The Jennifer Morgue Page 9

  “Why? What happens if I touch that button, Pinky?”

  “The car ejects!”

  “Don’t you mean, the passenger seat ejects?” I ask sarcastically. I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense.

  “No, Bob, you’ve been watching too many movies. The car ejects.” He reaches across the back of my seat and pats the fat pipe occupying the center of the luggage area.

  I swallow. “Isn’t that a little . . . dangerous?”

  “Where you’re going you’ll need all the help you can get.” He frowns at me. “The tube contains a rocket motor and a cable spool bolted to the chassis. The airbags in the wheel hubs blow when the accelerometer figures you’ve hit apogee, if you haven’t already used them in amphibious pursuit mode. Whatever you do don’t push that button while you’re in a tunnel or under cover.” I glance up at the concrete roof of the car park and shudder. “The airbags are securely fastened, if you land on water you can just drive away.” He notices my fixed, skeptical stare and pats the rocket tube. “It’s perfectly safe—they’ve been using these on helicopter gunships for nearly five years!”

  “Jesus.” I close my eyes and lean back. “It’s still a fucking Smart car. Range Rovers carry them as lifeboats. Couldn’t you get me an Aston Martin or something?”

  “What makes you think we’d give you an Aston Martin, even if we could afford one? Anyway, Angleton says to remind you that it’s on lease from one of our private sector partners. Don’t bend it, or you’ll answer to the Chrysler Corporation. You’ve already exceeded our consumables budget, totaling that Compaq in the meeting—there’s a new one waiting for you in the case in the boot, by the way. This is serious business: you’re representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defense contractors, old school tie and all that.”

  “I went to North Harrow Comprehensive,” I say wearily, “they didn’t trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod.”

  “Oh. Well.” Pinky pulls out a thick envelope. “Your itinerary, once you arrive at Juliana Airport. There’s a decent tailor in the Marina shopping center and we’ve faxed your measurements through. Um. Do you dress to the left, or . . . ?”

  I open my eyes and stare at him until he wilts. “Eight dead.” I hold up the requisite number of fingers. “In twenty-four hours. And I have to drive up the fucking autobahn in this pile of shit—”

  “No, you don’t,” says Brains, finally straightening up and wiping his hands on a rag. “We’ve got to crate up the Smart if we’re going to freight it to Maho Beach tomorrow—you’re riding with us.” He gestures at a shiny black Mercedes van parked opposite. “Feel better?”

  Wow—I’m not going to be strafed with BMWs again. Miracles do sometimes happen, even in Laundry service. I nod. “Let’s get going.”

  I SLEEP MOST OF THE WAY TO FRANKFURT. WE’RE late getting to the airport—no surprise in light of preceding events—but Pinky and Brains prestidigitate some sort of official ID out of their warrant cards and drive us through two chain-link barriers and past a police checkpoint and onto the apron, hand me a briefcase, then drop me at the foot of the steps of an air bridge. It’s latched onto a Lufthansa airbus bound for Paris’s Charles de Gaulle and a quick transfer. “Schnell!” urges a harried-looking flight attendant. “You are the last. Come this way.”

  One and a half hours and a VIP transfer later, I’m in business class aboard an Air France A300 bound for Princess Juliana International Airport. The compartment is half-empty. “Please fasten your seatbelts and pay attention to the preflight briefing.” I close my eyes while they close the doors behind me. Then someone shakes my shoulder: it’s a flight attendant. “Mr. Howard? I have a message to tell you that there’s WiFi access on this flight. You are to call your office as soon as we are airborne at cruising altitude and the seatbelt light goes off.”

  I nod, speechless. WiFi? On a thirty-year-old tourist truck like this? “Bon voyage!” She stands up and marches to the back of the cabin. “Call if you need anything.”

  I doze through the usual preflight, waking briefly as the engine note rises to a thunderous roar and we pile down the runway. I feel unnaturally tired, as if drained of life, and I’ve got a strange sense that somebody else is sleeping in the empty seat beside me, close enough to rest their head on my shoulder—but the next seat over is empty. Overspill from Ramona? Then my eyes close again.

  It must be the cabin pressure, the stress of the last couple of days, or drugs in the after-takeoff champagne, because I find myself having the strangest dream. I’m back in the conference suite in Darmstadt, and the blinds are down, but instead of a roomful of zombies I’m sitting across the table from Angleton. He looks half-mummified at the best of times, until you see his eyes: they’re diamond-blue and as sharp as a dentist’s drill. Right now they’re the only part of him I can see at all, because he’s engulfed in the shadows cast by an old-fashioned slide projector lighting up the wall behind him. The overall effect is very sinister. I look over my shoulder, wondering where Ramona’s gotten to, but she’s not there.

  “Pay attention, Bob. Since you had the bad grace to take so long during my previous briefing that it self-erased before you completed it, I’ve sent you another.” I open my mouth to tell him he’s full of shit, but the words won’t emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I’m able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “There’s a good fellow.”

