I turn and look at the waitress who's beaming at me inscrutably. " 'Scuse me." I tap the "pause" button on screen. "What was that again?"
"I said, are you ready to order yet?"
I shrug at Mo, she nods, and we order. The waitron skids off and I tap the "pause" button again. "I didn't originally volunteer for the Laundry," I feel compelled to add. "They drafted me much the same way they drafted you. On the one hand, it sucks. On the other hand, the alternatives are a whole lot worse."
She looks angry now. "What do you mean, worse?"
"Well"-I lean back-"for starters, your work on probability engineering. You probably thought it was mostly irrelevant, except to theoretical types like Pentagon strategic planners. But if we mix it up with a localised entropy inversion we can make life very hot for whoever or whatever is on the receiving end. I'm not clear on the details, but apparently it's at the root of one particularly weird directed invocation: if we can set up a gauge field for probability metrics we can tune in on specific EIs fairly-"
"EIs?"
"External Intelligences. What the mediaeval magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved. Some of them are strongly superhuman, others are dumb as a stump from our perspective. What counts is that they can be coerced, sometimes, into doing what people want. Some of them can also open wormholes-yes, they've got access to negative matter-and send themselves, or other entities, through. As I understand it, general indeterminacy theory lets us target them very accurately: it's the difference between dialling a phone number at random and using a phone book. I think."
A crescent-shaped plate of gyoza appears on the table between us, and for a couple of minutes we're busy eating; then bowls of soup arrive and I'm busy juggling chopsticks, spoon, and noodles that are making a bid for freedom.
"So." She drains her bowl, lays the chopsticks across it, and sits up to watch me. "Let's summarise. I've stumbled across a research field that's about as critical to your-the Laundry-as if I'd been working on nuclear weapons research without realising it. In this country, everyone who works on this stuff works for the Laundry, or not at all. So the Laundry has sucked me in and you're here to give me an update so I know what I'm swimming in."
"Other people's dirty underwear, mostly," I say apologetically.
"Yeah, right. And this concern for keeping me updated was all your own idea too, huh? Just what the hell was going on in Santa Cruz? Who were those guys who snatched me, and what were you doing?"
"I won't say I wasn't asked to have a discreet chat with you." I put my spoon down, then turn it over. Then over again. "Look, the Laundry is first and foremost a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like any other government agency, right? SOP, when shit hits the fan in the field, is to protect head office by pulling back feelers." I turn the spoon over. "When I got home I was carpeted for going after you-given a going over in front of my boss."
"You were what?" Her eyes widen. "I don't remember you-"
I pull a face. "Standard protocol if something goes down is to get the hell out of town, Mo. But you were obviously in over your head when you rang, so I went round your place and followed you to that safe house they were holding you in. Phoned your mobile, expecting a diversion tap, and the next thing I knew I was sitting up in hospital with a hangover and no alcohol to show for it, being grilled by the Feds. Very clever of me, but at least they pulled us both out alive. Anyway, when I got home it turned out that officially none of that shit happened. You were not abducted by, ahem, Middle Eastern gentlemen who might or might not have been working for a guy called Tariq Nassir, with connections to Yusuf Qaradawi. You were not being kept under surveillance by the Black Chamber. Because if either of those things were true, it would be Bad, and if it was Bad, it would put a black mark on my boss's record book. And she wants her KCMG and DBE so bad you can smell it when she walks in the door."
Mo is silent for a while. "I had no idea," she says presently. There's a slightly wild look in her eyes: "They were talking about killing me! I heard them!"
"Officially it didn't happen, but unofficially-Bridget isn't the only poker player in the Laundry." I shrug. "One of the other players wants to hear your side of the story, off the record." I glance round. "This is not the place for it. Even with a fuzzbox."
"I-huh." She checks her watch. "An hour to go. Look, Bob. If you've got time to come back to my place for a coffee before I turf you out, we should talk some more." She looks at me warningly: "I'm going to have to kick you out at nine-thirty, though. Got a date."
"Well okay." I don't think I show any sign of guilty disappointment-or relief that I won't have an opportunity to outscore Mhari at her own game this once. Besides which, I think Mo is too nice to play that kind of dirty trick on. I raise a hand and a waiter zips over, swipes my credit card through her handheld, and wishes me a nice day.
We head over to Mo's place and I get a bit of a surprise; she's renting a flat in a centralish part of Putney, all wine bars and bistros. We catch the tube over and end up walking downstairs from an overhead platform: you know you're entering suburbia when the underground trains poke their noses up into the open air. She walks very fast, forcing me to hurry to keep up. "Not far," she remarks, "just round a couple of corners from the tube stop."
She marches up a leaf-messed street in near darkness, hemmed in to either side by parked cars, everything washed out by orange sodium lights. I can feel the first chilly fingers of autumn in the air. "It's up here," she says, gesturing at a front door set back from the road, with a row of buzzers next to it. "Just a sec. I'm on the third floor, by the way; I've got the attic." She fumbles with a key in the lock and the door swings open on a darkened vestibule as the skin on the back of my neck begins to prickle, while the sound goes flat and the light deadens.
"Wait-" I begin to say, and something uncoils from the shadows and lashes out at Mo with a noise like an explosion in a cat factory.
She barely makes a noise as it grabs her with about a dozen tentacles-no suckers here-and yanks her into the darkened vestibule. I scream, "Shit!" and jump back, then yank at my belt where I happen to have clipped my multitooclass="underline" the three-inch blade flips out and locks as I fumble around the inside of the door for a light switch, left-handed, holding the knife in front of me.
Now I hear a muffled squeaking noise-Mo is on the floor up against an inner doorway, screaming her head off. What looks like a nest of pythons has wriggled under the woodwork and is trying to drag her in by the neck. But whatever field is damping my hearing is also stifling her cries, and the thing has got her arms and torso. Behind her, the door is bulging; the light from the bulb overhead is attenuated to a dull, candlelike flicker.
I step back, yank out my mobile phone, and hit a quick-dial button, then throw it into the roadway outside. Then I take a deep breath and force myself to go back inside.
"Get it off me!" she mouths, thrashing around. I lean over her and try sawing at one of the tentacles. It's dry and leathery and squirms underneath the blade, so I jab the point of the knife into it and force my weight down.
The thing on the other side of the door goes apeshit: a banging and crashing resounds through the floor as if something huge is trying to break down the wall. The tentacles around Mo tighten until her mouth opens and I'm terrified she's going to turn blue. Something black begins to ooze out around my knife so I concentrate on ramming the thing down against the floor and slicing from side to side. It feels as if I'm trying to skewer a rubber band big enough to power a wind-up freight locomotive.