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  There's a truck parked in front of the carport, the house lights are on, and the curtains are drawn. Ten minutes ago a couple of guys came out the front door, took the dirt bike from the garage, drove straight across the lawn and onto the main road without pausing for traffic. I didn't get a good look at them, but an applet on my palmtop is screaming warnings at me: huge, honking great summoning fields are loose in the area, and judging by the subtype it's a gateway invocation that they're planning. They're actually going to try and open a mass-transfer gate to another universe–seriously bad juju. I've no idea who the hell these people are, or why they snatched Mo, but this is not looking good.

  A flicker of light from the road; there's the snarl of a two-stroke engine, then the bike is turning back into the carport with its two passengers on board. One of them has a backpack . . . they've picked something up? Something they don't want to store too close to home? I hunker down lower, trying to make myself invisible. Take another reading, like the others I've made around this side of the garden. I think I've got a feel for it; a complex spiral of protection more than two hundred feet across, centred on the house. Major League paranoia, to protect something big that they're planning. This is where they've brought Mo–I wonder why? I sneak closer to a large window at the side, trying to keep the bushes between myself and the road, and hope like hell that there aren't any dogs here.

  They've got the curtains drawn but the window itself is open–although there's some kind of bug screen in the way. I can hear voices. I don't recognize the language and they're muffled by the curtain, but there are more than two speakers. One of them laughs, briefly: it's not a pleasant sound. I settle back against the wall and take stock, trying not to breathe too loudly. Item: I'm sure Mo is in here, unless she's in the habit of lending her T-shirts out to strange swarthy men who perform major summoning rituals whenever she's kidnapped by somebody else. Item: they're not with ONI, or the Laundry. In fact, they're presumed hostile until proven otherwise. Item: there are at least four of them–two on the bike, two or more who stayed in here with Mo. I am not a one-man SWAT team and I am not trained in dealing with hostage-rescue situations, and like Harry said, setting out to be a hero without knowing what you're doing is a good way to end up dead. Hmm. What I need right now is a SWAT team, but I don't happen to have one up my sleeve. And aren't SWAT teams supposed to figure out where the hostage is and what's going on before they go storming through the building?

  There is, of course, one constructive thing I can do, though it's going to get me yelled at when I go home. I switch my mobile phone back on, then fumble my way through its menus until I find the call log and tell it to dial the last caller. That would be Mo, and if ONI hasn't put a wiretap on her I'm a brass monkey's stepfather. It rings three times before there's an answer and I listen carefully, but there's nothing audible from inside the house.

  "Who is this?" It's a man's voice, rather harsh-sounding.

  I hold the mouthpiece very close to my lips: "You're looking for Mo," I say.

  "Who is this?" he repeats.

  "A friend. Listen. Where you find this phone you will find a house. There are several perps in the vicinity, at least four in the building. They've kidnapped Mo, they're building a Dho-Nha circle, at least level four, and you will want to take defensive precautions–"

  "Stay right there," says the man on the other end of the phone, so I carefully put it down under the window and scramble round to the back of the house on hands and knees. The front door bangs open. A different voice calls out, "Is that you, Achmet?"

  No answer. I hold my breath, heart pounding in my chest. Footsteps on gravel. "The American bitch, she is secure." I back away from the house toward the nearest clump of bushes–the men loom out of the shadows–but the footsteps halt. "I stay out here. Cigarette."

  Bastard's on a fag break! I glance up at the sky, which is dark as a marketing hack's heart and full of coldly distant stars. How am I going to get past him? I grip the monkey's paw in my pocket, carefully withdraw it, and point it at the ground. A red-eyed coal glowers from the doorway, just visible round the side of the house. A distant buzzing bike engine grows louder, heading up the hills far above. Apart from that, the night is silent. Too silent, I realise after a minute; that's a road over there–where's the traffic? I begin to edge backward, trying to get farther into the bushes, and that's when everything blanks.

  Chapter 4

  THE TRUTH IS IN HERE

  "You don't remember what happened next?"

