The Fuller Memorandum

11. CRIME SCENES

I DON’T FUNCTION WELL IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING. I sleep like a log, and I have difficulty pulling my wits about me if something wakes me in the pre-dawn dark.

So it takes me a few seconds to sit up and grab the bedside phone when it begins to snarl for attention. I fumble the handset close to my face: “Whuuu—” I manage to drone, thinking, If this is a telesales call, I’ll plead justifiable homicide, as Mo spasms violently in a twist of the duvet and rolls over, pulling the bedding off me.

“Bob.” I know that voice. It’s—“Jo here. Code Blue. How soon can you be ready for a pickup?”

I am abruptly awake in an icy-cold drench of sweat. “Five minutes,” I croak. “What’s up?”

“I want you in here stat, and I’m sending a car. Be ready in five minutes.” She sounds uncertain . . . afraid? “This line isn’t secure, so save your questions.”

“Okay.” The phrase this had better be good doesn’t even reach my larynx: declaring Code Blue is the sort of thing that attracts the Auditors’ attention. “Bye.” I put the phone down.

“What was that?” says Mo.

“That was a Code Blue.” I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and fish for yesterday’s discarded socks. “There’s a car calling for me in five minutes.”

“Shit . . .” Mo rolls over the other way and buries her face in a pillow. “Am I wanted?” Her voice, muffled, trails away.

“Just me.” I paw through an open drawer for pants. “It’s Jo Sullivan. At four in the morning.”

“She’s with Oscar-Oscar, isn’t she?”

“Yup.” Pants: on. Tee shirt: on. Trousers: next in queue.

“You’d better go.” She sounds serious. “Phone me the instant you hear something.”

I glance at the alarm. “It’s twenty to five.”

“I don’t mind.” She pulls the bedding into shape. “Take care.”

“And you,” I say, as I head downstairs, carrying my holstered pistol.

I’m standing in the front hall when blue and red strobes light up the window glass above the door. I open it in the face of a cop. “Mr. Howard?” she asks.

“That’s me.” I hold up my warrant card and her eyes age a little.

“Come with me, please,” she says, and opens the rear door for me. I strap myself in and we’re off for another strobe-lit taxi ride through the wilds of South London, speeding alarmingly down narrow shuttered streets and careening around roundabouts in the gray pre-dawn light until, after a surprisingly short time, we pull up outside the staff entrance to a certain store.

The door is open. Jo is waiting for me. One look at her face tells me it’s bad. Angleton warned me: This is where it starts. I tense. “What’s happened?” I ask.

“Come this way.” Jo leads me up the stairwell. The lights are on, which is abnormal, and I hear footsteps—not the steady shuffle of the night staff, but boots and raised voices. Something in the air makes me think of a kicked anthill.

We head past reception where a couple of blue-suited security men are standing guard over a stapler and six paper clips, then back along the corridor past Iris’s corner office, then round the bend to—

“Fuck,” I say, unable to contain myself. My office door is closed. But I can see the interior, because there’s a gigantic hole in the door, as if someone hit it with a wrecking ball. (Except a wrecking ball would leave rough jagged edges of splintered wood, while the rim of this particular hole looks oddly melted.) The interior isn’t much better; an avalanche of paper and scraps of broken metal are strewn across half an overturned desk. A thin blue glow clings patchily to some of the wreckage, fading slowly even as I watch. “What happened?”

“Am hoping you tell us.” It’s Boris, bags under his eyes and an expression as dark as midnight on the winter solstice. When did he get back? Wasn’t he doing something overseas connected with BLOODY BARON . . . ?

“What have you done, Bob?” Jo grabs my left elbow. “First a civilian FATACC, now this. What are you into?”

I blink stupidly at the destruction. “My secure document safe, is it . . . ?”

She shakes her head. “We won’t know until we go inside. It’s still active.” I feel a thin prickling on the back of my neck. Demonic intruders have been at work, summoned to retrieve something. Angleton was right, I realize.

“What did you have in your safe?”

“I’m not sure you’re cleared—”

Boris clears his throat. “Is cleared, Bob. I will clear her. What was in safe? What attracted attention of burglars in night?”

I squint through the hole in the door. “I had documents relating to several codeword projects in there,” I say. “The stacks can probably reconstruct my withdrawal record, and once it’s safe to go in there we can work out what is missing.”

“Bob, you went to the archives in person yesterday.” Jo tightens her grip on my elbow, painfully tight. “What did you withdraw most recently? Tell us!”

