The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross

diary about the end of the world, another briefing took place for various initiates of Mahogany Row, up on the third floor of Audit House.
    Audit House, name notwithstanding, is not in fact the name of an office building from which the Laundry’s audit department operates. It was originally a Georgian town house, which served as the home of a particularly stuffy accountancy firm during the late Victorian period. Requisitioned by the Ministry of War in 1915, it has remained a Crown property ever since. Too small to serve as an actual agency headquarters and too architecturally notable to rebuild – it’s a grade one listed building – it serves as a conference retreat within the city. Which is why, on a rainy Thursday afternoon, Jez Wilson, Gerald Lockhart, and several other senior officers are there to attend a lecture on variant hominid cladistics and the implications of early FOXP2 gene expression for ritual magic.
    With tea and biscuits, no less.
    “Tesco’s Value range,” Lockhart remarks disapprovingly. He’s a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit, balding, his posture stiff. “An oldie, and not so much of a goodie.”
    “Don’t even mention the tea,” says Ms. Hazard, who is gracing the event with her presence. She looks as out of place as a peacock among squabbling seagulls: she’s dressed for a diplomatic reception, or possibly a royal garden party. She shudders delicately. “They used
bags
.”
    “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over in a couple of hours.” Lockhart is the very soul of solicitude. “Then you can go back to…” He trails off, as if uncertain. (A very rare situation indeed for Gerry Lockhart.)
    “Wining and dining the younger brother of the Emir of Dubai,” she says with an enigmatic smile. “Doing my bit for the balance of trade deficit and the shareholders.” A momentary flash of steel in the smile: “Got to keep the toy chest overflowing, haven’t we? Shall we take our seats? I’m sure Kylie will be with us shortly —”
    A door leads from the reception area into a Georgian drawing room, done out in tasteful period decor, with a seventeenth-century lacquered harpsichord in one corner facing a half-circle of conference hall chairs, as if waiting for a recital. Beside it, there’s a much more modern table supporting a video projector that looks as out of place as a hovercraft at a tall ships race. The dozen invitees file in and take their seats, in some cases still munching furtively on bourbon creams and Hobnobs. Then a serving door at the far side of the room opens and a staffer walks in, leading a stranger. “Hello,” the gofer says diffidently, as if he’s not used to addressing this many top brass simultaneously. (Maybe he isn’t – he’s young enough that he clearly finds it an exciting challenge to drive a shaver around the volcanic range of zits gracing his right cheek – but if he’s lucky he’ll have time to grow into the job before his internship runs out or a necromancer eats him.) “I’d like to introduce this afternoon’s seminar lead, Professor Kylie McPherson from the Natural History Museum. Professor McPherson is an individual merit researcher in the Department of Paleontology, specializing in the origins of cognitive psychogenetics in genus
Homo
. She’s here to talk to us about some recent findings in hominid evolutionary biology.”
    Kylie McPherson is in her late forties, wears a no-nonsense tweed suit with her hair tied back, and clearly Mahogany Row is of no more significance to her than a pride of unruly baboons or a class of undergraduates. She walks to the table, taps her laptop trackpad to ensure it’s awake, and starts.
    “Good afternoon!” She hits the spacebar and the projection screen throws up a skull. At least, Lockhart supposes it’s meant to be a skull: it looks more like a child’s clay model of a skull that’s been dropped on the floor, shattered, and inexpertly glued back together again with missing pieces replaced by