“How long has she been like this?”

  “Since I came on duty. Eight this morning? I coaxed her out of bed but then she sat down and refused to go anywhere. I tried again after lunch and she just fell over. Not play-dead roll over, it was clearly serious. That’s when I sent for you.”

  “Right. Sorry it took me so long to get here, this is worse than Reception said. Has it progressed?”

  “I … think so? Slowly, though, no seizures or anything obvious.”

  “I think—” This time the vet looks at Candy and makes deliberate eye contact: Candy doesn’t react. “Can you help me get her on her feet?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Together they close in on the low-slung dog and gently ease their hands under her until they can pick her up.

  “Over here—oh. Well.” Candy is clearly awake, but as they lower her feet back to the floor she whines, then topples over sideways. “Hind legs are weak.” The vet touches the base of Candy’s tail, then rubs the pads on her uppermost hind leg. “Note the rounding of the lower back and the lack of touch response. There’s no sign of a fracture or torn ligament.” She gently lifts Candy’s head and peers into her eyes: “Horner syndrome is absent, doesn’t look like she’s had a stroke, but see the tremors? I need to get her to the surgery. I’m pretty sure she’s going to wind up in hospital for an MRI and further tests overnight.”

  The dog handler nods. “I’ll fetch her crate. Her Majesty is not going to be pleased.”

  * * *

  Talking Pete down from the window ledge is the highlight of my week—and the one thing I can point to as an unequivocally good deed.

  On Tuesday afternoon I get to sit through another interminable LONDON BRIDGE meeting. I’m ordered to waste money better spent on computer games on a Reservoir Dogs cosplay suit—all black except for the shirt. (My plea to be allowed to go 100 percent black, complete with a veil and pillbox hat, is harshly rejected.) Worse, I’m tasked with enforcing this mandate on junior staff with smaller pay packets.

  On Wednesday I get to drag my sorry ass to Hicksville UK, a giant concrete office block in the middle of Slough, to deliver the now-familiar dog-and-pony show again: magic is real, see Bob, see Bob do magic, Iä, Iä, all cursed now, any questions?

  On Thursday I am read into various aspects of the restructuring that we’re careening toward like one of the mine carts in that Indiana Jones film where everybody hurtles over a cliff and dies. No, really: Q-Division SOE is set to be dissolved and everyone will be raptured up to Ministerial Heaven as part of DEAT, the Department of Existential Anthropic Threats. We will then be led by an actual Minister with a cabinet seat, namely His Nibs, Fabian Everyman MP, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. (Yes, the PM can head up a ministry if he wants. Why do you ask?) Yay, bigger budget, more responsibilities; boo, direct oversight by the lidless fiery gaze of Darth Sauron himself.

  Finally, in my copious spare time I work on the POISON APPLE investigation, where nothing is the new something. Mo hasn’t heard back from the Palace, I’m not allowed to interrogate the Lord Chancellor in person: we’re just stuck in limbo waiting for the shoe to drop.

  Little do I realize that my treadmill of boredom is about to be disrupted by a sad puppy.

  * * *

  Buckingham Palace doesn’t have an on-site veterinary hospital, but there’s a private one in Belgravia. Fifteen minutes after the dog handler and the vet load Candy into one of the palace Range Rovers they wheel her into an examination room in the back of the clinic, where Candy is weighed, sedated, whines as blood samples are taken, is told she’s a good girl (she isn’t: she nips, a bit like her owner), then is prepped for her MRI.

  No expenses are spared: the bloods are whisked across London by a motorcycle courier for urgent out-of-hours processing. The MRI sequence is run. It’s clear that there are no internal injuries and no hard tissue tumors; no sign of aneurysms or brain hemorrhaging either. Candy hasn’t had a stroke or thrown a blood clot. She’s not constipated, her kidneys are still functioning, her bowels are perfectly normal for a pampered four-year-old dog, her ECG is normal …

  But Candy is clearly unwell. She’s having difficulty standing and staying upright, seems unusually fatigued, and is showing signs of neuropathy. (The vet can poke her paw pads with a wire without getting a reaction.) She’s drooling continuously, and her nictitating membranes are showing. The vet would worry about rabies—except she’s been vaccinated. It’s not food poisoning: the other dogs, on the same diet, are fine. It’s a conundrum.

