The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (5 page)

I have a bad record of letting Pete talk me into sticking my nose into dusty, mildewed sheds. It’s getting to be a habit. First there was the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY public information campaign posters, which we found amidst huge quantities of junk stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of Watford. (The less said about that, the better: a vampire elder was using it to hold his personal stash, some of which was still alive and twitching.) Then we were sent on a couple of training courses in the secure document storage tunnels under Dansey House. And now we’ve drawn this fool’s errand.

I’m a mathematician with an interest in higher-dimensional topological deformations, and a recent career track that includes designing visualization systems for directed exploration of stochastic market movements with application to the Black–Scholes model – a weaponized banker, in other words. I have
zero
training or understanding of architecture, facilities management, structural engineering, or logistics. So I’m somewhat puzzled that Management have shoved me out here with Pete (who, as a vicar, is just as unqualified as I am) to tramp around various decaying crown estate assets in West Yorkshire and pronounce on their fitness for refurbishment for various missions that I am not yet cleared to know about.

I suppose it
could
be that, as unqualified but not unintelligent laypersons, Pete and I are both deemed to be free from the pre-existing prejudices and unreasoning enthusiasms of our expert facilities management people. So we’re not automatically going to deliver the message that Facilities think Management want to hear, as opposed to the truth, whatever that may be. On the other hand, maybe the organization is just so short-staffed that sending untrained amateurs into the field is the best they can do, because everyone who actually knows what’s going on is running around naked with their hair on fire shrieking about the end of days. I’d rather not think about that possibility, because in this time of cuts it’s all too plausible – even without the looming prospect of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, whatever that is.

Does CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN loom? I’m not sure: I haven’t officially been briefed on it yet. However, every time anybody who knows anything mentions the code name they twitch nervously and look over their shoulders like it’s the end of the world. This does not make me happy, because these are people who work with zombies, demons, and Civil Service Documentation Standards on a routine basis.

Anyway, back to the present. Yesterday evening Pete and I went down the rabbit hole out at Lawnswood. We waited patiently while Bert Finney finished eating his sandwiches. Then he collected his keys and torch, and gave us a tour of Leeds War Room Region 2, also known as The Bunker.

Shorter version of the report I am about to spend the rest of the evening writing up: the bunker is a dump, a trash-heap, a shit-hole. A damp-infested slum. It probably
can
be restored to functional use, but not at any reasonable cost.

Slightly longer version: while the bunker is structurally sound – it has walls made of prestressed concrete two meters thick – internally it’s a mess. There’s a pile of broken furniture in the canteen. Virtually none of the fittings elsewhere in the bunker are usable: it has largely been stripped. The cable ducting in the Operational Control Room is rusted, the telephone switchroom contains a Strowger mainframe unit that predates the discovery of fire, the subbasement storage area for dry goods is flooded to a depth of nearly a meter with raw sewage from a leaky toilet outflow, the air conditioning filter packs have crumbled or moldered away, and the caretaker has installed a cat flap in the Secretary of State’s apartment so that his pet can sleep there when it’s not fighting a desperate rearguard action against the rats. This is
before
we mention the early 1990s when the sleeping quarters were used to host illegal raves, and the period during the late 1990s when the canteen was a heroin shooting gallery. There is lead in the roof and the 1940s era smoke detectors contain Americium capsules so intensely radioactive you could make a dirty bomb with them, making it a toxic waste site as well.

Given several million pounds and a multiyear timetable I think the bunker could probably be renovated to a high standard: but my understanding is that we need a new national headquarters building, not an emergency hole-in-the-ground for when the air raid sirens go off. The only conceivable use I can see for it is if CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN turns out to be an alien invasion, in which case we’re totally fucked.

What are we doing here? Can somebody explain that to me?
Please?

Tuesday afternoon is overcast and cloudy. Silently cursing the jobsworth who scheduled him for a pre-dusk meeting with his new local supervisor, Alex approaches the discolored aluminum entryphone at the back of the Arndale Centre in Headingley with a deep sinking feeling.
Is this it?
he thinks disbelievingly. He’s at the right address, and the cracked plastic face-plate next to the fourth doorbell holds a card lettered with CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES in hungover handwriting. But the card has slipped down, one corner is stained a suspicious shade of brown, and the door opens off the car park of a tiny, ancient suburban shopping mall. Alex raises a gloved hand and holds the remote entry keyfob he’s been given against the plate as he pushes the button. The lock buzzes, and he steps inside.

