however—

“Charmed to meet you,” she says, and smiles, impish and vampish simultaneously. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Howard! May I call you Bob?”

“I’m Bob to my friends,” I drone on autopilot as my brain freezes in the headlights. Stunning beauty in a minidress over black leggings, studiously casual yet somehow managing to send a bolt of electricity straight down my spine and drop my IQ by about fifty points on the spot…Yes, I’ve seen her like before. “That’s a nice glamour. Class two?”

Her smile freezes for an instant. “Class three, actually.” Then she lets it slip slightly and the starry soft-focus dissolves, and I’m merely shaking hands with a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman of indeterminate years—anything between twenty-five and forty—with Mediterranean looks and a dance instructor’s build, rather than a sorceress with a brain-burning beauty field set to Hollywood stun. “You have much experience of such things?”

“My wife doesn’t bother.” Is that a palpable hit? “But I’ve met them before, yes.”

Lockhart keeps a stony face throughout, but at this latter bit of banter he begins to show signs of irritation with me. “Bob, if you’d care to sit down, perhaps we could order some food?”

We sit down. I pointedly pay no attention to McTavish pointedly taking no slight at my pointed rejection of his mistress’s pointed—and unsubtle—attempt to beguile me. I’m somewhat disappointed. Do they think we’re amateurs or something?

“That was a very interesting service you sent us to last night,” Hazard tells Lockhart. She’s working on the English understatement thing, but her hands, expressive and mobile, give it away: she’s spinning exclamation marks in semaphore. “Absolutely fascinating.”

“Yes it was, wasn’t it?” Lockhart deadpans. He glances at McTavish. “You took a different angle, I assume?”

McTavish nods. “Penthouse and pavement.” His expression is oddly stony.

“Good—” Lockhart stops as the door opens. It’s one of the Wong Kei’s crack assault waiters, pad in hand. They’re famously rude; it’s all part of the service.

“You ready to order?” he barks.

“Certainly.” Lockhart is clearly a regular here. “I’ll start with the hot and sour soup…”

Two or three minutes later:

“Where was I?” Lockhart asks.

“You were grilling us about last night, as I recall,” says McTavish.

Hazard nods, eyes narrowing.

Lockhart glances at me briefly. It’s barely a flicker, but enough to warn me: The game’s afoot.

“Did you notice anything unusual about the, ah, performers?”

“What? Apart from the way they programmed the event to build the audience’s emotional investment in the key payload, then love-bombed them from fifty thousand feet with the warm floaty joy of Jesus?” Hazard props her chin on the back of her hand and pouts, sulky rather than sultry. “You should send Bob. He doesn’t like glamours. Do you, Bob?”

“Hey, it’s not you—it’s just that the last time someone put one on me I ended up buying an iPhone!” My protest falls on deaf ears.

“It’s not the glamour that interests me,” Lockhart says deliberately, “but the person it’s attached to.”

“You’re asking about Raymond Schiller, of the Golden Promise Ministries,” McTavish says lazily. “More like the Golden Fleece Ministries if you ask me, Duchess.”

“Mm, that tends to go with the territory.” Hazard is noncommittal.

“You didn’t see the average take in the collecting buckets at the back. Lot of people going short on luxuries this month, if you ask me.”

“The O2 Arena doesn’t rent for peanuts.”

“Unless it’s a charity loss-leader and they make up their margin on the food and entertainment franchises.” McTavish is a lot sharper than he looks. “Or someone with a glamour as good as Ray Schiller gets to the management committee.”

“Does he, ah, preach the prosperity gospel?” asks Lockhart.

“After a fashion.” McTavish’s lips are lemon-bitingly narrowed. “There are doctrinal shout-outs, dog-whistles the unchurched aren’t expected to notice. The prosperity gospel is in there, of course—it’s a Midwestern mega-church, after all. That’s what their appeal is all about. But there’s other stuff, too. It put me in mind of the church of my fathers, and not in a good way.”

“You didn’t say that last night.” Hazard sits up. The door opens as a pair of waiters appear, bearing trays laden with soup and starters. She continues after they leave, addressing Lockhart: “It was a very non-specific love-bombing, but it was a very public evening. I thought it was a recruiting drive for foot soldiers rather than a second-level indoctrination aimed at officers. Very skillful, though.”

“I’d use a different word for it,” McTavish says darkly.

“Yes?” Lockhart focusses on him.