  I try to say Blow me, but it comes out as “Brief me” instead. It seems I’m allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.

  “Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer , and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain—this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake—was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by humanity to BLUE HADES—the Deep Ones—in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores.”

  Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.

  “This is a map of the world we live in,” Angleton explains. “And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid air-swept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth’s surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them.”

  I lick my lips. “How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something?”

  “Worse than that.” He doesn’t smile. “This—” click-clack “—is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water—most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks—that BLUE HADES have prepared. Three-quarters of humanity live within two hundred miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit five hundred billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an all-out nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire.”

  “But we’ve got a deterrent, surely . . . ?”

  “No.” Angleton’s expression is implacable. “Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less
effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it—” he gestures at the screen “—they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine. They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It’s like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don’t even think about threatening them; we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly.”

  “Then what the hell was JENNIFER about?”

  Click-clack. “A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential. The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking.”

  I’m looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s a deep-ocean mudscape. Scattered across the layered silt are small irregular objects, some of them round, some of them long. A couple more seconds and my brain acknowledges that what my eyes are seeing is a watery field of skulls and femurs and ribs. I’ve got an idea that not all of them are entirely human.

  “The Caribbean sea hides many secrets. This field of silt covers a deep layer rich in methane hydrates. When some force destabilizes the deposits they bubble up from the depths—like the carbon dioxide discharge from the stagnant waters of Lake Nyos in the Cameroon. But unlike Lake Nyos, the gas isn’t confined by terrain so it dissipates after it surfaces. It’s not an asphyxiation threat, but if you’re on a ship that’s caught above a hydrate release, then the sea under your keel turns to gas and you’re going straight down to Davy Jones’s locker.” Angleton clears his throat. “BLUE HADES have some way of replenishing these deposits and triggering releases. They use them to keep us interfering hominids away from things that don’t concern us, such as the settlement at Witch’s Hole in the North Sea . . . and the depths of the Bermuda Triangle.”

  I swallow. “What’s down there?”

  “Some of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. And some of the largest BLUE HADES installations we’re aware of.” Angleton looks as if he’s bitten into a lemon expecting an orange. “That isn’t saying much—most of their sites are known to us only from neutrino mapping and seismology. The portion of the biosphere we understand is limited to the surface waters and continental landmasses, boy. Below a thousand fathoms of water, let alone below the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, it’s a whole different ball game.”

  “The Moho-what?”

  “The underside of the continental plates we live on—below the discontinuity lies the upper mantle. Didn’t you study geography at school?”

  “Uh . . .” I spent most of my school geography lessons snoozing, doodling imaginary continents in the backs of exercise books, or trying to work up the courage to pass a message to Lizzie Graham in the next row. Now it looks like those missed lessons are about to come back and bite me. “Moving swiftly on, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Ellis Billington has purchased a CIA spy ship designed for probing BLUE HADES territory. He’s got a high enough security clearance to be aware what it’s capable of, and his people are trying to suborn various intelligence organizations, like in Darmstadt. He’s playing some kind of endgame and you don’t like the smell and neither does the Black Chamber, which explains me and Ramona. Am I right so far?”

  Angleton nods minutely. “I should remind you that Billington is extraordinarily rich and has fingers in a surprising number of pies. For example, by way of his current wife—his third—he owns a cosmetics and haute couture empire; in addition to IT corporations he owns shipping, aviation, and banking interests. Your assignment—and Ramona’s—is to get close to Billington. Ideally you should contrive to get yourself invited aboard his yacht, the Mabuse, while Ramona remains in touch with your backup team and the local head of station. Your technical backups are Pinky and Brains, your muscle backup is Boris, and you’re to liaise with our Caribbean station chief, Jack Griffin. Officially, he’s your superior officer and you’ll be under his orders when it comes to nonoperational matters, but you’re to report directly to me, not to him. Unofficially, Griffin is out to pasture—take anything he says with a pinch of salt. Your job is to get close to Billington, remain in touch with us, and be ready to act if and when we decide to take him down.”

  I manage not to groan. “Why does it have to be me aboard the yacht—why not Ramona? I think she’d be a whole lot better at the field ops thing. Or the station chief guy? Come to think of it, why aren’t the AIVD doing this? It’s their territory—”

  “They invited us in; all I can say for now is, we have specialist expertise in this area that they lack. And it has to be you, not Ramona. Firstly, you’re an autonome, a native of this continuum: they can’t trap you in a Dho-Nha curve or bind you to a summoning grid. And secondly, it’s got to be you because those are the rules of Billington’s game.” Angleton’s expression is frightening. “He’s a player, Bob. He knows exactly what he’s doing and how to work around our strengths. He stays away from continental landmasses, uses games of chance to determine his actions, sleeps inside a Faraday cage aboard a ship with a silver-plated keel. He’s playing us to a script. I’m not at liberty to tell you what it is, but it has to be you, not Ramona, not anyone else.”

