“If—” I stop and force myself to take a deep breath. “If they’re possessed, that changes things. But. Minimum use of force necessary to achieve designated goals. Can we agree on that?”
She looks at me oddly. “Of course we can. Who did you think I am—Murder Incorporated?”
“One can never be too sure,” I mutter. “Sorry, sorry, I had to ask.” (Because I have dealt with people in the past whose main criticism of Murder, Inc., would be their messy inefficiency.) “Where were we?”
She sits down on the bed, cross-legged. “Motives. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve made some inferences, and then there’s this damned book.” She glances at the Bible.
“What do you think Schiller’s trying to achieve?”
“Besides the usual?” Her laughter is an abrupt bark of released tension. “Well, he’s clearly set on converting the entire planet. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“I need to know what he’s trying to achieve in the short term. Through the Prime Minister.” My arms are crossed and I’m leaning against the wall and not making eye contact: defensive body posture redux. “That’s my core mission, as I see it. It’s why we’re here. We can admit that the mission’s a wash and bug out, but if so, that’s not going to help the, the victims.” The women in the maternity unit. The pithed, god-struck men in black with their tongues half-eaten. “Come on. What do you know?”
“I don’t.” She looks frustrated. “Perhaps Johnny will have something…”
“And if not?”
“We can go back in if you dare.” She cocks her head to one side. “There are ways. Let’s say…Johnny runs into the Pinecrest police. You have a host, and so does he. We kill it and shell it, then you and he stick your tongues in them and pretend to be police, and I’m your captive. I have a glamour to provide cover against shallow inspection, and—”
“If you think I’m putting that thing in my mouth, alive or dead—”
“That’s a shame.” She stares at me with those huge, darkly unreadable eyes. “It’s a low risk approach. If we make them come after us we hand them the initiative.”
I take a deep breath. “Any other options?”
“Oh yes.” She nods at the field-expedient pentacle and its inmate sitting on the desk. “That was just the direct approach. There are indirect ones. We could try to hook up that thing and snoop on whatever or whoever powers it, to learn where it comes from. Feed it misinformation, tell it where to go to find us.”
I think for a moment. “I’ve got another idea. Is there any significant risk of them finding us here, if we stay overnight? Other than following Johnny?”
“I don’t think so. You warded this room well, I sanitized the path to your car…” She thinks for a moment. “What preparations do you need that will take so long?”
“I’ve got to phone a man about a book,” I say. “I need an hour to do some admin work. Then how about we go get some dinner? It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Lend me the car keys in the meantime?”
I chuck the keys her way. “Use them wisely.”
AFTER PERSEPHONE LEAVES I SIT DOWN AND THUMB THROUGH the back end of the Bible, trying to get a feel for the page count. I decide I can discount the first couple of chunks; a quick google confirms that the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha look like standard factory spec. They might have been tweaked and tuned under the hood, but I don’t have time to do more than check the table of contents. The Books of Enoch, however, aren’t part of the standard trim level package, or even the deluxe leather upholstery option with sports kit: they’re the biblical equivalent of the blue LEDs under the side skirts and the extra-loud chromed exhaust pipe. And when I get close to the end we’re off the Halfords shelves and into nitrous oxide injection territory, complete with a leak into the cabin airflow. Using my JesusPhone I find a listing of the Books of Enoch on the interwebbytubes, but it sure as hell doesn’t include chapters with titles like “The Book of Starry Wisdom,” “The Second Testament of St Enoch,” and—most intriguingly of all—“The Apocalypse Codex.”
The bumper bonus extra features aren’t particularly long, they only run to about eighty pages. But they’re typeset differently, in a different layout, and the footnotes and glosses don’t match up with anything in the front three-quarters of the book. So I place the Bible on the desk, shine the work lamp on it, and pull out the JesusPhone. Then I start photographing and flipping pages. Autofocus and five megapixels mean that just about any pocket camera these days is the equivalent of a flatbed document scanner, and a quarter of an hour later I’m stitching a bunch of image files together and converting them into a PDF. I run it through an OCR package and quickly check that it doesn’t mention certain unmentionable keywords (it doesn’t: it’s not that kind of occult text), then I take a deep breath, and do something deeply illegal and, much more importantly, quite possibly unforgivable.
I stick the PDF of the page images on a public file sharing site, then I phone Pete and Sandy at home.
Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring. “Wha, who—Bob? It’s one in the morning! What’s up?” Sandy sounds confused and as befuddled as I’d be if you woke me in the wee hours with a phone call. I scrunch up my eyes and wish that I believed in a god I could pray to for forgiveness.
“Sandy, is Pete awake?”
“Yes, but is it an emergency?”
“Sort of. Can I talk to him, please?”
“Hang on.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed from one hand to another.
“Bob?” It’s Pete. He doesn’t sound very awake.
“Pete? Can we talk privately? I’ve got a problem.”
“What sort of—of course. Hold on.” There follows a period of muffled thudding as, presumably, Pete disentangles himself from his bedding and leaves Sandy to go back to sleep. “There, I’m on my own. I assume this couldn’t wait for morning?”
“It’s sort of urgent.” I pause. “What I’m going to say mustn’t go any further.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die: you know what I do for a living, right? Pastoral care a speciality, spiritual care, too, although I guess that’s not what you’re looking for…”
There is an eerie pins and needles prickling at the back of my tongue. I am going to have to watch what I say very carefully: my immortal soul is very much in danger, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. The consequences of betraying my oath of office are immediate, personal, and quite hideous.
“You’ve probably guessed that, uh, I’m not allowed to talk about my job. But that it’s a bit different from what I’m required to lead people to believe.”
The hair on the back of my neck is all but standing on end, but the ward doesn’t clamp down on me—yet. To some extent it’s driven by my own conscience, by my own knowledge of wrongdoing. And as I’m not actually planning on betraying any secrets, I still have a clean conscience. But. I’m wearing saltwater-soaked shoes and walking alongside the third rail.
“I’ve recently come into possession of an interesting document, and I badly need a sanity check. Unfortunately, the only person I know with the right background to give it to me is you.”
(Which is entirely true: while the Laundry can probably cough up a doctor of theology with a security clearance and a background in Essene apocalyptic eschatology, it might take them a couple of weeks. Whereas Pete wrote the dissertation and I’ve got him on speed dial.)
“A document.” He sounds doubtful. “And you want a sanity check.” And you got me out of bed at one in the morning.