A certain tension drains away from his shoulders. “I was getting worried. Hell of a way to come for a no-show.”
“We’ve been a bit busy this week.” He nods vigorously. All his body language is a bit off, with the kind of uncoordinated exaggeration of someone who’s losing fine motor control from being awake too long. “What brings you over here?” I ask, checking the time. If we’re to get him to Heathrow for a nine o’clock checkin we’ll have to leave soon.
“My manager sent me to courier a message for your C-suite crisis team. Hand-to-hand, eyes-only, because the regular networks are all compromised. I’m supposed to deliver it in person, so”—McKracken looks at me—“I apologize in advance,” he says, then hits me in the face with a soul-gaze.
It is a very bad idea to try and soul-gaze the Eater of Souls. I manage to catch him under the arm before he crumples, and save his pint from spilling for the second time in a minute, and I’m pretty certain I managed not to take a bite out of him but dammit, it’s a really bad idea to take me by surprise that way. Clearly an adept, he takes it on the figurative chin and bends over, retching. I wave the bartender back: “I think he just tried to inhale his beer,” I tell the guy. McKracken leans against the bar and takes a deep breath, eyes squeezed shut. He’s actually in good shape, considering what he just tried to do. If an unwarded civilian caught me by surprise like that they’d be waiting for an ambulance right now.
“What are you?” he manages.
I shrug. “Bob Howard, Detached Senior Specialist grade one, Q-Division SOE, at your service. Like I said, the Senior Auditor was unavailable so they sent me in his place.”
“But you’re not, you’re not—” He looks at my face, everywhere but my eyes, as if frantically searching for something he’s lost.
“I’m Dr. Angleton’s replacement,” I say gently, and his face pales.
“I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“No,” I agree with him, “you shouldn’t. But you’ve got my undivided attention. Now. What can I do for the Comstock division?”
McKracken clears his throat discreetly, glances round, then makes a curious hand gesture: obviously triggering a macro of some sort, for the noise of the pub flattens and fuzzes until I can no longer identify individual voices. “The short version is, we’re fucked.” He raises his briefcase to the bar, dials in a combination, mutters something under his breath—I feel the very nasty wards on the case relax—and opens it. The contents are disappointingly mundane: toilet kit, spare socks, boarding pass and passport, a battered Dell laptop covered in inventory control stickers, and a brown manila document mailer. This he passes to me. From the heft, it contains some sort of file. “This is the long version. Codename DELIRIUM. Everything about how the enemy within sneaked up on us and whacked us and what they’re trying to accomplish, not that we can do anything about it—it’s gone too far.”
I accept the envelope and slide it into my messenger bag. He glances at it dubiously for a second, then nods. “This will be in front of our executive within twelve hours,” I promise him. “Now. What’s gone too far?” I pick up my glass, take a mouthful of beer, and wait.
McKracken closes his case and pulls himself together with a visible effort. “We’re being attacked via a new vulnerability channel: privatization.” His shoulders slump. “For the past few decades a bunch of congressmen have been pushing a bill to privatize the USPS.” He means their post office. “It’s going to happen sooner rather than later.” I manage to keep a straight face. (It may have been driven off the front page by events in Leeds, but there’s currently a scandal brewing in the news about how little money the government made from selling off the Royal Mail last year.) “When that happens, the Inspectorate’s duties go with it and will be fully under the authority of the new owners. The private carriers, UPS, FedEx, and their rivals, are covered by Homeland Security. So it’s a way of selling us out.”
“If it happens.” I try to look on the bright side.
“No, it’s gonna happen. The fix is in. The Inspectorate has been disbanded and defunded, via an amendment to a fisheries bill that Congress passed on the nod. They blindsided us with this—we had less than a week’s advance warning, it just came out of nowhere, bam! Only it’s not a true privatization—the Treasury will keep a controlling shareholding and most of the shares go to a holding company that already exists, a front owned by the OPA that’s called GP Services. That’s short for Golden Promise.”
I nearly drop my glass. “The—what—”
I have a flashback to fimbulwinter striking Colorado Springs, years ago: driving through a blizzard towards the airport only to be turned back by Highway Patrol officers. Johnny McTavish and ’Seph Hazard in a safe house, looking angry and tired and alive in a way they never were in meetings, like they’d woken up and remembered what it was like to measure themselves against dead-eyed worshippers chanting foul hymns in a desecrated megachurch before a silver-haired preacher with flickering emerald-bright eyes. Me, and a giant wood louse from hell in a fish tank in the basement of a church, mindlessly singing lullabies to its worshippers through the spawn it had grafted to them in place of their tongues.
“GP Services is a subsidiary of GP Systems, which is owned by Golden Promise Ministries out of Colorado Springs, which was set up over a decade ago by one of the OPA’s deniable assets, a stringer called Schiller.” I startle involuntarily. “Did you know of him?”