“Let me be straightforward: all the signs suggest that the Thirteenth Directorate are suddenly playing very dangerous games on our turf. If the cultists who CLUB ZERO shut down turn out to be a front for the Thirteenth Directorate, then we have to assume that CLUB ZERO is connected with BLOODY BARON—and that turns it from a low-key adversarial tactical analysis into a much higher priority for us. They’re not usually reckless, and they’re not pushing the old ideological agenda anymore—they wouldn’t be acting this openly for short-term advantage—so we need to find out what they’re doing and put a stop to it, before anyone else gets hurt. Yes, Bob? What is it?”
I put my hand down. “This might sound stupid,” I hear myself saying, “but has anyone thought about, you know, asking them?”
I’M NOT BIG ON HISTORY.
When I was at school, I dropped the topic as soon as I could, right after I took my GCSEs. It seemed like it was all about one damn king after another, or one war after another, or a bunch of social history stuff about what it was like to live as an eighteenth-century weaver whose son had run off with a spinster called Jenny, or a sixteenth-century religious bigot with a weird name and a witch-burning fetish. Tedious shite, in other words, of zero relevance to modern life—especially if you were planning on studying and working in a field that was more or less invented out of whole cloth in 1933.
The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.
History, it turns out, is all around us. Service House—where I used to have my cubicle—is where the Laundry moved in 1953. Before that, it used to belong to the Foreign Office. Before that, we worked out of an attic above a Chinese laundry in Soho, hence the name. Before that . . .
There was no Laundry, officially.
The Laundry was a wartime work of expedience, magicked into existence by a five-line memo headlined ACTION THIS DAY and signed Winston Churchill. It was directed at a variety of people, including a retired major general and sometime MI6 informer, whose dubious status was probably the deciding factor in keeping his ass out of an internment camp along with the rest of the Nazi-sympathizing Directorate of the British Union of Fascists—that, and his shadowy connections to occultists and mathematicians, his undoubted genius as a tactician and theorist of the arts of war, and the nuanced reports of his political officer, who figured his patriotism had a higher operator precedence than his politics. That man was F: Major-General J. F. C. “Boney” Fuller. He’s been in his grave for nearly half a century, and would doubtless be spinning in it fast enough to qualify for carbon credits as an environmentally friendly power source if he could see us today in all our multi-ethnic anti-discriminatory splendor.
But who cares?
That is, indeed, the big-ticket question.
Before the Laundry, things were a bit confused. You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop—calculating machines, in other words—tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way.
We’ve unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency—always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic’s great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences—or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing.
Let’s just say that you can’t always trust the historical record and move swiftly on.
On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scholars of night systematized and studied the occult with all the zeal Victorian taxonomists could bring to bear. There was a lot of rubbish written; Helena Blavatsky, bless her little cotton socks, muddied the waters in an immensely useful way, as did Annie Besant, and Krishnamurti, and a host of others.
And then there were those who came too damned close to the truth: if H. P. Lovecraft hadn’t died of intestinal cancer in 1937 something would have had to have been done about him, if you’ll pardon my subjunctive. (And it would have been messy, very messy—if old HPL was around today he’d be the kind of blogging and email junkie who’s in everybody’s RSS feed like some kind of giant mutant gossip squid.)
Then there were those who were sitting on top of the truth, if they’d had but the wits to see it—Dennis Wheatley, for example, worked down the hall in Deception Planning at SOE and regularly did lunch with a couple of staff officers who worked with Alan Turing—the man himself, not the anonymous code-named genius currently doing whatever it is they do in the secure wing at the Funny Farm. Luckily Wheatley wouldn’t have known a real paranormal excursion if it bit him on the arse. (In fact, looking back to the dusty manila files, I’m not entirely sure that Dennis Wheatley’s publisher wasn’t on the Deception Planning payroll after the war, if you follow my drift.)
But I digress.
It was to our great advantage during the cold war that the commies were always terrible at dealing with the supernatural.
For starters, having an ideology that explicitly denies the existence of an invisible sky daddy is a bit of a handicap when it comes to assimilating the idea of nightmarish immortal aliens from elsewhere in the multiverse, given that the NIAs in question have historically been identified as gods (subtype: elder). For seconds, blame Trofim Lysenko for corrupting their science faculty’s ability to cope with new findings that contradicted received political doctrine. For thirds, blame the Politburo, which, in the 1950s, looked at the embryonic IT industry, thought “tools of capitalist profit-mongers,” and denounced computer science as un-Communist.
Proximate results: they got into orbit using hand calculators, but completely dropped the ball on anything that required complexity theory, automated theorem proving, or sacrificial goats.
But that was then, and this is now, and we’re not dealing with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we’re dickering with the Russian Federation. (When we’re not trying to save ourselves from the end of the world, that is.)
The Russians are no longer dragged backwards by the invisible hand of Lenin. Their populace have taken with gusto to god-bothering and hacking, their official government ideology is “hail to the chief,” and Moscow is the number one place on the planet to go if you want to rent a botnet.
There’s a pragmatic and pugnacious attitude to their overseas operations these days. Their ruling network, the siloviki, aren’t playing the Great Game for ideological reasons anymore, even though they came up through the KGB prior to the years of chaos: they’re out to make Russia great again, and grab a tidy bank balance in the process, and they’re playing hardball because they’re pissed off at the way they were shoved off the board during the 1990s—consigned to the dustbin of history, asset-stripped by oligarchs and bamboozled by foreign bankers.
And so, to the present. The whole of Western Europe—and a bunch of far-flung outposts beyond—are currently crawling with KGB foot soldiers. No longer the stolid gray-suited trustees of Soviet-era spy mythology, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they have two things in common: snow on their boots and blood in their eyes. And if they’re looking for something connected with our founder, and deploying supernatural weapons on our territory—