knowswhat equipment, then they take me up a staircase and through another door, down a passage and into another doorway.
The room on the other side of it is long and narrow, like a railway carriage with no windows but equipment racks up to the ceiling on both sides of the aisle and instrument consoles every couple of feet. There are seats everywhere, and more minions in black than you can shake a stick at, still wearing mirrorshades — which is weird, because the lighting's dim enough to give me a headache. There's a continuous rumbling from underfoot which suggests to me that I'm standing right above the engine room.
Eileen Billington's suit is a surreal flash of pink in the twilight as she walks towards me. 'So, Mr. Howard.' Her smile's as tight as a six-pack of BOTOX injections. 'How are you enjoying our little cruise so far'
'No complaints about the accommodation, but the view's a bit monotonous,' I say truthfully enough. 'I gather you wanted to talk to me'
'Oh yes.' She probably means to smile sweetly but her lip gloss makes her look as if she's just feasted on her latest victim's throat. 'Who is this woman'
'Huh?' I stare blankly until she gestures impatiently at the big display screen next to me.
'Her. There, in the cross hairs.'
We're standing beside a desk or console or whatever with a gigantic flat display. A black beret sitting in front of it is riding herd on a bunch of keyboards and a trackball: he's got about seventy zillion small video windows open on different scenes. One of them is paused and zoomed to fill the middle of the screen. It's an airport terminal and it looks vaguely familiar, if a little distorted by the funny lens. Several people are crossing the camera viewpoint but only one of them is centered — a woman in a sundress and big floppy hat, large shades concealing her eyes. She's got a messenger bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, and she's carrying a battered violin case.
Very carefully, I say, 'I haven't a clue.' Hopefully the noise of my heart pounding away won't be audible over the ship's engines. 'Why do you think I ought to know her? What is this, anyway?' I force myself to look away from Mo and find I'm staring at the console instead, tier upon tier of nineteeninch rackmount boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. I blink and do a double take. They've got lockable. cabinet fronts, but there's a key stuck in the one right above the monitor. I can see LEDs blinking behind it, set in what looks suspiciously like the front panel of a PC. Suddenly the USB thumb drive in my pocket begins to itch furiously. 'You've sure got a lot of toys here.'
Eileen isn't distracted: 'She has something to do with your employers,' she informs me. 'This is the monitoring hub.' She pats the monitor. Some imp of the perverse tickles her ego, or maybe it's the geas. 'Here you see the filtered take from my intelligence queue. Most of the material that comes in is rubbish, and filtering it is a big overhead; I've got entire call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore trawling the inputs from the similarity grid, looking for eyes that are watching interesting things, forwarding them to the Hopper for further analysis, and finally funneling them to me here on the Mabuse. Computer screens and keyboards where the owners are entering passwords, mostly. But sometimes we get something more useful ... the girl on the cosmetics stand in the arrivals terminal at Princess Juliana Airport, for example.'
'Yes, well.' I make a show of peering at the screen. 'Are you sure she's who you're looking for? Could it be one of that group, there?' I point at a bunch of wiry-looking surf Nazis with curiously even haircuts 'Nonsense.' Eileen sniffs aristocratically. 'The surge in the Bronstein Bridge definitely coincided with that woman crossing the immigration desk — ' She stops and stares at me with all the warmth of a cobra inspecting a warm furry snack. 'Am I monologuing? How unfortunate.' She taps the black beret on his shoulder. 'You, take five.'
The black beret gets up and leaves in a hurry. 'It's very unfortunate, this geas,' she explains. 'I could spill important stuff by accident, and then I'd have to send him to Human Resources for recycling.' Her shoulder pads twitch up and down briefly, miming: What can you do? 'It's hard enough to get the staff as it is.'
