The Nightmare Stacks Read online

  Alex raises the visor on his full-face motorcycle helmet. “Give me a sec,” he says irritably, fumbling with the chin strap. He rode here on a rattly old Honda moped with L-plates, which he’s left leaning against a concrete pillar in the rooftop car park. He bought it yesterday for the princely sum of five hundred pounds. It’ll probably fail its next MOT test, but it’s a great excuse for wearing a helmet between hotel and office. He pulls the offending item off. “Alex Schwartz, from the New Annex. I’m supposed to report to Mrs. Knight? I’m hot-desking here for the next two weeks . . .”

  Juggling helmet in arm, he worms a hand inside his jacket and pulls out his warrant card. The security jobsworth relaxes slightly, then frowns. “Sir? My list says you were supposed to be here for a meeting at nine?”

  Alex glances at the clock on the wall. It’s a quarter to three in the afternoon. “So? I’m just very, very early.”

  “Sir, it says here, nine a.m. . . .”

  “Hang on.” Alex wishes for a moment that he had three hands: with some difficulty, he pulls out his phone. “Nope, that’s wrong, should be nine p.m. I don’t work mornings. Or daylight hours, for that matter. Is she still in?”

  “I don’t think she’s gone home yet, sir.” The security man looks distinctly perturbed. He thrusts a clipboard at Alex, who for the first time notices a pair of CCTV cameras mounted on a frame behind the guard’s shoulder. He suppresses a shudder. The guard continues: “Would you mind signing in, please?”

  Mrs. Knight has not gone home, and she’s still in her office when Alex knocks on the flimsy plywood door. “Yes?”

  “Alex Schwartz.” He pushes the door open. “I’m here for a meeting; there’s been a screw-up over the time, I only work nights.”

  “Oh, gracious.” She pushes her hair back—Alex is just about experienced enough to recognize a hastily suppressed eye-roll—and waves him into her visitor’s seat. (It’s armless, foam hangs out of one front seat corner, and a suspicious water stain decorates the back.) “Let me see—no, it says nine a.m. in the calendar.” She bats the ball brutally back into his half of the court, crosses her arms, and waits.

  “Well, the calendar’s wrong.” Mrs. Knight reminds Alex of a particularly uncooperative type of university administrator he’s met before, a kind he’s never really been able to get a handle on, so he buys time by glancing around. Over the past few months he’s gotten used to the make-do-and-mend ambiance of the New Annex, but even so, this is a distinct step down. “Have you been briefed on OPERA CAPE?” he asks. She nods, almost imperceptibly. “I’m one of them,” he says briskly. Deal with it. “So I work nights. Someone obviously cocked up the meeting slot, that’s all.”

  To her credit, Mrs. Knight doesn’t blanch, recoil, or reach for a crucifix. Alex finds this interesting, and starts to pay more attention. She’s in her late forties or early fifties, with tightly permed graying hair. She wears her office suit like a uniform. Ex-military, he guesses, or otherwise accustomed to disciplined austerity. She’s clearly made of stern stuff. Her office fixtures and fittings are beyond shabby, but everything is clean and tidy. “You’re part of Facilities, aren’t you?” he asks. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  “Oh Lord, they didn’t brief you either, did they?” Now the eye-roll comes out to play in earnest. “You’re the second today—do you know a Dr. Russell? He was through here earlier, I think Jack is still sorting out his desk—”

  “He’s a vicar, not a doctor,” Alex says absent-mindedly. “Yes, Pete’s my official mentor. Is he still—”

  “Well then,” she interrupts, standing up, “let’s go find him, grab a meeting room, and hear what you think of the bunker.”

  The Arndale office has a conference room. To Alex’s eye it looks like it was once a store cupboard, or maybe a stock room. Now it’s filled by an outsized boardroom table so large that there is only room for chairs along two edges. A row of mildewed lever arch files slowly collapses on a sagging chipboard shelf on the wall above the far side of the table: Alex makes out the runic inscription ACCOUNTS PAYABLE 88-89 on the spine of one of the binders. Mrs. Knight parks him at the end farthest from the door with a mug of institutional coffee that is almost exactly the same shade of beige as the carpet, then goes in search of Pete. She doesn’t take long to find him: they’re back almost before Alex has time to zone out.

