"Yeah, but-" I stop. "Ah… yes. Official report by Bridget, no?"
For the first time ever Angleton turns an expression on me that might, in a bright light, if you squinted at him, be interpreted as a faint smile. "I couldn't possibly comment."
I spin my wheels for a moment. "Nothing happened," I say robotically. "There were no witnesses. If anything happened it would mean we'd been passed a booby prize. It would mean some bunch of terrorists came arbitrarily close to getting their hands on a paranormal H-bomb designer, and someone at ONI figured they could count coup by passing the designer to us for safe keeping, meaning they expect us to fuck up to their political advantage. And that couldn't possibly happen, right?"
"She's in the Library, on secondment to Pure Research for the duration," Angleton says quite casually. "You might want to invite the young lady out for dinner. I'd be quite interested in hearing about her research at second hand, from someone who obviously understands so much about predicate calculus. Hmm, five-thirty already. You might want to go now."
Taking my cue I stand up and head for the door. My hand is outstretched when Angleton adds, tonelessly: "How many made it back from the raid on Wadi al-Qebir, Mr. Howard?"
I freeze. Shit. "Two," I hear myself saying, unable to control my traitor larynx: it's another of those auditor compulsion fields. Bastard's got his office wired like an interrogation suite!
"Very good, Mr. Howard. They were the ones who didn't try to second-guess their commanding officer. Can I suggest that in future you take a leaf from their book and refrain from poking your nose into things you have been told do not concern you? Or at least learn not to be so predictable about it."
"Ah-"
"Go away before I mock you," he says, sounding distantly amused.
I flee, simultaneously embarrassed and relieved.
I FIND MO BY THE SIMPLE EXPEDIENT OF REMEMBERING that my palmtop is still attuned to her aura; I bounce around the basement levels in the lift, doing a binary search until I zero in on her in one of the reading rooms of the library. She's poring over a fragile illuminated manuscript, inscribed with colours that glow brilliantly beneath the hooded spotlight she uses. She seems to be engrossed, so I knock loudly on the door frame and wait.
"Yes? Oh, it's you."
"It's ten to six," I say diffidently. "Another ten minutes and an orangoutang in a blue suit will come round and lock you in for the night. I know some people enjoy that sort of thing, but you didn't strike me as the type. So I was thinking, could you do with a glass of wine and that explanation we were talking about?"
She looks at me deadpan. "Sounds better than facing the urban gorillas. I've got to get home for nine but I guess I can spare an hour. Do you have anywhere in mind?"
We end up at an earning-facilitated nerd nirvana called Wagamama, just off New Oxford Street: you can't miss it, just look for the queue of fashion victims halfway around the block. Some of them have been waiting so long that the cobwebs have fossilised. My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida's influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the "in" herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen. Mo is crammed opposite me at one end of a barrack-room table of bleached pine that looks as if they polish it every night with a microtome blade; our neighbours are giggling over some TV studio deal, and she's looking at me with an analytical expression borrowed from the laboratory razor's owner.
"The food's very good," I offer defensively.
"It's not that"-she gazes past my shoulder-"it's the culture. It's very Californian. I wasn't expecting the rot to have reached London yet."
"We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of colour schemes for your safety and comfort!"
"Something like that." A waitron whizzes past and smart-bombs us both with cans of Kirin that feel as if they've been soaked in liquid nitrogen. Mo picks hers up and winces at me as it bites her fingertips. "Why do they call it the Laundry?"
"Uh…" I think for a moment. "Back in the Second World War, they were based in a requisitioned Chinese laundry in Soho, I think. They got Dansey House when the Dustbin's new skyscraper was commissioned." I pick up my beer carefully, using a mitten improvised from my sleeve, and tip the can into a glass. "Claude Dansey, he was stuck in charge of SOE. Former SIS dude, didn't get on well with the top nobs-it was all politics; SOE was the cowboy arm of British secret ops during the war. Churchill charged SOE with setting Europe ablaze behind German lines, and that's exactly what they tried to do. Until December 1945, when SIS got their revenge, of course."
"So the bureaucratic infighting goes that far back?"
"Guess so." I take a sip of beer. "But the Laundry survived more or less intact after the rest of SOE was gutted, like the way GCHQ survived even though the Bletchley Park operation was wound up. Only more secretively." Hmm. This is not stuff we should be talking about in public; I pull out my palmtop and tap away at it until a rather useful utility shows up.
"What's that?" she asks interestedly, as the background clatter and racket diminishes to a haze of white noise.
"Laundry-issue palmtop. Looks like an ordinary Palm Pilot, doesn't it? But the secret's in the software and the rather unusual daughterboard soldered inside the case."
"No, I mean the noise-it isn't just my ears, is it?"
"No, it's magic."
"Magic! But-" She glares at me. "You're not kidding, are you? What the hell is going on around here?"
I look at her blankly: "Nobody told you?"
"Magic!" She looks disgusted.
"Well okay, then, it's applied mathematics. I thought you said you're not a Platonist? You should be. These boxes"-I tap the palmtop-"are the most powerful mathematical tools we've developed. Things were done on an ad-hoc basis until about 1953, when Turing came up with his final theorem; since then, we've been putting magic on a systematic basis, on the QT. Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule, or so they tell me when I ask. When we carry out a computation it has side effects that leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there are listeners; sometimes we can coerce them into opening gates. Small gates we can transfer minds through, or big gates we can move objects through. Even really huge gates, big enough to take something huge and unpleasant-some of the listeners are big. Giants. Sometimes we can invoke local reversals or enhancements of entropy; that's what I'm doing right now with the sound damper field, fuzzing the air around us, which is already pretty random. That's basically the business the Laundry is in."
"Ah." She chews her lower lip for a moment, appraising me. "So that's why you were so interested in me. Say, do you have any references for this work of Turing's? I'd like to read up on it."
"It's classified, but-"
"Wtyjdfshjwrtha rssradth aeywerg?"