Truth and consequences time. “I asked for a copy of the Fuller Memorandum,” I tell her, which is entirely true and correct: “I was following up something Angleton told me to do a while ago.” Which is also entirely correct, and the most misleading thing I’ve said in front of witnesses all year.

“Fuller Memo—” I see a flicker of recognition on Boris’s face. “Tell me, when you go home last night, is Fuller Memorandum in safe?”

I nod. I don’t trust my tongue at this point because, as the man who used to be president said, it all depends on what you mean by the word “is.”

Jo stares at Boris. “What classification level are we talking about?” she asks.

Boris doesn’t answer at once. He’s staring at me, and if looks could kill, I’d be a tiny pile of ash right now. “Does Angleton say you are to the memorandum read?” he asks.

“Yup. Took me a while to track it down,” I extemporize. “So I left it in the safe overnight; I was going to look at it today.” All of which is truthful enough that I will happily repeat it in front of an Audit Panel, knowing that if I tell a lie in front of them the blood will boil in my veins and I won’t die—

Boris looks at Jo and nods, minutely. “Am thanking you for calling me. This is mess.”

“What was in the memo that’s so red-hot?” I ask, pushing my luck, because somewhere in all the fuss of expediting Angleton’s little scheme—taking the forgery he’d prepared and inserting it into the archives, then withdrawing it and planting the bait in my office safe—I hadn’t gotten round to asking him just what the original was about.

“Memorandum is control binding scripture for asset called Eater of Souls,” Boris says, and strangely he refuses to meet my eyes. “Codeword is TEAPOT. Consequences of loss—unspeakable.”

“Oh, shit.” I swear with feeling, because I’m not totally stupid: I worked out who Teapot was some time ago. I didn’t realize the Fuller Memorandum was his control document, though. The control document is the source code and activation signature for the geas that binds the entity called Teapot—the thing that over an eighty-year span became Angleton. It doesn’t even matter that our safe-breakers have stolen a ringer—at least, I assume Angleton gave me a ringer—the fact that they knew what to look for in the first place is really bad news.

“You’d better come with me,” says Jo, and I suddenly notice that she’s shifted her grip to my forearm and she’s got fingers like handcuffs. “Form R60 time, Bob. And this time it’s not just a FATACC enquiry. As soon as my people have gone over the incident scene with a fine-toothed comb this will be going before the Auditors. I’m sorry.”

I DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT £200, AND DO NOT BUY Piccadilly Circus. I don’t go to jail, either—not yet—but by the middle of the morning a thirty-year stretch in Wormwood Scrubs would come as a blessed relief.

“Committee of enquiry will come to order.”

I’ve been here before, and I didn’t like it the first time. The panel has requisitioned a small conference room, furnished in nineties government brutalist-lite: Aeron chairs and bleached pine table, health and safety posters on one wall, security notices on the other. The tribunal sits at the far end of the table, like a pin-striped hanging judge and his assistants. And they’ve rolled out that fucking carpet again, the one with the gold thread design woven into it, and the Enochian inscription, and the live summoning grid powerful enough to twist tendons and snap bones.

There is no peanut gallery at this trial. Jo is waiting outside with a couple of blue-suiters and the other designated witnesses, but the Auditors want no inconvenient onlookers who might have to be bound to silence or memory-wiped, should I accidentally disclose material above their level of classification.

“Please state your name and job title.” There’s a recorder on the desk, as usual: its light is glowing red.

“Bob Howard. Senior Specialist Officer grade 3. Personal assistant to Tea—er, DSS Angleton.”

That causes a minor stir. One of the Auditors—female, blonde, lateforties—turns sideways and says something to the others that I ought to be able to hear, but can’t. The other two nod. She turns back and addresses me directly. “Mr. Howard. You are aware of the terms of this investigation. You are aware of the geas it is conducted under. You have our special dispensation to respond to any question, the first time it is posed—and only the first time—by warning us if in your judgment the reply would require you to disclose codeword-classified information. Please state your understanding of this variance, in your own words.”

I clear my throat. “If you ask me about sensitive projects I’m allowed to stonewall—once. If you ask me again, I have to tell you, period. Uh, I assume that’s because you’d prefer to keep the enquiry from accidentally covering so many highly classified subjects that nobody is allowed to read its findings . . . ?”

She smiles drily. “Something like that.” It feels like the Angel of Death has just perched on my shoulder, paused from sharpening its blade, and quietly squawked: Who’s a pretty Polly? Then the sense of immanent ridiculous demise passes. Ha ha, I slay myself . . .

