6. RED ORCHESTRA

LET US TEMPORARILY LOOK ASIDE FROM YR. HMBL. CRSPNDNT’S work diary to contemplate a very different matter: a vignette of street life in central London. I am not, myself, a witness: so this is, to some extent, a work of imaginative reconstruction.

Visualize the scene: a side street not far from Piccadilly Circus in London, an outrageously busy shopping district crammed on both sides with fashion chains and department stores. Even the alleys are lined with bistros and boutiques, tidied up to appeal to the passing trade. Pedestrians throng the pavements and overflow into the street, but vehicle traffic is light—thanks to the congestion charge—and slow—thanks to the speed bumps.

Here comes a red-haired woman, smartly dressed in a black skirt, houndstooth-check jacket, medium heels. She’s holding a violin case in one hand, her face set in an expression of patient irritation beneath her makeup: a musician heading to a recital, perhaps. She looks slightly uncomfortable, out-of-sorts as she weaves between a pair of braying office workers, yummy mummies pushing baby buggies the size of lunar rovers, a skate punk in dreads, and a beggar woman in hijab. She cuts across the pavement on Glasshouse Street, crosses the road between an overheating BMW X5 and a black cab, and turns into Shaftesbury.

Somewhere in the teeming alleys behind Charing Cross Road there is a narrow-fronted music shop, its window display empty but for a rack of yellowing scores and a collection of lightly tarnished brass instruments. The woman pauses in front of the glass, apparently examining the sheet music. In fact, she’s using the window as a mirror, checking the street behind her before she places one hand on the doorknob and pushes. Her close-trimmed nails are smoothly sheathed in enamel the color of overripe grapes: there are calluses on the tips of her fingers.

A bell jingles somewhere out of sight as she enters the shop.

“Good afternoon?”

One side of the shop is occupied by a counter, glass bound in old oak, running back towards a bead-curtained alcove at the rear of the premises. A cadaverous and prematurely aged fellow with watery eyes, dressed as conservatively as an undertaker, shuffles between the hanging strings of beads and blinks at her disapprovingly.

“Mr. Dower? George Dower?” The woman smiles at him tightly, her lips pursed to conceal her teeth.

“I have that honor, yes.” He looks at her as if he wishes she’d go away. “Do you have an appointment?”

“As a matter of fact”—the woman slides a hand into her black leather handbag and produces a wallet, which falls open to display a card—“I do. Cassie May, from Sotheby’s. I called yesterday?” The card glistens with a strange iridescent sheen in the dim artificial light.

“Oh yes!” His expression brightens considerably. “Yes indeed! A restoration project, I am to understand . . . ?”

“Possibly.” The woman swings her violin case up above the glass counter then gently lowers it. “Our client has asked us to obtain a preliminary valuation, and also to inquire about the cost of certain necessary restoration work for an instrument of similar manufacture that is currently in storage in a degraded condition—it’s too fragile to move.” She reaches into her handbag again and when she takes her hand out, she’s holding an envelope. “Before examining the instrument, I would like you to sign this non-disclosure agreement.” She removes a thin document from the envelope.

Mr. Dower is surprised. “But it’s just a violin! Even if it’s a rarity—” He does a double take. “Isn’t it?”

The woman shakes her head silently, then hands him the papers.

Mr. Dower scans the first page briefly then glances up at her. “This isn’t from Sotheby’s—”

“If anybody asks you who I am and why I’m here, you will tell them I’m Cassie May, from Sotheby’s auction house, inquiring about a valuation.” She doesn’t smile. “You will now read the document and sign it.”

Almost as if he can’t help himself, Mr. Dower’s eyes return to the document. He scans it rapidly, mumbling under his breath as he turns the three pages. Wordlessly, he produces a pen from his inside jacket pocket.

