I smile and blank her out, because informing her that His Nibs is talking about reintroducing the criminal offense of Lèse-majesté would not contribute anything positive to this circus (even though it’s true). Besides, I’m trying to think of a suitable demonstration that won’t result in me being up on a disciplinary notice tomorrow morning—I knew it’d be a tough audience going in, but this is some above-and-beyond denialism. At least nobody’s called me a fraud yet.

  “Is that all?” I ask after Ms. Jones titters something about knowing how to deal with rubbish in her department. I look around: “Have you got it out of your system yet?” I stand up and stretch, then wrestle my cuffs back into position because I’m not really used to the whole suit thing. “I assure you, it’s just as real as the maniac who animated the Bull Ring bull last month and took it for a ride around the Grand Central site—”

  Ms. McCoyle interrupts again: “That was just a viral marketing event for the latest New Avengers movie.”

  “No it wasn’t.” Right, that’s it, I think, and before I can work through all the possible ways this can go wrong I utter a phrase in Old Enochian, a language that was never intended for late morning local government meetings—the air actually turns blue for a couple of seconds, the pale aqua of liquid oxygen shimmering in the corpse-light of an ancient white dwarf star. The walls of the conference room fade into translucency, laying bare a desolate, frosted landscape beneath the bowl of a black sky. It’s pierced by the merciless pinpricks of stars seen without the protection of a caul of atmosphere as the full moon floats high above us, its pockmarked silvery face carved into the likeness of Adolf Hitler by unspeakable ancient powers. “Like I said, magic is real, and it’s what my department deals with. Or do you think I smuggled a planetarium into this meeting room in my pocket?”

  The illusion is actually a reified memory of mine, from a very unpleasant experience—a visit to another timeline or pocket universe via the ghost roads, a world where the Second World War had ended in a pyrrhic victory for the Third Reich. The Birmingham Skeptics Society don’t need to know the background deets, or feel the bone-deep cold of a world refrigerated to the temperature of high noon on Pluto, but they do need to smell the coffee. I snap my fingers and the illusion vanishes, leaving me with their undivided attention.

  “There are other universes. We use resonance effects to access them, and the bleed-through between different versions of reality lets us manipulate stuff in this realm more or less at will. But there are consequences—take that world, for example. I was there about fifteen years ago”—give or take a year or two because who’s counting?—“and it’s lifeless and barren, all the heat sucked out of it by monsters that live in the darkness behind the walls of the world.”

  I sit down again. “You don’t know about this stuff because the agency I work for, and our foreign counterparts, have spent decades papering over the cracks. But it’s impossible to keep the lid on tight anymore. Something equivalent could happen here. So, look, I want you to take it on trust for now that there’s a very specific thing we refer to as magic, and it’s not to be confused with card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats on stage. It’s a real problem, like asbestos wallboard in the school estate, and we need to deal with it. And to make matters worse there are jokers out there who will call anything they don’t understand magic, and you need to be able to tell whether—”

  Which is precisely when my phone emits the nuclear attack air raid siren screech that means big trouble ahead.

  BEHOLD THE TRUE HORROR OF GERRY LOCKHART’S REVENGE:

  There are roughly 450,000 people in the British Civil Service at present. That’s not including the million and a half in the NHS organizations and the third of a million in the military and the police. We operate on a gargantuan scale, and doing so coherently is an immense challenge.

  When you’re dealing with roughly two and a half million people a certain amount of nonsense is inevitable. At any given time, a couple thousand of them will be undergoing an acute psychotic break. Another ten or twenty thousand will have joined one bizarre religious cult or another—from the relatively mild, like Seventh Day Adventists, through the reality-disconnected, such as the Fully Automatic 24-hour Church of Elvis. (At least two dozen will have fallen down the rabbit hole of call-the-PREVENT-hotline stuff like the Cult of the Mute Poet.) Maybe 10 percent of the population are flat-earthers, another 20 percent are young earth creationists, and don’t get me started on how many of them worship the royal family.

