As I learn when I finally get to check my calendar, the Commons Select Committee hearings are indeed due to kick off that afternoon. I’m not going to be called to give evidence for another two days.
It’s late morning when Zero drops me off outside the New Annex, but work waits for no man and I’ve got a ton of admin to catch up on before I can start working out what exactly I’m going to tell the MPs. Luckily there are no murderous cultists or tabloid photographers waiting to doorstep me outside the office, which is a mercy. The cops are back on door duty with their mirror-visored helmets and matte body armor, but they pay no particular attention as I enter. I head for my office, sit down, sigh loudly, and poke at my inbox and schedule. It’s nearly twelve o’clock, I have a mild headache, and after a minute or three I diagnose an excess of blood in my caffeine stream, so I head to the break room. People get out of my way, either because I have become a giant cockroach overnight or, less unreasonably, because I look like death and I will reap the soul of anyone who gets between me and my coffee.
I grab a mug of institutional paint-stripper and stalk back to my den, just in time for my monitor to ping. It’s the SA: he wants me to drop by his office for a, a—what the fuck is a media performance review? I wonder irritably. It’s in my Outhouse calendar, though, along with other flagged attendees: Mhari and Vikram. And that’s my evening fucked, because it’s blocked through until 8:00 p.m. tonight. Then I spot the start time and swear. I have twenty-five minutes to dash to the canteen, swallow whatever’s on offer, and get to Dr. Armstrong’s office.
I luck out. There’s no queue in the canteen when I get there and they’ve still got some food on the hot counter. I wolf down a steak and kidney pie with baked beans, and at least my stomach isn’t rumbling when I dash for the staircase to Dr. Armstrong’s office on the fourth floor.
“Ah, good afternoon, Bob.” The SA himself answers the door. I enter and collapse on his sofa. The SA’s office is like the den of a somewhat eccentric Oxford don, his sole concession to modernity being an antique 1990s green-screen computer terminal perched on one end of his blotter. (Angleton doubtlessly chewed him out in his own inimitable way for courting disaster through Van Eck phreaking, but hey: that was long ago and in another country, and besides, the barrow-wight is dead.) The office itself is slightly disturbing. It occupies a four-meter-deep slice of the New Annex floor plan but is at least seven meters long, and Dr. Armstrong keeps the window bay permanently shrouded with blackout curtains. It’s no weirder than Angleton’s office, which swapped buildings once while nobody was looking, but this is the sort of thing that leads sane Laundry employees to give DSS-level practitioners a wide berth. I’m probably heading that way myself, come to think of it.
The door opens again and Vikram Choudhury enters. Vik doesn’t have an occult bone in his body unless you categorize management as a black art. “Bob.” He nods. “Dr. Armstrong.” He’s staggering slightly under the weight of a huge armful of stuff; after a moment I realize it consists entirely of newspapers. He wheezes slightly as he deposits them on the SA’s coffee table. “I thought we could—oh, hello.” An otherwise unremarkable section of the wall opens and Mhari steps out. She closes the panel and straightens her jacket, as if it’s perfectly normal to enter the SA’s sanctum via a secret door that can’t possibly lead anywhere inside the building’s real-world floor plan. “Bob.” She smiles impishly. “Dr. Armstrong, Vik, is this us?”
“Yes,” says the SA. “Please make yourselves comfortable. Mr. Choudhury, what do we have here?”
Vik folds himself into the middle of the sofa, Mhari bags the visitor’s chair, and the SA himself pulls his ancient wooden banker’s chair out from behind the desk so that he can loom over the occasional table like an amiable thundercloud.
“The Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror.” Vik separates the tabloids as he unfolds them. “Also the Sun, the Metro … and that’s all the significant tabloids.” He starts a new pile: broadsheets this time. “The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, to represent the regionals. Finally, the big four: The Times, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.” He looks as serious as a heart attack. “If we each pick three, this will go faster.”
“What are we supposed to be doing?” I ask.
“Combing them for coverage,” Mhari tells me. “Any mention—substantive news, human interest pieces, scurrilous gossip, editorial, and other lies—basically anything about you, Bob.”
I stifle a groan. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because you’re our public face now, Bob.” The SA speaks with the compassionate tone of a doctor giving me a terminal prognosis. “We want to see what the papers make of you, with a chance to discuss it. Do bear in mind that when you’re up in front of the Select Committee, this reportage is going to inform their first impressions of you. We could pay a clippings agency to do this for us but we’d still have to read what they sent—and this way, paid out of my pocket, it’s entirely unofficial.” And thereby invisible and deniable. Hmm.
“But isn’t it all about the Facetweets and interwebbytubenet these days?” I protest. “These are just loss-leading birdcage liners put out by billionaire tax exiles to offset their double-Irish Dutch cheese sandwich tax arrangements, right? Clickbait for crumblies.”
“Old people vote,” Mhari says, with mild asperity, “and there’s an election coming up. Do try to keep up, Bob.”
“We’re not campaigning for office, though—” I stop dead as my brain finally catches up with my tongue. “Oh.”
“Yes,” says Dr. Armstrong. “And there’s an ongoing cabinet reshuffle right now. Get skimming, there’s a good lad?”
“It shouldn’t be too painful as long as you avoid the op-eds about which reality star is getting what bits of their anatomy surgically enhanced in the run-up to their celebrity wedding,” Mhari adds cruelly. Now she knows I’m going to be unable to avoid them.