  Then at nine o’clock the bloods come back, and the plot thickens.

  Platelet count is up. Leukocyte count is up. These are signs of inflammation, or possibly leukemia. Her liver enzymes are up. Her kidneys are damaged: they’re leaking amino acids, glucose, and other small molecules.

  The vet phones an off-duty senior colleague to brainstorm possible causes. While she’s on the phone Candy has a brief seizure. As fits go it’s not serious (the patient’s lack of muscle tone reduces the risk of damage), but it’s an alarming progression.

  “Have you screened for heavy metals?” asks her senior colleague.

  “No—” The vet pauses. “It’s worth a try, I guess?” She draws more bloods and phones the lab again, just in case.

  This time the samples get run through the gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy machine to look for traces of heavy metals, plus radioimmunoassay screening for a handful of diffuse and small organ cancers.

  The vet is napping in the staff break room in the early hours of the morning when the report comes in. It takes her a few minutes to make sense of it. But when she does, she’s instantly alert. She forces herself to drink a cup of strong coffee and read the email again, making notes before she does anything. Then she goes to the books, specifically the veterinary medical formulary and the poisons handbook, and starts looking up data sheets. The hospital doesn’t routinely keep chelating agents in stock, but she orders Succimer and Unithiol for urgent delivery, then writes up a prescription and a memo for the duty vet who’s on at eight.

  After she finishes writing, the vet collects her medical kit and drives back to the Palace. It’s essential to take samples of the current batch of dog food and test it before the pack get their breakfast. The GC/MS results indicate Candy has high levels of dimethyl mercury in her system, and her symptoms are consistent with Minamata disease—acute organic mercury poisoning. Worse, it’s come on frighteningly fast. The vet doesn’t hold out much hope that the DMSA/DMPS treatment she’s prescribed will save Candy, but it’s worth trying. But the next question is, how was it administered? Because dimethyl mercury is a horrific neurotoxin, and if it’s deliberate, the entire Palace could be at risk.

  * * *

  Happy joy: The following Tuesday afternoon finds me in Conference Room D7, because it’s time for another meeting about the progress of MUGGLE WONDERLAND. Various concerned persons, from Gerry Lockhart down, want to know how it’s going. In fact, Gerry seems to take an unholy delight in my gaslighting at the hands of the provincial Flat Earth brigade—until a mobile phone begins to ring. I thump my pocket, then realize it isn’t me: it’s Gerry this time. He jerks as if he’s just been goosed, then pulls out a device that clearly dates to the last ice age. He glares at the screen in disbelief, then snaps, “I have to take this,” and double-times it out of the meeting without further ado.

  I look around the table and see everyone wondering the same thing: What was that about? The Director of External Assets does not simply walk out of a meeting to answer the phone. Doesn’t he have a PA to handle his calls and schedule his every waking minute? I have a bad feeling about this, just an itch between my shoulder blades—

  Then my phone vibrates with an incoming message, which is an oh shit event. “Got to go,” I say, standing up from the table. “Urgent call of nature.” Which is a rubbish excuse, but nobody calls me on it as I march through the door then book it. One glance is all it takes to get me moving: Gerry has just invited me to Secure Briefing Room 14, FLASH meeting, subject: POISON APPLE.

  Scooby 14 is down the road and I have to go out through security, then back in through a different security checkpoint, and it’s raining outside and the lifts are either out of operation or loading and unloading Galapagos tortoises, so I take the stairs. By the time I’m four floors up I am feeling every one of my four hundred and sixty-odd months and my knees are sulking. (Unfortunately the ghost roads are blocked and warded in Agency-occupied buildings—it’s an elementary security precaution—so there is no shortcut I can take.) So I finally stagger, wheezing, up to the door with the illuminated red light, badge the panel to request admission, and wait for one of the occupants to buzz me in.

  “Where’s Gerald?” asks Iris, fixing me with a stare about as forgiving as an anti-tank shell.

