8. CLUB ZERO

I GET HOME AN HOUR AND A HALF LATE, BONE-TIRED, BAMBOOZLED, and bothered. I haven’t had a good day at the office, all things considered: a confusing briefing on Russian OCCINT activities in Western Europe, an old acquaintance who doesn’t recognize me anymore, the discovery that the Fuller Memorandum is missing, and now Panin’s evident patronizing contempt for my lack of insight. I’ve got a feeling that all the pieces of the jigsaw are within my grasp, if only I could figure out where they lie-probably dragged under the sofa by an invisible cat, knowing my luck.

It’s after eight as I turn my key in the lock, pass my left hand over the ward, and slope into the front hall. The lights are on in the kitchen, and there’s a pleasant smell-Mo is roasting a chicken, I think. “Hello?” I call.

“Up here!” She’s upstairs and she doesn’t sound pissed off, which is a relief.

I dump my jacket and take the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door’s open and she’s stewing herself in the tub in an inordinate amount of green foam and some kind of mud mask, so that she looks a little like the creature from the black lagoon. “Did you get my text?” I ask.

“Yes. Who was the Addams Family reference about?”

I do a double take: “What-Oh shit.” I shake my head. “Never mind.” Obviously she can’t read my mind, otherwise there’d have been an Artist Rifles’ brick staking out the pub before I’d taken my first mouthful of beer. I’m losing my touch. “I’m screwing up,” I admit.

“You’re…? Huh. Bet you I’ve had a more boring day.”

“Boring, maybe; unproductive, hardly.”

She snorts and blows a handful of bubbles my way. “I spent most of the morning and afternoon sitting on a wooden stool, watching a burned-out sixty-something expert mumble into a dictaphone. Then I had to run for a meeting. After that I looked in on the office but Mike wasn’t there, so I came home. Picked up a free-range bird at Waitrose; it’s in the oven now. I was hoping you might want to fix some side helpings?”

“I can do that.” I glance at the bath. “You going to be long?”

“Half an hour at least. I put the chicken in before I came up here; you want to look in on it in fifteen minutes or so.”

I’d rather spend my time here with her, but I can tell the difference between an order and a request: I sketch a salute. “By the way,” I say, trying to sound casual about it, “I’ve been stuck with Angleton’s work on BLOODY BARON, and I’m finding it a bit confusing. And nobody’s sent me the briefing papers on the other job yet, the one-you know. Last week.”

She’s silent for almost a minute. Then she sighs. “There’s a bottle of Bordeaux at the back of the cupboard under the plates and crockery. Open it and give it a while to breathe.”

“Okay. Um, sorry.” I back out of the bathroom, leaving her to try and rebuild the warm, scented bubble that I just burst.

I scrub and boil potatoes, then shove them in a roasting pan, check the chicken, chop some carrots, and have the vegetables just about ready when Mo comes downstairs in her bathrobe, hair in a towel. “Smells good,” she remarks, then looks skeptically at my potatoes. “Hmm.” She takes over; I get the plates out and pour two generous glasses of wine. It’s later than I expected and I’m really rather hungry.

Food and wine settle stomach and soul; neither of us is a very sophisticated cook (although Mo is much more experimentally minded than I am), but we can eat what we prepare for ourselves, which is a good start, and after half an hour we’ve methodically demolished half a small roast chicken and a pan of roast vegetables, not to mention most of a bottle of wine. Mo looks content as I shove the plates in the dishwasher and sort out the recyclable bits. “You wanted to know what Thursday was about,” she says, staring at what’s left in her wineglass.

“I keep running into people who expect me to know.” I go in search of another bottle to open. “It’s not something I can ignore.”

“How much of CLUB ZERO are you familiar with?”

“I’m not.” I get the waiter’s friend out and go to work on a pinot noir.

“Oh.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, but-are you sure you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?” I ask irritably as I scrape away the plastic seal on the bottle. “Are we in known unknowns territory, or unknown unknowns?”

“They’re known okay.” She shakes her head. “Fucking cultists.”

“Cul-” I do a double take. “That’s CLUB ZERO?”

She nods. “None other.”

Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them-and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.

Being predisposed to religion has its uses, but it’s a real Achilles’ heel if your civilization is under threat by vastly powerful alien horrors. We have a rich repertoire of primate behavior which includes the urge to suck up to the big bad alpha male, and a tendency to assume that any intelligence smarter or nastier than we are is the top of the pack hierarchy. Finally, we’ve got any number of dark religions out there. The followers of Kali or Mictecacihuatl or the various other faces of the lady of death. Certain splinter sects of millennialist Christianity who believe that the Revelation of St. John is black propaganda and that Satan will triumph. Strange heresies, by-blows of the Albigensians who trace their heritage back to secret cells who worshiped Ahriman in the palace basements of the Persian Empire. Other groups who are less familiar: syncretistic heresies spawned by bizarre collisions between seekers of hidden knowledge and followers of Tibetan demon princes. And, of course, bat-winged squid gods, although I find it hard to believe that anyone takes that seriously these days.

None of their specific beliefs matter. What matters is that if a cell or coven or parish or whatever get their hands on a genuine summoning ritual, the things at the other end of the occult courtesy phone aren’t fussy about what they’re called as long as the message is “chow time.”

I take a deep breath. “What variety of cult was it this time?”

“The rich American expat kind.” She takes a deep breath.

“American? But didn’t the Black Chamber-”

“They didn’t lift a finger.” Her voice rises. “Instead, the Dustbin got a reluctant tip-off from the FBI that a bunch of nutty Jeezmoids from the every-sperm-is-sacred crowd were planning on making a big splash at the UN Population Fund summit in Den Haag last week. It’s not terrorism in America this decade if they shoot doctors or firebomb family planning clinics, you know?”

I let her simmer for a minute while I pull the cork on the wine bottle and pour the last of the first bottle into her glass. “How did it get punted our way?”

“Chatter and crosstalk.” She drains her glass and shoves it towards me. “These aren’t your regular god-botherers, they’ve got form.” (A history of criminal activity, in other words.) “The Dustbin and the Donut are both keeping tabs on them. They tipped off the Dutch AIVD, which is good, but then they forgot to include us in the loop, which was anything but good. What finally pulled us in was when the AIVD Watch Team who were keeping an eye on the hundred kilograms of sodium chlorate and the primer cords they’d stockpiled noticed the church supplies catalog and the white goats. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom -”