The Jennifer Morgue Read online

  I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupé pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.

  “You stupid fucking bitch!” I yell, thumping the steering wheel until the Smart wobbles alarmingly and, heart in mouth, I tentatively lift off the accelerator and let my speed drift back down to a mere 140 or so. “Stupid fucking Audidriving Barbie girl, brains of a chocolate mousse—”

  I spot a road sign saying DARMSTADT 20KM just as something—a low-flying Luftwaffe Starfighter, maybe—makes a strafing run on my left. Ten infinitely long minutes later I arrive at the slip road for Darmstadt sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers, my buttocks soaking in a puddle of cold sweat and all my hair standing on end. Next time, I resolve, I’m going to take the train and damn the expense.

  Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it’s better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students. These days what’s left of the ’50s austerity concrete has a rusticated air and a patina of moss, and the worst excesses of ’60s Neo-Brutalism have been replaced by glass and brightly painted steel that clashes horribly with what’s left of the old Rhenish gingerbread. It could be Anytown EU, more modern and less decrepit than its US equivalent, but somehow it looks bashful and self-effacing. The one luxury Facilities did pay for is an in-car navigation system (the better to stop me wasting Laundry time by getting lost en route), so once I get off the Death Race track I drive on autopilot, sweaty and limp with animalistic relief at having survived. And then I find myself in a hotel parking bay between a Toyota and a bright red Audi TT.

  “The fuck.” I thump the steering wheel again, more angry than terrified now that I’m not in imminent danger of death. I peer at it—yup, it’s the same model car, and the same color. I can’t be certain it’s the same one (my nemesis was going so fast I couldn’t read her number plate because of the Doppler shift) but I wouldn’t bet against it: it’s a small world. I shake my head and squeeze out of the Smart, pick up my bags, and slouch towards reception.

  Once you’ve seen one international hotel, you’ve seen them all. The romance of travel tends to fade fast after the first time you find yourself stranded at an airport with a suitcase full of dirty underwear two hours after the last train left. Ditto the luxury of the business hotel experience on your fourth overseas meeting of the month. I check in as fast and as painlessly as possible (aided by another of those frighteningly helpful German babes, albeit this time with slightly worse English) then beam myself up to the sixth floor of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel. Then I hunt through the endless and slightly claustrophobic maze of air-conditioned corridors until I find my room.

  I dump my duffle bag, grab my toilet kit and a change of clothes, and duck into the bathroom to wash away the stink of terror. In the mirror, my reflection winks at me and points at a new white hair until I menace him with a tube of toothpaste. I’m only twenty-eight: I’m too young to die and too old to drive fast.

  I blame Angleton. This is all his fault. He set me on this path exactly two days after the board approved my promotion to SSO, which is about the lowest grade to carry any significant managerial responsibilities. “Bob,” he said, fixing me with a terrifyingly avuncular smile, “I think it’s about time you got out of the office a bit more. Saw the world, got to grips with the more mundane aspects of the business, that sort of thing. So you can start by standing in for Andy Newstrom on a couple of low-priority, joint-liaison meetings. What do you say?”

  “Great,” I said enthusiastically. “Where do I start?”

  Well okay, I should really blame myself, but Angleton’s a more convenient target—he’s very hard to say no to, and more importantly, he’s eight hundred miles away. It’s easier to blame him than to kick the back of my own head.

  Back in the bedroom I pull my tablet PC out of my luggage and plug it in, jack it into the broadband socket, poke my way through the tedious pay-to-register website, and bring up the VPN connection back to the office. Then I download an active ward and leave it running as a screen saver. It looks like a weird geometric pattern endlessly morphing and cycling through a color palette until it ends up in a retina-eating stereoisogram, and it’s perfectly safe to sneak a brief glance at it, but if an intruder looks at it for too long it’ll Pwnz0r their brain. I drape a pair of sweaty boxer shorts across it before I go out, just in case room service calls. When it comes to detecting burglars, hairs glued to door frames are passé.

  Down at the concierge desk I check for messages. “Letter for Herr Howard? Please to sign here.” I spot the inevitable Starbucks stand in a corner so I amble over to it, inspecting the envelope as I go. It’s made of expensive cream paper, very thick and heavy, and when I stare at it closely I see fine gold threads woven into it. They’ve used an italic font and a laser printer to address it, which cheapens the effect. I slit it open with my Swiss Army cybertool as I wait for one of the overworked Turkish baristas to get round to serving me. The card inside is equally heavy, but handwritten:

  Bob,

  Meet me in the Laguna Bar at 6 p.m. or as soon as you arrive, if later.

  Ramona

  “Um,” I mutter. What the fuck?

  I’m here to take part in the monthly joint-liaison meeting with our EU partner agencies. It’s held under the auspices of the EU Joint Intergovernmental Framework on Cosmological Incursions, which is governed by the Common Defense provisions of the Second Treaty of Nice. (You haven’t heard of this particular EU treaty because it’s secret by mutual agreement, none of the signatories wanting to start a mass panic.) Despite the classified nature of the event it’s really pretty boring: we’re here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what’s been going on lately, update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction—the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right—everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values. After the meeting I’m supposed to take the minutes home and brief Angleton, Boris, Rutherford, and anyone else in my reporting chain, then circulate the minutes to other departments. Sic transit gloria spook.

