Scattered across the layered silt are small irregular objects, some of them round, some of them long. A couple more seconds and my brain acknowledges that what my eyes are seeing is a watery field of skulls and femurs and ribs. I've got an idea that not all of them are entirely human.
'The Caribbean sea hides many secrets. This field of silt covers a deep layer rich in methane hydrates. When some force destabilizes the deposits they bubble up from the depths — like the carbon dioxide discharge from the stagnant waters of Lake Nyos in the Cameroon. But unlike Lake Nyos, the gas isn't confined by terrain so it dissipates after it surfaces.
It's not an asphyxiation threat, but if you're on a ship that's caught above a hydrate release, then the sea under your keel turns to gas and you're going straight down to Davy Jones's locker.' Angleton clears his throat. 'BLUE HADES have some way of replenishing these deposits and triggering releases. They use them to keep us interfering hominids away from things that don't concern us, such as the settlement at Witch's Hole in the North Sea ... and the depths of the Bermuda Triangle.'
I swallow. 'What's down there'
'Some of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. And some of the largest BLUE HADES installations we're aware of.'
Angleton looks as if he's bitten into a lemon expecting an orange. 'That isn't saying much — most of their sites are known to us only from neutrino mapping and seismology.
The portion of the biosphere we understand is limited to the surface waters and continental land masses, boy. Below a thousand fathoms of water, let alone below the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, it's a whole different ball game.'
'The Moho-what'
'The underside of the continental plates we live on — below the discontinuity lies the upper mantle. Didn't you study geography at school'
'Uh ... ' I spent most of my school geography lessons snoozing, doodling imaginary continents in the backs of exercise books, or trying to work up the courage to pass a message to Lizzie Graham in the next row. Now it looks like those missed lessons are about to come back and bite me.
'Moving swiftly on, let me see if I've got this straight. Ellis Billington has purchased a CIA spy ship designed for probing BLUE HADES territory. He's got a high enough security clearance to be aware what it's capable of, and his people are trying to suborn various intelligence organizations, like in Darmstadt. He's playing some kind of endgame and you don't like the smell and neither does the Black Chamber, which explains me and Ramona. Am I right so far'
Angleton nods minutely. 'I should remind you that Billington is extraordinarily rich and has fingers in a surprising number of pies. For example, by way of his current wife — his third — he owns a cosmetics and haute couture empire; in addition to IT corporations he owns shipping, aviation, and banking interests. Your assignment — and Ramona's — is to get close to Billington. Ideally you should contrive to get yourself invited aboard his yacht, the Mabuse, while Ramona remains in touch with your backup team and the local head of station. Your technical backups are Pinky and Brains, your muscle backup is Boris, and you're to liaise with our Caribbean station chief, Jack Griffin. Officially, he's your superior officer and you'll be under his orders when it comes to nonoperational matters but you're to report directly to me, not to him. Unofficially, Griffin is out to pasture — take anything he says with a pinch of salt. Your job is to get close to Billington, remain in touch with us, and be ready to act if and when we decide to take him down.'
I manage not to groan. 'Why does it have to be me aboard the yacht — why not Ramona? I think she'd be a whole lot better at the field ops thing. Or the station chief guy? Come to think of it, why aren't the AIVD doing this? It's their territory — '
'They invited us in; all I can say for now is, we have specialist expertise in this area that they lack. And it has to be you, not Ramona. Firstly, you're an autonome, a native of this continuum: they can't trap you in a Dho- Nha curve or bind you to a summoning grid. And secondly, it's got to be you because those are the rules of Billington's game.' Angleton's expression is frightening. 'He's a player, Bob. He knows exactly what he's doing and how to work around our strengths. He stays away from continental land masses, uses games of chance to determine his actions, sleeps inside a Faraday cage aboard a ship with a silver-plated keel. He's playing us to a script. I'm not at liberty to tell you what it is, but it has to be you, not Ramona, not anyone else.'
