“Me neither!” I squeak.
“Stop derailing.” Mo gives me one of her more repressive stares as she continues. “Schiller came back, and he’s got some sort of short-term goal that justifies pointing a firehose of money at making friends and influencing people right now. To say nothing of these horrible parasite worm-things. What if the attack on the agency is misdirection—”
“It’ll be a Plan B,”’Seph interjects.
“A Plan B, then his Plan A is an even higher priority. And we have to disrupt it at any cost because we’re dealing with a proxy for the Sleeper, and if the Sleeper is playing an endgame we are in deep trouble.”
The SA rubs his forehead. “Dr. O’Brien, do I understand that you’re proposing we should go full Watergate on this?”
For a moment my wife looks incredibly uncomfortable. But then her face sets in a mulish expression, almost harsh, and I shiver: this is the Mo whose pieces I used to pick up after jobs gone wrong, the increasingly brittle face of a nightmare hunter. “This is already a black operation, isn’t it? Because of the findings about the…” She inclines her head in Dr. Armstrong’s direction.
“What?” I ask.
He smiles that saintly, terrifying smile of his at me, and says, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
I glare. “I hear your Wittgenstein and I raise you one Alfred Korzybski: the map is not—”
“Boys!” Persephone snorts loudly. “Dr. Armstrong, please stop patronizing Bob. Bob, there’s”—her eyes flicker to take in both Auditors—“a sandbox, and you’re in it. Because somebody has to come out of this without blood on their hands.” She glances sidelong at Mo. “Oh yes, while I remember: we need to talk later. In private,” she adds, with a look back at me.
I’m about to ask about what but then what she said a moment earlier breaks through: I shudder, cold sweat breaking out in the small of my back, and do a double take. “But there’s plenty of blood on my—already—” I stop and look at ’Seph. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” She nods. Jesus, she’s serious. “More blood than a tank crew or a couple of hit teams?” And she’s got something to talk to Mo about without me around?
She nods again. “We’re irrevocably compromised, Bob. When the SA took direct control over this operation his impartial status as an Auditor was thereby compromised, the whole of Audit is compromised, Continuity Ops is a rogue team working on our own blind intuition without effective oversight—”
Dr. Armstrong shrugs. “Some knowledge is inherently corrupting,” he says forebodingly. “And there are things you don’t need to know. You might speculate about why the Black Chamber chose to run the operation described in the DELIRIUM briefing against the Comstocks at this time, for example. Just don’t talk about it, because I can’t give you any answers.”
“Should I even be here?” I ask the lantern despairingly.
“Yes,” says the SA. “I assume full responsibility, Mr. Howard. You’re just along for the ride.” He comes to a decision. “I want you to go away and talk to Ms. Murphy, Dr. Schwartz, Ms. Brewer, Mr. Choudhury, and the rest of the nonexec team. I want you to draw up an action plan. During the next reception Schiller throws at Nether Stowe House, I want simultaneous searches of Schiller’s apartment and his corporate HQ out at Heathrow. I want us to get people into the off-limits area of the mansion to find out what he’s doing that’s worth spending a million pounds an hour on that he doesn’t want us to see, and I want to disrupt it.”
“But I can’t be in three places at once!”
“Tough,” says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. “You’re management now; isn’t it time you learned to delegate?”
*
So the SA has cast the dice and determined that we’re going to disrupt Schiller’s scheme—whatever it is—by hitting him from three directions at once; and that I, in the absence of full information about what the SA suspects Schiller is up to, am going to come up with an operational plan and manage this clusterfuck-in-the-making on the basis of what I suspect Schiller is up to (which is clearly No Good).
Happy joy.
I’ve been involved in field operations for over a decade, and I can tell you that there’s a single golden rule that governs these junkets, and you already know it: no plan survives contact with the enemy. A corollary of this rule is that contingency planning is, if not futile, then of questionable utility. If you let it it’ll eat up 90 percent of your planning capacity and your targets will still find some creative and unanticipated way to balls things up for you. And another corollary is that as an op grows more complicated, the number of ways it can go off the rails explodes exponentially. What Dr. Armstrong has so kindly dropped in my lap is responsibility for planning, not a single op, but an intricate three-way dance-off competition with an experienced team of adversaries (mutter grumble corporate security who subcontract for the OPA, our American counterparts) who are already engaged in a counteroperation against us, using only the resources made available to me via Continuity Operations, viz. the organizational equivalent of two blokes I met down at the pub and their whippet on a string.
This is not just asking for trouble: this is like walking up to a baby grizzly bear and punching him on the nose in order to get momma’s undivided attention. It’s so inadvisable that under normal circumstances I’d kick up an extreme stink if someone tasked me with organizing such a circus. Unfortunately the present situation is not normal, and—I am unhappy to admit this—I can’t think of a better alternative. Schiller is trailing such a very scary threat profile in front of us (fox taking over contract to provide hen-coop security services, hit squads on the street, alien crotch-worm mind parasites as door-to-door evangelists) that it’s only the red ink in his cash flow that’s suggestive of it being cover for something even worse—something that justifies a burn rate that will bankrupt his organization within months if he keeps it up.