The Apocalypse Codex

“Here in Externalities, we monitor organizational assets that are largely outside the usual lines of control— beyond regular management.” Lockhart smiles blandly.

“Paperclips? Attached to interdepartmental memos?” That’s improbable enough on the face of it. Most intelligence agencies are fanatical about locking down the hardware, banning phones and USB sticks and iPods from the premises. The Laundry takes a different approach, and focuses on securing the people, not the property— although sometimes this leads to, shall we say, misunderstandings in our dealings with other agencies.

“Paperclips, other assets.” Lockhart waves dismissively. “People on external assignment, for example. We provide support for senior executives on request. And it goes both ways. We also keep track of external contractors.”

“External what?” I stumble into disbelieving silence. External contractors? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Not here, not in an agency that promiscuously hires anyone and everyone who stumbles across the truth—makes them a job offer they can’t refuse, inducts them under the authority of an appallingly strong geas, and keeps them busy chasing paper until it’s time to retire. “But we don’t employ external contractors! Do we?”

“No, we don’t. Not as such.” His expression is so arch you could hang a suspension bridge from it. “Tell me, Mr. Howard, have you eaten recently?”

“No—”

“Then you’ll have no objection to accompanying me to lunch at a restaurant, will you? The organization’s paying.”

I boggle. “Isn’t that against accounting regs or something?”

“Not when I’m briefing a pair of contractors, Mr. Howard. Your job is to sit tight, ears wide, and listen. When we get back here afterwards there will be an exam. If you pass, then I shall explain what I want you to do for the next couple of weeks.”

“And if I don’t pass?”

“Then you go back to Dr. Angleton with a recommendation for some more training courses. And I shall have to do the job myself.” His cheek twitches at the prospect. I am beginning to get a handle on the code. That is an unhappy twitch: the caterpillar has indigestion. “However, that would not be an ideal outcome, because the job in question appears to be well-matched to your strengths.”

Damn him, he’s clearly been taking lessons from Angleton on best practice for baiting the Bob-hook. “Okay, I’ll bite. Lunch with a contractor, then an exam. Where do I start?”

“Right here.” And Lockhart folds back his black cloth, picks up a slim dossier headlined BASHFUL INCENDIARY, and watches vigilantly while I read it.

AFTER AN HOUR’S READING, MY HEAD IS SPINNING. MIDWAY through the dossier, Lockhart—evidently satisfied by my absorption—tiptoes out of the office for a quick fag or something. I hear the door lock click behind him. Luckily I don’t need a toilet break. The file is quite slim, but the contents—or rather, their implications—are explosive.

Here’s the rub. The Laundry runs on three inviolate rules:

1) We make a point of recruiting—conscripting, really—everyone who learns the truth. That’s how I ended up here. We have a place for everyone (and make sure everyone knows their place).

2) It is a corollary of the preceding rule that we never employ external contractors. There are no independents.

3) Finally, and most importantly, the security services—of which we are one—do not snoop on Number Ten.

But all of these rules come with a sanity clause.

Take the first rule. It’s how everyone I know (Angleton excepted) came to work for the Laundry. We stumbled across something ghastly that we couldn’t handle, and before it could apply the Tabasco sauce and find us crunchy but good with fries the Laundry came and rescued us, then made us a job offer we weren’t allowed to refuse.

In my case, I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton with an unfortunate experimental rendering algorithm. (For my sins, they stuck me in IT Support for three years; on the flip side, I didn’t die.)

The B-team players we hire so we can keep an eye on them and protect them from the consequences of their own actions. The A-team players end up doing the protecting—both for the second-raters and for the Crown— defending the realm against things with too many tentacles and eye-stalks.

As for the second rule: if we employ everyone in the field, so to speak, then it follows that there are no external contractors. Anyway, external contractors would be a security risk. So even if there were external contractors, we couldn’t put them on the payroll without them taking the oath of allegiance, going the whole nine yards, etcetera. At which point, they wouldn’t be external.

As for the third rule…I’m guessing that’s where I come in. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself at this point.

HALF AN HOUR LATER LOCKHART COMES BACK AND REMOVES the dossier from my nerveless fingers: “Are you coming?”

“Uh? Lunch? Sure.” I struggle to my feet. “I’ll just get my coat.”

He picks up the dossier, adds it to another that he’s carrying—I spot the subject JOHNNY PRINCE on the cover before I force myself to stop—and turns to stash them in his large and exceedingly secure-looking office safe. I make myself scarce.

We meet downstairs, just outside the empty department store window. Lockhart flags down a passing taxi. We ride in silence: fifteen or twenty minutes to Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Pocketing a receipt, Lockhart leads me through the crowd of shoppers to a surprisingly familiar destination, if only because it’s infamous: the Wong Kei. “We’re meeting here?” I ask.

“Where better?” Lockhart says ironically as he leads me inside. It’s lunchtime and deafeningly loud inside the landmark restaurant. I’m expecting us to end up queuing, but no: as if by magic Lockhart flags down a waiter, mutters something, and we’re whisked through a Staff Only door, into a cramped lift that squeals and grinds its way up to the third floor, then along a narrow passageway to a private dining room. He pauses before we enter. “The budget will only stretch so far.” But my reading of his mustache is getting better, and right now it spells: caterpillar is hungry for Cantonese.

The room is cramped, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes and a tiny window outside which throbs a bank of kitchen extractor fans. But the table is already laid out with chairs for four and a pot of jasmine tea on the lazy Susan. “Remember what I said,” Lockhart warns me, “keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Within reason. Understood?”

I nod, and mime a zipper. I’d normally put up more of a fight, but after reading the BASHFUL INCENDIARY file I find myself curiously uninterested in making a target of myself: she might turn me into a toad or something.

A minute later—I’ve just filled both our cups with steaming hot tea—the door opens again. Lockhart stands, and I follow suit. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hazard.” The caterpillar is delighted. “Ah, and the estimable Mr. McTavish! How are you today?”

Handshakes and smiles all round. I take stock, then succumb to a brisk flashback: a disturbing sense that I’ve met these people before.

McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what the sidelong flat stare and the ridges on the sides of his hands mean. He reminds me of Scary Spice, one of Alan Barnes’s little helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbitholes full of blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight something else about him as well: he punches above the weight.

She, however—

“Charmed to meet you,” she says, and smiles, impish and vampish simultaneously. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Howard! May I call you Bob?”