The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [98]
Klub-N vertical launch cells are not small, and the owner’s lounge is about three meters longer than my entire house. It appears to be wallpapered in cloth-of-gold, which for the most part is mercifully concealed behind ninety-centimeter Sony displays wearing priceless antique picture frames. Right now they’re all switched off, or displaying a rolling screensaver depicting the TLA Corporation logo. The furniture’s equally lacking in the taste department. There’s a sofa that probably escaped from Versailles one jump ahead of the revolutionary fashion police, a bookcase full of self-help business titles (A Defendant’s Guide to the International Criminal Court, The Twelve-Step Sociopath, Globalization for Asset-Strippers), and an antique sideboard that abjectly fails to put the rock into baroque. I find myself looking for a furtive cheap print of dogs playing poker or a sad-eyed clown—anything to break the monotony of the collision between bad taste and serious money.
Then I notice the Desk.
Desks are to executives what souped-up Mitsubishi Colts with low-profile alloys, metal-flake paint jobs, and extra-loud, chrome-plated exhaust pipes are to chavs; they’re a big swinging dick, the proxy they use to proclaim their sense of self-importance. If you want to understand an executive, you study his desk. Billington’s Desk demands a capital letter. Like a medieval monarch’s throne, it is designed to proclaim to the poor souls who are called before it: The owner of this piece of furniture is above you. Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say this example is screaming “megalomaniac!” at me.
Billington may have an ego the size of an aircraft carrier but he’s not so vain as to leave his desk empty (that would mean he was pretending to lead a life of leisure) or to cover it with meaningless gewgaws (indicative of clownish triviality). This is the desk of a serious executive. There’s a functional-looking (watch me work!) PC to one side, and a phone and a halogen desk light at the other. One of the other items dotting it gives me a nasty shock when I recognize the design inscribed on it: millions wouldn’t, but the owner of this hunk of furniture is using a Belphegor-Mandelbrot Type Two containment matrix as a mouse mat, which makes him either a highly skilled adept or a suicidal maniac. Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.
McMurray gestures me to halt on the carpet in front of the Desk. “Wait here, the boss will be along in a minute.” He gestures at a skeletal contraption of chromed steel and thin, black leather that only Le Corbusier could have mistaken for a chair: “Have a seat.”
I sit down gingerly, half-expecting steel restraints to flash out from concealed compartments and lock around my wrists. My head aches and I feel hot and shivery. I glance at McMurray, trying for casual rather than anxious. The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. “Where’s Ramona?” I ask.
“I don’t remember saying you were free to ask questions.” He stares at me from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles until icicles form on the back of my neck. “Ellis has a specific requirement for an individual of her