The Fuller Memorandum (2 page)

I’m having second thoughts about having paid fifty pounds to sit on this train, expenses or no expenses. But I don’t see what alternatives there are. I need to get from London to RAF Cosford, just outside Wolverhampton, and I don’t have a car and the Laundry certainly isn’t going to hire me a helicopter for a job that isn’t time-critical. They won’t even pay for me to take a taxi the whole way. So I’m stuck with a choice: train or coach. At least this way I get to avoid the M6 motorway . . .

And at least I’ve got a seat with a table. I reread my instructions as the train shudders and lurches through the parched countryside. It’s a low-priority field job: to investigate reports of eerie manifestations of a disturbing nature from one of the airframes stored in the hangar annex to the Royal Air Force Museum. The museum houses a lot of historic war-birds. Violent death tends to go with the territory, and a few ghosts—echoes in the informational substrate of reality—wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary. My job is to dispel any annoying manifestations, reassure the locals, close out the case, etcetera. It’s sufficiently routine and predictable that I’d normally send the office junior, but for some reason, Angleton pulled me into his office this morning. “Bob, I’d like you to deal with this one yourself,” he said, handing me the brief. “It’ll get you out of the office for a day.”

“But I’m busy!” I protested, a tad limply—the lack of aircon was getting to me, and I’m not good at standing up to Angleton at the best of times. “I’ve got to respond to the RFP on structured cabling requirements for the new subbasement extension in D Block”—don’t call it a crypt,
the government
doesn’t do crypts,
the Spanish Inquisition
does crypts—“and go over Claire’s training budget. Can’t Peter-Fred do it? He’s finished Exorcism 101, it’s about time he had a field trip . . .”

“Nonsense!” Angleton said crisply. “You can take the paperwork with you, but I specifically want
you
to go and look at this one.”

There’s a warning gleam in his eyes: I’ve seen it before. “Oh no you don’t,” I replied. “Not so fast!” I raised an eyebrow and waited for the explosion.

Angleton is old school—so old school that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen his face in a departmental photo taken during the war, back when the Laundry was an obscure department of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, tasked with occult intelligence gathering and counter-demonology. He doesn’t look a day older today than he did back then, sixty-five years ago—dress him in a bandage and he could star in a remake of
The Mummy
. Ice-blue eyes with slightly yellowish scleras, skin like parchment left out for too long in a desert sandstorm, dry as bone and twice as chilly as ice. And I never want to hear his laugh again. But I digress. The thing about Angleton is that, despite (or in addition to) being the honorary departmental monster, he has a sense of humor. It bears about the same relationship to mirth that his cadaverous exterior does to Paris Hilton’s—but it’s there. (He has the heart of a young boy: keeps it in a reliquary under the coffin he sleeps in.) And right then, I figured he was winding me up for the punch line.

But: no. He shook his head slowly. “Not this time, Bob.” The gleam in his eye guttered out, replaced by dead-cold sobriety: “While you’re up there to do the business, I want you to take a look at one of the other museum exhibits—one that’s not on public display. I’ll explain it later, when you get back. Take your warrant card. When you’re through with the job on the worksheet, tell Warrant Officer Hastings that I sent you to take a look at the white elephant in Hangar 12B.”

Huh?
I blinked a couple of times, then sneezed. “You’re setting me up for another working group, aren’t you?”

“You know better than to ask that, boy,” he grated, and I jumped back: Angleton is nobody you want to stand too close to when he’s even mildly irritated. “I’ll give you the background when you’re ready for it. Meanwhile, get moving!”

“Whatever.” I sketched a sarcastic salute and marched off back to my office, lost in thought. It was a setup, obviously: Angleton was softening me up for something new. Probably a new game of bureaucratic pass-the-parcel, seeing if some poor schmuck—I was already in charge of departmental IT services, for my sins—could be mugged into taking on responsibility for exorcising hovercraft or something.

Back to the here-and-now. The carriage is slowing. A minute later I realize it’s pulling into a main line station—Wolverhampton, where I get to change trains. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it’s a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago—your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.

The air in the station hits me like a hot flannel, damp and clingy and smelling slightly of diesel fumes. I take a breath, step down onto the concrete, and try to minimize my movements as I go looking for the Cosford service. I find the platform it stops at: a crumbling concrete strip opposite a peeling wooden fence. The rails are rusty and overgrown, and a couple of young trees are trying to colonize the tracks; but the TV screen overhead is lit up and predicting a train will be along in ten minutes. I take a shallow breath and sit down, hunching instinctively towards the nearest shade. Fifteen minutes later, the TV screen is still predicting a train will be along in ten minutes; then my mobile rings. It’s Mo.

“Bob!” She sounds so cheerful when she says my name: I don’t know how she does it, but it cheers me up.

“Mo!”
Pause
. “Where are you?”

“I’m back in the office! I spent most of the morning in the stacks, I only just got your text . . .” The one telling her I was off on a day trip to Cosford. The Laundry’s deep archives are in a former underground tunnel, way down where the sun doesn’t shine, and neither do the cellular networks.

“Right. I’m on a railway platform waiting for an overdue train. It’s about two hundred degrees in the shade, the pigeons are falling out of the sky from heatstroke, and nobody will sell me a beer.” (Well, they might if I’d asked for one, but . . .)

“Oh, good! When are you going to be back?”