The Chief Auditor nods, then looks at the legal pad before him. “Yesterday you visited the library front desk. What was your objective?”

Lie back and think of England—and nothing else. “Angleton gave me a reading list,” I said. “He told me to bring back a particular document.” Pause. “Oh, and Mo wanted me to pick up a copy of a report she’d asked for, but it wasn’t in yet.”

There is no prickling of high tension current in my legs to warn me that my partial truth is unacceptable.

“Who is ‘Mo’?” asks Auditor #3.

“Dr. Dominique O’Brien. Epistemological Warfare Specialist grade 4.”

Auditor #3 leans forward hungrily. “Why did this person ask you to collect a document on their behalf?” he demands.

I blink, nonplussed. “Because I told her I was going to the library, and she was busy. She’s my wife.”

Auditor #3 looks baffled for a few seconds, his bloodhound trail evaporating in a haze of aniseed fumes. “You’re married?”

“Yes.” This would be hilarious if I wasn’t scared silly by the sleeping horror I am standing on that will sense any attempt at deception and—

“Oh.” He makes a note on his pad and subsides.

The blonde Auditor gives him a very old-fashioned look, then turns to me: “Are you cleared for the content of her work?” she asks.

Huh? “I have no idea,” I say sincerely. “We only discuss projects we’re working on after comparing codeword access and if necessary asking for clearance.” Then the glyph on the goddamn rug forces me to add, “But this time it doesn’t matter, the document hadn’t arrived anyway.”

She scribbles something on her own notepad. “Did Dr. O’Brien tell you anything about this particular note?” she asks.

I blink. “I have no idea. She simply gave me the file reference number—no codeword.”

More notes, more significant looks. The senior Auditor stares at me over the gold half-moon rims of his spectacles. “Mr. Howard. Please indicate if you are familiar with any of these individuals. Matthias Hoechst, Jessica Morgenstern, George Dower, Nikolai Panin—” He nods at my hand signal. “Describe what you know about Nikolai Panin.”

“I had a pint with him in the Frog and Tourettes the day before yesterday.”

The effect is astonishing: the Auditors jerk to attention like a row of frogs with cattle prods up their backsides. I meet their appalled gaze with a sense of sublime lightness. They want the truth? Okay, they can fucking have the truth.

“I reported it as a contact to the BLOODY BARON committee at the first opportunity, and it was agreed to keep it quiet for the time being. Panin seems to have wanted to pass on a warning about Teapot. He was concerned that it was missing, and that as its last custodians we ought to ensure it was found before the wrong persons got their hands on it and, uh, ‘made tea.’” I smile blandly. “Angleton authorized me to read the WHITE BARON files and I have inferred the identity of Teapot.”

The Chief Auditor shakes his head. “Bloody hell,” he grumbles, then, to me: “Do you know where Angleton is?”

I open my mouth—then pause. Now I can feel the electric flare of the geas tickling the fine hairs on my legs.

The blonde Auditor narrows her eyes. “Speak,” she commands.

I can’t not speak, but I still have some control. “I don’t believe Angleton has assigned it a codeword yet,” I hear myself saying, “but his disappearance is connected with an ongoing investigation and I don’t think he wants me to tell anyone about it . . .”

My legs feel as if they’re immersed in cold fire up to the knees. I gasp for breath, just as the Chief Auditor hastily holds up his hand: “Stay of execution! The subject has invoked the security variance.” He peers at me. “Can you confirm that you are cognizant of Angleton’s whereabouts?”

I nod, jerkily. The chilly, searing fingers recede down my calves.

“In your judgment, is Angleton working in the best interests of this institution?”

I nod like a parcel shelf ornament.

“Also in your judgment, would it impair his work on behalf of this institution if we continue to explore this line of enquiry?”

I think for a moment. Then I nod, emphatically.

“Very well.” Light glints on his spectacles as he looks at me for a few seconds. “On your recommendation, we will not enquire further—unless you have something you would like to tell us?”

Careful, Bob! This is an Audit board you’re up against. They’re at their most dangerous when they’re being reasonable, and they can turn all the fires of hell—imaginary or otherwise—on you if you don’t cooperate.

I take a deep breath. “I’m confused,” I finally say. “I thought this was an enquiry about the break-in and theft from my office safe, but you’ve been asking questions about Angleton and Mo instead. What’s going on?”

