Jennifer Morgue (44 page)

"Bob." She looks at me as if I'm mad. There's a loud bang from inside the control room, and a human figure in a black beret runs out onto the sealed doors flooring the pool: I shoot instinctively and miss, and he dives for cover. "Leave the fucking cat — hey, that's Billington down there!" She raises her instrument and prepares to let fly.

The cat squirts out across the floor, a white blur targeting the downed bad guy. I shoot again, and again, and keep missing.

"Not Billington! Get the cat!"

Mo sniffs skeptically. "Are you sure"

"Yes, I'm goddamn sure!" Billington's standing in front of the iron maiden, as if steeling himself to jump inside. "It's the enemy! Get it now, or we're fucked!"

Mo raises her violin, squints darkly down at the deck below us, and drops a noise like a million felines being disemboweled down on top of Fluffy. Who opens his fanged maw to howl, then explodes like a gore-filled, white dandelion head. Mo turns and looks at me harshly. "That looked just like a perfectly ordinary cat to me. If you've — "

"It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!" I gabble. "The clue — he saw a laser dot and dodged — "

"Bob. Back up a moment."

"Yes"

"The cat. You said it was the enemy. You didn't say it was occupied by the mind of that thing?" She points up at the ceiling, where the chthonic warrior is definitely twitching and writhing. I stare.

"Uh, well, I meant — "

"And you thought killing it would improve matters"

"Yes"

One of the bole-like knots in the warrior's hide is growing larger. Then it opens, revealing an eye the size of a truck tire.

It stares right back at me.

She clouts me on the back of the head: "Run!"

The huge tentacle slams down onto the deck where Ellis Billington kneels in supplication before his god, landing with a percussive clang that rattles the remaining windows and reduces him to a greasy stain on the bulkhead. Which is probably why Mo and I survive: we stumble back through the control room doorway about two seconds before the treetrunk-thick limb slams into the wall with the force of a runaway locomotive. Support trusses scream and buckle beneath the blow. I start coughing and my eyes water immediately.

The air is gray with smoke and thick with the greasy fish-oil smell of burning insulation. I thump the big red button beside the door and metal shutters begin to drop down behind the broken glass — maybe it's too little too late, but at least it makes me feel better. "Where's Ramona?

Mo glares at me. "What makes you think rescuing her's on my list of mission objectives? You're disentangled, aren't you"

I stare back at her, wondering who the hell she thinks she is, barging in here with her Class A thaumaturgic weapons.

Then I blink and remember sharing a slow breakfast with her back before all this started, all those endless weeks ago — Is that all? "I think I know what you're thinking," I say slowly, feeling an awful weary emptiness inside me, "but that's not what's been going on between us. And if you leave her because you're jealous, you'll be making a mistake you can never undo. Plus, you'll be leaving her to that."

JENNIFER MORGUE thumps against the outside of the security shutters, sending a shower of glass daggers crackling and clinking across the floor. The shutters bend but they hold: something's clearly wrong with the beast, or it should have been out of the moon pool by now, leaving a twisted trail of titanium structural members behind it. Dumping the controlling intelligence out of its temporary host body must have awakened the chthonian prematurely, still deathly weak and hungry. Mo doesn't look away from my face. She's searching me for something, some sign. I stare at her, wondering which way she's going to jump, whether the geas has gone to her head: if it has conferred not only the power that goes with her role, but also the callousness.

After a few seconds Mo looks away. "We'll sort this out later."

I stumble back towards the sacrifice chairs. Ramona is still out. I rest a palm on her forehead, then snatch it back fast: she's fever-hot. "Give me a hand ... " I manage to get one arm over my shoulder and begin to lift her off the chair, but in my present state I'm too weak. Just as my knees begin to give out under me someone takes her other arm. "Thanks — "

I glance round her lolling head.

"This way, mate." The apparition grins at me around its regulator. "Sharpish!"

