The Fuller Memorandum

9. NIGHT SHIFT

WALKING TO THE OFFICE ISN’T SOMETHING I’D NORMALLY DO, because it takes about three hours, but I am feeling inconveniently surveilled and I don’t like the idea of the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network being able to track me. So I follow the footpath for another half kilometer before reigniting the Hand of Glory and dashing back almost all the way I’ve come, then exiting onto a side street. I take two corners and jump a fence into somebody’s backyard before I extinguish the HOG again, then walk out casually with my shoulders back and my chin up.

A bus ride in an irrelevant direction takes me ten minutes farther away from the office—then it’s into a back alley and time to reignite the HOG for a brisk kilometer. Finally I snuff it out and catch a different bus that passes close enough to the New Annexe that I can walk from the stop.

I march up to the darkened C&A staff entrance and key my number, then swipe my pass card. The door clicks, and I step inside. It’s totally black, and in the gloom I can hear the restless shuffling of one of the night staff. I pull out my warrant card hastily, lest I be eaten by a grue: arguing with the night watchmen is singularly futile unless you do it with a chain saw or a baseball bat.

“Brrrrr—”

“Get me a torch,” I snap. The warrant card is all very well—it sheds a faint, nacreous glow—but the backlight invocation has unpleasant side effects if you crank up the lumens too high. (Why is it that all the movies make it look as if wizards find invoking light easy? Tenuous glows and balefire are all very well, but there’s a reason we use fluorescent tubes around here.)

“—rains?” he asks plaintively.

A torch flicks on and I see the wizened face of its holder. “Here, give me that.” I take the torch, being careful to hold the warrant card between me and the doorman. I think he might be Fred from Accounting, but if so, he’s definitely a bit the worse for wear these days; it’s several years since he died, and not everyone around here gets the deluxe Jeremy Bentham treatment. Mostly HR just arrange for one of us to stick them in a summoning grid and bind one of the eaters in the night to service (weak, minimally sentient efflorescences of alien will, that can animate a corpse and control it just about enough to push a broom, or scare the living daylights out of unwanted nighttime visitors). I gather it saves on funeral expenses. “Stay here and forget I came this way. That’s an order.”

I climb the stairs, leaving the residual human resource behind to eat any unwitting B-Team cultists who were stupid enough to tail me. It’s past midnight and they make regular inspection rounds, so I keep my card out and hope like hell the battery in this plastic piece of shit lasts until I make it to my office. I keep a proper torch there, a Maglite that’ll work properly when it’s time to go visit Angleton’s lair and turf those files from top to bottom. Luckily the plastic piece of shit holds out and I let myself in, flick on the light, shut the door, and flop down behind my desk with a sigh of relief.

“Took your time getting here, didn’t you, boy?”

In the time it takes me to peel myself off the ceiling and return my pistol to its holster, Angleton takes up residence in my visitor’s chair, folding his ungainly limbs around himself like a spindly black spider. The skeletal, humorless grin tells me I’m in trouble even before I open my mouth.

“I’ve waited here for three consecutive nights. What delayed you?”

I close my mouth. Then I open it and close it again a couple of times, just for practice. Finally, when I trust myself to speak, I say one word: “Cultists.”

“Three days, boy. Suppose you tell me what you’ve learned?”

“One moment.” My paranoia is growing. I take out my phone and peer at him through its camera. TRUESEER tells me that I am, indeed, looking at my boss, who is looking increasingly irritated. I make the shiny vanish. “Okay. From the top: the Fuller Memorandum is missing, the Russians have gotten all upset, cultists are throwing their toys out of the pram, and everyone wants to know about the Teapot. Oh, and someone in Research and Development says that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn’t going to wait a couple of years, but is due to kick off in a few weeks or months at the most. What am I missing?”

Angleton stares at me coldly. “You’re missing the spy, boy.”

“The”—I nearly swallow my tongue—“spy?”

“Yes: Helen Langhorn. Aged seventy-four, widow of Flight Lieutenant Adrian Langhorn, long-term resident of Cosford, working part-time at the museum as a volunteer. Met her husband while she was in the WRAAF back in 1963. Which is a pretty interesting occupation for her to have been in, considering that she was also a captain in the Russian Army and a GRU Illegal who was inserted into the UK in 1959, when she was barely out of her teens.”