Facilities have leased a number of private sector offices and storage facilities around the outskirts of the city, for temporary use by the London-based staff commuting to Regional Government Continuity Centre (North) – as Leeds is designated in the stilted language of internal Laundry memoranda. These offices are supposedly only temporary, and will vanish like the morning dew as soon as the Laundry manages to kick the Department of Work and Pensions out of their Kremlinesque palace on Quarry Hill, but Alex knows instinctively that the rival ministry is going to fight viciously to hang on to its status-symbol headquarters building.

Meanwhile, the temporary Arndale Centre office makes the New Annex look like a five-star luxury hotel. Take an early 1970s British copy of an early 1960s American shopping mall – small, dingy, and with parking spaces sized for 1950s runabouts. Cycle it through four or five recessions and a couple of renovations – a real American mall would have been bulldozed and rebuilt three times already by now – then, as the most recent recession bites, turn the old stock rooms into cramped offices aimed at neckbeard-wearing, flat-white-swilling hipster wannabes who can’t cut it in London but oh so desperately want to be cool. Allow the offices to fester for three or four years while the hipster startups go bust, then rent them out as payday loan call centers and, finally, as overflow offices for the surviving rump of Her Majesty’s Civil Service – the bits that can’t be outsourced, and desperately need short-term lets.

It’s all a bit of a come-down to Alex, who until recently studied in the Hogwartsesque ambiance of Oxford University, then toiled in a blue-chip investment bank’s opulent London headquarters. He grits his teeth and trudges up the scuffed concrete steps. They’re dimly lit by flickering fluorescent tubes. The lack of natural daylight is welcome in view of his peculiar condition, but it’s not exactly a luxurious affordance: quite the opposite, in fact.

There is a front desk at the top of the stairs in front of the rat’s warren of windowless cubbyholes that pass for offices here. The security guard seated there startles as Alex opens the fire door, and reaches for a hidden button as he speaks. “Sir, you can’t wear that —”

Alex raises the visor on his full-face motorcycle helmet. “Give me a sec,” he says irritably, fumbling with the chin strap. He rode here on a rattly old Honda moped with L-plates, which he’s left leaning against a concrete pillar in the rooftop car park. He bought it yesterday for the princely sum of five hundred pounds. It’ll probably fail its next MOT test, but it’s a great excuse for wearing a helmet between hotel and office. He pulls the offending item off. “Alex Schwartz, from the New Annex. I’m supposed to report to Mrs. Knight? I’m hot-desking here for the next two weeks…”

Juggling helmet in arm, he worms a hand inside his jacket and pulls out his warrant card. The security jobsworth relaxes slightly, then frowns. “Sir? My list says you were supposed to be here for a meeting at nine?”

Alex glances at the clock on the wall. It’s a quarter to three in the afternoon. “So? I’m just very, very early.”

“Sir, it says here, nine a.m…”

“Hang on.” Alex wishes for a moment that he had three hands: with some difficulty, he pulls out his phone. “Nope, that’s wrong, should be nine p.m. I don’t work mornings. Or daylight hours, for that matter. Is she still in?”

“I don’t think she’s gone home yet, sir.” The security man looks distinctly perturbed. He thrusts a clipboard at Alex, who for the first time notices a pair of CCTV cameras mounted on a frame behind the guard’s shoulder. He suppresses a shudder. The guard continues: “Would you mind signing in, please?”

Mrs. Knight has not gone home, and she’s still in her office when Alex knocks on the flimsy plywood door. “Yes?”

“Alex Schwartz.” He pushes the door open. “I’m here for a meeting; there’s been a screw-up over the time, I only work nights.”

“Oh, gracious.” She pushes her hair back – Alex is just about experienced enough to recognize a hastily suppressed eye-roll – and waves him into her visitor’s seat. (It’s armless, foam hangs out of one front seat corner, and a suspicious water stain decorates the back.) “Let me see – no, it says nine a.m. in the calendar.” She bats the ball brutally back into his half of the court, crosses her arms, and waits.