  Anyway, I’m expecting an agenda and directions to a meeting room, not a bar invite from a mysterious Ramona. I rack my brains: Who do I know who’s called Ramona? Wasn’t there a song . . . ? Joey Ramone . . . no. I fold the envelope and stuff it in my back pocket. Sounds like a porn spammer’s alias. I break out of the slowly shuffling coffee queue just in time to annoy the furiously mustachioed counter dude. Where the hell is the Laguna Bar?

  I spot a number of dark, glass-partitioned areas clustered around the atrium in front of the check-in desk. They’re the usual hotel squeeze joints, overpriced restaurants, and 24-hour shops selling whatever you forgot to pack yesterday morning at four o’dark. I hunt aroun
d until I spot the word LAGUNA picked out in teensy gold Fraktur Gothic to one side of a darkened doorway, in an evident attempt to confuse the unwary.

  I peek round the partition. It’s a bar, expensively tricked out in that retro-seventies style with too much polished Italian marble and sub-Bauhaus chrome furniture. At this time of evening it’s nearly empty (although maybe the fact that they charge six euros for a beer has something to do with it). I check my phone: it’s 6:15. Damn. I head for the bar, glancing around hopefully in case the mysterious Ramona’s wearing a cardboard sign saying: I’M RAMONA—TRY ME. So much for subtle spy-work.

  “Ein Weissbier, bitte,” I ask, exhausting about 60 percent of my total German vocabulary.

  “Sure thing, man.” The bartender turns to grab a bottle.

  “I’m Ramona,” a female voice with a vaguely East Coast accent murmurs quietly in my left ear. “Don’t turn around.” And something hard pokes me in the ribs.

  “Is that the aerial of your mobile phone, or are you displeased to see me?” It probably is a phone, but I do as she says: in this kind of situation it doesn’t do to take chances.

  “Shut up, wise guy.” A slim hand reaches discreetly under my left arm and paws at my chest. The bartender is taking an awfully long time to find that bottle. “Hey, what is this Scheiss?”

  “You found the shoulder holster? Careful, that’s my Bluetooth GPS receiver in there. And that pocket’s where I keep the noise-canceling headphones for my iPod—hey, watch out, they’re expensive!—and the spare batteries for my PDA, and—”

  Ramona lets go of my fishing jacket and a moment later the stubby object disappears from the small of my back. The bartender swings round, beaming and clutching a weird-looking glass in one hand and a bottle with a culturally stereotyped label in the other. “Dude, will this do? It’s a really good Weizenbock . . .”

  “Bob!” trills Ramona, stepping sideways until I can finally see her. “Make mine a dry gin and tonic, ice, but hold the fruit,” she tells the barman, smiling like sunrise over the Swiss Alps. I glance at her sidelong and try not to gape.

  We’re in supermodel territory here—or maybe she’s Uma Thurman’s stunt double. She’s almost five centimeters taller than me, blonde, and she’s got cheekbones Mo would kill for. The rest of her isn’t bad, either. She has the kind of figure that most models dream about—if indeed that isn’t what she does for a living when she isn’t sticking guns in civil servants’ backs—and whatever the label on her strapless silk gown says, it probably costs more than I earn in a year, before you add in the jewelry dripping from her in incandescent waves. Real physical perfection isn’t something a guy like me gets to see up close and personal very often, and it’s something to marvel at—then run away from, before it hypnotizes you like a snake staring into the eyes of something small, furry, and edible.

  She’s beautiful but deadly, and right now she has one slim hand in her black patent-leather evening bag: judging from the slight tension at the corners of her eyes I’ll bet hard money she’s holding a small, pearl-handled automatic pistol just out of sight.

  One of my wards bites me on the back of my wrist and I realize what’s come over me: it’s a glamour. I feel a sudden pang of something like homesickness for Mo, who at least comes from my own planet, even if she insists on practicing the violin at all hours.

  “Fancy meeting you here like this, darling!” Ramona adds, almost as an afterthought.

  “How unexpected,” I agree, taking a step sideways and reaching for the glass and bottle. The bartender, dazzled by her smile, is already reaching for a shot glass. I manage an experimental grin. Ramona reminds me of a certain ex-girlfriend (okay, she reminds me of Mhari: I admit it, try not to wince, and move on) done up to the nines and in full-on predator mode. As I get used to the impact of her glamour I begin to get an edgy feeling I’ve seen her before. “Is that your red Audi in the car park?”

  She turns the full force of her smile on me. “What if it is?”

  Glub glub . . . chink. Ice cubes sloshing into gin. “That’ll be sixteen euros, man.”

  “Put it on my room tab,” I say automatically. I slide the card over. “If it is, you nearly rubbed me out on the A45.”

