The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (39 page)

They walk for what feels like hours beneath the bizarre fractal burning in the empty darkness that passes for a sky. They walk until Alex can feel the soles of his feet aching, until the sigil in the void seems to turn and spawns blazing streamers of dust that contains universes. They walk until a blazing blue circle appears in the distance, at the far end of the ley line through the continuum of the dream roads. Then Cassie stops and beckons him forward. “What,” he says.

“This.”
A moment later she’s in his arms, shaking, clutching at him.

“What,” he repeats. She silences him with a kiss. He hugs her and they mash their lips together, clumsy with desperation.

Finally she pulls back a little. “From now on, whatever you do, don’t tell
anyone
your name – or mine. Names have power. I am known as Agent First of Spies and Liars, and I will live up to that: believe nothing I say once we cross the threshold until… well, until whatever happens, happens.” She kisses him again. “Trust me, I’m a very
good
liar.” Then she lets go and pushes him away, her face smoothing into a mask of haughty arrogance. “Remember, I have bound you as a vassal and you are compelled to obey me,” she says. She turns to face the blue-glowing portal. “Follow me.”

Together they step through the doorway to the Host’s marshaling area.

By seven o’clock in the morning, the worst case of motorway gridlock ever recorded in the UK is rapidly engulfing London. Unusually, the cause is neither an accident nor a surfeit of rush-hour traffic: the police have simply closed the entire clockwise carriageway of the M25 between junction 7 and junction 23.

The proximate cause of the blockage is crawling north at barely seventy kilometers per hour: a convoy of thirty bellowing desert brown low-loaders bearing tarpaulin-shrouded payloads. Each low-loader – including its load – weighs close to a hundred tons. Many of the Army’s heavy tanks have been sold off since the 2010 defense review, and most of the rest are stored in Germany against the ever-present threat of a Soviet invasion through Poland. But almost all the Challenger-2s in working order in the UK are now on the move, crawling from the complex of hangars in Hampshire where they’re stored as fast as the mechanics can gas them up, arm them, and find transporters for the five-hundred-kilometer trip to Leeds.

The heavies don’t travel unaccompanied. More low-loaders follow them, carrying recovery vehicles and spare engine packs; there’s a steady trickle of regular trucks and Land Rovers playing catch-up, with as many spares as they can scour from the depot. Not that the tanks are ready to fight yet. Ammunition will arrive separately from one of the Defense Munition Centers in Warwickshire, converging as fast as the trucks can move it – again, with a huge police escort, because nothing gives the civil authorities indigestion like hundreds of tons of high explosives driving around the motorway grid in rush-hour traffic.

But it’s going to be late afternoon before any of this stuff gets where it’s needed, and by then the battle will probably be over.

It’s eight o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, and the Right Honorable Jeremy Michaels is in a foul mood.

He’s been booted and suited for three hours as he walks along the red tunnel to the door of the secure meeting room in the Cabinet Office building, where an extraordinary session of the combined Civil Contingencies Committee, Defense Committee, and a bunch of spooks from the Intelligence side of the table has been thrown together in a blinding hurry. Whitehall has been a self-kicking centipede orgy since four o’clock this morning, with phones ringing and secure email systems smoking since whatever it is that’s kicking off kicked off in cloth-capshire or wherever it is up north, interrupting Jeremy’s post-prandial beauty sleep. It shows no sign of dying down, and nobody seems to be able to tell him just what the purple throbbing fuck is going on. He’s carpeted a couple of spads but whatever this is it’s
not
a flying-under-the-radar exercise left running by one of the useless tossers who walked the plank during the last reshuffle. Losing airliners to some sort of terrorist attack is really bad PR and after the bollocking he’s given them they should have a story ready for him to feed the inevitable press conference in a couple of hours – but what he’s getting from the Home Office is that it’s
not
terrorism, it’s MOD territory – and what the blithering fuck is the Army up to in Leeds?

