A stillness hangs in the air between them.
“No,” says Persephone, “there isn’t, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you. I’m not here to gloat. What I mean to say is, things have gone drastically wrong, and in a way none of us ever foresaw. The Cabinet Office agenda and the public-private partnership process doesn’t know anything about ancient gods and nightmares, Iris. Their world is all about austerity politics and balancing the budget in time for the next but one general election instead of winning the war against sleep. We know how to deal with soul-stealing horrors, not death from above by legal sleight-of-hand. Your way and our way—we still disagree about the means, but the goal is survival, yes? The new reality, though, is that we came under the scrutiny of superiors who fundamentally don’t believe in anything except the size of their bank accounts and the number of nonexecutive directorships of public corporations they can retire into when they quit politics. And they’ve been bought and sold by the enemy without even noticing. Which is why, when an order in council came down from the Cabinet Office yesterday, dissolving the agency with immediate effect, we moved onto Continuity Operations. And that’s when whatever was left of your oath finally dissolved.”
Iris Carpenter, formerly a midlevel executive within Q-Division Field Operations (and Bob Howard’s line manager), also High Priestess of the Lambeth Temple of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, and finally a permanent resident of Camp Sunshine, turns to face Persephone. “Don’t you people ever give up?” she whispers; then, louder, “What do you want from me? Isn’t it over yet?”
“It’s never over until the agency has no more use for us, you should know that. And by the way, we know that back in the day you didn’t break your oath of office—you bent it, most certainly, so extensively that the working group is still trying to establish how exactly you did it—but you still belong to us. On some level. The oath is merely a marker. And now we’re calling it in.”
Persephone stands up and recites in a singsong voice, “Oh dear, all that tea has gone straight to my bladder! I’d better go and powder my nose right away. I think I’ll just leave my handbag here where it’s safe. There’s a spare exit token from the camp in the side pocket, I hope it’s still there when I get back, I’d be in terrible trouble if it goes missing and I only thought to check it when I got back to London.” She nods at the now-gaping Iris and pushes past her, opening the door to the outside world. “Good luck.”
And then she’s gone.
*
For the next couple of weeks after the escape from the POW camp, I am a fugitive from justice. I’m also hiding from my own conscience, but I won’t burden you overmuch with that. But boy have things changed!
In the old days of, say, 1984, if you went on the run you’d try to do everything with cash. Pay for cheap hotel rooms, shop in supermarkets, lose yourself in the crowd. Forged papers were still plausible. Hell, forged checks and credit cards were still a thing. Your biggest risk was being recognized by a cop, either spotting your face from the MOST WANTED poster down the nick, or by running the poster past a bored hotel desk clerk who’d seen you the night before. So you’d do your best to stick to the anonymity of crowds or stay out of sight completely. Oh, and avoiding the cameras was easy: there weren’t any. Well, there were a few—some big stores had them to deter shoplifters and catch staff stealing from the tills—but there was no mechanism for the cops to monitor them.
Today, we’ve got networked cameras everywhere. Everyone carries a mobile phone, but it’s a tracking device that can report your location if the cops know your number and can get a warrant. (Which, for a murder suspect, they most certainly can.) Cash? To buy anything, you need plastic, and it will be checked online to the bank for any significant purchase. So you might think that hiding out would be ridiculously difficult, if not impossible—but you’re not thinking like a state security agency.
There’s a goddam script on my phone. Not the software kind; I mean a series of activities for me to perform, in sequence. So after I leave Cassie and Alex in their safe house, I go into zombie mode—you know what that looks like, the guy shuffling along the pavement, head downturned to gaze into the depths of his glowing Palantir—and obey the instructions a twenty-first-century Lamplighter has installed on my phone. (Lamplighters: they’re the dudes who set up the safe houses for the spies in all the le Carré movies and ensure there’s milk in the fridge, bugs in the bedstead, and nobody watching the target. That’s a real job within the security services.)
Now, as I’ve already said, Bob Howard is not my true name. (If you need to ask why I don’t use it, you obviously haven’t been adequately briefed on powers of binding, geasa, and how they work.) What the SA handed me in that envelope was: a sterile smartphone with a bunch of extremely paranoid security upgrades and a burner SIM card, a driving license, a passport, debit and credit cards, and a warrant card bound to Continuity Operations. All in the name of, oh, let’s call him Bob Howard 2.0: a fresh new working alias. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that this represents the very tip of an enormous iceberg of plausible lies.