Jennifer Morgue Read Free Page A

You could have asked us." The British agent crosses his arms tensely.

    "You could have asked your Office of Naval Intelligence, too.

    But no, you had to go and get creative."

    "The fuck. You'd just have told us not to bother. This way — "

    "This way you learn your own lesson."

    "The fuck."

    The grab was 3,000 feet below sea level and still rising when the tentacles finally caught up with it.

    The rest, as they say, is history.

1: RANDOM RAMONA

    IF YOU WORK FOR THE LAUNDRY LONG ENOUGH, eventually you get used to the petty insults, the paper clip audits, the disgusting canteen coffee, and the endless, unavoidable bureaucracy. Your aesthetic senses become dulled, and you go blind to the decaying pea-green paint and the vomit-beige fabric partitions between office cubicles. But the big indignities never fail to surprise, and they're the ones that can get you killed.
    I've been working for the Laundry for about five years now, and periodically I become blase in my cynicism, sure that I've seen it all — which is usually the signal for them to throw something at me that's degrading, humiliating, or dangerous — if not all three at once.

    "You want me to drive a what?" I squeak at the woman behind the car rental desk.

    "Sir, your ticket has been issued by your employer, it says here und here — " She's a brunette: tall, thin, helpful, and very German in that schoolmarmish way that makes you instinctively check to see if your fly's undone. "The, ah, Smart For two coupe. With the, the kompressor. It is a perfectly good car. Unless you would like for the upgrade to pay"

    Upgrade. To a Mercedes SI90, for, oh, about two hundred euros a day. An absolute no-brainer — if it wasn't at my own expense.

    "How do I get to Darmstadt from here?" I ask, trying to salvage the situation. "Preferably alive?" (Bloody Facilities.

    Bloody budget airlines that never fly where you want to go.

    Bloody weather. Bloody liaison meetings in Germany.

    Bloody "cheapest hire" policy.) She menaces me with her perfect dentistry again. "If it was me I'd take the ICE train. But your ticket — " she points at it helpfully " — is non-refundable. Now please to face the camera for the biometrics"

    Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.

    In between moments of blood-curdling terror I spend my time swearing under my breath. This is all Angleton's fault.

    He's the one who sent me to this stupid joint-liaison committee meeting, so he bears the brunt of it. His hypothetical and distinctly mythological ancestry is followed in descending order by the stupid weather, Mo's stupid training schedule, and then anything else that I can think of to curse. It keeps the tiny corner of my mind that isn't focused on my immediate survival occupied — and that's a very tiny corner, because when you're sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.

    There's an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the