The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [110]
I consider this for a full minute. “Whoops.”
“That’s how we screwed up,” she says bleakly. “Billington had a handle on me all along. I’m his handle on you, and you’re his handle on Angleton. He’s stacked us up like a row of dominos.”
I take a deep breath. “What happens if I go next door and smash the diorama?”
“The signal strength—” She shakes her head. “You noticed how fast it drops off? If you’re close enough to smash it the backwash will kill you, but it’ll probably leave Billington alive. If we could get word out about what’s going on it might be worth trying, but nobody’s close enough to do anything right now—so we’re back to square one. It really has to be shut down in good order, the same way it was set up, and I’d guess that’s why Billington’s brought that fucker Pat aboard.”
“Hang on,” I say slowly. “Griffin was sure there was a shit-hot Black Chamber assassin in town this week. Some guy code named Charlie Victor. Could he do anything about Billington if we cleared a path?”
“Bob, Bob. I’m Charlie Victor.” She looks at me with the sort of sympathetic expression usually reserved for terminal cases.
I consider this for a moment. Then an atavistic reflex kicks in and I snap my fingers. “Then you must be, um . . . you’re the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, right? Like Major Amasova in the film version of The Spy Who Loved Me, or Jinx in Die Another Day. Does that mean you’re the Good Bond Babe archetype or the Bad Bond Babe?”
“Well, I don’t think I’m bad—” She’s looking at me oddly. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“There are usually two Babes in every Bond movie,” I say slowly. Shit, she isn’t British, is she? I keep forgetting. She hasn’t suffered through the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two. I’d probably seen them all by the time I was fifteen, and read some of the books, but I’ve never had to use the knowledge before now . . .
“Look, Bond almost always has two Babes. Sometimes it’s three, and in a few of the later movies they experimented with one, but it’s almost always two. The first to show up is the Bad Bond Babe, who usually works for the villain and who sleeps with Bond before coming to a nasty end. The second, the Good Bond Babe, helps him resolve the plot and doesn’t shag him until just before the closing credits. You haven’t slept with me so far, which probably means you’re safe—at least, you’re not the Bad Bond Babe. But you might be the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, who’s sort of a revisionist merge between the Bad Bond Babe and the Good Bond Babe, who turns up later, gets Bond out of a load of grief, tries to kill him, and eventually sleeps with him—”
“—I hope this isn’t a come-on, monkey-boy, because if it is—”
“The setup’s skewed. And I reckon we’re going to have company soon.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“There are never two girls in the movies that feature the glamorous rival assassin,” I say, trying to get my head around what this signifies. “And this plot doesn’t fit that mold. Not with Mo on her way out here.”
“Mo? Your girlfriend?” Ramona gives me a hard-edged stare.
I look around. The shelves are covered in business administration titles with an admixture of first editions of Ian Fleming novels—boosters for the geas, at a guess—and the portholes show me a view of a dark blue sea beneath a turquoise sky.
“She said she was coming out here right after she finished reaming Angleton,” I add, and wait for the double take.
“I find that hard to believe,” Ramona says primly. “I’ve read her dossier. She’s just an academic who stumbled into some classified topics!”
“Yes, but I’ll bet that dossier doesn’t have much on her after your organization gave her permission to leave, does it? That was three years ago. Did you know she works for the Laundry these days? And have you heard her violin? She plays music to die for . . .