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Mo tugs at the frayed edges of my management-phobia over the wreckage of a passable saag gosht and a stack of parathas. “Sending you on a course on leadership and people skills sounds like a really good idea to me,” she says. Tearing off a piece of the bread and wrapping it around a lump of lamb and spinach: “They’re not saddling you with stuff like public administration, procurement policy, or PRINCE2. That’s significant, Bob: you’re getting a very odd take on management from this one.” She chews thoughtfully. “Leadership and people skills. Next thing you know they’ll be whisking you off to the Joint Services Command and Staff College.”

“I am so not cut out for that.”

“Oh. Really?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Marching around in uniform, spit and polish and exercise and healthy outdoor living, that kind of thing.” I’m making excuses. We’ve both worked as civilian auxiliaries with the police and military on occasion. I chase a chunk of spinach around my plate with a fork, not meeting her eyes. “I don’t get it. This particular training schedule, I mean. There’s a lot of work I should be doing, and there are courses at the Village”—Dunwich, our very own not-on-the-map training and R&R facility—“that I could be auditing. Stuff that really will improve my survival prospects when the tentacles hit the pentacle.”

Mo sighs and puts down her spoon. “Bob. Look at me. What’s coming next?”

“What’s—dessert?” I try to parse the precise nuanced meaning of her frown. “The big picture? DEEP SIX rising? Um, the Sleeper in the Pyramid’s alarm clock going off? The Red Skull Cult taking the sightseeing elevator up the Burj Khalifa with a black goat and a SCSI cable—oh, you mean CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN?” She nods: kindly encouragement for the cognitively challenged. “The end of the world as we know it? Lovecraft’s singularity, when the monsters from beyond spacetime bleed through the walls of the universe, everyone simultaneously acquires the power of a god and the sanity of an eight-week-old kitten, and the Dead Minds finally awaken?” She nods vigorously: clearly I’m on the right track. “Oh, that. We fight until we go down. Fighting. Then we fight some more.”

I look at my plate, at the smeary streaks of drying curry and the mortal remains of a dead sheep’s slaughtered, butchered, and cooked haunch. “Hopefully we don’t end up as someone else’s dinner.” For a moment I feel a stab of remorse for the lamb: born into an infinite, hostile universe and destined from birth to be nothing more than fodder for uncaring alien intelligences vaster by far than it can comprehend. “’Scuse me, I’m having a Heather Mills moment here.”

Mo makes my plate disappear into the dishwasher. That’s what my Agent CANDID does for the Laundry: she makes messes vanish. (And sometimes I have to hold her in the night until the terror passes.) “What you missed, love, is that it’s not enough for you to be good at your job. When the shit hits the fan your job’s going to get a lot bigger, so big that it takes more people to do the work. And you’ve got to show those other people how to do it; and you’ve got to be good at leading and motivating them. That’s why they want you to go on this course. It’s about getting you ready to lead from the front. Next thing you know Mahogany Row will be taking a look to see if you’ve got what it takes to be an executive.”

I stare at my wineglass for a moment. That latter bit is so wildly out there that it’d be laughable, if the big picture wasn’t so dire. What do executives do, anyway? It’s not as if there’s ever anyone in the posh offices when I’m called upstairs to deliver an eyes-only report. It’s like they’ve transmigrated to another dimension, or moved outside the organization entirely. Maybe they’re squatting in the House of Lords. But she’s right about the job getting bigger and the need for rad management skillz, that’s the hell of it. “I suppose so,” I admit.

“So. When do you start?” she asks.

I blink. “I thought I told you? It’s next Monday!”

“Oh, for—” Mo picks up the wine bottle. “That’s a bit sudden.” She drains it into our glasses, then adds it to the recycling bucket. “All next week?”

“Yes, I’m supposed to check in on Sunday evening. So we’ve got tomorrow and Saturday.”

“Bugger.” She looks at me hungrily. “Well I suppose we shall just have to make up for time apart in advance, won’t we?”

My pulse speeds up. “If you want…”

*     *     *

BY MONDAY AFTERNOON THE TORTURE HAS NOT ONLY BEGUN, it is well underway.

“Hello, and welcome to this afternoon’s workshop breakout session exploring leadership and ownership of challenging projects. I’m Dr. Tring and I’m part of the department of public administration at Nottingham Trent Business School. We like to keep these breakout sessions small so we can all get to know one another, and they’re deliberately structured as safe space: you all work for different agencies and we’ve made sure there’s no overlap in your roles or responsibilities. We’re on Chatham House rules here—anything that’s said here is non-attributable and any names or other, ah, incriminating evidence gets left behind when we leave. Are we all clear with that?”

I nod like a parcel-shelf puppy. Around me the three other students in this session are doing likewise. We’re sitting knee-to-knee in a tight circle in the middle of a whitewashed seminar room. The powder-blue conference seats were clearly not designed by anyone familiar with human anatomy: we’re fifteen minutes in and my bum is already numb. Dr. Tring is about my age and wears a suit that makes him look more like a department store sales clerk than an academic. As far as my fellow students go, I’m one of the two dangerous rebels who turned up in office casual; the rest are so desperately sober that if you could bottle them you could put the Betty Ford Clinic out of business.

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 detaiclass="underline" 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—