Wrong question: Auditor #3 smiles sharkishly and the blonde Auditor shakes her head. “It is not in the remit of this committee to answer questions,” says the Chief Auditor, a trifle archly. “Now, back to the matter in hand. I have some questions about office supplies. When did you last order stationery fasteners from office stores, and how many and what type did you request . . . ?”

WHILE I’M BEING HAULED OVER THE COALS, MO RISES AT HER usual hour, makes coffee, eats a cereal bar, reads my text message. It’s along the lines of HELD UP AT WORK IN COMMITTEE. She frowns, worried but not unduly alarmed. (My texts range from verbose and eloquent—when I’m bored—to monosyllabic, when the entire cesspit is about to be ingested by a jet engine. This intermediate level is indicative of stress, but not of mortal danger.)

She leaves the dregs of the coffee in the pot, and the cereal bar wrapper on top of the other waste in the kitchen bin. She goes upstairs, dresses, collects violin and coat, and leaves.

Sometimes Mo works in the New Annexe; and sometimes she doesn’t. There’s an office in the Royal College of Music where her name is one of three listed on the door. There’s a course in philosophy of mathematics at King’s College where she sometimes lectures—and forwards reports on her pupils to Human Resources. And she’s a regular visitor at the Village, across the fens and up the coast by boat, where the Laundry keeps certain assets that don’t belong in a crowded city. Today, she sets out by tube, heading for the city center. She is on her way to ask Mr. Dower whether he did in fact mail his report. And she is in for a surprise.

Watch the red-haired woman in a black suit, violin case in hand, walking up the pavement towards the shuttered shopfront with the blue-and-white police incident tape stretched across the doorway. Traffic cones with more tape stand to either side of the shop front, fluttering in the light breeze. She pauses, nonplussed, then looks around. There is a police officer standing discreetly by, hands clasped behind his back. She glances back at the taped-off doorway. There is no dark stain on the lintel—the SOC officers and the cleanup crew did their job well—but the ward she wears under her blouse buzzes a warning. Her expression hardens, and she walks towards the constable, reaching into her handbag to produce an identity card.

“What happened here, officer?” she asks quietly, holding the card where he can’t help but see it.

He doesn’t stand a chance. “Who, uh, oh dear . . .” He shakes his head. “Ma’am. Murder scene. You can’t go, I mean, you shouldn’t . . .”

“Who’s in charge here?” she enquires. “Where can I find them?”

“That’d be DI Wolfe, from MIT 4. He’s set up shop round the back—that way, that alley there—who should I say—”

“In the name of national security, I command and require you to forget me,” she says, slipping the card away and turning towards the alley that runs around to the back of the row of four shops. The constable’s eyes close momentarily; by the time he opens them again, the woman with the violin case is gone.

Ten minutes later, the back door to George Dower’s shop clicks open. Two figures step inside: a uniformed detective sergeant and the woman. Both of them wear disposable polythene slippers over their shoes; she still holds her violin case. “Don’t touch anything—tell me what you want to look at,” he says, pulling on a pair of disposable gloves. “What exactly are you after?”

“First of all, what state is his PC in?”

“It wasn’t stolen, so we bagged it.” The sergeant sounds sure of himself. “If you’re wanting to scrape the hard drive, we can have an image of it available in an hour or so.”

Mo cools slightly. If the killer left the PC behind, then there’s almost certainly nothing left on it but random garbage, an entropic mess that not even CESG will be able to unerase. “Any memory sticks? Small stuff? CD-Rs?”

“We bagged them, too.” The sergeant picks his way into Dower’s workshop, which still reeks of rosin and varnish. A row of disemboweled instruments hang from a rail overhead, like corpses in the dissectionist’s cold parlor. Those tools that are not in their places on the pegboard that covers one wall are laid out on the bench in parallel rows, neatly sorted by size. The metal parts gleam like surgical steel, polished and unnaturally bright.

“Any papers?”

The sergeant pauses beside a rolltop desk, itself an antique, Victorian or Edwardian. “Yes,” he says reluctantly. “They’re scheduled for pickup tomorrow so we can continue working on the contact list. Receipts, suppliers’ brochures, estimates, that sort of thing.”

“I’m looking for an appraisal of a customer’s instrument,” she tells him. “It will be dated yesterday or the day before, and it relates to a violin. It may be in an unmarked envelope, like this one.” She produces an envelope from her bag.

