“Took your time getting here, didn’t you, boy?”
In the time it takes me to peel myself off the ceiling and return my pistol to its holster, Angleton takes up residence in my visitor’s chair, folding his ungainly limbs around himself like a spindly black spider. The skeletal, humorless grin tells me I’m in trouble even before I open my mouth.
“I’ve waited here for three consecutive nights. What delayed you?”
I close my mouth. Then I open it and close it again a couple of times, just for practice. Finally, when I trust myself to speak, I say one word: “Cultists.”
“Three days, boy. Suppose you tell me what you’ve learned?”
“One moment.” My paranoia is growing. I take out my phone and peer at him through its camera. TRUESEER tells me that I am, indeed, looking at my boss, who is looking increasingly irritated. I make the shiny vanish. “Okay. From the top: the Fuller Memorandum is missing, the Russians have gotten all upset, cultists are throwing their toys out of the pram, and everyone wants to know about the Teapot. Oh, and someone in Research and Development says that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn’t going to wait a couple of years, but is due to kick off in a few weeks or months at the most. What am I missing?”
Angleton stares at me coldly. “You’re missing the spy, boy.”
“The”-I nearly swallow my tongue-“spy?”
“Yes: Helen Langhorn. Aged seventy-four, widow of Flight Lieutenant Adrian Langhorn, long-term resident of Cosford, working part-time at the museum as a volunteer. Met her husband while she was in the WRAAF back in 1963. Which is a pretty interesting occupation for her to have been in, considering that she was also a captain in the Russian Army and a GRU Illegal who was inserted into the UK in 1959, when she was barely out of her teens.”
I make an inarticulate gurgling noise. “But she-the hangar-she wasn’t-she can’t have-”
Angleton waits for me to wind down. “The many-angled ones are not the only enemy this country has ever faced, boy. Some of us remember.” (It’s okay for him to say that-I was about ten when the cold war ended!)
“Helen Langhorn’s primary assignment did not come to an end just because the Soviet Union collapsed. To outward appearances her utility had been in decline for many years, after her husband failed to achieve advancement, costing her access to people and bases; once she hit sixty with no long-term prospects they wrote her off. That is one of the risks one runs with long-term Illegals-their entire life may be marginalized by one or two unfortunate and unpredictable errors. There are probably fifty others like her in the UK -retired bank managers and failed politicians’ wives pruning their privet hedges and daydreaming of the revolution that failed them. Or perhaps they accept it gladly, happy to no longer be a pawn on the chessboard. But in any case, Helen’s career appears to have undergone a brief second flowering in the last few years.”
“But she”-I flap my jaws inarticulately-“she was halfway to dementia!”
“Was she?” Angleton raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She was on the front desk of a museum gallery barely two hundred meters from Hangar 12B, where Airframe 004 is being cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other three white elephants airworthy. You may think that no more than a coincidence, but I don’t.”
“You never told me what that stuff about the white elephants was about-”
“I expected you to find out for yourself, boy.” Then Angleton does something I absolutely never expected to see: he sighs unhappily.
“Boss?”
Angleton leans back in his chair. “Tell me about Chevaline,” he asks.
“Chevaline?” I frown. “Wasn’t that some sort of nuclear missile program from the sixties or seventies, something like that?”
“Chevaline.” He pauses. “Back in the 1960s, when Harold Wilson cut a deal with Richard Nixon to buy Polaris missiles for the Royal Navy, the tacit assumption was that a British nuclear deterrent need merely be sufficient to pound on Moscow until the rubble bounced. During the 1970s, the Soviets began to construct an anti-ballistic-missile shield around Moscow. It was crude by modern standards: anti-missile rockets with nuclear warheads-but it would have rendered the British Polaris force obsolete. So during the 1970s, a succession of Conservative and Labour governments pushed through a warhead upgrade scheme that replaced the original MRV warheads with far more sophisticated MIRV buses, equipped with decoys and able to engage two targets rather than one. The project was called Chevaline; it cost a billion pounds back in the day-when a billion pounds was real money-and they didn’t even tell the Cabinet.”
“A billion pounds? With no oversight?” I blink rapidly. We’re subject to spot audits on office stationery, all the way down to paper clips.
“Yes.” Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “We helped ensure security, so that it was relatively easy for them to spend an extra two hundred million pounds in 1977 to keep the Concorde production lines at Filton and Bristol open for long enough to produce four extra airframes for the RAF,” Angleton says blandly. “The Plumbers ensured that nobody remembered a thing afterwards.”
“RAF 666 Squadron fly Concordes?”
“Flew them,” Angleton corrects me. “The long-range occult reconnaissance model, not the nuclear-armed model the RAF originally asked for in 1968. You may not be aware of this, but Prototype 002 was built with attachment points for a bomb bay before the project was abandoned; Bomber Command wanted to replace V-force with a fleet of supersonic bombers that could carry Blue Steel nuclear stand-off bombs to Moscow, but the Navy won the toss. Instead, the RAF got the recon version, with supercargo space for the six demonologists and the optics bench to open the gate they needed to fly through.”
My jaw is beginning to ache from all the speechless opening-and-closing cycles. “You’re shitting me.”
Angleton shakes his head. “The Squadron was based in Filton and Heathrow, flying in British Airways livery-the aircraft movements were described as charter flights, and they wore the hull numbers of BA airframes that were currently undergoing maintenance. They flew one mission a week, departing west over the Atlantic. They refueled from a VC-10 tanker, then the supercargo would open a gate and they’d make a high-speed run across the dead plateau before reopening the gate home and landing at Filton for decontamination and exorcism. It’s all in CODICIL BLACK SKULL. Which you are cleared to read, incidentally.”
I shake myself and take a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that the RAF has a squadron of black Concordes which they currently keep in a hangar at RAF Cosford? Helen Langhorn was a former Soviet spy who, by a happy accident-for her employers-was in a position to poke around them? Which she did, with results that…” I shudder, remembering again: a purple flash, face shrinking and crumpling in on itself around the harsh lines of her skull. “And now the Thirteenth Directorate are sniffing round?”
“Very good! We’ll make a professional paranoid out of you one of these days.” Angleton nods, grudging approval.
“Concorde.” I do a double take. “But they’ve been retired, right?”
“That put a crimp on the cover story, certainly. These days they fly only at night, described as American B-1Bs if anyone asks. A big bomber with four engines and afterburners is a much flimsier cover, and the plane spotters and conspiracy theorists keep the Plumbers busy, but we cannot neglect the watch on the dead plateau. If the thing in the pyramid should stir-” He makes an abrupt cutting gesture with the edge of one hand.
“Dead plateau? Thing in the pyramid?” I’ve got no idea what he’s referring to, but it sounds ominous.
“You’ve been through a gate to elsewhere.” I remember a world in the grip of fimbulwinter, where the rivers of liquid air ran down through valleys of ice beneath a moon carved with the likeness of Hitler’s face. “There are other, more permanent, elsewheres. Some of them we must monitor continuously. That world… pray you never see it, boy, and pray that the sleeping god in the pyramid never awakens.”