Anyway, this week it’s time for me to haul a field thaumograph all over the site, logging every anomaly and making sure that nothing distorts the mana flow on D-day. At first it’s just me, but on day three I rope in Janice to tackle the subbasement areas and join me in working above ground after dark. I invited Mo to join the party but she just snarled, Go play in Phibes’s crypt. I think she’s a little stressed.

  On day three it’s raining so I’m working indoors. Because the public areas of the Palace are off-limits due to tourists, I decide to start right at the top and work my way down, which is why early afternoon finds me in the attic with a footman.

  “What ’zackly are we looking for, boss?” asks the footman, a former infantry soldier trapped in a crimson mess dress tailcoat with red braid and white tie, because in this looking-glass world the twentieth century hasn’t started yet. (I swear the Palace is so far behind the times that the rats wear knee-breeches and horsehair wigs.)

  I heft my thaumograph. “I’m taking readings,” I tell him. “And logging the whole site.”

  “Which site? The west wing roof spaces?”

  “No, the entire palace. What’s over there?” I point at an unpromising-looking corner.

  We’re in the loft of a two-hundred-year-old palace. There are floorboards to walk on—nobody wants to put a boot through the ceiling above a royal bedroom—and at some time in the past few decades someone has suspended fiberglass insulating panels between the overhead joists. But the lights are flickering fluorescent tubes, the floor is covered in a thin scum of dirt, and it’s cold. Piles of furniture lurk beneath dust sheets.

  “Looks like”—my escort flips dog-eared pages on a clipboard—“says ’ere it’s dry storage for”—he frowns—“chamber pots?”

  I head for the corner and find a dusty cabinet which, on examination, is indeed full of thunder mugs. Thankfully they were cleaned before they were put away, and none of them are thaumically active. I take some photographs of the corner, make some notes on what I found, enter the thaumograph reading, and we move on.

  The attic space is enormous and drafty—there are no doors up here, just low openings between loft areas and the occasional trapdoor for getting stuff in and out—so I manage to move through it comparatively fast until we reach the southeast end, which is somewhat warmer than the rest of the attic. At which point two things happen. First, the thaumograph starts to click, then buzz, then whine and smoke. I switch it off hastily. (Oops.) And secondly—

  “What’s that doing here?” I ask, raising my voice over the din as I approach a blatant intrusion from the data center dimension. It’s a windowless enclosure that someone appears to have boxed in below the ceiling, with a bunch of air conditioning packs roaring away on top.

  “Uh, dunno, boss. It’s a wall?”

  I stifle a sigh. Minions: they don’t make ’em like they used to. “There must be a…” I walk along the edge for a bit: it spans nearly the entire width of the attic, but there’s a corner close to the eaves with a flush-fitting door and a security keypad. “Okay, I need you to get me in here. Right now.” If it wasn’t for the thaumograph going apeshit I’d guess it was the royal cannabis farm.

  “How do you want me to do that?” asks number one minion, shrugging his gilt-edged shoulder tabs.

  “Any way you like—” I begin, just in time to be brought up short by the footman’s inner squaddie asserting himself. “No, wait!”

  But I’m too late and his rugby quarter-back shoulder has already made hard contact with the plywood enemy, which crunches open expensively. I wince, and pray that whatever I’ve discovered has no good reason for being here.

  “I thought you wanted it opening?” His expression is simultaneously confused and smug.

  “Yeah: not like that.”

  Inside, I find myself facing a rack of steel shelving units that run from the floor to just below the ceiling. It’s about ten meters wide and every square centimeter of shelf space is covered in open PC cases with beefy power supplies and backplanes full of extremely fat expansion cards. Above the racks, fat cables and fatter ventilation ducts descend from the ceiling. It’s as hot as a tropical greenhouse—or the aforementioned indoor cannabis farm—and noisy as hell from all the cooling fans.

  I toggle the thaumograph on again and hastily twist the attenuator dial. The field wobbles between thirty and forty megaParsons,1 which is deeply disturbing because a normal background is something like two to three milliParsons—and as I move the thaumograph closer to the rack it starts to whine. So I switch it off again, pull out my penlight, and take a quick look.