“Like that—” The officer’s eyes widen and his back straightens. “Would you happen to have any information about the killer?” he asks. “Because if so—”

Mo shakes her head. “I do not know who the killer is.” The sergeant stares at her, seeking eye contact. “The victim was commissioned to prepare a report for my department. He was due to post it on the evening when the incident occurred. It has not been delivered.”

“What was he meant to report on?”

Mo makes eye contact at last, and the detective sergeant recoils slightly from whatever he sees in her expression. “You have no need to know. If it appears that there is a connection between the report and the killing, my department will notify Inspector Wolfe immediately. Similarly, if the identity of the killer comes to our attention.” She doesn’t add, in such a way that we can disclose it without violating security protocol: that much is always understood to be a minor chord in the uneasy duet of spook and cop. “The report, however, is a classified document and should be treated as such.” And she raises her warrant card again.

The detective sergeant is clearly torn between the urgent desire to get her into an interview room and the equally urgent desire to get her the hell out of this shop, and away from what was until a few minutes ago a straightforward—if rather unusual—murder investigation; but being on the receiving end of a Laundry warrant card is an oh-shit moment. It begins with the phrase Her Britannic Majesty’s government commands and compels you to provide the bearer of this pass with all aid and assistance , written atop a design of such subtle and mind-numbing power that it makes the reader’s breath catch in his throat as suddenly as if trapped by a hangman’s noose. He can no more ignore it—and no more ignore her instructions—than he can ignore a gun pointed at his head.

“What do you want?” he finally asks.

“I want the contents of that report.” She lowers her card. “I suspect the killer doesn’t want me to have it. So if you find it, call me.” She produces a business card and he takes it. Then her roving gaze settles on the desk. “Oh, and one other thing. Are there any paper clips or staples in there? Because if so, I want them all.”

“Paper clips?”

“Yes, I want all the paper clips and staples in that desk.” Her cheek quirks. “Mr. Dower was the type to fasten a report together before folding it and putting it in an envelope. And where there’s a link, there’s a chain of evidence.”

THE AUDIT BOARD CHEWS ME UP AND SPITS ME OUT IN LESS than an hour. Light as thistledown and dry as a dead man’s tongue I walk through the door, past the seated witnesses—the blue-suiters are collecting Choudhury now, ushering him into the Presence—and drift on stumbling feet towards my office. Except I don’t get very far: instead I bump up against a blue translucent bubble that seems to have swallowed the corridor, and everything in it, just before Iris’s office door. The bubble is warm and rubbery and I have a feeling that it would be a very bad idea indeed to try and bull my way through it, so I turn round and go back the other way, towards the coffee station.

I’m just scooping brown powder into a filter cone (the jug was empty right when I most needed it, as usual) when Iris clears her throat behind me.

“I’ve been Audited,” I say, in answer to her silent question. “I don’t think it went badly, but I gather I’m not allowed back in my office just yet.”

“No one is,” she says, surprisingly calmly. “Are you making a fresh pot?”

“Sure.” I slide the basket back into the coffee maker and hit the brew button. Iris watches me silently.

“Um, as a matter of fact, you won’t be going back to work for a bit,” she says.

“I—what?” The coffee machine clears its throat behind me as I stare at her.

“The civilian FATACC incident when you were out at Cosford has been upgraded.” Her expression is apologetic. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it, I know, but the Incident Committee has escalated it to Internal Affairs and they actioned me to notify you that you’re being suspended on full pay pending a full hearing.”

“They’re what?” I hear my voice rise uncontrollably, cracked. But what about Angleton’s plan? “But it’s not a FATACC anymore—”

“Bob! Bob? Calm down. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m sure the hearing will exonerate you; they don’t want you in the office until it’s over. It’s just a routine precaution—Bob?”

She’s talking to my back—I’m halfway down the corridor by the time she says my name, then round the bend and halfway down the twist that takes me to the stairwell to Angleton’s office. Because (fuck Helen Langhorn and her KGB sleeper medals, part of me is swearing furiously) I know damn well that I’m going to be exonerated, because the victim wasn’t a victim: she was a hostile agent who poked her nose into an off-limits area at the wrong time. So the question is: Why now? And there’s only one species of answer that fits—

I take the stairs two at a time, thudding down them hard enough to raise dust from the elderly carpet, bouncing off the bannister rail and caroming up against the door. I raise my phone and squint through its magic-mirror eye, seeing that the wards are merely the usual ones, and then I twist the doorknob and push.

“Boss?” I glance around the empty room. The Memex sits in its corner, hulking like a sleeping baby elephant; the filing cabinets are all neatly shut and sealed. “Boss?”

