The Annihilation Score (47 page)

“Later,” she says tensely. There are other concert-goers in the corridor. Stanwick leads me to the staircase, then heads down them
briskly. We go with the flow for the time being, but once we reach the ground floor, there's another staircase going down—and very little traffic. The corridors here have scuff guards on the walls and uncarpeted floors, and I find myself curiously unsurprised when, as we turn into one, another two cops fall into step behind us—these two wearing street patrol gear, stabbies and hi-vis jackets over black combats, pistols discreetly holstered on their hips.

Well, that tears it. The skin-crawling sensation that I've been aware of for the past week, that there's a target pinned between my shoulders, is back in full strength: I can feel Lecter coming to full alertness, coiling and writhing slowly in the smoky velvet-lined void in his case. The adversary surely has me in his sights. But . . .
the Police
?

We come to an office; just past it there's a staircase leading up to the doors in back of the stage. It's cluttered with desks and papered with posters announcing past performances. Stanwick makes a beeline for the director's desk and sits down behind it. There's a folio in the middle of the desk, and she opens it and begins to sort through papers. “Go ahead, Alan,” she says. “I'll take it from here.”

“If you're sure—”

“Yeah.” She looks straight at me. “Dr. O'Brien. Sit down.” There is no
please
. I sit opposite her, acutely aware of the two armed officers flanking the only exit.

I lick my lips. “What's going on?” I ask.

“I think you know what's going on.” Stanwick looks at me sharply. “But we don't have time to tango right now. I'm going to have to ask you to read this, please.”

“Read—”

She slides a letter from the folio across the desk towards me. I take it with nerveless fingers.

It's on Home Office letterhead. And in one brief paragraph it sets out my worst nightmare.

It identifies Freudstein. It tells me what to do. And it puts me in a terrible quandary.

*   *   *

For the past few months, the biggest source of stress in my working life has been our lack of progress in identifying our Mad Science villain.

The obvious answer, so obvious it has been our main avenue of investigation, is that the pseudonym
Professor Freudstein
is the front for an organization. Why is it obviously an organization? Because there might be an evil genius somewhere in the picture, or even a Mad Scientist, but in this century, you don't do science without teamwork. Neither do you break into the Bank of England on your own, or the Sellafield Product and Residues Store, much less the British Library. Each of those incidents has to have involved one or more insiders, or someone with privileged information and the ability to suborn a high-level security system. So: Freudstein is a group of people able to stage remarkable coordinated operations with virtual impunity, a group with access to fissile nuclear materials, a team who are able to stay inside my unit's observation/decision loop, able to plan the most sophisticated schemes—

These are not the activities of a rogue genius or a loose cannon. These are the coldly calculated actions of a sophisticated organization that has huge resources and understands criminality too well for it to actually
be
a criminal.

And now I know what that organization is.

*   *   *

“You are
absolutely
out of your fucking mind,” I tell the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Specialist Operations Directorate of the London Metropolitan Police, “and if you think I am going to cooperate with
this,
you have another think coming.”

I push the letter back across the table at her, then cross my arms. “Not. Going. To. Happen.”

Laura's face goes still, in a peculiarly over-controlled way that suggests she's bottling everything up tight. She pauses for a couple of seconds before she speaks again, this time in the distant tones of a copper reading a charge sheet to a petty criminal she's just nicked.
“Dr. O'Brien, you have just been presented with a written order signed by the Home Secretary, under Part Two of the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), declaring a large-scale civil emergency and ordering you to support special operations as directed by my command. In case it has escaped your attention,
you swore an oath before a magistrate
not very many months ago. This is all by the book.” Her smile is thin and utterly lacking in humor. “Are you rejecting a lawful order?”

I try to center myself. “May I suggest that running a false-flag supervillain operation is one thing, but ordering the deployment of a class six quasi-sentient occult invocation engine is another matter entirely?”

“You can suggest it, but I'm not listening.” She mimes hear-no-evil. “This is a crisis, Dr. O'Brien. You don't get to say
no
. You're part of Operation Freudstein now, and you're going to play the violin sonata from the second act of that manuscript.”

You have got to be kidding.
“Convince me.”
Play for time.
I fidget with the ring on my right hand, desperately aware that if Mhari mistakes it for a routine itch or is sleeping or otherwise distracted—

Stanwick gestures at the glass wall separating us from the ops room. “You've got all the pieces: five minutes' time out won't hurt. Tell me what your hypotheses are and I'll set you straight.”

“Hypotheses?” I shrug. “You're part of a working group within ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers. A clearing house and information exchange between territorial forces, operating at the very highest level, with some staff seconded from other forces, that also undertakes operations directly on behalf of the Home Office. Your command has responsibility for a bunch of major security briefs—you run the counter-terrorism command, what used to be Special Branch, among other things. You're therefore the logical person to put in charge of responding to the imminent threat to law and order posed by a, a”—I check with my internal censor: it grants permission for me to continue, which is in itself worrying—“sudden sharp spike in the prevalence of both ritual magic and informal paranormal powers, commonly interpreted by those on the receiving end as making them superheroes.”

She nods minutely, so I continue, listening for the caution of a still, small inner voice. “You plotted the same graphs that
my
employers have been sweating over for the past few months. You saw the sudden upswing and worried that before long
everyone
would be casting fireballs, levitating, building space stations, and generally getting in the way of community policing. So you began looking for a solution to the problem, framed tightly as a superpowered public order issue. Then my people came along. Have you signed section three?”

She nods. “I know who you are,” she says, with a surprising level of quiet vehemence. “SOE. Another wartime relic.” Her cheek twitches. “We are out of the unlawful activities business, Dr. O'Brien. We're part of the Home Office, not the Ministry of Defense. Unlike
your
employers we attempt to do everything by the book. Sometimes we fail, and then it's time for Professional Standards and the IPCC to work out what went wrong, but the point is,
we don't cut corners
.”

