In the meantime, private-sector contractors have been identified entering the New Annex. Presumably they’re having some issues with site security—Residual Human Resources, being dead, are not on payroll and were not covered by the shutdown order—but after a couple of days the new arrivals no longer wear body armor, and body bags stop leaving in ambulances so the GP Security people must be assumed to have the free run of the building. I wish them much luck dealing with some of the more baroque and deadly non-Euclidean spaces such as Angleton’s office, the eldritch singularity in Briefing Room 202, the hole where Andy’s lab used to be, and so on. Babes in the wood, babes in the fucking wood—and I’m not shedding any tears over their screaming.
But none of this can make up for the fact that we’ve lost access to the archive stacks, Angelton’s Memex, our in-house network and labs, and a bunch of other vital resources. Some of that stuff is priceless. Ditto a bunch of less obvious facilities. Persephone’s top-floor lab, for example, with the humongous containment grid—I don’t think it’s safe to drop round there right now. All the remote facilities that have gone dark represent an imponderable hit to our ability to resume operations. And some of the side effects are worse.
There are a couple of rays of metaphorical sunlight. Mhari has apparently found a source of blood for the PHANGs. It may not last for long, but they’re not going to starve or go feral. (The last thing we need on top of everything else right now is a V syndrome epidemic in London.) The crumblies from St. Hilda’s have apparently bluffed their way into some sort of sheltered living halfway house arrangement by pretending to be senile, and I am informed that they’re cautiously, gradually, showing signs of re-engaging with the cutout who’s serving as their minder from Continuity Ops. Likewise, our drinking buddies from the SRR are still on speaking terms, and willing to see that the odd OCCULUS unit shows up should we need it (on an entirely deniable it’s-just-a-routine-readiness-exercise basis—and this is a card we can play only once). And on a purely personal note, everything is coming up daisies.
But otherwise it’s darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see.
Something bad is happening in Assyria, but our last stringer on the ground was beheaded live on YouTube by Islamic State. There’s a marked upswing in terrorist atrocities in that part of the world and some of the incidents … they’re not being allowed to hit the mainstream media channels, let’s put it that way, nobody wants a mass panic. Da’esh propaganda websites are fulminating about Western devils and if you drop the compass angle they’re not entirely wrong: the djinn are restive, and I am not talking about the goatee-and-turban three-wishes Disney remix of the dark and bloody legend.
In Mexico there’s been a mass kidnapping and disappearance of student teachers—forty-two of them—at Iguala in Guerrero. No bodies have been found. It’s being blamed on a drugs syndicate with help from corrupt local police officials, but as I read about it in the daily flash briefing that someone working for Continuity Ops is still putting out via secure departmental email I’m not giving that much credit. Worshippers of Tezcatlipoca, the Cult of the Smoking Mirror, are no neophytes at the human sacrifice game, let’s put it that way.
The United States is still disturbingly quiet. A couple of resignations and retirements of deputy assistant secretaries of this or that, a couple of new appointments to the Republican National Committee, nothing terribly visible to outsiders. We used to use the Kremlin as a reference point for politics utterly opaque to external observers, but the complexities of DC and the depths of the waters there are breathtaking. The only obvious sign of the power struggle in progress is that the number of actors represented by the United States Intelligence Community clearinghouse has dropped from eighteen to sixteen in the past month, due to mergers—and it’s only obvious that a titanic and brutal struggle for supremacy is in progress if you know what signs to look for. There are other symptoms (our thaum flux distant monitoring array is picking up twenty or thirty intermittent titanic power spikes per day, as if someone or something is working major summonings in diverse states across the continental US), but it’s frustratingly hard to tell what’s going on from the outside … and our few remaining stringers on the ground have stopped filing reports.
In our absence, a lot of the low-level occult defense tasks we took care of are falling apart. There has been an outbreak of “demonic possession” in Aberystwyth, claiming the lives of two pensioners at a Pentecostal Church. Séances have become markedly dangerous, with eighteen survivors being sectioned under the Mental Health Act in the past week alone, but so far the Health Secretary has stayed mum.
And finally there’s the catastrophically bad news from back home. Due to the lack of anyone running routine security maintenance tasks on the Laundry’s server farms—80 percent of which are still running, at least until the power bills come due—a failure to install a critical patch for a zero-day exploit that came out a week ago has resulted in the firmware blobs that install SCORPION STARE capability on one of the nation’s most common outdoor camera systems being leaked. The first word we got was when it turned up for auction on the usual darknet sites, with a ￡25 million opening bid: activity has been fierce. It’ll take a while before anyone works out how to decompile the deep observing neural network code, much less figures out how it works.
But when they do?
Oh dear.
PART III
SURRENDER
EIGHT
BETRAYAL
Euston Station, London, marks the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line, one of the two main north-south railway arteries that tie England and Scotland together. Right now it’s horrendously busy. The East Coast Main Line runs through Leeds and will not be back in service for at least two weeks; while some passenger services are diverting around the devastated city’s station, all the freight and a good proportion of the foot traffic are using the west coast route instead.
Around the same time Mo and I are rebonding over a pizza, a bottle of wine, and a pile of broken yesterdays, a Virgin Voyager slides into Euston and wheezes to a halt. Doors streaked with dirt after the two-hundred-mile run from Liverpool rattle and hiss open and passengers spill across the busy platform.
Concealed within the crowd of weary travelers is a middle-aged woman. Her dark blonde hair is streaked with gray and frizzled; her face is lined and there are crow’s feet around her eyes, but she’s trim and her posture erect. Wearing boots, jeans, and a sweater, with a waterproof and a small day pack over her shoulder, she might be on her way home from a hiking holiday in the Lake District. But as she casts around, looking for someone, there’s an anxious, haunted aspect to her expression, and whenever she spots the anonymous black bubble of a camera she tenses slightly and hunches her shoulders.