“Studio A. Which is right … here…”
Boris and the other guy (a blue-suiter in civvies, fooling no one: he stinks of cop) wait outside while Mhari pushes me through the door into the production suite and follows me inside to stop me escaping. I turn and frown at her. She’s far better at looking professional than I am. With her mercilessly coiffured blonde hair, tailored black suit, watered silk blouse, and sky-high heels, she looks like Taylor Swift in boardroom drag—a version of TayTay that runs on type O negative and has a severe sunlight allergy. “Can’t you do this?” I ask plaintively, one last time. “Take one for the team?”
She spares me a brazenly unapologetic grin as she points a finger at the ceiling: “See the bright lights, sweetie? I’d go up in flames.”
I’m about to tell her that they use LED spotlights these days and they’re not powerful enough to set fire to her PHANG-sensitive skin when I spot the producer. He’s half-risen from his seat, clearly fascinated by this exchange. He leans forward and peers at our ID badges. “Ah, you must be Mr. Howard and Ms. Murphy from the, er, Ministry of Magic?”
That makes even Mhari twitch. “Special Operations Executive, Ministry of Defense,” she says sharply. “There is no ‘Ministry of Magic.’” She holds out her hand for him to shake. Her nails are the same color as her lips; they look dipped in fresh blood.
“Can we take any questions arising from this interview to the Defense Secretary?” he asks hopefully.
Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ-grinder a memo.” Mhari manages to keep a straight face. Drinks on me indeed.
“Well then, assuming you’re not going to offer me a last-minute substitution I’ve got you down to go live six minutes into the program, off at twenty—the Big Man’s in the studio already, running through the warm-up highlights.” Just the biggest news interviewer in the country, the chief presenter on Newsnight, waiting for me. “You haven’t done this before, have you?” He shows me all the kindly concern of a hangman sizing up a client. “Really, it’ll all be over before you know it and it won’t hurt at all. Let’s get you hooked up…”
There’s a glass door fronting a surprisingly cramped office with a plain gray backdrop, brilliantly illuminated by camera fill-in LEDs. Through the door I see a famous silhouette: the barely tamed hair and fiercely hooked nose. He was scheduled to retire last month but I gather he decided to stay in the saddle a bit longer just for us. I may be the Eater of Souls, but this guy is the Consumer of Cabinet Ministers. And now he’s beckoning to me! “Go on in and take the chair to his left,” says the producer; “when it’s time to go live the camera will give you a red light, and when the red light goes off I’ll cue you to slide the chair back and leave. Just try not to run the next guest over.”
The green light over the door begins blinking. The producer starts making urgent shooing motions at me, and Mhari mouths break a leg. So I go through the door and I sit down in the hot seat, wishing it was electrified so I could get this over with faster. I wipe my fingers carefully along the underside of the seat frame, then peel back a tab of adhesive film, leaving a coin-sized self-adhesive disc behind. My pulse spikes. The chair is wheeled, rolling on a track: “Move eighty centimeters to your left—perfect!” The producer’s voice comes in through the bud in my right ear. It’s not the only wire I’m wearing: there’s a lapel mike too, and I half-suspect it doubles as a polygraph so they can tell when I’m lying. “You’re going to be on camera three. Jeremy will lead in to your item in about ten seconds. Okay, I’m shutting up now.”
Then the red light comes on above the camera, and I’m live on a Monday evening special crisis edition of Newsnight.
*
Hi. My name is Bob Howard, and I do secret work for the government.
This is my workplace diary. People in my line—anyone with “active duty” flagged on their personnel file—are required to keep one. It’s a precaution against loss of institutional knowledge. If you’re reading this, either you’re in an Oversight position (probably an Auditor or a magistrate of the Black Assizes tasked with investigating my activities) or, more likely, I’m dead and the powers that be want you up to speed on my job toot sweet.
Side-splitting stuff, eh?
Let me tell you a bit about myself. As I said, I’m Bob Howard, age 39, position: DSS Grade 1, that’s short for Detached Senior Scientist or Deeply Scary Sorcerer or something, nobody really cares (in the Laundry they’re more or less the same thing), and my life sucks right now.
I got into this gig because when I was working on my master’s thesis in image processing in the late nineties I almost summoned up a manifestation of outer chaos by accident. This led to the Laundry making me a job offer I wasn’t allowed to refuse. (Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.)
That was about fifteen years ago, in more innocent, less embattled days. So I spent a couple of years in tech support hell before getting bored, stupidly volunteering for operational duties, and ending up as Dr. Angleton’s understudy. Dr. Angleton really was a Deeply Scary Sorcerer, and when he got himself lethally entangled with a monstrously powerful vampire elder I inherited all of his duties, some of his powers (I’m still learning how much), and very little of his seventy-plus years of wisdom and experience …