I make an inarticulate gurgling noise. “But she—the hangar—she wasn’t—she can’t have—”

Angleton waits for me to wind down. “The many-angled ones are not the only enemy this country has ever faced, boy. Some of us remember.” (It’s okay for him to say that—I was about ten when the cold war ended!)

“Helen Langhorn’s primary assignment did not come to an end just because the Soviet Union collapsed. To outward appearances her utility had been in decline for many years, after her husband failed to achieve advancement, costing her access to people and bases; once she hit sixty with no long-term prospects they wrote her off. That is one of the risks one runs with long-term Illegals—their entire life may be marginalized by one or two unfortunate and unpredictable errors. There are probably fifty others like her in the UK—retired bank managers and failed politicians’ wives pruning their privet hedges and daydreaming of the revolution that failed them. Or perhaps they accept it gladly, happy to no longer be a pawn on the chessboard. But in any case, Helen’s career appears to have undergone a brief second flowering in the last few years.”

“But she”—I flap my jaws inarticulately—“she was halfway to dementia!”

“Was she?” Angleton raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She was on the front desk of a museum gallery barely two hundred meters from Hangar 12B, where Airframe 004 is being cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other three white elephants airworthy. You may think that no more than a coincidence, but I don’t.”

“You never told me what that stuff about the white elephants was about—”

“I expected you to find out for yourself, boy.” Then Angleton does something I absolutely never expected to see: he sighs unhappily.

“Boss?”

Angleton leans back in his chair. “Tell me about Chevaline,” he asks.

“Chevaline?” I frown. “Wasn’t that some sort of nuclear missile program from the sixties or seventies, something like that?”

“Chevaline.” He pauses. “Back in the 1960s, when Harold Wilson cut a deal with Richard Nixon to buy Polaris missiles for the Royal Navy, the tacit assumption was that a British nuclear deterrent need merely be sufficient to pound on Moscow until the rubble bounced. During the 1970s, the Soviets began to construct an anti-ballistic-missile shield around Moscow. It was crude by modern standards: anti-missile rockets with nuclear warheads—but it would have rendered the British Polaris force obsolete. So during the 1970s, a succession of Conservative and Labour governments pushed through a warhead upgrade scheme that replaced the original MRV warheads with far more sophisticated MIRV buses, equipped with decoys and able to engage two targets rather than one. The project was called Chevaline; it cost a billion pounds back in the day—when a billion pounds was real money—and they didn’t even tell the Cabinet.”

“A billion pounds? With no oversight?” I blink rapidly. We’re subject to spot audits on office stationery, all the way down to paper clips.

“Yes.” Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “We helped ensure security, so that it was relatively easy for them to spend an extra two hundred million pounds in 1977 to keep the Concorde production lines at Filton and Bristol open for long enough to produce four extra airframes for the RAF,” Angleton says blandly. “The Plumbers ensured that nobody remembered a thing afterwards.”

“RAF 666 Squadron fly Concordes?”

“Flew them,” Angleton corrects me. “The long-range occult reconnaissance model, not the nuclear-armed model the RAF originally asked for in 1968. You may not be aware of this, but Prototype 002 was built with attachment points for a bomb bay before the project was abandoned; Bomber Command wanted to replace V-force with a fleet of supersonic bombers that could carry Blue Steel nuclear stand-off bombs to Moscow, but the Navy won the toss. Instead, the RAF got the recon version, with supercargo space for the six demonologists and the optics bench to open the gate they needed to fly through.”

My jaw is beginning to ache from all the speechless opening-and-closing cycles. “You’re shitting me.”

Angleton shakes his head. “The Squadron was based in Filton and Heathrow, flying in British Airways livery—the aircraft movements were described as charter flights, and they wore the hull numbers of BA airframes that were currently undergoing maintenance. They flew one mission a week, departing west over the Atlantic. They refueled from a VC-10 tanker, then the supercargo would open a gate and they’d make a high-speed run across the dead plateau before reopening the gate home and landing at Filton for decontamination and exorcism. It’s all in CODICIL BLACK SKULL. Which you are cleared to read, incidentally.”

I shake myself and take a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that the RAF has a squadron of black Concordes which they currently keep in a hangar at RAF Cosford? Helen Langhorn was a former Soviet spy who, by a happy accident—for her employers—was in a position to poke around them? Which she did, with results that . . .” I shudder, remembering again: a purple flash, face shrinking and crumpling in on itself around the harsh lines of her skull. “And now the Thirteenth Directorate are sniffing round?”

