Raymond’s New Flesh stiffens gratifyingly as he eases her thighs apart, then squeezes its way into her vagina. She heaves against him and sighs wordlessly as his little master’s segmented head pushes inside her for the first time, but her desire for communion stills her initial instinct to resist and by the time the pain begins her limbs are paralyzed. There is a slight rasp in her throat when it reaches her cervix and pushes inside—shedding the grace of her virginity is no doubt uncomfortable. Schiller prays silently for her in sympathy, sharing her last moments of isolated humanity. Then his little master splits, the distal segments pulling away halfway along its length. The proximal segments stay wedded to Schiller’s crotch; the rest remain inside Anneka, in whose womb they will take root, to feed and grow new segments in safety.
The limousine’s soundproofing is excellent. As the little master shoots tendrils into her pudendal nerve and thence up the spinal cord to take control of her brain stem, Anneka’s scream is muffled against Raymond’s shoulder. By the time they reach the underground parking garage beneath the apartment they are sitting up again, shaky and drained but presentable. The wet wipes in the console suffice to clean up most of the blood, allowing them to make it to the private elevator. And if Schiller’s New Flesh is truncated to little more than a weeping stump, and Anneka’s eyes are bloodshot and her expression is slackly poleaxed, well, they will both recover from her initiation soon enough.
PART II
LIQUIDATION
FOUR
TERMINATION
We British pride ourselves on our lack of corruption in civil life. Nobody takes bribes. We hold that sort of thing in contempt and view it as utterly beyond the pale in polite society. Merely offering something that might be misconstrued as a corporate favor invites prosecution under the Bribery Act (2010).
And if you believe that, I’ve got a very nice bridge you might be interested in buying. (It leads to Brooklyn, you may have heard of it?)
Of course, if I were the government and I really had a bridge to sell …
Listen, there’s nothing corrupt about it. At least there’s nothing provably corrupt about the way outsourcing contracts are handled. That’s because corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a ￡20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?
All of this happens very discreetly. Air gaps, Chinese walls, and plausible deniability are baked into the process. But the general pattern is out in the open for those with eyes to see.
First, identify a department with an essential function or significant capital assets on the books. Second, define ambitious performance targets they can’t possibly meet with the resources available, hire a bunch of nonexec directors to “provide valuable insights from the private sector” to the board, and in case that’s not enough, cut the budget until they fail to perform. Third, the minister moves on and a new minister parachutes in, with lots of heroic rhetoric about radical change and accountability. Fourth, the nonexec directors leave, returning to their private sector posts with the large outsourcing company they originally came from, taking with them everything they’ve learned about how the agency is run. Fifthly and finally, the work is put out to public tender, and the usual outsourcing contractors, who now know how the agency works in intimate detail, make a—surprise!—winning bid. Finally, the usual suspects show up on the golf course a year or two later and buy trebles all round.
What greases the wheels is that the capital assets managed by the agency are transferred to the new owners, thus taking them off the government’s books, thereby thinning the property portfolio the Crown can borrow against. It looks good to get all that debt off the balance sheet. Meanwhile, tax revenue continues to roll in and some of it is now siphoned off to rent back the former government assets.
You might think, “That’s insanely inefficient!” and you would be right. But you’re not seeing it through the wonderful rose-tinted lenses of high finance. Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn. Certainly, sewage farms are something you can float as an investment: they’re valuable infrastructure and once you own them you can rent them back to the government until people learn to shit in their hands.
No, I’m not bitter or anything about the post office fire sale, or the roads, or the way they’re flying kites about turning the fire service and police into employee-owned companies. I couldn’t care less whether the nation’s air defense interceptors are maintained by a blue-suiter or by a former blue-suiter working as a private sector contractor at five times the hourly rate. The worst case for any of the above is that parcels don’t get delivered, buildings burn down, or Vladimir Putin parks a tank in Downing Street. Stuff breaks, people die, maybe there’s a small nuclear war, boo hoo.
But if they pull that stunt on the Laundry or an equivalent agency the worst-case outcome is drastically worse, because the adversaries we face are not remotely human. And the DELIRIUM brief that Bill handed me gives us a working example of exactly that happening, in the shape of the shutdown of the US Postal Service Inspectorate Occult Texts Division by the Operational Phenomenology Agency, aka the Black Chamber, via a private sector cut out in the shape of GP Services.
This is how it went down, according to our leaker: