The Delirium Brief Read online

  “Yes. It turns out that mathematics has side effects in the real world. This agency, SOE, has been investigating this effect ever since Alan Turing did pioneering work on it in the 1940s at Bletchley Park. Computers are tools that do much more than share cute cat photos, and they can be lethally dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  So far so good. I’m on the approved message track, regurgitating talking points acknowledging stuff that’s already out there in public. My brief is to make the Laundry sound boring; encryption bad, hacking bad, misusing computers bad, Home Office rah, National Security rah, War on Tentacular Terror, rah. But in the back of my head I am uncomfortably aware of all the tasty minds crowded around me in this building, fuzzy shadows of warmth and sustenance in the studio control room and the offices beyond. I can taste the focus of the producer, feel the chilly (and inedible) ramparts of Mhari’s vampire shell, the armored fortress of solitude sitting across the table from me—

  What?

  Paxo smiles at me like a kindly uncle, or maybe a crocodile with a gold tooth, as he says: “It has been alleged”—Oh shit, I think—“that the disaster in Leeds was the result of an SOE operation that went wrong, that your people invited the attack that killed over nine thousand innocent people and shot down three airliners and two fighter jets. Is that true, Mr. Howard?”

  Fuck! The fucker’s wearing a heavy-duty ward! Which means I can’t read him or trivially control him—the small leather bag he’s wearing on a cord around his neck, under his shirt, is the thaumaturgic equivalent of a bulletproof vest.

  I wipe the smile and do my best impersonation of a granite cliff. “Absolutely not.” I take a breath. “SOE does not recklessly endanger national security or put lives at risk.” I think I can see where this line of questioning is going, and it’s nowhere good. “We were invaded without warning by a hitherto theoretical threat. We responded immediately and alerted the police and the army in accordance with our standing orders. The handling and outcome of the conflict are a matter for the Commons Select Committee to investigate and the Public Enquiry to report on, and I can’t comment further.” Phew.

  The Crocodile nods and he’s dropped his smile, which is a bad sign: the gloves are coming off and I wonder, horrified, How the fuck did the BBC get their hands on a level six defensive ward? as I realize this is a setup and meanwhile he’s leaning forward, closing in for the kill—

  “Perhaps you could explain to the viewers why the surviving invaders are being treated as asylum seekers, Mr. Howard? Wouldn’t terrorism charges be more appropriate? Or a war crimes investigation?”

  Shit! That’s not supposed to be public knowledge. Which means there is a leak somewhere. As the scriptwriters on Yes, Minister observed, the ship of state is unique in that it’s the only vessel that leaks from the top down. Our oath of office should prevent anyone inside the tent from pissing out … which means someone in the government is briefing against us, probably at cabinet level. We are totally off the talking points now: nobody briefed me for this. Fuck! Time to pass the blame.

  “The … survivors … of the attacking force include a number of slaves and other victims who were there unwillingly. The Home Office has conceded that in some cases there is a case for them to claim refuge from persecution.” Pass the blame. “I’d like to remind you that the enemy military made extensive use of human sacrifice and other forms of necromancy to power their attack.” All of which is entirely true, but—

  “I’m not talking about the slaves, Mr. Howard. Why is the All-Highest, their leader, claiming asylum? Can you explain?”

  Fuck. Fuck fuckityfuck fucksticks really bad swear words.

  “Let me emphasize this: what came through the gate in Malham Cove was the last surviving military force of a nation that had just lost the magical equivalent of a nuclear war. Also their dependents. And slaves. They can’t go back; sending them back means sending them to their certain deaths. The enemy All-Highest who ordered the attack is dead. The current All-Highest was not in charge of the attack, and on inheriting the position immediately ordered the unconditional surrender of the, ah, attacking force.” That is, the Host of Air and Darkness: the surviving armored cavalry forces of the Morningstar Empire. Don’t say elves, there’s nothing terribly Tolkienesque about this bunch and the good PR would just make them harder to handle. “Accommodating their unwilling victims was a precondition of the surrender. In return, the current All-Highest is actively cooperating with us in restraining their military forces. None of them are able to, ah, go back. The world they came from is—it’s been overrun by alien horrors.”