He’s not here. My spine crawls. Need to leave him a message. I head for the Memex and slide into the operator’s seat.

WRITE CLEARANCE.

I foot-type TEAPOT and wait for the soul-mangling symbol to disappear.

WRITE.

The menu prompt is empty. MESSAGE, I type. The prompt changes, and I keep going.

BOSS, THEY TOOK THE BAIT. PROBLEM: IA ARE SUSPENDING ME OVER COSFORD. AUDITORS MORE INTERESTED IN PAPER CLIPS. MY MOBILE NUMBER IS: . . .

Angleton isn’t a total technophobe. As long as he has my phone number he can get in touch. But now I’ve got another problem: I’m not supposed to be here. So I switch off the Memex carefully and stand up, and I’m just on the point of tiptoeing out of the room when two blue-suiters appear out of nowhere and grab my wrists.

“Careful now, sir. We wouldn’t want to make a fuss, would we?”

I look past his shoulder at Iris. She looks concerned. “Bob, what are you doing? Didn’t I tell you you were being suspended?”

I pant for breath. My heart’s hammering and my palms are slippery. “I was hoping—Angleton—”

She shakes her head sympathetically, then tuts to herself. “I think you’re overwrought. He’s been having a bad time lately,” she explains to the blue-suiters. “You need to go home and relax badly, don’t you, Bob?”

I can take a hint. I nod.

Blue-suit #2 clears his throat apologetically. “If he’s not cleared for this room, ma’am—” he begins.

“No, that’s all right,” Iris says, casting me a quelling look. “He’s—he was—personal secretary to DSS Angleton. He’s cleared for this room, and he’s not required to be off the premises until noon, and he obviously hasn’t touched anything”—I blink at that, but keep my mouth shut—“so you may feel free to report it, but he hasn’t actually violated the security articles. Yet.” She taps her wristwatch. “Not for another nine minutes. So I suggest you might want to take a deep breath and let these gentlemen escort you to the front door, Bob?”

She’s right. I really don’t want to still be in the building when my permission is suspended—the consequences would be drastic and painful, I imagine. “I’ll go quietly,” I hear myself saying. “If you’d like to lead the way . . .”

AT TWELVE THIRTY EXACTLY I FIND MYSELF STANDING ALONE in the middle of a concrete emptiness, the blurred ghosts of shoppers darting around me like shadows beneath a pitiless sun. I can’t remember how I came to this place. My hands are shaking and I can’t see the future. All I can see is gray. The sun is beating down but I’m cold inside. I keep seeing a purple flash, the old woman’s face rotting and flaking and shrinking around her skull before me; the thing on the bike path, growling deep in its throat.

(They took my pistol. “Don’t want you to go carrying that around when you’re all depressed, sir,” the blue-suiter told me.) I’d phone Mo and ask her to pick up another ward if I wasn’t feeling so frustrated and ineffectual.

Everything’s fallen apart at the very worst time, and it’s all my fault.

Item: There is a security breach. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom—hereafter and forevermore to be known as the Goatfuckers, because that’s the least of what they get up to and I don’t want to think about them eating the blonde teacher’s face—have got an informer inside the Laundry.

I walk past a bus stop and an overflowing litter bin, the ashtray on its lid smoking and fulminating. There’s a disgusting stench of cheap tobacco and smoldering filter wadding. A convoy of buses rumbles past slowly, like a troupe of implausibly red elephants walking trunk-to-tail.

Item: They followed Mo home and they’re following me, and unless I’m very much mistaken they want the key that binds the Eater of Souls, which is probably one of our most powerful weapons. (Disguised as a public school master indeed!)

There’s a rundown concrete suburban shopping mall here, a brutalist plaza surrounded by walkways overlooking cheap supermarkets, an off-license, and a shuttered chemist’s. Abandoned disposable carrier bags clog the gutters. I walk beneath a bridge between two piers, and up an arcade walled by the display windows of empty shop units, as grimy as my sense of self-worth.

Item: The Goatfuckers aren’t the only people who are into the Laundry; Panin and the Thirteenth Directorate clearly know a lot more than I do about the CODICIL BLACK SKULL flights, Triple-six Squadron, and the Eater of Souls (who keeps cropping up in this mess like a bad penny). And anything that worries the KGB ought to worry the hell out of me, too.

