Bastard's on a fag break! I glance up at the sky, which is dark as a marketing hack's heart and full of coldly distant stars. How am I going to get past him? I grip the monkey's paw in my pocket, carefully withdraw it, and point it at the ground. A red-eyed coal glowers from the doorway, just visible round the side of the house. A distant buzzing bike engine grows louder, heading up the hills far above. Apart from that, the night is silent. Too silent, I realise after a minute; that's a road over there-where's the traffic? I begin to edge backward, trying to get farther into the bushes, and that's when everything blanks.
4.
THE TRUTH IS IN HERE
"Yes, that's what I've been telling you for the past hour." There's no point getting angry with them; they're just doing their job. I resist the temptation to rub my head, the dressing covering the sore patch behind my right ear. "All I remember after that is waking up in hospital the next day."
"Harrumph." I blink; did I really hear someone say harrumph? Yes-it's the guy who looks like something the gravedigger's cat dragged in, Derek something or other. He blinks right back at me with watery eyes. "According to page four of the medical notes, paragraph six-"
I watch while they all obediently shuffle their notes. Nobody thought to give me a copy, of course, even though they're mine. "Contusion and hairline fracture on the right occipital hemisphere, some bruising and abrasion consistent with a weighted object." I turn my head, wincing slightly because of the pain in my neck, and point to the dressing. It's been nearly a week; one thing they don't tell you in the detective potboilers is how bad being whacked on the head with a cosh hurts. No, not a cosh: an Object, Weighted, Black Chamber Field Operatives for the Use of, Complies with US-MIL-STD-534-5801.
"I suppose we can consider this to be substantiated, then," says the talking corpse. "Please continue where you left off."
I sigh. "I woke up in a hospital room with a needle in my arm and a goon from one of their TLAs baby-sitting me. After about an hour someone who claimed to be running Plaid Shirt turned up and started asking pointed questions. Seems they were already running a stakeout. After the third time that I explained what happened at the motel he agreed that I hadn't waxed their asset and demanded to know why I'd been round at the house. I told him that Mo phoned me and asked for help and it sounded urgent, and after I repeated myself another couple of dozen times he left. The next morning they shipped me to the airport and stuck me on the plane."
The battle-axe from Accounting who's sitting next to Derek glares at me. "Business class," she hisses. "I suppose that was your idea of a good ride home?"
Huh? "That was nothing to do with me," I protest. "Did they bill-"
"Yes." Andy twirls his pen idly as a fly batters itself against the energy-saving lightbulb overhead.
"Uh-oh." Unsanctioned expenditure isn't quite a hanging offense in the Laundry, but it's definitely up there with insubordination and mutiny. During the Thatcher years they were even supposed to have had paper clip audits, before someone pointed out that the consequences of poor employee morale in this organisation might be a trifle worse than in, say, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. "Not guilty," I say automatically, before I can stop myself. "I didn't ask them for that, it happened after the assignment went pear-shaped, and I wasn't conscious at the time."
"Nobody's accused you of authorising budgetary variances beyond your level of authorisation," Andy says soothingly. He casts a quelling glance at Derek from Accounting, and then asks: "What I'd like to know is why you went after her, though. SOP was to leave the area as soon as you were blown. Why did you stick around?"
"Uh-" My lips are dry because I've been expecting this one. "I was going to leave. I was in the rental car and heading for the road out of town back to the airport, just as soon as I got out of the kill zone. I'd have done it too, except that Mo rang."
I lick my lips again. "I was sent to see if I could facilitate an extraction. I figured that meant someone thought Mo was worth extracting. My apologies if that isn't actually the case, but what I heard on the phone sounded like Mo had been abducted, and in the wake of the shooting I figured this was an even worse outcome than a blown mission and withdrawal. So I improvised, went round to her house and used my locator on her.
"I've been thinking about it a lot since then. What I should have done, I mean. I could have found where she was being held then driven back to the motel to find whoever was running that spy. Or something. Or headed for the airport and phoned from the departure lounge. All I can say is I was too involved. Some bastard had just tried to kill me; I mean, ONI was bugging Mo. When I phoned, they had put a diversion on her line, which is how come I was able to tell them where to look. But they probably already knew, I mean, when Mo called me on her pocket mobile that would have tipped them off."
I empty the glass of water down my throat and put it back on the table in front of me.
"Look, I figure ONI or some other TLA outfit-say, the Black Chamber pretending to be ONI investigators-was watching Mo and picked up on me as soon as we made contact. It was a stitch-up. Whoever tried to shoot me and snatch her took them by surprise. That wasn't in the script. I know I should have come home then, but at that point I think everyone was off balance. Who the fuck were those loons, anyway? A major summoning in public-"
"You have no need to know," Derek says snippily. "Drop it!"
"Okay." I lean back in my chair, tipping it on two legs; my head aches abominably. "I get the picture."
My third interrogator pipes up in a reedy voice: "This isn't the whole story, is it, Robert?"
I stare at her, annoyed. "Probably not, no."
Bridget is a blonde yuppwardly-mobile executive, her sights fixed on the dizzying heights of the cabinet office in seeming ignorance of the bulletproof glass ceiling that hovers over all of us who work in the Laundry. Her main job description seems to be making life shitty for everybody farther down the ladder, principally by way of her number one henchperson, Harriet. She holds forth, strictly for the record: "I'm unhappy about the way this assignment was set up. This was supposed to be a straightforward meet-and-pitch session, barely one rung up from having our local consul pay a social call. With all due respect, Robert is not a particularly experienced representative and should not have been sent into such a situation without mentoring-"
"It's friendly soil!" Andy interrupts.
"As friendly as it gets without a bilateral arrangement, which is to say, not an active joint-intelligence-sharing, committee-sanctioned, liaison environment. Foreigners, in other words. Robert was pushed out in the cold without oversight or adequate support from higher management, and when things went off the rails he quite naturally did his best, which wasn't quite good enough." She smiles dazzlingly at Andy. "I'd like to minute that he needs additional training before being subjected to solo exercises, and I'd also like to say that I think we need to review the circumstances leading up to this assignment closely in case they are symptomatic of a weakness in our planning and accountability loop."
Oh great. Andy looks almost as disgusted as I feel. Bridget has just damned us-everyone else, in fact-with faint praise. I did "as well as could be expected" and need extra supervision before I can be let out of the kindergarten to go pee-pee. Derek and Andy and everyone else involved get to have Bridget poke her long, inquisitive nose into their procedural compliance and see if they're exercising due diligence. As for Bridget, if she turns up anything that even whiffs of negligence she gets to look good to the top brass by cleaning shop, and anyone who disagrees is being "grossly unprofessional." Office politics, the Laundry remix.