He's on the phone again. "Very good, any survivors? Two, you say, and three sacrifices? That's excellent. Have you identified-"
I tap him on the shoulder. "Mo told me what she was researching on the Black Chamber contract," I say. "You really don't want them to get their hands on it."
Angleton's head whips round. "One minute, boy." Back to the phone: "Get them to sing. I don't care how you do it; by dawn I want to know who they thought they were summoning." He puts the phone down and glares at me. "Tell me."
"Probability manipulation," I say.
"Close, but not close enough," Angleton says coldly. He stands up, leaving the armless chair swinging-in the confined space of the truck this is not a good idea. "You got some of it right and the rest wrong. And what makes you think I can afford to risk you? This is an OCCULUS job now: straight in, find out what's there, plant demolition charges, straight out."
"Demolition charges." I look past his shoulder. The door opens and a familiar face is coming in. Odd, I'd never imagined what Derek the Accountant would look like in battle dress. (Worried, mostly.)
"The commander's due in half an hour," Derek says by way of introduction. "What's the goat doing here?"
"Enough." Angleton waves me to follow as he heads for the door. I slide my feet into moon boots, follow him without bothering to fasten the straps. I hurry down the steps into a flashing hell of red and blue lights; Dutch police escorting sleepy hotel guests and residents to safety, firemen gearing up with breathing apparatus in the road. Angleton pulls me aside. "Interrupt if you see Captain Barnes-"
"Who?"
"Alan Barnes," he says impatiently. "Listen." He fixes me with a beady stare: "This is not a game. There's a very good chance that Dr. O'Brien is already dead-in case you hadn't noticed, there's no air on the other side of that gate, and unless her abductors wanted her alive they won't have bothered with niceties like a respirator for her. That lack of air is one of the reasons we must close it as fast as possible, the other being to stop the people who opened it from making use of it as a stable egress portal."
"You say people," I mutter. "Who? The Ahnenerbe-SS?"
"I hope so," he replies grimly. "Anything else would be infinitely worse. At the end of the war, Himmler ordered a number of so-called werewolf units to continue the struggle. We've never been able to track down the Ahnenerbe's final redoubt, but the suspicion that it lies on the other side of a gate goes back a long way-you've read OGRE REALITY, you can imagine why the Mukhabarat might want to get in touch with them."
"So the other side of that gate is"-my mind races-"a holdout from the Third Reich, a colony intended to keep the dark flame burning and exact revenge on the enemies of Nazism in due course… One that's had fifty years to fester and grow on an alien world… But they lost the coordinates for the return journey, didn't they? Something went wrong and they were trapped there until-" I stop and stare at Angleton. "You hope that's what's on the other side of the gate?"
He nods. "The alternatives are all much worse."
On further thought I have to admit he's right: a colony of leftover Nazi necromancers and their SS bodyguards are trivially dangerous compared to things like the one that took over Fred the Accountant. And they are small beer by the standards of the sea of universes, where malignant intelligences wait only for an invitation to surge through a knothole in the platonic realm and infect our minds.
"How are you going to deal with them?" I ask. Angleton leads me around the truck; I can get a good view of the big low-loader that squeezed past us, and there's some sort of tracked vehicle sitting on its load bed. There's a crane, too. I peer closer, but the cordon of cops around it bars my view. "How the hell are you going to get that through a third-floor window?" I ask.
Angleton shrugs. "I'm sure the hotel owners will file a claim on their building insurance." He looks at me. "Alan's men are professionals, Robert. They're not used to being slowed down by civilians like you-or me. What can you do that they can't?"
I lick my lips. "Can they open a temporary gate back home if the door there slams shut behind them? Can they safely disarm a live geometry node?"
"They're the Artists' Rifles," Angleton says witheringly. "They're the bloody SAS, boy, 21st Battalion Territorial Army; what did you think they were, a gun club? Who else do you think we'd trust with a hydrogen bomb wired up to a dead man's handle?"
I stare at the low-loader and realise that the cops around it are all carrying HK-4s and facing outward. "I can provide you with a different kind of insurance policy. Give me the charts and I'll see they make it back alive-with Mo, if I have any say in the matter. Plus, aren't you just a little curious about what the Ahnenerbe might have been doing with a Z-2 and its descendants for the past fifty years?"
"Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he's finished annoying you?" asks Alan, who has sneaked up behind me so quietly I never even noticed. Needless to say I almost jump out of my skin.
"Leave him be." Angleton almost looks amused. "He's still young enough to think he's immortal-and he's cleared for active. All waivers signed, next of kin on file, carries an organ donor card, that sort of thing. Can you use him?"
I have to turn my head to keep both of them in view: Angleton, the old, dried-up ghost of intelligence spooks past, and Alan-Captain Barnes, that is-schoolmasterly and intense. "That depends," Alan tells Angleton. Then he focuses on me. "Bob, you can come along on this trip on one condition. The condition is that if you get any of my men killed by arsing around, I will personally shoot you. Do you understand and agree?"
Somehow I manage to nod, although my mouth's gone very dry all of a sudden. "Yup, got it. No arsing around."
"Well, that's all right then!" He claps his hands together briskly, then softens very slightly. "As long as you do what you're told, you'll pass. I'm going to give you to Blevins and Pike; they'll look after you. I know what your specialities are: weird alien runes, ancient Nazi computers, esoteric rocket science, that sort of thing. Boffin city. If we run into anything like that I'll let you know. What's your weapons clearance, if any?"
"I'm certified to level two, unconventional." I frown. "What else do you need?"
"Ever used scuba gear?"
"Er, yes." I neglect to add that it was on a holiday package deal, an afternoon of training followed by supervised swimming near a coral reef, with instructors and guides on hand.
"Okay, then I'll leave Pike to check you out on the vacuum gear. You'll be issued with a weapon; you are not, repeat not, to use it under any circumstances while any soldiers are left alive unless you are explicitly ordered to. Got that?"
"Find Pike. Learn how to use vacuum gear. Do not use weapon without orders."
"That'll do." Alan glances at Angleton. "He'll make a good Norwegian Blue, don't you think?"
Angleton raises an eyebrow. "Bet you he'll be 'pining for the fjords' within hours."
"Hah! Hah!" Alan doesn't bray: his laughter is oddly fractured, as if it's escaping from a broken muffler. Loss of control, that's what it is. He's thin, wiry, intense, and looks like the kind of schoolmaster who's spent years slitting throats in strange countries, and took to teaching as a way of passing on his knowledge. A weird breed, not uncommon in the British public schools, who recycle their own graduate cannon fodder to train the next generation in an ethos of military service. And whose mannerisms are aped lower down the academic ladder. Artists' Rifles indeed!
I TRY TELLING MYSELF THAT MO WILL BE ALL right, that they wouldn't have bothered abducting her if they didn't want her alive, but it's no good: whenever I get some idle time my brain keeps looping on the fact that someone I feel strongly about has been snatched and may already be dead. Luckily I don't have much time to obsess because Alan immediately drags me back inside the OCCULUS control truck and throws me to Sergeant Martin Pike, who takes one look at me, mutters something about the blessings of Loki, and starts grilling me about nitrogen narcosis, the bends, partial pressure of oxygen, and all sorts of other annoying things I haven't studied since school. Pike is a sergeant. He's also a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and designs things that go fast and explode, when he isn't being a weekend soldier in a special unit hung off the SAS. He's met people like me before and knows how to deal with them.