The Fuller Memorandum (45 page)

Angleton recovered much faster. Two nights under observation and they released him. Then he heard about me and kicked up a stink. They were planning on moving me to St. Hilda’s. Angleton had a better idea of what was wrong with me and refused to take no for an answer; so after nearly a week in hospital (with my head wrapped in the pink fluffy haze of a major antipsychotic bender), a private ambulance picked me up and deposited me in the Village.

The Village used to be called Dunwich, back before the Ministry of War evacuated it and turned it into a special site. It was allocated to the wartime Special Operations Executive, part of which later became the Laundry and inherited this small coastal community with its street of cottages and decaying pier, its general store and village pub. Today we use it as a training center, and also as a quiet place for taking time out. There’s no internet access, and no mobile phone coverage, and no nagging from head office about time sheets and sickness self-certification. There
is
a medical doctor, but Janet is sensible and very patient, and has seen an astonishing number of cases of Krantzberg syndrome (and other, more esoteric sorcerous injuries) over the years.

They billeted me in a tiny seaside cottage and Janet took me off the chlorpromazine, substituting a number of other medications—not all of them legally prescribable. (MDMA helps a
lot
when you’re suffering from the delusion that you’re one of the walking dead.) After three days, I stopped shivering and hiccuping with fear; after a week, I could sleep again without a night-light. At the weekend, Mo came to visit. I was glad to see her. She knows what it’s like where I’ve been, to a good first approximation. We spent a lot of time together, just holding hands. It feels very strange, touching someone who’s alive. Maybe in another week I’ll be able to hug her without recoiling because I’m terrified I’m going to accidentally eat her mind.

(That’s the trouble with this job. Sometimes it chews you up and spits you out—literally.)

Mo came back the next weekend, too. She says she’s trying to get a week’s compassionate leave, but the fallout from Iris’s actions has been beyond earthshaking. We’ll see.

I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS REPORT FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS
now.

This being the Village, and an internet-free zone, I’m allowed to use a computer and dictation software—although it’s had its CD drive and wifi chipset removed, the case is welded shut, and it’s padlocked to an oak desk that weighs approximately half as much again as Angleton’s Memex. It beats the manual typewriter hands down, but when I asked if I could take it home with me, the security officer barely managed to conceal his sneer.

I suppose there are some loose ends I should tie up, so here goes:

We never did find out exactly what happened to any of Panin’s men apart from Alexei, or to Panin himself: you should read my speculations with more than a pinch of salt. I can’t even be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Panin was behind the theft of the violin report, although theft of state secrets
is
the sort of thing that the Thirteenth Directorate’s parent agency traditionally excelled at. I’m assuming that the elite Spetsnaz infiltration troops assigned to an occult warfare department probably stood more of a chance of escaping alive than the cultists: but we didn’t account for all of them, either. The scene at Brookwood the next morning was indescribable. I’ve seen the pictures. It was easy enough to close down the cemetery—police roadblocks, reports about an illegal rave and graveyard vandalism, a handful of D-notices to gag the more annoying local reporters—but then they had to do something with the bodies. The feeders raised just about everything that wasn’t totally dismembered and disarticulated. In the end, they had to bring in bulldozers and dig trenches. They identified some of the cultists—but not Jonquil the Sloane Ranger, or her boyfriend Julian.

I don’t think Brookwood will reopen for a long time.

Brains has been given a good talking-to, and is being subjected to the Security Theater Special Variety Show for breaching about sixteen different regulations by installing beta software on an employee’s personal phone. Reminding Oscar-Oscar that if he hadn’t done so they’d have lost the Eater of Souls to a cultist infiltrator appears to be futile. Right now, everyone in Admin has joined in the world’s biggest arse-kicking circle dance, except possibly for Angleton, who is shielding me from the worst of it. Because they haven’t forgotten that
I’ve
been a naughty boy too—if it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have needed all those bulldozers at Brook-field, would they? Although Angleton
has
had a measure of success in pointing out to certain overenthusiastic disciplinarians that if it wasn’t for the feeders I summoned, they’d have had the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh trying to open up a long distance call to the Sleeper in the Pyramid, paid in the coin of London’s dead.

