Schiller’s head bows. His host twitches sleepily in his trousers, reminding him who he serves. He can feel the truth in her words, the voice of the Sleeping—slowly awakening—God speaking through her. The Lord is awake, but desperately weak: it needs to broaden its congregation, to gain new worshippers through the holy act of initiation in which a communicant receives the segmented wormlike host that can bond with their central nervous system and join them to the Lord’s growing distributed brain. He has focused over-much, he now realizes, on penetrating and defeating the only agency of government that might react effectively to the Sleeper’s arrival on British soil. Already weakened by an earlier incursion and governed by crass materialists who scoff in the face of God, this nation will be much easier to take than the United States, where rival powers are emerging from the unhallowed shadows. All that remains is to roll up the remnants of the hostile indigenous power and the Kingdom will be his. But, intent on seducing their rulers and milking the venom from their fangs, he has deliberately kept the number of hosts in his team under tight control. Anneka is right. They stand close to triumph; they will soon need more bodies, an army of them to bring about the Kingdom of the Lord on these isles, and the time for restraint is past.
“You are right, Daughter.” He lapses into English, the common tongue. “The party is still a priority, but once you and Bernadette have taken Redmayne, Grove, Irving, and Michaels, there will be no point in holding back any more. Bring them to me here and I shall convert them, and you may direct them to bring more sinners to the Lord.” He smiles when she tuts at him, an impishly conspiratorial expression on her lips. “Now where are the others? We have a meeting to run.”
*
While much of Mahogany Row is on the run, hiding underground in scattered safe houses under the aegis of Continuity Operations, some sections are still relatively free to come or go as they will. The haste with which the Cabinet Office abolished the agency led them to make mistakes. Not only have they mistaken the Auditors for mere accountants, they appear to think that the office of the Chief Counsel, and the Black Assizes themselves, are merely an eccentric and obscure appendage of the Ministry of Justice. Not being on the Laundry payroll as such but accountable to the Supreme Court (formerly the Law Lords), Policy and Legal still occupy offices on Fetter Lane, not far from the Royal Courts of Justice, in a cramped but picturesque building just slightly older than the United States of America. This is where Chris Womack has her office, and this particular morning she is receiving a visit from the Senior Auditor. Even priests need to confess to someone, and the SA is no exception: as Chief Counsel Chris is in a position to give him a reality check on the lawfulness of projects under his supervision, and in turn to provide an unbiased progress report to the Board. (As an Auditor, when monitoring other operations Dr. Armstrong would report to the Board directly, but when managing an operation himself, other rules must perforce apply.)
“So how did it go?”
“I really couldn’t say yet.” Dr. Armstrong sits hunched in his chair, cradling his teacup protectively. His eyes are shadowed and slightly bloodshot: he’s showing signs of stress or sleeplessness. “The cutout listened to me. I believe she’ll do as I asked. There’s a lot … a lot of residual loyalty. More than we have any right to expect. It’s what saw her through her time in the—on the outside.” He chuckles unhappily. “The sunk cost fallacy makes us so easy to predict, sometimes.”
“How long was she in that place?”
“Most of six years.” Dr. Armstrong nods at Womack’s sharp intake of breath. “Yes, exactly. At first it was just for the duration of the COBWEB MAZE wrap-up, but when we couldn’t get a lock on the scope of the mole problem everything dragged on. Unconscionably so. Then OPERA CAPE came up and there was the throw-down between Basil and Old George and it became clear that being penetrated by the Cult of the Black Pharaoh was the least of our problems. And now there’s this.”
“Are you sure she’s still loyal?”
“Yes, absolutely. Which is to say, her overall objectives have always been aligned with those of this organization. She was flexible enough to square her oath of office with leading a congregation of a forbidden faith, but then, we always knew that was possible, didn’t we? And she volunteered in the first place. It was the only way to make sure, at the time…”
“And she’s not embittered in any way by her treatment?”
Dr. Armstrong winces. “You know, when this is put to rest I intend to recommend that we make special accommodations for her. The restoration of her full back pay with interest, for starters. An additional component to recognize promotion and grade increments she missed out on. Some sort of formal recognition. I think the incoming management will see fit to sign off on it, under the circumstances.”
“I thought we already had?”
“No. In order to make it look good we bypassed the usual escrow arrangements. Everyone except you, me, and Persephone can swear under oath and compulsion that she’s a disgraced traitor. And Persephone doesn’t count.”
“So the Board is insulated. For how long?”
“We haven’t passed the final go/no-go gate yet. Our candidate is still in the Tower and Iris is still on the ‘wanted’ list. If you tell me to, I can still stop it in its tracks with a single phone call—until tomorrow morning.”
“All right. And in practical terms, how likely is she to get through? What about the Ring of Steel? Might the police spot her going in?”
“Oddly enough, it turns out that we didn’t have an up-to-date photograph of her on file that’s suitable for biometric extraction. And therefore neither do they.”
Womack nods. With no biometrics on file, the police camera network around the City won’t be able to automatically identify Iris Carpenter—or the Mandate, for that matter. The credit card Iris is using is a prepaid disposable card purchased overseas by a foreign tourist, and her phone is sterile. Iris’s tradecraft is about as good as can be expected, and she’s in her home city. The only way she’s going to get picked up is if she’s run over by a cycle courier or has the terminal bad luck to be spotted by one of the Met’s handful of super-recognizers—who will be working from a blurry ten-year-old picture if Persephone and the SA have done their job properly. “So tell me what happens next?”
“It’s going to go down like this…”
*
“We serve an old man in a dry season, a lighthouse keeper in the desert sun…”
Iris moves among the tourists like a fish swimming with her school, humming lyrics under her breath in time with the tune playing on her iPod.
After her meeting with Dr. Armstrong the night before she did as she was bid: checked into a hotel, ate dinner, slept, showered, broke her fast, and checked out. But then she had a morning at liberty before her meeting, and time to fill. When she couldn’t work out how to put music on her locked-down and paranoid phone, she went into an Apple store and took a certain malicious delight in the purchase of an iPod touch, some headphones, and a gift card that she used to buy back the sounds of her teenage years. Misuse of funds—fuck ’em, they can dock my pay. It enabled her to combine an acoustic nostalgia trip (there was no music in Camp Sunshine) with tradecraft cover: no sane agent would render themselves situationally unaware by screwing in the earphones and grooving to The Sisters of Mercy, so that was exactly what Iris chose to do.