“Well, the calendar’s wrong.” Mrs. Knight reminds Alex of a particularly uncooperative type of university administrator he’s met before, a kind he’s never really been able to get a handle on, so he buys time by glancing around. Over the past few months he’s gotten used to the make-do-and-mend ambiance of the New Annex, but even so, this is a distinct step down. “Have you been briefed on OPERA CAPE?” he asks. She nods, almost imperceptibly. “I’m one of them,” he says briskly.
Deal with it.
“So I work nights. Someone obviously cocked up the meeting slot, that’s all.”

To her credit, Mrs. Knight doesn’t blanch, recoil, or reach for a crucifix. Alex finds this interesting, and starts to pay more attention. She’s in her late forties or early fifties, with tightly permed graying hair. She wears her office suit like a uniform. Ex-military, he guesses, or otherwise accustomed to disciplined austerity. She’s clearly made of stern stuff. Her office fixtures and fittings are beyond shabby, but everything is clean and tidy. “You’re part of Facilities, aren’t you?” he asks. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

“Oh Lord, they didn’t brief you either, did they?”
Now
the eye-roll comes out to play in earnest. “You’re the second today – do you know a Dr. Russell? He was through here earlier, I think Jack is still sorting out his desk —”

“He’s a vicar, not a doctor,” Alex says absent-mindedly. “Yes, Pete’s my official mentor. Is he still —”

“Well then,” she interrupts, standing up, “let’s go find him, grab a meeting room, and hear what you think of the bunker.”

The Arndale office has a conference room. To Alex’s eye it looks like it was once a store cupboard, or maybe a stock room. Now it’s filled by an outsized boardroom table so large that there is only room for chairs along two edges. A row of mildewed lever arch files slowly collapses on a sagging chipboard shelf on the wall above the far side of the table: Alex makes out the runic inscription
ACCOUNTS PAYABLE 88-89
on the spine of one of the binders. Mrs. Knight parks him at the end farthest from the door with a mug of institutional coffee that is almost exactly the same shade of beige as the carpet, then goes in search of Pete. She doesn’t take long to find him: they’re back almost before Alex has time to zone out.

“The bunker,” Mrs. Knight begins expectantly. “What did you make of it?”

Alex cuts to the chase. “Why hasn’t it been condemned? The basement’s flooded, it’s about thirty years overdue for maintenance, and it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“Dr. Schwartz, the Civil Service doesn’t simply
abandon
everything it can no longer think of a use for.” She smiles at him, experimentally, and the temperature in the room drops a few degrees. “If it did, your kind would get short shrift, wouldn’t they?” Pete raises a hand as Alex bristles, but she pushes on regardless: “We don’t abandon people – like you – or
things
. The bunker has been underutilized for twenty-three years, but it has certain advantages. Besides being blast-proof, it’s fireproof and has daylight-proof accommodation, doesn’t it? It’s just off the ring road, on a major artery running right into the city center. One might even speculate that with a little modernization to bring it up to scratch it’d make excellent accommodation for photophobic employees?” Her smile is as bright as the dawn.

“But —” Alex feels unaccountably panicky. The bunker is terrifyingly close to a certain suburban estate near Adel that Alex is desperately trying to avoid – the one where his old bedroom lurks in wait – but there’s got to be more to it than that, hasn’t there?

“Calm down, Alex.” Pete lays a palm on Alex’s forearm. Alex can feel himself twitching, the end of his biro rattling on the desktop as if he’s auditioning for a hair metal band’s spontaneous combustion spot. Pete frowns apologetically at Mrs. Knight: “That wasn’t decaf, was it?”

“Why? Is it important —”

“Oh dear.” Pete winces. “Alex, it’s my fault: I didn’t spell it out properly.” Pete’s tone is soothing. To their interlocutor, he continues: “Alex doesn’t do caffeine, these days: it makes him a little too intense.”

It’s mortifying: in the months since contracting PHANG syndrome, Alex has discovered that he’s become sensitive to caffeine. He’s not just mildly sensitive: a cup of milky tea has the same effect on him as a double shot of espresso on a normal person. (A regular filter coffee ought to come with a twelve-month sentence for possession with intent to supply.) He tries to nod, but the effort of doing so while keeping his teeth from clattering defeats him. Mrs. Knight looks at him dubiously, then back at Pete. “All right, then… can you present your colleague’s findings while he gets over it?”