“It’s a, a non-standard biblical text. Not your regular apocrypha. I’m having to do due diligence on people who are, uh, believers. I’d normally write them off as your regular American evangelical types, but they aren’t reading from your standard King James version. And it’s kind of urgent: I’m meeting with them in the morning.”
“You’re meeting with—” I can almost hear the audible clunk from the mechanism between his ears as his brain jolts into gear. But you work in computer support in a civil service department, he’s thinking. And almost certainly putting two plus two together and getting five, which is just fine by my oath of office, if not my conscience…“Okay, I think.”
“I’ve got a PDF of a scan of the variant bits of their Bible,” I say. “Mostly it’s the King James version plus a bunch of standard apocrypha, but this stuff is entirely different. I’m going to email you a link to it as soon as I get off the phone. It runs to about eighty pages. If you can take a peek and email me back, what I need to know is: If you start out from a bog-standard Pentecostalist position and add these extra books, what does it do to their doctrine and outlook? What do they believe and what are they going to want to do?”
“That’s horribly vague! I—” He swallows. “You really want an opinion from me?”
“Pete.” I pause, feeling like a complete shit. “You’re the guy with the PhD in whacked-out millenarian sects from the first century, right? Work could probably put me in touch with someone else, but they’d take weeks. And I’ve got to do—business—with these people tomorrow.”
“What time tomorrow?”
“I’m in America. Mountain Time Zone. Tomorrow morning—call it three p.m., your time.”
Pete whistles quietly. “You’re in luck; I was planning on spending the morning working on a sermon.”
“I’ll email you that link,” I promise. “Text me when you’ve got it, then go back to bed?”
“Sure. God bless.”
“And you,” I say automatically. Then he hangs up, and I get the shakes. I haven’t blown my oath of office—I’m still upright and breathing, not smoldering and crispy around the edges—but I’ve just bent it creatively. I haven’t told Pete about the Laundry, but at a minimum I’ve suggested to him that I’m not just a boring IT guy, that my job takes me to strange places and involves dealing with very odd people. If the Operational Oversight—no, scratch that. External Assets doesn’t normally answer to them. But if Gerald Lockhart decides I’ve exceeded my authority…well, he probably will, but it is easier to ask forgiveness than to request permission, especially if the gambit works. It’s possible I’ll be up before the Auditors again. And in the absolute worst case, the Laundry can probably find a use for a Vicar with a PhD in Unmentionable Mythology. They aren’t going to be motivated to dump on Pete. I hope. Not with Pete and Sandy expecting a kid. Not because I’ve gone and fucked up and dragged my work home with me to smear around my social circle.
I feel soiled. I hope I’m not wrong about the significance of that Apocalypse Codex. It would suck to be hauled up before the Black Assizes. It would suck even harder to have gotten my friends into trouble because of a false positive. Mo would never forgive me; worse, neither would I.
I’M BUSY TRACING A SECOND CONTAINMENT GRID ON THE pizza box lid containing Crusty McNightmare when my mobile rings. It’s Persephone. “Yes?” I say.
“I’m in the car park. Dinner’s on you.”
I glance at the gray, many-legged thing snoozing on the oily corrugated cardboard. It’s quiescent, but I know better than to poke it—I don’t want to risk breaking the ward. The primary pentacle serves much the same function as a Faraday cage: as long as it’s locked down this way, whoever owns it can’t connect to it and see through its sensory organs. But if it’s locked down like that, I can’t use it to feed misinformation to said owner. Hence the second, outer ward I’m working on.
Once it’s in place I can set up a bridge between the inner and outer containments to let it phone home while I snoop on its communication and introduce material of my own: a man-in-the-middle (or, more accurately, a thing-in-the-middle) attack. But it’s a delicate job, I haven’t actually tested this particular configuration in the lab, and there’s no way I’m getting it down before dessert. So I double-check the outer diagram for flaws in the logic, ensure that it’s fully powered up—rechargeable batteries and a frequency generator disguised as a pocket digital multimeter take care of that—and grab my coat. On the way out the door I grab my shoulder bag, complete with phone, camera, and passport; you can never be too prepared.
By the time I get to the car park night is falling, and with it a light dusting of snow. There’s a convertible drawn up near the entrance, headlights on and roof up. I walk around the passenger side and Persephone pops the door. “Get in,” she says. I obey and I barely have time to get my seat belt fastened before she’s moving, fishtailing into the road with a harsh scrabble of grit and ice under the wheels.
“What have you been up to?”
“I got you a laptop.” She gestures at the back seat. “And I bought ammunition at Walmart. Then I went for a drive, up north. I tried I-76. Ran into a diversion and checkpoint out past E-470. So I drove around the beltway until I hit I-70. Same deal. The north- and eastbound interstates all detour back into the city. The airport is shut,” she adds. “I double-checked in case you have no-fly cooties. They gave me some crap about a frontal system coming down from Canada that’s due to dump a meter of snow on us overnight. It’s all lies: I checked the NOAA aviation weather reports and NOTAMs. There’s a front coming, but it’s not carrying snow. So I tried a couple of general aviation fields, even a helicopter taxi service, but they’re all grounded.”
“But—” I stop dead.
“I drove out to Meadow Lake Airport,” she adds. “I went in two offices. The front desk staff were all infected.”
I tense. “How did you handle it?”
“There was nothing to handle. I didn’t go in and say, Hi, I’m the Big Bad your pastor told you about and I want to hire an escape plane. One air taxi firm have an enquiry from a dentist’s wife called Lonnie Williams on file, and a helicopter company have a phone number for a lawyer’s secretary who is setting up a day trip to the Grand Canyon for an office party. Unless Schiller mobilizes the entire population of Colorado to hunt us door-to-door with torches and pitchforks, I left them no leads.”
“They’ll be looking for—” I stop. She’s not driving the stolen pickup, and somehow while I haven’t been looking she’s changed her clothing and hairstyle from off-shift nursing scrubs to suburban American soccer mom. In jeans and a skiing jacket, ponytail and sunglasses, she’s just about unrecognizable as the rich socialite Schiller’s people will remember. Still glamorous, though. “You’ve got paperwork for that cover?”
She nods. “I probably have more experience of escape and evasion than you do.” She checks the mirrors and slows, turns towards a downtown thickening of concrete and flags. “I thought perhaps we might try a small brasserie I’ve heard good things about. Their Kobe steaks are said to be excellent.”
Kobe beef? The soccer mom is trying to upgrade to premier league WAG territory. My wallet cringes: despite Lockhart’s scandalously liberal approach to expenses I’m probably going to be called upon to justify this in writing, then cough up for it out of my own pay packet. (Unless I can convince the small-A auditor that Kobe is a kind of cheeseburger…) “If you insist.”