"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We-or the Black Chamber-have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render him metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition-numbered and classified."
"That's-" She frowns. "May I borrow it? To read?"
"You're on the inside now; just don't leave it on the bus."
She pulls the book down, shoves a bundle of crumpled jeans to one side of my bed to make room, and perches on the end of it. Mo in dress-up mode turns out to be a grownup designer version of hippie crossed with Goth: black velvet skirt, silver bangles, ethnic top. Not quite self-consciously pre-Raphaelite, but nearly. Right now she's destroying the effect completely by being 100 percent focussed on the tome. "Wow." Her eyes are alight. "I just wanted to see if you were, like, getting ready? Only now I don't want to go; I'm going to be up all night!"
"Just remember we need to be out the door by seven o'clock," I remind her. "Allow two hours for getting to Luton and check in…"
"I'll sleep on the plane." She closes the book and puts it down, but keeps one hand on the cover, protectively close. "I haven't seen you around much, Bob. Been busy?"
"More than you can imagine," I say. Setting up scanners that will slurp through the Laundry's UPI and Reuters news feeds and page me if anything interesting comes up while I'm away. Reading the manual for field operations. Avoiding my guilty conscience… "How about you?"
She pulls a face. "There's so much stuff buried in the stacks, it's unbelievable. I've been spending all my time reading, getting indigestion along the way. It's just such a waste-all that stuff, locked up behind the Official Secrets Act!"
"Yeah, well." It's my turn to pull a face now. "In principle, I kind of agree with you. In practice… how to put it? This stuff has repercussions. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set; play around with it for too long and horrible things can happen to you." I shrug. "And you know what students are like."
"Yes, well." She stands up, straightening her skirt with one hand and holding the book with the other. "I suppose you've got more experience of that than I have. But, well." She pauses, and gives a little half-smile: "I was wondering if, if you'd eaten yet?"
Ah. Suddenly I figure it out: I'm so thick. "Give me half an hour?" I ask. Where the hell did I leave that shirt? "Anywhere in particular take your fancy?"
"There's a little bistro on the high street that I was meaning to check out. If you're ready in half an hour?"
"Downstairs," I say firmly. "Half an hour!" She slips out of my room and I waste half a minute drooling at the back of the door before I snap out of it and go in search of something to wear that doesn't look too shop-soiled. The sudden realisation that Mo might actually enjoy my company is a better antidepressant than anything I could get on a prescription.
I'M BROUGHT TO MY SENSES BY THE SHRILL OF my alarm clock: it's eight in the morning, the sky's still dark outside, my head aches, and I'm feeling inexplicably happy for someone who this afternoon will be baiting the trap for an unknown enemy.
I pull on my clothes, grab my bags, head downstairs still yawning vigorously. Mo is in the kitchen, red-eyed and nursing a mug of coffee; there's a huge, travel-stained backpack in the hall. "Been up all night with the book?" I ask. She was thinking about it all through what was otherwise a really enjoyable quiet night out.
"Here. Help yourself." She points to the cafetière. She yawns. "This is all your fault." I glance at her in time to catch a brief grin. "Ready to go?"
"After this." I pour a mug, add milk, shudder, yawn again, and begin to work on it. "Somehow I'm not hungry this morning."
"I think that place goes on the visit-again list," she agrees. "I must try the couscous next time…" She mounts another attack on her mug and I decide that she's just as attractive wearing jeans and sweat shirt and no warpaint first thing in the morning as in the evening. I'll pass on the red eyes, though. "Got your passport?"
"Yeah. And the tickets. Shall we go?"
"Lead on."
Some hours later we've emerged from Arrivals at Schiphol, caught the train to the Centraal Station, grappled with the trams, and checked into a cutesy family-run hotel with a theme of hot and cold running philosophers-Hegel on the breakfast room place mats, Mo in the Plato room on the top floor, and myself relegated to the Kant basement. By early afternoon we're walking in the Vondelpark, between the dark green grass and the overcast grey sky; a cool wind is blowing in off the channel and for the first time I'm able to get the traffic fumes out of my lungs. And we're out of sight of Nick and Alan who, until the hotel, tailed us all the way from the safe house to the airport and then onto our flight-I suppose they're part of the surveillance team. It's bad practice to acknowledge their presence and they made no attempt to talk to me; as far as I can tell, Mo doesn't suspect anything.
"So where is this museum then?" asks Mo.
"Right there." I point. At one end of the park, a neoclassical lump of stonework rears itself pompously toward the sky. "Let's check in and get our restricted area passes validated, huh? Give it an hour or so and we can try and find somewhere to eat."
"Only a couple of hours?"
"Everywhere closes early in Amsterdam, except the bars and coffee shops," I explain. "But don't go in a coffee shop and order a coffee or they'll laugh at you. What we call a café is an Eethuis, and what they call a café we call a pub. Got it?"
"Clear as mud." She shakes her head. "Good thing for me everyone seems to speak English."
"It's a common affliction." I pause. "Just don't let it make you feel too secure. This isn't a safe house."
We walk past a verdigris-covered statue while she considers this. "You have another agenda for coming here," she says finally.
My guts feel cold. "Yes," I admit. I've been dreading this moment.
"Well." Unexpectedly she reaches out and takes my hand. "I assume you're prepared for the shit to hit the fan, right?"
"All feco-ventilatory intersections are covered. They assure me."
"They." She shrugs, uncomfortably. "This was their idea?"
I glance round, keeping a vague eye on the other wanderers in the park; a couple of elderly pensioner types, a kid on a skateboard, that's about it. Of course that doesn't mean we aren't being tailed-a raven that's had its central nervous system hijacked by a demonic imperative, a micro-UAV cruising silent a hundred metres overhead with cameras focussed-but at least you can do something about human tradecraft, as opposed to the esoteric or electronic kinds.
"They're not keen on letting whoever's tracking you get a chance to say 'third time lucky,' " I try to explain. "This is a setup. We're on friendly territory and if anyone tries to grab you, I'm not the only one on your case."
"That's nice to know." I look at her sharply but she's got her innocent face on, the absent-minded professor musing over a theorem rather than focussing on the world, the flesh, and the devils of Interpol's most-wanted list.
"You never did tell me about the Thresher," I comment as we cross the road to the museum.
"Oh, what? The submarine? I didn't think you were interested."