The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (6 page)

“Certainly.” Pete opens the folder he’s carrying: it contains a printout of Alex’s 5 a.m. email report. “I’ve looked at the basic bill of works to put the bunker in order and we’re looking at two to three million just to make it structurally safe, drain the subbasement, identify the source of ingress and block and damp-proof it, safe disposal of the medium-level radioactive waste, install a new sprinkler system, and bring the power supply up to modern spec. New mains interconnect, new diesel backup generator, that kind of thing. Then there’s the air filtration system – cost unknown, cold war nuclear-proof air filters aren’t an off-the-shelf product – and the entire telephone and network system to rip out and replace. I’d be surprised if it was less than another million and a half on top. Double everything if it’s done by our wonderful private sector partners, then add the cost of refurnishing and restocking the installation to house forty staff on 24x7 rotation and crisis manning with two hundred bodies for six weeks… and that’s before we add the special extras our department requires. Bindings and wards and suchlike. Is it really worth it? I mean, there are warehouse units out near Elland Road we could customize more easily at a tenth the price.”

Mrs. Knight sighs. Then, to Alex’s surprise, she leans back in her chair, peers shortsightedly at the ceiling, and announces, “You’re right. Although it’s a bad idea to admit it. In fact it’s a potentially career-limiting move to say that. You could embarrass whoever was involved when the bad decisions were made in the first place, twenty or more years ago.”

“Do go on,” Pete encourages her.

“No.” She sits up again and smiles alarmingly. “I saw you palm that card, Doctor.”

“I’m not a doctor —”

“So
he
says.” She nods at Alex. “Rule number one, gentlemen, is that you are
out in the hinterlands
now. To the jobsbodies who keep the public works going and run the spreadsheets and authorize the payments,
this
is a technical service department and
you
are the eggheads from Research and Development in London. So you need respect, or they’ll ignore you, which is why Jez Wilson” – who is Alex’s line manager – “tipped me the wink to take you in hand and explain the facts of life to you. You are both doctors – doctor of divinity isn’t it,
Doctor
Russell? – because otherwise you’re just two trainees out on a provincial junket, getting underfoot and messing things up.

“Whereas, in fact, your brief is to report on the bunker. Not on
whether
it’s suitable for the proposed use, but on
how
to make it suitable. Considering alternatives is not on the table.”

Alex can no longer contain himself. “Wh-why not?”

“Because policy. Or, if you mean
why policy
, because ley lines. You’re dead right about the warehouse units on the southwest, or all the other sites – but we need the bunker as well because it’s in exactly the right place to make best use of the local ley lines. Leeds grew up as a major transport intersection during the industrial revolution. It’s on a canal, a river, a couple of major railway lines, and at the intersection of three major motorways, but there’s an older significance to its location, since it was just a medieval village —”

Ley lines.
Alex zones out because
of course
it would have to be all about the geometry, wouldn’t it? Not the trivial geometry of megadeath architecture, of planting a concrete bunker with walls over a meter thick right at the intersection of the ring road and a main road to the city center, just beyond the 5psi overpressure contour of a quarter megaton air burst directly above Vicar Lane… no: Alex is flashing back to the higher-dimensional occult geometry that winds a nightmarish golden braid through alien continua, where undead alien minds gibber and howl at the darkness. At the projections of higher-dimensional paths into our own curved four-dimensional spacetime that give rise to ley lines along which distance is distorted – paths created by the activities of computational thinkers, be they machines (British Telecom had terrible problems with clock drift in their 1960s microwave tower network due to spontaneous line formation) or concentrations of villagers praying to beings with webbed fingers and dubious dietary preferences.

“Alex?” Pete elbows him discreetly.

“What? Oh, yes. Ley lines. Of course.” Mrs. Knight sends him a cool stare while he struggles to focus through the caffeine buzz. “I take it the bunker is particularly convenient for the, uh, proposed national headquarters?” There, he’s said it: admitted the horrifying possibility that the Laundry is serious about upping stakes from London and transplanting most of its infrastructure to Leeds. It sticks in his throat, but what’s a boy from Bramhope to do?

