CODE ELDRITCH

PROLOGUE

The Interlude

Phone call. Obnoxious clanging against tapestried walls, no echo.

The Official lifts his eyes slowly from the papers he has set out in front of him, as if stirred from a deep sleep.

Obnoxious clanging, enough to make a man sick.

He lifts the phone and taps the green, vibrating icon.

"Yes."

The man on the other end of the phone speaks jumbled Norwegian, or perhaps it is English. "There is a situation."

The Official nods. There is always a situation somewhere. On a second screen, he tracks the origin of the phone call with one dark, drowsy eye. The phone call comes from Trondheim and is routed through a clandestine military base on the outskirts of Stavanger. The screen displays other unhelpful information, such as the fact that air humidity in Trondheim currently hovers around 97%, or the fact that the lion's share of opposition leadership is exiting the city in a diverse convoy of nondescript SUVs with Oslo as their final destination.

"Proceed."

There is a slight delay as the command is unscrambled, translated, and executed. The process is identical regardless of which language is spoken into the phone.

"Task 57701-E is a negative. Loss of life total."

The Official does not immediately react, wary of the surveillance cameras mounted in the corners of his office ceiling. He reaches over to close the second screen, and sets the phone down flat on the table.

"What happened?"

The delay is shorter this time. "The agents were killed."

"I understand that. I am asking how."

"Agents Epitomy, Solstice and Cliff suffered acute brain herniation as a result of hostile strobe lighting. Agents Wash and Figurine suffered self-inflicted wounds to the throat and suffered hypovolemic shock. Supervisor Brandish could not be accounted for until the other five had been confirmed dead for forty-four minutes."

"And?"

A mechanical pause again. "Supervisor Brandish was found in a shallow puddle of water. Cause of death, myocardial infarction."

The Official considers this. Brain swelling, suicide, heart attack. The methods were not particularly different from in previous attempts. What set this failure apart was the forty-four minute delay between the deaths of the five agents and the death of Supervisor Brandish. What ever had struck the first five dead — the Official has theories, of course, but they remained theories as long as he kept them in his personal file — had needed more than eight times as long to finish the job as it had the time before.

He makes hasty notes and says, "is that all?"

"Various data indicate sea level north of Trondheim fell by eighty-five point eight centimeters just after the agents entered the perimeter."

The Official flips through his papers. Eighty-five point eight. The last time it had been ninety-one point one.

"Have the local police department or weather stations received any reports or calls they will file as uncharacteristic?"

"None."

"Then we are cleared to proceed with Task 57701-F. Assign the group and schedule the excursion for Sunday, seventeen-hundred hours."

The Official is not usually a cynic, but after five attempts he felt the need for a distraction. Various metrics indicated that reporting on Sweden was becoming increasingly attractive to the Norwegian media, and the fever pitch of politics that was the Swedish election would surely distract from mild weather anomalies.

"There is one more matter."

"Go on."

"The CCTEA operations officer reports it has exhausted its current Prime Object. They have need of a new one before operations can resume."

"I see." The Official does not let on how much this actually worries him. In the same manner that sea level differences in the Trondheim area were shrinking for each attempt, so had the exhaustion rate of Prime Objects accelerated.

This current one had lasted only five tasks. These makeshift variants were not, as the handbook would have put it, cutting it.

"I will attend the CCTEA at once. That will be all."

The other end of the line went dead.

The Official flicks a mote of dust from his shoulder and gathers his material. The next morning, he would have to fly to the United States. He had a new Prime Object in mind.