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  I can't very well go back to civvy street; they'll let me if I ask nicely, but only as long as I agree to have nothing to do with a wide range of occupations–including everything I can possibly earn a living at. This will cause problems, family problems as well as money problems–mum will probably ignore me and dad will yell about slacking and layabout hippies. Having a son in the civil service suits them down to the ground: they both get to ignore the inconvenient evidence of their mistaken marriage and carry on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that at least they did the parental thing successfully. Meanwhile, I haven't served long enough to earn a pension yet. I suppose I could stagnate in tech support indefinitely, or mutate into management; a generous portion of the Laundry's payroll is devoted to buying the silence of incompetent lambs, manufacturing work for people who need something to fill the time between their first, accidental exposure and final retirement. (There's nothing kindhearted about this; bumping off talkative voices is an expensive, dangerous business with hideous political consequences if you get caught, and it makes for an unpleasant working environment. Paying dead wood to sit at a desk and not rock the boat is comparatively cheap and painless.) But I'd like to think life isn't quite so . . . meaningless.

  Seagulls wheel and squawk overhead. There's a faint thud behind me; one of them has dropped something on the beach. I turn round to watch, just in case the bastards are trying to toilet-bomb me. At first glance that's what it looks like: something small, like a starfish, and faintly green. But on closer inspection . . .

  I stand up and lean over the thing. Yes, it's starfish-shaped: radial symmetry, five-fold order. Seems to be a fossil, some kind of greenish soapstone. Then I look closer. I know that only two hundred miles away most of the nuclear reactors in Europe are sitting on the Normandy coast, where the prevailing winds would blow a fallout plume out toward us. (And you wonder why the British government insists on keeping its nuclear weapons?) Nevertheless, this is weirder than any radiation mutant has a right to be. Each tentacle tip is slightly truncated; the whole thing looks like a cross-section through a sea cucumber. It must be a representative of an older order, a living fossil left over from some weird family of organisms mostly rendered extinct by the Cambrian biodiversity catastrophe–when the structures that lie buried two kilometres below a nameless British Antarctic Survey base were built.

  I stare at the fossil, because it seems like an omen. A thing transported from its natural environment, washed up and left to die on an alien beach beneath the gaze of creatures incomprehensible to it: that's a good metaphor for humanity in this age, the humanity that the Laundry is sworn to defend. Never mind the panoply of state and secrecy, the cold-war trappings of village and security cordon–what it's about, when you get down to it, is this: our appalling vulnerability, collectively, before the onslaught of beings we can barely comprehend. A lesser one, not even one of the great Old Ones, would be enough to devastate a city; we play under the shadow of forces so sinister that a momentary relaxation of vigilance would see all that is human blotted out.

  I can go back to London, and they will let me go back to my desk and my stuffy cubicle and my job fixing broken office machines. No recriminations, just a job for life and a pension in thirty-years time in return for a promise of silence to the grave. Or I can go back to the office in the village and sign the piece of paper that says they can do whatever they like with me. Unthanked, possibly fatal service, anywhere in the world: called on to do things which may well be repugnant, and which I will never be able to talk about. Maybe no pension at all, just an unmarked grave in some isolated defile on a central Asian plateau, or a sock-shod foot washed up, unaccompanied, on a Pacific beach one morning while the crabs dine heavy. Nobody ever volunteered for field ops because of the pay and conditions. On the other hand . . .

  I look at the starfish-thing and see eyes, human eyes, with worms moving inside them, and I realise that there is no choice. Really, there never was a choice.

  Chapter 3

  DEFECTOR

  Three months later to the nearest minute I am loosely attached to the US desk, working on my first field assignment. This would normally be an extremely stressful point in my career, except that this is very much a low-stress training mission, as Santa Cruz is one of the nicest parts of California, and right now having my fingernails pulled out by the Spanish Inquisition would be more pleasant than putting up with Mhari. So I'm making the most of it, sitting in a tacky bar down on a seaside pier, nursing a cold glass of Santa Cruz Brewing Company wheat beer, and watching the pelicans practice their touch-'n'-gos on the railing outside.