  Then you come to the Laundry, and the revelation in the media that magic is real and we have, in fact, spent half a century working to suppress it—hey, it’s an actual government conspiracy! A real one! Men In Black going door to door near you!—and we’ve spent so long educating our highly intelligent civil servants to disbelieve conspiracy theories that, now we’re owning up to one, they won’t listen to us.

  When a secret government agency confesses to a conspiracy, people often refuse to believe the confession.2 It doesn’t matter how much supporting evidence you provide if it doesn’t reinforce their existing beliefs. This is especially true when what you’re confessing to is a half-century-long coverup of something even more bonkers than usual—secret Cold War bases on the moon, vampires run the banking sector, that sort of thing. So now the requirement for a coverup has passed, and we need the Civil Service to work with us, we’ve run head-first into the unpalatable truth: about 30 percent of our own people refuse to believe anything we tell them.

  Jez asked me to be part of our outreach team, visiting outlying offices to explain the facts of life to the skeptics, and muggins here was stupid enough to say “Sure.” And that’s why I now spend a day a week in meeting room hell.

  Welcome to Gerry’s revenge!

  * * *

  I pick up my phone, despite the dirty looks and exasperated sighs from around the conference room in Birmingham. It’s a work call, with a high enough priority to override my do not disturb filter.

  “Mr. Howard? Duty Officer here, please confirm.”

  “I’m in a meeting—”

  “Please confirm.”

  “Um. Oxtail, Antelope, Brimstone. Over to you.”

  “Sideboard. Teapot. Excalibur. You have a flash priority call from Mr. Choudhury, please hold.”

  (Swearing ensues, then I make my apologies to the room: a minute later I’m crouching in a supplies cupboard just along the corridor.)

  “Bob? Are you secure?”

  “I am now. I’m supposed to be conducting a MUGGLE WONDERLAND training seminar—”

  “—But you’re in Brum, am I correct? City council headquarters?”

  “Yeah, visiting Council House. What’s up?”

  “You need to get down to the lobby right away. A police armed response unit will pick you up in the next five minutes. There’s a metahuman incident in progress at a comic book shop on Queensway and you’re the nearest asset we’ve got to ground zero.”

  I swear. (A lot.) “Isn’t this a job for TPCF? The Home Office heavies? You know who I am, right?”

  “TPCF teams one and two are currently out fighting fires in Lancaster and Fishguard and can’t make it back in time. Your assistant”—Peter-Fred—“is in remedial diversity awareness training this morning. The Duty PHANG can’t handle it because daylight hours lock-down, the other H-list officers are variously on annual leave, off sick, or busy, and the Queensway situation hasn’t escalated to major incident yet so we can’t assign an OCCULUS team.”

  (I sigh.) “Okay, I’m moving, I’m moving. What do you mean by yet?”

  “There are Daleks.”

  Oh God, and by God I mean Shub-Nuggirath, the Stoat of a Thousand Young, it’s one of those incidents.

  “It’s a comics shop siege,” Sergeant Samson sums up succinctly when I pile in the back of the police BMW. His driver, Constable Nobby (he hasn’t told me his name and I’ve been reading Pratchett last thing at night so that’s what I’m calling him) floors the accelerator and hits the lights and siren. “Some saddo wanted his latest fix and wouldn’t take no for an answer.” (It’s Thursday, comic release day is usually Tuesday. Don’t ask why I know this: I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.) “When the owner asked him to leave things turned weird.”

  I manage to strap myself down between tire-screeching corners as I grapple with the conundrum of an armed siege in a comic shop. “I was told Daleks were involved? Is this a prank?”

  A Gatso camera double-flashes our numberplate from behind as we accelerate. “That right there was half an hour of extra forms to fill out after end-of-shift so I sincerely hope not, sonny.” More screeching tires. “Whoever’s responsible will be getting a piece of my mind. You’re with the X-Files crowd, you can sort it out.”

  “Daleks,” I prod.

  “Awright. Sitch is called Andromeda Bookshop, they do books and comics, and apparently they’ve got a Doctor Who exhibit running. Saddo is holding the owner and two or three members of the public hostage with a couple of Daleks from the BBC props department”—he’s interrupted by a burst of radio fuzz—“he wants his copy of the next issue of Squidbob Shartpants or whatever right now or he’s going on a rampage in the Bull Ring Centre.”

