The Fuller Memorandum

spare him from this misery, but wiser counsel prevailed and my cossacks continued to care for him until he began to recover the following day, babbling in tongues and occasionally ululating: “Ieyah! Ieyah!”

On the third day, just as I was on my way back to the palace, Teapot is said to have sat up in bed, whereupon he asked, “What year is it?” Upon being told it was 1920, he collapsed in a dead faint. And although he is now back at his duties, he is not the same. There is a cold intellect in him that was hitherto absent. Before, he was a loyal brute, but limited: he gave no thought to the morrow. Now he anticipates my orders with eerie efficiency, organizes the men under his command to meet any contingency, shows an unerring ability to sniff out spies—indeed, he has begun to unnerve me, the more so since I discovered he has other qualities. It is commonplace for war to degrade a good man to the level of a brute, but unique in my experience for it to elevate one such as Ensign Burdokovskii.

Consequently, I would like to ask a favor of you, dear mother.

Enclosed with this letter I send a copy of the Buddhist scripture that so turned Teapot’s mind. It is written in an archaic dialect of Barghu-Buryat. I have heard that Professor Sartorius of the Schule des Toten Sprachen in Berlin has some expertise in material of this nature, and I would deeply appreciate it if you could forward the document to him and commission a translation, at my expense! This is a matter that I am extremely reluctant to entrust to any of my political associates, for they scheme and plot incessantly, and I am sure there are many who believe that I dabble in the blackest sorcery; I would not like to place such incendiary ammunition in their hands. I implore you not to soil your precious eyes with the contents of this scroll, for it is illustrated with such vile and obscene diagrams that I would be tempted to burn it, were it not for the effect it seems to have on those who read it! But it is for that very reason that I urgently need to obtain the advice of a savant who might tell me what those who read the fragment become. And so, I commit it to your gentle hands.

Your loving son,

General Baron Ungern Von Sternberg

8. CLUB ZERO

I GET HOME AN HOUR AND A HALF LATE, BONE-TIRED, BAMBOOZLED, and bothered. I haven’t had a good day at the office, all things considered: a confusing briefing on Russian OCCINT activities in Western Europe, an old acquaintance who doesn’t recognize me anymore, the discovery that the Fuller Memorandum is missing, and now Panin’s evident patronizing contempt for my lack of insight. I’ve got a feeling that all the pieces of the jigsaw are within my grasp, if only I could figure out where they lie—probably dragged under the sofa by an invisible cat, knowing my luck.

It’s after eight as I turn my key in the lock, pass my left hand over the ward, and slope into the front hall. The lights are on in the kitchen, and there’s a pleasant smell—Mo is roasting a chicken, I think. “Hello?” I call.

“Up here!” She’s upstairs and she doesn’t sound pissed off, which is a relief.

I dump my jacket and take the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door’s open and she’s stewing herself in the tub in an inordinate amount of green foam and some kind of mud mask, so that she looks a little like the creature from the black lagoon. “Did you get my text?” I ask.

“Yes. Who was the Addams Family reference about?”

I do a double take: “What—Oh shit.” I shake my head. “Never mind.” Obviously she can’t read my mind, otherwise there’d have been an Artist Rifles’ brick staking out the pub before I’d taken my first mouthful of beer. I’m losing my touch. “I’m screwing up,” I admit.

“You’re . . . ? Huh. Bet you I’ve had a more boring day.”

“Boring, maybe; unproductive, hardly.”

She snorts and blows a handful of bubbles my way. “I spent most of the morning and afternoon sitting on a wooden stool, watching a burned-out sixty-something expert mumble into a dictaphone. Then I had to run for a meeting. After that I looked in on the office but Mike wasn’t there, so I came home. Picked up a free-range bird at Waitrose; it’s in the oven now. I was hoping you might want to fix some side helpings?”

“I can do that.” I glance at the bath. “You going to be long?”

“Half an hour at least. I put the chicken in before I came up here; you want to look in on it in fifteen minutes or so.”

I’d rather spend my time here with her, but I can tell the difference between an order and a request: I sketch a salute. “By the way,” I say, trying to sound casual about it, “I’ve been stuck with Angleton’s work on BLOODY BARON, and I’m finding it a bit confusing. And nobody’s sent me the briefing papers on the other job yet, the one— you know. Last week.”

She’s silent for almost a minute. Then she sighs. “There’s a bottle of Bordeaux at the back of the cupboard under the plates and crockery. Open it and give it a while to breathe.”

“Okay. Um, sorry.” I back out of the bathroom, leaving her to try and rebuild the warm, scented bubble that I just burst.

I scrub and boil potatoes, then shove them in a roasting pan, check the chicken, chop some carrots, and have the vegetables just about ready when Mo comes downstairs in her bathrobe, hair in a towel. “Smells good,” she remarks, then looks skeptically at my potatoes. “Hmm.” She takes over; I get the plates out and pour two generous glasses of wine. It’s later than I expected and I’m really rather hungry.

Food and wine settle stomach and soul; neither of us is a very sophisticated cook (although Mo is much more experimentally minded than I am), but we can eat what we prepare for ourselves, which is a good start, and after half an hour we’ve methodically demolished half a small roast chicken and a pan of roast vegetables, not to mention most of a bottle of wine. Mo looks content as I shove the plates in the dishwasher and sort out the recyclable bits. “You wanted to know what Thursday was about,” she says, staring at what’s left in her wineglass.

“I keep running into people who expect me to know.” I go in search of another bottle to open. “It’s not something I can ignore.”

“How much of CLUB ZERO are you familiar with?”

“I’m not.” I get the waiter’s friend out and go to work on a pinot noir.

“Oh.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, but—are you sure you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?” I ask irritably as I scrape away the plastic seal on the bottle. “Are we in known unknowns territory, or unknown unknowns?”

“They’re known okay.” She shakes her head. “Fucking cultists.”

“Cul—” I do a double take. “That’s CLUB ZERO?”

She nods. “None other.”

Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.

Being predisposed to religion has its uses, but it’s a real Achilles’ heel if your civilization is under threat by vastly powerful alien horrors. We have a rich repertoire of primate behavior which includes the urge to suck up to the big bad alpha male, and a tendency to assume that any intelligence smarter or nastier than we are is the top of the pack hierarchy. Finally, we’ve got any number of dark religions out there. The followers of Kali or Mictecacihuatl or the various other faces of the lady of death. Certain splinter sects of millennialist Christianity who believe that the Revelation of St. John is black propaganda and that Satan will triumph. Strange heresies, by-blows of the Albigensians who trace their heritage back to secret cells who worshiped Ahriman in the palace basements of the