  “I nearly—” She looks puzzled for a moment. Then even more puzzled. “Was it you in that ridiculous little tin can?”

  “If my office would pay for an Audi TT I’d drive one, too.” I feel a stab of malicious glee at her visible disquiet. “Who do you think I am? And who are you, and what do you want?”

  The bartender drifts away to the other end of the bar, still smiling blissfully under her influence. I blink back little warning flickers of migraine-like distortion as I look at her. That’s got to be at least a level three glamour she’s wearing, I tell myself, and shiver. My ward isn’t powerful enough to break through it so I can see her as she really is, but at least I can tell I’m being spoofed.

  “I’m Ramona Random. You can call me Ramona.” She takes a chug of the G&T, then stares down her nose at me with those disquietingly clear eyes, like an aristocratic Eloi considering a shambling, half-blind Morlock who’s somehow made it to the surface. I take a preliminary sip of my beer, waiting for her to continue. “Do you want to fuck me?”

  I spray beer through my nostrils. “You have got to be kidding!”

  It’s more tactful than I’d rather bed a king snake and sounds less pathetic than my girlfriend would kill me, but the instant I come out with it I know it’s a gut reaction, and true: What’s under that glamour? Nothing I’d want to meet in bed, I’ll bet.

  “Good,” says Ramona, closing the door very firmly on that line of speculation, much to my relief. She nods, a falling lock of flax-colored hair momentarily concealing her face: “Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later.” It must be my expression, because a moment later she adds, defensively: “It’s just a coincidence! I didn’t kill them. Well, most of them.”

  I realize I’m trying to hide behind my beer glass, and force myself to straighten up. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I say, a little too rapidly.

  “I was just checking because we’re supposed to be working together. And it would be real unfortunate if you slept with me and died, because then we couldn’t do that.”

  “Really? How interesting. And what exactly is it you think I do?”

  She puts her glass down and removes her hand from her bag. It’s déjà vu all over again: instead of a gun she’s holding a three-year-old Palm Pilot. It’s inferior tech, and I feel a momentary flash of smugness at knowing I’ve got the drop on her in at least one important department. She flips the protective cover open and glances at the screen. “I think you work for Capital Laundry Services,” she says matter-of-factly. “Nominally you’re a senior scientific officer in the Department of Internal Logistics. You’re tasked with representing your department in various joint committees and with setting policy on IT acquisitions. But you really work for Angleton, don’t you? So they must see something in you that I—” her suddenly jaundiced gaze takes in my jeans, somewhat elderly tee shirt, and fishing vest stuffed with geek toys “—don’t.”

  I try not to wilt too visibly. Okay, she’s a player. That makes things easier—and harder, in a way. I swallow a mouthful of beer, successfully this time. “So why don’t you tell me who you are?”

  “I just did. I’m Ramona and I’m not going to sleep with you.”

  “Fine, Ramona-and-I’m-not-going-to-sleep-with-you. What are you? I mean, are you human? I can’t tell, what with that glamour you’re wearing, and that kind of thing makes me nervous.”

  Sapphire eyes stare at me. “Keep guessing, monkey-boy.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake—“Okay, I mean, who do you work for?”

  “The Black Chamber. And I always wear this body on business. We’ve got a dress code, you know.”

  The Black Chamber? My stomach lurches. I’ve had one run-in with those guys, near the outset of my professional career, and everyth
ing I’ve learned since has taught me I was damned lucky to survive. “Who are you here to kill?”

  She makes a faint moue of distaste. “I’m supposed to be working with you. I wasn’t sent here to kill anyone.”

  We’re going in circles again. “Fine. You’re going to work with me but you don’t want to sleep with me in case I drop dead, Curse of the Mummy and all that. You’re tooled up to vamp some poor bastard, but it’s not me, and you seem to know who I am. Why don’t you just cut the crap and explain what you’re doing here, why the hell you’re so jumpy, and what’s going on?”

  “You really don’t know?” She stares at me. “I was told you’d been briefed.”

  “Briefed?” I stare right back at her. “You’ve got to be kidding! I’m here for a committee meeting, not a live-action role-playing game.”

  “Huh!” For a moment she looks puzzled. “You are here to attend the next session of the joint-liaison committee on cosmological incursions, aren’t you?”

  I nod, very slightly. The Auditors don’t usually ask you what you didn’t say, they’re more interested in what you did say, and who you said it to.1 “You’re not on my briefing sheet.”

  “I see.” Ramona nods thoughtfully, then relaxes slightly. “Sounds like a regular fuck-up, then. Like I said, I was told we’re going to be working together on a joint activity, starting with this meeting. For the purposes of this session I’m an accredited delegate, by the way.”

  “You—” I bite my tongue, trying to imagine her in a committee room going over the seventy-six-page agenda. “You’re a what?”

  “I’ve got observer status. Tomorrow I’ll show you my ward,” she adds. (That clinches it. The wards are handed out to those of us who’re assigned to the joint committee.) “You can show me yours. I’m sure you’ll be briefed before that—afterwards we’ll have a lot more to talk about.”