  “But Daleks?” Daleks aren’t real! a part of me is screaming.

  “Oh yeah, he animated them and it turns out that makes them really angry and they exterminated the hell out of a red pillar box before we could clear the street. So there are more MOPs sheltering in place.”

  Sounds like I’ve got a rogue animator on my hands—a powerful one if he’s making constructs with firepower. Or maybe he’s an invoker? “Fuck my life,” I mutter.

  “Fuck your life indeed, sonny,” the sergeant says affably. “We’ve got AROs on site backed up by SFO snipers at each corner but it’s anybody’s guess how effective they’ll be against robot Space Nazis. It’s up to you to handle it.”

  “Sounds like I’m going to need specialist support. Let me make a call,” I tell him, then get on the blower to the Duty Office.

  BACK TO IRIS’S BRIEFING …

  “Forecasting Operations can’t give us anything specific because an adversary is fuzzing the probabilities. They’re getting hit with haruspicy countermeasures, oracular paradoxes, nonlinear invocations, all sorts of stuff that point to a top-rated occult operations agency. Anyway, the threat—when it shows up—will need to be investigated, and the adversary needs to be told to fuck off with extreme prejudice before His Dread Majesty notices and gives it His personal attention, thereby generating an international incident and much screaming from the Foreign Office. He’s planning something for the anniversary and He will be most displeased if His elbow is jogged.”

  Threats against Her Majesty the Queen are an everyday occurrence. Nutters: we have them. The police deal with them when needed.

  Threats against the Prime Minister also come up regularly, but are not a problem for the police: anyone stupid enough to get in the PM’s not-a-face generally leaves only a greasy smear on the ground.

  But I doubt I’d be sitting in a securely warded briefing room if this was a normal threat.

  My heart is down to periscope depth and still diving even before she adds, “It needs to be done without making visible waves. It’s probably the neighbors, and we don’t want to give them the impression we can’t take out our own trash.”

  “Oh boy,” I say faintly.

  Mention of the neighbors puts this particular threat well beyond the frontier of normal and deep into yikes territory, because the neighbors most likely to pull this kind of stunt are our US counterpart agency, the Black Chamber.

  While the US and the UK are theoretically allies, a better fit would be frenemies: the USA acquired many of the British Empire’s former possessions at gunpoint, and in the occult sector the mugging is still ongoing.

  Anyway, they’ve had the knives out for us ever since His Dark Majesty sent a team into Washington, D.C., in February last year to kidnap—er, rescue—the President, who they were planning to sacrifice because an unharvested head of state is an amazing store of mana, magical energy accumulated through worship. The Pentagon Ringwraiths are extremely peeved, and our relations with them are chilly at the best of times, so some kind of counterattack is totally in their wheelhouse.

  A thought occurs to me: “Are any of the YELLOW OLYMPIC team available?” I ask, “I mean, the survivors?” YELLOW OLYMPIC was the operation in D.C. “I mean, they’ve gone up against BC operatives and survived, and Officer Friendly alone would make a huge—”

  Iris makes a cutting gesture. “Sorry, Bob, Jim is unavailable.”

  “He’s unavailable? Why?”

  Iris looks momentarily uncomfortable. “Almost all the team who weren’t already vampires came back as PHANGs. As for the others—” She pauses. “Given your history I assume you don’t want to work with the crazy alfär mage, either.” Iris is right: Yarisol of the Host, the anomalous alfär sorcerer Mhari dragged along on her caper, is bad news.

  Iris stands, clueing me in that it’s time to leave. “I have another meeting to get to. Meanwhile don’t get too far ahead of the eight ball just yet. I’m assigning you to ops, but you’ll be working under an Auditor—in case you have to go head-to-head with senior executives in the course of the investigation—and they’ll be reporting directly to me.” So I’m going to be in charge of operations but number two on the org chart? Whoopee, all the work and none of the credit. I can hardly wait. “I’m going to read them in next. Anyway, this is just your initial heads-up: enjoy your coffee.” And with that, the meeting’s over.

  If this is how my week is starting, surely things can only get better?