I come out of the arcade in a wide alley lined with loading bays, rusting metal shutters drawn down across concrete slabs. Overflowing dumpsters redolent with the sweet fetor of dead rats lean between scraped and battered steel bollards, huddling together like school kids sharing a fag behind the bike shed. The sky is clouding over, the merciless sun shrouded by dirty clouds of doubtful provenance. I keep walking.

Item: The Auditors wanted to know about Mo, and about paper clips. I know about paper clips and why they’re a security risk. (The laws of contagion and sympathy are fundamental to all systems of magic: quantum entanglement and spooky action-at-a-distance for the witch doctor set. More prosaically, if you’ve got a paper clip from the same box as a sibling that’s clipped to a top secret file . . . you figure it out. Okay?) But why did they want to know about Mo? What was the document she wanted me to retrieve? Am I missing something? What if it’s not all about me, or Angleton? The business in Saint Martin a few years ago should have been a wake-up call. Just because I’m under investigation, it doesn’t mean she—

—The hell I’m under investigation. No. I’m under suspicion. But suspicion of what?

My feet carry me past the end of the delivery alley and across a road where a cast-iron railway bridge shadows the terraced houses, their fronts smeared with smuts from the diesel locomotives that rumble overhead, freighting coal to the power stations that keep the lights burning and the hard drives turning. There is a cycle path here, and my feet seem to know which way they’re going. I turn left and find myself on an incline, ascending a tree-flanked slope. The faint tinkle of a bell prompts me to stand aside as an urban cyclist in luminous lycra zips past, coasting in the opposite direction.

Item: Angleton wants to use me as a tethered goat, but I’m not much use to him if I’m not in the right place when the Goatfuckers come calling. Damn, I hope he gets my message via the Memex. Where are we leaking? Is it via the BLOODY BARON committee? That seems to be the logical place, but . . .

A chill creeps over me and I glance up at a turbid cloudscape that wasn’t there five minutes ago, swirling masses of dirty cumulonimbus crammed with a promise of rain to come. Uh-oh. Here’s me, out and about in a lightweight summer jacket. I really ought to head for home. I keep walking, because it seems like the thing to do, although the shadows are lengthening among the dark green trees to either side. The cycle path is empty; I ought to start looking for an exit from it that’ll take me back down to street level and a bus stop or tube station. I glance behind me, but I can’t see the ramp I came up anymore.

Item: Doctor Mike’s research finding about the early onset of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Let’s hypothesize that the Goatfuckers heard about it by way of our security breach. We know the Goatfuckers want CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to come about—they’re fans of the old, dead nightmares that will stalk the planet once more. (They worship the things. How twisted is that?) Ford’s new finding suggests that the onset conditions for tearing a hole in the structure of reality are a bit more flexible than we previously thought. Which suggests that there are things the Goatfuckers can do to accelerate the onset of apocalypse, the stars coming right as the pulp writer put it. They’re showing an interest in the Eater of Souls. Why? Do they think that if they get their hands on the Fuller Memorandum they can control him, make him do something unspeakable that will shiver the stars in their tracks and split the sky apart like—

—I look up. “Oh fuck.” Then I shut my mouth and save my breath for more important activities. Like, for example, running away.

While I have been wandering aimlessly, locked in my head, my feet have guided me onto a dismal path. There are no cyclists or pedestrians in sight, just an endless dark strip of tarmac that curves out of sight ahead and behind me, surrounded by impenetrable walls of spiny evergreen shrubs that lean inwards above my head. I can’t see through the hedge, but there are pallid mushroom-like structures bursting from the soil around their roots. The cloudscape overhead is turbulent and dappled, side-lit by sunlight slanting under its floor—even though there are hours yet to go until sunset—and the ever-shifting whirlpools and knots of darkness roll and dance, lit from within by the snapshots of cosmic paparazzi.

I have no idea how I got here and I’m not amused with myself for succumbing to what was, at a guess, a very low-key glamour, but the urge to get out and find a safe refuge is overwhelming. Every instinct is screaming that I’m in immediate danger. And so I begin to jog, just as the U-boat klaxon starts to honk urgently from my breast pocket.

“Bob?” It’s Mo.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” I pant. “What’s up?”

“The memo I was after, are you sure it wasn’t in?”

Huh? “I’m dead sure. Listen, what was it about?”

“That external appraisal of my violin, I told you about that, remember?”

“Oh, that—”

“The examiner was murdered! About thirty-six hours ago. Bob, if they think you’ve got the violin report—”

“Listen, let me give you an update. I’ve been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I’m heading home now, but I’m in a spot of bother and they took my pistol. Angleton isn’t AWOL: Can you find him and tell him he was right, the Goatfuckers are after the bait and I need backup right now—”

The NecronomiPod beeps at me three times and drops the call.

