The Annihilation Score (11 page)

After an hour in the cafe I drift furtively back to my office suite. There is now a sign on the glass lobby door: TRANSHUMAN POLICY COORDINATION UNIT. It strikes me as indiscreet at first, but then I think it through: given that I'm running a Potemkin village, indiscretion had better be my middle name from now on. Just as long as it's
planned
indiscretion.

Back in my office, things are looking up: it contains a Desk and a Chair, both so grand that they really demand capitalization. The Desk is a very fine desk indeed—my laptop sits adrift in the middle of its empty bleached woodgrain ocean, looking lost. The Director's throne is a high-end piece of Herman Miller sculpture: all resin and chrome, it looks as if it was designed by H. R. Giger. I check it carefully for teeth and ovipositors before I dare to sit on it. Once adjusted to my height and seating position, it is, indeed, indecently comfortable: I feel as if I'm levitating. Then I look at my laptop's battery status and swear.

Martin from Facilities sticks his head around the door while I'm
crawling around on my hands and knees, plugging the computer's power supply into the socket under the desk. “Miss? There's someone at the front desk who says he's been sent over to see you.”

I scoot backwards and sit up, barely managing not to bang my head on the underside of the desk. “Send him in.” So much for directorial dignity. Bob did this for a living, for years on end, crawling under desks with one end of a cable clutched between his teeth? No wonder he went mad and volunteered for active ops.

I'm back on my throne by the time the door opens. “Hello?” A hipsterish head—mid-twenties male, owlish black horn-rimmed spectacles and highly ironic beard—oozes round the door frame, followed shortly thereafter by a hipsterish body. “Dr. O'Brien? I'm Samuel Jennings. Emma MacDougal sent me.”

“She did, did she?” I look at him for a while, until he swallows. There's probably a personnel file clogging up my inbox, but I like to get an unvarnished look at people before I resort to the funhouse mirror of HR's misconceptions. (The next personnel file I read that describes its subject accurately will be the first: at best they're misleadingly out of date, and at worst they're just plain misleading.) “As you can see, things are a bit sparse around here right now—sorry there's no visitor's chair yet! Your file hasn't caught up with you. So, Samuel—or is it Sam? What do you do?”

“What—” He shifts gears with an almost audible
clunk
. “Oh,
that
. Senior analyst, level two. Background in abstract theoretical xenobiology with application to endogenous evolved neurocomputing architecture.” The beard twitches in a self-deprecatingly ironic smile. “I think I'm here because I got caught moonlighting a year ago and HR carpeted me for it.”

“Moonlighting?” I do a double take.
Is that even
possible
? This is
the Laundry
. We have an oath of office that fries us from the inside out if we do anything remotely dodgy!
I lean forward: “What were you doing?”

“I have an, er, hobby. Scriptwriting comics. I'm a so-so illustrator but after doing some indy work I landed a gig writing for a second-tier Titan property.”

Right.
“So. And this qualifies you to work for Transhuman Policy Coordination, how?”

“Beats me, but HR seem to think that writing about intelligent alien insect invaders from Sirius qualifies me as an expert on the paranormally enhanced.” He shrugs. “My office got trashed the day before yesterday so I'm temporarily homeless, and there's the xenotech neurocomputing specialty to consider, and I'm an analyst, so I got this call from Moira in HR, and she said, ‘You're the superhero expert, go analyze!' So here I am.”

“Cool. You'll have to tell me all about the comics business some day.” I stand up. “Let's go find you an office. Got laptop?”

“Got laptop.” He pats a carnivorous-looking Crumpler messenger bag.

“Let's get you going then. Hmm. As you can see, we've barely begun moving in. You can start by drawing up a wish list for equipment and I'll forward it to Facilities—anything you expect you'll need to get an analysis and reporting office for four up and running within the next month. You can also answer the door and send anyone new who shows up through to me. That's just for today, mind. Tomorrow, we'll hold an all-hands at two o'clock sharp. Clear?”