“Not like that.” The woman offers him a disposable sterile needle: “First, you must draw blood. Then sign using this pen.” She waits patiently while he presses a digit against the needle, winces, and rubs the nib of the pen across the ball of his thumb. He makes no complaint about the unusual request, and doesn’t seem to notice the way she produces a small sharps container for the office supplies and carefully folds the document back into its envelope. “Good. By the authority vested in me I bind you to silence, under pain of the penalties specified in this document. Do you understand?”

Mr. Dower stares at the violin case as if stunned. “Yes,” he mutters.

The woman who calls herself Cassie May unclips the lid of the violin case and lays it open before him.

Mr. Dower stares into the case for ten long seconds, barely breathing. Then he shudders. “Excuse me,” he says, hastily covering his mouth. He turns and stumbles through the bead curtain. A few seconds later she hears the sound of retching.

The woman waits patiently until Mr. Dower reappears, looking pale. “You can shut that,” he tells her.

“If you want.” She shrugs. “I take it you’ve seen one before.”

“Yes.” He shudders again, his gaze unfocused. He seems to be staring down inner demons. “What do I have to do to get you to take it away?”

“You give me a written evaluation.” She has another piece of paper, this one containing a short list of bullet points. “As I said, a preliminary estimate of the cost of repairing such a . . . relic. A half-gram sample excised from the corpse of another identical instrument. All necessary materials to be provided by the customer. If you can assess the nature of the bindings that hold it together, my employers would like to be able to replicate them.”

He stares at her. “Who are you from? Who sent you here?”

“I’m from the government department responsible for keeping instruments like this out of your shop. Unfortunately there is a time for business as usual, and then . . . well. Can you do it?”

Mr. Dower stares at the wall behind her. “If I must.”

“Good. If you attach your invoice to the report I will see that it is processed promptly.”

“When do you need the report?” he asks, shaking himself as if awakening from a dream.

“Right now.” She walks over to the door and flips the sign to CLOSED.

“But I—” He swallows.

“I’m required to stay within arm’s reach of the instrument at all times. And to remove it from your premises when you are not working on it.” The woman doesn’t smile; in fact, her expression is faintly nauseated.

“Why? To prevent me stealing it?”

“No, Mr. Dower: to prevent it from killing you.”



I’M BACK IN MY OFFICE AFTER THE BLOODY BARON MEETING. The committee have minuted that I am to try and think myself into Angleton’s shoes (ha bloody ha); the coffee mug is cooling on the mouse mat beside my cranky old HP desktop as I sit here, head in hands, groaning silently and wishing I’d paid more attention in history classes rather than staring at the back of Zoe McCutcheon’s head and thinking about—let’s not go there. (Sixteen-year-old male: fill in the blanks.) All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me—why can’t we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?

There’s a pile of dusty manila folders sitting on my desk. Angleton said they were interesting, right before he went missing, and if that wasn’t a deliberate clue I’ll eat my pants. He’s a slithy old tove and I wouldn’t put it past him to have meant something significant, damn him. But all I’ve got is a list of hastily scrawled file reference numbers, pointers into the shelf positions documents are stored at in the stacks—nothing as simple as filenames, of course, that would be giving valuable information to the enemy. How like Angleton.

I pick up the first folder and open it. It contains a creased, dog-eared, and much folded letter, handwritten on paper that’s a weird size. I peer at the faded scrawl, trying to make head or tail of it. “Jesus, boss, what the hell . . . ?” Luckily I have a scanner with an automatic document feeder. I carefully feed the brittle pages to the computer, one at a time, twitching the software to maximum resolution. On the first page I pick up a reasonable high-contrast scan—there’s some ghosting, what looks like pale scribble showing through, as if the author tried to scrub something out—and zoom in. I puzzle out the date, first: October 11th, 1921. Then I turn the handwriting recognition software loose and sit back. After a while, it’s cooked and ready to read.

CLASSIFIED: S76/45


Dear John,

First of all, greetings from Reval! I sincerely hope this letter finds you experiencing a more clement climate than the Estonian autumn, which has clamped down in earnest this past week. Please give my best regards to Sonia.