  “The bunker,” Mrs. Knight begins expectantly. “What did you make of it?”

  Alex cuts to the chase. “Why hasn’t it been condemned? The basement’s flooded, it’s about thirty years overdue for maintenance, and it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Dr. Schwartz, the Civil Service doesn’t simply abandon everything it can no longer think of a use for.” She smiles at him, experimentally, and the temperature in the room drops a few degrees. “If it did, your kind would get short shrift, wouldn’t they?” Pete raises a hand as Alex bristles, but she pushes on regardless: “We don’t abandon people—like you—or things. The bunker has been underutilized for twenty-three years, but it has certain advantages. Besides being blast-proof, it’s fireproof and has daylight-proof accommodation, doesn’t it? It’s just off the ring road, on a major artery running right into the city center. One might even speculate that with a little modernization to bring it up to scratch it’d make excellent accommodation for photophobic employees?” Her smile is as bright as the dawn.

  “But—” Alex feels unaccountably panicky. The bunker is terrifyingly close to a certain suburban estate near Adel that Alex is desperately trying to avoid—the one where his old bedroom lurks in wait—but there’s got to be more to it than that, hasn’t there?

  “Calm down, Alex.” Pete lays a palm on Alex’s forearm. Alex can feel himself twitching, the end of his biro rattling on the desktop as if he’s auditioning for a hair metal band’s spontaneous combustion spot. Pete frowns apologetically at Mrs. Knight: “That wasn’t decaf, was it?”

  “Why? Is it important—”

  “Oh dear.” Pete winces. “Alex, it’s my fault: I didn’t spell it out properly.” Pete’s tone is soothing. To their interlocutor, he continues: “Alex doesn’t do caffeine, these days: it makes him a little too intense.”

  It’s mortifying: in the months since contracting PHANG syndrome, Alex has discovered that he’s become sensitive to caffeine. He’s not just mildly sensitive: a cup of milky tea has the same effect on him as a double shot of espresso on a normal person. (A regular filter coffee ought to come with a twelve-month sentence for possession with intent to supply.) He tries to nod, but the effort of doing so while keeping his teeth from clattering defeats him. Mrs. Knight looks at him dubiously, then back at Pete. “All right, then . . . can you present your colleague’s findings while he gets over it?”

  “Certainly.” Pete opens the folder he’s carrying: it contains a printout of Alex’s 5 a.m. email report. “I’ve looked at the basic bill of works to put the bunker in order and we’re looking at two to three million just to make it structurally safe, drain the subbasement, identify the source of ingress and block and damp-proof it, safe disposal of the medium-level radioactive waste, install a new sprinkler system, and bring the power supply up to modern spec. New mains interconnect, new diesel backup generator, that kind of thing. Then there’s the air filtration system—cost unknown, cold war nuclear-proof air filters aren’t an off-the-shelf product—and the entire telephone and network system to rip out and replace. I’d be surprised if it was less than another million and a half on top. Double everything if it’s done by our wonderful private sector partners, then add the cost of refurnishing and restocking the installation to house forty staff on 24x7 rotation and crisis manning with two hundred bodies for six weeks . . . and that’s before we add the special extras our department requires. Bindings and wards and suchlike. Is it really worth it? I mean, there are warehouse units out near Elland Road we could customize more easily at a tenth the price.”
r />   Mrs. Knight sighs. Then, to Alex’s surprise, she leans back in her chair, peers shortsightedly at the ceiling, and announces, “You’re right. Although it’s a bad idea to admit it. In fact it’s a potentially career-limiting move to say that. You could embarrass whoever was involved when the bad decisions were made in the first place, twenty or more years ago.”

  “Do go on,” Pete encourages her.

  “No.” She sits up again and smiles alarmingly. “I saw you palm that card, Doctor.”