"If you say so." More black-clad figures appear — this time, wearing wet suits and body armor. "Is Alan here"

"Yeah. Why"

"Because — " there's a crashing noise from the far wall, and I wince " — there's an alien horror on the other side of that wall and it wants in bad. Make sure somebody tells him." I start coughing: the air in here becoming unbreathable.

"Ah, Bob, exactly the man! Don't worry about the eldritch horror, we've got a plan for this contingency — as soon as we've evac'd we'll just pop a brace of Storm Shadows on his ass and send him right back down where he came from. But you're exactly the man I was hoping to see. How are you doing, old chap? Got a Sitrep on the opposition for me"

I blink, bleary-eyed. It's Alan all right: wearing scuba gear and a communications headset only the Borg could love, he still manages to look like an excitable schoolteacher. "I've had better days. Look, the primary opposition movers are dead, and I think Charlie Victor might be amenable to an offer of political asylum if the rite of unbinding did what I think it did to her, but about the Smart car on the drilling deck — "

have to worry: the Auditors won't mind normal wear and tear — "

"No, that's not it." I try to focus. "In the boot. There's a tablecloth with a diorama wrapped up in it. Would you mind having one of your lads blow it up? Otherwise all the Bond mojo zapping around in here is going to follow us home and wreck any chance of me and Mo getting back together again for anything but a one-night stand."

"Ah! Good thinking." Alan pushes a button and mutters into his mike. "Anything else"

"Yeah." Either there's a lot of gray smoke in here, or — "I'm feeling dizzy. Just let me sit down, for a moment..."

IT'S AUGUST IN ENGLAND, AND I'M ALMOST functioning on British Summer Time again. We're having another heat wave, but up here on the Norfolk coast it's not so bad: there's an onshore breeze coming in from the Wash, and while it isn't exactly cold, it feels that way after the Caribbean.

We call this place the Village: it's an old in-joke. Once upon a time it was a hamlet, a village in all respects save its lack of a parish church. It was one of three churchless hamlets that had clustered in this area, and the last of them still standing, for the others slid under the waves a long time ago.

There was only the one meandering road in the vicinity, and it was potholed and poorly maintained. Go back sixty or seventy years and you'd find it was home to a small community of winkle-pickers and fishermen who braved the sea in small boats. They were a curious, pale, inbred lot, not well liked by the neighbors up and down the coast, and they kept to themselves.

Some of them, it's said, kept to themselves so efficiently that they never left the company of their own kind from birth unto death.

But then the Second World War intervened. And someone remembered the peculiar paper the village doctor had tried to publish in the Lancet, back in the '20s, and someone else noticed its proximity to several interesting underwater obstructions, and, with the stroke of a pen, the War Ministry relocated everyone who lived next to the waterline. And the men from MI6 Department 66 came and installed electricity and telephones and concrete coastal defense bunkers, and they rerouted the road so that it doubled back on itself and missed the village completely before merging with the road to the next hamlet up the coast. And they systematically erased the Village from the Ordnance Survey's public maps, and from the post office, and from the discourse of national life. In a very real sense, the Village is as far away from England as Saint Martin, or the Moon. But in another sense, it's still too close for comfort.

Today, the Village has the patina of neglect common to building developments that subsist on the largess of government agencies, and rely for their maintenance on duct tape and the extensive use of the power of Crown Immunity to avoid planning requirements. It's not a white-painted picturesque Italianate paradise like Portmeirion, and we inmates aren't issued numbers instead of names. But there's a certain resemblance to that other Village — and there is, overlooking the harbor mole, a row of buildings that includes an old-fashioned pub with paint peeling from the wooden decking outside, worn linoleum floors, and hand-pumps that dispense a passable if somewhat briny brew.

It's late afternoon and I'm on my second pint, slumped in the grasp of the sofa in the east corner of the lounge bar. I'm the only customer at this time of day — most everyone else is off attending training courses or working — but the bar stays open all the same.

The door opens. I'm busy failing to reread a dog-eared paperback biography, my mind skittering off the words as if they're polished ice cubes that melt and slide away whenever I warm them with my glance. Right now it's gathering moss on the coffee table in front of me as I idly flip the antique Zippo lighter that's the one part of my disguise kit I ended up bringing home. Footsteps slowly approach, clattering on the bare floor. I sit there in the corner, and I wonder tiredly if I ought to run away. And then it's too late.

