The Apocalypse Codex

my password. Which is the first thing that bubbles up into my subconscious (because I am destiny entangled with my own warrant card, which does double duty as an authentication token), and lets me into a webmail service that, despite all the to-ing and fro-ing and blood-curdling threats, isn’t cleared for any messages above PROTECT—“may cause mild embarrassment if published in The Sun; curdles milk and causes stillbirth in sheep: significant risk of accounting errors.” (And when I say isn’t cleared, I mean that any attempt to type certain codewords for restricted or confidential topics will cause smoke to rise from the keyboard. Laundry IT have a very literal-minded approach to designing firewalls…)

There is a memo from HR about the correct format for minor expense claims. I read it and, with mild dismay, discover that I’ve cocked up the hotel reservation. Hopefully it’s fixable; if not, they’ll try and debit ?2895.50p from my next month’s payroll run, which would be bad. I swallow a mouthful of weak coffee and make a note, then move on.

There are several more irritating memos from HR. (Time off in lieu for medical issues does not cover jet lag; conversion of foreign currency expenses to sterling needs competitive tendering from at least three competing bureaux de change for amounts exceeding 50 pence and staff are reminded that currency triangulation arbitrage is strictly illegal; requirements for time sheets do cover jet lag, but only from west to east because the 1970s payroll system doesn’t understand negative time differentials…)

Then I come to an email from Angleton asking why I missed the CENSORED CENSORED weekly committee meeting yesterday. I do a double take, then realize that (a) it’s COBWEB MAZE, and (b) Angleton himself did not write the message—it was automatically generated by our in-house calendar system, which doesn’t understand time zones terribly well either (the design brief focussed on converting cultist Great Cycle sacrificial festivals into Gregorian dates rather than pandering to jet-setting executives).

And finally there is a short, enigmatic message from Lockhart:

Your arrival was noticed. You should avoid direct contact with subjects. You must avoid any contact, repeat any contact, with local FBI, USAF, and police personnel. Infection more severe than initially suspected.

I gulp down the rest of my coffee and re-read it, just to make sure I’m not wrong and I really am in the shit up to my nostrils.

In the Laundry, we use certain words with extreme caution. “Should” means what it says—it’s strongly worded advice, but it’s discretionary. “Must” is another matter entirely: it’s an order.

If Lockhart is ordering me to avoid the FBI and the cops and saying “infection more severe than initially suspected” then, reading between the lines, those agencies must be presumed hostile. I note with interest that he didn’t order me not to consort with the Nazgul—sorry, the Black Chamber. Not that there’s much chance of me going to them without lots of kicking and screaming and splintering of fingernails along the way, but it tells me that the warning about the FBI and the blue-suiters is based on specific intelligence.

Which means they’ve been penetrated and compromised. By a church?

RIGHT NOW, MY JOB IS TO HURRY UP AND WAIT. WATCH, MONITOR, and report back to Lockhart; all those things will come in due course. So after I’ve been up for a while I go down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, after which I head out for a morning constitutional—and, I will admit, to nose around and familiarize myself with the area on foot.

I am not, at this time, tailed by police cars, monitored by serious-faced G-men in trench coats, or hovered over by black helicopters.

After an hour or two in an indie bookstore and coffee shop, I head back to my hotel room. It’s neat, sterile, the bed made, and the coffee station resupplied. As I touch the doorknob the ward I left there tells me the only person who has been inside is a Columbian maid called Maria, who is either a tooled-up occult operative from the Black Chamber with a terrifyingly effective line in countermeasure invocations, or exactly what she thinks she is. I go inside, lock the door, sit down in the swivel chair at the desk, and open the book of tats.

It’s time to go to work.

My last experience with destiny-entanglement protocols was not, shall we say, a happy one. Anything that involves telepathic bonds with other parties is pretty damned dangerous. If you’ve got a skull full of classified files, the other party you’re forcibly entangled with turns out to be a BLUE HADES/human hybrid succubus working for the Black Chamber, and you’ve got a week to get disentangled before your neural states start to merge, you might develop a slight aversion to the procedure.

Luckily, this time it’s different. The tats don’t result in a direct merging of minds; but if I close my mind and try to daydream, I find I’m daydreaming myself into someone else’s skull. Try and visualize something else—pink elephants, say—and after a moment I find myself drifting back into the headspace of a dangerous woman trying to play the part of a wealthy ingenue on a religious retreat…

PERSEPHONE LOOKED AROUND THE CONFERENCE SUITE LOBBY with politely veiled curiosity. Calling it a conference center was a bit of an exaggeration; a timber-fronted motel with an attached car park and a picturesque chapel nestling against a pine-tree-infested hillside, it clearly catered more often to weddings than to business events. On the other hand, the combination of a secluded lodge with an event center and chapel was clearly a good match for Golden Promise Ministries, with the added bonus feature of execrable mobile phone signal—her Blackberry had been showing one bar ever since she arrived, and no data.

She’d driven up that morning, checked into the lodge with a matched set of Mandarina Duck luggage, and engaged the concierge with a barrage of bubble-headed questions about the facilities. For his part, the concierge humored her: no complaints there. Once in her room she’d taken time to install her extensive wardrobe in the closet, then retired to the bathroom for the best part of an hour. Finally, she sneaked downstairs for lunch—a tuna salad—and across to the event center where the course was due to kick off at three o’clock with an afternoon reception.

Palmer Lake, Persephone was displeased to learn, lay outside the Golden Promise Ministries’ compound. Her target was at the far end of a private road, beyond a gateway just around the corner of the hill from Pinecrest. In between interrogating the concierge about nearby beauticians and whether the fitness center had an elliptical trainer, she’d pumped him for details: GPM ran these courses regularly, and usually gave participants a guided tour of their ministry on the final day. Not good, she told herself. If they were going to keep her exposure down to a supervised tour, how was she going to plant her spyware? More importantly: What were they trying to keep out of sight?

The timbered hall was furnished for a talk—a podium at the front and rows of chairs facing it—but there was a buffet spread at the back, with coffee urns and trays piled high with cookies, cake slices, and sushi rolls, as for a corporate motivational junket.

Aiming to stay in character (a London high-society divorcee or widow, hunting for meaning in an over- privileged, sterile existence), Persephone drifted towards the coffee urn. It was already the focus of some attention by a handful of over-groomed men in office casual and a corresponding gaggle of women who, from their costumes, were desperate not to fade into the invisibility of middle age. As she took in faces, a woman of a very different sort—young and perky, blonde, clipboard-armed and badge-wearing—stepped in front of her. “Can I help you?”

“I do hope so.” Persephone injected a faint quaver of uncertainty into her voice. “This is the Omega Course reception, isn’t it…?”

“Sure! My name’s Julie, and I’d just like to take a few details if I may, ma’am? If you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”

“Persephone Hazard. Um, this is—”

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Hazard, you’re in the right place.” Julie patted her arm, clearly intending reassurance, then scored through a line on her clipboard. Persephone took note, careful not to snoop visibly: from the size of the list they were expecting fewer than thirty people. “From London, I see? Wow, you’ve come a long way today!”

“I flew in yesterday,” Persephone confided. “There are no direct flights via British Airways so I caught the afternoon shuttle from—”

Two sentences and Julie began to nod like a metronome; it was amazing how fast most people zoned out if you babbled at them, in Persephone’s experience. (It was all true, easily verifiable—drown ’em in data and they won’t suspect you’re holding out.)

“Thank you, that’s wonderful,” Julie gushed as soon as Persephone gave her a crevice to lever her way back into the conversation-turned-monologue. “Now I absolutely have to go and take other names? But make yourself