The Apocalypse Codex

pantone-colored concrete seagulls. “A place called Hanslope Park. Home to an organization called HMGCC.”

“Her Majesty’s GNU C Compiler?” I blink stupidly at the daylight.

“No, Her Majesty’s Government Communications Centre. Very much not open source, Mr. Howard.”

“Oh.” Something about the address rings a bell from years ago, but I’m not certain yet. I stare at the seagulls. My skin crawls; I have bad memories of Milton Keynes, but they mostly center on the concrete cows and a compromised research station that may or may not have been located close to Hanslope Park. A sign beside the station entrance tells me that the local schools are having a seagull parade, with a charity draw and a prize for the best avian paint job. “So we’re making the rounds?”

“It generally attracts less attention than an external request.” A taxi pulls up between a puce seabird with bright red eyes and a startled expression and another gull wearing authentic 1940s Luftwaffe insignia. We climb in.

HMGCC is one of those boringly standardized cookie-cutter government installations that look like a blighted industrial estate: crappy seventies brutalist office architecture and prefabricated concrete warehouses with an open car park behind razor-wire-topped fences and signs saying BEWARE OF THE DOG. For all I know it could be right next door to the unit where I had my happy-fun encounter with Mark McLuhan; these places are so anonymous they could be anything. A bonded whisky warehouse, a bank cash center, or a factory where they build nuclear warheads. Further back, behind the buildings and out of sight of the road, there will be satellite dishes and exposed runs of cabling and pipes between buildings, and stuff of interest to spies and trainspotters—but first you have to get inside.

Lockhart stops our taxi driver at the front gate, pays, and we walk up to an impressive set of wire gates that are overlooked from three directions by white masts bending under the weight of CCTV cameras and antennae. My skin is just about ready to crawl off my neck and sprint screaming up the street—I know what those cameras are for!—but Lockhart pulls out his warrant card and advances on the gate guard. “Gerald Lockhart and Robert Howard to see Dr. Traviss. We’re expected.”

Half an hour and the electronic equivalent of a body cavity search later—I swear they’re using me as a guinea pig for the scanners for next decade’s airport security theater—we arrive in a small, dingy office with high, frosted- glass windows and too much furniture. It’s clearly one of the graveyards where the MOD filing cabinets go to die. There’s a too-small meeting table, and three occupied seats. The occupants stand as Lockhart shakes hands. “Bob, this is Dr. Traviss.” A tall, gloomy-looking fellow in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses, Traviss seems only marginally aware of his surroundings. “This is Alan Fraser”—a government-issue scientific officer, subtype: short, hairy, and explosive, probably screeches all over the home counties on a monstrously overpowered motorbike every weekend to reassure himself that he still has a life—“and this is Warrant Officer O’Hara”—a blue-suiter, middle-aged, clearly along for the ride with orders to shoot the boffins if they try to think too hard. “Dr. Traviss, Bob is the individual you were briefed on yesterday.” Oh, really? I think. “He’s going overseas. Bob, these fellows are going to equip you for inventory tracking.”

I stifle the urge to roll my eyes. “You aren’t planning on using destiny entanglement on me, are you? Because last time—”

Lockhart cuts across me: “Nothing of the kind,” he snaps. “Destiny entanglement leaks. It’s a security violation waiting to happen.”

Warrant Officer O’Hara pulls a file folder out from under his blotter and extracts a fearsome-looking document. “Read this and initial each page please, Mr. Howard.” His avuncular smile draws some of the sting from his words, but it’s quite clear that I’m not going to hear another word from these folks until I sign.

I read the first paragraph, clock that it’s the standard Official Secrets Act boilerplate with added Laundry special sauce that we use to bind people to silence under threat of a fate worse than prosecution, skim-read the rest to make sure there are no surprise whoopee cushions buried in it, and sign in blood, using the sterile lancet and pen that O’Hara provides for that purpose. The unusually heavy paper itches under my fingertips, a dry prickling sensation that reminds me of dead insects. O’Hara removes the form and slides it back into the folder as I apply a cotton wool pad to my hand.

