The Annihilation Score (9 page)

There is a chirp from the SA's suit pocket, then another chirp: the discreet mating call of the mobile phone. That the Senior Auditor carries a mobile phone at all, let alone that he doesn't silence it in meetings, is so extraordinary a revelation that I stare, but then something even stranger happens: he pulls it out (a rather ancient Blackberry, plastic edges polished to a shine by constant use) and
answers
it, right in front of our shocked faces. In, as I said, a highly sensitive meeting.

“Hello? I'm in the INCORRIGIBLE session, didn't I say I wasn't to be— Oh. I see.” (A pause.) “He insists, does he? Damn. Damn. Yes, I'll tell them.”

He puts his phone away and frowns.

“I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut this short, ladies and gentlemen: they've brought the meeting forward an hour. Dr. O'Brien, Agent CANDID.” He nods at me. “As you can see, our organization has been dragged into dangerously close proximity to the public sphere by the INCORRIGIBLE problem. In particular, Mahogany Row are desperately keen to stay out of the limelight. So in order to avoid compromising our core mission, we need to generate a semi-classified proxy to deal with the superhero problem.

“Dominique.” I tense: his use of my first name is unusual enough to put my adrenal glands on fight-or-flee alert. “The narrative we are developing is that there is a secret department within the Security Service”—better known to members of the public as MI5—“which
deals with superpowered threats to the realm. As your cover has been comprehensively blown by this morning's events, I have decided that it is necessary to place Agent CANDID on indefinite furlough.”

I'm afraid I gasp involuntarily: I manage to suppress the flinch reflex. Agent CANDID is my operational designation. Worse, it has framed my working life for the past several years. Part-time academic by day, part-time Laundry researcher and active service operative by night—and occasional on-call executioner.

The Senior Auditor rolls on, pretending not to notice my lapse: “Meanwhile, we want you—that is, Dr. Dominique O'Brien—to become the semi-public face of OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE. Semi-public in this context means that you will interact directly with other government agencies. Your cover story is that you are a senior member of the aforementioned secret department of MI5, answering to the Home Office, where you will recruit and operate an, ah, ‘Superhero Team' to, um, ‘fight crime.' You will appear to report to the regular Security Service authorities, and your department will identify and execute suitable responses to the anomalous power threat.

“Fighting crime is the cover story for the BBC and national news media. The internal narrative within other civil service departments, and for open dissemination within MI5 and the Police, is that your primary objective is to put the frighteners on the pervert suits. Compliant ones will be recruited and corralled in a safe organizational framework that provides them with plenty of opportunities for make-believe superhero work; noncompliant ones can be taken down in public if necessary, without compromising the operational security of designated national security agencies. We anticipate full and enthusiastic support for this goal from the Police and the Security Service, because this strategy feeds into their operational goals and all they're required to do is to claim credit for your hard work.

“But those are merely your tertiary and secondary tasks. Your
primary
objective is to insulate the Laundry from public exposure and consequential political meddling by directing media attention away from us and towards the antics of the official government superhero team, working for this fictional department within the
Security Service.” His smile is terrifying. “In other words, think of yourself as James Bond's M—if Bond had a cape.”

“But no such organization exists!” I protest, horrified.
I've got to battle supervillains in public?
Worse:
I'm working for the Home Office?
The Laundry is part of the security services, answerable to the Ministry of Defense, while the Home Office is all about law enforcement. “Two cultures” doesn't even
begin
to describe the scale of the divide.

“The organization you will be in charge of exists as of now, at least on paper.” The SA's smile is fey. “Mrs. MacDougal, the dossier, if you please . . . ?”

Emma gives me a sympathetic look as she slides a ten-centimeter-thick dossier across the table towards me. “Sorry dear,” she says: “I'm afraid you're promoted—sideways.”

“Better read quickly,” the Senior Auditor adds. “Because that phone call was the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office. They're expecting you in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A in forty-two minutes precisely. Just in time to update the Deputy Prime Minister on your new assignment.”