  "Yes, that's what I've been telling you for the past hour." There's no point getting angry with them; they're just doing their job. I resist the temptation to rub my head, the dressing covering the sore patch behind my right ear. "All I remember after that is waking up in hospital the next day."

  "Harrumph." I blink; did I really hear someone say harrumph? Yes–it's the guy who looks like something the gravedigger's cat dragged in, Derek something or other. He blinks right back at me with watery eyes. "According to page four of the medical notes, paragraph six–"

  I watch while they all obediently shuffle their notes. Nobody thought to give me a copy, of course, even though they're mine. "Contusion and hairline fracture on the right occipital hemisphere, some bruising and abrasion consistent with a weighted object." I turn my head, wincing slightly because of the pain in my neck, and point to the dressing. It's been nearly a week; one thing they don't tell you in the detective potboilers is how bad being whacked on the head with a cosh hurts. No, not a cosh: an Object, Weighted, Black Chamber Field Operatives for the Use of, Complies with US-MIL-STD-534-5801.

  "I suppose we can consider this to be substantiated, then," says the talking corpse. "Please continue where you left off."

  I sigh. "I woke up in a hospital room with a needle in my arm and a goon from one of their TLAs baby-sitting me. After about an hour someone who claimed to be running Plaid Shirt turned up and started asking pointed questions. Seems they were already running a stakeout. After the third time that I explained what happened at the motel he agreed that I hadn't waxed their asset and demanded to know why I'd been round at the house. I told him that Mo phoned me and asked for help and it sounded urgent, and after I repeated myself another couple of dozen times he left. The next morning they shipped me to the airport and stuck me on the plane."

  The battle-axe from Accounting who's sitting next to Derek glares at me. "Business class," she hisses. "I suppose that was your idea of a good ride home?"

  Huh? "That was nothing to do with me," I protest. "Did they bill–"

  "Yes." Andy twirls his pen idly as a fly batters itself against the energy-saving lightbulb overhead.

  "Uh-oh." Unsanctioned expenditure isn't quite a hanging offense in the Laundry, but it's definitely up there with insubordination and mutiny. During the Thatcher years they were even supposed to have had paper clip audits, before someone pointed out that the consequences of poor employee morale in this organisation might be a trifle worse than in, say, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. "Not guilty," I say automatically, before I can stop myself. "I didn't ask them for that, it happened after the assignment went pear-shaped, and I wasn't conscious at the time."

  "Nobody's accused you of authorising budgetary variances beyond your level of authorisation," Andy says soothingly. He casts a quelling glance at Derek from Accounting, and then asks: "What I'd like to know is why you went after her, though. SOP was to leave the area as soon as you were blown. Why did you stick around?"

  "Uh–" My lips are dry because I've been expecting this one. "I was going to leave. I was in the rental car and heading for the road out of town back to the airport, just as soon as I got out of the kill zone. I'd have done it too, except that Mo rang."

  I lick my lips again. "I was sent to see if I could facilitate an extraction. I figured that meant someone thought Mo was worth extracting. My apologies if that isn't actually the case, but what I heard on the phone sounded like Mo had been abducted, and in the wake of the s
hooting I figured this was an even worse outcome than a blown mission and withdrawal. So I improvised, went round to her house and used my locator on her.

  "I've been thinking about it a lot since then. What I should have done, I mean. I could have found where she was being held then driven back to the motel to find whoever was running that spy. Or something. Or headed for the airport and phoned from the departure lounge. All I can say is I was too involved. Some bastard had just tried to kill me; I mean, ONI was bugging Mo. When I phoned, they had put a diversion on her line, which is how come I was able to tell them where to look. But they probably already knew, I mean, when Mo called me on her pocket mobile that would have tipped them off."

  I empty the glass of water down my throat and put it back on the table in front of me.

  "Look, I figure ONI or some other TLA outfit–say, the Black Chamber pretending to be ONI investigators–was watching Mo and picked up on me as soon as we made contact. It was a stitch-up. Whoever tried to shoot me and snatch her took them by surprise. That wasn't in the script. I know I should have come home then, but at that point I think everyone was off balance. Who the fuck were those loons, anyway? A major summoning in public–"

  "You have no need to know," Derek says snippily. "Drop it!"

