The Apocalypse Codex (5 page)

This morning we started with a power breakfast and a PowerPoint-assisted presentation on the goals and deliverables of this week’s course. Then we broke for an hour-long meet-and-greet get-to-know-you team building session, followed by a two-hour pep talk on the importance of common core values and respect for diversity among next-generation leadership. Then lunch (with more awkward small talk over the wilted-lettuce-infested sandwiches), and now
this
.

“I’d like to start by asking you all to introduce yourselves by name and department, then give us a brief sketch of what you do there. Not in great detail: a minute or two is enough. If you’d like to begin, Ms.…?”

Ms.…gives a quick giggle, rapidly suppressed. “I’m Debbie Williams, Department for International Development.” Blonde and on the plump side, she’s one of the suits, subtype: black with shoulder pads, very formal, the kind you see folks wearing when they want to convince their boss that they’re serious about earning that promotion. (Or when they work for a particularly stuffy law firm.) “I’m in the strategy unit for Governance in Challenging Environments. We work with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to develop robust accounting standards for promoting better budgetary administration for NGOs working in questionable—”

I zone out. Her mouth is moving and emitting sounds, but my mind’s a thousand kilometers away, deep in a flashback. I’m in the middle of a platoon of SAS territorials, all of us in full-body pressure suits with oxygen tanks on our backs, boots crunching across the frozen air of a nightmare plain beneath a moon carved in the likeness of Hitler’s face as we march towards a dark castle…I pinch myself and try to force my attention back to the here and now, where Debbie Somebody is burbling enthusiastically about recovery of depreciated assets and retention of stakeholder engagement to ensure the delivery of best value to local allies—

“Thank you, that’s very good, Debbie!” Dr. Tring has the baton again. “Next, if you’d like to fill us in on your background, Mr.—”

“Bevan, Andrew Bevan.” Andrew has a Midlands accent, positively Mancunian, and although he’s another suit-wearer, his is brown tweed. “Hi, everyone, I’m with the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, and I’m really excited to be part of the Olympic Delivery Authority’s Post-Event Assets Realization Team! As you know, the Olympics went swimmingly and were a big hit for Britain, but even though the games are over the administrative issues raised by hosting the Olympics are still with us—”

And I’m gone again (
four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
), held prisoner in a stateroom aboard a luxury yacht—a thinly disguised ex-Soviet guided missile destroyer—with a silver-plated keel and a crew of jump-suited, mirrorshade-wearing minions, cruising the Caribbean under the orders of a madman who is trying to raise a dead horror from the Abyss (
and though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all
)—

I pull myself back to the present just as Mr. Bevan explains the urgent necessity of documenting best practices for monetizing tangible assets including but not limited to new-build Crown estate properties in order to write down the balance sheet deficit left by the games.

“Thank you, Mr. Bevan, for that fascinating peek inside the invaluable work of the DCMS. Ah, and now you, Mr., ah, Howard, is it?”

I blink back to the here and now, open my mouth, and freeze.

What I was
about
to say was something like this: “Hi, I’m Bob Howard. I’m a computational demonologist and senior field agent working for an organization you don’t know exists. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; diving through holes in spacetime that lead to dead worlds and fighting off the things with too many tentacles and mouths that I find there; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new classified document processing architecture; exorcising haunted jet fighters; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; engaging in gunfights with the inbred cannibal worshippers of undead alien gods; and sitting in committee meetings.”

All of which is entirely true, and utterly, impossibly inadmissible: if I actually said it smoke would come out of my ears and my hair would catch fire long before I died, thanks to the oath of office I have sworn and the geas under which Crown authority is vested in me.

“Mr. Howard?” I snap into focus. Dr. Tring is peering at me, an expression of faint concern on his face.

“Sorry, must be something I ate.”
Quick, pull yourself together, Bob!
“The name’s Howard, Bob Howard. I work in IT security for, uh, the Highways Agency, in Leeds. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new automatic numberplate recognition-based road pricing scheme’s penalty ticket management system; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; and sitting in committee meetings.”

I blink. They’re all staring at me as if I’ve grown a second head, or coughed to being a senior field agent in a highly classified security organization.

“That’s the system for handing out automatic fines to people who exceed the speed limit between cameras anywhere on the road network, isn’t it?” Debbie from DFID chirps, bright and menacing.

“Um, yes?” Living as we do in central London, inside the Congestion Charge Zone, Mo and I don’t own a car.

“My mum got one of them,” observes Andrew from the Olympics. “She was driving my dad to the A&E unit, he swore blind ’e’d just got indigestion, but ’e’d already ’ad one heart attack—” The dropped aitches are coming out; the mob of angry peasants with the pitchforks and torches will be along in a moment.

“
I
think they’re stupid, too,” I say, perhaps a trifle too desperately; Dr. Tring is focusing on me with the expressionless gaze of a zombie assassin—
don’t
think
about those things, you’re in public
. “But it’s part of the integrated transport safety policy.” I hunch my back and roll my eyes as disarmingly as any semi-professional Igor to the Transport Secretary’s Frankenstein, but they’re not buying it. “Speed kills,” I squeak. From the way they stare at me, you’d think I’d confessed to eating babies.

“That’s
enough
,” says Dr. Tring, finally condescending to drag the seminar back on course. “Ah, Ms. Steele, if you don’t mind telling us a little about your specialty, which would be managing an audit team for HMRC…?”

And Ms. Steele—thin-faced and serious as sudden death—launches straight into a series of adventures in carousel duty evasion and international reverse double-taxation law, during which I retreat into vindictive fantasies about setting my classmates’ cars on fire.

