The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

makes a show of examining the warrant card. “We’re here to conduct a site visit and check the works list.” Pete brandishes his stash of photocopies, which Alex now sees includes blueprints and floorplans for the ancient radar control bunker turned regional emergency center, along with what is probably a surveyor’s report listing what will need to be done in order to restore it to operational capability – if not for a nuclear war, then for another equally grim purpose. “If it’s in order, I’ll be back tomorrow with another inspection team. You’re living in the Regional Commissioner’s rooms, aren’t you? Can you give us the tour of the accessible areas? We’d particularly like to see the broadcast suite, the telephone switchroom, the generator and supply rooms, and the air conditioning units.”
    “Aye, I can do that, but I was ’aving me tea? Can tha be waiting five minutes?”
    “Did someone say tea?” Pete brightens. Alex doesn’t have the heart to translate the word into London-speak: tea means supper up here.
    “Nay, but I can be making tha’a cuppa. Come along now.” The caretaker turns and shuffles wearily back into the depths of the secret nuclear bunker, a hermit retreating into his cave. Pete glances at Alex, who shrugs before turning to follow their host. It’s not as if he’s got anything better to do this evening…

2: INTERLUDE: ADVERSARY
     
DEAR DIARY:
    A lot of stuff has happened in the month since I wrote about visiting Leeds, and I’m not sure I understand it all.
    (Of course, that probably puts me ahead of the game: it turns out that most people understand
nothing
.)
    The short version: my working life stopped being boring almost immediately after the visit to the bunker. In fact, everything got unpleasantly exciting! Although not all at once, of course. You know the urban legend about how if you put a frog in a saucepan of cold water and bring it slowly to a boil, the frog won’t notice the heat until it dies? I was that frog. Mind you, at first I thought it was my personal life that was getting exciting, and pleasantly so at that. I had no idea about the huge events taking place in the background and what they would mean for me. Or for
us
.
    The long version…
    Because of the whole stored-institutional-knowledge thing I’m supposed to make this a complete account of what happened this April. To fill in the gaps between what actually happened to me, and what was happening elsewhere, a lot of this is going to consist of a fictionalized account of documented events. (Don’t worry, I have expense claims and memos to work from.) I’m also trying to pull together reconstructions based on interviews with an uncommonly well-informed source, random bits of guesswork, and of course my own workplace confessional.
    Oh, and Cassie, if by any remote chance you ever read this? I’m very, very sorry…
     
    Some time before Alex had his fateful cliffside encounter in Whitby, then visited the moribund bunker housing the Leeds War Room, an audience was held in another underground bunker that would ultimately have a huge impact on his life.
    The bunker lay beneath a plateau in the foothills of a mountain range at the western end of a large landmass. Bleached slabs of white limestone pavement poked through holes in the plateau’s surface like the bones of a mummified continent showing through its desiccated skin. Constellations similar to those of Earth wheeled across its skies every night, but the darkness was not relieved by sunlight reflected from a giant moon. Instead, the plateau was illuminated by the sickly radiance of a planetary ring, a cyclopean arch of green-gray rubble circling the waist of the world. From time to time the flicker of meteors lit up the southern horizon, for planetary rings are seldom stable. The debris belt created by the shattering of the moon had already bombarded the equatorial latitudes, leaving a pockmarked belt of sullen, glowing craters around the