The Apocalypse Codex (38 page)

AT THE EXACT MOMENT THAT LOCKEY IS BEING PAGED BY SECURITY
in the New Life Church’s control room, it’s coming up on 6 p.m. in London. In a dingy office block above a row of shuttered shops, somewhere south of the river, most of the windows are dark, for it is far into overtime territory in a time of spending cuts. But in one particular meeting room—windowless, in the interior of the warren of narrow puce-green corridors and beige-carpet-tiled offices that make up the New Annex—the lights are burning late.

Approach the meeting room by way of the corridor and you will see that the door has no windows, and is identified only by a name plate reading M25. There’s a strip of lights above it, like a miniature horizontal traffic signal. Right now the red light is flashing.

There’s a battered boardroom table in the middle of the room. Eight chairs—equally battered, castoffs from Human Resources—are scattered around it. Someone has furnished it with a large black velvet tablecloth, chain-stitched with intricate designs in conductive silver thread using a sewing machine that is stored in a secure vault room when not in use. A couple of ruggedized boxes full of electronics sit at one end of the table, attached to the cloth by alligator clips and to a wheeled, voltage-regulated battery pack by fat cables. The door is not merely shut, or locked, but barred: physically and by means of less obvious but more lethal wards. These are not the only precautions against unwanted eavesdropping—only the most obvious ones.

“Tell me,” the Senior Auditor leans forward, “precisely how long ago Howard was supposed to report in.”

Gerald Lockhart clears his throat as he checks his wristwatch: “I was expecting him to be here by now,” he says mildly. “I delivered the scram instruction at eight fifteen p.m. yesterday and authorized him to use any means necessary. He should have had sufficient time to make a connection by now.”

The Auditor—sixty-ish, male, distinguished-looking, with gold-rimmed half-moon bifocals—exchanges a significant look with his colleague—female, late forties, with the twin-set-and-pearls look of a House of Lords apparatchik. She delivers the next question pointedly: “What
is
the communication situation at present?”

Lockhart grimaces as if he’s just been asked to swallow a live toad. “In a word, poor. Phone calls are not connected. Email is not downloaded. SMS messages are not delivered. To determine whether this was specific to our people, I tried contacting various businesses in Colorado. Denver and Colorado Springs and all points between might as well have dropped off the map. The last information I could independently verify was that there is an anomalous snowstorm sweeping down the Rockies, that all flights in and out of those cities and their environs are grounded, and there’s some kind of problem with satellite phones.”

The female auditor makes a note on her pad. “Have you enquired through formal channels yet?”

“No.” Lockhart stares down his nose, refusing to be intimidated. “As I already noted at the last oversight meeting, local law enforcement is believed to be compromised.”

“Have you contacted the Black Chamber, directly or indirectly?”

Lockhart takes a deep breath. “That’s what we’re here to discuss. The answer is ‘no,’ by the way. Not without your authorization.”

The male Auditor speaks again: “So we have established a baseline for this situation.” He looks at Lockhart sharply. “Denver. Tell me about its geography.”

“Geography? It’s on a plateau.” Lockhart shrugs. “West of it, everything goes crinkle-cut. East, it slopes gently down to the Mississippi.”

The fourth occupant of the meeting room finally speaks. “A
plateau
.” His tone is wintry.

“Thank you, Doctor,” the female Auditor is snippy, “unless you have anything to contribute…?”

“Yes, it’s a plateau,” Lockhart snaps waspishly. “With a couple of cities in the middle, and a
big temple
. The parallels to the layout of a certain other plateau in a location formerly subject to regular photorecon overflight did not pass me by, James.”

Angleton nods. He rests his elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers steepled; beneath the harsh fluorescent light from the ceiling tubes, his face looks sunken, cadaverous. “I see.” He turns to stare at the auditors. “You are aware of APOCALYPSE CODEX?”

The male Auditor nods. “That is the document that…” He glances at Lockhart.

“Yes,” says Lockhart, surly at having his work exposed to hostile eyes and critical minds. “The one that was copied during the black bag job at Schiller’s hotel. And that Howard so casually emailed to
an uncleared social contact
—” His icy disapproval is profound.