  * * *

  Ten minutes after leaving Council House the police car I’m sitting in has slowed to a comparative crawl. (Say what you will about police drivers, but even they aren’t crazy enough to play chicken with trams.) And I’m on the phone to the situation room and back-office support the Duty Officer has scared up for me.

  “I need to know exactly what items besides the two Daleks they’ve got in the exhibit,” I explain. (There’s nothing like a rogue Cyberman or unaccounted-for Auton to ruin your day.) “In particular, is there a TARDIS in the shop? And if so, is it a BBC prop or just a cardboard cutout?” (I have the beginnings of a plan.)

  “Let me just loop in someone in the Beeb’s publicity team and get back to you, sir,” says the support officer, who is irritatingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a Thursday morning. “Is there anything else you need in the meantime?”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. I manage to bite back a sonic screwdriver: this is not the time for inappropriate humor. “What’s the ETA if I ask for an OCCULUS team?”

  “Unit One is already en route from Hereford, but they’re at a standstill on the M5—there’s heavy congestion from a multi-vehicle RTA earlier this morning. They’ll be at least an hour.”

  Fuck it. “Okay, you go talk to the BBC, I’ll hold.”

  I lean back and try to close my eyes as Nobby drives us up onto the pavement to get around an inconveniently parked Amazon delivery van. “Any joy?” asks Samson.

  “OCCULUS is a support unit for this sort of incident, looks like a generic Fire Service command vehicle except it carries a specialist squad of Territorial SAS operatives.” (Well, they used to be that—they’ve got a different name now—but the tiger doesn’t change its stripes.) “You may not have worked with them before but they’re used to working with you guys. Once they get here they’ll take point and your job then is strictly support and mop-up. But this time they’re snarled up in a jam on the M5 because, I say again, fuck my life.”

  I’m interrupted by my phone again. “The shop is currently hosting a traveling exhibit of Doctor Who props including two original model Daleks, an older TARDIS mock-up, and a cardboard cutout of the latest Doctor and his companion (this year that’s Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman). Apparently the owner has friends in high places at BBC Wales. OCCULUS are rolling again but traffic is slow to clear, so ETA is still an hour and a half. Mr. Choudhury says to be aware the press are taking an interest so please keep it low key?” (Translation: no explosions. So that rules that out.)

  Finally—finally—ten minutes and half a kilometer later, we pull up behind a mob of police vans and barricades parked at one side of a dismal dual carriageway. To our right, a row of offices and retail storefronts curve toward the Bull Ring. It looks to be one of those brutalist smash-and-grab raids on our historic architectural heritage that were all the rage in the 1950s. There’s a weird shortage of moving vehicles and pedestrians—not too surprising, under the circumstances—so when we pile out onto the pavement the first thing I do is ask my minders, “Right, where’s the nearest hotel?” just as I see a sign for a Radisson Blu further up the street.

  “Not so fast, son…”

  In my experience the three stages of any positive interaction with the police are: suspicion, incredulity, and a good old-fashioned briefing. (Or, if you’re interacting with them negatively, a good old-fashioned beating.) This time around I get hustled straight into the third stage, courtesy of a very annoyed chief inspector who clearly doesn’t approve of bizarre bookshop bandits. Especially when they’re accompanied by screeching cyborg Space Nazis who shoot up innocent law-abiding pillar boxes. So I get my ears pinned back by a very irritated Inspector Angel, who, unlike the sorcery skeptics in the council offices, is fully up to speed on supernatural crimes and is having none of my shit. “You’re that clown off Newsnight? I know your type! Understand this—I want a clean takedown, no casualties, no injured bystanders or hostages, no property damage, and definitely no fucking zombies. Can you do that, son? Because if not, if you can’t match those targets, I don’t want you on my patch—you’re just another distraction and I’ve got six of those already.”

  I do not roll my eyes at Inspector Angel: he’s got a twitchy eyelid and a taser and this is something like the fifth metahuman-associated incident in Brum so far this year. “How about this: I get you in through the back door and we can take a look? I’ll update the OCCULUS team who’re inbound, then if it’s safe you can neutralize the, uh, overenthusiastic fan. If it’s not safe, then we sit tight and wait for OCCULUS. Does that work for you?”