'Do we have any idea what he's planning? You said something about weapons — '
Angleton fixes me with a steely gaze. 'Pay attention, Bob.
The presentation is about to commence.' And this time I can't stifle the groan, because it's another of his bloody slideshows, and if you thought PowerPoint was pants, you haven't suffered through an hour of Angleton monologuing over a hot slide projector.
SLIDE 1: Photograph of three men wearing suits with the exaggerated lapels and wide ties of the mid-1970s. They're standing in front of some sort of indistinct building-like structure, possibly prefabricated. All three wear badges clipped to their breast pockets.
'The one on the left is me: you don't need to know who the other two are. This photograph was taken in 1974 while I was assigned to Operation AZORIAN as our liaison — officially from MI6 as an observer, but you know the drill. The building I'm standing in front of is ...'
SLIDE 2: A photograph taken looking aft along the deck of a huge sea-going vessel. To the left, there's a gigantic structure like an oil drilling rig, with racks of pipes stacked in front of it. Directly ahead, at the stern, is the structure glimpsed in the previous slide — a mobile office, jacked up off the deck, its roofline bristling with antennae. Behind it, a satellite dish looms before the superstructure of the ship.
'We're aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer on its unsuccessful voyage to raise the sunken Soviet Golf-II- class ballistic missile submarine K-129. Announced as Operation JENNIFER, this was leaked to the press by someone acting on unofficial orders from the director of ONI — the usual goddamn turf war — and Watergated to hell by mid-1975. I said Operation JENNIFER was unsuccessful. Officially, the CIA only retrieved the front ten meters or so of the sub because the rear section broke off. In reality ...'
SLIDE 3: Grainy black-and-white photographs, evidently taken from TV screens: a long cylindrical structure grasped in the claws of an enormous grab. From below, thin streamers rise up towards it.
'BLUE HADES took exception to the intrusion into their territory and chose to exercise their salvage rights under Article Five, Clause Four of the Benthic Treaty. Hence the tentacles. Now ...'
SLIDE 1 (Repeat): This time the man in the middle is circled with a red highlighter. 'This fellow in the middle is Ellis Billington, as he looked thirty years ago. Ellis was brilliant but not well socialized back then. He was attached to the 'B' team as an observer, tasked with examining the circuitry of the cipher machine they hoped to recover from the sub's control room. I didn't pay much attention to him at the time, which was a mistake.
He already had his security clearance, and after the JENNIFER debacle he moved to San Jose and set up a small electronics and software business.'
SLIDE 4: A crude-looking circuit board. Rather than fiberglass, it appears to be made of plywood that has been exposed to seawater for too long, and has consequently warped. Sockets for vacuum tubes stud its surface, one of them occupied by the broken base of a component; numerous diodes and resistors connect it to an odd, stellate design in gold that covers most of the surface of the board.
'This board was taken from a GRU-issued Model 60 oneiromantic convolution engine found aboard the K- 129. As you can see, it spent rather longer in the water than was good for it. Ellis reverse-engineered the basic schematic and pieced together the false vacuum topology that the valves disintermediated. Incidentally, these aren't your normal vacuum tubes — isotope imbalances in the thorium-doped glass sleeves suggest that they were evacuated by exposure in a primitive wake-shield facility, possibly aboard a modelthree Sputnik satellite similar to the one first orbited in 1960.
That would have given them a starting pressure about six orders of magnitude cleaner than anything available on Earth at the time, at a price per tube of about two million rubles, which suggests that someone in the GRU's scientific directorate really wanted a good signal, if that wasn't already obvious. We now know that they'd clearly cracked the Dee-Turing Thesis by this point and were well into modified Enochian metagrammar analysis. Anyway, young Billington concluded that the Mod-60 OCE, NATO code 'Gravedust,' was intended to allow communication with the dead.
Recently dead, anyway.'
SLIDE 5: An open coffin containing a long-dead body.