  It's early summer and the temperature's in the mid-twenties; the beach is covered in babes, boardwalk refugees, and surf nazis. This being Santa Cruz I'm wearing cut-off jeans, a psychedelic T-shirt, and a back-to-front baseball cap–but I can't kid myself about passing for a native. I've got the classic geek complexion–one a goth would kill for–and in Santa Cruz even the geeks get out in the sun once in a while. Not to mention wearing more than one earring.

  My contact is a guy called Mo. Actually, I'm not sure that isn't a pseudonym. Nobody seems to know very much about the mysterious Mo, except he's an expatriate British academic, and he's having trouble coming home. All of which makes me wonder why the Laundry is involved at all, as opposed to the Consulate in San Francisco.

  A bit of background is in order; after all, aren't the UK and the USA allies? Well, yes and no. No two countries have identical interests, and the result is a blurred area where self-interest causes erstwhile allies to act toward one another in a less than friendly manner. Mossad spies on the CIA; in the 1970s, Romania and Bulgaria spied on the Soviet Union. This doesn't mean their leaders aren't slurping each other's cigars, but . . .

  In 1945 the UK and the USA signed a joint intelligence-sharing treaty that opened their most secret institutions to mutual inspection and exchange: at the time they were fighting a desperate war against a common enemy. Not many people outside the secret services understand just how close to the abyss we stood, even as late as April 1945: there's nothing like facing a diabolical enemy set on your complete destruction to cement an alliance at the highest level . . . and for the first few postwar years, the UK-USA treaty kept us singing from the same hymn book.

  But UK-USA relations deteriorated over the following decade. Partly this was a side effect of the Helsinki Protocol; when even Molotov agreed that occult weapons of the type envisaged by Hitler's Thule Society minions were too deadly to use, a lot of the pressure came off the alliance. When it became apparent that the British intelligence system was riddled with Russian spies, the CIA turned the cold shoulder; thus, a background of shifting superpower politics was established, in which the moth-eaten British lion was unwillingly taught his place in the scheme of things by the new ringmaster, Uncle Sam. I suppose you could blame the Suez crisis and the Turing debacle, or Nixon's paranoia, but in 1958, when the UK offered to extend the 1945 treaty to cover occult intelligence, the US government refused.

  My colleagues in GCHQ listen in on domestic US phone calls, compile logs, and pass them across the desk to their NSA liaisons–who are forbidden by charter from spying on domestic US territory. In return, the NSA Echelon listening posts give GCHQ a plausibly deniable way of monitoring every phone conversation in western Europe–after all, they're not actually listening; they're just reading transcripts prepared by someone else, aren't they? But in the twilight world of occult intelligence, we aren't allowed to cooperate overtly. I don't have a liaison here, any more than I'd have one in Kabul or Belgrade: I'm technically an illegal, albeit on a tourist visa. Any nasty reality excursions are strictly my problem.

  On the other hand, the days of midnight insertions–bailing out of the back door of a bomber by midnight and trying not to hang your parachute up on the Iron Curtain–are gone for good. Gone, too, are the days of show trials for captured spies: if I get caught, the worst I can expect is to be questioned and put on the first flight home. M
y way into the country was more prosaic than a wartime parachute drop, too: I flew in on an American Airlines MD-11, filled out the visa waiver declaration ("occupation: civil servant; purpose of visit: work assignment," and no, I was not a member of the German Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945), and entered via the arrival hall at San Francisco Airport.

  * * * *

  Which is how I find myself watching the pelicans on the pier at Santa Cruz, sipping my beer sparingly, waiting for Mo to manifest himself, and trying to figure out just why a British academic should be having so much trouble coming home as to need our help–not to mention why the Laundry might be taking him seriously.