“Very good! We’ll make a professional paranoid out of you one of these days.” Angleton nods, grudging approval.

“Concorde.” I do a double take. “But they’ve been retired, right?”

“That put a crimp on the cover story, certainly. These days they fly only at night, described as American B-1Bs if anyone asks. A big bomber with four engines and afterburners is a much flimsier cover, and the plane spotters and conspiracy theorists keep the Plumbers busy, but we cannot neglect the watch on the dead plateau. If the thing in the pyramid should stir—” He makes an abrupt cutting gesture with the edge of one hand.

“Dead plateau? Thing in the pyramid?” I’ve got no idea what he’s referring to, but it sounds ominous.

“You’ve been through a gate to elsewhere.” I remember a world in the grip of fimbulwinter, where the rivers of liquid air ran down through valleys of ice beneath a moon carved with the likeness of Hitler’s face. “There are other, more permanent, elsewheres. Some of them we must monitor continuously. That world . . . pray you never see it, boy, and pray that the sleeping god in the pyramid never awakens.”

I tilt my head from side to side, trying to spill the invisible goop that’s clogging up my mind. Thinking in here is difficult, as if the air, hazy with the congealed fumes of state secrets, is impeding my ability to reason—

“Boss. Why are you here? Everyone thinks you’ve gone missing, AWOL with no forwarding address.”

Angleton grins skeletally. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

My eyes are feeling hot and gritty from too much stress and too little sleep, but I manage to roll them anyway. “Big problem: you just tipped me off. Can you give me a reason not to out you to the BLOODY BARON team—other than ‘because I said so’?”

“Of course.” He looks increasingly, alarmingly, amused. What have I gotten myself into this time? “You’ll keep it to yourself because while the cat’s away the mice may play, and one of this particular bunch of mice appears to be a security leak, and I’m setting a trap for them. You’re the bait, by the way.”

“I’m the—”

“And to sex you up so they come after you, I’ve got a little job for you to do.”

“Right, that’s it, I’m through with—”

“Assuming you want to nail the scum responsible for the CLUB ZERO incident in Amsterdam.”

“—fucking cultists—really?”

“Yes, Bob.” He has the good grace not to look too smug. “Now shut up and listen, there’s a good boy.”

He deposits a slim memo on my desk, then places a small plastic baggie on top of it. I squint at it: it’s empty except for a paper clip.

“Here’s what I want you to do . . .”

I’M NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN HOW I GOT HERE FROM THERE: JUST take it as given that it is now ten o’clock in the morning, I am still in the office (but called Mo half an hour ago to see she’s okay), I haven’t shaved or slept, and there’s a BLOODY BARON meeting in five minutes. I’ve got Amarok running on my desktop (playing “Drowning in Berlin” on endless repeat, because I need a pounding beat to keep me awake) and I’ve plowed through the CODICIL BLACK SKULL file that Angleton left me, and then on into a bunch of tedious legwork for this morning’s session. I’m suffering from severe cognitive dissonance; every so often you think you’ve got a handle on this job, on the paper clip audits and interminable bureaucracy and committee meetings, and then something insane crawls out of the woodwork and gibbers at you, something crazy enough to give James Bond nightmares that just happen to be true.

I close the CBS file and I’m just sticking it back in my secure document safe when Iris pops her head round the door. “Bob? Are you ready to do battle with BLOODY BARON yet?”

I groan quietly. “I think I need a coffee, but yeah, I’ll be along just as soon as I’ve locked this . . .” I poke at the keypad and it tweedles happily. Not that an electronic lock is the only security we rely on; anyone who tries to crack this particular safe is going to wake up in hospital with a hangover the size of a whale.

“White, no sugar, right?”

“You’re a star. I’ll be right with you.” Did I remember to say good management cures the King’s Evil and makes coffee, too? Because if not, it’s all true.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting in Room 206 again, with a mug of passable paint stripper in front of me and a printout of the minutes. It’s a very cut-down rump session today. Franz is absent, Iris is tapping her fingers and Shona is looking as if she’d like to be away with the fairies while Choudhury drones on: “No observed deviations from traffic intercept patterns established over the past week, and no notified agent movements yesterday—”

What the hell, I’m bored. I clear my throat.

Choudhury glances at me, irritated: “What is it, Howard?”

“These non-existent agent movements wouldn’t happen to include Panin, would they? Because I’m sure if Panin so much as farted in F-flat minor our boys would be up his arse with a gas spectrograph, wouldn’t they?”