*   *   *

I thought I'd hit rock bottom on my way into the Admiralty building: little did I suspect how much further there was to sink!

Emma's dossier is a doozie. If it's to be believed, I have been promoted three whole grades in a single bound. I am now attached to the org chart of the sprawling bureaucratic empire popularly misidentified as MI5, about three management tiers down from the top and so far off to one side that I'm teetering on the edge of a virtual cliff, with dotted lines leading off the edge of the paper in the direction of the iceberg labelled Home Office. And what a view this cliff overlooks! I have no less than five subdepartments under me, and something like forty staff. But it's a skeleton crew for now. Their niches on the org chart are all blank for the time being, a tabula rasa labelled INSERT RECRUIT HERE; half of them are tagged SUPERHERO. I have a budget of three million a year, an open requisition for a Secret Bunker and a Team
Headquarters (subject to authorization, approval, and planning permission), and an entire back story to memorize for my decades-old career as some kind of high-level counter-espionage expert.

It's
utterly humiliating
, that's what it is.

What I really wanted and expected was to receive my entirely justified bollocking behind closed doors, then to go home and take a month of garden leave and several sessions with a security-cleared therapist and maybe a talk with a marriage guidance counselor. Not to mention a discreet word with Emma about commencing the search for a suitable candidate to take over a certain bone-white cross that I bear. (It's a long shot but it just
might
work, although the search might take a while to bear fruit.)

Instead, they seem to think they're
doing me a favor
by promoting me, dumping a huge load of unfamiliar management responsibilities on my shoulders, and putting me in charge of my very own department (in another organization, to boot).

Once my speed-reading session with the dossier runs out of time, they form a protective phalanx around me and march me in bureaucratic lockstep down marble corridors and the pavement alongside Whitehall, past the Scotland Office, unto the front steps of the Cabinet Office building. Or maybe they're just making sure I have no opportunity to escape before the ritual feeding of the newly commissioned departmental director to the ministers.

As I climb the steps and present my ID to the policemen on duty, all I can think of is a silly book that Bob told me he was reading a couple of years ago, by some dead famous author, who came up with a clever neologism, what was it . . . an out of concept problem? No: an out of
context
problem. Something which organizations or cultures encounter in very much the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop.

I can't shake the sense that today is my very own hyper-personalized out of context problem. I talk to my violin in the privacy of my own head: fine. When my violin talks back and tries to use me as a puppet to murder my husband, that's not so fine. When I go on to nearly kill a man in the middle of Trafalgar Square live on network TV, that's even less fine. But then there's
this
.

What should I expect next, if the day continues to go downhill at this rate? An invading army of elves for after-dinner amusement?

I'm so wrapped up in myself that I nearly walk into a familiar-looking man in a rumpled suit clutching a battered red leather file box under one arm. I flinch violently and nearly push Lecter's quick-release button by accident: “Whoops, sorry,” I say, trying to force my heart back down into my chest where it belongs.

“Not to—” He does a double take, noticing my violin case. “Ah! You must be the star of the show.” He offers me a handshake: I accept it instinctively. “Jolly good. See you later, must dash.” And with that, the Justice Minister—number five in the Cabinet—deftly sidesteps around me, body-swerves between Vik and the Senior Auditor, and barrels down the front steps.

Oh dear God, I've fallen into “The Thick of It.”

“Was that . . . ?” Vikram asks faintly.

“Stiff upper lip,” murmurs Dr. Armstrong. “Yes, it was. If you'd like to go in, Dr. O'Brien, they'll be expecting you. We'll be back to pick you up at six, when the meeting's over.”

I will
not
show fear.
I smile at him, baring my teeth like a good little girl. “Looking forward to it.” Then I enter the dragon's den.

