Free The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

touch-'n'-gos on the railing
outside.
    It's early summer and the temperature's in the
mid-twenties; the beach is covered in babes, boardwalk refugees, and
surf nazis. This being Santa Cruz I'm wearing cut-off jeans, a
psychedelic T-shirt, and a back-to-front baseball cap—but I can't kid
myself about passing for a native. I've got the classic geek
complexion—one a goth would kill for—and in Santa Cruz even the geeks
get out in the sun once in a while. Not to mention wearing more than
one earring.

    My contact is a guy called Mo. Actually, I'm not
sure that isn't a pseudonym. Nobody seems to know very much about the
mysterious Mo, except he's an expatriate British academic, and he's
having trouble coming home. All of which makes me wonder why the
Laundry is involved at all, as opposed to the Consulate in San
Francisco.
    A bit of background is in order; after all,
aren't the UK and the USA allies? Well, yes and no. No two countries
have identical interests, and the result is a blurred area where
self-interest causes erstwhile allies to act toward one another in a
less than friendly manner. Mossad spies on the CIA; in the 1970s,
Romania and Bulgaria spied on the Soviet Union. This doesn't mean their
leaders aren't slurping each other's cigars, but … 
    In 1945 the UK and the USA signed a joint
intelligence-sharing treaty that opened their most secret institutions
to mutual inspection and exchange: at the time they were fighting a
desperate war against a common enemy. Not many people outside the
secret services understand just how close to the abyss we stood, even
as late as April 1945: there's nothing like facing a diabolical enemy
set on your complete destruction to cement an alliance at the highest
level … and for the first few postwar years, the
UK-USA treaty kept us singing from the same hymn book.
    But UK-USA relations deteriorated over the
following decade. Partly this was a side effect of the Helsinki
Protocol; when even Molotov agreed that occult weapons of the type
envisaged by Hitler's Thule Society minions were too deadly to use, a
lot of the pressure came off the alliance. When it became apparent that
the British intelligence system was riddled with Russian spies, the CIA
turned the cold shoulder; thus, a background of shifting superpower
politics was established, in which the moth-eaten British lion was
unwillingly taught his place in the scheme of things by the new
ringmaster, Uncle Sam. I suppose you could blame the Suez crisis and
the Turing debacle, or Nixon's paranoia, but in 1958, when the UK
offered to extend the 1945 treaty to cover occult
intelligence, the US government refused.
    My colleagues in GCHQ listen in on domestic US
phone calls, compile logs, and pass them across the desk to their NSA
liaisons—who are forbidden by charter from spying on domestic US
territory. In return, the NSA Echelon listening posts give GCHQ a
plausibly deniable way of monitoring every phone conversation in
western Europe—after all, they're not actually listening; they're just
reading transcripts prepared by someone else, aren't they? But in the
twilight world of occult intelligence, we aren't allowed to cooperate
overtly. I don't have a liaison here, any more than I'd have one in
Kabul or Belgrade: I'm technically an illegal, albeit on a tourist
visa. Any nasty reality excursions are strictly my problem.
    On the other hand, the days of midnight
insertions—bailing out of the back door of a bomber by midnight and
trying not to hang your parachute up on the Iron Curtain—are gone for
good. Gone, too, are the days of show trials for captured spies: if I
get caught, the worst I can expect is to be questioned and put on the
first flight home. My way into the country was more prosaic than a
wartime parachute drop, too: I flew in on an American Airlines MD-11,
filled out the visa waiver declaration ("occupation: civil servant;
purpose of visit: work assignment," and no, I was not a member of the
German Nazi Party