  “I’m not a doctor—”

  “So he says.” She nods at Alex. “Rule number one, gentlemen, is that you are out in the hinterlands now. To the jobsbodies who keep the public works going and run the spreadsheets and authorize the payments, this is a technical service department and you are the eggheads from Research and Development in London. So you need respect, or they’ll ignore you, which is why Jez Wilson”—who is Alex’s line manager—“tipped me the wink to take you in hand and explain the facts of life to you. You are both doctors—doctor of divinity isn’t it, Doctor Russell?—because otherwise you’re just two trainees out on a provincial junket, getting underfoot and messing things up.

  “Whereas, in fact, your brief is to report on the bunker. Not on whether it’s suitable for the proposed use, but on how to make it suitable. Considering alternatives is not on the table.”

  Alex can no longer contain himself. “Wh-why not?”

  “Because policy. Or, if you mean why policy, because ley lines. You’re dead right about the warehouse units on the southwest, or all the other sites—but we need the bunker as well because it’s in exactly the right place to make best use of the local ley lines. Leeds grew up as a major transport intersection during the industrial revolution. It’s on a canal, a river, a couple of major railway lines, and at the intersection of three major motorways, but there’s an older significance to its location, since it was just a medieval village—”

  Ley lines. Alex zones out because of course it would have to be all about the geometry, wouldn’t it? Not the trivial geometry of megadeath architecture, of planting a concrete bunker with walls over a meter thick right at the intersection of the ring road and a main road to the city center, just beyond the 5psi overpressure contour of a quarter megaton air burst directly above Vicar Lane . . . no: Alex is flashing back to the higher-dimensional occult geometry that winds a nightmarish golden braid through alien continua, where undead alien minds gibber and howl at the darkness. At the projections of higher-dimensional paths into our own curved four-dimensional spacetime that give rise to ley lines along which distance is distorted—paths created by the activities of computational thinkers, be they machines (British Telecom had terrible problems with clock drift in their 1960s microwave tower network due to spontaneous line formation) or concentrations of villagers praying to beings with webbed fingers and dubious dietary preferences.

  “Alex?” Pete elbows him discreetly.

  “What? Oh, yes. Ley lines. Of course.” Mrs. Knight sends him a cool stare while he struggles to focus through the caffeine buzz. “I take it the bunker is particularly convenient for the, uh, proposed national headquarters?” There, he’s said it: admitted the horrifying possibility that the Laundry is serious about upping stakes from London and transplanting most of its infrastructure to Leeds. It sticks in his throat, but what’s a boy from Bramhope to do?

  “You could say that.” Mrs. Knight’s stare loses its acuity by increments. “We’re two and a half kilometers out, here in Headingley. The bunker is another one point five. But if it’s refurbished and we can create a new endpoint anchor in the center of town—I gather R&D has some people looking into amending the construction plans for the Merrion Centre replacement project to distort the local geomantic contour map—we can bring it down to a virtual two hundred meters from the back of Quarry House! You ought to be able to dash that far without catching fire even in bright daylight.”

  “And—” Alex blinks. “Right. A nuke-proof regional continuity of government bunker that’s just two hundred meters from the new HQ building via ley line, with access to the national ley line network, I can see why that would be . . . interesting.” Assuming the newly energized track doesn’t attract eaters and class two or higher agencies to feed on the fleeing personnel, it’d be quite an advantage. “Doesn’t Quarry House also have a bunker?”

  “Of course it does.” Mrs. Knight opens her own folder and pulls out a sheaf of dog-eared papers. “But firstly, it’s in the city center, and secondly, it’s smaller, and third, no on-site geomantic nexus. It’s right in the bullseye of the target zone for any major incursion, Dr. Schwartz, and if by some mischance anything does hit Leeds, getting stuff in and out of NOH will be nearly impossible—”

  “NOH?” asks Pete.

  “National Operational Headquarters. That’s what the overall project’s called.” She pulls out another file. “The project to take the fourth largest metropolitan district in the nation and turn it into a fortified coordinating center for repelling alien invasions when the stars come right, without being obvious about it.” Is that a nervous tic, a twitch, or a sniff of sly amusement? Alex wonders. “So you see, Dr. Schwartz, it’s not about whether we refurbish the bunker—it’s about how. And when. And how best to use it to reinforce NOH’s peripheral defenses.