This, Jeremy has decided, is intolerable. And when he decides something is intolerable, he is in the habit of sharing the pain. So he’s got the Chief of Defense Staff, the Minister for Outsourcing Arms Contracts – that would be, the Minister of Defense – Her Bitchiness the Home Secretary, and a chorus line of spooks out of their beds this morning. He is determined to get to the bottom of this clusterfuck, and God help them if they don’t bend to it.

There’s an empty seat waiting for the Prime Minister at the head of the table, and Jeremy takes his place without hesitation. It is his by right of birth, breeding, and the parliamentary equivalent of a quick knee to the balls behind the bike shed when none of the prefects were watching; and it’s his job to chair this sesh and figure out what to do and who to blame for it.

Once seated he glances around, taking in his audience. On display are: a mixture of anticipation (Jessica Greene, the Home Secretary, is wearing her crocodile smirk, as if expecting a blood meal imminently), irritation (Nigel Irving, the Minister of Defense, has the red eyes and dog-breath of a habitual heavy Saturday-night binge-drinker), and lugubrious hang-dog guilt (a senior parliamentary secretary from the Joint Intelligence Committee who apparently expects to be crucified). There are also some unfamiliar faces – a general, an RAF air marshal, and a couple of whey-faced spooks who look as if they’ll burst into flames if exposed to daylight. In other words, the usual.

Jeremy opens the slim agenda on his blotter. The Cabinet Office staff, bless their socks, have at least sketched out a list of bullet points, and he scans it quickly in search of the usual suspects – Al Qaida, airliners, final demands – when —

“What on earth is this RED RABBIT thing?” he barks. “Is this some kind of joke?”

The Chief Cabinet Secretary, Adrian Redmayne, clears his throat. “I am afraid it isn’t, Prime Minister,” he says calmly. He slips in Jeremy’s title as a placatory prophylactic: the PM can become quite
irritable
(to use the correct euphemism) when exposed to circumstances that threaten his authority. “It’s an official contingency plan from the MOD’s playbook. Although” – he glances at one of the bland-faced spooks – “I gather it’s one of the Never-Happen scenarios we aren’t routinely briefed on.”

“Not briefed?
Why?
” The PM glares at the agenda, as if he expects it to confess that it’s all just a good laugh between friends: but the paper remains stubbornly silent. He bottles his initial reaction, choleric and unquotable on TV before the watershed. “Who made that decision?”

“Let’s find out.” Redmayne smiles over the top of his half-moon reading glasses, like an executioner sizing up one of his customers for the drop. “Dr. Moore – do we have a Dr. Moore present? Representing, ah, Q-Division, SOE? Please could you give the PM a brief backgrounder on SOE, and what they have to do with an airliner crash in Yorkshire?”

Dr. Moore turns out to be one of the anonymous-looking spook-side people. Subtype, female, early middle age, a bit plump, wearing a suit that Jeremy thinks his wife wouldn’t be seen dead giving away to charity: cheap, very cheap (although it’s not her fault she wasn’t born into money).

Moore clears her throat and recites, tonelessly: “SOE, the Special Operations Executive, goes back a long way, historically: it was established by the Ministry of Economic Warfare in 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill, as an espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance agency in parallel to MI5. It was publicly dissolved in January 1946 – but Q-Division remained in active operation and was transferred to the Ministry of Defense at the same time as GCHQ. The organization is tasked with detecting, evaluating, and responding to paranormal threats to the nation. As most aspects of the paranormal – magic, colloquially – are side effects of mathematical manipulation…” She stops. The PM is rolling his eyes. “Sir?”

