"If so, you probably need to know that I intend to arrest him. Twelve counts of murder and attempted murder, in case you were wondering." I almost look round, but manage to resist the urge: Josephine's voice is brittle but controlled. "Police."
"Wrong jurisdiction, dear," Harriet says consolingly. "And I do believe our idiot tearaway here has got you on the wrong message. That will never do." She snaps her fingers. "Take the woman, detain the man."
"Stop-" I begin. The zombies step forward, lurching jerkily, and then all hell breaks loose about twenty centimetres from my right ear. Zombies make excellent night watchmen and it takes a lot to knock one down, but they're not bulletproof, and Josephine unloads her magazine two rounds at a time. I'm dazzled by the flash and my head feels as if someone is whacking me on the ear with a shovel-bits of meat and unspeakable ripped stuff go flying, but precious little blood, and they keep coming.
"When you've quite finished," Harriet hisses, and snaps her fingers at Josephine: the zombies pause for a moment then close in, as their mistress backs toward the staircase up to the first floor.
"Quick, down the back corridor there!" I gasp, pointing to my left.
"The-what?"
"Quick!"
I dash along the corridor, tugging Josephine's arm until I feel her running with me. I pull my warrant card and yell, "Open sesame!" ahead and doors slam open to either side-including the broom closets and ductwork access points. "In here!" I dive in to one side and Josephine piles in after me and I yank at the door-"Close, damn you, fuck, close sesame!" and it slams shut with the hardscrabble of bony fingertips on the outside.
"Got a light?" I ask.
"Nah, I don't smoke. But I've got a torch somewhere-"
The scrabbling's getting louder. "I don't want to hurry you or anything, but-" And lo, there is light.
We're standing at the bottom of a shallow shaft with cable runs vanishing above us into the gloom. Josephine looks frantic. "They didn't drop! I shot them and they didn't drop!"
"Don't sweat it, they're run by remote control." Maybe now is not the time to explain about six-node summoning points, the Vohlman exercise, and the minutiae of raising and binding the dead: they're knocking on the door and they want in. But look, here's something even more interesting. "Hey, I see CAT-5 cabling. Pass me your torch?"
"This isn't the time to go all geeky on me, nerd-boy. Or are you looking for roaches?"
"Just fucking do it, I'll explain later, okay?" Harriet is really getting to me; it's been a long day and I told myself ages ago that if I ever heard another fucking lecture about timekeeping from her I'd go postal.
"Bingo." It is CAT-5, and there's an even more interesting cable running off to one side that looks like a DS-3. I whip out my multitool and begin working on the junction box. The scrabbling's become insistent by the time I've uncovered the wires, but what the fuck. Who was it who said, When they think you're technical is the time to go crude? I grab a handful of network cables and yank, hard. Then I grab another handful. Then, having disconnected the main trunk line-mission accomplished-I take another moment to think.
"Bob, have you got a plan?"
"I'm thinking."
"Then think faster, they're about to come through the door-"
Which is when I remember my mobile phone and decide to make a last-ditch attempt. I speed-dial Bridget's office extension-and Angleton picks up after two rings. Bastard.
"Ah, Bob!" He sounds positively avuncular. "Where are you? Did you manage to shut down the Internet?"
I don't have time to correct him. Besides, Josephine is reloading her cannon and I think she's going to try a really horrible pun if I don't produce a solution PDQ. "Boss, run McLuhan's SCORPION STARE tool and upload the firmware to all the motion-tracking cameras on the ground floor east wing loop right now."
"What? I'm not sure I heard you correctly."
I take a deep breath. "She's subverted the night watchmen. Everybody else is out of the building. Do it now or I'm switching to a diet of fresh brains."
"If you say so," he agrees, with the manner of an indulgent uncle talking to a tearaway schoolboy, then hangs up.
There's a splintering crash and a hand rams through the door right between us and embeds itself in the wall opposite. "Oh shit," I have time to say as the hand withdraws. Then a bolt of lightning goes off about two feet outside the door, roughly simultaneous with a sizzling crash and a wave of heat. We cower in the back of the cupboard, terrified of fire until after what seems like an eternity the sprinklers come on.
"Is it safe yet?" she asks-at least I think that's what she says, my ears are still ringing.
"One way to find out." I take the broken casing from the network junction box and chuck it through the hole in the door. When it doesn't explode I gingerly push the door open. The ringing is louder; it's my phone. I pull it wearily out of my pocket and hunch over it to keep it dry, leaning against the wall of the corridor to stay as far away from the blackened zombie corpses as I can. "Who's there?"
"Your manager." He sounds merely amused this time. "What a sorry shower you are! Come on up to Mahogany Row and dry off, both of you-the director has a personal bathroom, I think you've earned it."
"Uh. Harriet? Bridget? McLuhan?"
"Taken care of," he says complacently, and I shiver convulsively as the water reaches gelid tentacles down my spine and tickles my balls like a drowned lover.
"Okay. We'll be right up." I glance back at the smashed-in utility cupboard and Josephine smiles at me like a frightened feral rat, all sharp teeth and savagery and shining.38 automatic. "We're safe now," I say, as reassuringly as possible. "I think we won…"
THE JOURNEY TO ANGLETON'S LAIR IS BOTH UP AND along-he normally works out of a gloomy basement on the other side of the hollowed-out block of prime London real estate that is occupied by the Laundry, but this time he's ensconced in the director's suite on the abandoned top floor of the north wing.
The north wing is still dry. Over there, people are still at work, oblivious to the charred zombies lying on the scorched, soaked, thaumaturgically saturated wing next door. We catch a few odd stares-myself, soaked and battered in my outdoors gear, DI Sullivan in the wreckage of an expensive grey suit, oversized handgun clenched in a death grip at her side-but wisely or otherwise, nobody asks me to fix the Internet or demands to know why we're tracking muddy water through Human Resources.
By the time we reach the thick green carpet and dusty quietude of the director's suite Josephine's eyes are wide but she's stopped shaking. "You've got lots of questions," I manage to say. "Try to save them for later. I'll tell you everything I know and you're cleared for, once I've had time to phone my fiancée."
"I've got a husband and a nine-year-old son, did you think of that before you dragged me into this insane nightmare? Sorry. I know you didn't mean to. It's just that shooting up zombies and being zapped by basilisks makes me a little upset. Nerves."
"I know. Just try not to wave them in front of Angleton, okay?"
"Who is Angleton, anyway? Who does he think he is?"
I pause before the office door. "If I knew that, I'm not sure I'd be allowed to tell you." I knock three times.
"Enter." Andy opens the door for us. Angleton is sitting in the director's chair, playing with something in the middle of the huge expanse of oak desk that looks as if it dates to the 1930s. (There's a map on the wall behind him, and a quarter of it is pink.) "Ah, Mr. Howard, Detective Inspector. So good of you to come."