We call this place the Village: it’s an old in-joke. Once upon a time it was a hamlet, a village in all respects save its lack of a parish church. It was one of three churchless hamlets that had clustered in this area, and the last of them still standing, for the others slid under the waves a long time ago. There was only the one meandering road in the vicinity, and it was potholed and poorly maintained. Go back sixty or seventy years and you’d find it was home to a small community of winkle-pickers and fishermen who braved the sea in small boats. They were a curious, pale, inbred lot, not well liked by the neighbors up and down the coast, and they kept to themselves. Some of them, it’s said, kept to themselves so efficiently that they never left the company of their own kind from birth unto death.

But then the Second World War intervened. And someone remembered the peculiar paper the village doctor had tried to publish in the Lancet, back in the ’20s, and someone else noticed its proximity to several interesting underwater obstructions, and, with the stroke of a pen, the War Ministry relocated everyone who lived next to the waterline. And the men from MI6 Department 66 came and installed electricity and telephones and concrete coastal defense bunkers, and they rerouted the road so that it doubled back on itself and missed the village completely before merging with the road to the next hamlet up the coast. And they systematically erased the Village from the Ordinance Survey’s public maps, and from the post office, and from the discourse of national life. In a very real sense, the Village is as far away from England as Saint Martin, or the Moon. But in another sense, it’s still too close for comfort.

Today, the Village has the patina of neglect common to building developments that subsist on the largess of government agencies, and rely for their maintenance on duct tape and the extensive use of the power of Crown Immunity to avoid planning requirements. It’s not a white-painted picturesque Italianate paradise like Portmeirion, and we inmates aren’t issued numbers instead of names. But there’s a certain resemblance to that other Village—and there is, overlooking the harbor mole, a row of buildings that includes an old-fashioned pub with paint peeling from the wooden decking outside, worn linoleum floors, and hand-pumps that dispense a passable if somewhat briny brew.

I came up from London yesterday, after the board of enquiry met to hear the report on the outcome of the JENNIFER MORGUE business. It’s over now, buried deep in the secret files in the Laundry stacks below Mornington Crescent tube station. If you’ve got a high enough clearance you can get to read them—just go ask the librarians for CASE BROCCOLI GOLDENEYE. (Who says the classification office doesn’t have a sick sense of humor?)

I’m still feeling burned by the whole affair. Bruised and used about sums it up; and I’m not ready to face Mo yet, so I had to find somewhere to hole up and lick my wounds. The Village isn’t a resort, but there’s a three-story modern building called the Monkfish Motel that’s not entirely unlike a bad ’60s Moat House—I think it was originally built as MOD married quarters—and there’s the Dog and Whistle to drink in, and if I get drunk and start babbling about beautiful man-eating mermaids and sunken undersea horrors, nobody’s going to bat an eyelid.

It’s late afternoon and I’m on my second pint, slumped in the grasp of the sofa in the east corner of the lounge bar. I’m the only customer at this time of day—most everyone else is off attending training courses or working—but the bar stays open all the same.

The door opens. I’m busy failing to reread a dog-eared paperback biography, my mind skittering off the words as if they’re polished ice cubes that melt and slide away whenever I warm them with my glance. Right now it’s gathering moss on the coffee table in front of me as I idly flip the antique Zippo lighter that’s the one part of my disguise kit I ended up bringing home. Footsteps slowly approach, clattering on the bare floor. I sit there in the corner, and I wonder tiredly if I ought to run away. And then it’s too late.

“He told me I’d find you here,” she says.

“Really?” I put the Zippo down and look up at her.

“You’ll be able to see her whenever you want,” he said, right out of the blue, without any warning.

“Fuck it! What makes you think—”

“Look at me, boy.” There’s a tone of voice he uses that reaches into the back of your head and pulls the control wires, grating and harsh and impossible to ignore: it got my attention.

I looked directly at him. “I am sick and tired of everyone tiptoeing around me as if I’m going to explode,” I heard myself say. “Apologizing won’t help: what’s done is done, there’s no going back on it. It was a successful mission and the ends, at least in this case, justify the means. However underhanded they were.”

“If you believe that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.” Angleton closed the cover of the accounts folder and put his pen down. Then he caught my gaze. “Don’t be a fool, son.”

Angleton’s not his real name—real names confer power, which is why we always, all of us, use pseudonyms—nor is it the only thing about him that doesn’t ring true: I saw the photographs in his dream-briefing, and if he was that old when he was along for the ride on Operation JENNIFER, he can’t be a day under seventy today. (I’ve also seen an eerily similar face in the background of certain archival photographs dating from the 1940s, but let’s not go there.) “Is this where you give me the benefit of your copious decades of experience? Stiff upper lip, the game’s the thing, they also serve who whatever-the-hell-the-saying goes?”

“Yes.” His cheek twitched. “But you’re missing something.”

“Huh. And what’s that?” I hunker down in my chair, resigned to having to sit through a sanctimonious lecture about wounded pride or something.

“We fucked with your head, boy. And you’re right, it is just another successful operation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t owe you an apology and an explanation.”

“Great.” I crossed my arms defensively.

He picked up his pen again, scratching notes on his desk pad. “Two weeks’ compassionate leave. I can stretch it to a month if you need it, but beyond that, we’ll need a medical evaluation.” Scribble, scribble. “That goes for both of you. Counseling, too.”

“What about Ramona?” The words hung in the air like lead balloons.

“Separate arrangements apply.” He glanced up again, fixing me with a wintry blue stare. “I’m also recommending that you spend the next week at the Village.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because that’s where Predictive Branch says you need to go, boy. Did you want fries with that?”

“Fucking hell. What do they have to do with things?”