"He told me I'd find you here," she says.

"Really?" I put the Zippo down and look up at her.

The prelude to this little drama took place the day before yesterday in Angleton's office. I was sitting in the cheap plastic visitor's seat he keeps on the other side of his desk, my line of sight partially blocked by the bulky green-enameled flank of his Memex, trying to hold my shit together. Up until this point I'd been doing a reasonable job aided by Angleton going out of his way to explain how we were going to clear my entirely unreasonable expense claims with the Auditors: but then he decided to try and get all human on my ass. "You'll be able to see her whenever you want," he said, right out of the blue, without any warning.

"Fuck it! What makes you think — "

"Look at me, boy." There's a tone of voice he uses that reaches into the back of your head and pulls the control wires, grating and harsh and impossible to ignore: it got my attention.

I looked directly at him. "I am sick and tired of everyone tiptoeing around me as if I'm going to explode," I heard myself say. "Apologizing won't help: what's done is done, there's no going back on it. It was a successful mission and the ends, at least in this case, justify the means. However underhanded they were."

"If you believe that, you're a bigger fool than I thought." Angleton closed the cover of the accounts folder and put his pen down. Then he caught my gaze. "Don't be a fool, son."

Angleton's not his real name — real names confer power, which is why we always, all of us, use pseudonyms — nor is it the only thing about him that doesn't ring true: I saw the photographs in his dream-briefing, and if he was that old when he was along for the ride on Operation JENNIFER, he can't be a day under seventy today. (I've also seen an eerily similar face in the background of certain archival photographs dating from the 1940s, but let's not go there.) "Is this where you give me the benefit of your copious decades of experience? Stiff upper lip, the game's the thing, they also serve who whatever-the-hell-the-saying goes"

"Yes." His cheek twitched. "But you're missing something."

lecture about wounded pride or something.

"We fucked with your head, boy. And you're right, it is just another successful operation, but that doesn't mean we don't owe you an apology and an explanation."

"Great." I crossed my arms defensively. He picked up his pen again, scratching notes on his desk pad. Two weeks' compassionate leave. I can stretch it to a month if you need it, but beyond that, we'll need a medical evaluation."

Scribble, scribble. "That goes for both of you. Counseling, too."

"What about Ramona?" The words hung in the air like lead balloons .

"Separate arrangements apply." He glanced up again, fixing me with a wintry blue stare. "I'm also recommending that you spend the next week at the Village."

"Why?" I demanded. "Because that's where Predictive Branch says you need to go, boy. Did you want fries with that"

"Fucking hell. What do they have to do with things"

"If you'd ever studied knife fighting, one of the things your instructors would have drilled into you is that you always clean your blade after using it, and if possible sharpen and lubricate it, before you put it away. Because if you want j to use it again some time, you don't want to find it stuck to the scabbard, or blunt, or rusted. When you use a tool, you take care to maintain it, boy, that's common sense. From the organization's point of view ... well, you're not just an interchangeable part, a human resource: we can't go to the nearest employment center and hire a replacement for you just like that. You've got a unique skill mix that would be very difficult to locate — but don't let it go to your head just yet — which is why we're willing to take some pains to help you get over it. We used you, it's true. And we used Dr. O'Brien, and you're both going to have to get used to it, and what's more important to you right now — because you expect to be used for certain types of jobs now and again — is that we didn't use you the way you expected to be used. Am I right?" I spluttered for a moment. "Oh, sure, that's everything! In a nutshell! I see the light now, it's just in my nature to be all offended about having my masculinity impugned by being cast in the role of the Good Bond Babe, hero-attractor and love interest for Mo in her capacity as the big-swinging-dick secret agent man with the gun, I mean, violin, and the license to kill. Right? It's just vanity. So I guess I'd better go powder my nose and dry my tears so I can look glamorous and loving for the closing romantic-interest scene, huh"