The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (11 page)

Alex closes his eyes, then opens them slowly again. There are no windows in the garage, and plenty of cobwebby dark corners. There is even an inspection trench in the floor, between the trailer’s wheels. Not that he’s going to need it – or have room to stash his moped in here – but it’s nice to know there’s somewhere to take shelter if the teapot explodes.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ve seen enough.” He pauses with a hand on the door. “About the rooms. I don’t need two bedrooms to myself, but I’ve got a colleague who has a family down south – he probably won’t be moving up here full-time, but he can certainly use a room for the night when he’s in town. If you’re okay with the idea of me occasionally parking a friend in the other attic bedroom, I think we can do a deal.”

“Sure!” Pinky says brightly. “Let’s go back inside. I’m pretty sure the tea should be brewed by now, and we can hammer out the details over a cuppa.” His expression turns to one of worry. “Assuming this time he’s managed to keep the teapot haunting-free…”

I have come to an agreement to rent the top floor of the house off Harehills Lane for six months. I’m getting it semi-furnished for five hundred a month, plus my share of the council tax and bills. Pinky and Brains have already got a BT Infinity connection, and I’m getting to share it, so I will have internet access. It’s going to be secured as a class B safe house as soon as we’re all listed as living there by Human Resources, which means we get wards installed by Facilities and a secure landline. Also an intruder alarm. I emailed Pete and he’s interested in using the spare top room when he’s in town overnight. P & B want to meet him but they’re okay with this arrangement in principle because he has already been vetted by HR.

I have some minor reservations, and I may not be staying there after the first six months, because something about P & B smells funny.

I don’t care that they’re civil partners: that’s none of my business. Nor do I mind them keeping a hovercraft and a half-track in the garage and a lathe in the living room: that’s pretty normal for a geek house. But something doesn’t quite ring true. They work in tech support ops, Q Branch, playing with exotic toys, and they know about PHANG syndrome. That’s really quite hardcore, when you think about it. They’ve been in the organization for more than fifteen years – Pinky said in passing that they used to share a house with Mr. Howard and Mhari Murphy. That’s time to accrue quite a lot of seniority. So what are they doing in Leeds, rather than down in one of our research sites in Milton Keynes or Oxford?

I’m sure there’s a story behind it, but it’s a bad idea to ask questions. I guess I should just check with HR before I sign that contract and hand over the deposit and the first month’s rent. I’ll do it tomorrow.

Hmm. While I’m on the topic of Human Resources…

HR have given me a Story. I’m required to roll it out if anyone asks what I’ve been doing,
including
the parents. I’m not allowed to tell them The Truth, on pain of spontaneous human combustion. (At least, it would be spontaneous human combustion if I wasn’t a PHANG. In my case, it’s on pain of a black mark on my personnel record, because the standard formula for
geases
doesn’t work very well on us.) Unfortunately the cover story they gave me is very badly constructed. I’ve requested a better one – one that won’t get me disinherited, at any rate – and Mr. Jenkins said he’d work on putting together a package, but I could tell from his expression that it’s a low priority.

This is what I’m supposed to tell people if they start digging into my background and occupation:

I am Alex Schwartz, PhD in mathematics, University College Oxford. I was headhunted from university by a certain bank, but my entire team was downsized in a round of cost-cutting following the parent institution’s indictment over the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal.
Not
my fault, not my team’s fault, but the bank had to make adjustments to its overhead to deal with the scale of the fine they got landed with. The bonuses we were due at the end of the year made us a fat target, and after our unit’s head, Oscar Menendez, was murdered by a drug dealer in Essex, we had nobody to defend us from a spurious stack-ranking exercise…

I’m not bitter. Okay?

Actually, about half of that story is true. The bits that aren’t: Oscar was murdered by a crazed vampire hunter who happened to be a catspaw working for the incredibly ancient vampire elder who actually owned the bank. Said elder died, but not before he was maneuvered into making a spectacularly lethal raid on the New Annex by his rival for the title of vampire elder of London. Oh, and my team were downsized because we’d already been recruited by the Laundry – thank you, Ms. Murphy, for saving our collective ass – and someone on Mahogany Row had a quiet word with someone senior at the bank before our annual bonus came through, dammit.

