The Woman Who Died a Lot Read online

  “I’ll meet you in TJ-Maxx around two,” said Landen, giving me an affectionate nuzzle. “And don’t be too mean with the shrink, will you? They’ve got feelings, too.”

  “I’ll play nice. What’s the password this time?”

  For a few years now, Goliath had been sending Synthetic Thursdays out into the world to try to get information from people who would speak only to me—Landen being an obvious example. They had also tried to gain access to my house, to the SpecOps records department, and they’d even tried to scam a free membership at a health farm. The copies were initially crude but had made steady and sustained advances in sophistication since first appearing a eighteen months before. The Mark IVs and Vs wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but the Mark VIs were impressive and had been able to crack single code words, which was why we used the more cloak-and-daggerish sentences and responses.

  “What about if I say, ‘No cookies at the hunt, sir!’ and then you reply with, ‘It’s not a cookie, it’s a Newton’?”

  “Sounds random enough.”

  So with the passwords committed to memory, we limped off in opposite directions. I turned once to take a look at him, and he turned as well, and we smiled a simple smile of understanding. Parting for us was generally sweet sorrow, as past experience had taught us there was a fair possibility we might not see each other for a while, if at all—a state of affairs for which I took full responsibility. Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.

  I hobbled across the pedestrian walkway and passed beneath the shadow of Swindon’s centrally located anti-smite tower, the primary defense against God’s planned cleansings of the sinful. I stopped to stare for a moment at the sixty-foot tower. It looked like an electricity pylon topped with a domed metallic mushroom. The burnished copper sheathing glowed in the sun, and even though the many towers dotted about the country were mechanically complete, there were still several hurdles to overcome. The software regulating the 8.2 million independently controlled lasers inside the dome had yet to be fine-tuned, and until it was, the defense shield remained nonoperational.

  Perhaps the members of the city council wasn’t so bothered about Swindon’s smiting because they’d convinced themselves the tower would be running in good time to deflect the wrath of the Almighty four days from now. I didn’t think it would, and with good reason: I knew the genius behind the technology, and despite much midnight oil, the Anti-Smite Defense Shield remained firmly on the theoretical side of reality.

  I hurried on, past the Thistle Hotel to my right, and presently found myself outside the front entrance of the Wessex Special Operations headquarters.

  2.

  Monday: Phoebe Smalls

  The SpecOps division most associated with Thursday Next was SO-27, the Literary Detectives. It was their job to protect the citizenry against literary fraud, overenthusiastic interpretations of protected plays and the illegal trade in bogus Shakespeareana. Miss Next joined in the Swindon branch in 1985, not long before the adventure that came to be known as the Eyre Affair. She worked there on and off in various capacities until disbandment in 1991 and was always suspected of continuing her job under the radar in the years since.

  Millon de Floss, The Thursday Next Chronicles

  The offices had survived almost completely unchanged since most of the Special Operations Network was disbanded thirteen years before. The building was of a sensible design from the forties, and the worn wood and eroded stonework contained more memories than any other place in my life, with the possible exception of the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park. I pushed open the heavy doors and walked into the lobby. High above me a glazed ceiling let in a directionless gray light and, by the look of it, some rainwater. The paint was peeling, and there was the ever-present smell of damp carpets and boiled cabbage—or, if you prefer, boiled carpets and damp cabbage.

  The lobby had a few officers milling about, which reflected the fact that the Special Operations Network had not been completely disbanded. There were six SpecOps divisions remaining out of the thirty or so that once worked here. SO-6 and SO-9 had been merged and looked after national security and diplomatic protection. SO-1 policed the network itself, and SO-5 was a superjudiciary search-and-destroy unit—I’d worked for them myself when we’d hunted down Acheron Hades. The tax office was SO-28, and the Cheese Enforcement Agency was SO-31.

  This left only SO-3, which we had called the “Odd Squad.” They looked after dimensional travel issues, which were so disagreeably complex and mind-bogglingly strange that we were all glad to have nothing to do with them. Suffice it to say there were a shade over six thousand entirely separate dimensions within the League of Alternative Realities—a tiny fraction of the total, but you didn’t get to join the league until you’d figured out how to move across, something that now seemed so blindingly obvious it’s astonishing we couldn’t see it before. Our own dimension was coded ID-11 and was the only league member with diphtheria, David Hasselhoff, and the French, which amused the rest of the multiverse no end. It wasn’t all bad news, as we were also the only one with bicycles, dogs and music, which put us in a robust trading position. SO-3 mostly dealt with trade issues like this; early trades were Brompton folding bicycles to HC-110 in return for escalators and Dalmatians to X-TOL for fax machines. A more recent deal was the complete works of Bartok in exchange for a chain of grocery stores peculiar to D-76, which featured cheaper groceries. The chain was called Aldi, which explained the low cost and why you can’t ever recognize the brands.