“You’ll have read my file.” McTavish winks and picks up a prawn toast. “Let’s not disrespect the food, eh?”

As I dive into my chicken and sweetcorn soup I’m trying to place Hazard’s accent. It’s not remotely American, but not British, either; there’s a hint of something central European, but it’s been thoroughly scrubbed—all but erased—by very expensive speech training.

“Ray is an interesting character,” Lockhart explains over the starters. “We don’t know much about him. US citizen, of course; he came out of Texas, but his background is rather vaguer than we’re happy about. There’s a worrying lack of detail, especially about what he did before he found Jesus in his mid-twenties and joined the Golden Promise Ministries, back when it was a converted shack in the Colorado mountains.”

“Aye, well.” McTavish is busy with his ribs—I can’t tell whether he’s genuinely hungry or using them as a smoke screen—but Hazard is suddenly abruptly intent on Lockhart, her gray eyes as tightly focused as a battleship’s range-finder. “You think…”

Lockhart clears his throat. “Please don’t say what you’re about to say. I’m implying nothing, Persephone. There’s no evidence and there are no witnesses—none we’ve been able to locate. I may be barking up the wrong tree. Nevertheless, we are concerned.”

“I am not sure I see why,” she says slowly. “As long as he simply takes the marks for their marks, what’s the problem?”

Johnny McTavish has gone very still and very distant, gaze fixed and unblinking in a sniper’s thousand-yard stare. A cold chill runs up and down my spine. I’m the only person at this table who hasn’t been fully briefed on whatever is being spoken of here, and I feel horribly exposed, because I’ve read enough of the BASHFUL INCENDIARY dossier to know what Persephone is capable of, and Johnny is her lieutenant—and I suspect the subject of the other dossier, the JOHNNY PRINCE one I saw on Lockhart’s desk—which means he shouldn’t be underestimated either.

“Did you stay for the laying on of hands?” Lockhart asks after a moment.

“Yes.” Her eyes narrow. “And the speaking in tongues, and the reeling and writhing. Thank you very much.”

Johnny is pointedly silent and dour.

“Did they say anything interesting?” Lockhart leans forward.

“Hard to tell.” She frowns. “Glossolalia is always hard to follow, even with my—assets. The music and chanting and clapping and cheering from the back, they make it really hard to hear. But if I had to guess, I think—I might be wrong—it was all coming through in High Enochian. And one lady in particular—she was facing in my direction as the Holy Spirit took her—she was calling, He is coming, he is coming, over and over. And it was definitely in that tongue.”

Johnny looks up and nods. “The faith of my fathers, for sure,” he says quietly. “I could feel the siren song in my blood.”

“Well that tears it.” Lockhart looks at me sourly.

“What?” I say, surprised.

“Gerry, would you mind explaining, preferably in words of one syllable, just why this particular hedge-wizard occultist turned preacher-man is suddenly a person of interest to Her Majesty’s Government?” Hazard stares at Lockhart, openly challenging.

Johnny looks uncomfortable. “Duchess—”

Lockhart shakes his head. “That’s the wrong question.”

“What’s the right one, then?”

“The right question,” he pauses for a final mouthful of soup, “is why Her Majesty’s Government has suddenly become of interest to Raymond Schiller. And in particular, why our prime minister is hosting a prayer breakfast for the pastor the day after tomorrow.” He puts his spoon down and fixes Hazard with a chilly stare. “There are aspects of Pastor Schiller’s mission that were not on display at the arena. Call it the uncut, X-rated version of yesterday’s PG performance. As you can imagine, we find his faith disturbing.”

McTavish fixes me with a lazy smile. “Are you a man of faith, Mr. Howard?”

“In a manner of speaking.” I use my napkin to wipe my lips while I work out how much I can say without Lockhart putting me on latrine duty afterwards. “I’m fully aware of the One True Religion. I know where I stand with respect to it.” I stare right back at him. “And I know what to do with worshipers when I find them.”

His smile widens. “We must get together and compare notes some time.”

Hazard cuts across us: “If you gentlemen have quite finished? I believe we still have a main course to eat.” She smiles indulgently. “You can continue plotting deicide later. I, for one, am looking forward to the Hoisin duck…”

Jesus, that woman’s got a strong stomach, I think as the waiters come to clear away our starters and Lockhart looks at me and gives a stiff, very quick nod.

Little do I suspect what’s in store for dessert.

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