The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (49 page)

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Risky activities include going out in daylight, going to parties with a black light show, or spilling a bag of rice on the kitchen floor.

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Really, really badly by merchant banking standards. Not that I had time to get used to banking pay and bonuses before I came down with PHANG: just to the 100-hour overtime culture and the workplace bullying.

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The donors are terminally ill patients who are in hospice care and dying. I’m shortening their lives by hours or days, they’re lengthening mine by weeks or months. It’s not a calculus I’m terribly happy about, but it beats the alternative.

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Bursting into flames in daylight, not so much.

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Note to readers: holy water does not work on PHANGs, even the newbie incisors-aren’t-growing-yet variety. Crucifixes don’t work. I like garlic bread (we still have to eat). We aren’t actually undead, unlike the Residual Human Resources on the night shift: we’re just socially undead.

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When it was started during the war, it occupied the building above a Chinese laundry in Soho, hence the name. Technically we’re Q-Division, SOE, but SOE was officially wound up/absorbed by MI5 in late 1945 when we were spun off. Yes, there is a history of inter-service rivalry.

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And the PRINCE2 project management standards for dealing with them.

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He induced radioactivity through neutron bombardment, and synthesized a hatful of transuranic elements.

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The complex is more than just a museum. The British government has obsessively collected firearms since 1631 – maintaining a complete working example of every single handgun and small arm under the sun. The national firearms collection known as the Enfield Pattern Room was formerly located at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield. But when the new museum opened in Leeds, the contents of the Pattern Room were relocated to a very discreet secure building close to the museum site. But Alex is unaware of the NFC at this time. Which is perhaps all for the best.

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He remembers how – years ago – next door’s cat got indoors, leapt on the table, and slowly slid across it and fell off the far side, despite futile front-paw backpedaling. It had worn an expression of profound outrage the whole time, much like a child summoned to the sink-side to do the washing up.

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Y2K was a real end-of-civilization problem. And the people who could deal with it treated it as such, working flat-out on disaster management for the last year-long countdown. With the result that the end-of-the-world scenario didn’t happen… causing everyone not directly involved to conclude that it was a false alarm.

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Which has been blamed on Islamist terrorists with hallucinogenic gas by the more tractable media – newspapers and the BBC – although the volume of conspiracy theories is somewhere between deafening and eardrum-rupturing.

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The plans used to live in a building full of filing cabinets, then they migrated to a dinosaur-era mainframe in an air-conditioned basement, and more recently someone who has heard of the internet has been trying to get the usual public sector procurement suspects to implement a wiki system using Lotus Notes. It’s so cumbersome that they keep the first couple of pages of each contingency printed out on paper to this day.

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Another unreasonable homework assignment.

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Last updated in 2003 at the request of Tony Blair.

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In the name of the Lord of the seventh hell…