Back to the cover story:

Banking having proven to be a suboptimal career choice (on top of requiring me to work fourteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week), I was invited to attend a recruitment open day held by the Civil Service. They decided that I was a good fit for their needs and hired me on —

This makes no sense!
 

— Firstly, only an idiot would take that kind of pay cut, wouldn’t they? An idiot or somebody expecting to receive some
very special
benefits in kind.

Secondly, if the bank had
really
downsized my department, we’d have been headhunted as a team by Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or Morgan Stanley before the ink was dry on the papers, no-competes or not. No-compete clauses in employment contracts aren’t legally enforceable in the UK, and if your new employer is a blue-chip investment bank and wants you badly enough, they will throw lawyers at the contract until it breaks under the weight of briefs.

But let me go on:

I have apparently been hired by the Ministry of Defense to work on the quality assurance program for flight software procurement in the F-35B fighter program, which is why I supposedly can’t talk about what I’m doing. This is such a transparently stupid lie that a
Daily Mail
reader could shred it in seconds. Yes, it’s true that automated theorem provers have a role to play in software QA for writing test harnesses designed to deliver proof of formal correctness, so my background isn’t totally implausible… but the Pentagon have publicly said that nobody outside the USA is going to get their hands on the source code to the F-35’s avionics. And this was in response to a UK request some years ago, reported in all the papers! It’s as if they
want
any random person I meet with an IQ above room temperature to see through my cover.

And the best bit? The reason I don’t come out during daylight hours is apparently because my work requires me to be online and available for telephone meetings during daylight hours in Japan – except the JSDF are not buying the F-35 at all!

On the train up from London I came up with three different cover stories, none of which contain holes big enough to sail a container ship through. But I am not allowed to use them until they have been approved by HR, because HR is required to provide a documentary and paper trail to substantiate my lies if anyone asks. Coming up with a new (even if more coherent) bunch of lies requires someone to get off their arse and do some work, so it’s a lower priority than dreaming up a new mess of transparently stupid falsehoods as a cover for the next employee to come on board.

If I go and see my parents for dinner, then they
will
ask how things are going with my job, and I’ll have to confess that I don’t work at the bank anymore. Then they’ll ask what I’m doing now, and I’ll be required to roll out the red carpet of lies – which they will probably see through before I finish speaking. And then I will have to choose between telling the Plumbers to come and clean up the mess and bind my own parents’ tongues, or let them think they’ve raised a bad liar.

I don’t know what to do.

“This is a K-22 thaumometric spectrum analyzer. It measures the gradient of the ambient thaum field, and outputs an energy spectrum giving you some idea of the flux in a given area, its rate of change over time and distance, and how penetrating it is based on its excitation level. It’s highly directional, so you need to take three readings at each logging point: X, Y, and Z axes.”

It’s six o’clock on the Monday evening after the Thursday when Alex visited Pinky and Brains’s house. He and Pete are the last guys through the door of the briefing room in the Arndale Centre office. Dave, the technician who’s giving them the orientation, stumbles through his spiel as if he’s sleepwalking: he’s obviously been repeating himself at two-hour intervals and he’s got an advanced case of teaching assistant burnout.

Alex shares a brief glance of mutual frustration with Pete. Pete has agreed to stay late in the office because after work Alex is taking him to see the house in Harehills, and they’ll sign the rental agreement jointly if it looks okay. Starting the training course on the K-22 at four in the afternoon seemed like a good idea – it was supposed to take two hours – but that was before they realized that it was just a version of the lab gear they’ve been using for months, packaged with a battery in a messenger bag. Nevertheless, Trainer Dave is determined to run them through the entire manual and subject them to a quiz at the end, even though he’s clearly suffering from narcolepsy.

“Dave.” Pete interrupts, but keeps his voice calm and slow. “Dave, we’re both familiar with the K-22. We’ve been using them on the proving ground at Dunwich and in lab work for the past six months. Why don’t you just skip the rest and see if we can complete your multiple-choice right now, so we can go home?”

Trainer Dave yawns and wobbles on his feet, then gives Pete a dirty look. “How do I know you’re not secret shoppers auditing me for compliance with training delivery standards?” He puts down the bag containing the K-22 – it looks suspiciously like a cheap Android tablet connected to a plastic project box with some LEDs sticking through the front panel – and picks up the training course folder he’s reading from. “This is dangerous stuff! If you get too close to a steep thaum gradient you can accidentally precipitate a cascade —”

Alex has had enough. “Excuse me,” he begins.