I roll my eyes. “Sure. And we deal with threats you can't handle.
Existential
threats. Your job is to enforce the law, but the law in question applies to human beings here on this Earth. It doesn't work so well after a nuclear war, which is the only sane comparison for what my organization is responsible for heading off—”

“That's where you're wrong.” She gives me a brief, feral smile and taps the disastrous letter again. It's lawful, it's signed by the Home Secretary herself, and I'm not willing to bet that my Laundry warrant card can trump it: short of getting it countersigned by the Queen, it doesn't go much higher than this. “Civil Contingencies Act, Dr. O'Brien. It was drafted to govern
exactly
that sort of situation.”

Shit.
She is, of course, technically correct: the CCA is the overarching piece of civil defense and disaster preparedness legislation that governs how the United Kingdom would be ruled in the aftermath of a nuclear war or an invasion by undead alien gods. She's got me bang to rights. And she continues, remorselessly: “You agree that it's my organization's job to enforce the law, don't you?”

Where is she going with this?
“Yes.”

“Well, we consider the outbreak of three- to five-sigma superpowers to be a critical problem. An out of context problem for the practice of policing, if you're familiar with the term.”
Oh God.
“We have to take preventative action to stop it from turning into a tidal wave of lawlessness. And we have to do it as soon as possible, before disasters like the EDL march in Oldham become daily occurrences. Your sock-puppet public relations superhero team isn't going to provide a constructive role model for our superpowered youth—it's just going to be the butt of their jokes. Don't think it hasn't been tried before any number of times, during various panics over juvenile delinquency. We're facing Armageddon, Dr. O'Brien; we've got to head it off before it happens. A nightmare of lawless rioting lumpenproletariat with superpowers is just around the corner.
You
may be concerned with the defense of the realm, but
I'm
concerned with ensuring there's a realm left to defend.”

“Aren't you exaggerating a bit?” I ask.

That's a mistake. Laura proceeds to deliver the smackdown, in the shape of a canned three-minute lecture on Law And Disorder In The Big City: “Our total overall detection rate is just twenty-four percent, Dr. O'Brien. Less than a
quarter
of reported crimes for which we get a confirmed clear-up. In some areas—offenses against vehicles, burglary, theft, and criminal damage—we're under fifteen percent. In reality most of those crimes are the work of a hard core of serial offenders, so we get them eventually—but in the meantime it creates a chilling climate. It creates the impression that we are institutionally incapable of preventing crime. Law-abiding citizens like yourself go about in a state of fear out of all proportion to the scale of the problem, fanned by the tabloid media. Meanwhile, real criminals feel empowered and invulnerable. If some of them subsequently become invulnerable
in reality
, we will have a desperately serious problem. Bad enough if they were to be robbing sleepy banks who pay insufficient attention to securing their vaults—” She reaches into the folio and produces a Police evidence baggie containing a pair of DLT tapes. “Think of the climate of fear! We can't afford to let go for a split
second, Doctor. We're all that stands between you and anarchy red in tooth and claw.”

I know where Laura is coming from, now: she's a member of the
you couldn't handle the truth/thin blue line saving you from drowning in a sea of filth
school of police opinion. Which is all very well, but better policing and more powers to stop and search isn't going to protect us when the Sleeper in the Pyramid wakes up. “That's not going to happen,” I point out. “I don't know if you've been briefed yet, but the superpowered are at risk of K-type dementia. The more power they use, the faster they're going to come down with—”

“Doesn't matter, Doctor. A malevolent five sigma who succumbs to a neurodegenerative condition after two weeks is still a disaster.” Her eyes widen slightly. “Is Jim Grey at risk?” I nod. “Oh dear.” “We—the Laundry—have some experience in managing this condition. There are techniques that can reduce an occult practitioner's susceptibility: they may work for superpowers, too. After all, they're just informal ritual practitioners with an intuitive/somatic interface . . . But. But. If you want to tackle the superpowered, you need to build hospitals, not super-dungeons.”

“Nevertheless.” She swallows, looking appalled: she's genuinely rattled, if I'm any judge of character at all. “If I give full credit to what you're telling me, that just makes your willing participation in Operation Freudstein all the more important.”

Tell me more: I'm fascinated.
“Why the name?”

“It's a portmanteau: the twentieth century was book-ended by the nightmares of Freud and Einstein. Freudstein is a high-profile awareness-raising exercise, to show everyone just how dangerous a five-sigma criminal can be: we can point to his activities and say, that's why we need these special contingency powers.
Before it's too late.
For a project simulating a Mad Scientist, whose goal is to provide the impetus and the mechanism for performing surgery on the collective subconscious of a nation, what could be more appropriate?”

I nod encouragement. “Let me guess. This sonata you want me to play. It's from
The King in Yellow
, isn't it? The second act? Or the third?”

“Yes.” The Assistant Commissioner looks past me, at something happening in the control room. “You know the Last Night is being broadcast live: audio on Radio Three and television on BBC One? We can push this broadcast a bit further—we can tie in to the backbone routers at Telehouse Docklands using the same interconnect GCHQ use for their MTI surveillance. And we can transparently redirect the DNS queries from any computer in the UK to point wherever we want them to. In a nutshell, we're going to piggyback your solo on every YouTube video session in the country. At the same time, we will push a Playout update to Sky and Virgin.” The satellite and cable monopolists for the UK. “We won't get everyone, but a good thirty percent of the population should receive saturation coverage. Maybe even half.” She smiles encouragingly: “Just think, you'll have the biggest audience of any live event in Britain since the Royal Wedding.”