  "Okay." I lean back in my chair, tipping it on two legs; my head aches abominably. "I get the picture."

  My third interrogator pipes up in a reedy voice: "This isn't the whole story, is it, Robert?"

  I stare at her, annoyed. "Probably not, no."

  Bridget is a blonde yuppwardly-mobile executive, her sights fixed on the dizzying heights of the cabinet office in seeming ignorance of the bulletproof glass ceiling that hovers over all of us who work in the Laundry. Her main job description seems to be making life shitty for everybody farther down the ladder, principally by way of her number one henchperson, Harriet. She holds forth, strictly for the record: "I'm unhappy about the way this assignment was set up. This was supposed to be a straightforward meet-and-pitch session, barely one rung up from having our local consul pay a social call. With all due respect, Robert is not a particularly experienced representative and should not have been sent into such a situation without mentoring–"

  "It's friendly soil!" Andy interrupts.

  "As friendly as it gets without a bilateral arrangement, which is to say, not an active joint-intelligence-sharing, committee-sanctioned, liaison environment. Foreigners, in other words. Robert was pushed out in the cold without oversight or adequate support from higher management, and when things went off the rails he quite naturally did his best, which wasn't quite good enough." She smiles dazzlingly at Andy. "I'd like to minute that he needs additional training before being subjected to solo exercises, and I'd also like to say that I think we need to review the circumstances leading up to this assignment closely in case they are symptomatic of a weakness in our planning and accountability loop."

  Oh great. Andy looks almost as disgusted as I feel. Bridget has just damned us–everyone else, in fact–with faint praise. I did "as well as could be expected" and need extra supervision before I can be let out of the kindergarten to go pee-pee. Derek and Andy and everyone else involved get to have Bridget poke her long, inquisitive nose into their procedural compliance and see if they're exercising due diligence. As for Bridget, if she turns up anything that even whiffs of negligence she gets to look good to the top brass by cleaning shop, and anyone who disagrees is being "grossly unprofessional." Office politics, the Laundry remix.

  "My head aches," I mutter. "And my body is telling me that it's two in the morning. Do you have any more questions? If you don't mind, I'm going to go home and lie down for a day or two."

  "Take all week," Andy says dismissively. "We'll have everything sorted out when you get back." I stand up fast; in my current state I don't think to ask what strange and perverted definition of "sorted" he's using.

  "I'd like to see a written report of your trip," Bridget adds before I can close the door behind me. "Documented in accordance with Operations Manual Four, chapter eleven, section C. No need to hurry, but I want it on my desk by the end of next week."

  Evidence, Written, Bureaucrats for the Malicious Use of. I head for home, anticipating a long hot bath and then eighteen hours in the sack.

  * * * *

  Home is much as I left it seven days ago. There's a pile of bills slowly turning brown at the corner propping up one of the kitchen table legs. The bin is overflowing, the kitchen sink likewise, and Pinky hasn't cleaned out his bread-maker since the last time he used it. I look in the fridge and find a limp tea bag and a carton of milk that's good for another day or so before it starts demanding the vote, so I make myself a mug of tea and sit at the kitchen table playing Tetris on my palmtop. Coloured blocks fall like snowflakes in my mind, and I drift for a while. But reality keeps intruding: I've got a week's washing in my suitcase, another week of washing in my room, and while Pinky and the Brain are at work I can get to the washer/dryer. (Assuming nobody's left a dead hamster in it again.)

  Deliberately ignoring the bills, I get up and drag my suitcase upstairs. My room is much the way I left it, and I suddenly realise that I hate living this way: hate the second-hand furniture designed by aliens from Planet Landlord, hate sharing my personal space with a couple of hyperintelligent slobs with behavioural problems and explosive hobbies, hate feeling my future possibilities hemmed in by my personal vow of poverty–the signature on my Laundry warrant card. I drag the suitcase into my room through a fog of fatigue and mild despair, then open it and begin to sort everything into piles on the floor.