“Sometime late this evening,” I say doubtfully. “I’m due to arrive in Cosford at”—I check the lying timetable—“two thirty, and I don’t think I’ll get away before six. Then it’ll take me about three hours—”

“Angleton did this? He did, didn’t he!” Suddenly Mo switches from warm and cuddly to spiky as a porcupine: “Didn’t you tell him you couldn’t? We’re supposed to be having dinner with Pete and Sandy tonight!”

I do a mental backflip, re-engage my short-term memory, and realize she’s right. Dinner for four, booked at a new Kurdish restaurant in Fulham. Pete was at university with Mo years ago, and is a priest or a witch doctor or something; Sandy is blonde and teaches comparative religion to secondary school kids. Mo insists we stay in touch with them: having friends with ordinary jobs who don’t know anything about the Laundry provides a normative dose of sanity for the two of us, to keep us from drifting too far out of the mainstream. “Shit.” I’m more mortified for having landed Mo in it than anything else . . . “You’re right. Listen, do you want to go on your own, tell them I’ll turn up later—I’ll come straight from the station—or do you want to cancel?”

There’s silence for a second, then she sighs. “Sandy doesn’t have flexitime, Bob, she’s got classes to teach.
You
cancel.”

“But I don’t have their mobile numbers—”

I’m bluffing, and Mo knows it. “I’ll text them to you, Bob. Maybe it’ll help you remember, next time?”

Bollocks
. She’s right: it’s my fault. “Okay.” It’s my turn to sigh. “I’ll be claiming some hours back. Maybe we can use them for something together—” The tracks begin to vibrate and squeal and I look up. “It’s my train! See you later? Bye . . .”

The train to Cosford is about as old as Angleton: slam doors, wooden partitions, and high-backed seats, powered by a villainously rusted diesel engine slung under its single carriage. Air conditioning is provided by the open louvered windows. I swelter in its oven-like interior for about forty minutes as it rattles and burbles through the countryside, spewing blue smoke and engine oil behind it. Along the way I furtively leave my apologies on Pete and Sandy’s voice mail. Finally, the train wheezes asthmatically to a halt beside a station overlooking a Royal Air Force base, with a cluster of hangars outside the gate and some enormous airliners and transport aircraft gently gathering moss on the lawn outside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I walk up the path to the museum annex and head for the main exhibit hall.

It’s time to go to work . . .

PAY ATTENTION NOW: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN
fifteen minutes.

My name is Bob, Bob Howard. At least, that’s the name I use in these memoirs. (True names have power: even if it’s only the power to attract the supernatural equivalent of a Make Money Fast spammer, I’d rather not put myself in their sights, thank you very much.) And I work for the Laundry.

The Laundry is the British Government’s secret agency for dealing with “magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so “magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the . . .
things
. . . that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between
pay attention
and
free buffet lunch here
. My job—applied computational demonologist—comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don’t survive to claim it.

Magic being a branch of pure mathematics, and computers being machines that can be used to perform lots of mathematical tasks very fast, it follows that most real practicing magicians start out as computer science graduates. The Laundry, the government agency for handling this stuff, started out as a by-blow of the Second World War code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the people who built the first working programmable computers. And the domestic side of our work—preventing accidental incursions by incomprehensible horrors from beyond spacetime—has been growing rapidly in recent decades. You may have noticed there are more computers around these days, and more computer programmers. Guess what? That means more work for the Laundry!

I have a somewhat embarrassing relationship with Wolverhampton. Back when I was at university in Birmingham I nearly landscaped it by accident. I was trying to develop a new graphics algorithm. Planar homogeneous matrix transformations into dimensions dominated by gibbering horrors tend to attract the Laundry’s attention: they got to me just in time—just before the nameless horrors I was about to unintentionally summon into this world—and made me a job offer I wasn’t allowed to refuse.

(Mo’s history is similar—indeed, I was involved not only in recruiting her, but in keeping her alive until she could be recruited. That was some years ago. Mo and I have been together for, oh, about six years; we tied the knot nearly three years ago, using the urgent need to break a behavioral geas as an excuse to do something we both wanted to do anyway.)

So, I’m here at RAF Cosford, an active air force base which is also home to the Royal Air Force Museum annex, where they keep the stuff that’s too big to fit in their North London site at Duxford. Ostensibly I’m here to examine an aircraft that has been the locus of some disturbing incidents (and to stop those incidents recurring). Also, thanks to Angleton, I’m supposed to take a look at something in Hangar Six.

One of the things you learn fairly fast in the Laundry is that most people in the British civil service and armed forces don’t know you exist. You—your organization, your job, the field you work in—are classified so deeply that the mere knowledge that such a classification level exists is itself a state secret. So, to help me do my job, I carry something that we laughably call a “warrant card.” It’s a form of identification. It comes with certain Powers attached. When you present your warrant card for inspection, in the course of official business, the recipients tend to believe you are who and what you say you are, for the duration of that business. Not only that: you can bind them to silence. Of course, trying to use your card
outside
official business tends to attract the attention of the Auditors. And having attracted their attention once or twice, I’ve never been too keen on finding out what happens next . . .

The RAF Museum is fronted by a shiny new glass-and-steel aircraft hangar of an exhibit hall. I march right up to the front desk (there’s no queue), present my warrant card, and say: “Bob Howard. I’m here to see Mr. Hastings.”