The Fuller Memorandum

Iris begins to chant, in Aramaic I think—something containing disturbingly familiar names. I tune her out and focus on my own liquid, gurgling subvocalization.

They strapped me to the electric chair, but they didn’t notice I was wearing a suicide belt . . .

A BLACK BMW CRUISES DOWN A TREE - LINED COUNTRY LANE IN the late evening dusk. To one side, there’s a fence, behind which trees block out the view. To the other side, there’s a two-meter-high brick wall, the masonry old and crumbling, with trees behind it—but spaced more widely than the woods opposite. A black minivan follows the BMW saloon, which has slowed to well below the national speed limit.

“It’s around here, somewhere,” says the driver, frowning at the brightly glowing rectangle of card on his dash.

“It’s getting weaker,” says Panin. “I think”—he glances sidelong out of the window—“our man is on the other side of that wall.”

At just that moment, the wall falls away from the road, as a driveway opens out. Dmitry needs no urging to turn into it; the trailing minivan overshoots, but the road is empty, and its driver reverses back up to the drive.

There’s a gatehouse, like that of a stately home, and a black cast-iron gate topped with spikes. There are no lights in the house, and the gate is chained shut. Panin points at it. “Get that open.”

“Sir!” The front seat passenger gets out and approaches the gate. It takes him less than a minute to crack the padlock and unwrap the chain; he waves the small convoy through, then leans in the BMW’s open door as it creeps alongside. “Do you want it closing or securing, sir?”

“Both.” The guard disappears again, the car door closing as the driver slowly accelerates along what appears to be a narrow and unlit wood-land road. The driver spares him a glance in the wing mirror. He’s the lucky man: all he has to do is stand guard over a gate tonight. What could go wrong?

“Brookwood cemetery,” Panin says quietly. He uses a pen torch to read his gazetteer. “The London necropolis, built in the nineteenth century. Eight square kilometers of graves and memorial chapels. Who would have thought it?” He clicks his tongue quietly and puts the torch away.

“What do you want me to do, sir?” asks Dmitry.

“Drive. Headlights off. Follow the card until you see a chapel ahead of you, then pull over.”

Dmitry nods, and switches off the headlights. The BMW has an infrared camera, projecting an image on the windscreen: he drives slowly. Behind them, the minivan douses its lights. Its driver has no such built-in luxuries— but military night-vision goggles are an adequate substitute.

Panin pulls a walkie-talkie from the back of the seat in front of him and keys it. There’s an answering burst of static.

“Rook One to Knight One. Closing on board now. We’ll dismount before proceeding. Over.”

“Knight One, understood, over.”

The big saloon ghosts along the winding way, past tree-shadowed gravestones and monuments that loom out of the darkness and fade behind with increasing frequency. Then it slows. Dmitry has spotted a car parked ahead, nearside wheels on the grassy verge, its tires and exhaust glowing luminous by infrared: it hasn’t been there long.

“That will be the target,” says Panin.

Dmitry kills the engine, and they coast to a silent halt. Doors open. Panin walks around the BMW, to stand behind it as the minivan pulls up behind. More doors open. Men climb out of the minivan: wiry men, clad in dark fatigues and balaclava helmets, moving fast. They deploy around the vehicles, weapons ready. Panin pulls his own goggles on over his thinning hair and flicks the switch. Then he drags a tiny, grotesque matrioshka doll on a loop of hemp string from one pocket and holds it high. Seen by twilight it appears to have a beard: and the beard is rippling. “Wards, everyone,” he says softly. “This is the target. Clear it. Spare none but the English agent—and don’t spare him either, if there’s any doubt.” He slides the loop of string over his head. “Sergeant Murametz, this is your show now.”

Murametz nods, then waves his men towards the building they can dimly discern in the distance. The Spetsnaz vanish into the night and shadows, searching for guards. Dmitry turns to his boss. “Sir—what now?”

“Now—we wait.” Panin frowns and checks his watch. “I hope we got here in time,” he murmurs. “We must finish before James and his men arrive.”

ANGLETON TURNS HIS HEAD SIDEWAYS TO WATCH MO. SHE LEANS against her seat back in the control room of the OCCULUS truck, eyes closed and face drawn. She clutches the violin case with both hands, as if it’s a lifesaver; the fingers of her left hand look bruised.

“I’m not infallible,” he repeats quietly.

She doesn’t open her eyes, but she shakes her head. “I didn’t say you were.”

(Up front, Major Barnes—who is navigating by means of a simple contagion link Angleton established for him—tells the driver to take the second left exit from a roundabout. The truck sways alarmingly, then settles on its suspension as it accelerates away.)

“I had a long list of suspects. She was very low down.”

“Angleton,” Mo says gently, “just shut up. To err is human.”

“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.

Mo is quiet for a long time. “Do you want to be yourself?” she asks, finally.

“It would be less—limiting.” He pauses for a few seconds. “Sometimes self-imposed limits make life more interesting, though.”

The engine roars as the truck accelerates up a gradient.

“What would you do, if you weren’t limited?”

“I would be terrible.” Angleton doesn’t smile. “You would look at me and your blood would freeze.” Something moves behind the skin of his face, as if the pale parchment is a thin layer stretched between the real world and something underneath it, something inhuman. “I have done terrible things,” he murmurs.

“We all do, eventually. Dying is terrible. So is killing. But I’ve killed people and survived. And as for dying—you don’t have to live with yourself afterwards.”

“Ah, but you can die. Have you considered what it might be like to be . . . undying?”

She opens her eyes, at that, and looks at him coldly. “Pick an innocent, if you’re looking to put the frighteners on someone.”

“You misunderstand.” Angleton’s eyes are luminous in the dark of the cab. “I can’t die, as long as I am bound to this flesh. Have you ever longed for death, girl? Have you ever yearned for it?”

Mo shakes her head. “What are you getting at?” she demands.

“I can feel my end. It’s still some distance away, but I can feel it. It’s coming for me, sometime soon.” He subsides. “So you’d better be ready to manage without me,” he adds, a trifle sourly.

Mo looks away: through the windscreen, at the onrushing darkness of the motorway, broken only by cats’ eyes and the headlight glare of oncoming cars on the other carriageway. “I hope we get there in time,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’ll have to do more than die if you want me to forgive you for losing Bob.”

MY ARM HURTS, AND I’M FADING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. There’s a foul taste in my mouth but I can’t spit it out because of the gag. Iris is singing. Her voice is a strangled falsetto, weird swooping trills that don’t seem to follow the chord progressions of any musical style I’m familiar with. I’m tied to an altar between two long- dead corpses as the Brotherhood choral society sing a dirge-like counterpoint to Iris’s diva and slowly walk around me, bearing candles that burn dark, sucking in the lamplight . . .

The distorted lines inscribed in the canopy above my head seem to blur and shimmer, cruel violet lines cutting into my retinas, surrounded by a pinprick of stars—or are they distant eyes?—as I keep up my lines. They don’t make much sense, translated into English: the sense is something like, for iterator count from