I assume you have already received word through the wires about the execution of the Beast of Dauria last month. By all accounts he was given as fair a trial as the Reds could manage, and if even a tenth of the allegations leveled against him are true then I can’t see that they had any alternative but to shoot him. I have been paying special attention to the reports filtering out of Siberia about Semenov’s bandits, and Ungern Sternberg was by far the worst of a bad bunch. It was a beastly affair, and a bad end to a thoroughly bad fellow, and perhaps we should thank the Reds for ridding us of this monster.

However, his death leaves certain questions unanswered. I decided to visit his parents—not his father, but his mother and her husband, Sophie Charlotte and Baron Oskar Von Hoyningen-Huene. They live in Jerwakant, and although the weather is dismal—the snow is already lying four feet thick on the ground—I was able to arrange a weekend visit.

As you probably know, madness stalks the Ungern Sternberg line; the Baron’s father Theodor—once a keen amateur geologist, noted for his interest in unusual fossils—is in a sanatorium to this day. In my estimate Sophie Charlotte suffered considerably by proximity, for he deteriorated while they were still married; it is a difficult topic to raise in conversation, especially in light of the unfortunate fate of her son, and so I did not seek to disturb her, but made my observations indirectly.

The Hoyningen-Huene estate is a stately home that would grace any family of means, in any country. By winter it presents a fairy-tale face to the world, its steeply pitched roofs and turrets peaceful beneath a blanket of snow, an island of tranquility in the middle of the gloomy pine forest. But it is a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, rather than the bloodless and bowdlerized fare that our parents’ generation sought to raise us on! This is a castle of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and servants of the Russian Empire until the late upheaval deprived them of the object of their loyalty. And it is an estate that has been cut down to size, thanks to the decrees of the Riigikogu relating to land reform and the rights of the peasants to the fruits of their labor.

Evgenia and I visited with the Hoyningen-Huenes last weekend, ostensibly to write a tub-thumper for the Guardian about the equitable settlement in Rapla County, which has not seen so much turbulence and persecution of the former rulers as other areas: I put it about that we would also like to see the countryside thereabouts, and talk to some of the local landlords about the recent changes. The Guardian’s status as an English newspaper outweighs its political reputation in the backwoods: I had no shortage of correspondents, mostly of the Indignant of Colchester variety so familiar to us from the letter columns.

On Sunday afternoon, after the obligatory morning visit to the chapel—which was very Lutheran in that manner that is peculiar to the Baltic territories, with gloomy danse macabre and carved skull heraldry above the bare wood pews, and do I need to add, unheated even in winter?—I had a chance to chat with the Baron, and by way of two or three glasses of schnapps the subject of the Prodigal rose to the surface.

“He has always been a disappointment to me, and a tribulation to his mother,” quoth Oskar Hoyningen-Huene. “This latest shame is but the final straw—luckily the final one—on the pyre of his depravity.” He sighed deeply at this point. “I tried to beat sense into him when he was young, you know. But he was always a wild one. Took after his father, and then there was the obsession with Shamanism, like the nonsensical garbage Theodor plagued my wife with before she divorced him.”

“Garbage?” I asked, digging. I intimated, indirectly, that I had been asked to prepare a column about his adoptive son, but had declined to do so out of respect for the recently bereaved.

Oskar snorted. “No son of mine,” he said, with cold deliberation, “would have done what that beast did. He wrote us letters, you know, boasting of it! Executing prisoners by quartering—tying their limbs to springy saplings. Mass hangings, stabbings, shootings. Said he was going to line the road to Moscow with Commissars and Jews, impaled every couple of yards—heaven knows I’ve got no time for yids myself, but he pledged to kill them all, to purify Russia and reinstate serfdom. Can you believe it? And there was other stuff, dark stuff. Absolutely disgusting.”

I asked what he did with the letters.