  “I passed”—I gasp—“must have overtaken”—my back hits the wall by the door and I slither down, panting—“were both in”—pant—“MUGGLE WONDERLAND meeting—”

  A pudgy hand grabs my upper arm and lifts with unnatural strength. Derek heaves a chair out from the table with his free hand and deposits me in it like a sack of potatoes, just as I notice that the lighting in the room is distinctly reddish. “Thanks,” I wheeze, momentarily gobsmacked by his display of anomalous strength.

  “You’re welcome.” The DM sits down again and resumes looking like a portly fifty-something guy in coke-bottle glasses, while Iris goes back to pacing a hole in the carpet. She looks at her watch every ten seconds and she’s ignoring her phone (which is fair do’s, the Scoobies are all Faraday cages, the mobile signal is blocked), but she’s clearly got withdrawal symptoms.

  “What’s going—” I begin as the door buzzes again. Derek hits the button to admit Dennis, Emma MacDougal’s henchman from HR, who looks flustered: Lockhart is close on his heels.

  “One more,” warns Iris, holding up a bony digit. “Any moment now…”

  The door buzzes and Derek admits my wife, wearing a very unhappy expression. “What now?” she demands, yanking out the chair beside me and throwing herself into it without giving Derek a chance to show off.

  “It’s the Queen.” Iris points at Derek. “Take it away.”

  “Wh-what? M-me?” I haven’t heard Derek stutter like that in ages: he looks stricken.

  “Who else?” Iris finally forces herself to sit down.

  “Oh. Well.”

  Gerald makes eye contact with me and shakes his head minutely. I manage not to blink.

  “W-we got a lock on a, a vision,” Derek begins. “Primary source is oneiromantic with haruspex-derived secondary con-confirmation. Adversarial fuzzing makes it h-hard to be sure, but there w-will be a ceremony in Westminster Hall before the end of May and it will be a mass casualty event. W-with mourners.”

  “A funeral?” Gerald leans forward sharply.

  “I—I—I—” Derek jolts to a stop, visibly takes a deep breath, and shakes his head. “I don’t know. B—but—” He gives up and looks at Iris imploringly.

  Iris takes a deep breath. “We received word from the Palace this morning. One of the royal corgis has been poisoned. We don’t know much more yet, but.” Another deep breath. “If this is POISON APPLE we may have been thrown a blinder. Or it could be worse than anyone imagined. So I called you here to read you in on FAIREST, otherwise known as POISON APPLE Phase Two: the plan for handling the aftermath of a royal assassination.”

  PART

  TWO

  TERMINAL PROGNOSIS

  The POISON APPLE meeting descends into barely contained panic before Gerry Lockhart wrestles it back into a semblance of brainstorming about strategies for addressing the situation we find ourselves in, viz. Dead Queen Walking.

  What we know so far: Candy the Dorgi, aged four years (in human), has been dosed with dimethyl mercury, a compound notorious for killing an eminent toxicology professor and expert in the substance in question, Professor Wetterhahn. She was working in a fume cupboard with all due precautions—wearing two layers of protective gloves, breathing filtered air, generally doing the full Andromeda Strain—when she spilled a drop on the back of one glove. That was enough: she died, paralyzed and blind, some months later. DMM is a thing of horror. It dissolves right through rubber and plastics, not to mention skin, and there’s no effective antidote. It’s the poor man’s polonium: exotic, lethal, and hard to obtain.

  We don’t know how Candy was poisoned, but it’s a fair bet that she wasn’t the target. So, who was?

  This may surprise you—but the most likely answer is: the Laundry.

  Listen, nobody sane would assassinate the Queen. Everybody knows she’s a figurehead, a ceremonial head of state whose main job is to make a speech to Parliament once a year setting out the government’s coming legislative program. Moreover, if and when she dies she will be replaced instantly by a big-eared homeopathy enthusiast, and if he dies it goes to a thirty-something prince: it turns out to be royalty all the way down. (You could drop an asteroid on Westminster Abbey during a royal wedding, and before the rubble stopped bouncing there’d be a very surprised newly minted monarch with absolutely no idea how fucked-up their life is about to get.)