  As I stood there for a moment, lost in thought, three operatives in civvies walked past. I could tell they were Odd Squad because they all wore their thumb on the wrong side of their left hand. No one knew quite why, but we suspected that it was similar to a hazing or a rite of passage, like my bout with Basher Dwight. The story goes that newbies at SO-3 are sent to mirror dimension E-6 to get partially reversed, but they had to be careful—stay a second too long and you’d have your ears on backward or genitals in the small of your back. Mind you, it was less permanent than a tattoo—stay for just the right length of time in E-6 and you’d go all the way round and revert to normal. None ever did. You carried two right hands for life as a badge of honor and solidarity.

  By way of comparison, hazing in the now-defunct time-traveling elite known as the ChronoGuard was just as frightening but a lot more spectacular: a 65-million-year backjump to ground zero during the K-T extinction event. The losers jumped out as the meteor struck, but the bold and proud waited for the shock wave. If you returned with grit in your hair and the smell of terrified hadrosaur about you . . . well, you’d not be buying the first round for a while.

  I made my way across the lobby to the main desk. A woman had her back to me as I approached, but she turned as soon as I limped up to the desk.

  “Detective Next?” she said, giving me a broad smile and holding out her hand. “It’s a huge honor.”

  She was taller than me by a few inches, slender and attractive. Her long dark hair was unflecked by gray and tied in a loose ponytail. She had fine features and smiled with easy confidence. She was also young—barely thirty—and I’d heard that she spoke three languages and had graduated with a double first in English literature from Oxford. I also knew that she’d been a cop since graduation, made detective in only three years and been awarded Swindon’s highest award for bravery, the Dorcan Star. It was well deserved: She took a bullet through the ear defending the mayor against Elgin separatists. This was Phoebe Smalls.

  “Detective Smalls,” I said, shaking the proffered hand, “you’ve been making quite a name for yourself.”

  “I looked to your career for inspiration,” she said. “Everything I’ve ever done was because you did it first.”

  “I never lost an ear on the mayor’s account,” I told her, indicating the ragged thing on the side of her head.
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  “Pardon?”

  “I said, ‘I never lost—’ ”

  “Just kidding. I can hear perfectly.” She looked down at my walking stick. “I heard you took all this in pursuit of the law,” she said. “I only tackled the separatists because I knew you would. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be just like Thursday Next—only more so.”

  She gave me the steely gaze of the supremely ambitious, and my hackles, which had already risen, rose further.

  “Like me only more so? How’s that meant to work?”

  “Go further, achieve more, fail less.”

  “Oh, yes?” I replied. “And how’s that working out for you so far?”

  “I’m already taller.”

  “But not older.”

  “I’m working on that daily. I think you should be flattered— someone who wants to be a better version of you. I think we should schedule a longer meeting,” she added, “to have a chat. Find out the areas in which there could be improvement.”

  “That’s the point about failure,” I said. “It’s an intrinsic part of success. You win some, then you lose some. But with experience and luck, you learn to lose less as the years go on.”

  Smalls nodded in agreement. “Like in sports,” she said. “It all boils down to lose/save ratios. I’ve been studying your stats, Thursday. You’ve got a career lives lost/saved ratio of thirty-two to one over one hundred and eighty-six encounters and a solve ratio of sixty-two percent. That places you at number twenty-eight in the global tables.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied eagerly. “It’s all very scientific.”

  “There’s nothing scientific in tackling a crazed lunatic coming at you with an ax,” I said. “How did you do in the league table?”

  “Okay so far. But if I’m to improve my ratio, I need to know where you failed and how I might do better. In that way I can make your mistakes the mistakes I would have made but now won’t. It’s for the good of the citizenry we protect, Miss Next. I’m not in this for the glory, as I’m sure neither were you.”

  “Neither was I?”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t suggesting that your career was effectively over.”

  But she just had. I sighed. I didn’t want to fight her. She was good, it was undeniable. Just a bit . . . well, intense—and obsessed with figures.

  There was a pause.

  “So,” I said, “would you like to be my second-in-command when Braxton offers me the SO-27 job?”

  “Generous, if a little misguided,” she replied with a smile. “As far as I can see, I’m the only viable candidate.”

  “Not quite correct,” I replied with a smile. “Braxton values experience above all.”

  She looked at my stick and my leg, then back to me. “Yes, I’m fully confident that Commander Hicks will come to the correct decision. I’d still like us to be friends, Thursday. Together we have much to offer the service. Youth, vitality, vigor . . . and experience. See you around.”

  And she left me there in an empty pause in which I was thinking up a pithy rejoinder. I did think of one, but her back had already turned and it was too late to be anything but a lame attempt to get the final word.

  “Detective Smalls is the gold standard in law enforcement,” said the officer at the main desk as he watched her walk elegantly to the exit. “Can I help?”

  I told him I was here for a psychiatric evaluation and showed him my ID. He recognized the name and raised an eyebrow.

  “Welcome back, Detective Next. When I said Smalls was the gold standard, my comment may have been taken out of context. I really meant that she met the high standard set by your reputation.”

  “You’re a terrible creep, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Is the shrink in his usual room?”

