This Ramona person, I want you to describe her."
"I can't. She was wearing a glamour, level three at least — it nearly sent me cross-eyed. But she knows who I am and what I'm here for."
"All right, Bob, that's about what I expected. Now this is what I want you to do." Angleton pauses. I lick my suddenly dry lips. "I want you to finish your drink and go back to your room. However, rather than entering, I want you to proceed down the corridor to the next room along on the same side, one number up. Your support team should be checked in there already. They'll continue the briefing once you're in the secure suite. Do not enter your room for the time being. Do you understand?"
"I think so." I nod. "You've got a little surprise job lined up for me. Is that it"
"Yes," says Angleton, and hangs up abruptly.
I put my beer down, then stand up and glance round. I thought I was here for a routine committee meeting, but suddenly I find I'm standing on shifting sands, in possibly hostile territory. The middle-aged swingers glance disinterestedly at me, but my wards aren't tingling: they're just who they appear to be. Right. Go directly to bed, do not eat supper, do not collect... I shake my head and get moving.
To get to the elevator bank from the bar requires crossing an expanse of carpet overlooked by two levels of balconies — normally I wouldn't even notice it but after Angleton's little surprise the skin on the back of my neck crawls, and I clutch my Treo and my lucky charm bracelet twitchily as I sidle across it. There aren't many people about, if you discount the queue of tired business travelers checking in at the desk, and I make it to the lift bank without the scent of violets or the tickling sense of recognition that usually prefigures a lethal manifestation. I hit the "up" button on the nearest elevator and the doors open to admit me.
There is a theory that all chain hotels are participants in a conspiracy to convince the international traveler that there is only one hotel on the planet, and it's just like the one in their own home town. Personally, I don't believe it: it seems much more plausible that rather than actually going somewhere I have, in fact, been abducted and doped to the gills by aliens, implanted with false and bewildering memories of humiliating security probes and tedious travel, and checked in to a peculiarly expensive padded cell to recover. It's certainly an equally consistent explanation for the sense of disorientation and malaise I suffer from in these places; besides which, malevolent aliens are easier to swallow than the idea that other people actually want to live that way.
Elevators are an integral part of the alien abduction experience.
I figure the polished fake-marble floor and mirror-tiled ceiling with indirect lighting conspire to generate a hypnotic sense of security in the abductees, so I pinch myself and force myself to stay alert. The lift is just beginning to accelerate upwards when my phone vibrates, so I glance at the screen, read the warning message, and drop to the floor.
The lift rattles as it rises towards the sixth floor. My guts lighten: we're slowing! The entropy detector wired into my phone's aerial is lighting up the screen with a grisly red warning icon. Some really heavy shit is going on upstairs, and the closer we get to my floor the stronger it is. "Fuck fuck fuck," I mumble, punching up a basic countermeasure screen. I'm not carrying: this is supposed to be friendly territory, and whatever's lighting up the upper levels of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel is — I briefly flash back to another hotel in Amsterdam, a howling wind sucking into the void where a wall should be — Clunk. The door slides open and I realize at the same instant that I should have leapt for the lift control panel and the emergency stop button. "Shit," I add — the traditional last word — just as the flashing red dial on my phone screen whisks counterclockwise and turns green: green for safety, green for normal, green to show that the reality excursion has left the building.
"Zum Teufel!"
I glance up stupidly at a pair of feet encased in bulletproof-looking, brown leather hiking boots, then further up at the corduroy trousers and beige jacket of an elderly German tourist. "Trying to get a signal," I mutter, and scramble out of the lift on all fours, feeling extremely stupid.
I tiptoe along the beige-carpeted corridor to my room, racking my brains for an explanation. This whole set-up stinks like a week-old haddock: What's going on? Ramona, whoever the hell she is — I'd put hard money on her being mixed in with it. And that entropy blip was big. But it's gone now. Someone gating in? I wonder. Or a proximal invocation?
I pause in front of my door and hold my hand above the door handle for a few seconds.
The handle is cold. Not just metal-at-ambient cold, but frigid and smoking-liquid-nitrogen cold.
"Oops," I say very quietly, and keep on walking down the corridor until I arrive at the next room door. Then I pull out my phone and speed-dial Angleton.
"Bob, Sitrep."
I lick my lips. "I'm still alive. While I was in the elevator my tertiary proximity alarm redlined then dropped back. I got to my room and the door handle feels like it's measuring room temperature in single-digit Kelvins. I'm now outside the adjacent door. I figure it's a hit and unless you tell me otherwise I'm calling a Code Blue."
"This isn't the Code Blue you'te here to deal with."
Angleton sounds dryly amused, which is pretty much what I expect from him. "But you might want to make a note that your activation key is double-oh-seven. Just in case you need k later." I "You what?" I glare at the phone in disbelief, then punch the number into the keypad. "Jesus, Angleton, someday let me explain this concept called password security to you, I'm not meant to be able to hack my own action locks and start shooting on a whim — "
"But you didn't, did you?" He sounds even more amused as my phone beeps twice and makes a metallic clicking noise.
"You may not have time to ask when the shit hits the fen.
That's why I kept it simple. Now give me a Sitrep," he adds crisply.
"I'm going live." I frantically punch a couple of buttons and invisible moths flutter up and down my spine; when they fade away the corridor looks darker, somehow, and more threatening. "Half-live. My terminal is active." I fumble around in my pocket and pull out a small webcam, click it into place in the expansion slot on top of my phone. Now my phone has got two cameras.
"Okay, SCORPION STARE loaded. I'm armed. What can I expect"
There's a buzzing noise from the door lock next to me and the green LED flashes. "Hopefully nothing right now, but ... open the door and go inside. Your backup team should be in place to give you your briefing, unless something's gone very wrong in the last five minutes."
"Jesus, Angleton."
"That is my name. You shouldn't swear so much: the walls have ears." He still sounds amused, the omniscient bastard.
I don't know how he does it — I'm not cleared for that shit — but I always have a feeling that he can see over my shoulder.
"Go inside. That's an order."
I take a deep breath, raise my phone, and open the door.
"Hiya, Bob!" Pinky looks up from the battered instrument case, his hands hovering over a compact computer keyboard. He's wearing a fetching batik sarong, a bushy handlebar moustache, and not much else: I'm not going to give him the pleasure of knowing just how much this disturbs me, or how relieved I am to see him.
"Where's Brains?" I ask, closing the door behind me and exhaling slowly.
"In the closet. Don't worry, he'll be coming out soon enough." Pinky points a digit at the row of storage doors fronting the wall adjacent to my room. "Angleton sent us.
He said you'd need briefing."
"Am I the only person here who doesn't know what's going on"