The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [14]
I’M ABOUT HALFWAY DOWN MY BEER AND THINKING about calling Mo—if she’s off work right now we could chat—when my phone rings. I glance at it and freeze: it’s Angleton. I key the cone of silence, then answer: “Bob here.”
“Bob.” Angleton’s voice is papery-thin and cold, and the data compression inflicted by the telephone network and the security tunnel adds a hollow echo to it. “I got your message. This Ramona person, I want you to describe her.”
“I can’t. She was wearing a glamour, level three at least— it nearly sent me cross-eyed. But she knows who I am and what I’m here for.”
“All right, Bob, that’s about what I expected. Now this is what I want you to do.” Angleton pauses. I lick my suddenly dry lips. “I want you to finish your drink and go back to your room. However, rather than entering, I want you to proceed down the corridor to the next room along on the same side, one number up. Your support team should be checked in there already. They’ll continue the briefing once you’re in the secure suite. Do not enter your room for the time being. Do you understand?”
“I think so.” I nod. “You’ve got a little surprise job lined up for me. Is that it?”
“Yes,” says Angleton, and hangs up abruptly.
I put my beer down, then stand up and glance round. I thought I was here for a routine committee meeting, but suddenly I find I’m standing on shifting sands, in possibly hostile territory. The middle-aged swingers glance disinterestedly at me, but my wards aren’t tingling: they’re just who they appear to be. Right. Go directly to bed, do not eat supper, do not collect . . . I shake my head and get moving.
To get to the elevator bank from the bar requires crossing an expanse of carpet overlooked by two levels of balconies—normally I wouldn’t even notice it but after Angleton’s little surprise the skin on the back of my neck crawls, and I clutch my Treo and my lucky charm bracelet twitchily as I sidle across it. There aren’t many people about, if you discount the queue of tired business travelers checking in at the desk, and I make it to the lift bank without the scent of violets or the tickling sense of recognition that usually prefigures a lethal manifestation. I hit the “up” button on the nearest elevator and the doors open to admit me.
There is a theory that all chain hotels are participants in a conspiracy to convince the international traveler that there is only one hotel on the planet, and it’s just like the one in their own hometown. Personally, I don’t believe it: it seems much more plausible that rather than actually going somewhere I have, in fact, been abducted and doped to the gills by aliens, implanted with false and bewildering memories of humiliating security probes and tedious travel, and checked in to a peculiarly expensive padded cell to recover. It’s certainly an equally consistent explanation for the sense of disorientation and malaise I suffer from in these places; besides which, malevolent aliens are easier to swallow than the idea that other people actually want to live that way.
Elevators are an integral part of the alien abduction experience. I figure the polished fake-marble floor and mirror-tiled ceiling with indirect lighting conspire to generate a hypnotic sense of security in the abductees, so I pinch myself and force myself to stay alert. The lift is just beginning to accelerate upwards when my phone vibrates, so I glance at the screen, read the warning message, and drop to the floor.
The lift rattles as it rises towards the sixth floor. My guts lighten: We’re slowing! The entropy detector wired into my phone’s aerial is lighting up the screen with a grisly red warning icon. Some really heavy shit is going on upstairs, and the closer we get to my floor the stronger it is. “Fuck fuck fuck,” I mumble, punching up a basic countermeasure screen. I’m not carrying: this is supposed to be friendly territory, and whatever’s lighting up the upper levels of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel is—I briefly flash back to another hotel in Amsterdam, a howling