Wireless (23 page)

“So what clients do you have at present?” I ask.

“We have eighteen,” she says, without missing a beat. “Milk or sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar. Nobody at head office seems able to tell me much about them.”

“I don’t see why not—we file regular updates with Human Resources,” she says, pouring the tea.

I consider my next words carefully: no need to mention the confusing incident with the shredder, the medical files, and the photocopies of Peter-Fred’s buttocks at last year’s Christmas party. (Never mind the complaint, which isn’t worth the toilet paper it was scribbled on except insofar as it proves that the Funny Farm’s cordon sanitaire is leaking. One of the great things about ISO9000-compliant organizations is that not only is there a form for everything but anything that isn’t submitted on the correct form can be ignored.) “It’s the paper thing, apparently. Manual typewriters don’t work well with the office document-management system, and someone tried to feed them to a scanner a couple of years ago. Then they sent the originals for recycling without proofreading the scanner output. Anyway, it turns out that we don’t have a completely accurate idea of who’s on long-term remand here, and HR want their superannuation files brought up to date, as a matter of some urgency.”

Renfield sighs. “So someone had an accident with a shredder again. And no photocopies?” She looks at me sharply for a moment. “Well, I suppose that’s typical. We’re just another of those low-priority outposts nobody gives a damn about. I suppose I should be grateful they sent someone to look into it . . .” She takes a sip of tea. “We’ve got fourteen short-stay patients right now, Mr. How ard. Of those, I think the prognosis is good in all cases, except perhaps Merriweather . . . If you give me your desk number, I’ll post you a full list of names and payroll references tomorrow. The four long-term patients are another matter. They live in the secure wing, by the way. All of them have a nurse of their own, just in case. Three of them have been here so long that they don’t have current payroll numbers—the system was first computerized in 1972, and they’d all been permanently decertified for duty before that point—and one of them, between you and me, I’m not even sure what his name is.”

I nod, trying to look encouraging. The complaint I’m supposed to investigate apparently came from one of the long-term patients. The question is, which one? Nobody’s sure: the doorman on the night shift when the document showed up isn’t terribly communicative (he’s been dead for some years himself), and the CCTV system didn’t spot anything. Which is in itself suggestive—the Laundry’s HQ CCTV surveillance is rather special, extremely hard to deceive, and guaranteed not to be hooked up to the SCORPION STARE network anymore, which would be the most obvious route to suborning it. “Perhaps you could introduce me to the inmates? The transients first, then the long-term ones?”

She looks a little shocked. “But they’re the
long-term
residents! I assure you, they each need a full-time Sister’s attention just to keep them under control!”

“Of course”—I shrug, trying to look embarrassed (it’s not hard)—“but HR have got a bee in their bonnet about some European Directive on workplace health and safety and long-term-disability resource provisioning that requires them to appoint a patient advocate to mediate with the ombudsman in disputes over health and safety conditions.” I shrug again. “It’s bullshit. You know it, and I know it. But we’ve got to comply, or Questions will be Asked. This is the Civil Service. And they’re still technically Laundry employees, even if they’ve been remanded into long-term care, so someone has to do the job. My managers played spin the bottle and I got the job, so I’ve got to ask you. If you don’t mind?”

“If you insist, I’m sure something can be arranged,” Renfield concedes. “But Matron won’t be happy about your visiting the secure wing. It’s very irregular—she likes to keep a firm grip on it. It’ll take a while to sort a visit out, and if any of them get wind . . .”

“Well, then, we’d just better make it a surprise, and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair!” I grin like a loon. “They told me about the observation gallery. Would you mind showing me around?”

We do the short-stay ward first. The ward is arranged around a corridor, with bathrooms and a nursing station at either end, and individual rooms for the patients. There’s a smoking room off to one side, with a yellow patina to the white gloss paint around the doorframe. The smoking room is empty but for a huddle of sad-looking leather armchairs and an imposing bulletin board covered in health and safety notices (including the obligatory SMOKING IS ILLEGAL warning). If it wasn’t for the locks and the observation windows in the doors, it could be mistaken for the dayroom of a genteel, slightly decaying Victorian railway hotel, fallen on hard times.

The patients are another matter.

“This is Henry Merriweather,” says Dr. Renfield, opening the door to Bed Three. “Henry? Hello? I want you to meet Mr. Howard. He’s here to conduct a routine inspection. Hello? Henry?”

Bed Three is actually a cramped studio flat, featuring a small living room with sofa and table, and separate bedroom and toilet areas opening off it opposite the door. A windup gramophone with a flaring bell-shaped horn sits atop a hulking wooden sideboard, stained almost black. There’s a newspaper, neatly folded, and a bowl of fruit. The frosted window glass is threaded with wire, but otherwise there’s little to dispel the illusion of hospitality, except for the occupant.

Henry squats, cross-legged, on top of the polished wooden table. His head is tilted in my direction, but he’s not focusing on me. He’s dressed in a set of pastel-striped pajamas the like of which I haven’t seen this century. His attention is focused on the Sister waiting in the corridor behind us. His face is a rictus of abject terror, as if the automaton in the starched pinafore is waiting to pull his fingers to pieces, joint by joint, as soon as we leave.

“Hello?” I say tentatively, and wave a hand in front of him.