*   *   *

COBRA is Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, on the first floor of the Cabinet Office building on Whitehall. Contrary to media folklore, there is no such thing as “the COBRA committee.” That implies an implausible level of permanence. COBRA is simply the place where ministers and senior civil servants meet to be briefed on, assess, and respond to civil and military emergencies.

It may be on the first floor rather than in a reinforced bunker, but there are no windows in COBRA's reinforced walls, and the whole section of the building is surrounded by not one, but two Faraday cages and an airlock tunnel lined with metal detectors and other sensors. Naturally, there are discreet security checkpoints that make your typical airport boarding experience look like it's run by Larry, Moe, and Curly, and the whole building is contained within the security
cordon that embraces Downing Street, much of Whitehall, and the Houses of Parliament.

On my way in to COBRA they take my handbag and phone. They don't take my earrings or necklace, but they check them over with handheld emission detectors. As for Lecter . . . he's just going to have to get used to the hand searches. The quick-release springs in his case worry them, but in the end we reach a tense compromise: after they X-ray and manually examine him, I leave him in a security locker (along with my handbag and phone), but they let me take both the keys to the locker.

It's funny: I'm fully dressed but I feel naked without my violin.

The Briefing Room itself is nearly filled by a thoroughly modern bleached pine boardroom table. One wall is a solid slab of TV screens, and there are charge points for laptops and tablets on the table—internet, too, I gather, but not for the likes of me: requests for access have to be cleared in advance by CESG. Today's session is chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, a last-minute substitution due to the Big Cheese himself being distracted by an opportunity to be seen rubbing snouts with his frenemy the Mayor by whatever proportion of the populace still bother watching the News at Nine. Also in attendance are Barry Jennings, the avuncular Justice Minister I nearly ran down earlier, and Jessica Greene, the Home Secretary, Lady High Executioner, and pin-up girl for the hanging's-too-good-for-them electoral demographic.
*

In addition to the political heavies, there's a small coterie of lower-level drones and minor flappers: the Commissioner of Police (London's copper-in-chief), a female Assistant Commissioner attending on behalf of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers), the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office, representatives from the Prison Service, and so on. It's all a bit intimidating: I feel like a secondary school football coach who's been summoned to a meeting of the Premier League chairmen. Who are, of course, very busy men (and want you to know it).

“Dr. O'Brien.” The Deputy PM starts up smoothly without any social lubrication: “Can you tell us exactly what happened in Trafalgar Square this morning?”

I stand up, and deliver the cover story that the INCORRIGIBLE committee sweated their skulls over for me while I was heading home for a quick change and shower at lunchtime.

I am used to giving lectures: this is no different, I tell myself. I can't be suffering from stage fright, can I? I've done this thousands of times before—just to different audiences. I recall a trick I used to use at unfamiliar academic conferences, where I pretend I'm addressing a room full of sapient cauliflowers from Arcturus. It's less nerve-wracking than lecturing some of the most powerful civil servants and policy-makers in the land, so I do that. It does indeed make everything easier, except for a slight tendency to get distracted (Bob
really
doesn't like brassicas—even the smell upsets him—which leads to a hypnagogic vision of my husband choking as he tries to eat the Deputy Prison Minister's head).

High points:

• I run a very small, very new department within MI5 which keeps tabs on superheroes and supervillains.
  
• Sometimes the two are easy to tell apart; sometimes they're indistinguishable.
  
• The number of them crawling out of the woodwork is increasing.
  
• I, myself, have some small talent in that direction.
  
• I happened to be in town on my day off when the Trafalgar Square incident kicked off.
  
• Yes, my department works with the Metropolitan Police. Together, we fight crime.
  

I am at the end of my canned spiel, congratulating myself on a message well-delivered, when the Home Secretary herself fixes me with a brooding, brown-eyed stare.

“Dr. O'Brien, what you've outlined to us is a purely reactive stance. But this incident isn't an isolated event. We can't afford to be on the back foot: the terrorism implications are dreadful. Where's your strategy to get ahead of the problem?”