Although I’ve been learning. Boy, have I been learning! I’ve spent most of the past year scurrying around clearing up the messes he left behind. He clearly wasn’t planning on dying any time soon, so not only did I have to pick up the slack on his more recondite duties, I also had to check the padlocks he’d left on a lot of metaphorical closets with skeletons in them. Angleton did not keep one of these diaries, oh no: he kept his notes on a magically warded electromechanical data store built during the late 1940s, and a lot of those notes said things like, demon bound under rear quadrant of supermarket car park with level six ward, half-life eighteen years, check back early next century. So I’ve spent the past nine months trotting around the globe, pacifying the unquiet dead with extreme prejudice, and inadvertently being out of the country when all hell cut loose in Yorkshire.
But I digress. Nearly a decade ago I married a fellow employee, Dr. Dominique O’Brien.1 You might have heard of her. Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching. When that got too much for her they reassigned her to the Home Office for a while. Now she’s back in-house as a freshly minted Auditor, which means she holds people like me accountable for our work with the power of life or death. For many years Mo carried an occult instrument, the White Violin, as her main operational tool. The trouble with occult instruments is that they sometimes have their own agendas; it wasn’t too keen on sharing her, so eventually it tried to eat me. She managed to get rid of it somehow, but now she’s afraid that as Angleton’s heir I might absentmindedly eat her in my sleep. As we keep undergoing the kind of personal growth experiences that involve new and exciting magical abilities—like an interesting tendency to absentmindedly mumble death spells while waking up—I have to concede that she’s got a point. This has been a time of changes for both of us and we have about a decade of unexamined marital baggage to rethink, and consequently we’re currently living apart.
Did I mention that my life sucks?
Speaking of which: let’s have a round of applause for management responsibility! Because, after years of dodging it at every opportunity, I have had management responsibility forced upon me, whether I want it or not. And if I find the joker who nominated me for the role of Departmental Public Relations Officer I will—
No, I won’t eat them. That would be unprofessional.
(I won’t even put the frighteners on them. I might remonstrate with them politely. I could explain the errors of their ways and suggest, more in sorrow than in anger, that although I have been promoted into a very senior dead man’s shoes I don’t look good in a suit, I don’t suffer fools gladly, and if they really want a spokesman they ought to hire someone who’s trained for it, rather than being better qualified for fighting off a zombie invasion or fixing a broken firewall.)
Because I’m management now, I have to face facts. Hiring a real PR person would involve approving a budget, going through the HR recruitment and candidate selection cycle, managing the new employee’s enhanced security background check and in-processing, then bringing them up to speed on what exactly we do in the agency. (Which involves working around people with titles like Senior Staff Necromancer, Applied Computational Demonologist, or Combat Poet. Lots of newbies flee screaming at that point: our first month attrition rate is sky-high.)
So let me sum up the ways in which my life sucks right now: I’ve had a bunch of extra responsibilities dumped on me for no extra pay, I’ve had to move out of my home because my wife’s violin tried to murder me, morale is in the shitter because of the disaster in Leeds, and for the pièce de résistance, they made me wear a suit and sent me out to be grilled live on TV, because we don’t have the budget for a public relations fixer!
Yeah, it all sucks, but I suppose it could be worse. At least this time my line manager isn’t trying to sacrifice me to an elder god. But it’s still only May, so I suppose there’s time for that to change …
*
Jeremy smiles his trademark smile at me, simultaneously sympathetic and pitying, like a headmaster carpeting an unruly schoolboy. “Some would say that the truth is out there: well, tonight we’re going to see about that. My next interviewee is Mr. Howard, from the Ministry of Defense’s hitherto extremely secret agency for dealing with the sort of thing you expect to meet in an episode of The X-Files—alien abductions, supervillains, UFOs, and”—he pauses momentarily, as if he’s just tasted something lip-wrinklingly bitter—“magic.” Skepticism boils off him in waves so thick it makes the air around his head shimmer.
I smile, nod, and avert my eyes from my own image in the screen on the opposite wall. Jesus, I look like a life insurance salesman. “Yes, Jeremy,” I hear myself saying, “although we prefer to call it applied computational thaumaturgy. There’s a lot of mathematics involved.”
“So rather than smoke and mirrors you use clouds and servers?” The grizzled eyebrow creaks upwards towards the receding hairline. That’s a good pun: obviously scripted in advance. I nod again.
“Yes. It turns out that mathematics has side effects in the real world. This agency, SOE, has been investigating this effect ever since Alan Turing did pioneering work on it in the 1940s at Bletchley Park. Computers are tools that do much more than share cute cat photos, and they can be lethally dangerous in the wrong hands.”
So far so good. I’m on the approved message track, regurgitating talking points acknowledging stuff that’s already out there in public. My brief is to make the Laundry sound boring; encryption bad, hacking bad, misusing computers bad, Home Office rah, National Security rah, War on Tentacular Terror, rah. But in the back of my head I am uncomfortably aware of all the tasty minds crowded around me in this building, fuzzy shadows of warmth and sustenance in the studio control room and the offices beyond. I can taste the focus of the producer, feel the chilly (and inedible) ramparts of Mhari’s vampire shell, the armored fortress of solitude sitting across the table from me—
What?
Paxo smiles at me like a kindly uncle, or maybe a crocodile with a gold tooth, as he says: “It has been alleged”—Oh shit, I think—“that the disaster in Leeds was the result of an SOE operation that went wrong, that your people invited the attack that killed over nine thousand innocent people and shot down three airliners and two fighter jets. Is that true, Mr. Howard?”
Fuck! The fucker’s wearing a heavy-duty ward! Which means I can’t read him or trivially control him—the small leather bag he’s wearing on a cord around his neck, under his shirt, is the thaumaturgic equivalent of a bulletproof vest.
I wipe the smile and do my best impersonation of a granite cliff. “Absolutely not.” I take a breath. “SOE does not recklessly endanger national security or put lives at risk.” I think I can see where this line of questioning is going, and it’s nowhere good. “We were invaded without warning by a hitherto theoretical threat. We responded immediately and alerted the police and the army in accordance with our standing orders. The handling and outcome of the conflict are a matter for the Commons Select Committee to investigate and the Public Enquiry to report on, and I can’t comment further.” Phew.