Henry jackknifes to his feet and tumbles off the table backward, making a weird gobbling noise that I mistake at first for laughter. He backs into the corner of the room, crouching, and points past me. “Auditor! Auditor!”

“Henry?” Renfield steps sideways around me. She sounds concerned. “Is this a bad time? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You—you—” His wobbly index finger points past me, twitching randomly. “Inspection! Inspection!”

Renfield obviously used the wrong word and set him off. The poor bastard’s terrified, half out of his tree with fear. My stomach just about climbs out through my ribs in sympathy: the Auditors are one of my personal nightmares, and Henry (that’s Senior Scientific Officer Third, Henry Merriweather, Operations Research and Development Group) may be half-catatonic and a danger to himself, but he’s got every right to be afraid of them. “It’s all right, I’m not—” There’s a squeaking grinding noise behind me.

Whirr-clunk. “Miss-TER MerriWEATHER. GO to your ROOM.” Click. “Time for BED. IMM-ediateLY.” Click-clunk. Behind me, Nurse Flywheel is blocking the door like a starched and pin-tucked Dalek: she brandishes a cast-iron sink plunger menacingly. “IMM-ediateLY!”

“Override!” barks Renfield. “Sister! Back away!” To me, quietly, “The Sisters respond badly when inmates get upset. Follow my lead.” To the Sister, who is casting about with her stalklike Thaumic Thix ometer, “I have control!”

Merriweather stands in the corner, shaking uncontrollably and panting as the robotic nurse points at him for a minute. We’re at an impasse, it seems. Then: “DocTOR—Matron says the patIENT must go to bed. You have CON-trol.” Clunk-whirr. The Sister withdraws, rotates on her base, and glides backward along her rails to the nursing station.

Renfield nudges the door shut with one foot. “Mr. Howard, would you mind standing with your back to the door? And your head in front of that, ah, spyhole?”

“You’re not, not, nuh-huh—” Merriweather gobbles for words as he stares at me.

I spread my hands. “Not an Auditor,” I say, smiling.

“Not an—an—” His mouth falls open and his eyes shut. A moment later, I see the moisture trails on his cheeks as he begins to weep with quiet desperation.

“He’s having a bad day,” Renfield mutters in my direction. “Here, let’s get you to bed, Henry.” She approaches him slowly, but he makes no move to resist as she steers him into the small bedroom and pulls the covers back.

I stand with my back to the door the whole time, covering the observation window. For some reason, the back of my neck is itching. I can’t help thinking that Nurse Flywheel isn’t exactly the chatty talkative type who’s likely to put her feet up and relax with a nice cup of tea. I’ve got a feeling that somewhere in this building, an unblinking red-rimmed eye is watching me, and sooner or later I’m going to have to meet its owner.

Andy was
afraid
.

Well, I’m not stupid; I can take a hint. So right after he asked me to go down to St. Hilda’s and find out what the hell was going on, I plucked up my courage and went and knocked on Angleton’s office door.

Angleton is not to be trifled with. I don’t know anyone else currently alive and in the organization who could get away with misappropriating the name of the CIA’s legendary chief of counterespionage as a nom de guerre. I don’t know anyone else in the organization whose face is visible in circa-1942 photographs of the Laundry’s lineup, either, barely changed across all those years. Angleton scares the bejeezus out of most people, myself included. Study the abyss for long enough, and the abyss will study you right back; Angleton’s qualified to chair a university department of necromancy—if any such existed—and meetings with him can be quite harrowing. Luckily, the old ghoul seems to like me, or at least not to view me with the distaste and disdain he reserves for Human Resources or our political masters. In the wizened, desiccated corners of what passes for his pedagogical soul he evidently longs for a student, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got right now.

“Enter.”

“Boss? Got a minute?”

“Sit, boy.” I sat. Angleton bashed away at the keyboard of his device for a few more seconds, then pulled the carbon papers out from under the platen—for really secret secrets in this line of work, computers are flat-out
verboten
—and laid them face down on his desk, then carefully draped a stained tea towel over them. “What is it?”

“Andy wants me to go and conduct an unscheduled inspection of the Funny Farm.”

Whoa.
Angleton stares at me, fully engaged. “Did he say why?” he asks, finally.

“Well.” How to put it? “He seems to be afraid of something. And there’s some kind of complaint. From one of the inmates.”

Angleton props his elbows on the desk and makes a steeple of his bony fingers. A minute passes before a cold wind blows across the charnel-house roof.
“Well.”

I have never seen Angleton nonplussed before. The effect is disturbing, like glancing down and realizing that, like Wile E. Coyote, you’ve just run over the edge of a cliff and are standing on thin air. “Boss?”

“What exactly did Andy say?” Angleton asks slowly.

“We received a complaint.” I briefly outline what I know about the shit-stirring missive. “Something about one of the long-stay inmates. And I was just wondering, do you know anything about them?”

Angleton peers at me over the rims of his bifocals. “As a matter of fact I do,” he says slowly. “I had the privilege of working with them. Hmm. Let me see.” He unfolds creakily to his feet, turns, and strides over to the shelves of ancient Eastlight files that cover the back wall of his office. “Where did I put it . . . ?”

Angleton going to the paper files is another
whoa!
moment. He keeps most of his stuff in his Memex, the vast, hulking microfilm mechanism built into his desk. If it’s still printed on paper, then it’s really important. “Boss?”