The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [154]
“Whoa! I didn’t want you to worry—”
“You didn’t want! Jesus, Bob, what does it take to get through to you? You can’t stop other people worrying just by not wanting them to. It’s not about you, dim-bulb, it’s about me. At least, this time it was. Or do you think I turned up there on your ass by accident?”
I stare at her, at a loss for words.
“Let me lay it out for you, Bob. The whole solitary reason Angleton assigned you to that stupid fucking arrangement with Ramona was precisely because you didn’t know what was going on. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t leak to Ramona.”
“I got that much, but why—”
“Billington was enslaved by JENNIFER MORGUE Two sometime in the ’70s, after the abortive attempt to raise the K-129. He tried to contact the chthonian using the Gravedust rig—a little private free enterprise, if you like. JENNIFER MORGUE Two wanted out, and wanted out bad, but it needed someone to come and repair it. Billington provided it with a temporary host body, kitty kibble, and he had the resources to buy the Explorer—once the US Navy decommissioned it—and kit it out for a retrieval run. And we knew all this, on deep background, three years ago.”
I blink. “Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”
“Me.” She looks impatient. “And Angleton. And everybody else with BLUE HADES clearance who’s been working on the project. Except for you, and a couple of others, who’ve been kept in a mushroom box against the day.”
“Damn.” I pick up my glass and drain what’s left of the beer. “I need another drink.” Pause. “You too?”
“Make mine a double vodka martini on ice.” She pulls a face. “I can’t seem to kick the habit.”
I stand up and walk inside to the bar, where the middle-aged barwoman is sitting on a stool poring over the Sudoku in the back of the Express. “Two double vodka martinis on ice.” I say diffidently.
The woman puts her magazine down. She stares at me like I crawled out from under a rock. “You’re going to say shaken, not stirred, ain’t cha?” She’s got a Midwestern accent: probably another defector, I guess. “You know how bad that tastes?”
“Make it one shaken, one stirred, then. Off the ice. And easy on the vermouth.” I wink.
I go back towards the corner I’d claimed, then pause in the archway. Mo’s leaning back in the sofa, infinitely familiar. For a moment my breath catches in my throat and I have to stop and try to commit the picture to memory in case it turns out to be one of the last good times. Then I force myself to get my legs moving again.
“They’ll be over in a minute,” I say, dropping onto the sofa beside her.
“Good.” She stares at the windows overlooking the beach. “You know the Black Chamber wanted to get their hands on JENNIFER MORGUE. That’s what McMurray was doing there.”
“Yes.” So she thinks I want to talk about business?
“We couldn’t let them do that. But luckily for us, Billington . . . well, he wasn’t entirely sane to begin with, and when he came up with the idea of implementing a Hero trap, that made things a lot easier.”
“Easier?” It’s a good thing I don’t have a drink in my hand.
“Absolutely.” She nods. “Imagine if Billington had simply gone to the Black Chamber and said, ‘Ten billion and it’s yours,’ keeping his fix-it plan to himself. But instead, he gets this idea that he’s got to act in solitary as the prime mover in the scheme, and of course he’s the archetype of the billionaire megalomaniac, so he does the obvious thing: leverages his assets. The Hero trap—the geas he built around that yacht—required a hero to trigger it. He figured the plot structure is deterministic: the hero falls into the bad guy’s hands, the bad guy monologues—and at that point, he was going to destroy the trap, neuter the hero, who is just another civil servant at this point, stripped of the resonances of the Bond invocation—and allow his plan to proceed to completion.”
“Except . . .”
“You know the alternative plot?” She glances at the book I’ve been reading: a biography of a playboy turned naval intelligence officer, news agency manager, and finally spy novelist.
“What?” I shake my head. “I thought it