  There are five fat black cartridge-like cards in each PC backplane, with red go-faster stripes and a fan fighting to keep the silicon from melting. They’re Radeon R9 295X2s, high-end GPU cards with six billion transistors a pop, each crunching 700 GFLOPS of floating point numbers per second. So that’s about three TFLOPS in this cage alone. Those cards only came out around the end of last year: I take stock and realize I’m looking at two-thirds of a million quid’s worth of GPUs drawing almost a hundred kilowatts, which would explain why I’m sweating in an unheated attic on a chilly spring afternoon. The cables are bundled professionally and I see a mains power distribution board with circuit breakers and also a salami-thick cable snaking away toward a hole in the floor.

  I could mistake it for a Bitcoin farm if it wasn’t for the thaum flux. But that’s not what’s going on here. Also, this was not done on a pocket-money budget, especially the wiring—it’s got to be consuming a good chunk of the Palace’s electricity draw. I take a deep breath, then catch my minion’s eye. “See these boxes?” I point at a server: “I want you to count them. Exact numbers, no guessing, I need a backup before I go find someone in Building Services to tell me who the hell authorized this.”

  * * *

  Really, in this day and age stumbling across a homebrew petaFLOPS supercomputer in the attic is not particularly unusual. There are village cryptocurrency exchanges in China with bijou hydroelectric power stations left over from the Great Leap Forward with more demon-summoning power.

  This farm sucks maybe half a megawatt of juice: it’s tiny to the point of uselessness, and it’ll be obsolete within a year or two anyway—GPUs for sorcery are old school, the new hotness is using custom ASICs to compute the shortest (meaning fastest) Dho-Nha curve.

  But I do not linger. Nor do I pull out a fistful of gadgets and go spelunking for an access port so I can Wireshark the hell out of the traffic on the farm’s backbone. If I start, appealing as it might be, I’ll probably still be scratching my head when they wheel Brenda down the aisle to hook her up to the undead support system they’re building for her in Westminster Abbey. Instead I head straight to the security office.

  “Got a problem,” I tell the bored inspector on duty: “There’s an unaccounted server farm in the attic that isn’t on the surveyors’ drawings and it’s sucking a lot of juice. I thought it was a whacky baccy plantation at first, so I got Fred Flintstone here—”

  “Hey!”

  “—to break down the door. You’ll be wanting to secure it ASAP, then find out who authorized it, and why. Do not, whatever you do, shut off power to the computers—they’re magic crunchers and if you perform a hard shutdown you could release something very nasty indeed. As soon as you find out who put it there I want to know so I can brief my agency head.”

  And that’s basically it until I head back to Mahogany Row, except for a lot of yelling because apparently you are not supposed to open suspicious doors in the Queen’s attic without obtaining the services of the Master of the Royal Key Ring or whatever.

  Little do I suspect the scale of the hornets’ nest I’ve just whacked with a baseball bat …

  * * *

  The next day, while Bob is poking around the Palace in a wild goose hunt for incriminating demonological detritus,2 Mo intends to return to the medical suite in search of the mad professor.

  Phibes clearly knows things about the occult that he can’t talk about, and his caginess about his plans for the Queen’s suspension is worrying. Mo is worried: Who is Phibes really working for?

  Her first port of call is not the Palace: it’s across the Thames, buried beneath the toxic landfill site that used to be known as Dansey House, the Laundry’s postwar headquarters.

  A moldering pile of Victorian brickwork that had unfortunately survived the Blitz, Dansey House suffered from groaning radiators, leaky rooftops, and black mold around the window frames. It finally closed for reconstruction over a decade ago: then it was discovered that the laboratories were dangerously contaminated. Crown Immunity meant that fifty years of badly conceived summonings, crude wards, horripilating hauntings, and eldritch emanations had leaked, and the foundations had lost their grip on reality.