“Now we can proceed,” says Traviss. He walks over to one of the filing cabinets and unlocks it, withdraws a zip-lock bag containing something that looks like a small photo album—the old dead-tree variety—and sits back down in front of me. He pulls the booklet out. “Mr. Howard. Have you ever seen one of these before?”

I squint at it. “A photo album. Yes?”

“Exactly.” Traviss looks glumly satisfied. “Nine pounds from WHSmith’s.” He carefully folds the first page open. “And this is a prepaid phone card.”

I nod, fascinated.

He flips to the next page. “This is a temporary tattoo.” Just like a million other tramp stamps sold on rolls of transfer paper in tat shops for kids who’re too chicken to let a weekend biker scribble on their skin with a needle gun. “And, oh look, another. Inventory tags, Mr. Howard.”

“Right.”

“The phone card goes in your wallet. There’s nothing special about it except that any call you make using this number will go through a switch that is monitored around the clock, so everything you say will be overheard.” He nods at Lockhart. “I believe Mr. Lockhart has a list of codewords for you to memorize.”

“Isn’t that a little crude?” I probe.

Traviss pulls a face. “There is a man behind the curtain but you should pay no attention to him, Mr. Howard. We’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring that if you ever use this phone card, nobody will pay it any particular attention. In fact, we encourage you to use it a lot—if you’re overseas, you can use it to call your wife.” I suppress a twitch. Clearly he doesn’t know that Mo is also a Laundry employee. “Would you rather engage in some cloak- and-dagger antics involving ad-hoc wifi networks running at set times in Starbucks, and laptops with hardware encryption dongles? So that when the black hats come to arrest you they find all your incriminating equipment and beat your password out of you with rubber hoses?”

I swallow. “I’m not used to that particular threat,” I admit.

“I suppose not.” Traviss looks satisfied.

“What about the tattoos?” I ask.

“Ah. Let’s see.” He flips rapidly through them: a goth’s trophy pentacle, a cherub’s kebab-skewer of love hearts, a hieroglyphic squiggle of ankhs and eye of Horus, even a couple of crosses. “Put these on your, ah, inventory items. They’re waterproof and will last until they rub off—typically three to six days, but possibly longer if the inventory items refrain from bathing or cover them with an occlusive dressing. The image itself is non- signifying—the ink contains suspended nanoparticles impregnated with—” O’Hara clears his throat. “Right.” Traviss pauses for a few seconds. “This is the master controller.” He flops to the back of the book and shows me a kitsch clockface tat. “Apply this and you can communicate with the satellite tattoos.”

“Um. How?” I ask.

“Contagion and blood magic,” says Fraser, with relish. He grins fiendishly. “Use a needle to prick yourself through the tat and you’ll be able to drop in on your subject. Or just use pain, in emergency pinch skin—but that can damage the tattoo. You can talk by subvocalizing or thinking the words—you can communicate silently.”

I blink. It sounds almost too good to be true. “What are the drawbacks?” I ask.

“Well, there’s some sensory leakage; while you’re connected, you can feel their emotional state to some extent, see through their eyes. And physical pain—that transfers much too easily. You really don’t want to call one of your satellites right after they’ve been shot in the stomach. The second real risk is that the opposition will find the tattoo and deduce what it is and what it’s for before one of you can remove it. Oh, and you really don’t want to activate it while you’re in proximity to an unshielded trophic resonator—soul-suckers, or demons, or anything that can get a lock on your nervous system—they’re attracted to such channels, and a ward won’t save you.”

I shiver. Suddenly it’s not looking that convenient after all.

“It’s a tool,” O’Hara explains slowly, as if to a particularly stupid schoolboy, “to allow you to silently and untraceably talk one-on-one with field operatives, or snoop on their activities. In enemy territory, under the nose of the bad guys. It is not a magic wand. There are countermeasures, and if you are not careful and run into them it can betray you as thoroughly as being caught with a shortwave radio and a code book. But not to civilians.” By which he means the likes of the FBI and police.

I take a deep breath. “Got it. Is there an FAQ?”