  I'm not the only customer in the bar, but I'm the only one with a beer and a copy (unopened) of Philosophical Transactions on Uncertainty Theory lying in front of me. That's my cover; I'm meant to be a visiting postgrad student come to talk to the prof about a possible teaching post. So when Mo walks in he should have no difficulty identifying me. There are six professors of philosophy at UCSC: one tenured, two assistant, and three visiting. I wonder which of them he is?

  I glance around idly, just in case he's already here. There are two grunge metal skateboard types in the far corner, drinking Bud-Miller-Coors and comparing body piercings; the town's swarming with 'em, nothing to take note of. A gentleman in a plaid shirt, chinos, and short haircut sits on a bar stool on his own, back ramrod-straight, reading the San Jose Mercury News. (That dings my suspicion-o-meter because he looks very Company in a casual-Friday kind of way–but if they were tailing me why in hell would they make it so obvious? He might equally well be an affluent local businessman.) A trio of nrrrd grrrlzz with shaven scalps and unicorn forelocks compare disposable tattoos and disappear into the toilet one by one, going in glum and coming out giggly: must be a Bolivian marching powder dispenser or a mendicant sin-eater or something in there. I shake my head and sip my beer, then look up just as a rather amazing babe with classic red hair leans over me.

  "Mind if I take this chair?"

  "Um–" I'm trying desperately to think of an excuse, because my contact is looking for a single man with a copy of PTUT on the table in front of him. But she doesn't give me time:

  "You can call me Mo. You would be Bob?"

  "Yeah. Have a seat." I blink rapidly at her, stuck for words. She sits down while I study her.

  Mo is striking. She's a good six feet tall, for starters. Strong features, high cheekbones, freckles, hair that looks like you could wrap it in insulation and run the national grid through it. She's got these big dangly silver earrings with glass eyeballs, and she's wearing combat pants, a plain white top, and a jacket that is so artfully casual that it probably costs more than I earn in a month. Oh, and there's a copy of Philosophical Transactions on Uncertainty Theory in her left hand, which she puts down on top of mine. I can't estimate her age; early thirties? That would make her a real high-flyer. She catches me staring at her and stares back, challenging.

  "Can I buy you a drink?" I ask.

  She freezes for a moment then nods, emphatically. "Pineapple juice." I wave at the bartender, feeling more than a little flustered. Under her scrutiny I get the feeling that there's something of the Martian about her: a vast, unsympathetic intelligence from another world. I also get the feeling that she doesn't suffer fools gladly.

  "I'm sorry," I say, "nobody told me who to expect." The local businessman looks across from his newspaper expressionlessly: he sees me watching and turns back to the sports pages.

  "Not your problem." She relaxes a little. The bartender appears and takes an order for a pineapple juice and another beer–I can't seem to get used to these undersized pints–and vanishes again.

  "I'm interested in a teaching post," I find myself saying, and hope her contact told her what the cover story is. "I'm looking for somewhere to continue after my thesis. UCSC has a good reputation, so . . ."

  "Uh-huh. Nice climate too." She nods at the pelicans outside the window. "Better than Miskatonic."

  "Really? You were there?"

  I must have asked too eagerly because she looks at me bleakly and says, "Yes." I nearly bite my tongue. (Foreign female professor of philosophy in the snobbish halls of a New England college. Worse: non-WASP, judging from the Irish accent.) "Some other time. What was the topic of your thesis again?"

  Is it my imagination or does she sound half-amused? This isn't part of the script: we're meant to go for a walk and talk about things where we can't be overheard, not ad-lib it in a cafe. Plus, she thinks I'm from the Foreign Office. What the hell does she expect me to say, early Latin literature? "It's about"–I mentally cross my fingers–"a proof of polynomial-time completeness in the traversal of Hamiltonian networks. And its implications."

  She sits up a bit straighter. "Oh, right. That's interesting."