“I burned them!” he said indignantly. “All but a couple that Sophie refused to let me have. I hadn’t the heart to deprive her of . . . well. Memories.” He subsided into a sulky silence for a few minutes, but bestirred himself with the assistance of a fresh glass. “There were his father’s fossils, you know. I think that’s where the rot set in.”

“Fossils?” I asked.

“Rum things, never seen anything like them. I think Sophie left them in the boy’s room. He used to play with them when he was a tot, you know. I’d find him staring at the things. Thought he was going to grow up to be a geologist like his pa, which would have been no bad thing compared to how he turned out.”

Knowing of your interests, and learning that his mother had actually preserved the Prodigal’s bedroom—untouched! As if she expected her son to return!—I availed myself of an opportunity to look inside, in hope of getting some insight into his character.

(ENCLOSED: 8 faded black and white photographs of irregular pieces of rock, cleaved along fracture planes. Most of the pieces appear to be slate, although it is hard to be certain. The fossils resemble certain other samples referenced by codeword: ANNING BLUE SKULL.)

I think we’ve seen the like of these pieces before, haven’t we? “In those days, giants walked the Earth . . .”

I shall make indirect enquiries to see if it is possible to acquire Roman Von Ungern Sternberg’s boyhood fossil collection for the nation, and (if possible) his mother’s collection of letters. I shall also attempt to arrange a follow-up visit, although it is now unlikely to be practical until the spring thaw. (Chateau Hoyningen-Huene is somewhat isolated, and polite society does not travel much in winter: a premature visit would invite unwelcome scrutiny.) Meanwhile, I shall be wintering in Reval and will make use of my free time to investigate further the matter of the Bloody White Baron and the mystery he discovered in the Bogd Khan’s palace.

Your obedient friend,

Arthur Ransome

THE WOMAN WHO CALLS HERSELF CASSIE MAY WAITS PATIENTLY, sitting on a backless stool behind the antique cash register in George Dower’s shop while keeping an eye on the proprietor, who is busy in the workshop behind the bead curtain (which she has tied back, to afford her a clear view).

The back of the shop is not what she had expected. She’s been in instrument makers’ workshops before, smelled the glue and fresh-planed wood, the wax and varnish. She’s familiar with other musical specialties as well, with signal generators and plugboards, amps and filters, the hum and hot metallic smell of overdriven amplifiers. Dower’s shop is not like any of these. It has some of the characteristics of a jeweler’s workshop, or a watch repairer’s—but it is not entirely like either of those. It’s summer but the air is uncharacteristically chill, and not from air conditioning: it’s stuffy, and there’s a faint charnel-house scent, as if something has died under the floorboards.

Dower has donned a pair of white cotton conservator’s gloves and hung a dictaphone around his neck. He keeps the bone-white violin at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t want to hold it too close, muttering into his microphone: “C-rib thickness varies between 3.2 and 5.5 millimeters; as with the right lower curve, this material appears to be ductile and rigid, although examination at 6X magnification reveals the characteristic spongiform structure of endochondral ossification . . .” He swallows, as if nauseous—as well he might be. (The instrument is indeed made of bone, preserved and treated to give it a rigidity and resonance similar to mountain maple. The treatments that modify the material in this way are applied while its donor is still alive, and in excruciating pain.) Peering into a fiber-optic probe, the end of which is inserted through one of the violin’s f-holes: “The upper block appears to be carved from the body and lesser cornu of os hyoideum; the greater cornu is avulsed in a manner usually indicative of death by strangulation . . .”

Dower may suspect, but the woman knows, that the materials used to construct this instrument were harvested from the bodies of no less than twelve innocents, whose premature deaths were believed to be an essential part of the process. Before he became a highly specialized instrument maker, Dower trained as a surgeon. He’s a sensitive, trained to see what lies before his eyes: most people wouldn’t recognize the true horror of the instrument, seeing merely a white violin. Which is why the woman came here, after checking the files for a list of suitable examiners.