  “They moved him to the first floor,” said the officer. “Room 101. Another high-ranker is with him at the moment. We had Officer Stoker in this morning—before dawn for some reason.”

  This was better news. Spike was a good friend, and like me, had also lost his job during the SpecOps disbandment.

  “He’s up for the SO-17 divisional chief’s job?”

  “Apparently, although as he himself says, ‘Who else would be dumb-arsed enough to take it?’”

  “There might be some truth in that,” I mused. Spike’s work with the semidead, ethereal horrors, demons, bogies and vampires wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, aside from Spike himself with my occasional assistance, it wasn’t anyone’s cup of tea. His old division of SO-17 was known colloquially as the “Suckers and Biters,” but they dealt with anything of a nominally undead or horrific nature. Despite the cuts, Officer Spike Stoker had managed to keep the phantasm-containment facilities and deep refrigeration units going in the subbasements, but only after he demonstrated precisely why there was a good reason. The councilor who was eager to make the cuts rashly took up Spike’s offer of a tour. She was struck dumb for six months. Only a fool looked into anything below the fifth subbasement.

  “May I ask a question, Detective?” said the sergeant.

  “Go on.”

  “Why are they resurrecting SpecOps?”

  “I have no idea. First floor, did you say?”

  “Room 101. Don’t be too harsh with Dr. Chumley. He’s our third shrink in as many years. The last one was taken away in an ambulance. They don’t make them like they used to. Let me give you a visitor’s pass.”

  3.

  Monday: SpecOps

  The recent smitings undertaken around the globe have caught many theological analysts by surprise, as this level of apparent interest in mankind’s affairs by the Almighty had not been seen since biblical times. The reason and purpose for the sudden reversion to Old Testamentism have spawned a thousand debates on late-night chat shows, none of which have so far provided a coherent answer. Traditionalists state that it was simply vengeance for sinful behavior, but of the eight confirmed smitings around the planet, only two locations could be described as “sinful,” leading scholars to muse on what being sinful might actually mean in the twenty-first century.

  Eugene Plugg, God, the New Interventionist

  I took the lift to the first floor and trod along the familiar corridors. The SO-27 staff had taken other jobs or retired when the Literary Detective unit was disbanded. Victor Analogy had gone one further and was currently embracing his newfound eternity from a sunny corner of Wanborough Cemetery. I’d lost contact with most. Herr Bight had returned to Germany, where he came out in a spectacular fashion as a fantasy author, much to the shock of his classically educated parents. The Forty brothers ran an antiquarian bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, but Jim Finisterre was still local—he was the head of the prestigious Really Ancient Texts department at the locally Sponsored Swindon All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library. Even Bowden Cable, my onetime partner and closest work colleague, had found that running Acme Carpets suited his health better. The worst that could happen was laying an Axminster over someone’s budgie or handing out a refund.

  Room 101, I discovered, was sparsely furnished. There was a small desk at which sat a receptionist, and against the wall was a row of hard chairs. On a coffee table were much-thumbed copies of the SpecOps Gazette, and on the wall were posters suggesting various help groups that overstressed SpecOps officers could attend. One was for an Odd Squad support group for those diagnosed with “dimensional fatigue,” and another for SpecOps accountants offered assistance to those who had become dangerously overstimulated by calculating tax exemptions for year-averaged pension deductibles.

  I gave my name to the receptionist, and she asked me to take a seat. I said I’d stand, since I could maintain at least a pretense of good health if no one saw me try to get up, but after she said, “Are you sure?” and I’d walked round the office twice, I opted to sit on the windowsill, which was higher and afforded an easier transit to my feet. You learn to adapt.

  Onc
e comfortably perched, I looked around, having been in the office a number of times. This had once been the reception for the ChronoGuard, the division that had policed time travel, defending the Standard History Eventline from the rapacious plundering of the temporally mischievous.

  Unlike most of the other SpecOps divisions, the ChronoGuard had not been disbanded because of budgetary difficulties. They had been shut down when it was found that the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle couldn’t be applied to time-travel technology. The deficit concept was simple: Use a technology now in the almost-certain knowledge that it will be invented in the future. Nanotechnology works this way, as do the Gravitube, thermos flasks, tachyon data streaming, and the wheel. The reason the concept as applied to Time Travel had once worked but now didn’t was simple: A courageous Time Traveler by the name of “Flipper” O’Malley had upstreamed his way to where time eventually ended and discovered that during that unthinkably vast swath of time no one had actually gotten around to inventing time travel. So with the technology now unsupported by the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle, there was nothing for it but to spool down the C-90 fluxgates and decommission the time engines.

  This was a serious blow for the three thousand timeworkers who suddenly found that the glittering career they should have had was no longer going to happen. It was bad news for the human race, too, whose potential extinction by asteroid HR-6984 in thirty-seven years’ time had once been averted by an ingenious flexing of the eventline, an act that lowered the potential Armageddon to a manageable 1.8 percent and not the alarming 34 percent it was at present. Flipper O’Malley had chosen a bad time to declare time travel impossible. And if all that makes no sense, then welcome to the time industry.