“The, ah, doctor of divinity,” Angleton notes with relish, “whose thesis was a study of variant Essene apocalypse cults.” He returns Lockhart’s glare with a blandly satisfied expression. “Do we have one of those on payroll? I seem to recall Donald Hiller retired nearly twenty years ago without any decision as to a successor being made. How long would it have taken us to locate and vet a suitable consultant if Howard hadn’t cut the Gordian knot?”

“But he shouldn’t be—”

“Mister Lockhart.”
Angleton leans forward like an angry rattlesnake: “You picked Howard
because
he can think outside the box and improvise solutions in the field. And you sent him out into the field to support BASHFUL INCENDIARY and JOHNNY PRINCE, without showing him the PRINCE dossier or explaining the relationship between Hazard and McTavish and our organization. You are the one who decided that the best way to evaluate his performance under stress would be to handicap him in that respect. You chose your cake. And now you are complaining about the flavor?”

“Dr. Angleton!” The female Auditor sits up. “
If
you please.” She glances at her colleague. “Should we action HR about this external contact?”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Not yet. A vicar.” The other Auditor picks up a pen and twirls it between his fingertips. “Too public a figure. Background checks only, for now. We can reel him in if he begins to ask uncomfortable questions.”

“So.” The female Auditor raises a hand and starts ticking off finger joints: “Mahogany Row suggested BASHFUL INCENDIARY and JOHNNY PRINCE investigate a location that has unfortunate resonances with GOD GAME BLUE, not to mention PRINCE’s background. Howard was sent to monitor them and provide top cover while they were underground. He acknowledged a scram instruction but is now overdue, and there appears to be a communications blackout over most of populated Colorado. However, he transmitted documentary evidence that confirms GOD GAME VIOLET. The anomalous meteorological conditions suggest that GOD GAME YELLOW is in effect, either now or imminently. INCENDIARY and PRINCE are also unaccounted for. Is that a reasonable summary?”

Lockhart runs a hand through his thinning hair distractedly. “Yes.”

Angleton peers out across a bony cage of interlaced fingers. “The black bag job,” he says smoothly. “It was deniable, yes?”

Lockhart bristles. “It was a journalist from the
News of the World
, if you must know. He bribed a cleaner. We used a cut-out in the Met to suggest he investigate Schiller—
Freaky Fundie Preaches Polygamy at Number Ten
, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “Our friends at the Doughnut were good enough to send us his cameraphone contents. Totally, utterly hands-off, you may rest assured.”

“Ahem.” The Senior Auditor interrupts. “I’d like to get back to the situation in hand, which has evidently spiraled out of control in the last day. Thank you for drawing it to our attention.” He glances at his colleague. “Do you think we have time to send this back up the ladder to board level? Will it keep overnight?”

Her expression could chill liquid nitrogen. “No.” She glances at her watch. “If there’s any risk whatsoever that Schiller is attempting to raise the Sleeper I think we should act immediately on our own cognizance.”

Lockhart looks as if he’s about to say something, but freezes at a glance from Angleton.

“This isn’t a regular external operation anymore,” the Senior Auditor tells Lockhart, not ungently. “Nor is there any need for it to remain so. You can let go, if you want. A more collegiate protocol is called for.”

“Collegiate?” Lockhart pales. “But Hazard and McTavish
are
at that level.”

“He’s talking about the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty,” Angleton points out. “Someone has to tell the Black Chamber. Stands to reason, old man.” Angleton looks at the Auditors. “Well?”

“Doctor Angleton.” The older Auditor pauses to push his bifocals up the bridge of his nose. “I believe you have dealt with those entities in the past. Would you mind…?”

“What? Right here and now?” Angleton, normally imperturbable, for the first time sounds taken aback.

“Can you suggest a reason not to? As this is a matter of some immediate urgency…”

Angleton looks round. “Well, we should ward the documentary evidence first. Anything that’s not cleared for sharing under these admittedly irregular circumstances. And we should ward ourselves
thoroughly
. And have suitable backup in place to contain any hard contact. Otherwise, no.”

