It seemed a pretty weird idea at the time-a thirty-year-old occult intelligence officer should take time off on the job to work on his autobiography?-but he had a point. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun.Īnd I'm keeping the last shell for myself.Ī couple of years ago, Angleton suggested I start writing my memoirs. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos-in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever-was infinitely more comforting than the truth.īecause the truth is that my God is coming back. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. I have studied the ancient writings of his prophets and followers in person, not simply relying on the classified digests in the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and the background briefings for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. I know his secret rituals and the correct form of prayer and his portents and signs. I know the path you have to walk down to be one with this God. However, there is a God out there-vast and ancient and infinitely powerful-and I know the name of this God. The guardians of the Ka'abah have got the world's best tourism racket running, the Dalai Lama isn't anybody's reincarnation, Zeus is out to lunch, and you really don't want me to start on the neo-pagans. Moses may have taken two tablets before breakfast, but there was nobody home to listen to the prayers of the victims of the Shoah. The truth won't make your Baby Jesus cry because, sad to say, there ain't no such Son of God. I wish I could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism it's so much less unpleasant than the One True Religion. But then I was recruited by the Laundry, and learned better. It was a conviction encouraged by every crazy news item from the Middle East, every ludicrous White House prayer breakfast on the TV. Like the majority of ordinary British citizens, I used to be a good old–fashioned atheist, secure in my conviction that folks who believed-in angels and demons, supernatural manifestations and demiurges, snake-fondling and babbling in tongues and the world being only a few thousand years old-were all superstitious idiots. Bob Howard, accidental hero, return in the fourth of Charles Stross's novel about the activities of that most secret of British secret agencies-The Laundry.
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