I am pleased to see that both Shona and Iris are paying attention: Shona’s nostrils flare unconsciously and Iris raises an eyebrow at me. Choudhury, however, is a harder nut. He frowns. “Don’t be silly. Of course they’d spot him if he was in the UK.”

“Really?” I lean back, cross my arms, and bare my teeth at him. Maybe he’ll mistake it for a grin. “Explain last night, then.”

“Last n—” He stops dead. “What happened last night?”

I glance at the Sitrep folder. “Panin isn’t in the UK, according to that folder. So how exactly is it that he picked me up as I was leaving work and bought me a pint of ESB in the Frog and Tourettes?”

“Preposterous.” Choudhury glares. Neither Shona nor Iris is smiling.

“You’d better explain,” Iris tells me.

“What I said. Here is a hint: Panin knew. He tried to pump me about Teapot, so I played dumb. He knows the rules; left me a calling card. It’s downstairs in the Security Office safe. For reasons of operational security I didn’t report the contact immediately, but I’m reporting it now. The Plumbers should be able to confirm it from the pub CCTV.” I sit up. “Personally, I find the implications highly suggestive.”

“Why did you not tell Security—” Shona stops, her eyes widening.

“We’re not as secure as we’d like to be. I’d rather not spread it around beyond this committee for the time being.”

Iris’s brows furrow. “You’re taking rather a lot on your shoulders, aren’t you?”

“I’m only doing what Angleton would advise.”

Choudhury has spent the past thirty seconds or so looking hurt and offended. Now he collects his dignity: “This can’t possibly be right—Oversight don’t get their movement reports wrong. Perhaps you were taken in by an impostor? I assure you, you didn’t see Panin last night—he was in Madrid.”

I am getting tired of this shit. “According to your Sitrep he was sighted in Madrid at four p.m.,” I point out. “That’s plenty of time to catch a flight into London City and accost me outside the front door at a quarter past eight. If you had bothered to check the duty rota behind that sighting”—gosh, I didn’t know he could turn that shade of pink!—“you’d know that the Madrid office files their report at five, local time, which is sixteen hundred hours on British Summer Time, and they go home at six. And if you got out from behind your desk once in a while you’d know that the Madrid office consists of two cotton tops and their pet chihuahua, whose job is to take whatever the Guardia Civil feeds them and barf it over the wire on demand, rather than actually running surveillance boxes on visiting opposition controllers. Like I said: the pub CCTV—not to mention the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network and Panin’s mobile phone company’s logfiles—will back me up on this. I’m right, you’re wrong, and I would appreciate it if you’d stop acting like a complete prat and pay attention.”

I find that during my little rant I must have stood up: I’m leaning over the table, balanced on my fists, and Choudhury is leaning over backwards in his chair, not balanced in the slightest. “This is harassment!” he splutters. “Intimidation!”

“No.” I sit down hastily, before Iris can get a word in: “Intimidation is when you’re boxed by a Thirteenth Directorate officer and two Spetsnaz thugs he borrowed from the embassy. I’d recommend it sometime: it’ll be good practice for when the Auditors decide to rake you over the coals.”

Shona has been bottling it up for some time, and now she lets rip: “Bob, what exactly did Panin want? I think you’d better make a full statement right now.” That’s right, she’s with Oscar-Oscar, same as Jo, isn’t she?

“Panin tried to pump me; I don’t pump easily. His specific concern is Teapot. The Teapot is missing, he told me: You’d better find it before the wrong people get their hands on it and use it to make tea. There was a lot of tap-dancing, but that’s the basic substance of it.” I carefully avoid thinking about our inconclusive exchange on the topic of Amsterdam, which is now looking even murkier in context: They do that, you know. To muddy the waters. (Fucking cultists.) “He offered to trade, if we have anything to offer.”

“Wonderful.” Shona is making notes. “So that’s it?”

“Substantially, yes.” Because all I know for sure about the cultist connection is inference—and Angleton’s instructions. (Thus do we damn ourselves, by the treachery of our own words.)

“Okay, I’ll compile this and add it to the minutes, so at least we’ve got it on paper somewhere. That should cover you. Then we can decide how and when to send it up the chain.” She stares at me blackly. “I assume that’s why you brought it up here?”

“Yes. I want to keep it confidential to the BLOODY BARON committee for now. I’m worried about how Panin knew who to talk to and where to find him. Not to mention when.”

