The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [34]
★★Jesus. Then why do you keep having them?★★ I realize I’m waving my arms around but I’m too upset to stop. I have a terrible feeling that if I’d just given in to my first impulse to yank the cord on the projector—★★It’s murder! Letting it go ahead like that—★★
★★We don’t. My—department—doesn’t. TLA is selling hard outside the US, Bob. They sell in places like Malaysia or Kazakhstan or Peru, and in places that aren’t quite on the map, if you follow me. We’ve heard rumors about this. We’ve seen some of the . . . fallout. But this is the first time we’ve gotten in on the ground floor. Sophie Frank was fingered by your people, if you must know. Your Andy Newstrom raised the flag. She’s been behaving oddly for the past couple of months. You were sent because, unlike Newstrom, you’re trained for this category of operation. But nobody else took the warnings sufficiently seriously—except for your department, and mine.★★
★★But what about the others?★★
She stares at me grimly. ★★Blame Ellis Billington, Bob. Remember, if he wasn’t into the hard sell, this wouldn’t have happened.★★
Then she turns and stalks away, leaving me alone and shaking in the corridor, with a corpse and a locked conference room full of middle-management zombies to explain.
4.
YOU’RE IN THE JET SET NOW
MY CHECKOUT IS EVER SO SLIGHTLY DELAYED. I spend about eight hours at the nearest police station being questioned by one GSA desk pilot after another. At first I think they’re going to arrest me—shoot the messenger is a well-known parlor game in spook circles—but after a few fraught hours there’s a change in the tone of the interrogation. Someone higher up has obviously got a handle on events and is smoothing my path. “It is best for you to leave the country tomorrow,” says Gerhardt from Frankfurt, not smiling. “Later we will have questions, but not now.” He shakes his head. “If you should happen to see Ms. Random, please explain that we have questions for her, also.” A taciturn cop drives me back to the hotel, where a GSA cleaning team has replaced the conference room door with a blank stretch of brand-new wall. I walk past it without quite losing my shit, then retreat to my shielded bedroom and spend a sleepless night trying to second-guess myself. But not only is the past another country, it’s one that doesn’t issue visas; and so, first thing in the morning, I head downstairs to collect the hire car.
A tech support nightmare is waiting for me down in the garage. Pinky is goose-stepping around with a clipboard, trying to look officious while Brains is elbow-deep in the trunk with a circuit tester and a roll of gaffer tape.
“What. The. Fuck?” I manage to say, then lean against a concrete pillar.
“We’ve been modifying this Smart car for you!” Pinky says excitedly. “You need to know how to use all its special features.”
I rub my eyes in disbelief. “Listen guys, I’ve been attacked by brain-eating zombies and I’m due on a flight to Saint Martin tonight. This isn’t the right time to show me your toys. I just want to get home—”
“Impossible,” Brains mutters around a mouthful of oily bolts that look suspiciously as if they’ve just come out of the engine manifold.
“Angleton told us not to let you go until you’d finished your briefing!” Pinky exclaims.
There’s no escape. “Okay.” I yawn. “You just put those bolts back and I’ll be going.”
“Look in the boot, here. What our American friends would call the trunk. Careful, mind that pipe! Good. Now pay attention, Bob. We’ve added a Bluetooth host under the driver’s seat, and a repurposed personal video player running Linux. Peripheral screens at all five cardinal points, five grams of graveyard dust mixed with oil of Bergamot and tongue of newt in the cigarette lighter socket, and a fully connected Dee-Hamilton circuit glued to the underside of the body shell. As long as the ignition is running, you’re safe from possession attempts. If you need to dispose of a zombie in the passenger seat, just punch in the lighter button and wait for