“Absolutely.” His head bobs: he looks at me with an expression that makes me feel very strange for a few seconds until I realize what it signifies. I've mostly seen it in research students up 'til now. It's the look you give your new and terrifyingly efficient and impressive boss on your way out their office door the first time you meet them, when you realize that you've survived the encounter and you don't even need a change of underwear.

Am I
that
kind of office dragon?

It'll be fun finding out.

*   *   *

By six o'clock I'm about ready to call it a wrap for the day. It's threatening to get dark outside: the shadows are lengthening in the canyon-like street below my window, and the traffic is hitting its rush-hour peak. In addition to Sam, I have acquired another
analyst (Nick: mid-thirties, serious male-pattern baldness on top, wiry build that hints at alarmingly athletic exercise preferences, specializes in traffic analysis, owns a huge DVD collection and identifies himself as a sad fan who goes to conventions for fun—almost as if it's an ethnicity or a calling), and a techie (Sara: I vaguely know her, she used to work for Bob a couple of years ago). Sara gets a phone installed on every desk by five o'clock, promises to plumb us into the intranet tomorrow morning, and even finds me a visitor's chair from somewhere. She seems a bit shy and diffident, but then again, I'm fifteen years her senior and the sign on my door says DIRECTOR.

So Sam, Nick, and Sara have gone home and at half past six I'm all alone in the office, finishing up my PowerPoint slides for tomorrow's all-hands, when there's a knock on the door. “Come in,” I say, not looking up.

“Hi, I'm your new deputy director—oh
shit
.”

I look up, and freeze.

“You,”
we both say at the same time.

The door swings shut behind my new deputy director with a solid
click
.

I stare at her, calculating angles and distances. It doesn't look good: Lecter is about three meters behind my chair, leaning against the corner between the windows. I don't have a gun or a knife, Facilities haven't installed the security wards in this room yet, and there's no panic button. Even if I had a hotline to the blue-suiters on the front desk, I very much doubt they could get here in time to help.

“What's that on your face?”

“Theatrical makeup.” Her glare could curdle milk. “Nobody mentioned I'd be working for
you
. What a fucking mess.”

“Take a seat,” I say, heart pounding and the small of my back suddenly prickling-hot and slick with sweat.

“No thanks, I'd rather stand.”

Mhari stares at me: I stare back at her.

She's a willowy blonde with a figure fit to send vapid twenty-something non-supermodels into paroxysms of jealousy. Her only flaw is that her face is pancaked with theatrical quantities of makeup.
She does the severe-office-power-suit thing way better than I do: everything's black except for her high-collared red silk blouse. She looks like the walking human incarnation of a venomous spider. It takes me an extra moment to notice that she's wearing opaque black hosiery and gloves: the only skin on display is her face. “Nice outfit. Sun getting to you?”

“It's a workaround.” She reaches into her handbag and produces a pair of mirrored aviator shades. “A sub-optimal one.” She twirls them lazily between left index finger and thumb, like an Old West gunslinger.

I need to get control of this situation.
Fast.
“I'll give you a choice. You can go out the door, go back to whatever box they put you in, and I'll tell Emma to roll the dice again. Without prejudice. Or you can sit down”—I point at the chair—“
right now
and we will work this out.”

My heart is going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, and I'm so keyed up that my hand is shaking: I lower it hastily, in case she notices. Coldsweat terror claws at the back of my neck.

“Promise you won't try to kill me with that
thing
.” I note her gaze tracking towards the corner between the windows. My perspective flips, in another of those dizzying Rubin vase moments: Is
she
afraid of
me
?

“Don't be silly, killing one's staff is workplace harassment. Definitely gross misconduct: I think it's a sacking offense.” (It's also murder, and the Black Assizes take a very dim view of it, but I don't bring that up: I don't want her to feel too comfortable.) I pause. “Sit down and let's talk things over like grown-ups.”

She sits, but she's wound up like a watch spring: back straight, knees together, oversized black leather handbag clenched on her lap. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

I consider the idea. “Very possibly.” But if so, who is the joke aimed at? And where's the joker?