Iris speaks up: “Yes, that’s very disturbing.” She looks appropriately disturbed for a split second, then flexes her management muscle. “Vikram, would you be a dear and make sure to accidentally lose the minutes of this session between your desk and your email program? I think it wouldn’t hurt for distribution to be delayed for a few days, until the situation settles one way or the other.”

Despite the aging biker chick style that she affects, the temperament and training of a steely home-counties matron lurk not too far under the skin; put her in twinset and pearls and you can see her biting the heads off hunt saboteurs. When she turns the big guns on Choudhury he runs up the white flag at once. “Ah, certainly, madam.” He spares me a poisonous glance, which I ignore. “SSO 3 Howard’s unfortunate encounter will be thoroughly misfiled until I hear otherwise.”

“Do you expect Panin to make contact again?” Shona demands. “In your personal judgment.”

“Um.” Now that’s a question and a half. “He left me a card in case I want to contact him, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I got the impression he was worried about timing. If the Thirteenth Directorate are running to some kind of schedule we need to know, don’t we?”

Iris looks grimly pleased. “Minute that.”

“Schedules.” Shona stares at Vikram. “What does the calendar have for us?”

“The calendar? It’s August bank holiday in a couple of weeks—”

“I believe she was asking about significant intersections,” Iris interrupts, sparing me a quelling glance. “Summit conferences, international treaties, Mayan great cycle endings, general elections, prophesied apocalypses, that sort of thing. It’ll be in Outlook under events. You’re the one with the laptop, why don’t you look it up?”

Choudhury manages to look long-suffering. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Anything!” Shona makes a curse of the word. “Whatever might interest Panin.”

I blink. Suddenly a rather unpalatable thought occurs to me. Forget dates that interest Panin: What about dates relevant to the Teapot? Assuming the Teapot in question is the one I’m thinking of.

Trying not to be too obvious about it, I pull out my phone and start hunting. There’s an ebook reader, and a Wikipedia client, and a bunch of other stuff. What was Ungern Sternberg’s adjutant called again . . . ?

“Bob, what are you doing?” It’s Iris.

I grin apologetically. “Checking a different calendar.” 19 August 1921. That’s when the mutineers murdered Teapot. At least, that’s when they said they did the deed. And the ninetieth anniversary is coming up in the next week: How interesting. I quickly scan for other significant anniversaries on that date: Salem witch trial executions, Hungerford massacre, twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR . . . “No, sorry, nothing there,” I say, putting my phone away. Liar, liar, pants on fire.

It’s like this: If you were going to try and break the geas that restrains an extra-dimensional horror called the Eater of Souls, wouldn’t you pick the anniversary of its last taste of freedom? Dates have resonance, after all, and this particular horror has been living quietly among human beings, the lion lying down with the lamb, for so long that our patterns of thought have imprinted upon it.

Isn’t that just the sort of nutso thing that the cultists might be up to? Trying to free a vastly powerful occult force from its Laundry-imposed chains? And isn’t this exactly the sort of thing that Panin might anticipate? Well maybe. There’s a slight motivational gap: Just what makes cultists tick, anyway? Besides the obvious—having your head turned by a hugely powerful glamour, being bound by a geas, that sort of thing—what’s in it for them? Fucked if I know: I mean, what makes your average high school shooter tick, for that matter?

Suddenly, not knowing is making me itch—but the only person who can answer for sure is the one person I don’t dare to ask: Angleton.

“Maybe we could wire Bob?” Shona suggests.

What? I shake my head. “What do you mean?”

“If Panin makes contact again, it would really help if you had a recording angel,” she points out.

“There was a word in that sentence: if.” I look at Iris for support but she’s nodding thoughtfully along with Shona. “Panin’s not going to make contact on working hours, and if it’s all right by you, I’d rather not wear a wire during all my off-duty life. Now, if you want me to use that business card and wear a recorder while we’re talking, that’s another matter. But I think we ought to have something to trade with him before we go there, otherwise he’s not going to give us anything for free.”

“Point,” says Iris.

Vikram looks at me through slitted eyes. “We should wire him anyway,” he suggests maliciously, “just in case.”

I sink back in my chair, racking my brain for plausible defenses. We’ve only been in this meeting for half an hour and already it feels like a decade: what a morning! But it could be worse: I’ve got to run Angleton’s little errand at two o’clock . . .