  Not to mention that sending them back would risk drawing the attention of the undead nightmares they were fleeing, who might well pick up the trail in our direction and decide not to stop at eating just one civilization—but I can’t say that on live TV news, people might complain to Ofcom about the nightmare fuel.

  “But—asylum, Mr. Howard?” The eyebrow is at full extension. Time to shut this down.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not my job to set policy. That question is better directed to the minister responsible.”

  Paxo is indignant. “A minister responsible for a department that didn’t officially exist until the week before last? That’s simply not good enough, Mr. Howard!” Bastard. “I’m sure we’ll get some better answers when we have a cabinet minister in charge. But one final question for you: can you explain to the viewers why you are reportedly known to other members of your agency as the ‘Eater of Souls’?”

  For a moment I see red: blood splattered all up and down the blue-screen back wall of the studio. But no, that would be bad, and worse, it would be unprofessional. Also, the ward he’s wearing under his shirt collar is powerful enough that I could break it, but I’d probably set fire to his hair in the process. It would look bad on camera. And also-also—I suddenly realize this is the wrap-up question: I get the last word in so I can select what to give him.

  I summon up a sheepish smirk: “When I was junior, I used to put my foot in my mouth rather a lot. The nickname stuck.”

  And the light on the camera goes out.

  * * *

  The government’s occult secret service goes back further than most people realize.

  Our oldest handwritten records were left behind by Dr. John Dee, the noted mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer who worked for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster. Back in his day, everything ran on a nod-and-a-wink basis. It was part of the Crown Service and established by Royal Prerogative, which basically means Lizzie Tudor wrote a letter saying “make it so” and appointed Frankie the Fixer to run it. The Invisible College (as it later became known) operated as an informal gentleman-dabbler’s club until the Second World War. Then wartime expansion and the systematization provided by the Turing Theorems led to the incorporation of the Laundry as a division inside the Special Operations Executive, when Winston Churchill wrote an “action this day” memo using the authority vested in him by His Kingliness George the Umpty …

  (You get the picture.)

  Now, back in the day the Invisible College ran entirely on ritual magic. But ritual magic doesn’t work reliably, because ritual magicians tend to succumb to Krantzberg syndrome, a very nasty spongiform dementia caused by microscopic extradimensional feeders (parasites attracted by magical manifestations of information processing). Over time they nibble the practitioner’s cerebral cortex into lace, which tends to bring the practitioner’s career staggering to a palsied conclusion. And that’s assuming they don’t inadvertently succumb to the greater feeders, such as feeders in the night: predators that make themselves at home in neural networks like, oh, the human cerebral cortex, and take over the body to go in search of more brains to chow down on. (Thereby leading to myths, legends, and Shaun of the Dead.)

  There are a handful of cognitive infections that grant ritual practitioners a degree of immunity to eaters—PHANG syndrome (vampirism) is one of them, and the for-want-of-a-better-word elven invaders seem to have
come up with some kind of occult vaccine. And then there’s little old me. (I’m … let’s say “unique” and tiptoe away from the subject.) But all these mitigating techniques have severe drawbacks, and as a result there are old ritual magicians, and there are bold ritual magicians, but there are no old, bold magicians. They don’t survive, and they tend to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principle of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable.

  In contrast, computational magic does work reliably, for pretty much anyone who can punch a keyboard and follow a checklist, because eaters don’t seem to have a taste for silicon or germanium, which is why it’s the go-to discipline for organizations.