  Something snuffles behind me.

  I spin round so fast I nearly levitate, hand fumbling for a mummified monkey's paw that isn't there–then recognition cuts in and I breathe again. "You startled me! What are you doing in there?"

  Just the top of her head is visible. She blinks at me sleepily. "What does it look like?"

  I consider my next words carefully. "Sleeping in my bed?"

  She pulls down the duvet far enough to yawn, mouth pink and grey in the dim light that filters through the new curtains. "Yeah. Heard you were due back today so I, mmm, pulled a sickie. Wanted to see you."

  I sit down on the side of the bed. Mhari's hair is mousy-brown with blonde highlights she puts in it every few weeks; it's cut in short flyaway locks that tangle around my fingers when I run my hand over her scalp. "Really?"

  "Yeah, really." A bare arm reaches out of the bedding, wraps around my waist, and pulls me down. "Been missing you. Come here."

  I'm meaning to sort my dirty clothing into piles for the washing machine, but instead all my clothing ends up in a heap in the middle of the floor, and I end up in a heap under Mhari, who is naked under the duvet and seemingly intent on giving me a very warm welcome home, if not a rinse and tumble-dry. "What is this?" I try to ask, but she grabs my head and holds my mouth against one generously proportioned nipple. I get the message and shut up. Mhari is in the mood, and this is about the one situation in which our relationship functions smoothly. Besides, it's more than a week since the last time I've seen her, and being ambushed this way is the best thing that's happened to me in quite a while.

  About an hour later, fucked-out and completely exhausted–to say nothing of sweaty–we're lying in a tangle on the bed (the duvet seems to have decided to join the washing pile) and she's making buzzing noises in the back of her throat like a cat. "What brought this on?" I ask.

  "I needed you," she says, with the kind of innocent egotism that a cat could only envy. Grabs at my back: "Mmm. Hmm. Had a bad week."

  "A bad week?" I'm practising being a good listener; it's usually opening my mouth that gets me into trouble with her.

  "First there was a complete mess at the office: Eric was off sick and dropped the ball on a case he was handling and I had to pick up the pieces. Ended up working late three nights running. Then there was a party at Judy's. Judy got me drunk, introduced me to a friend of hers. He turned out to be a rea
l shit, but only after–"

  I roll away. "I wish you wouldn't do this," I hear myself saying.

  "Do what?" She looks at me, hurt.

  I sigh. "Never mind." Never fucking mind, I try not to say. I suddenly feel really dirty. "I'm going to have a shower," I say, and sit up.

  "Bob!"

  "Never mind." I get up, grab a dirty towel from the pile on the floor, and head for the bathroom to wash her off me.

  Mhari has a problem: her problem is me. I should just tell her to fuck off and die, sever all links, refuse to talk to her–but she's good company when we're on speaking terms, she can push all my buttons correctly when we're in bed, and she can get right under my skin and leave me feeling about five and a half inches high. My problem is that she wants to trade me in on New Boyfriend, model 2.0, one with a fast car and a Rolex Oyster and prospects. (Warped senses of humour and dead-end Laundry postings are strictly optional.) She's permanently on the rebound, either toward me or away from me–I can't always tell which–and in between she uses me the way a cat uses a scratching post. Partying at Judy's place, for example: Judy is a mindless management functionary bimbo friend of hers who is somehow always impeccably turned out and manages to make me feel like a dirty little schoolboy, although she's far too polite to ever say anything. So when Mhari traps off with some double-glazing salesman she meets via Judy and he turfs her out of his bed the next morning, I'm supposed to be around as a friendly consolation fuck the next day.

  My problem is that she doesn't seem to appreciate that I hate being on the receiving end of this. If I try to make a big deal of it she'll accuse me of being jealous and I'll end up feeling obscurely guilty. If I don't make a big deal of it she'll continue to act like I'm some kind of doormat. And who knows? Maybe I'm just being paranoid and she isn't looking around for Mr. New Boyfriend. (Yeah, and wild boars have been spotted in the holding pattern over Heathrow with an engine under each wing.)