'Don't you mean, the passenger seat ejects?' I ask sarcastically.
I've had just about enough of this nonsense.
'No, Bob, you've been watching too many movies. The car ejects.' He reaches across the back of my seat and pats the fat pipe occupying the center of the luggage area.
I swallow. 'Isn't that a little ... dangerous'
'Where you're going you'll need all the help you can get.'
He frowns at me. 'The tube contains a rocket motor and a cable spool bolted to the chassis. The airbags in the wheel hubs blow when the accelerometer figures you've hit apogee, if you haven't already used them in amphibious pursuit mode. Whatever you do don't push that button while you're in a tunnel or under cover.' I glance up at the concrete roof of the car park and shudder. 'The airbags are securely fastened, if you land on water you can just drive away.' He notices my fixed, skeptical stare and pats the rocket tube.
'It's perfectly safe — they've been using these on helicopter gunships for nearly five years!'
'Jesus.' I close my eyes and lean back. 'It's still a fucking Smart car. Range Rovers carry them as lifeboats. Couldn't you get me an Aston Martin or something'
'What makes you think we'd give you an Aston Martin, even if we could afford one? Anyway, Angleton says to remind you that it's on lease from one of our private sector partners. Don't bend it, or you'll answer to the Chrysler Corporation. You've already exceeded our consumables budget, totalling that Compaq in the meeting — there's a new one waiting for you in the case in the boot, by the way. This is serious business: you're representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defense contractors, old school tie and all that.'
'I went to North Harrow Comprehensive,' I say wearily, 'they didn't trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod.'
'Oh. Well.' Pinky pulls out a thick envelope. 'Your itinerary once you arrive at Juliana Airport. There's a decent tailor in the Marina shopping center and we've faxed your measurements through. Um. Do you dress to the left, or...'
I open my eyes and stare at him until he wilts. 'Eight dead.' I hold up the requisite number of fingers. 'In twentyfour hours. And I have to drive up the fucking autobahn in this pile of shit — '
'No, you don't,' says Brains, finally straightening up and wiping his hands on a rag. 'We've got to crate up the Smart if we're going to freight it to Maho Beach tomorrow — you're riding with us.' He gestures at a shiny black Mercedes van parked opposite. 'Feel better'
Wow — I'm not going to be strafed with BMWs again.
Miracles do sometimes happen, even in Laundry service. I nod. 'Let's get going.'
I sleep most of the way to Frankfurt. We're late getting to the airport — no surprise in light of preceding events — but Pinky and Brains prestidigitate some sort of official ID out of their warrant cards and drive us through two chain-link barriers and past a police checkpoint and onto the apron, hand I me a briefcase, then drop me at the foot of the steps of an air bridge. It's latched onto a Lufthansa airbus bound for Paris's Charles de Gaulle and a quick transfer. 'Schnell!' urges a harried-looking flight attendant. 'You are the last. Come this way.'
One and a half hours and a VIP transfer later, I'm in business class aboard an Air France A300 bound for Princess Juliana International Airport. The compartment is halfempty.
'Please fasten your seatbelts and pay attention to the preflight briefing.' I close my eyes while they close the doors behind me. Then someone shakes my shoulder: it's a flight attendant. 'Mr. Howard? I have a message to tell you that there's WiFi access on this flight. You are to call your office as soon as we are airborne at cruising altitude and the seatbelt light goes off.'
I nod, speechless. WiFi? On a thirty-year-old tourist truck like this? 'Bon voyage!' She stands up and marches to the back of the cabin. 'Call if you need anything.'
I doze through the usual preflight, waking briefly as the engine note rises to a thunderous roar and we pile down the runway. I feel unnaturally tired, as if drained of life, and I've got a strange sense that somebody else is sleeping in the empty seat beside me, close enough to rest their head on my shoulder — but the next seat over is empty. Overspill from Ramona? Then my eyes close again.
It must be the cabin pressure, the stress of the last couple of days, or drugs in the after-takeoff champagne, because I find myself having the strangest dream. I'm back in the conference suite in Darmstadt, and the blinds are down, but instead of a room full of zombies I'm sitting across the table from Angleton. He looks half-mummified at the best of times, until you see his eyes: they're diamond-blue and as sharp as a dentist's drill. Right now they're the only part of him I can see at all, because he's engulfed in the shadows cast by an old-fashioned slide projector lighting up the wall behind him. The overall effect is very sinister. I look over my shoulder, wondering where Ramona's gotten to, but she's not there.
'Pay attention. Bob. Since you had the bad grace to take so long during my previous briefing that it self- erased before you completed it, I've sent you another.' I open my mouth to tell him he's full of shit, but the words won't emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I'm able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. 'There's a good fellow.'
I try to say blow me, but it comes out as 'brief me' instead.
It seems I'm allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.
'Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer, and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain — this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake — was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by .humanity to BLUE HADES — the Deep Ones — in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores.'
Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.
'This is a map of the world we live in,' Angleton explains. 'And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid airswept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth's surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them.'
I lick my lips. 'How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something'
'Worse than that.' He doesn't smile. 'This — ' click-clack ' — is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water — most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks — that BLUE HADES have prepared. Threequarters of humanity live within 200 miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit 500 billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an allout nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire.'
'But we've got a deterrent, surely ...'
No.' Angleton's expression is implacable. 'Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it — he gestures at the screen ' — they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine.
They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It's like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don't even think about threatening them, we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly.'
'Then what the hell was JENNIFER about'
Click-clack. 'A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential.
The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking.'
I'm looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it's a deep-ocean mudscape.