  The worst of it from Mo’s point of view is that the archival stacks in the second-level subbasement are still active—the paper archives were too bulky and sensitive to relocate. The records cover the entire history of the Laundry and its predecessors, all the way to the days of Doctor John Dee and Sir Francis Walsingham, but they mostly haven’t been digitized—some of the texts in the stacks give a new and unwelcome meaning to the term data corruption—and now the main building is off-limits. So to check the archives Mo has to visit a former Post Office building, descend to the basement, don full personal protective gear including a noddy suit, respirator, and heavy duty wards, then ride a tiny Mail Rail train along a claustrophobic narrow-bore tube tunnel to the archive lobby area.

  Whereupon she is grudgingly admitted to a tiny reading room, where she sits on her own for half an hour while they fetch the files she has requested, and is then scrutinized suspiciously while she reads them.

  As she suspected, the Laundry has a history with Anton Phibes, PhD. It’s not a happy history, and it goes back a long way. Phibes became a Person of Interest to the Invisible College in 1925, when he evaded Dr. Angleton and Scotland Yard’s Finest and deftly executed a fiendish murder spree with an occult angle. At least, it was deft right up until the end, when the final victim survived and Phibes’s silent assistant didn’t. (She was later identified by Scotland Yard, from her dental records, as Vulnavia Mrożek, a Polish aristocrat’s daughter who had fallen under Phibes’s spell while he was teaching music in Heidelberg).

  Phibes reappeared four years later, along with his very dead but miraculously preserved wife, in the company of a woman inexplicably identified as Vulnavia Mrożek … with fingerprints and the likeness of the “Vulnavia” who had previously been dissolved in piranha solution in the basement of Phibes’s mansion on Maldene Square. Whereupon the good doctor led Inspector Trout of the Yard on a merry dance all the way to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, into the long-lost temple of a sleeping god who would arise when a very specific stellar conjunction came around—

  “Oh hell no,” Mo mutters when she sees a photograph of a pyramid doorway where a triumphant archaeologist poses for the camera: “Trust Him to be mixed up in this.”

  She rapidly skims the rest of the dossier. Phibes’s murder spree was motivated by the death of his wife on the operating table, at the hands of a professor of surgery and his students … or rather, by her ritual sacrifice by a lodge of Mute Poet cultists disguised as surgeons. Phibes, it seems, was himself an occultist of some standing—there is a reference to his now-lost doctoral thesis on the numerological symbolism of the music of Azathoth. More unusually, he’d stolen his wife’s remains and somehow preserved them, then gone to Egypt in search of the gate to the River of Life that opened when the stars were right in the temple of N’yar Lat-Hotep …

  Mo makes a list of unanswered questions:

  Vulnavia: If she died in 1921, then why was she sighted with Phibes in 1925? And why are they both apparently physically unchanged today, in 2015?

  Phibes: Servant of the Black Pharaoh, or something more sinister? How did he get appointed to the office of the royal physician?

  Victoria Phibes: Dead or alive? If preserved, then how? Is this the technique Phibes intends to apply to the Queen?

  And what is the statute of limitations for serial killers in England, anyway? (Phibes has murdered at least eleven people, and Mo finds the lack of closure upsetting.)

  She flips to the next dossier.

  Phibes disappeared in Egypt, but came to the attention of the Invisible College again, in Berlin in 1932, when he crossed the path of the thoroughly nefarious Dr. Mabuse. It is unclear who double-crossed who, but one thing is certain: Phibes and Mabuse are not besties.

  In 1936, Phibes was sighted in Munich, in the company of a raven-haired woman identified only as Countess Mrożek. They made at least one visit to Dachau to meet with Sturmhauptführer Zahn, instrument-maker to the SS. They vanished afterward, one jump ahead of a Gestapo arrest warrant for crimes against the Reich.

  Countess Mrożek popped up again in 1943 when SOE assigned her the codename RAVEN. She initially trained for infiltration into occupied Europe, but was reassigned to Q-Division, External Assets, then shipped out to Mesopotamia. The rest of her file is missing from the archives.

  (There are no files on Phibes after the 1936 Munich incident.)