  I shrug. "It's what I do for a living. Among other things. Where do your research interests lie?"

  The businessman stands up, folds his newspaper, and leaves.

  "Reasoning under conditions of uncertainty." She squints at me slightly. "Not prior probabilities stuff, Bayesian reasoning based on statistics–but reasoning where there are no evidential bases."

  I play dumb: suddenly my heart is hammering between my ribs. "And is this useful?"

  She looks amused. "It pays the bills."

  "Really?"

  The amusement vanishes. "Eighty percent of the philosophical logic research in this country is paid for by the Pentagon, Bob. If you want to work here you'll need to get your head around that fact."

  "Eighty percent–" I must look dumbfounded, because something goes click and she switches out of her half-sardonic Brief Encounter mode and into full professorial flow: "A philosophy professor earns about thirty thousand bucks and costs maybe another five thousand a year in office space and chalk. A marine earns around fifteen thousand bucks and costs maybe another hundred thousand a year in barrack space, ammunition, transport, fuel, weapons, VA expenses, and so on. Supporting all the philosophy departments of the USA costs about as much as funding a single battalion of marines." She looks wryly amused. "They're looking for a breakthrough. Knowing how to deconstruct any opponent's ideological infrastructure and derive self-propagating conceptual viruses based on its blind spots, for example. That sort of thing would give them a real strategic edge: their psych-ops people would be able to make enemies surrender without firing a shot, and do so reliably. Cybernetics and game theory won them the Cold War, so paying for philosophers is militarily more sensible than paying for an extra company of marines, don't you think?"

  "That's"–I shake my head–"logical, but weird." No weirder than what they pay me to do.

  She snorts. "It's not exceptional. Did you know that for the past twenty years they've been spending a couple of million a year on research into antimatter weapons?"

  "Antimatter?" I shake my head again: I'm going to get a stiff neck at this rate. "If someone figured out how to make it in bulk they'd be in a position to–"

  "Exactly," she says, and looks at me with a curiously satisfied expression. Why do I have a feeling she's seen right through me?

  (Antimatter isn't the most exotic thing DARPA has been spending research money on by a long way, but it's exotic enough for the average college professor; especially a philosopher who, reading between the lines, has any number of reasons for being cheesed off with the military-academic complex.)

  "I'd like to talk about this some more," I venture, "but maybe this isn't the right place?" I take a mouthful of beer. "How about a walk? When do you have to get back to your office?"

  "I have a lecture to deliver at nine tomorrow, if that's what you're asking." She pauses, delicately, tongue slightly extended: "You're thinking about coming to work here, why don't I show you some of the sights?"

  "That would be great." We finish our drinks and leave the bar–and the bugs, real or imagined–behind.

  * * * *

  I can be a good listener when I try. Mo–A diminutive of Dominique, I gather,
which is why I couldn't find her on the university's staff roster–is a good talker, or at least she is when she has a lot to unload. Which is why we walk until I have blisters.

  Seal Point is a grassy headland that abruptly turns into a cliff, falling straight down to the Pacific breakers. Some lunatics in wet-suits are trying to surf down there; I wouldn't want to underwrite their life insurance policies. About fifty feet away there's a rocky outcrop carpeted in sea lions. Their barking carries faintly over the crash of the surf. "My mistake was in signing the nondisclosure agreements the university gave me without getting my own lawyer to check them out." She stares out to sea. "I thought they were routine academic application agreements, saying basically the faculty would get a cut from any commercial spin-offs from inventions I made while employed by them. I didn't read the small print closely enough."

  "How bad was it?" I ask, shifting from one foot to another.

  "I didn't find out until I wanted to go visit my aunt in Aberdeen." So much for my ear for accents. "She was sick; they wouldn't give me a visa. Would you believe it, an exit visa from the USA? I was turned back at the security gate."

  "They're usually more worried about people trying to immigrate," I say. "Isn't that the case?"