 

 

AS FOR THE MAN HIMSELF—CALL HIM TEAPOT , CALL HIM
Angleton, call him Sir—I haven’t seen him since I woke up here, and I won’t be seeing him until the Auditors hear my final report and I go back on active duty. But I have this to say:

I used to think he scared the shit out of me, but now I know better. I know what he’s like, from the inside. The effects of Iris’s botched binding faded fast, and I probably only borrowed a tiny fraction of his power. I didn’t know how to use it properly, either. But I have been destiny-entangled before, and I know what it was like then, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Angleton was in a flatlined coma for the entire duration of my funny turn.

I also learned this much: Angleton isn’t bound to the Laundry by the ramshackle geas that Fuller and his fellow eccentric occultists threw together in the 1930s. He’s a free agent—or at least as free as any of us are, be we beasts, men, or gods. The reason he puts up with us? I don’t know. It may be long habit—he’s lived the life of an Englishman for so long now that he self-identifies as such. But I have a theory.

Angleton knows what’s coming. He knows exactly what is going to bleed through the walls of reality, when the stars burn down from the pitiless heavens and our ever-thinking numbers begin to corrode the structure of reality. And he believes we’re his best hope for his own survival.

Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.

AIVD
Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (General Intelligence and Security Service) [Netherlands]

BA
British Airways [UK]

BLACK CHAMBER
Cryptanalysis agency officially disbanded in 1929 (secretly retasked with occult intelligence duties) [US]

CESG
Communications-Electronics Security Group (division within GCHQ) [UK]

CIA
Central Intelligence Agency [US]

CMA
Computer Misuse Act (law governing hacking) [UK]

COTS
Cheap, Off The Shelf (computer kit; procurement term) [US/UK]

DEA
Drug Enforcement Administration [US]

DERA
Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (privatized as QinetiQ) [UK]

DGSE
Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure [France]

DIA
Defense Intelligence Agency [US]

FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation [US]

FO
Foreign Office [UK]

FSB
Federal Security Service (formerly known as KGB) [Russia]

GCHQ
Government Communications HQ (equivalent to NSA) [UK]

GCSE
General Certificate of Secondary Education (high school qualification; not to be confused with GCHQ) [UK]

GRU
Russian Military Intelligence [Russia]

JIC
Joint Intelligence Committee [UK]

KCMG
Knight-Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (honors service overseas or in connection with foreign or Commonwealth affairs) [UK]

KGB
Committee for State Security (renamed FSB in 1991) [Russia]

THE LAUNDRY
Formerly SOE Q Department (spun off as a separate organization in 1945) [UK]

MI5
National Security Service (also known as DI5) [UK]

MI6
Secret Intelligence Service (also known as SIS, DI6) [UK]

NEST
Nuclear Emergency Support Team [US]

NKVD
Historical predecessor organization to KGB (renamed in 1947) [USSR/Russia]

NSA
National Security Agency (equivalent to GCHQ) [US]

OBE
Order of the British Empire (awarded mainly to civilians and service personnel for public service or other distinctions) [UK]

OCCULUS
Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations [UK/NATO]

ONI
Office of Naval Intelligence [US]

OSA
Official Secrets Act (law governing official secrets) [UK]

OSS
Office of Strategic Services (disbanded in 1945/remodeled as CIA) [US]

Q DIVISION
Division within the Laundry associated with R&D [UK]

QINETIQ
See DERA [UK]

RIPA
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (law governing communications interception) [UK]

SAS
Special Air Service (British Army special forces) [UK]

SBS
Special Boat Service (Royal Marines special forces) [UK]

SIS
See MI6 [UK]

SOE
Special Operations Executive (equivalent to OSS, officially disbanded in 1945; see also the Laundry) [UK]

TLA
Three Letter Acronym [All]

 

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HALTING STATE
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THE FULLER MEMORANDUM