Jennifer Morgue Read Online Free

slightly worse English) then beam myself up to the sixth floor of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel. Then I hunt through the endless and slightly claustrophobic maze of air-conditioned corridors until I find my room.
    I dump my duffle bag, grab my toilet kit and a change of clothes, and duck into the bathroom to wash away the stink of terror. In the mirror, my reflection winks at me and points at a new white hair until I menace him with a tube of toothpaste.
    I'm only twenty-eight: I'm too young to die and too old to drive fast.

    I blame Angleton. This is all his fault. He set me on this path exactly two days after the board approved my promotion to SSO, which is about the lowest grade to carry any significant managerial responsibilities. "Bob," he said, fixing me with a terrifyingly avuncular smile, "I think it's about time you got out of the office a bit more. Saw the world, got to grips with the more mundane aspects of the business, that sort of thing. So you can start by standing in for Andy Newstrom on a couple of low-priority, joint-liaison meetings.

    What do you say"

    "Great," I said enthusiastically. "Where do I start"

    Well okay, I should really blame myself, but Angleton's a more convenient target — he's very hard to say "no" to, and more importantly, he's eight hundred miles away. It's easier to blame him than to kick the back of my own head.

    Back in the bedroom I pull my tablet PC out of my luggage and plug it in, jack it into the broadband socket, poke my way through the tedious pay-to-register website, and bring up the VPN connection back to the office. Then I download an active ward and leave it running as a screen saver. It looks like a weird geometric pattern endlessly morphing and cycling through a color palette until it ends up in a retina-eating stereoisogram, and it's perfectly safe to sneak a brief glance at it, but if an intruder looks at it for too long it'll PwnzOr their brain. I drape a pair of sweaty boxer shorts across it before I go out, just in case room service calls. When it comes to detecting burglars, hairs glued to door frames are passe.

    Down at the concierge desk I check for messages. "Letter for Herr Howard? Please to sign here." I spot the inevitable Starbucks stand in a corner so I amble over to it, inspecting the envelope as I go. It's made of expensive cream paper, very thick and heavy, and when I stare at it closely I see fine gold threads woven into it. They've used an italic font and a laser printer to address it, which cheapens the effect. I slit it open with my Swiss Army cybertool as I wait for one of the overworked Turkish baristas to get round to serving me. The card inside is equally heavy, but hand-written: Bob, Meet me in the Liaguna Bar at 6 p.m. or as soon as you arrive, if later.

    Ramona "Um," I mutter. What the fuck?

    I'm here to take part in the monthly joint-liaison meeting with our EU partner agencies. It's held under the auspices of the EU Joint Intergovernmental Framework on Cosmological Incursions which is governed by the Common Defense provisions of the Second Treaty of Nice. (You haven't heard of this particular EU treaty because it's secret by mutual agreement, none of the signatories wanting to start a mass panic.) Despite the classified nature of the event it's really pretty boring: we're here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what's been going on lately update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction — the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right — everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values. After the meeting I'm