  Mo exits the stacks in a foul mood and makes her way back to HQ, where she writes up her recollection of the Phibes/Mrożek dossiers, then emails it to Gerry Lockhart and the team leads on FAIREST.

  It seems clear that there is a deep game in play here, but how deep is unclear. The PM is clearly meddling, the rules of accountability the agency runs on are being broken, even the rules for involving External Assets are being bent. Gerry might be able to shed some light on what Vulnavia does (or did) for EA, and why neither she nor Phibes have aged a day since the 1920s. But for now Mo has hit a dead end, so as it’s lunch time she heads to the dining room, looking for Bob.

  * * *

  When I get back to my office I find Willard waiting in the visitor’s chair, feet up on the desk, playing with a Google-branded yo-yo that flashes LEDs whenever it hits the end of its string. He’s looking unbearably smug and there’s a stack of printouts neatly tagged with luminous Post-it notes within accidental kicking distance.

  “Is this the DMM stuff?” I ask, plonking my ass behind the desk and trying to burn holes in the soles of his shoes by raw willpower.

  Will, evidently feeling empowered by his success, nods. “Yup.”

  The yo-yo reaches the end of its tether and bounces again. Was I ever that irritating to my managers? Impossible. “Summarize,” I command, and for a miracle his feet vanish from my worktop.

  “I’ve followed up the other shipments, like you said. The university chemistry department orders are all real, so I got Julie”—our team administrative assistant—“to request a full audit of their DMM stock. It’s all accounted for by legitimate research projects. I also asked the instrument vendors and they came back clean, too. One of them nearly had a heart attack over the phone at the suggestion some might be missing, and they’d only ordered a gram of it…”

  “Okay, who else?” I nudge. “The chemical wholesalers?”

  “Same story. I asked our CSO to get the Police to audit their poison registers in person, then watch the warehouse supervisor weighing their stock—that nearly caused a mass casualty incident in Southampton: an idiot cop tried to touch the sample under the fume hood—but it all checked out. Porton Down”—Will sucks in a deep breath between his teeth—“they came round here to audit us, I mean this time yesterday there was one of those white unmarked trucks with flashing blue lights parked out front.”

  I bare my teeth. “How inconvenient.”

  “Mrs. Carpenter just happened to be passing.” Will cringes. “You could have warned me about her?”

  I relax. “She sorted them out, I take it.”

  “Oh yes.” Willard shudders. “Sent them away with a flea in their ear—and a Diplomatic Protection Group escort.”

  “Well, score one for the good guys,” I say, not trying to mask my heavy irony. Again: Are we the baddies? I mean, we’re part of the MOD, DSTL Porton Down is also part of the MOD—their chemical and biological weapons defense institute. “I suppose they have a plausible excuse for keeping dimethyl mercury on hand.”

  “Yup. So: the analytical labs all came back clean, I’m sure you saw that coming. But I haven’t been able to make any headway with SIS. They’re not MOD, they’re part of the FO.” The Foreign Office, in other words.

  “Right.” I nod. “So did you send them a memo?”

  “Yes.” He leans forward and riffles through the stack. “Right here. It went in yesterday afternoon, so it’s probably working its way up.”

  “Well, then.” I read his memo. It’s succinct, but Willard didn’t know the right incantations to light a fire under whoever reads it. “Huh, okay—I see what’s missing, you needed to flag it TOP SECRET and add the keywords for assassination, hostile government, and cabinet office. Send me the Word doc and I’ll resend it via Downing Street.”

  Will is looking at me with an odd expression, as if I’ve suddenly grown devil horns and a goatee and started laughing maniacally. “You can do that?” he asks disbelievingly.

  I grin and crack my knuckles. “Watch me.”

  * * *

  I’m in the directors’ dining room, contemplating a spot of mayhem to liven up my afternoon, when Mo walks in. So I wave and of course she comes over and joins me and I realize she’s stressed about something. My starter hasn’t arrived, so I wave for the waiter and let Mo order before I say anything. “Bad morning?” I eventually ask.

  “You could say that!” Her frustration is palpable. “I was in the stacks following up a hunch but didn’t get anything but more questions. How about you?”