  “Now. Shall we go over your preliminary report together? I have some questions I’d like you to consider . . .”

  * * *

  Alex does not work all night at the Arndale office: for one thing, almost everyone else goes home by 7 p.m., and for another thing, there’s nothing to do there. After their meeting Doris Knight tells him that the next day someone from Internal Resources will assign him a desk, then politely suggests he go home—which in his case means returning to his hotel room. So Alex is out in the city center by 8:30 p.m., wondering moodily whether to try one of the newer Chinese restaurants, when his phone vibrates with the urgent SOS pattern he’s assigned to family members, relatives, and other unwelcome intrusions from the so-called real world.

  “Oh hell,” Alex mutters aloud, perturbing a dog-walker as he fumbles the big Samsung out of his jacket pocket and clamps it to the side of his head. “Hello?”

  “Alex? Alex, is that you?”

  He recognizes his mother’s slightly querulous tone instantly, and although he knows he ought to be glad to hear her voice his heart sinks and in consequence he feels a stab of guilt. He can guess why she’s calling and he really doesn’t want to have to think about it.

  “Yes, Mum, it’s me. What is it?”

  His mother is fifty-three, with curly brown hair (or so he believes: she’s been dyeing it for some years now), slightly saggy-cheeked, with eyelids that droop at the corners. She wears face powder that smells of lilac (not the choking chemical warfare fragrance of a seventy-year-old, but it’s still an olfactory assault on his senses), and she is still married to Eric, her childhood sweetheart and Alex’s father. She works full-time as a VAT audit clerk for HMRC, in the regional tax headquarters. Her specialty is takeaway food joints. If he could talk to her about his new job he would be surprised by how much their working environments have in common, but this is all irrelevant because Alex is suffering the tachycardia, sweaty palms, and overwhelming deer-caught-in-headlights freezing panic that comes on when he realizes she’s about to put The Question to him again.

  “Are you in Leeds yet? When are you coming to dinner?”

  Alex is in the habit of phoning his parents every week, usually on Friday evening around seven o’clock, before they sit down to dinner. It’s a long-standing ritual that got started when he first went away to university: if he doesn’t call them, they get anxious. Since working for the Laundry he’s been given a back story to explain any anomalies in his habits, and so far it’s just about held together—despite some unfortunate problems he’s trying to get fixed. But last Friday, seven o’clock found Alex scrunched into
a south-facing window seat in second class on an East Coast Main Line train barreling past Peterborough on the way north. Phone signal dropouts and an unwise moment led him to let his guard down and admit what he should, at all costs, have kept to himself: that he was coming home (even if only briefly, because of work). Visiting Leeds is not in and of itself catastrophic. But it gives Mum an excuse to ask The Question once more, and his stomach gives a sickening lurch as he realizes she’s going to do it again.

  “I don’t know, Mum, I’m working evenings and into the early hours and commuting back to London at weekends, so I’m not sure—”

  “But how about staying up here the week after next? Sarah is going to be home from college by then and she’s dying to see you! Perhaps you can come over for dinner on Saturday? It’ll be just like old times!”

  Sarah is Alex’s kid sister. She’s four years younger than him, all elbows and knees and frizzy hair the color of a dead mouse. He remembers her for freckles and dental braces, but he understands she’s twenty now (how did that happen?) and in her second year at Nottingham, studying Management and Accounting. She probably thinks she’s a grown-up. Worse, she probably has a boyfriend who thinks she’s a grown-up, and who she will in due course bring home to introduce to the parents over dinner, at which point The Question becomes an unavoidable, fiery source of mortification and embarrassment—

  “I can make that Saturday,” he hears his traitor mouth admit as his attention splits to drive his feet in a wide berth around a pavement pizza. “But honestly, if it’s too much bother you don’t need to—”

  “Nonsense, I was going to cook anyway! Sarah’s going to bring Mack.” This is the first time he’s heard a male name attached to his younger sibling and he almost walks into a lamppost in surprise, even though it’s entirely in line with his earlier speculation. “Are you bringing, anyone?” He almost misses the brief pause. “We’re dying to meet her, your mystery girlfriend!”