  “Do we have any idea what he’s planning? You said something about weapons—”

  Angleton fixes me with a steely gaze. “Pay attention, Bob. The presentation is about to commence.” And this time I can’t stifle the groan, because it’s another of his bloody slideshows, and if you thought PowerPoint was pants, you haven’t suffered through an hour of Angleton monologuing over a hot slide projector.

  SLIDE 1: PHOTOGRAPH OF THREE MEN WEARING suits with the exaggerated lapels and wide ties of the mid- 1970s. They’re standing in front of some sort of indistinct building-like structure, possibly prefabricated. All three wear badges clipped to their breast pockets.

  “The one on the left is me: you don’t need to know who the other two are. This photograph was taken in 1974 while I was assigned to Operation AZORIAN as our liaison—officially from MI6 as an observer, but you know the drill. The building I’m standing in front of is . . .”

  SLIDE 2: A photograph taken looking aft along the deck of a huge seagoing vessel. To the left, there’s a gigantic structure like an oil drilling rig, with racks of pipes stacked in front of it. Directly ahead, at the stern, is the structure glimpsed in the previous slide—a mobile office, jacked up off the deck, its roofline bristling with antennae. Behind it, a satellite dish looms before the superstructure of the ship.

  “We’re aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer on its unsuccessful voyage to raise the sunken Soviet Golf-II-class ballistic missile submarine K-129. Announced as Operation JENNIFER, this was leaked to the press by someone acting on unofficial orders from the director of ONI—the usual goddamn turf war—and Watergated to hell by mid-1975. I said Operation JENNIFER was unsuccessful. Officially, the CIA only retrieved the front ten meters or so of the sub because the rear section broke off. In reality . . .”

  SLIDE 3: Grainy black-and-white photographs, evidently taken from TV screens: a long cylindrical structure grasped in the claws of an enormous grab. From below, thin streamers rise up towards it.

  “BLUE HADES took exception to the intrusion into their territory and chose to exercise their salvage rights under Article Five, Clause Four of the Benthic Treaty. Hence the tentacles. Now . . .”

  SLIDE 1 (Repeat): This time the man in the middle is circled with a red highlighter.

  “This fellow in the middle is Ellis Billington, as he looked thirty years ago. Ellis was brilliant but not well socialized back then. He was attached to the ‘B’ team as an observer, tasked with examining the circuitry of
the cipher machine they hoped to recover from the sub’s control room. I didn’t pay much attention to him at the time, which was a mistake. He already had his security clearance, and after the JENNIFER debacle he moved to San Jose and set up a small electronics and software business.”

  SLIDE 4: A crude-looking circuit board. Rather than fiberglass, it appears to be made of plywood that has been exposed to seawater for too long, and has consequently warped. Sockets for vacuum tubes stud its surface, one of them occupied by the broken base of a component; numerous diodes and resistors connect it to an odd, stellate design in gold that covers most of the surface of the board.

  “This board was taken from a GRU-issued Model 60 oneiromantic convolution engine found aboard the K-129. As you can see, it spent rather longer in the water than was good for it. Ellis reverse-engineered the basic schematic and pieced together the false vacuum topology that the valves disintermediated. Incidentally, these aren’t your normal vacuum tubes—isotope imbalances in the thorium-doped glass sleeves suggest that they were evacuated by exposure in a primitive wake-shield facility, possibly aboard a model-three Sputnik satellite similar to the one first orbited in 1960. That would have given them a starting pressure about six orders of magnitude cleaner than anything available on Earth at the time, at a price per tube of about two million rubles, which suggests that someone in the GRU’s scientific directorate really wanted a good signal, if that wasn’t already obvious. We now know that they’d clearly cracked the Dee-Turing Thesis by this point and were well into modified Enochian metagrammar analysis. Anyway, young Billington concluded that the Mod-60 OCE, NATO code ‘Gravedust,’ was intended to allow communication with the dead. Recently dead, anyway.”

  SLIDE 5: An open coffin containing a long-dead body. The corpse is partially mummified, the eyelids sunken into the empty sockets and the jaw agape with lips retracted.

  “We’re not sure exactly what a Gravedust system was doing aboard the K-129. According to one theory that was remarkably popular with our friends at ONI around the time, it had something to do with the former Soviet Union’s postmortem second strike command-and-control system, to allow the submarine’s political officer to ask for instructions from the Politburo after a successful decapitation stroke. They were very keen on maintaining the correct chain of command back then. There’s just one problem with that theory: it’s rubbish. According to our own analysis after the event—I should add, the Black Chamber was remarkably reluctant to part with the Gravedust schemata, we finally got it out of them by remote viewing—Billington underestimated the backreach of the Gravedust interrogator by a factor of at least a thousand. We were told that it would only allow callbacks to the recently dead, within the past million seconds. In actual fact, you could call up Tutankhamen himself on this rig. Our best guess is that the Soviets were planning on talking to something that had been dead for a very long time indeed, somewhere under the ocean.”