  The Queen is merely a symbol—the living head that wears the crown. The actual wellspring of legal, constitutional power in the UK is an abstract entity called the Crown. This is not just a piece of expensive headgear, any more than the US Constitution is a piece of sheepskin covered in ink. If you were to melt down the jewellery or burn the paper a lot of people would be very annoyed, but the Crown or the Constitution would still persist: they’re ideas, not physical objects. Egregores, in other words.

  But there’s some confusion between the Crown and the crowned head. Public servants swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch by name. A new monarch means a lot of ceremonial reswearing of the oath of allegiance.

  For most people this is a formality. But for those of us bound by the Laundry’s Oath of Office, it has a deeper significance. The Oath of Office is a powerful geas that commands our obedience, at a very low level. Mostly it’s used by the Auditors to compel us to testify truthfully in hearings, and to block other occult agencies from sneakily installing spyware in our brains. But because it’s anchored by the Oath of Allegiance to Her Majesty, when the Queen dies, we all get called in to reswear immediately, under Auditor supervision, to the new crowned head. No deferrals can be allowed: a sorcerer with an unanchored Oath of Office is like a computer on the internet with a factory default password.

  You might think this is stupid—having a national security agency that can be forced to suddenly drop everything and perform a magic chicken dance whenever an old-age pensioner dies—but remember, Elizabeth II has been Queen for nearly sixty-five years. Nobody now living and working for us was around for the coronation, so we’re going to have to go to the archives and blow the dust off some really ancient plans, check them for buried thaumaturgic bugs, and bring them up to date in a hurry.

  And that’s before we start asking who dunnit …

  * * *

  “Dimethyl mercury, Professor. Have you found it yet?”

  Mo has returned to the misleadingly signed office in the Palace, and she’s on the war path.

  Professor Phibes glares at her from his side of the desk; his companion—a nurse or medical receptionist perhaps—remains silent. “We’re working on it. The proprieties must be observed—”

  “The proprieties can take a back seat. If Her Majesty’s been poisoned—”

  “I can’t just demand a blood sample!” Phibes looks appalled. “She’s very upset. Candy is her favorite dog—”

  “Candy has been poisoned, Professor. I appreciate your concern for your patient’s privacy, but the vet has been more forthcoming. This is an animal that is in frequent contact with Her Majesty and DMM is a contact poison. My agency is concerned that this may have been an assassination attempt. You need to screen the target, then search for delivery vectors. If we’re lucky it was only the dog—”

  Mo is pretty sure it’s too late, but she needs a smoking gun—a mass spec report on a sample of royal blood—before she can take this to the next level.

  Phibes’s face sags lugubriously. “Her Majesty is due”—he looks sideways at his companion—“Vulnavia? If you would explain?” His voice is hoarse, as if his larynx is somehow damaged.

  Vulnavia wears the starched uniform of a staff nurse straight out of the 1930s: the Palace makes a fetish of rejecting modernity. She has model-perfect skin and straight black hair yet seems curiously ageless, and this puts Mo’s back on edge. But she also knows her stuff: “Her Majesty’s diary is booked up six months in advance. She maintains a work routine of over three hundred public appearances a year, and her daily schedule is blocked out the week before, in fifteen-minute periods. So you see, we simply can’t schedule a medical examination at short notice without giving a reason. It would be headline news.”

  “That’s not—” begins Mo, but Nurse Vulnavia hasn’t finished.

  “Her Majesty is due for a checkup this Friday afternoon.” Mo catches her quick glance at Phibes, and his grudging nod. “We can take bloods then, as long as her diary is running to time and she’s in a good mood.”

  “Friday?” Mo shakes her head. “But we need an update immediately.”

  “Mrs. O’Brien,” Phibes’s expression is patronizing, “with all due respect, if Her Majesty was exposed a week or more ago, then a three-day delay won’t materially affect her prognosis. And if she has not been poisoned, which seems more likely to me, I see no benefit in unduly troubling her. I will write her up for a full set of bloods on Friday afternoon, and that’s final. And I’ll request a full heavy metal workup.”