The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [152]
“You’ll be able to see her whenever you want,” he said, right out of the blue, without any warning.
“Fuck it! What makes you think—”
“Look at me, boy.” There’s a tone of voice he uses that reaches into the back of your head and pulls the control wires, grating and harsh and impossible to ignore: it got my attention.
I looked directly at him. “I am sick and tired of everyone tiptoeing around me as if I’m going to explode,” I heard myself say. “Apologizing won’t help: what’s done is done, there’s no going back on it. It was a successful mission and the ends, at least in this case, justify the means. However underhanded they were.”
“If you believe that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.” Angleton closed the cover of the accounts folder and put his pen down. Then he caught my gaze. “Don’t be a fool, son.”
Angleton’s not his real name—real names confer power, which is why we always, all of us, use pseudonyms—nor is it the only thing about him that doesn’t ring true: I saw the photographs in his dream-briefing, and if he was that old when he was along for the ride on Operation JENNIFER, he can’t be a day under seventy today. (I’ve also seen an eerily similar face in the background of certain archival photographs dating from the 1940s, but let’s not go there.) “Is this where you give me the benefit of your copious decades of experience? Stiff upper lip, the game’s the thing, they also serve who whatever-the-hell-the-saying goes?”
“Yes.” His cheek twitched. “But you’re missing something.”
“Huh. And what’s that?” I hunker down in my chair, resigned to having to sit through a sanctimonious lecture about wounded pride or something.
“We fucked with your head, boy. And you’re right, it is just another successful operation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t owe you an apology and an explanation.”
“Great.” I crossed my arms defensively.
He picked up his pen again, scratching notes on his desk pad. “Two weeks’ compassionate leave. I can stretch it to a month if you need it, but beyond that, we’ll need a medical evaluation.” Scribble, scribble. “That goes for both of you. Counseling, too.”
“What about Ramona?” The words hung in the air like lead balloons.
“Separate arrangements apply.” He glanced up again, fixing me with a wintry blue stare. “I’m also recommending that you spend the next week at the Village.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because that’s where Predictive Branch says you need to go, boy. Did you want fries with that?”
“Fucking hell. What do they have to do with things?”
“If you’d ever studied knife fighting, one of the things your instructors would have drilled into you is that you always clean your blade after using it, and if possible sharpen and lubricate it, before you put it away. Because if you want to use it again sometime, you don’t want to find it stuck to the scabbard, or blunt, or rusted. When you use a tool, you take care to maintain it, boy, that’s common sense. From the organization’s point of view . . . well, you’re not just an interchangeable part, a human resource: we can’t go to the nearest employment center and hire a replacement for you just like that. You’ve got a unique skill mix that would be very difficult to locate—but don’t let it go to your head just yet—which is why we’re willing to take some pains to help you get over it. We used you, it’s true. And we used Dr. O’Brien, and you’re both going to have to get used to it, and what’s more important to you right now—because you expect to be used for certain types of jobs now and again—is that we didn’t use you the way you expected to be used. Am I right?”
I spluttered for a moment. “Oh, sure, that’s everything! In a nutshell! I see the light now, it’s just in my nature to be all offended about having my masculinity impugned by being cast in the role of the Good Bond Babe, hero-attractor and love interest for Mo in her capacity as the big-swinging-dick secret