Johnny watches with studied detachment as the show begins. People are still arriving, filtering in in knots and clumps and talking in quiet, excited tones as the warm-up man starts on stage, a younger preacher from Golden Promise Ministries’ Mission to Miami: “Welcome, Welcome! Open your hearts to the golden promise of a love that will make everything right—”
He’s an inspiring speaker, and he promises joy on a plate, heaven on a stick. There is a prayer. Everybody joins in. There is a chant. It’s impossible not to stand and clap in time with twenty thousand other sweaty, excited pairs of hands, as Johnny rediscovers: they’ve got the script letter-perfect. Then the warm-up man segues into an introduction for the first act, a squeaky-clean rock band who are impossibly young and skinny behind the electric guitars they grip as tightly as their faith. There follows half an hour of power ballads where the punch line is Jesus.
Johnny gives up on the notepad, and settles down to wait. An old professional, he gives no outward sign of his irritation. Three more hours of this shit, he thinks disgustedly. Amanda’s banker was stuck overnight in Zurich; he won’t be home for hours yet. What price an immortal soul, when booty beckons? He makes a private guess with himself, and wins a fiver when the band give way to Warm-Up Man in his shiny electric-blue suit, who invites the audience to pray with him and starts the workup towards the main act. Johnny’s boredom is just beginning to strengthen towards anomie when Raymond Schiller strides on stage, arms spread in benediction, a larger-than-life figure.
Johnny forgets everything else and focuses on the stage with the total nerveless calm of a sniper.
The Duchess was absolutely right to bring him here. He realizes, to his dismay, that Lockhart was also right to finger him for this caper: you can take the boy out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy. And like the devil (in whom Johnny does not believe), the boy will know his own.
4. EXTERNAL ASSETS
THAT MONDAY MORNING I MAKE A POINT OF SETTING MY ALARM fifteen minutes early, bolting my bowl of muesli, and skidding out the house fast enough to leave trainer burns in the hall carpet. I’m pulling my coat on while Mo is still half-asleep at the cafetière, working on her second mug of the morning. “What’s the big hurry?” she asks blearily.
“Departmental politics,” I tell her. “I’ve been told I’m being temporarily reassigned and I want to get the skinny from Him Downstairs, just in case.”
“Him Downstairs? At nine a.m.?” She shudders. “Rather you than me. Give him my regards.”
“I will.” And with that I’m out the door and double-timing it up to the end of the street and the hidden cycle path which runs along the bed of the former Necropolitan Line that transported corpses to London’s largest graveyard in the late nineteenth century. It’s a useful short-cut, affording those who know how to use it a one-kilometer journey between points that are five kilometers apart on the map. I’d normally get the tube—the ley lines are best used sparingly: human traffic is not all that they carry—but I want to beard the lion in his den before I get sent up to groom the tiger.
Fifteen minutes later I surface in a back alley off a side street a block from the New Annex. I look both ways for feral taxi drivers, cross the road briskly, and insert my passkey in the drab metal panel beside a door at one end of an empty department store frontage.
Welcome to my work.
My department of the Laundry is based in the New Annex for the time being. Dansey House, our headquarters building, is currently a muddy hole in the ground as a public-private partnership scheme rebuilds it. Despite the current round of cuts, our core budget is pretty much inviolate. I heard a rumor that our unseen masters in Mahogany Row found it quite difficult to get the message across to the treasury under the current bunch of clowns, but once fully briefed not even a cabinet of sadomasochistic monetarists would dare downsize the department charged with protecting their arses from CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Unfortunately neither Mahogany Row nor the Audit Department can do anything to make Bob the Builder complete a major new inner-city property development on time. And so we’re nearly two years into a twelve-month relocation, and it’s beginning to feel painfully permanent.
I’m early. The night watchmen have retreated to their crypts in the subbasement, but most of the department are still on their way in to work. I trudge to my office—I have an office all of my own these days, with a door and everything—collect my coffee mug, shuffle to the coffee station, fill it with brown smelly stuff, then head down the back stairs and along a dusty windowless passageway towards an unmarked green door.
I pause for a moment before I knock, and a hollow voice booms from within: “Enter, boy!”
I enter.
Angleton is sitting behind his desk, a huge gunmetal-gray contraption surmounted by something that looks like a microfiche reader as hallucinated by Hieronymus Bosch. (Or perhaps, going by the fat cables that snake under its hood, H. R. Giger.) Tall, pallid, with skin like parchment drawn tight across the bones beneath, he’s the spitting image of every public school master who held the upper fifth in an iron grip of disciplined terror on TV in the 1960s. Which is appropriate, because for some years in what passed for his youth he was indeed a public school master. Only now he’s my boss, and even though I’m well into my third decade he still calls me boy.
“Hi, boss.” I pull out the creaky wooden guest chair and sit down.
It’s a funny thing, but ever since the clusterfuck last summer I’ve lost some of my fear of Angleton. I don’t mean to say that I don’t treat him with respect—I give him exactly the same degree of respect I’d give a live hand grenade with a missing safety pin. It’s just that now that I know exactly what he is, I’ve got something concrete to be terrified of.
Eater of Souls.
“Make yourself at home, Bob, why don’t you.” His glare is watery, a pro forma reprimand delivered with sarcasm but no real sting. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”
“Interesting training course at Sunningdale Park.” I bounce up and down on the rusty mainspring of the chair. It must be the coffee, or something. “I ran into an interesting fellow. Name of Gerry Lockhart.” I grin. “He gave me a book.” Bounce, squeak, bounce, squeak.
I’m bluffing, of course. They kept me so damn busy I didn’t have time to read more than the first couple of chapters—but I checked the Wikipedia entry, just in case.
“Do stop that, there’s a good boy.” The wrinkles around his eyes deepen into a scowl. “What precisely was the book, may I ask?”
“Oh, some potboiler about a wild man who used to work for the Dustbin, back in the day.” MI5. “Reds under the bed, that kind of thing.”
I wait for a few seconds. Angleton continues to stare at me, his expression icy. Finally, he thaws—but only by a degree or two.
“Peter Wright.” The way he pronounces the name I’m pretty sure he intends it to rhyme with Wrong. “A dangerous crank.”
“Oh, really? I suppose you knew him?” Never mind that Wright retired in 1976; Angleton’s been with the Laundry for a very long time indeed. “What exactly did Wright do wrong?” What lesson am I meant to draw from this book? in other words. (See, I’m not above cheating at homework.)