“Emma told me this is a new departmental start-up, a public front to deflect attention from the Laundry. Also an attempt to contain the pervert suit problem.”

Very succinct.
“Yes.”

“You're directing it, why? Is this something to do with yesterday's headlines?”

Kid, you have
no
idea.
I nod, stiffly. “I've been reallocated. My old job became nonviable the, the instant the TV cameras locked on.”

“Oh.”
I recognize that expression from somewhere. I wish I didn't: I don't need her sympathy, however grudging. “Right.”

I lace my fingers together in front of me to stop my hands from shaking with the effort of not fidgeting as I stare back at her: “Why do you think Emma thought you were suited for the role of deputy director of this unit?” I see her hesitate, so I add, “If it helps, try to imagine you're talking to someone else. Animal, vegetable, sentient cauliflower from Arcturus: it doesn't matter, just as long as they're not me.”

“I don't need egg-sucking lessons.” Her lip curls, momentarily supercilious, then she realizes what she's doing and hides it behind an instantly raised hand. Anything to avoid slipping me a flash of the old ivory gnashers. “Really, it's not hard. I spent three years in HR, back in the day. Then I transferred to the deactivation list and was out-placed into the second-largest investment bank in Europe. While I was working there I did a part-time MBA and worked in a variety of roles, most recently as the operations manager for an internal business unit with a turnover of roughly two hundred million pounds a year.” She squares her shoulders and sticks her chest out: “I am also a blood-sucking fiend,
out
and
proud
. Superpowers: I have them. What do
you
bring to the table, Mrs. Howard?”

I grin and bare my teeth at her: “That's Dr. O'Brien to you, Ms. Murphy.”

I glance over my shoulder at Lecter: his case is the right way round to display the sticker on its side. THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS.

“That facetious bumper-sticker sums up what I used to do for our organization—our
real
organization, that is. I destroy emergent threats. When I'm not doing field work, I have a PhD in philosophy of mathematics, lecture part-time in music theory at Birkbeck, and specialize in the application of fast Fourier transforms to
psychoacoustic summoning systems. And I appear to be your designated line manager.”

Superpowers I do
not
have, but I've got five years on this highly annoying person, and age and guile trump youth and enthusiasm—or so they say. I must remember to bear in mind that I've
only
got five years on her: she may be able to pass for her early twenties but she's roughly Bob's age. Unfortunately, in addition to the butterflies that come of knowing I'm unarmed and in the presence of a potentially immortal and superstrong obligate carnivore, I've got a curious sinking sensation in my stomach. It comes from the realization that, on paper at least, Mhari is
impressively
well-qualified to be my executive officer.

“Right,” she says crisply. “So. The job of this unit is to generate and then execute a strategy for containing and mitigating the superhero nuisance. We've got office space, two analysts, and a target—?” She raises a latex-smeared eyebrow and I nod, very slightly. “And all that's holding us back is a marked lack of trust between the designated director and their executive assistant.”

I nod again.

She leans forward as she speaks, loudly and clearly: “I did
not
fuck your husband.”

I nod once more, feeling cornered despite all the empty space behind my chair.

Mezzo forte: “I didn't even drink his blood!”

The only way to respond is fortissimo: “So
that
makes everything all right?”

(I swear at myself: she's clearly trying to build bridges, why am I trying to knock them down?)

She rises to a crescendo: “
Can we agree
that he should probably have let you know I was staying over?”

If pauses can be pregnant, this one's on the run from a fertility clinic. A drop of sweat trickles down the small of my back.
Re-evaluate. Re-evaluate. Prioritize.
On Monday morning I have to stand up in front of the Home Secretary and deliver a cogent, achievable plan for getting Her Majesty's Government out in front of the
paranormal power-assisted pervert suit menace,
stat
. This woman, who I
dislike intensely
, who seriously fucked up Bob before I met him and spent a couple of years working through his neuroses about the opposite sex, this woman
who I trust as far as I can throw her
, this Vampire Bitch from Human Resources
who nearly triggers panic attacks when I see her
, also happens to be exactly the strong right arm that I need to get the job done.