'This looks like a great system,' I say, fingering the frame of the workstation. 'So you've got access to the eyeballs of anyone who's wearing Pale Grace(TM) eye shadow? That must be really hard to filter effectively.' I'm guessing that I've got Eileen's number. I've seen her type before, stuck in a pale green annex block our behind rhe donut in Cheltenham, desperate to show off how well she's organized her departmental brief. Eileen's little cosmetics operation is genuine enough, but she came out of spook country just the same as Ellis did: staring at goats for state security. (Forget the whack-jobs at Fort Bragg; there's stuff the Black Chamber gets up to that makes it very useful to have a bunch of useful idiots prancing around in public out front, convincing everybody that it's all a bunch of New Age twaddle.) Eileen isn't much of a necromancer, but she's got the ghostly spoor of midlevel occult intelligence management all over her designer suit, and she's desperate for professional recognition.
'It's top of the range.' She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it's still there: 'This baby's got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence(TM) middleware cluster[11 Translation: 'a bunch of computers.'] connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe.'
Her smile softens at the edges, turning slightly sticky: 'It's the best remote-viewing mission support environment there is, including Amherst. We know. We built the Amherst lab.'
Amherst lab? It's got to be a Black Chamber project. I keep my best poker face on: this is useful shit, if I ever get a chance to tell Angleton about it via a channel who isn't code named Charlie Victor. But right now I've got something more immediate to do. 'That's impressive,' I say, putting all the honesty I can muster at short notice into my voice. 'Can I have a look at the front panel'
Eileen nods. The hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end: for a moment everything seems to be limned in an opalescent glow and her gaze is simultaneously fixed on my face and looking at something a million miles away — no, infinitely far away: at an archetype I've borrowed, at an identity with the ability to sway any woman's sanity, the talent to lie like a rug and charm their knickers off at the same time. 'Be my guest.' She giggles, which is a not entirely appropriate sound — but sanity and consistency are in decreasing supply this close to the geas field generator (which, unless I am very much mistaken, is one deck up and five meters over from where we're standing). I reach up with one hand and flip the front panel down to look at the blinkenlights and status readouts on the front of the box. Eileen's still looking at me, glassily: I run my hand down the front panel, the palmed thumb drive between two fingers, and a moment later I twitch my finger over the reset button then flip the lid closed.
The screen freezes for a moment, then an error message dialog box flashes up. Eileen blinks and glances at the monitor then her head whips round: 'What did you just do'
I roll out my best blank look. 'Huh? I just closed the front panel. Is it a power glitch?' I can't believe my luck.
Now if only Eileen didn't notice me stick the stubby little piece of plastic in the exposed USB keyboard socket...
She leans forwards, over the screen. 'One of the servers just went offline.' She sniffs then straightens up and waves the nearest beret over: 'Get Neumann back here, his station's acting up.' She looks at me suspiciously then glances at the workstation, her gaze flickering across the lid of the blade server. 'I thought they'd fixed the rollover bug,' she mutters.
'Do you still need me around?' I ask.
'No.' She knows something's not right but she can't quite put her finger on it: the alarm bells are ringing in her head but the geas has wrapped a muffling sock disguised as a software bug around the hammer. 'I don't like coincidences, Mr.
Howard. You'd better stick close to your quarters until further notice.'
The goons escort me back to the padded-cell luxuries of the yacht. I'm trying not to punch the air and shout 'Yes!' at the top of my voice: it's bad form to gloat. So I let them shut me in and look appropriately chastened until they go away again. I chucked the tux jacket in the closet this morning. Now I rifle through the pockets quickly until I find the business !
card Kitty gave me. Yes, it is scratch 'n' sniff on steroids: about five tiny compartments full of Pale Grace (TM) mascara, eye shadow, foundation, and other stuff I don't recognize.
There's even a teensy brush recessed into one side of it, like the knife on a Swiss Card. Humming tunelessly I pull out the brush and quickly sketch out a diagram on the bathroom mirror — a reversed image of the one I sketched in the sand around the hire car. With any luck it'll damp down any access they've got to the cabin until they wise up and come to look in on me in person. Then I take a deep breath and imagine myself punching the air and shouting 'Yes!' by way of relief. (Better safe than sorry.) Let me draw you a diagram: Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that's not all