Jeremy is ignoring the background noise. It seems more productive to examine his cabinet subordinates for their immediate reaction to this garbage. The Home Secretary appears to be doodling electric chairs on her blotter, eyes downcast to spare her neighbors the psychotic giggles: clearly her personal coach has been reminding her not to swallow baby mice in public again. Nigel has poured himself a water glass and is gazing at it as if trying to turn it into Absolut by sheer force of willpower. Redmayne is wearing a peculiarly glazed expression that Jeremy remembers from the headmaster’s waiting room that time when the lower sixth were carpeted for hot-wiring Miss MacDonald’s Mini Clubman and borrowing it for a panty raid on St. Ninian’s –
oh. It’s
that
serious.
Jeremy snaps back into focus, and latches onto the last word he remembers hearing: “Magic, you say?”

He’s expecting bashful backsliding or at least a semblance of professional embarrassment, but Dr. Moore’s expression hardens unexpectedly. She raises her hand above the desk. “Yes, sir. We anticipated this reaction: however, you are aware of the recent appearance of superpowers. I assure you that the two phenomena are connected. Allow me to demonstrate.” She makes a very strange gesture, fingers twisting as if double-jointed, and quietly adds: “
…”
*

Jeremy misses the rest of the sentence because he’s mesmerized by the green glow between Dr. Moore’s fingers, and the way her hair writhes as if she’s holding onto a Van de Graaff generator. “Very pretty,” he says dismissively, “but I can’t go on
Newsnight
and do that, can I? And you still haven’t explained what this has to do with the Yorkshire clusterfuck. Get to the point. What’s
going on
?”

Dr. Moore’s eyes blaze for a moment, as if she’s about to mouth off – but then she bites back on whatever she was about to say and lowers her hand to the table. “Sir. Seventy-two hours ago our threat analysis division issued a storm warning – high probability of a high-powered incursion. These warnings are like earthquake warnings, rarely accurate and usually erring on the side of alarmism. But this time it appears to have been fully justified, and as of seven hours ago we became aware of what appears to be a level one incursion in progress – that is, an invasion by a Power from outside our universe. In response we immediately began mobilizing resources to contain the major incident, and the armed forces are responding in accordance with our prearranged contingency plans for a surprise attack on the nation.” She looks pointedly at the Cabinet Secretary, who in turn is looking everywhere except at her: “I believe the MOD can give you more details of the conventional forces response posture and time to engagement, but the situation in Leeds is evolving rapidly —”

Jeremy dismisses her from his attention. “That’s enough, now. Adrian, speak to me. Do we have any idea who is to blame for this? And is there a timetable for breaking this before the news cycle rolls in? What about social media?”

Adrian draws breath: “I took the liberty of announcing a 1 p.m. conference. That will kick the ball back just far enough to keep it out of the lunchtime programming, and with some careful spin we can ensure the newspapers don’t get hold of the details before they have to go to press —”

The HomeSec looks up from her doodle. “Blame a supervillain,” she says coldly. “That should plausibly muddy the waters. Start a bunch of rumors on Twitter, all of them obviously silly; it’ll make it easier to control the direction once we provide a plausible narrative. If you like I can have my office put out a statement attributing it to asylum seeking supers from Syria, supporting the preferred immigration line. It’ll take at least two cycles for the press to work out that it’s a red herring and by then we can have a new story waiting in the wings.”

Irving cracks: he raises his tumbler and chugs the contents convulsively, Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he slams it down on the table. “You don’t close motorways to make way for tanks just for a run-of-the-mill mad scientist!”

“But they won’t know about that until later if we hit them with a DA-notice covering all military movements,” Jeremy points out smugly. “It’ll leak, but this will all be over by tomorrow, won’t it?” he adds, trying to raise the morale of the various civil service nebbishes who don’t rate a real seat at the table. He nods at Irving: “I want a full report on this Q-Division as soon as the dust settles. Obviously
someone
took their eye off the ball,” he adds. “There will be a reckoning, I assure you. But not until the enemy at Broadcasting House lose interest. Smoke and mirrors, people, smoke and mirrors: we can’t show them weakness.” He leans forward. “Now, ah, General Stewart, can
you
tell me what’s happening on the ground and in the air? Without any of this nonsense about magic.”