She freezes in place for a moment as if there's something more to say, then grabs the file and storms out of the conference room, slamming the door behind her so hard that the latch fails and it bounces open again. Barnes stares after her, then, seeing the wide eyes and open mouth of the receptionist, he nods politely and pulls the door shut.
"Do you think she'll take the assignment?" he asks Angleton.
"Oh yes." Angleton stares bleakly at the door for a few seconds. "She'll hate us, but she'll do it. She's operating inside the paradigm. In the groove, as Bob would say."
"I was afraid for a minute that I was going to have to take her down. If she lost it completely."
"No." Angleton gathers himself with a visible effort and shakes his head. "She's too smart. She's a lot tougher than you think, otherwise I wouldn't have put her on the spot like that. But don't sit with your back to any doors until this is all over and we've got her calmed down."
Barnes stares at the pitted green desktop. "I could almost pity that Black Chamber agent you've hitched Bob to."
"Those are the rules of the game." Angleton shrugs heavily.
"I didn't write them. You can blame Billington, or you can blame the man with the typewriter, but he's been dead for more than forty years. O'Brien's not made of sugar and spice and all things nice. She'll cope." He stares at Barnes bleakly. "She'll have to. Because if she doesn't, we're all in deep shit."
9: SKIN DIVING
"THAT' S INTERESTING,** RAMONA SAYS TO THE pitch darkness as I choke on a throatful of stinging cold saltwater, **I didn't know you could do that.** My chest is burning and it feels like ice picks are shoving at my eardrums as I begin to thrash around. I can feel my heart pounding like a trip hammer as the fear grips me like a straitjacket. I manage to bang one elbow on the side of the tunnel, a sharp stab of pain amidst the black pressure. **Stop struggling.** Slim arms slide around my chest; her heart is hammering as she hugs me to her, pulling my face between her breasts.
She drags me down like a mermaid engulfing a drowning sailor and I stiffen, panicking as I begin to exhale. Then we're in a bigger space — I can feel it opening up around me — and suddenly I don't need to breathe anymore. I can feel her/our gills soaking in the cool refreshing water, like air off a spring meadow, and I can feel her borrowed underwater freedom again.
**Where are we?** I ask, shuddering. **What the hell was that?**
**We're right under the platform's central deflection circuit.
I figure it throttled our link while we were passing through.** My eyes are starting to adjust and I can see a diffuse green twilight. A black ceiling squats above us, rough and pitted as I run my fingertips across it: the tunnel is a square opening in the middle of a room-sized dome under the middle of the flat ceiling. Off to the sides I can just about see other black silhouettes, support pillars of some sort that vanish into the murk below. Beyond them, the turbidity speaks of open seas.
**I thought it was poured onto the bottom?**
**Nope. The reef comes to within meters of the surface, but offshore it falls away rapidly; the bottom hereabouts is nearly sixty meters down. They built it on the edge of an undersea cliff and jacked it off the bottom with those pillars.**
**Right, right.** I experiment, pushing off and swimming a little distance away from her until the tightness in my chest begins to return. I can make it to about eight meters out on my own, down here in the penumbra of the coastal defense ward. I turn and drift slowly back towards her. **What was it you were wanting to tell me? Before we got interrupted.** Her face is a ghostly shade in the twilight. **No time.
The bad guys are coming.**
**Bad guys — ** I hear a distant churning rumble and look up, out from under the poured concrete ceiling. **Let me see. They've got spear guns?**
**Good guess, monkey-boy. Follow me.** She swims out towards one of the pillars and I follow hastily, afraid of being left behind by our bubble of entangled metabolic processes.
The pillar is as thick as my torso, rough-pored concrete covered with lumpy barnacles and shells and a few weird growths that might be baby corals. Beyond it, the open sea: greenness above us — we must be at least ten meters down — and darkness below. Ramona pulls her knees up and rolls head down, then kicks, spearing into the gloomy depths. I swallow, then turn and clumsily follow her. My inner ear is churning but I can almost fool it into thinking I'm climbing alongside the fat, gray pillar. I feel a bit breathless, but not too bad — all things considered. **Are you doing okay?** I ask.
**I'm okay.** Ramona's inner voice is tense, like she's breathing for two of us.
**Slow down, then.** There's a great beige wall looming behind us in the gloom, bulging closer to the pillar. In the distance I see the streamlined torpedo silhouettes of hunting fishes. **Let's get between the pillar and the cliff face.** Distant plopping, bubbling noises from above. **Here they come.** Ramona peers up towards the surface.
**C'mon.** The cleft between the pillar and the rock face is about a meter wide at this depth. I swim into it then reach out and take her hand. She drifts towards me, still staring up at the distant sky, as I pull her into the shadow of the pillar.
**How long can we hide down here? If they figure we're just skinny-dippers, they may not think to come this deep.**
**No such luck.** She closes her eyes and leans back against me. ** Have you ever killed anyone, Bob?**
**Have I ever ...?** It depends what you mean by anyone. **Only paranormal entities. Does that count?**
**No. Has to be human.** She tenses. **I should have asked earlier.**
**What do you mean, has to be human?**
**That's an oversight,** she says tightly. **You were supposed to be blooded.**
**What are you — **
**The geas. You have to kill one of them.** She turns round slowly, her hair swirling around her head like a dark halo. Here we are under twenty meters of seawater and my mouth's gone as dry as the desert. **There are steps you have to carry out in sequence in order to adopt your role in the eigenplot. Jeopardy in a distant city, meet the dark anima, kill one of the other side's assassins — at least one, more would be better — and then we have to figure out a way around my — damn, here they come. We'll have to cover this later. Get ready.** She shoves something hard into my hand. After a moment's confusion I realize it's the handle of a vicious-looking knife with a serrated edge. Then she vanishes into the shadows lining the cliff face. I glance round as a shadow glides overhead: tracking up and over I see a diver in a wetsuit, head down, peering into the depths.
I pass through a moment of acute disbelief and resentment.
I've been in mortal danger before, but I'm not used to being in mortal danger from humans. It feels wrong. Any one of Alan's mad bastards is probably capable of whacking half a dozen al Qaeda irregulars before breakfast and not working up an existential sweat, but I'm not prepared for this. I can shoot at targets, sure, and I'm death on wheels when it comes to terminating cases of demonic possession with extreme prejudice, but the idea of killing a real human being in cold blood, some eating breathing sleeping guy with a job on a rich man's yacht, makes all the alarm bells in my head go tilt.
Trouble is, I also have a deep conviction in my guts that whatever the hell Ramona is on about, she's right. I'm here for a purpose, and I've got to move my feet through the occult dance steps in the right sequence or it'll all be for nothing. And it doesn't matter what I want or don't want if Angleton's right and Billington is gearing up to drop the hammer on us. When you come down to it, if there's a war on, the bombs don't care whether they're falling on pacifists or patriots. And speaking of bombs ...