“— cascade chain in which any grid patternings you’re carrying become activated, like inducing eddy currents by putting a metal container in a microwave oven. Only they’d be
magical
eddy currents. In which case you can attract —”

Fuck it.
This is Thaumotechnic Safety 101 stuff. Never mind knowing it: Alex is qualified to teach it. He’s only been on the inside for six months but he has a natural aptitude for applied computational thaumaturgy. He soaks it up like a sponge. “Look into my eyes,” he says tiredly.

“— you could be eaten alive from the inside out by K-parasites… What?” Trainer Dave stops reciting the canned safety spiel and makes the fundamental error of locking gazes with a PHANG.

Persons afflicted with PHANG syndrome are not, in fact, the living dead. They can’t turn into bats or mist. However, they
do
have a number of traits associated with the vampire legends of yore. PHANGS can move superhumanly fast and exert great strength… and the mythical vampire mind-control trick is
entirely
true.

Trainer Dave is wearing a standard-issue Laundry field ward on a chain around his neck. It looks like a small silver charm pendant, and it’s designed to protect the wearer from everyday magical threats, or at least provide enough warning that they’re getting in out of their depth to give them time to run away. However it offers about as much protection against the gaze of a pissed-off PHANG as a bicycle helmet offers against an onrushing tank. Dave stands slack-jawed for a couple of seconds as he stares into Alex’s eyes, then he twitches violently and grabs at his shirt collar. A moment later the shorted-out ward is on the floor, emitting a thin trail of bitter-smelling smoke. And Dave is
still
gazing into Alex’s eyes like a love-struck puppy.

“Dave,” Alex licks his lips. The familiar hunger, ever-present, sharpens abruptly.
Damn it, I’m not due for another blood meal until next Tuesday!
He feels a momentary urge to go for Dave’s throat but suppresses it ruthlessly: he’ll just have to tough it out until HR delivers the next sample tube. “Dave. You can
trust
us. We are not auditing you for quality purposes: we are
exactly
what we seem to be. But we’re all wasting our time here. Let us take the workbooks away and we’ll return the completed questionnaires when we’ve read the books from cover to cover. You can go home and get some sleep. We’re done here, aren’t we?”

Trainer Dave nods jerkily, his head puppet-like; he picks up the K-22 demonstrator and slings it over his shoulder. “Well, if you’re sure, it’s your neck on the line when you’re out in the field. Let’s call it a day: send me your worksheets through the internal post by next Wednesday and I’ll sign you off.” He bends down and picks up the ward. “Huh. What happened? It got really hot…”

“I think it might be defective.” Alex catches a sharp glance from Pete and shrugs. Pete’s eyes narrow, but he nods imperceptibly. “You probably want to tell Facilities. Sign out a replacement tomorrow. I gather they’re issuing higher-powered ones to everyone now: the old class two wards just aren’t much use.”

“I’ll say.” Dave yawns again. “Well, I’ll be going then. Gosh, is that the time? How did it get to be so late?”

Alex watches their trainer flee, then sits down and massages his forehead. He has a mild headache. Cracking a low-powered ward by sheer willpower isn’t something he does very often. It’s got his V-parasites riled and they’re whooping it up, an insectile chittering of eldritch tinnitus resonating at the back of his head.

When they’re alone in the decrepit conference room Pete takes a deep breath and holds it for a count of ten.
“You. Should. Not. Have. Done. That.”

Alex rubs his brow again. Abruptly he realizes he’s shivering and hot, angry and scared with the adrenaline flood of reaction. It’s as if all his frustration and stress came bubbling up in a rebellious outburst. “Nope, I shouldn’t have! And he shouldn’t have been wasting our time. It’s made me
hungry
!” He glares. Pete blanches, and Alex blinks, cringing inwardly as he realizes how he must look from the outside. He backpedals furiously: “I’m sorry, I’m crabby because I only did breakfast around two o’clock. Let’s go grab a takeaway – no, wait, there’s a pizza place across the road, how about we sit down and eat?”