After almost three hours, Dower is flagging, but his work is nearly done. The woman is checking her watch now, with increasing concern. Eventually, finally, he replaces the bow in its recess and folds the lid of the case shut, snapping the latches closed. He steps back and fastidiously peels off his gloves, then drops them in a rubbish bin, being careful not to touch their contaminated outer surface with his bare skin. Finally he clicks off the dictaphone. “I’m done,” he says flatly.

The woman stands, smooths the wrinkles out of her skirt, and nods. “Your written report,” she says.

“I’ll write it up after I’ve had some lunch. You can collect it after four, this afternoon . . .”

She shakes her head. “I won’t be back.” Reaching into her bag she pulls out another envelope. “Print out one copy of your report—and no more—and place it in this envelope. Then seal it and post it.” There is no address on the envelope. “After you have done that, you should destroy your records. Erase your word processor files, burn the tapes, whatever it takes. You will be held responsible if your report leaks.”

“But there’s no—” He takes the envelope. “You’re sure?”

“If you post that envelope I will have the contents on my desk by morning,” she tells him, staring at him with pale green eyes as unquiet as a storm surge.

“I don’t want to see that thing ever again,” he tells her.

“You won’t.”

“But you want to know how to make more—”

“No.” Her face is as smooth as plaster, as if any hint of human emotion might crack the surface of her glaze: “I want to prove to my superiors that the cost is too high.”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Not given the magnitude of the threat we face. Desperate measures are called for; I merely believe this one to be too desperate. Good-bye, Mr. Dower. I trust we shall never meet again.”



BACK IN THE OFFICE:

Photograph One:

A large slate, resting on a table beside a wooden measuring rod. According to the rod it is twenty inches high and (inferred using a ruler) eighteen inches wide. Cleaved along a plane, it reveals a well-preserved fossil of what appears to be a starfish of class Asteroidea.

On closer inspection, there is something wrong with the fossil. Although it possesses the characteristic five-fold symmetry, each tentacle tip appears to be blunt, as if truncated. Moreover, the body doesn’t show signs of radial segmentation—it’s an integral whole, giving an effect more like a cross section through an okra fruiting body, or perhaps an oversized echinoderm—a sea cucumber.



Photograph Two:

Is another large slab of broken rock, this time revealing the partially dissected and fossilized arm of a juvenile BLUE HADES . . .

Photograph Three:

Is in the pile Bob has just dumped on the floor.

I rub my eyes and quietly snarl: “Fuck this shit!” The temptation to start jumping up and down and shouting is well-nigh irresistible, but my office shares a plasterboard partition with that of an easily distracted computer-phobic project manager, and the last time I punched the wall he made me come round and put all of his GANT chart stickies back in the right order on pain of being forced to attend a training course on critical path analysis. Which is deeply unfair, in my book—if the lines on one of Roskill’s charts don’t join up, all that happens is a project goes over budget: nobody gets eaten or goes insane (unless the Auditors decide to get involved)—but there’s no arguing with him: ex-RAF type, thinks he runs the country.

It’s almost too late for lunch, and all I’ve succeeded in figuring out so far is that F had a lot of interesting correspondents in the Baltic states, not to mention a huge and not entirely rational hard-on for the Bolsheviks. (Mind you, he was a bit unhinged in more ways than that.) On the other hand, this Ransome chap seems to have had his head screwed on. A journalist, obviously, but corresponding with a colonel in the War Office? And his correspondence ended up filed in the Laundry archives? That’s pretty suggestive. And those photographs . . . ! Roman Von Ungern Sternberg clearly had a disturbed childhood if his idea of fossil-collecting involved elder race relics. No wonder Daddy ended up in the loony bin and Mummy shacked up with a boringly conventional country squire with no questionable hobbies.

