Let me try to explain…

I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.

I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist. Consequently, I’d much rather dismiss theology and religious belief as superstitious rubbish. My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism… except that I know too much.

See, we did evolve more or less randomly. And the little corner of the universe we live in is 13.73 billion years old, not 5,000 years old. And there’s no omnipotent, omniscient, invisible sky daddy in the frame for the problem of pain. So far so good: I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist.

Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren’t normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God-the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones… aren’t friendly.

(See? I told you I’d rather be an atheist!)

I push the button on the dishwasher, straighten up, and glance at the kitchen clock. It’s pushing ten thirty, but I’m wide awake and full of bleak existential rage. I don’t want to go to bed; I might disturb Mo, and she really needs her sleep right now. So I tiptoe upstairs to check on her, use the bathroom, then retreat downstairs again. But that leaves me with a choice between sitting in a kitchen that smells of bleach and a living room that smells of sour fear-memories. I can’t face the inanities of television or the solace of a book. I feel restless. So I clip on my holster, pull on my jacket, and go outside for a walk.

It may be summer but it’s already dark and the streetlights are on. I walk down the leafy pavement, between the neatly trimmed front hedges and the sleeping cars parked nose to tail. The lichen-stained walls and battered wheelie bins are stained by the stale orange twilight reflected from the clouds. Traffic rumbles in the distance, pulsing with the freight of the unsleeping city. Here and there I see front windows illuminated from within by the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations. I turn a corner, walk downhill under the old railway bridge, then left past a closed back street garage. Cats slink through the moonless twilight with nervous stealth; the smell of night-blooming pollen meshes with the gritty taste of diesel particulates at the back of my throat. I walk through the night, wrapped in my anger, and as I walk I think:

Angleton is missing. Why? And where? He doesn’t live anywhere, according to Human Resources; doesn’t have a life. Well, that’s not much of a surprise. Angleton’s grasp on mundane humanity has always struck me as tenuous-the idea that there’s a four-hundred-year-old stone cottage in a village in the countryside, and a Mrs. Angleton puttering around hanging out the laundry on a line in the back garden, simply doesn’t work for me. He goes beyond the usual monasticism of the man who married his job; he never takes holidays, he’s always in the office, and then there’s the photograph. (Maybe he inherited it from Dorian Gray?) So, let this be Clue #1 that something is wrong. Angleton never does anything by accident, so either something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or he’s embarked on a caper he didn’t see fit to tell anyone about.

I turn right, across a main road-quiet at this time of night-then along and left down an alleyway that leads between rows of high back-garden fences. Grass grows beneath the crumbling, silvery woodwork and around the wheelie bins; here’s a concrete yard where someone has parked a decaying caravan, its windows frosted dark in the urban twilight.

The Fuller Memorandum is missing. Whatever is in it is still a hot potato after seventy-odd years. Angleton was interested in it, and in BLOODY BARON, and in this new business about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming into effect sooner rather than later.

Item: Why are the Russians sniffing around? And what did Panin mean about finding the Teapot? He can’t be talking about Ungern Sternberg’s psychotic batman, can he? I did some checking. Teapot was fragged by Ungern Sternberg’s own rebellious troops in 1921, right before they handed the Baron over to Trotsky’s commissars. At least, the mutineers said they shot him. If he’d run away into the Siberian forest, alone, might they have concocted some cock-and-bull cover story…?

I make a right turn into a narrow path. It leads to a tranquil bicycle track, walled in beech and chestnut trees growing from the steep embankments to either side and sporadically illuminated by isolated lampposts. It used to be a railway line, decades ago, one of the many suburban services closed during the Beeching cuts-but it wasn’t a commuter line. (I stumbled across it not long after we moved to this part of town, and it caught my attention enough to warrant some digging.)

The Necropolis Service ran from behind Waterloo station to the huge Brookwood cemetery in Surrey; tickets were sold in two classes, one-way and return. This is one of its tributaries, a tranquil creek feeding the great river of the dead. Today, cyclists use it to bypass the busy main roads on their way into the center. It is, however, unaccountably unpopular with the after-work exercise set, and I have the left lane to myself as I walk, still chewing over what I know and what I don’t know.

CLUB ZERO and Mo. Who sent Uncle Fester? I see three alternatives: Panin and his friends, the cultists she was sent to shut down, or some third party. Taking it from the top: Panin is a professional, and can be expected to usually play by the rules. Sending a zombie to doorstep an officer in a foreign nation’s service at home just isn’t done; it’s not businesslike, and besides, once you start sending assassins to bump off the oppo, you’ve got no guarantee that their assassins aren’t going to outperform yours. The reason great powers don’t usually engage in wars of assassination is that it levels the playing field. On the other hand, cultists like the perps behind CLUB ZERO are far more likely to do that sort of thing. Assassination and terrorism are Siamese twins: tools for outsiders and pressure groups. So my money is on Uncle Fester being an emissary from the cultists the AIVD called Mo in to neutralize… unless there’s a third faction in play, a prospect I find far too scary to contemplate.

The cycle path narrows, and descends deeper into its cutting. The lights are more widely spaced here, and a number of them are out. Hearing a rustling scampering sound behind me, I glance round as something flickers in the bushes between lights-dog-like, with a great bush of a tail. An urban fox? Maybe: I didn’t see the ears or muzzle, though. Urban foxes aren’t a problem (unless you’re a cat), but feral dogs might be another matter. I keep walking in the twilight. London is warm and humid in summer, but down here it’s almost clammy-cold, and there’s a faint whiff of something like a sewer, sweet and slightly rotten. I break into a slow jog, aiming to outrun the stench.