The Apocalypse Codex

kit: they’re the biblical equivalent of the blue LEDs under the side skirts and the extra-loud chromed exhaust pipe. And when I get close to the end we’re off the Halfords shelves and into nitrous oxide injection territory, complete with a leak into the cabin airflow. Using my JesusPhone I find a listing of the Books of Enoch on the interwebbytubes, but it sure as hell doesn’t include chapters with titles like “The Book of Starry Wisdom,” “The Second Testament of St Enoch,” and—most intriguingly of all—“The Apocalypse Codex.”

The bumper bonus extra features aren’t particularly long, they only run to about eighty pages. But they’re typeset differently, in a different layout, and the footnotes and glosses don’t match up with anything in the front three-quarters of the book. So I place the Bible on the desk, shine the work lamp on it, and pull out the JesusPhone. Then I start photographing and flipping pages. Autofocus and five megapixels mean that just about any pocket camera these days is the equivalent of a flatbed document scanner, and a quarter of an hour later I’m stitching a bunch of image files together and converting them into a PDF. I run it through an OCR package and quickly check that it doesn’t mention certain unmentionable keywords (it doesn’t: it’s not that kind of occult text), then I take a deep breath, and do something deeply illegal and, much more importantly, quite possibly unforgivable.

I stick the PDF of the page images on a public file sharing site, then I phone Pete and Sandy at home.

Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring. “Wha, who—Bob? It’s one in the morning! What’s up?” Sandy sounds confused and as befuddled as I’d be if you woke me in the wee hours with a phone call. I scrunch up my eyes and wish that I believed in a god I could pray to for forgiveness.

“Sandy, is Pete awake?”

“Yes, but is it an emergency?”

“Sort of. Can I talk to him, please?”

“Hang on.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed from one hand to another.

“Bob?” It’s Pete. He doesn’t sound very awake.

“Pete? Can we talk privately? I’ve got a problem.”

“What sort of—of course. Hold on.” There follows a period of muffled thudding as, presumably, Pete disentangles himself from his bedding and leaves Sandy to go back to sleep. “There, I’m on my own. I assume this couldn’t wait for morning?”

“It’s sort of urgent.” I pause. “What I’m going to say mustn’t go any further.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die: you know what I do for a living, right? Pastoral care a speciality, spiritual care, too, although I guess that’s not what you’re looking for…”

There is an eerie pins and needles prickling at the back of my tongue. I am going to have to watch what I say very carefully: my immortal soul is very much in danger, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. The consequences of betraying my oath of office are immediate, personal, and quite hideous.

“You’ve probably guessed that, uh, I’m not allowed to talk about my job. But that it’s a bit different from what I’m required to lead people to believe.”

The hair on the back of my neck is all but standing on end, but the ward doesn’t clamp down on me—yet. To some extent it’s driven by my own conscience, by my own knowledge of wrongdoing. And as I’m not actually planning on betraying any secrets, I still have a clean conscience. But. I’m wearing saltwater-soaked shoes and walking alongside the third rail.

“I’ve recently come into possession of an interesting document, and I badly need a sanity check. Unfortunately, the only person I know with the right background to give it to me is you.”

(Which is entirely true: while the Laundry can probably cough up a doctor of theology with a security clearance and a background in Essene apocalyptic eschatology, it might take them a couple of weeks. Whereas Pete wrote the dissertation and I’ve got him on speed dial.)

“A document.” He sounds doubtful. “And you want a sanity check.” And you got me out of bed at one in the morning.

“It’s a, a non-standard biblical text. Not your regular apocrypha. I’m having to do due diligence on people who are, uh, believers. I’d normally write them off as your regular American evangelical types, but they aren’t reading from your standard King James version. And it’s kind of urgent: I’m meeting with them in the morning.”

“You’re meeting with—” I can almost hear the audible clunk from the mechanism between his ears as his brain jolts into gear. But you work in computer support in a civil service department, he’s thinking. And almost certainly putting two plus two together and getting five, which is just fine by my oath of office, if not my conscience…“Okay, I think.”

“I’ve got a PDF of a scan of the variant bits of their Bible,” I say. “Mostly it’s the King James version plus a bunch of standard apocrypha, but this stuff is entirely different. I’m going to email you a link to it as soon as I get off the phone. It runs to about eighty pages. If you can take a peek and email me back, what I need to know is: If you start out from a bog-standard Pentecostalist position and add these extra books, what does it do to their doctrine and outlook? What do they believe and what are they going to want to do?”

“That’s horribly vague! I—” He swallows. “You really want an opinion from me?”

“Pete.” I pause, feeling like a complete shit. “You’re the guy with the PhD in whacked-out millenarian sects from the first century, right? Work could probably put me in touch with someone else, but they’d take weeks. And I’ve got to do—business—with these people tomorrow.”

“What time tomorrow?”

“I’m in America. Mountain Time Zone. Tomorrow morning—call it three p.m., your time.”

Pete whistles quietly. “You’re in luck; I was planning on spending the morning working on a sermon.”

“I’ll email you that link,” I promise. “Text me when you’ve got it, then go back to bed?”

“Sure. God bless.”

“And you,” I say automatically. Then he hangs up, and I get the shakes. I haven’t blown my oath of office— I’m still upright and breathing, not smoldering and crispy around the edges—but I’ve just bent it creatively. I haven’t told Pete about the Laundry, but at a minimum I’ve suggested to him that I’m not just a boring IT guy, that my job takes me to strange places and involves dealing with very odd people. If the Operational Oversight—no, scratch that. External Assets doesn’t normally answer to them. But if Gerald Lockhart decides I’ve exceeded my authority…well, he probably will, but it is easier to ask forgiveness than to request permission, especially if the gambit works. It’s possible I’ll be up before the Auditors again. And in the absolute worst case, the Laundry can probably find a use for a Vicar with a PhD in Unmentionable Mythology. They aren’t going to be motivated to dump on Pete. I hope. Not with Pete and Sandy expecting a kid. Not because I’ve gone and fucked up and dragged my work home with me to smear around my social circle.

I feel soiled. I hope I’m not wrong about the significance of that Apocalypse Codex. It would suck to be hauled up before the Black Assizes. It would suck even harder to have gotten my friends into trouble because of a false positive. Mo would never forgive me; worse, neither would I.

I’M BUSY TRACING A SECOND CONTAINMENT GRID ON THE pizza box lid containing Crusty McNightmare when my mobile rings. It’s Persephone. “Yes?” I say.

“I’m in the car park. Dinner’s on you.”

I glance at the gray, many-legged thing snoozing on the oily corrugated cardboard. It’s quiescent, but I know better than to poke it—I don’t want to risk breaking the ward. The primary pentacle serves much the same function as a Faraday cage: as long as it’s locked down this way, whoever owns it can’t connect to it and see through its sensory organs. But if it’s locked down like that, I can’t use it to feed misinformation to said owner. Hence the second, outer ward I’m working on.

Once it’s in place I can set up a bridge between the inner and outer containments to let it phone home while I snoop on its communication and introduce material of my own: a man-in-the-middle (or, more accurately, a thing- in-the-middle) attack. But it’s a delicate job, I haven’t actually tested this particular configuration in the lab, and there’s no way I’m getting it down before dessert. So I double-check the outer diagram for flaws in the logic, ensure that it’s fully powered up—rechargeable batteries and a frequency generator disguised as a pocket digital multimeter take care of that—and grab my coat. On the way out the door I grab my shoulder bag, complete with phone, camera, and passport; you can never be too prepared.

By the time I get to the car park night is falling, and with it a light dusting of snow. There’s a convertible