The Atrocity Archives (10 page)

There's a loud blat of engine noise from outside
the balcony; a motorbike with a blown muffler revs up then shrieks out
of the car park on a trail of rubber. I grab my trainers, yank them on
(wincing every time I flex my left arm), grab my jacket, wrap a hand
around the dry-dusty object in the right front pocket, and yank the
door open—

Just in time to see the bike vanishing down the
road, and not a single cop in sight.

I duck into the bathroom and run the taps, then
thrust my hands under them to rinse the blood away. They're shaking, I
notice distantly. After a moment I start thinking very fast; then I dry
my hands and go into the bedroom and pick up my mobile phone. The
number I want is already programmed in.

"Hello? Winchester Waste Management?"

"Hi, this is Bob H-Howard speaking," I say. "I've had a bit of an
accident and I could do with some cleaning
services."

"What did you say your address was?" asks the
receptionist. I rattle off the hotel address. Then: "What sort of
cleaning do you require?"

"The bedcovers will need changing." I think for
a moment. "And I cut myself shaving. I'm going to have to go to work
now."

"Okay, our crew will be around shortly." She
hangs up on me.

The coded message I sent translates as follows: "Warning, my cover
is shot. I've got to get out urgently, things are
going bad, and under no circumstances should anyone approach me."
I
cut myself shaving:
"Things turned bloody." This sort of code,
unlike a cypher, is virtually impossible to crack—as long as you never
use it twice. With luck it'll take whoever's
tapping the line a few minutes to realise that I've pushed the panic
button.

I drop the bathroom towels over Plaid Shirt's
leaking head, then grab my jacket and flight bag and cautiously nudge
the front door open. Nothing nasty happens. I step out onto the
balcony, lock the door behind me, and head down to the car park. All
thought of getting Mo's travel arrangements in hand is gone: my
immediate job is to drive north, drop the rental off at the airport,
and bump myself onto the next available flight.

When I zap the car it doesn't explode: the doors
unlock and the lights come on. Clutching my lucky monkey's paw I get
in, start the engine, and drive away into the night, shaking like a
leaf.

"Hello? Who is this?"

"Mo? This is Bob."

"Bob—"

"Yeah. Look, about this afternoon."

"It's so good to hear—"

"It was great seeing you too, but that's not
what I'm calling about. Something's come up at home and I've got to
leave. We'll be reviewing your case notes and seeing what pressure we
can—"

"You've got to help me."

"What? Of course we'll—"

"No, I mean right
now
! They're going to
kill me. I'm locked up in here and they didn't search me so they didn't
find my phone but—"

CLICK.

"What the fuck?"

I stare at the phone, then hastily switch it off
and yank out the battery in case someone's trying to trace my cell.

"What the
fuck
?"

My head whirls. Oh yeah, a redheaded maiden in
distress just asked me to rescue her: a chunk of
me is cynically thinking that I must be
really
hard up. There's
a pithed spy in my hotel suite and my welcome mat is going to be
withdrawn with extreme prejudice when his owners find out about it,
just in time to get a cryptic phone call from my target who seems to be
in fear for her life. What the—
whatever
—is going on, here?

In the Laundry we supposedly pride ourselves on
our procedures. We've got procedures for breaking and entering offices,
procedures for reporting a shortage of paper clips, procedures for
summoning demons from the vasty deeps, and procedures for writing
procedures. We may actually be on track to be the world's first
ISO-9000 total-quality-certified intelligence agency. According to our
written procedure for dealing with procedural cluster-fucks on foreign
assignment, what I should do at this point is fill out Form 1008.7,
then drive like a bat out of hell over Highway 17 until it hits the
Interstate, then take the turnoff for San Francisco Airport and use my
company credit card to buy the first available seat home. Not
forgetting to file Form 1018.9 ("expenses unexpectedly incurred in
responding to a situation 1008.7 in the line of duty") in time for the
end of month accounting cycle.

Except if I do that—and if Mo's abductors are as
friendly as my second visitor of the evening—I've just vaped the
mission, screwed the pooch, written off the friendly I was supposed to
be extracting, and blown my chances of a second date. (And we'll never
find out whether the last thought to pass through the mind of the
captain of the
Thresher
was, "It's squamous and rugose," or
simply, "It's squamous!")