  Mahogany Row, the successor to the Invisible College, continues to this day to keep track of and provide a framework for the high-level unique practitioners. However, the rest of the Laundry is an ant farm full of computational demonologists and IT managers. Indeed most staff, to the extent that they’re aware of Mahogany Row, think it’s just a senior management stratum—even though the organization as a whole exists to support it. Because a big chunk of the Laundry’s postwar mission was to keep the lid on the mere existence of algorithmic thaumaturgy, we ended up with a bloated head count—we’d spent decades giving everybody who stumbled on the truth a job where we could keep an eye on them. (Or, more accurately, where they could keep an eye on each other.) The iron law of bureaucracy doesn’t help: everybody working to ensure that the organization continues to pay them a salary, rather than necessarily achieving its objectives. So it has become progressively harder to keep the ball rolling, with the result that we finally and unambiguously lost the plot in Leeds.

  You can hush up a massacre in an office park or a hideous manifestation at the Albert Hall with DA-Notices and dark muttering about terrorist attacks and hallucinogenic gas. But it’s impossible to cover up airliners being shot down, an invading army rampaging through the suburbs of a major city, and a traffic jam of main battle tanks on the nation’s motorways. Once the situation escalated to COBRA, the Cabinet Office emergency committee, and the government invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (calling for support from NATO forces following an attack on a member nation), the mess in Leeds became the number one global rolling news headline and still hasn’t died down. It even beat out an eighty-meter-tall daikaiju that invaded the Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise theme park and duked it out with the Japanese Self-Defense Agency, as a result of the incursion at Puroland that I was sent to help deal with—

  Nope, the events in Leeds aren’t going back in the closet any time soon.

  Nor has the aftermath gone unnoticed. There are smoking craters all over Yorkshire, an anime convention full of collateral damage in pointy ears, and the remains of a heavy cavalry brigade mounted on unicorns (shudder) corralled behind razor wire on Dartmoor, eating their heads off under the guns of half the army’s remaining Challenger MBTs. (And don’t ask me about the, ahem, “dragons.”) They’re arranging a snap summit meeting of all the heads of NATO member states later this month, and that’s something that simply does not happen. A large segment of the press and public are baying for blood, calling on the government to nuke the bastards, convene a war crimes tribunal, or arrest them for terrorism. Only the inconvenient fact that the current All-Highest is pleading for asylum from something even worse is giving anybody pause for concern.

  * * *

  I come out of the Newsnight studio feeling like SpongeBob SquarePants after a trip through the dishwasher: wrung out but still somewhat moist. Mhari and Boris are waiting for me. “Am being impressed,” Boris rumbles once we’re out of the glass doors and into the passage leading to the lifts. “Jeremy are not eated despite copious provocation.”

  “This way,” Mhari says tensely. Her heels click as she walks into the lift and holds the door for us. “That could have gone worse.”

  I lean against the wall and close my eyes as the floor sinks beneath me. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “No! I mean it.” I open my eyes as she shrugs. Her jacket shoulder pads rise and fall stiffly. “You spend time in the piranha tank, you’ve got to expect to get bitten.”

  “Piranhas am not biting fishes; reputation undeserved,” Boris says pedantically.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Mhari raises a finger. “But I’m calling it a qualified success. For starters, Bob managed to avoid looking rumpled for almost fifteen minutes. I think that’s a personal best.” My hand unconsciously moves to loosen the knot of my tie and she bats it away; we’re still in Broadcasting House, there must be a dress code or something. Another finger rises. “Two, he went five rounds with the Newsnight rottweiler without wetting himself, babbling state secrets, or losing his temper and eating Paxo’s soul.”

  I frown. “I wouldn’t have done that; it’s far too stringy and bitter.”

  Mhari raises a third finger. “Three: now we know for sure that someone’s briefing against us. Which means—”

  “Wait,” I interrupt, “you thought someone was briefing against us earlier? And didn’t warn me?”

  Mhari gives me a look. “In the current clusterfuck, who the hell knows?” she asks. I have to admit she’s got a point: in the past four weeks there have been three ministerial resignations and a vote of confidence in the Commons that the government barely won by the skin of its teeth, there’s been one mini-cabinet reshuffle already (with rumors of more to come), and the Scottish Independence referendum has been postponed until next year. In other words, politics has gone nonlinear and nobody seems to know what’s happening anymore. “But now the Auditors have reasonable cause to start investigating,” she concludes. “So that’s something.”

