My bad feeling is getting worse. In fact, it's not setting off alarm bells in my head anymore: it's sounding the Three Minute Warning. "Mind if I use your phone?" I ask, carefully nonchalant. "I think we still need the Plumbers."
DUE TO THE MIRACLES OF MATRIX MANAGEMENT Bridget is my head of department and writes my personal efficiency assessments, and Harriet is her left hand of darkness and handles administrative issues like training; but since I moved to active service, Andy is now my line manager with overall responsibility for my effectiveness and work assignment, and Angleton is just the guy I'm acting as temporary private secretary for. I decide to start at the bottom of the seniority queue, consign Harriet to the pits of operational ineffectiveness-I mean, this is a woman who would give you a written reprimand for wasting departmental funds if you used silver bullets on a werewolf-and conclude that my best chance of survival is to throw myself on Andy's mercy.
Which means I nobble him absolutely as soon as I can, first thing in the morning.
"Mind if I have a word?" I ask, sticking my head around his door without asking-the red light is off.
Andy is slumped behind his desk, nursing his starter-motor coffee mug. He raises an eyebrow at me. "You look-" He stabs a finger at his keyboard, raises another eyebrow at his email. "Oh. So it was you who called the Plumbers out last night."
I sit down in the chair opposite his desk without asking permission. "Angleton told me to pump Mo after work"-I see his expression-"for information, dammit!"
Andy hides behind his coffee. "Do go on," he says warmly, "this is the best entertainment I'm going to get all morning."
"Then you must be hard up. We ate out, then went back to her place for some more sensitive discussions about the, uh, non-events last month. Something was waiting for us in the lobby."
"Something." He looks sceptical. "And you called out the Plumbers for that?"
I yawn: it's been a long night. "It tried to rip her fucking head off and I've got a cracked rib to show for it. If you'd read that goddamn report you'd see what forensics found in the carpet; they're never going to get the ichor stains out-"
"I'll read it." He puts his coffee mug down. "First, give me the basics. How did you deal with it?"
I produce the wreckage of my Laundry-issue palmtop. "I'll be needing a new PDA, this one's fucked. Mind you, it's not as fucked as the malevolent mollusc from Mars that jumped us; I bumped the fuzz diffuser up to full power and piped the entire entropy pool into it over wide-spectrum infrared. It decided it didn't like that and discorporated instead of sticking around to finish the job, otherwise you'd be spending this morning watching them hoover me off the walls and ceiling."
I take as deep a breath as the strapping around my ribs will permit. "Anyway, afterward I got the whole story out of Mo. The bits she was afraid of telling anyone for fear they wouldn't believe her. And that's why I called the Plumbers. See, the Yank field group who rescued her didn't tell us what the hell was going on. The leader was some Arab guy with a German accent, talking about help for the struggle with the Dar-al-Harb once the roots of Yggdrasil are unbound. Only they didn't get him-or she didn't see his body. Boss, do we have anything on German terror groups using Beckenstein-Skinner actor theory to possess their victims? Hell, anything about any German terror groups more recent than the Ahnenerbe using occult techniques?"
Andy looks at me with a stony expression. "Wait here. Do not move." He pushes the DNI button (turning on the red warning light outside the door-WARNING: CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES: DO NOT INTRUDE) then stands up and hurries out.
I sit there and let my eyes roam around Andy's cubbyhole. The contents are prosaic: one institutional desk (scratched), one swivel chair (used), two armless visitor chairs (ditto), one bookcase, and a classified document safe (basically a steel cabinet with lockable metal doors on it). His PC is five years old and running a password-locked screensaver, and his desk is clear-no papers lying around. In fact, if it wasn't for the classified document safe and the lack of papers it could be a low-level manager's office in any cash-pinched business in corporate Britain.
I'm leaning back in my chair and inspecting the flecks of institutional paint smeared on the frosted glass in the high window when the door opens again. Andy enters, closely followed by Derek and-shock, horrors-Angleton. I'm surrounded! "Here he is," says Andy.
Angleton claims Andy's chair behind the desk-the privilege of the senior inquisitor-and Andy sits down next to me, while Derek stands at parade rest in front of the door, as if to stop me escaping. He's got some kind of box like a small briefcase, which he parks on the floor next to his feet.
"Speak," says Angleton.
"I did as you told me. Mo and I were talking. I kept it to non-classified while we were in public; I convinced her I needed to hear the full story, not just the official version, so we went back to her place. We were jumped in the hallway. Afterward, she told me enough that I thought there was a clear and present danger to her life. Did Andy tell you-"
Angleton snaps his fingers at Derek. Derek, who is not my idea of an obedient flunky, nevertheless obediently passes him the briefcase, which he opens on the desk. It turns out to contain a small mechanical typewriter with a couple of sheets of paper already wound around the roller. He laboriously taps out a sentence, then turns the typewriter toward me: it says SECRET OGRE CARNATE GECKO, and I get an abrupt sinking feeling in my stomach.
"Before you leave this office you will write down everything you remember about last night," he says tersely. "You will not leave this office until you have finished and signed off on the report. One of us will stay with you until the job is done, and countersign that this is a true transcript and that there were no uncleared witnesses. Once you leave this office you will not see this document again. You will not, repeat not, discuss last night's events with anyone other than the participants and the people in this room without first obtaining written permission from one of us. Do you understand?"
"Uh, yeah. You're classifying everything under OGRE CARNATE GECKO and I'm not to discuss it with anyone who isn't cleared. Can I ask why the typewriter? I could email-"
Angleton looks at me witheringly: "Van Eck Radiation." He snaps his fingers. But we're in the Laundry, I protest silently, the whole building is Tempest-shielded. "Start typing, Bob."
I start typing. "Where's the delete key on this-oh."
"You're typing on carbon paper. In triplicate. Once you finish, we burn the carbons. And the typewriter ribbon."
"You could have offered a quill pen: that'd be more secure, wouldn't it?" I peck away at the keyboard in a purposeful manner. After a minute or two Angleton silently rises and ghosts out of the room. I peck on, occasionally swearing as I catch a fingernail under a key or jam a bunch of letters together. Finally I'm done: one page of single-spaced, densely printed text, detailing the events of last night. I sign each copy and present them to Andy, who countersigns, then carefully inserts them into a striped-cover folder and passes it to Derek, who writes out receipts for them and hands a copy to each of us. He leaves without a word.
Andy walks round the desk, stretches, then looks at me. "What am I going to do with you?"