Looking around, I see the parking lot is still
empty. So I pull out, and roll through a U-turn across the railway
tracks, and back into town. It's time to apply a little thought to the
situation.

Mo lives in a rented flat
not that far from the university campus. Now that I know her
true name it takes me ten minutes with a map and a
phone book to find it and drive over. There are no police cars outside
and no sign of trouble; just a flat that's showing no lights. I know
she's not home but I need something—anything—of hers so I park the
car
and briskly walk up the path to her front door, and knock as if I
expect a welcome, hoping like hell that her abductors haven't left me a
nasty surprise.

The screen door is shut but the inner door gapes
open. Ten seconds with the blade of a multitool and the screen door's
gaping too. The place is a mess—someone tipped over a low table
covered
in papers, there's a laptop inverted on the floor, and as my eyes
become accustomed to the gloom I see a bookcase face down on the carpet
in front of a corridor. I step over it, one hand in my pocket, looking
for the bedroom.

The bedroom's a mess: maybe someone searched it
in a hurry, or maybe she's the nesting kind. There's a pile of clothing
by the bed that looks worn, so I bundle a T-shirt into my bag and head
back to the car. Skin flakes, that's what I need; I try not to think
too hard about what might be happening to her right now.

As I'm going down the path I see someone coming
the other way. Middle-aged, male, thickset. "Howdy," he says, slightly
suspiciously.

"Hi," I say, "just dropping by. Mo asked me to
water her plants."

"Oh." Instant boredom, conjured by her name. "Well, try not to
leave your car there, it's blocking the disabled
space."

"I'll be gone before anyone notices," I promise,
and do my best to do just that.

Parked safely round the corner I pull out the
T-shirt. In the dashboard light it looks faded; hopefully that'll do. I
reach into my travel bag and pull out my hacked Palm computer, call up
a specialised application that will erase itself if I don't enter a
valid password within sixty seconds, pop open the expansion slot on its
back, and swipe the concealed sensor across the
fabric.
Oh great:
The arrow on the screen is pointing right
back at me—I must have contaminated that swatch with my own
biomagnetic
whatever. Swearing, I restart the program and the machine promptly
crashes. It takes another three tries before I get an arrow that's
pointing somewhere else, and points in the same direction no matter
which way I hold the gadget.

The wonders of modern technology.

An hour later I'm lying on
my belly in the undergrowth at the edge of a stand of trees. I'm
clutching a monkey's paw, a palmtop computer, and a cellphone; my
mission, unless I choose to reject it, is to prevent a human sacrifice
in the house in front of me—with no backup.

The hiss and crash of Pacific surf drowns out
any noise from the road behind me. There's an onshore breeze, and along
with the dampness of the ground—it rained earlier—it is making me
shiver. The bruise on my left shoulder smarts angrily: I probably won't
be able to move it in the morning. (My damn fault for getting in the
way of a bullet. The kinetic impact binding worked its intended miracle
but I'm not covered anymore.)

There's a truck parked in front of the carport,
the house lights are on, and the curtains are drawn. Ten minutes ago a
couple of guys came out the front door, took the dirt bike from the
garage, drove straight across the lawn and onto the main road without
pausing for traffic. I didn't get a good look at them, but an applet on
my palmtop is screaming warnings at me: huge, honking great summoning
fields are loose in the area, and judging by the subtype it's a gateway
invocation that they're planning. They're actually going to try and
open a mass-transfer gate to another universe—seriously bad juju. I've
no idea who the hell these people are, or why they snatched Mo, but
this is not looking good.

A flicker of light from the road; there's the
snarl of a two-stroke engine, then the bike is turning back into the
carport with its two passengers on board. One of
them has a backpack … they've picked something up?
Something they don't want to store too close to home? I hunker down
lower, trying to make myself invisible. Take another reading, like the
others I've made around this side of the garden. I think I've got a
feel for it; a complex spiral of protection more than two hundred feet
across, centred on the house. Major League paranoia, to protect
something big that they're planning. This is where they've brought
Mo—I
wonder why? I sneak closer to a large window at the side, trying to
keep the bushes between myself and the road, and hope like hell that
there aren't any dogs here.