  Her expression wavers somewhere between uncertainty and fear: nobody likes being carpeted by the Auditors, even if they’re not under suspicion themselves. But before she can continue the lift hits bottom, and she stops talking because there’s no telling who might overhear us in the BBC headquarters’ lobby.

  “Drinks am on you,” Boris reminds her as we head towards the doors at the front of the atrium. I don’t dignify this with a reply and neither does Mhari. We’re both gloomily silent. I can’t speak for her, but I’m keeping my thoughts to myself because I’m brooding and irritable. I’m coming down from the adrenaline high of being grilled live on the nation’s flagship TV news program, and the crash is something special.

  It’s spitting with rain, so Boris valiantly steps forward to flag down a taxi while we wait on the plaza out front. Finally, I glance at Mhari. “Babbling state secrets?”

  She stares into the nighttime London traffic, eyebrows lowered in a minute frown, as if trying to decipher messages encoded in the flicker of passing headlights. “There’s a ten-second delay on the live broadcast loop. That’s why I was there: to hit the red button if you fucked up, and cover for you if they spotted you planting the bug.”

  “Thank you for that vote of confidence.”

  “You didn’t need me.” She hugs herself against the after-dark chill: she seems to be shaking. In front of us, in the rain, Boris has lowered his head and is speaking through a cab’s open side-window. Mhari’s cheek twitches slightly as an ivory fang’s sharp point pushes against her plumped lower lip. “Eater of soles. Heh. Well done!” After a moment I realize she’s laughing silently.

  “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”

  * * *

  It’s close to midnight when the taxi drops us off at the Hilton Olympia. Hiltons are reliable and terminally un-hip, so the bar is blessedly free of the hipster crowd who swarm the lobbies of boutique hotels from Hoxton to Hampstead these days. In fact it’s empty except for us, and a couple of international men of mystery busy downloading internet porn on their phones as they try to medicate their jet lag with vodka martinis.

  (Welcome to my life these days.)

  Boris grabs us a booth at one end of the bar. A waitress materializes as Mhari slithers onto the bench seat opposite us. We order: a whisky soda for Boris, a Bud (
the Czech kind) for me, and a Bloody Mary for Mhari, because she’s not totally humorless about her condition. My beer evaporates slowly as Mhari and Boris dissect my interview in painstaking detail. I wave for another just as Mhari gets around to asking the question I’ve been avoiding for the past hour. “Do you suppose it’s on iPlayer yet, Bob? Do you want to watch it? Your very own fifteen minutes of fame?”

  “How about we don’t go there?” I raise my new beer. Glug. “I’d like to sleep tonight, thanks. Watching me make an arse of myself on TV will not help. Beer will help.”

  “You didn’t make an arse of yourself—” Mhari cocks her head to one side and looks pitying, which irritates the hell out of me. “That’s not a good place to go, Bob.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t normally go places where I get laughed at by four million people, do I?” I shrug, then put my bottle down, loosen my strangulation device, and unbutton my collar. This time she doesn’t try to stop me: okay, so apparently I’m off duty at last. “It was a total clusterfuck, he was wearing a class six ward. Who ordered that?”

  Mhari looks at me sharply. “You’re sure? Class six?”

  “Yeah. Someone got to him, in addition to briefing against us. Can you—”

  She jerks her chin sideways. “Boris?”

  “Am on it,” he says without looking up as he thumb-types away. “Am emailing the SA nows.”

  “Any other surprises?” she asks me, and I shake my head.

  “No, but that one was bad enough as it is. It threw me badly.” I scan our surroundings again. You can never be too sure, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to us. “What was the sticky about, anyway?” The gizmo they wanted me to plant on the underside of the interviewee’s chair.

  Boris is inspecting his glass in obsessive detail.

  “Nobody briefed me on why, just on what,” Mhari says calmly. “You did your job, I did mine, that’s all.”