“You could say that.” Mrs. Knight’s stare loses its acuity by increments. “We’re two and a half kilometers out, here in Headingley. The bunker is another one point five. But if it’s refurbished and we can create a new endpoint anchor in the center of town – I gather R&D has some people looking into amending the construction plans for the Merrion Centre replacement project to distort the local geomantic contour map – we can bring it down to a virtual two hundred meters from the back of Quarry House! You ought to be able to dash that far without catching fire even in bright daylight.”

“And —” Alex blinks. “Right. A nuke-proof regional continuity of government bunker that’s just two hundred meters from the new HQ building via ley line, with access to the national ley line network, I can see why that would be… interesting.” Assuming the newly energized track doesn’t attract eaters and class two or higher agencies to feed on the fleeing personnel, it’d be quite an advantage. “Doesn’t Quarry House also have a bunker?”

“Of course it does.” Mrs. Knight opens her own folder and pulls out a sheaf of dog-eared papers. “But firstly, it’s in the city center, and secondly, it’s smaller, and third, no on-site geomantic nexus. It’s right in the bullseye of the target zone for any major incursion, Dr. Schwartz, and if by some mischance anything
does
hit Leeds, getting stuff in and out of NOH will be nearly impossible —”

“NOH?” asks Pete.

“National Operational Headquarters. That’s what the overall project’s called.” She pulls out another file. “The project to take the fourth largest metropolitan district in the nation and turn it into a fortified coordinating center for repelling alien invasions when the stars come right,
without being obvious
about it.” Is that a nervous tic, a twitch, or a sniff of sly amusement? Alex wonders. “So you see, Dr. Schwartz, it’s not about
whether
we refurbish the bunker – it’s about
how
. And when. And how best to use it to reinforce NOH’s peripheral defenses.

“Now. Shall we go over your preliminary report together? I have some questions I’d like you to consider…”

Alex does not work all night at the Arndale office: for one thing, almost everyone else goes home by 7 p.m., and for another thing, there’s nothing to do there. After their meeting Doris Knight tells him that the next day someone from Internal Resources will assign him a desk, then politely suggests he go home – which in his case means returning to his hotel room. So Alex is out in the city center by 8:30 p.m., wondering moodily whether to try one of the newer Chinese restaurants, when his phone vibrates with the urgent SOS pattern he’s assigned to family members, relatives, and other unwelcome intrusions from the so-called real world.

“Oh hell,” Alex mutters aloud, perturbing a dog-walker as he fumbles the big Samsung out of his jacket pocket and clamps it to the side of his head. “Hello?”

“Alex? Alex, is that you?”

He recognizes his mother’s slightly querulous tone instantly, and although he knows he ought to be glad to hear her voice his heart sinks and in consequence he feels a stab of guilt. He can guess why she’s calling and he really doesn’t want to have to think about it.

“Yes, Mum, it’s me. What is it?”

His mother is fifty-three, with curly brown hair (or so he believes: she’s been dyeing it for some years now), slightly saggy-cheeked, with eyelids that droop at the corners. She wears face powder that smells of lilac (not the choking chemical warfare fragrance of a seventy-year-old, but it’s still an olfactory assault on his senses), and she is still married to Eric, her childhood sweetheart and Alex’s father. She works full-time as a VAT audit clerk for HMRC, in the regional tax headquarters. Her specialty is takeaway food joints. If he could talk to her about his new job he would be surprised by how much their working environments have in common, but this is all irrelevant because Alex is suffering the tachycardia, sweaty palms, and overwhelming deer-caught-in-headlights freezing panic that comes on when he realizes she’s about to put The Question to him again.

“Are you in Leeds yet? When are you coming to dinner?”

Alex is in the habit of phoning his parents every week, usually on Friday evening around seven o’clock, before they sit down to dinner. It’s a long-standing ritual that got started when he first went away to university: if he doesn’t call them, they get anxious. Since working for the Laundry he’s been given a back story to explain any anomalies in his habits, and so far it’s just about held together – despite some unfortunate problems he’s trying to get fixed. But last Friday, seven o’clock found Alex scrunched into a south-facing window seat in second class on an East Coast Main Line train barreling past Peterborough on the way north. Phone signal dropouts and an unwise moment led him to let his guard down and admit what he should, at all costs, have kept to himself: that he was coming home (even if only briefly, because of work). Visiting Leeds is not in and of itself catastrophic. But it gives Mum an excuse to ask The Question once more, and his stomach gives a sickening lurch as he realizes she’s going to do it again.