“Fuck.” I thumb-tap the software ward back to life, then shove the JesusPhone back in my pocket and keep jogging, breathing heavily now. There’s a breeze in my face, shoving me back and slowing me down, and the surface of the footpath feels greasy and turgid, almost sticky. The sense of wrongness is overwhelming. I have a sense of déjà vu, harking back to my midnight run, although that path was miles away and didn’t look anything like . . .

Oh. Am I on a siding? I ask myself, as the headwind builds and the shadows deepen. I hear distant thunder and the first heavy slap of rain-drops on the path ahead: Did the Necropolitan line have branches that were edited out of the public record decades ago, by any chance?

The hoarse scream of a ghostly steam whistle echoes in my ears. It’s behind me. And it’s gaining ground.

It’s funny how you lose track of a situation while it spins out of control: in the space of about fifteen minutes I’ve let myself be led by the nose—or rather, the feet—from a busy suburban high street in London, right into an occult trap. There are places where the walls of reality are thin; the service corridors of hotels, subway footpaths at night, hedge-mazes and cycle paths. You can get lost in such places, led astray by a lure and a snare and a subliminal suggestion. These routes blend into one another. Of all the myriad ways that link the human realm to the other places, these are the ones we know very little about—because those of us who stumble into them seldom return with their minds intact.

I can feel my heart hammering as I run. The hedges to either side brandish spikes edged with a nacreous rind of blight. There are pale white shapes embedded in the wall of leaves, the flensed bones of intruders trapped in the interstices of the vegetative barrier. Overhead, the clouds are black as smoke from the funnel of a racing steam locomotive, boiling and raging at the ground. I don’t dare look back, even though I’m sure I’m being herded towards an ambush: the phone in my pocket is buzzing and vibrating in urgent Morse, signaling the presence of hostile intent.

I need to get off the path. The trouble is, there’s nowhere to go—

Hang on, I think. Am I seeing true?

There is this about the interstitial paths: it takes a fair bit of power to open a gate, and I didn’t notice any pentacles and altars draped in eviscerated goats during my walk through the decaying shopping center. On the other hand, it takes relatively little power to fake up a glamour to provide the illusion of a dark path. Wheezing, I reach for my phone, thumb it on, and slow my stride just enough that I can see the display. Bloody Runes, ward detector, turn the camera on the footpath—

A silver thread, disappearing around the bend ahead of me. I pan sideways, and the camera blurs then clears, showing me ordinary English nettles and a thinly spaced row of trees pruned well back from the path. It’s bright, too, the ground dappled with summer daylight filtered through the branches overhead. Gotcha. I jink sideways, towards the menacing hedgerow on my right, slowing, eyes focused on the face of my phone as the shadows of the thorny wall loom over me—

And I crash through a stand of waist-high nettles and narrowly miss a young beech tree as the hedge and the thunderstorm sky vanish like the illusion they are.

“Ow!” I swear under my breath, the hot-bright pinprick sting of nettles rising on the back of my phone hand. I examine the side of the cutting the path runs through. Yes, it’s familiar. I’ve been here before, or somewhere very like it. Except for the lack of pedestrians walking the dog, or cyclists en route from one side of town to the other, it could be a normal bike track. But this one’s been warded off; anyone starting down it who isn’t wanted is going to feel a mild sense of dread, rising after a while to an urgent conviction that they need to be anywhere else.

I thumb my phone back to the start screen, and look for a signal. There’s nothing showing. That shouldn’t be possible, not on a major network in the middle of a city, but there are zero bars. Do the bad guys have a jammer? It wouldn’t be unheard of. And they knew enough to lay a snare right outside the New Annexe, one tailored for me . . . that is not good news. I sit down behind a tree, careful to check that I’m concealed from the path by that stand of stinging nettles, and then I do something that’s overdue: I compose an email to the two people I know I can trust—Angleton and Mo. The JesusPhone is smart enough to keep looking for a connection, and to send the mail as soon as it snags a signal. Then I compose a slightly different email to a whole bunch of people I don’t entirely trust, remembering to include Angleton and Mo on the recipient list, and send it. Now that should set the cat among the pigeons. My heartbeat is just about back to normal by the time I finish, and my lungs aren’t burning anymore, so I slide my phone into an inside jacket pocket and stand up.

Click-clack. “Don’t move.”