I look at the stack of files: nine of the bloody things, brown manila envelopes with dates and security classifications scribbled on their front, beneath the familiar Dho-Nha geometry curve of the Internal Security Sigil (“read this without authorization and your eyeballs will melt,” or words to that effect in one of the simpler Enochian metalanguages). They’re identified by number, using a system we call the Codex Mathemagica—four three-digit quads, just like IP addresses (and isn’t that a significant coincidence, given that the Laundry archives predate the internet by thirty years? Although the Laundry stacks use decimal as a native format, not two hex digits, now that I think about it: Does that mean their original numeric routines were written to manage BCD primitives?)—with no overall meaning except that they’re unique in the index . . .

Nine folders.

I rummage around on my desk for the original paper Angleton gave me. Weren’t there ten files there? Ten sets of numbers? I can’t find the note, damn it, but I know where I entered the document retrieval request. I wake my computer and call up the transaction log. Yup, ten files requested.

I look under my desk. Then I look behind my desk. Then I look in the circular filing cabinet, just in case. I recount the folders, double-checking inside them just in case the missing file has been interleaved.

Nine folders. Shit.

Have you ever found yourself in a cold sweat, your palms clammy and your clothes sticking to the small of your back? Heart hammering, even though you’re sitting down? Mouth dry as a mummy’s tomb?

I am a rough, tough, hardened field agent (yeah, right). I have been in the Laundry for nearly a decade. I’ve met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I’ve even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn’t know any better). But I’ve never lost a classified file before, and I don’t ever want there to be a first time.

I force myself to sit down and close my eyes for what feels like an hour, but is actually just under two minutes according to the clock on my computer’s screen. When I open my eyes, the problem is still there, but the sweat is beginning to dry and the panicked feeling has receded . . . for now. So I get down on my knees and start picking up the photographs, working through them until I am certain I’ve got them all in sequence, and then I put them in the correct envelope and very carefully stack it on my chair.

I pick up a Post-it pad and copy the number on the front of the envelope. Then I repeat, eight times, for the remaining envelopes. Then I hunt across my desk until—aha!—I find Angleton’s original spidery scrawl, numbers swimming before my eyes like exotic fish.

Ten numbers. I go through them checking off the files I’ve got, until I identify the number that’s missing. 10.0.792.560. Right.

I call up the requisition and look for 10.0.792.560. Sure enough, it’s there. So I ordered it, but it isn’t in my office. Double shit. I dumpster-dive the transaction file, looking for my request: Did they fill it? Oh. Oh my. DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF.

I just about faint with relief, but manage to force myself to pick up the phone and dial the front desk number. “Hello? Archives?” The voice at the far end is female, distracted, a little squawky, and all human—for which I am grateful: not all the archive staff are warm-blooded.

“Hi, this is Bob Howard in Ops? Back on Thursday I requested an archival document retrieval, ten dead files. I’m going through them now, and one of them is missing. I’ve got a file number, and an annotation saying DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF. Can you tell me what that means?”

“It means”—she sounds irritated—“the librarian couldn’t find your file. They looked where it was supposed to be and it wasn’t there.”

“Oh. Is there a direct mapping between the document reference number and a given shelf?”

“Yes, there is. You should really use code names and the index in case the file’s been assigned a new number, you know. It happens sometimes. Do you have a codeword for me? I could look it up for you . . .”

“I’m sorry, my colleague just gave me a list of document reference numbers,” I explain. “And he’s, uh, off sick. So I’m trying to figure out what’s missing. I was worried that the file had been sent over and got misplaced, but if it’s missing in the stacks I suppose that just means it’s been renumbered. Or he wrote down the wrong reference. Or something.” I don’t believe that last one for a split second—no way would Angleton get a file number wrong—but I don’t want some nosy librarian poking her nose into my investigation. “Bye.” I put the phone down and lean back, thinking.

Let’s see: Angleton was working on BLOODY BARON. When I came back to the office he gave me a list of ten files to read, then he went missing. This coincides with an upswing in Russian activity, including a marked willingness to use extreme measures. Nine files came from the stacks, and they turn out to be tedious backgrounders relating indirectly to the historical investigation side of BLOODY BARON. The tenth file isn’t on its shelf. All I’ve got is a number, not a name.

I think it’s time to do some unofficial digging . . .



