late, but at least it makes me feel better. 'Where's Ramona?
We've got to get her out of here!'
Mo glares at me. 'What makes you think rescuing her's on my list of mission objectives? You're disentangled, aren't you'
I stare back at her, wondering who the hell she thinks she is, barging in here with her Class A thaumaturgic weapons.
Then I blink and remember sharing a slow breakfast with her back before all this started, all those endless weeks ago — Is that all? 'I think I know what you're thinking,' I say slowly, feeling an awful weary emptiness inside me, 'but that's not what's been going on between us. And if you leave her because you're jealous, you'll be making a mistake you can never undo. Plus, you'll be leaving her to that.'
JENNIFER MORGUE thumps against the outside of the security shutters, sending a shower of glass daggers crackling and clinking across the floor. The shutters bend but they hold: something's clearly wrong with the beast, or it should have been out of the moon pool by now, leaving a twisted trail of titanium structural members behind it. Dumping the controlling intelligence out of its temporary host body must have awakened the chthonian prematurely, still deathly weak and hungry. Mo doesn't look away from my face. She's searching me for something, some sign. I stare at her, wondering which way she's going to jump, whether the geas has gone to her head: if it has conferred not only the power that goes with her role, but also the callousness.
After a few seconds Mo looks away. 'We'll sort this out later.'
I stumble back towards the sacrifice chairs. Ramona is still out. I rest a palm on her forehead, then snatch it back fast: she's fever-hot. 'Give me a hand ... ' I manage to get one arm over my shoulder and begin to lift her off the chair, but in my present state I'm too weak. Just as my knees begin to give out under me someone takes her other arm. 'Thanks — '
I glance round her lolling head.
'This way, mate.' The apparition grins at me around its regulator. 'Sharpish!'
'If you say so.' More black-clad figures appear — this time, wearing wet suits and body armor. 'Is Alan here'
'Yeah. Why'
'Because — ' there's a crashing noise from the far wall, and I wince ' — there's an alien horror on the other side of that wall and it wants in bad. Make sure somebody tells him.' I start coughing: the air in here becoming unbreathable.
'Ah, Bob, exactly the man! Don't worry about the eldritch horror, we've got a plan for this contingency — as soon as we've evac'd we'll just pop a brace of Storm Shadows on his ass and send him right back down where he came from. But you're exactly the man I was hoping to see. How are you doing, old chap? Got a Sitrep on the opposition for me'
I blink, bleary-eyed. It's Alan all right: wearing scuba gear and a communications headset only the Borg could love, he still manages to look like an excitable schoolteacher. 'I've had better days. Look, the primary opposition movers are dead, and I think Charlie Victor might be amenable to an offer of political asylum if the rite of unbinding did what I think it did to her, but about the Smart car on the drilling deck — '
'Yes, yes, I know it's a bit scorched around the edges and there are some bullet holes, but you don't have to worry: the Auditors won't mind normal wear and tear — '
'No, that's not it.' I try to focus. 'In the boot. There's a tablecloth with a diorama wrapped up in it. Would you mind having one of your lads blow it up? Otherwise all the Bond mojo zapping around in here is going to follow us home and wreck any chance of me and Mo getting back together again for anything but a one-night stand.'
'Ah! Good thinking.' Alan pushes a button and mutters into his mike. 'Anything else'
'Yeah.' Either there's a lot of gray smoke in here, or — 'I'm feeling dizzy. Just let me sit down, for a moment...'
EPILOGUE: THREE'S COMPANY
IT'S AUGUST IN ENGLAND, AND I'M ALMOST functioning on British Summer Time again. We're having another heat wave, but up here on the Norfolk coast it's not so bad: there's an onshore breeze coming in from the Wash, and while it isn't exactly cold, it feels that way after the Caribbean.
We call this place the Village: it's an old in-joke. Once upon a time it was a hamlet, a village in all respects save its lack of a parish church. It was one of three churchless hamlets that had clustered in this area, and the last of them still standing, for the others slid under the waves a long time ago.
There was only the one meandering road in the vicinity, and it was potholed and poorly maintained. Go back sixty or seventy years and you'd find it was home to a small community of winkle-pickers and fishermen who braved the sea in small boats. They were a curious, pale, inbred lot, not well liked by the neighbors up and down the coast, and they kept to themselves.
Some of them, it's said, kept to themselves so efficiently that they never left the company of their own kind from birth unto death.
But then the Second World War intervened. And someone remembered the peculiar paper the village doctor had tried to publish in the Lancet, back in the '20s, and someone else noticed its proximity to several interesting underwater obstructions, and, with the stroke of a pen, the War Ministry relocated everyone who lived next to the waterline. And the men from MI6 Department 66 came and installed electricity and telephones and concrete coastal defense bunkers, and they rerouted the road so that it doubled back on itself and missed the village completely before merging with the road to the next hamlet up the coast. And they systematically erased the Village from the Ordnance Survey's public maps, and from the post office, and from the discourse of national life. In a very real sense, the Village is as far away from England as Saint Martin, or the Moon. But in another sense, it's still too close for comfort.
Today, the Village has the patina of neglect common to building developments that subsist on the largess of government agencies, and rely for their maintenance on duct tape and the extensive use of the power of Crown Immunity to avoid planning requirements. It's not a white-painted picturesque Italianate paradise like Portmeirion, and we inmates aren't issued numbers instead of names. But there's a certain resemblance to that other Village — and there is, overlooking the harbor mole, a row of buildings that includes an old-fashioned pub with paint peeling from the wooden decking outside, worn linoleum floors, and hand-pumps that dispense a passable if somewhat briny brew.
I came up from London yesterday, after the board of enquiry met to hear the report on the outcome of the JENNIFER MORGUE business. It's over now, buried deep in the secret files in the Laundry stacks below Mornington Crescent tube station. If you've got a high enough clearance you can get to read them — just go ask the librarians for CASE BROCCOLI GOLDENEYE. (Who says the classification office doesn't have a sick sense of humor?) I'm still feeling burned by the whole affair. Bruised and used about sums it up; and I'm not ready to face Mo yet, so I had to find somewhere to hole up and lick my wounds. The Village isn't a resort, but there's a three-story modern building called the Monkfish Motel that's not entirely unlike a bad '60s Moat House — I think it was originally built as MOD married quarters — and there's the Dog and Whistle to drink in, and if I get drunk and start babbling about beautiful man-eating mermaids and sunken undersea horrors, nobody's going to bat an eyelid.
It's late afternoon and I'm on my second pint, slumped in the grasp of the sofa in the east corner of the lounge bar. I'm the only customer at this time of day — most everyone else is off attending training courses or working — but the bar stays open all the same.
The door opens. I'm busy failing to reread a dog-eared paperback biography, my mind skittering off the words as if they're polished ice cubes that melt and slide away whenever I warm them with my glance. Right now it's gathering moss on the coffee table in front of me as I idly flip the antique Zippo lighter that's the one part of my disguise kit I ended up bringing home. Footsteps slowly approach, clattering on the bare floor. I sit there in the corner, and I wonder tiredly if I ought to run away. And then it's too late.
'He told me I'd find you here,' she says.
'Really?' I put the Zippo down and look up at her.
