“Nonsense!” Angleton said crisply. “You can take the paperwork with you, but I specifically want you to go and look at this one.”
There’s a warning gleam in his eyes: I’ve seen it before. “Oh no you don’t,” I replied. “Not so fast!” I raised an eyebrow and waited for the explosion.
Angleton is old school-so old school that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen his face in a departmental photo taken during the war, back when the Laundry was an obscure department of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, tasked with occult intelligence gathering and counter-demonology. He doesn’t look a day older today than he did back then, sixty-five years ago-dress him in a bandage and he could star in a remake of The Mummy. Ice-blue eyes with slightly yellowish scleras, skin like parchment left out for too long in a desert sandstorm, dry as bone and twice as chilly as ice. And I never want to hear his laugh again. But I digress. The thing about Angleton is that, despite (or in addition to) being the honorary departmental monster, he has a sense of humor. It bears about the same relationship to mirth that his cadaverous exterior does to Paris Hilton’s-but it’s there. (He has the heart of a young boy: keeps it in a reliquary under the coffin he sleeps in.) And right then, I figured he was winding me up for the punch line.
But: no. He shook his head slowly. “Not this time, Bob.” The gleam in his eye guttered out, replaced by dead-cold sobriety: “While you’re up there to do the business, I want you to take a look at one of the other museum exhibits-one that’s not on public display. I’ll explain it later, when you get back. Take your warrant card. When you’re through with the job on the worksheet, tell Warrant Officer Hastings that I sent you to take a look at the white elephant in Hangar 12B.”
Huh? I blinked a couple of times, then sneezed. “You’re setting me up for another working group, aren’t you?”
“You know better than to ask that, boy,” he grated, and I jumped back: Angleton is nobody you want to stand too close to when he’s even mildly irritated. “I’ll give you the background when you’re ready for it. Meanwhile, get moving!”
“Whatever.” I sketched a sarcastic salute and marched off back to my office, lost in thought. It was a setup, obviously: Angleton was softening me up for something new. Probably a new game of bureaucratic pass-the-parcel, seeing if some poor schmuck-I was already in charge of departmental IT services, for my sins-could be mugged into taking on responsibility for exorcising hovercraft or something.
Back to the here-and-now. The carriage is slowing. A minute later I realize it’s pulling into a main line station- Wolverhampton, where I get to change trains. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it’s a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago -your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
The air in the station hits me like a hot flannel, damp and clingy and smelling slightly of diesel fumes. I take a breath, step down onto the concrete, and try to minimize my movements as I go looking for the Cosford service. I find the platform it stops at: a crumbling concrete strip opposite a peeling wooden fence. The rails are rusty and overgrown, and a couple of young trees are trying to colonize the tracks; but the TV screen overhead is lit up and predicting a train will be along in ten minutes. I take a shallow breath and sit down, hunching instinctively towards the nearest shade. Fifteen minutes later, the TV screen is still predicting a train will be along in ten minutes; then my mobile rings. It’s Mo.
“Bob!” She sounds so cheerful when she says my name: I don’t know how she does it, but it cheers me up.
“Mo!” Pause. “Where are you?”
“I’m back in the office! I spent most of the morning in the stacks, I only just got your text…” The one telling her I was off on a day trip to Cosford. The Laundry’s deep archives are in a former underground tunnel, way down where the sun doesn’t shine, and neither do the cellular networks.
“Right. I’m on a railway platform waiting for an overdue train. It’s about two hundred degrees in the shade, the pigeons are falling out of the sky from heatstroke, and nobody will sell me a beer.” (Well, they might if I’d asked for one, but…)
“Oh, good! When are you going to be back?”
“Sometime late this evening,” I say doubtfully. “I’m due to arrive in Cosford at”-I check the lying timetable-“two thirty, and I don’t think I’ll get away before six. Then it’ll take me about three hours-”
“Angleton did this? He did, didn’t he!” Suddenly Mo switches from warm and cuddly to spiky as a porcupine: “Didn’t you tell him you couldn’t? We’re supposed to be having dinner with Pete and Sandy tonight!”
I do a mental backflip, re-engage my short-term memory, and realize she’s right. Dinner for four, booked at a new Kurdish restaurant in Fulham. Pete was at university with Mo years ago, and is a priest or a witch doctor or something; Sandy is blonde and teaches comparative religion to secondary school kids. Mo insists we stay in touch with them: having friends with ordinary jobs who don’t know anything about the Laundry provides a normative dose of sanity for the two of us, to keep us from drifting too far out of the mainstream. “Shit.” I’m more mortified for having landed Mo in it than anything else… “You’re right. Listen, do you want to go on your own, tell them I’ll turn up later-I’ll come straight from the station-or do you want to cancel?”
There’s silence for a second, then she sighs. “ Sandy doesn’t have flexitime, Bob, she’s got classes to teach. You cancel.”
“But I don’t have their mobile numbers-”
I’m bluffing, and Mo knows it. “I’ll text them to you, Bob. Maybe it’ll help you remember, next time?”
Bollocks. She’s right: it’s my fault. “Okay.” It’s my turn to sigh. “I’ll be claiming some hours back. Maybe we can use them for something together-” The tracks begin to vibrate and squeal and I look up. “It’s my train! See you later? Bye…”
The train to Cosford is about as old as Angleton: slam doors, wooden partitions, and high-backed seats, powered by a villainously rusted diesel engine slung under its single carriage. Air conditioning is provided by the open louvered windows. I swelter in its oven-like interior for about forty minutes as it rattles and burbles through the countryside, spewing blue smoke and engine oil behind it. Along the way I furtively leave my apologies on Pete and Sandy’s voice mail. Finally, the train wheezes asthmatically to a halt beside a station overlooking a Royal Air Force base, with a cluster of hangars outside the gate and some enormous airliners and transport aircraft gently gathering moss on the lawn outside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I walk up the path to the museum annex and head for the main exhibit hall.
It’s time to go to work…
PAY ATTENTION NOW: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN fifteen minutes.
My name is Bob, Bob Howard. At least, that’s the name I use in these memoirs. (True names have power: even if it’s only the power to attract the supernatural equivalent of a Make Money Fast spammer, I’d rather not put myself in their sights, thank you very much.) And I work for the Laundry.
The Laundry is the British Government’s secret agency for dealing with “magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so “magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the… things… that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job-applied computational demonologist-comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don’t survive to claim it.