“Thanks.” I try not to groan. “I’ll try not to obsess about Peter-Fred fucking up the wiring loom too much.”
“Don’t worry.” She waves a hand vaguely: “The cabling’s all going to be outsourced from next year anyhow.”
That gets my attention. “Outsourced?” I realize that shouting might deliver entirely the wrong message about my suitability for return to work and moderate my voice: “There are four, no, five, no-several, very good reasons why we do our own cabling, starting with security and ending with security. I really don’t think outsourcing it is a very good idea at all, unless it’s the kind of outsourcing which is actually insourcing to F Division via a subcontractor arrangement to satisfy our PPP quota requirements…”
And that’s another ten minutes wasted, bringing Iris up to speed on one of the minutiae of my job. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know where the dividing line between IT support scut-work and OPSEC protocol lies, although she catches on fast when I explain the predilection of class G3 abominations for traveling down Cat 5e cables and eating clerical staff, not to say anything about the ease with which a bad guy could stick a network sniffer on our backbone and do a man-in-the-middle attack on our authentication server if we let random cable installers loose under the floor tiles in the new building.
Finally she leaves me alone, and I open the cover on BLOODY BARON and start reading.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER I’M THOROUGHLY SPOOKED BY MY reading-so much so that I’ve had to put the file down a couple of times when I caught myself scanning the same sentence over and over again with increasing disbelief. It comes as something of a relief when Iris knocks on my door again. “Showtime,” she says. “You coming?”
I shake the folder at her. “This is nuts!”
“Welcome to the monkey house, and have a banana.” She taps her wristwatch. “Room 206 in four minutes.”
I lock up carefully-the files I requisitioned from the stacks aren’t secret or above, but it’d still be professionally embarrassing if anyone walked in on them-and sketch a brief ward over the door. It flickers violet, then fades, plugging into the departmental security parasphere. I hurry towards the stairs.
Room 206 is up a level, with real windows and an actual view of the high street if you open the dusty Venetian blinds. There’s a conference table and a bunch of not-so-comfortable chairs (the better to keep people from falling asleep in meetings), and various extras: an ancient overhead slide projector, a lectern with a broken microphone boom, and a couple of tattered security awareness posters from the 1950s: “Is your co-worker a KGB mole, a nameless horror from beyond spacetime, or a suspected homosexual? If so, dial 4-SECURITY!” (I suspect Pinky has been exercising his curious sense of humor again.)
“Have a chair.” Iris winks at me. I take her up on the invitation as the door opens and three more attendees show up. Shona I recognize from previous encounters in ops working groups-she’s in-your-face Scottish, on the plump side, and has a brusque way of dealing with bureaucratic obstacles that doesn’t exactly encourage me to insert myself in her line of fire. I think she’s something to do with the Eastern Europe desk. “This is Shona MacDonald,” says Iris. “And Vikram Choudhury, and Franz Gustaffson, our liaison from the AIVD-Unit G6.” Franz nods affably enough, and I try to conceal my surprise. It’s an unusual name for the Netherlands, but I happen to know that his father was Danish. The last time I saw him, he was on what I was sure was a one-way trip to a padded cell for the rest of his life after sitting through one PowerPoint slide too many at a certain meeting in Darmstadt. The fine hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
“We’ve met,” I say, guardedly.
“Have we?” Franz looks at me with interest. “That’s interesting! You’ll have to tell me all about it later.”
Oh. So they only managed to save part of him.
“Allow me to introduce Bob, Bob Howard,” Iris tells them, and I nod and force a bland smile to cover up the horror.
“Mr. Howard is an SSO 3 and double-hats as our departmental IT security specialist and also as personal assistant to Dr. Angleton. A decision was taken to add him to this working group.” I notice the descent into passive voice; also some disturbing double takes from around the table, from Shona and Gustaffson. “He also-this is one of those coincidences I was talking about earlier-happens to be married to Agent CANDID.”
At which name Gustaffson drops all pretense at impassivity and stares at me as if I’ve just grown a second head. I nod at him. What the hell? Mo has a codeword all of her own? Presumably for overseas assignments like the Amsterdam job, but still…
“Bob. Would you be so good as to summarize your understanding of the background to BLOODY BARON for us?”
Oh Jeez. I clear my throat. “I’ve only had an hour and a half with the case files, so I may be misreading this stuff,” I admit. Shit, stop making excuses. It just makes you look lame. “BLOODY BARON appears to be a monitoring committee tasked with-well. The cold war never entirely ended, did it? There are too many vested interests on all sides who want to keep it simmering. And the upshot is that Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don’t need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe -in fact, communism was a distraction. Hence the current gas wars and economic blackmail.”
Iris winces. (I’m wincing inside: if you had our heating bills last winter, you’d be wincing too.) “Enough of the macro picture, if you don’t mind. What’s the micro?”
“FSB activity in London has been rising steadily since 2001.” I shrug.
“The Litvinenko assassination, that embarrassing business with the wifienabled rock in Moscow in ’05, diplomatic expulsions; the old confrontation is still bubbling under. But BLOODY BARON is new to me, I will admit.”
I glance at the file on the table in front of me. “Anyway, there’s an organization. We don’t know their real designation because nobody who knows anything about them has ever defected and they don’t talk to strangers, but folks call them the Thirteenth Directorate-not to be confused with the original Thirteenth Directorate, which was redesignated the Fifth Directorate back in the 1960s. Nasty folks-they were the ones responsible for wet work, Mokryye Dela.
“The current bearers of the name seem to have been forked off the KGB back in 1991, when the KGB was restructured as the FSB. They’re an independent wing, much like us.”
The Laundry was originally part of SOE, back during the Second World War; we’re the part that kept on going when SOE was officially wound up at the end of hostilities.
“They’re the Russian OCCINTEL agency, handling demonology and occult intelligence operations. Mostly they stay at home, and their activities are presumably focused on domestic security issues. But there’s been a huge upsurge-unprecedented-in overseas activity lately. Thirteenth Directorate staff have been identified visiting public archives, combing libraries, attending auctions of historic memorabilia, and contacting individuals suspected of having contact with the former parent agency back before the end of the real cold war. They’ve been focusing on London, but also visible in Tallinn, Amsterdam, Paris, Gdańsk, Ulan Bator… the list doesn’t make any obvious sense.”
I swallow. “That’s all I’ve got, but there’s more, isn’t there?”
Everyone’s looking at me, except for Gustaffson, who’s watching Iris. She nods. “That’s the basic picture. Vikram?”
Choudhury looks at me curiously. “Is Mr. Howard replacing Dr. Angleton on this committee?”
I nearly swallow my tongue. Iris looks disconcerted. “Dr. Angleton isn’t currently available,” she tells him, sparing me a warning glance. “There are Human Resources issues. Mr. Howard is deputizing for him.”