The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [10]
Down at the concierge desk I check for messages. “Letter for Herr Howard? Please to sign here.” I spot the inevitable Starbucks stand in a corner so I amble over to it, inspecting the envelope as I go. It’s made of expensive cream paper, very thick and heavy, and when I stare at it closely I see fine gold threads woven into it. They’ve used an italic font and a laser printer to address it, which cheapens the effect. I slit it open with my Swiss Army cybertool as I wait for one of the overworked Turkish baristas to get round to serving me. The card inside is equally heavy, but handwritten:
Bob,
Meet me in the Laguna Bar at 6 p.m. or as soon as you arrive, if later.
Ramona
“Um,” I mutter. What the fuck?
I’m here to take part in the monthly joint-liaison meeting with our EU partner agencies. It’s held under the auspices of the EU Joint Intergovernmental Framework on Cosmological Incursions, which is governed by the Common Defense provisions of the Second Treaty of Nice. (You haven’t heard of this particular EU treaty because it’s secret by mutual agreement, none of the signatories wanting to start a mass panic.) Despite the classified nature of the event it’s really pretty boring: we’re here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what’s been going on lately, update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction—the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right—everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values. After the meeting I’m supposed to take the minutes home and brief Angleton, Boris, Rutherford, and anyone else in my reporting chain, then circulate the minutes to other departments. Sic transit gloria spook.
Anyway, I’m expecting an agenda and directions to a meeting room, not a bar invite from a mysterious Ramona. I rack my brains: Who do I know who’s called Ramona? Wasn’t there a song . . . ? Joey Ramone . . . no. I fold the envelope and stuff it in my back pocket. Sounds like a porn spammer’s alias. I break out of the slowly shuffling coffee queue just in time to annoy the furiously mustachioed counter dude. Where the hell is the Laguna Bar?
I spot a number of dark, glass-partitioned areas clustered around the atrium in front of the check-in desk. They’re the usual hotel squeeze joints, overpriced restaurants, and 24-hour shops selling whatever you forgot to pack yesterday morning at four o’dark. I hunt around until I spot the word LAGUNA picked out in teensy gold Fraktur Gothic to one side of a darkened doorway, in an evident attempt to confuse the unwary.
I peek round the partition. It’s a bar, expensively tricked out in that retro-seventies style with too much polished Italian marble and sub-Bauhaus chrome furniture. At this time of evening it’s nearly empty (although maybe the fact that they charge six euros for a beer has something to do with it). I check my phone: it’s 6:15. Damn. I head for the bar, glancing around hopefully in case the mysterious Ramona’s wearing a cardboard sign saying: I’M RAMONA—TRY ME. So much for subtle spy-work.
“Ein Weissbier, bitte,” I ask, exhausting about 60 percent of my total German vocabulary.
“Sure thing, man.” The bartender turns to grab a bottle.
“I’m Ramona,” a female voice with a vaguely East Coast accent murmurs quietly in my left ear. “Don’t turn around.” And something hard pokes me in the ribs.
“Is that the aerial of your mobile phone, or are you displeased to see me?” It probably is a phone, but I do as she says: in this kind of situation it doesn’t do to take chances.
“Shut up, wise guy.” A slim hand reaches discreetly under my left arm and paws at my chest. The bartender