“The nonparliamentary route, my Lord?”
He smiles again, sunlight flashing on teeth like wavetops. “The Prime Minister may appoint a nonparliamentarian to the cabinet, but by convention ministers must be members of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. So I will not only have to persuade him of the pressing need for an interim appointment, but then obtain the Royal Assent for my elevation without waiting for the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Although as that’s due to be announced next month I imagine an appointment could be expedited? A dukedom will do at a pinch…”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He chuckles at Iris’s use of the honorific. “Not yet, Daughter, not yet.” Then the smile fades. “How am I to proceed?”
“Do you have any luggage?” He shakes his head. “Then we can leave as soon as you’re ready.”
The prisoner looks at her, and then through her, and for a moment Iris feels that her body has turned to glass beneath the thunderous scrutiny of a godlike gaze—“Ah, I see. Carry on then.”
“Thank you, my Lord.” Iris stands, a little shakily, waits for the prisoner to also rise, then walks along the short corridor. The door has swung to in front of her. She unlocks her phone, turns it so that the rear camera faces the door, and brings up the standard OFCUT countermeasures app. The ward appears in the middle of the door, limned in false-color balefire. Iris presents the shiny new warrant card from the SA’s briefing package. “Attention. By the power vested in me under my oath of office, I deactivate this ward.” Her Enochian is very rusty, but she manages not to stumble over the words. There’s a brief flare of light and a crackle as the ward fades away. “The way is now open,” she says over her shoulder, trying not to think too hard about what she’s just done.
If nothing else, she has just confirmed the wisdom of locking her up and throwing away the key—at least, to anyone not cleared for CONSTITUENCY, the honeypot operation under which she had established and run a chapter of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh. But looming above and beyond that are the frightening implications of the SA’s gambit—and of the depthless pit of despair that must have motivated the Board of Directors to approve it.
Above my pay grade, Iris tells herself nervously, as she opens the front door and leads her Lord blinking into the daylight.
*
Thursday evening finds Mhari working overtime with the tiger team monitoring Schiller’s apartment in Docklands.
Things have changed quite a bit in the weeks since Persephone and Johnny McTavish first rented the apartment and subsequently parked Bob in it in the wake of the snatch attempt. Johnny has been spending a lot of time there, as has Mhari. The living room is now an operations room, staffed by former tech ops people who Continuity Ops have vetted, cleared, and recruited. Johnny is managing the team, who keep the apartment two floors below the safe house under 24×7 observation. The kitchen is stocked with microwave meals and coffee, the office desks in the living room support a comprehensive array of surveillance receivers and loggers, and go-bags sit in the hallway awaiting the mission to black-bag Schiller’s residence.
Working out how to enter Schiller’s flat without falling foul of the elaborate alarm system has been tiresome and problematic. For one thing, there’s a one-floor air gap between occupied apartments, with empty but alarm-covered rooms in the way. For another, the flats are shielded against electromagnetic leakage, with their own cellular picocells and secure internet landlines to carry the traffic. The ops team have brought a StingRay to the party but it’s remained stubbornly silent apart from logging all the team members’ own phones. Schiller’s staff have some top-notch InfoSec Discipline. GP Security employees sweep for electronic bugs daily, there’s a white-noise generator coupled to every window frame to defeat laser microphones, and whoever configured their internet firewall is frustratingly competent.
If Johnny was still able to call on GCHQ’s resources via Q-Division’s liaison desk, they could doubtless find a zero-day that would get through the cordon downstairs, but under the circumstances that option is off the menu. It’s also targeting a state-level adversary—a private-sector contractor that works for the Laundry’s American equivalent agency. So Johnny is already feeling a little defensive when Mhari beckons him into the second bedroom—repurposed as a break room by the surveillance team—and sits him down for a head-to-head.
“It’s not goin’ well, love.” He shakes his head. “The StingRay’s getting nothing—Schiller’s people turn off their mobile phones when they go inside. Roz thinks ’e’s got ’em all using some kind of encrypted voice-over-IP app on the suite Wi-Fi, which is stitched up like a kipper.” Roz is the team’s white-hat hacker. “She cracked the Wi-Fi password but says they’re just using it for a VPN. She also figures they’ve got a bunch of intrusion detection sniffers. Snooping on them is like blind pogoing in a minefield, she says.”
“Well, bum.” Mhari picks up a can of caffeine-free Coke from the cooler on the dressing table and plants herself on the side of the bed. “How are the mikes coming along?”
“Gazza’s done good.” Johnny scratches his head. “’E made a few false starts with the drill but ’e finally found a stud wall downstairs yesterday and drove three fiber runs through it.” The empty flat below the safe house is a major obstacle: the non-load-bearing internal walls are deliberately offset from the floors above and below, so that attempts to run a wire or fiber-optic cable straight down through the ceiling will be glaringly obvious. “One came out in the bog, one’s in the kitchen, but the third—’e thinks ’e got the living room, but it’s not over the conference table.”
“Is there any take?” Mhari sips at her Coke. She’s tired and irritable, having spent the day holed up in a cheap hotel room with noisy neighbors, and has come here to take over the night shift.
Johnny smiles crookedly. “I was just gettin’ to that.” Mhari resists the urge to strangle him, but flashes him a little fang. The smile vanishes. “Gazza’s got us a passive optical pickup embedded about half a millimeter inside a ceiling tile diagonally across the room from the conference table, just over the sofa. Optics are really hazy but we can see when someone’s sitting there—not who, though. The audio is better: we can bounce an infrared laser beam down the fiber and amplify the take, so there’s no EM noise for their bug sniffer to pick up. Only trouble is, nobody’s been in there during the daytime ’cept the agency cleaners, so there’s no intel—”
“Wait. Agency cleaners.” Mhari cocks her head to one side. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Johnny whistles quietly between his teeth. “Risky, love, very risky.”
“Who logged them?” Mhari persists.
“I think Steve was on the morning shift…”