FOUR HOURS OF SOUL-DESTROYINGLY BANAL TEDIUM—VAPID
nostrums about leadership values, stupid role-playing games involving pretending to be circus performers organizing a fantasy big top night, sly digs from the Ministry of Sport—pass me by in a blur. I go upstairs to my bedroom, force myself to shower and unkink my clenched jaw muscles, then dress again, and go downstairs.

They’ve set up a buffet in one of the meeting rooms. It’s piled high with tuna mayo sandwiches, cold chicken drumsticks, and greasy mini-samosas, evidently in a misplaced attempt to encourage us to mingle and network after working hours. Halfway across the campus there’s a bar, although the beer’s fizzy piss and the spirits are overpriced. I check the clock: it’s only six thirty. If I do the mingling thing they’ll start badgering me about their aunts’ speeding tickets, but the prospect of drinking on my own does not appeal.

I make the best of a bad deal and strike out across the campus to the nearest bar, where I order a pint of lemonade to calm my nerves and contemplate the menu without much enthusiasm. The ghastly truth is beginning to sink in when one of my fellow victims walks in and approaches the bar. At least I
think
he’s a victim; he might be staff. Three-piece suit, mid-fifties, distinguished gray hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache. Something about his bearing is familiar, then I realize where I’ve seen it before—ten to one he’s ex-military. As he taps the brass bell-push he catches me watching him and nods. “Ah, Mr. Howard.”

I stare at him. “That’s me. Who are you?” It’s rude, I know, but I’m not in a terribly good mood right now.

“I heard one of you young people would be here, and thought I ought to meet you.” The barman, who looks younger than most of the single malts behind the bar, sticks his head up. “Ah, that’ll be a Talisker, the sixteen-year-old, and”—he looks at me—“what’s your poison, Mr. Howard?”

“I’ll try the Glengoyne ten,” I say automatically.

“Bill it to my tab,” says my nameless benefactor. “No ice!” he adds, with an expression of mild horror as the barman reaches for the bucket. “That will be all.” The barman, to my surprise, makes himself scarce, leaving two tumblers of amber water-of-life atop the bar. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says, gesturing at a couple of armchairs beside the empty fireplace. He makes it sound like an order.

I sit down. He sits down opposite me. “You still haven’t introduced yourself,” I say.

“Indeed.” He smiles faintly.

“Indeed.” There’s nothing I can say to that without being rude, and we in the Laundry have an old saying: Do not in haste be rude to whoever’s buying the drinks. So I raise my tumbler, take a good sniff (just to make sure it isn’t poison), and examine him over the rim.

“You surprised Dr. Tring, you know. Most of the students here are aiming to network and make connections; you might want to pick a slightly less objectionable cover story next time.”

Cover story.
I give him the hairy eyeball. “For the third time. Who’s asking?”

He reaches into his jacket pocket with his right hand and withdraws a familiar-looking card. Which he then holds in front of me while I read the name on it and feel a prickling in the balls of my thumbs (and a vibration in the ward that hangs on a chain around my neck) that tells me it’s the real thing.

“All right, Mr. Lockhart.” I take a sip of his whisky and allow myself to relax—but only a little. “I’ll take your helpful advice under consideration, although in my defense, I have to say, the story wasn’t my idea. But what—if I may ask—are
you
doing here?”

“I’d have thought it was obvious; I’m enjoying an after-work drink and networking with a useful contact in the Highways Agency.” Gerald Lockhart, who at SSO8(L) is a stratospheric four grades above me—that’s four grades up in the same organization—replies without any noticeable inflection.

“Uh huh.” I think for a moment. “We couldn’t possibly be running an ongoing effort here to identify suitable candidates for recruitment from within other branches of the civil service—or to implant geases in up-and-coming players fast-tracked for promotion that will enable us to work more effectively with them in future. Could we?”

“Certainly
not
, Mr. Howard, and I’d thank you to stop speculating along such lines. You’re not cleared for them.”

Oops.
“Okay, I’ll stop.” But I can’t avoid a little jab: “But you’re obviously cleared for
me
, aren’t you?”

Lockhart fixes me with a reptilian stare: “James warned me about your sense of humor, young man. I think he indulges you too much.”

Young man?
I’m in my early thirties. On the other hand, I can take a hint that I’m in over my head: when your sparring partner turns out to be on a first-name basis with Angleton, it’s time to back off.

I put my glass down, even though it’s not empty. “Look, I don’t need this. You obviously want to talk to me about something. But I’ve had a bad day, I’m not terribly happy to be here, and I’m not handling this very well. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just say your piece, all right?”

I can see his jaw working, behind the salt-and-pepper topiary on his upper lip. “If that’s the way you want it.” He takes a sip of his single malt. “I expect you’ve noticed that there are a lot of high-flyers here. Civil servants who are being groomed for upper management roles, where in ten years time they’ll deal with members of the government and represent their departments in public. You should be making notes, Mr. Howard, because although you won’t be dealing with the general public, you’ll certainly be representing us in front of
these
people. You’re going to need those people-handling skills. If we all live long enough for you to acquire them. Ha, ha.”

“Ha”—I try not to look unsuitably unamused—“ha. So?”

“James is assigning you to my department for a little project—nothing you can’t handle, I assure you. I’ll see you in my office next Monday morning at eleven o’clock sharp. In the meantime, you have some background reading to catch up on.” He slides a dog-eared paperback towards me across the table before I can respond. “Good night, Mr. Howard.” He rises, and before I can open my mouth and insert any additional limbs he vanishes.

I pick up the book and turn it over in my hands.
Spy-Catcher
, it says, by Peter Wright.
A
New York Times
bestseller.
I stare at it.
Background reading?
Wasn’t he a rogue Security Service officer from the seventies or something?
How bizarre.
I pick up my whisky glass, and open the book.

Oh well, at least I’ve got something to pass the evenings with now…

3.

BIG TENT