MEANWHILE, BACK TO THE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION:

It is nearly six o’clock when Mr. Dower finishes typing his report.

He’s lost track of the time, his head locked inside the scope of his postmortem on the instrument. He’s read about its like before. Their design is attributed to a deaf-mute German violinist in Paris in the early 1920s, but nobody actually built one until the ghastly Dr. Mabuse commissioned an entire string section from a certain Berlin instrument maker in 1931. (It should be no surprise that the instrument maker prospered under the subsequent regime, but was executed after a summary trial by SMERSH investigators in 1946.) This particular instrument made its way to the West in the luggage of a returning GI, was retrofitted with electric pickups during the 1950s, and after a spectacular run of accidents was acquired by a reclusive collector in 1962—believed by some to be a front for a British government department who, as a matter of state policy, did not like to see such instruments in the wrong hands.

He dreads to think what its reappearance portends. On the other hand, the young woman who brought it to him—Mr. Dower thinks of everyone aged under fifty as “young”—seemed to have a sober appreciation of its lethality.

He shudders fastidiously as the last of five pages of single-spaced description hisses out of the ink-jet printer. It joins the half dozen contact pages of photographs, including his fiber-optic examination of the interior of the instrument, and an invoice for just over two thousand pounds. He shakes the bundle of pages together, and binds them neatly with a paper clip from a desk drawer. Then they go inside the envelope the woman who called herself Cassie May gave him. He licks the flap and seals it, then, in a moment of curiosity, he switches on the anti-counterfeit lamp he keeps by the cash register and examines it under ultraviolet light. Nothing shows up: it bears none of the UV-fluorescent dots the Post Office prints on envelopes to control their routing.

If “Cassie May” thinks she can retrieve an unmarked envelope from the postal system she’s welcome to it, in Mr. Dower’s books. He turns back to the computer and deletes his work, then sighs and glances at the clock. Five minutes to closing time: no point keeping the shop open any longer. He stands and stretches, switches the computer off, and goes through an abbreviated version of his regular closing routine; no point banking the cash register contents (his takings before the woman’s visit barely amounted to petty cash). He pulls on his coat, turns his coffee mug upside down on the draining board, switches off the lights, and opens the front door.

The woman is waiting for him. She smiles. “Have you finished your report?” she asks.

Mr. Dower nods, confused. “I was going to post it, as you requested.” He pats his coat pocket.

“I’m in a hurry. There’s a rush on. If you don’t mind . . . ?” She looks at him impatiently.

“Of course.” He pulls out the envelope and hands it to her. “My invoice is enclosed.”

“You don’t need to worry about that side of things.” She slides the envelope into her black patent leather handbag and smiles.

“I suppose not. You people always pay your debts eventually.”

“Yes, you can be absolutely certain of that.”

He turns back to the door and fumbles with his key ring. Which is why he doesn’t see her withdraw a silenced pistol from her bag, raise it to the back of his head, and discharge a single round into his cerebellum. The gun makes little sound—just the racking click of its action—but as she fires, the suppressor fitted to its muzzle frosts over with clear fluid, air in contact with it liquefying as it chills to just above absolute zero. Mr. Dower slumps forward against the door. The woman’s arm follows him down with absolute precision and discharges a second round into the top of his skull, but it is unnecessary: he is already dead.

She looks around with green eyes as deep as sacrificial cenotes, eyes in which a sensitive witness might see luminous worms writhing. But there are no sensitive witnesses to see through the glamour: just the ordinary post-work crowd hurrying about their business on the London streets. For a moment her face shimmers, the facade sliding—her attention is strained, flying in too many directions to maintain the illusion effectively—but then she notices and pulls herself together. She returns the chilly pistol to her bag. Then, turning on one spiked heel, she strides away from the corpse: just another professional woman on her way home from the office. Nobody has witnessed the killing, and it will be twenty minutes before a passing policeman realizes that the drunk sleeping in the doorway is never going to rise again.

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