“Then so be it.” The Auditor looks at Lockhart. “Gerald. When called upon, you will give an account of the inception of this operation, the direction of the external assets, and the status of Agent Howard as their monitor, and a concise report about what they found. You may mention the motivation for this operation, but should not identify the participants in the black bag job. You may discuss material classified under GOD GAME color codes freely—the Black Chamber will already be fully aware of their content—but may not refer to those codewords directly. Do not discuss McTavish’s background unless the Black Chamber show prior cognizance of it. If you wish to vary these constraints you may request it of us, but not in the presence of the other party. Am I understood?”

Lockhart swallows. “Yes, I think so. Am I to negotiate?”

“No.” The Auditor peers at him over his spectacle frames. “That’s Angleton’s job. He knows what we’re dealing with.” He puts down his pen. “I wish we had time to send out for a longer spoon, though…”

“I THINK THEY’RE ONTO US,” I SAY.

I have been sitting in the passenger seat for the past hour, as Persephone flogs the rental coupé down the interstate in weather only a homesick penguin could love—it’s so cold I’m shivering inside my anorak just from looking out the windows—when I realize what’s going on.

“Where?” she asks, instantly focussed.

“Not in sight right now.” I pause, and glance down at the pizza box. “But we keep passing cops on the shoulder with light bars going. Every ten minutes or so. If you knew you were tracking someone on this highway, wouldn’t that be how you’d do it if you had the resources? Station observers every five to ten miles to radio in a sighting, instead of putting a car on their tail which they might spot.”

“That would work.” Persephone glances at me. “If they knew we were here.”

“Yes, well.” I tap the pizza box. She swears loudly and swerves. “It shouldn’t be able to talk. I put wards on this box that are strong enough to gag a death metal band. But if it’s found some kind of back-channel—”

Persephone isn’t listening to me: she’s chanting something in a tonal language that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, and her eyes are shut. I’m about to make a grab for the steering wheel—we’re beginning to drift out of our lane—when she turns her head to the box, then turns sharply frontwards and opens her eyes again.
“Merde.”

“Yes?”

“It
is
leaking. Bleed-through in the Other Place.”

“The other—”
Oh.
That’s one of the things about ritual magicians; they use visual or tactile metaphors instead of nice standard well-defined terminology. The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an
n
-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue. And if she says it’s leaking—“I should have grounded it there, too?”

“That might not have worked.” Her fingers are white on the wheel. “It has an astral body: separate the two and it’ll probably die. It’s connected to something in the distance off and to the right. Like a spiderweb. I think it’s in the compound near Palmer Lake.
Which is the next turnoff.
”

Signs blur towards us, warning of a junction: turn right for the Air Force Academy. Without indicating, Persephone crosses lanes and brakes hard, dragging us into a sharp turn before merging with a main road below the grade of the interstate. “Hey!” I say.

“We’re going to Palmer Lake,” she says firmly, “to pay a visit to the Golden Promise Ministries compound while Schiller’s people are attending their revival show. Besides, it’s lit up like a lighthouse in the Other Place.”

“But the church service—”

“Is fuel for Schiller’s invocation, yes, but do you think he’ll have set up the major summoning itself in the middle of a mega-church?”

It’s like arguing with a madwoman, except she’s not mad. “But he might have—”

“No. He hasn’t had the free run of the mega-church until very recently. If he had, he wouldn’t be using it to attract new victims. They’d already belong to him.”

It’s hard to argue with her logic because it fits the pattern that’s emerging, but I really want her to be wrong. A few months back, Mo came home in meltdown after closing down CLUB ZERO in Amsterdam—a circle of cultist fanatics (from this neck of the woods, now that I think about it) who’d decided to summon up something unpleasant. The venue for the summoning was a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel, but the fuel was the kindergarten on the other side of the road. Linked by a path through the Other Place—exactly the MO Persephone is proposing. I
really
want Persephone to be wrong about this.