The Apocalypse Codex

Her passenger cogitates for a few seconds. “That depends. If the Nazgul tell us they’ll handle it—then, I think, at that point we should leave as fast as we can. Assuming we’re able to, of course. At that point, it’s their baby.”

“And if they don’t? Or if we can’t contact them?”

Howard sighs. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get—”

There are red-and-blue lights flashing up ahead. Another big rig has slid off the side of the road, and the highway patrol are directing traffic over to the left to pass it. She notices the way Howard tenses. “Do you have a plan, or were you going to improvise?” she asks.

“It depends on whether Schiller’s church event is where he’s opening the gate, or merely where he’s feeding it from,” he admits.

“They’re separate.” She purses her lips. Can’t he see that? Doesn’t he have the inner eye to observe the magic lighting up the horizon all around? Clearly not—and she doesn’t think he’s the type to go through life with eyes wide shut.

“Then it also depends on whether the Nazgul are on the case. I figure I can shut down one or the other but not necessarily both, assuming they’re in separate places. If the Nazgul can shut down the gate I can stop the sacrifices, or vice versa. Or—”

“You are not asking me to take one of them. Why is that?”

She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, but her fingers tighten on the wheel. Howard might notice and think she’s tense because of the snow, but he’d be wrong. Clearly Lockhart didn’t brief him fully: it’s almost as if he thinks he’s in charge here.

Howard is silent for a few seconds. Then: “I don’t think it’s fair to ask civilian contractors to do something that could get them killed in the line of duty.”

Civilian Contractors? Lockhart definitely left him in the dark, then, or maybe that part of her dossier was above Howard’s clearance level. But Persephone finds another aspect of Howard’s reply more interesting than his misconceptions about her and Johnny. “What has fairness got to do with it?”

Howard looks at her. She keeps her eyes on the road, but can half-feel his curiosity burning into the side of her face. “We hired you for a hands-off reconnaissance mission, not a suicide op. As of the moment Lockhart told me the operation was scrubbed, you were off the hook. You’re not part of the Laundry. You don’t want to be part of the organization. So you’ve done your bit; game’s over, you can go home and collect your pay packet with a clear conscience and a job well…okay, a job that would have been well done if the snark wasn’t a boojum after all.” He clears his throat. “I, on the other hand, swore a binding oath to defend the realm against certain threats, of which this is clearly one. Schiller made it my business when he stuck his nose into our tent back in London. Now, my job doesn’t stop until it’s over. If I was a complete bastard like some of my managers, I’d be looking for a way to blackmail you into giving your all for Blighty. But I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience. So once we’ve confirmed the target and gotten the word out, I want you to—”

Persephone can’t contain her laughter anymore: she starts to giggle. “Oh dear. Is that what you think?”

“Uh?”

“You listen to me. I am not going to leave this job half-done, and I am certain Johnny will say exactly the same when you ask him. You are not the only person here with a reason to put Schiller out of business.”

Howard hunkers down in his chair. “Oh,” he says quietly. “Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.”

“Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”

They drive on in silence for another ten minutes before Persephone feels calm enough to try to explain.

“The Laundry, Mr. Howard. It’s not noted for enabling high achievers, is it?”

“What?” He looks puzzled. “What, you mean—”

“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.” She pauses to maneuver around a nose-to-tail queue of trucks that are making bad time on an uphill stretch, slowing as she sees red-and-blue lights on the shoulder ahead. “Wizards and visionaries are all very good but you cannot count on them for legwork and form- filling. Which is why there is tail-chasing and make-work and so many committee meetings and reports to read and checklists to fill out, to keep the low achievers preoccupied.

“Now, I suspect Gerald Lockhart didn’t brief you on certain…aspects of his department. Like its relationship with what is sometimes jokingly called Mahogany Row. And it’s not my place to brief you for him, but you appear to be working on the assumption that the tail wags the dog, not vice versa. So let me put it to you that there’s more to the occult intelligence world than institutional bureaucracy. Sometimes a bureaucracy grinds up against a problem that requires a mad genius instead of an office full of patient researchers. And indeed, the mad genii predate the bureaucracy. The Laundry is like an oyster nursing an irritating grain of sand within layers of bureaucratic mother- of-pearl.”

The snow is falling in ever-heavier sheets, obscuring the roadside signage and turning the slopes to either side of the freeway into blank white planes. “Sometimes they try to nurture the talent within the organization. You usually work for Dr. Angleton, don’t you? Yes, I suspect you’re one of them. The specialists who come up through the ranks. And then there are the external assets. Lockhart deals with those. Because sometimes the bureaucracy needs people who can do things that bureaucrats are not allowed to do, people who can work outside the law or who have unique skills. The organization needs to scratch its own back.”

She thumps the steering wheel hub hard. Howard jerks upright. “What?”

“I am not outside your agency, Mr. Howard, I am outside your organization chart. And I’m outside it because I am more useful on the outside. Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”

The idiots in Rome, endlessly bickering over who had killed her parents, had tried her patience sorely. And the patronizing men at the Ministry with their no job for a little girl. The British organization, at least, had a more pragmatic approach—one reflecting its antique collegiate origins, all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee; never mind its wartime expansion into a special operations team, willing to take anyone whether or not they had been to the right school or university. Buried somewhere in the lard-belly of committee agendas and office politics is a steel spine, and the arrangement they offered her has proven to be very satisfactory.

“The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger organization, built from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.

“I believe Gerald Lockhart may have misled you about our working relationship, Mr. Howard. Perhaps he implied that Johnny and I are contractors who work for the agency. A little white lie that lends us a bit more flexibility than we’d have if we spent all our hours filling in time sheets and attending meetings. That sort of stuff is Gerald’s job—dealing with the bureaucracy so that we don’t have to. Us? We go places, break plots, and kill demons.”