“I don’t know, Mum, I’m working evenings and into the early hours and commuting back to London at weekends, so I’m not sure —”

“But how about staying up here the week after next? Sarah is going to be home from college by then and she’s dying to see you! Perhaps you can come over for dinner on Saturday? It’ll be just like old times!”

Sarah is Alex’s kid sister. She’s four years younger than him, all elbows and knees and frizzy hair the color of a dead mouse. He remembers her for freckles and dental braces, but he understands she’s twenty now (how did
that
happen?) and in her second year at Nottingham, studying Management and Accounting. She probably thinks she’s a grown-up. Worse, she probably has a boyfriend who thinks she’s a grown-up, and who she will in due course bring home to introduce to the parents over dinner, at which point The Question becomes an unavoidable, fiery source of mortification and embarrassment —

“I can make that Saturday,” he hears his traitor mouth admit as his attention splits to drive his feet in a wide berth around a pavement pizza. “But honestly, if it’s too much bother you don’t need to —”

“Nonsense, I was going to cook anyway! Sarah’s going to bring Mack.” This is the first time he’s heard a male name attached to his younger sibling and he almost walks into a lamppost in surprise, even though it’s entirely in line with his earlier speculation. “Are you bringing, anyone?” He almost misses the brief pause. “We’re dying to meet her, your mystery girlfriend!”

This is The Question, and Alex’s stomach lurches queasily. He’s about to recklessly say
I met this girl called Cassie
, but then he suddenly realizes that they
didn’t
meet. He didn’t even get her phone number. His social life is as bereft of feminine company as ever. “I’ll have to see if she’s free,” he says flatly. “Call you back later?”

“All right! Saturday at seven! Love you, dear!” And Mum ends the call, leaving him twitching on the hook, its viciously barbed point cramping his guts.

Here’s the thing: Alex’s parents are, well,
parents
. Subtype: well-meaning, very ordinary folks. They live in a nice semi out towards Adel, in a classic sixties suburban development (subtype: British, which means self-conscious, cramped, and embarrassed by the trappings of prosperity). Mum, Dad, son, daughter. Two cars and a one-car garage. They’re living the dream, for Marks & Spencer values of the dream, working really hard at being sober-sided middle-class professionals. Dad (never Eric to Alex) is a chartered accountant, Mum (never Samantha) is a tax officer, and Sarah is going to follow in Dad’s footsteps because Alex, the eldest son, insisted on taking his uncanny mental acuity with mathematics to a higher level – but their initial misgivings subsided when he completed his doctoral thesis, replaced by genuine pride when he got a
real
job in the City.

Alex is the eldest child and only son, and Mum and Dad have certain expectations involving the eventual patter of tiny feet. They waited patiently through his schooling and first degree: he was awfully
busy
studying, they agreed. And they waited some more during his PhD. But now he has a
real
job, and a high-status, high-paying one at that, by their lights, so why isn’t he dating an elegantly dressed Jessica from Gilts, and dropping pink-eared hints about engagement rings?

About eight months ago Mum popped The Question and, in a second of weakness, Alex didn’t so much deny being single, let alone pull an imaginary girlfriend out of his hat, as evade The Question and allow his mother to draw her own conclusions. It wasn’t that he
wanted
to mislead his parents as that he was deathly tired of the ritualized ordeal. But he now realizes he should have nipped her misconception in the bud immediately. Mum has somehow convinced herself that Alex is hiding a girlfriend from her, which can only mean something unspeakable. Or worse: he’s hiding a boyfriend, which will force her to confront her own easy assumption that she’s not prejudiced.

In truth, Alex
is
hiding something, but it’s not what she thinks. Alex doesn’t work for the bank anymore. (He’s on indefinite unpaid leave, which is much the same thing.) Alex’s salary has dropped by over 70 percent and there are no juicy bonuses depending on his year-end review. He’s spent so much time focussing on his studies in applied computational demonology and his new job as a civil servant that he hasn’t had time to think about socializing. And that’s before he takes into account his personal affliction: seropositive for V syndrome, and all it implies. Alex could meet Ms. Right tomorrow and he’d be too paralyzed by anxiety and existential dread to ask her out for dinner. It’s not that he wouldn’t
like
to meet someone, but he is hemmed in by ominous circumstances and oppressed by uncertainty.