“Not a clue, me old cock!” Johnny makes what is clearly his best effort to show good cheer. “The fact that Golden Promise Services Corporation are up to their armpits in outsourcing contracts and the OPA are making cannibal whoopee on their sister agencies is neither here nor there. But when someone with ’is photo on their passport flies in and a couple of days later someone else tries to snatch you off the streets of London, that’s kind of suggestive, innit?”
“I was on TV the evening before,” I say slowly, slotting an unwelcome realization into place. “Was I there as bait?” Did someone set me up with Paxo on Newsnight just to tell Schiller’s people that I’m about? (I knew the “let’s bug the BBC newsroom” mission was too Mickey Mouse to be the entire story.) My nasty paranoid imagination supplies a plausible scenario all too easily: The armed cops on the door of a clearly compromised work site put up a neon sign saying BOB WORKS HERE, but they clock off at 6:00 p.m. because bad guys only kick the door down during office hours. Meanwhile I’ve just ploughed through a day of meetings carefully contrived to keep me busy until the SA sends me to run his little after-hours errand, instead of sending the cops to haul the helpful Mr. McKracken into protective custody—
No, Bob, don’t be fucking stupid, the Laundry wouldn’t set you up as a tethered goat, they’d never do that to anyone senior and you’re a valuable high-level asset—
“Dunno, Bob, not my brief, more’n my job’s worth to go drawing conclusions.” He whistles surprisingly tunefully, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “Although it isn’t just Schiller who’s got the knives out for you. You being our public face to the nation and all that, it could be anyone, really. And it would be really fucking stupid of Schiller to do something so gauche as to try to put a hit on his least favorite Laundry employee the week he sets foot back on old Blighty, wouldn’t it? Not saying what you’re thinking is impossible, like, but say wot you will about him, Schiller isn’t stupid. Smart money is on you being the wrong target: he sent them after your contact, and they followed you because ’e passed you the file the SA wanted. Let’s face it, it’d be pretty fucking dumb to send only three-and-a-bit brain-scorched gunmen to take down the Eater of Souls, right?”
I take a deep, shaky breath. “I could have killed everyone within a quarter-kilometer radius.” That’s an underestimate, probably, but I know better than to go full Angleton in the middle of a city. (I practice rigid self-control. It leaves me with unresolved anger issues, but those are the breaks: with great power comes a great tendency to mangle Spider-Man quotes.)
“If it’s any consolation, the SA knows that.” He ponders for a few seconds. “What d’you think would have happened that time in Denver if you’d had your current mojo when we walked into the New Life temple while Schiller was running his summoning?”
I let my breath out. “I’d have dropped the hammer.” Necromantic rituals are really easy to break if you’re the Eater of Souls, just like house fires are really easy to blow out if you just happen to detonate a few kilos of C-4 inside them. Of course there won’t be much of the house left afterwards—but that’s not the point.
“Right, right.” He punches the palm of his left hand for emphasis. “Nobody in the big tent would be stupid enough to hang you out as bait, and Schiller—or his people, or whoever fielded those grunts—are too professional to take the bait. Which means we’re probably looking at something else, it’s not about you, you just ’appened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that that’s a surprise, knowing you. You sit tight, read yer file and write yer report, and I’ll see it gets to the big man as soon as you’re done—” The buzzer rings again. “’Scuse me.”
Johnny disappears from my field of view and I slump back on the sofa. I hear quiet voices from the vestibule, then feel the arrival of someone with another high-level ward. Two sets of footsteps approach: Johnny’s heavy boot steps and someone lighter and faster. “Bob? Are you all right? Bob?”
It’s Mo, she’s upset and frightened, and that’s when I get really afraid.
THREE
GOD GAME INDIGO
I force myself to my feet, dizzy and nauseous notwithstanding, as Mo breaks into an uneven trot. Time stops, or goes a bit blurry for a while. “I’ll just be minding my own business out back,” Johnny grumbles in the background.
When I come back to myself I’ve got a double-armful of my wife, and she’s hugging me hard enough to hurt, and sniffing. “Don’t you dare get yourself killed!” she scolds me, voice catching somewhere between laughing and crying.
“I’m”—I’m wheezing—“touched.”
“Touched in the head,” she grumps, but her grip around me loosens. If she was that fragile when she was carrying the White Violin she’d have been an hors d’oeuvre for horrors years ago, but she’s shaking. That medical leave she’s back from, I wonder if it was worse than she’s letting on? Add a sudden change of job—“What … what exactly happened?”
“Let me sit down…” Somehow we find ourselves hip to hip on a white leather sofa so big it could be the end product of a really bad taxidermy job on Moby Dick. “The SA sent me to talk to an informer and I was jumped on my way home.”
“I got that,” she says impatiently. “You mentioned a snatch.”
“They were tailing me, I’m not sure for how long. Then they set up a box, three plus a bomb in a pram—the pram was an insurance policy, I think. There was a van in the frame. I think they meant to take me but they were armed”—I feel her shiver as I continue—“and I’m not sure whether they were after me or the brief.” I tilt my chin towards the messenger bag on the sofa.
“Right. Right.” She tucks herself against my side and buries her chin on my shoulder.
“How not-all-right are you?” I ask, hoping she’ll tell me something meaningful.
“I’m”—she sniffs—“not very all right at all, it’s the relief more than anything else, I mean, you’re not kidnapped or dead”—she sniffs again—“during is easy it’s after that’s harsh, that’s what my counselor keeps telling me.”
Counselor? What? I’ve been so up to my ass in lost temples to nameless evil and laying to rest the thaumaturgic equivalent of leaking radioactive disposal sites that I can almost half-kid myself I’ve got an excuse for not knowing, but—“We—” I pause and rephrase. “I haven’t been doing a good job of keeping an eye out for you lately, have I?”
“Makes two of us,” she mumbles.
Johnny reappears. He’s carrying two tumblers half-full of amber liquid that promise unguarded words and sore heads on the morrow. “I shall just leave you two lovebirds in ’ere,” he tells us as he hands over the water-of-life. “I’ll be out front with the guard detail if you want me, polishing the guns. Master suite’s all yours; if you want the second bedroom—” He hesitates momentarily. “—I’ll take the sofa.”
He ducks out discreetly enough, but just the mention of the second bedroom is a real buzzkill in view of our recent difficulties. Mo sniffs and straightens up self-consciously. “I’m staying the night,” she says, as if challenging me to contradict her. “Spooky can cope, he’s just a cat.”