They've got the curtains drawn but the window
itself is open—although there's some kind of bug screen in the way. I
can hear voices. I don't recognize the language and they're muffled by
the curtain, but there are more than two speakers. One of them laughs,
briefly: it's not a pleasant sound. I settle back against the wall and
take stock, trying not to breathe too loudly. Item: I'm sure Mo is in
here, unless she's in the habit of lending her T-shirts out to strange
swarthy men who perform major summoning rituals whenever she's
kidnapped by somebody else. Item: they're not with ONI, or the Laundry.
In fact, they're presumed hostile until proven otherwise. Item: there
are at least four of them—two on the bike, two or more who stayed in
here with Mo. I am not a one-man SWAT team and I am not trained in
dealing with hostage-rescue situations, and like Harry said, setting
out to be a hero without knowing what you're doing is a good way to end
up dead. Hmm. What I need right now is a SWAT team, but I don't happen
to have one up my sleeve. And aren't SWAT teams supposed to figure out
where the hostage is and what's going on before they go storming
through the building?

There is, of course, one constructive thing I
can do, though it's going to get me yelled at when I go home. I switch
my mobile phone back on, then fumble my way through its menus until I
find the call log and tell it to dial the last
caller. That would be Mo, and if ONI hasn't put a wiretap on her I'm a
brass monkey's stepfather. It rings three times before there's an
answer and I listen carefully, but there's nothing audible from inside
the house.

"Who is this?" It's a man's voice, rather
harsh-sounding.

I hold the mouthpiece very close to my lips: "You're looking for
Mo," I say.

"Who is this?" he repeats.

"A friend. Listen. Where you find this phone you
will find a house. There are several perps in the vicinity, at least
four in the building. They've kidnapped Mo, they're building a Dho-Nha
circle, at least level four, and you will want to take defensive
precautions—"

"Stay right there," says the man on the other
end of the phone, so I carefully put it down under the window and
scramble round to the back of the house on hands and knees. The front
door bangs open. A different voice calls out, "Is that you, Achmet?"

No answer. I hold my breath, heart pounding in
my chest. Footsteps on gravel. "The American bitch, she is secure." I
back away from the house toward the nearest clump of bushes—the men
loom out of the shadows—but the footsteps halt. "I stay out here.
Cigarette."

Bastard's on a fag break!
I glance up
at the sky, which is dark as a marketing hack's heart and full of
coldly distant stars.
How am I going to get past him?
I grip
the monkey's paw in my pocket, carefully withdraw it, and point it at
the ground. A red-eyed coal glowers from the doorway, just visible
round the side of the house. A distant buzzing bike engine grows
louder, heading up the hills far above. Apart from that, the night is
silent.
Too
silent, I realise after a minute; that's a road
over there—where's the traffic? I begin to edge backward, trying to
get
farther into the bushes, and that's when everything blanks.

"You don't remember what happened next?"

"Yes, that's what I've been telling you for the
past hour." There's no point getting angry with them; they're just
doing their job. I resist the temptation to rub my head, the dressing
covering the sore patch behind my right ear. "All I remember after that
is waking up in hospital the next day."

"Harrumph." I blink; did I really hear someone
say
harrumph
? Yes—it's the guy who looks like something the
gravedigger's cat dragged in, Derek something or other. He blinks right
back at me with watery eyes. "According to page four of the medical
notes, paragraph six—"

I watch while they all obediently shuffle their
notes. Nobody thought to give me a copy, of course, even though they're
mine. "Contusion and hairline fracture on the right occipital
hemisphere, some bruising and abrasion consistent with a weighted
object." I turn my head, wincing slightly because of the pain in my
neck, and point to the dressing. It's been nearly a week; one thing
they don't tell you in the detective potboilers is how bad being
whacked on the head with a cosh hurts. No, not a
cosh: an Object, Weighted, Black Chamber Field Operatives for the Use
of, Complies with US-MIL-STD-534-5801.