“If you’d ever studied knife fighting, one of the things your instructors would have drilled into you is that you always clean your blade after using it, and if possible sharpen and lubricate it, before you put it away. Because if you want to use it again sometime, you don’t want to find it stuck to the scabbard, or blunt, or rusted. When you use a tool, you take care to maintain it, boy, that’s common sense. From the organization’s point of view . . . well, you’re not just an interchangeable part, a human resource: we can’t go to the nearest employment center and hire a replacement for you just like that. You’ve got a unique skill mix that would be very difficult to locate—but don’t let it go to your head just yet—which is why we’re willing to take some pains to help you get over it. We used you, it’s true. And we used Dr. O’Brien, and you’re both going to have to get used to it, and what’s more important to you right now—because you expect to be used for certain types of jobs now and again—is that we didn’t use you the way you expected to be used. Am I right?”

I spluttered for a moment. “Oh, sure, that’s everything! In a nutshell! I see the light now, it’s just in my nature to be all offended about having my masculinity impugned by being cast in the role of the Good Bond Babe, hero-attractor and love interest for Mo in her capacity as the big-swinging-dick secret agent man with the gun, I mean, violin, and the license to kill. Right? It’s just vanity. So I guess I’d better go powder my nose and dry my tears so I can look glamorous and loving for the closing romantic-interest scene, huh?”

“Pretty much.” Angleton nodded. His lip quirked oddly. A suppressed smile?

“Jesus fucking Christ, Angleton, that’s leaving just a little bit out. Not to mention Ramona. If you think you could tie our brains together like the Kilkenny cats, then just cut us loose—it doesn’t work that way, you know?”

“Yes.” He nodded again. “And that’s why you need to go to the Village,” he said briskly. “Talk to her. Settle where you both stand, in your own mind.” He picked up his papers and looked away, an implicit dismissal. I rose to my feet.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he added.

“What?”

“While you’re about it, remember to talk to Dr. O’Brien as well. You both need to sort things out—and sooner, rather than later.”

“Enjoying yourself?” I ask. It’s the sort of stilted, stupid question you ask when you’re trying to make small talk but walking on eggshells in case the other person explodes at you. Which is what I’m half-expecting—this situation is a minefield.

“No,” she says with forced levity. “The weather sucks, the beer’s warm, the sea’s too cold for swimming, and every time I look at it . . .” She stalls, the thin glaze of collected-ness cracking. “Can I sit down?”

I pat the sofa beside me. “Be my guest.”

She sits down in the opposite corner, an arm’s length away. “You’re acting like you’re mad at me.”

I glance at the book on the table. “I’m not mad at you.” I try to figure out what to say next: “I’m mad at the way the circumstances made things turn out. Are you still mad at her?”

“At her?” She chuckles, startled. “I don’t think she had any more choice in it than you did. Why should I be mad at her?”

I pick up my glass and take a long mouthful of beer. “Because we slept together?”

“Because you—what?” A waspish tone creeps into her voice: “But I thought you said you hadn’t!”

I put my glass down. “We didn’t.” I meet her eye. “In the Bill Clinton sense of things, I can honestly say I have not had sexual intercourse with that woman. You know what the Black Chamber did to her? If I had slept with her I’d be dead.”

“But how can you—” Mo is confused.

“Her monster had to feed. Before you came and unbound it, it had to feed. She had to feed it, or it would have eaten her. I was along for the ride.”

Enlightenment dawns. “But now she’s there—” a wave in the vague direction of the drowned village of Dunwich, a mile out to sea, where the Laundry maintains its outpost “—and you’re here. And you’re both safe.”

Acid indigestion. “Safe from what?” I ask, watching her sidelong.

“Safe from—” She stops. “Why are you looking at me?”

“She’s undergoing the change, you know that? They can usually hold it off, but in her case it’s looking irreversible.”

Mo nods, reluctantly.

“Probably it was triggered by the deep-diving excursion,” I add. “Although proximity to certain thaumic resonances can bring it on prematurely.” Which you would be in a position to know all about, I don’t say. It’s a horrible thing to suspect of anyone, especially your partner who you’ve been sharing a house with for enough years that it’s getting to be a habit. “I gather they expect her to make it, with her mind intact.”

“That’s good,” Mo says automatically. A double take: “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Is it a good thing?” I ask.

“That’s not a question I’d have expected you to ask.”

I sigh. None of this is straightforward. “Mo, you could have warned me they were training you in deep-cover insertion and extraction operations! Jesus, I thought I was the one on the sharp end!”

“And you were!” she snaps at me suddenly. “Did you wonder how I felt about it, every time you disappeared on a black bag job? Did you ask if maybe I was worried sick that you were never coming back? You know what I know, how helpless do you think that left me feeling?”

“Whoa! I didn’t want you to worry—”

“You didn’t want! Jesus, Bob, what does it take to get through to you? You can’t stop other people worrying just by not wanting them to. It’s not about you, dim-bulb, it’s about me. At least, this time it was. Or do you think I turned up there on your ass by accident?”

I stare at her, at a loss for words.

“Let me lay it out for you, Bob. The whole solitary reason Angleton assigned you to that stupid fucking arrangement with Ramona was precisely because you didn’t know what was going on. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t leak to Ramona.”

“I got that much, but why—”

“Billington was enslaved by JENNIFER MORGUE Two sometime in the ’70s, after the abortive attempt to raise the K-129. He tried to contact the chthonian using the Gravedust rig—a little private free enterprise, if you like. JENNIFER MORGUE Two wanted out, and wanted out bad, but it needed someone to come and repair it. Billington provided it with a temporary host body, kitty kibble, and he had the resources to buy the Explorer—once the US Navy decommissioned it—and kit it out for a retrieval run. And we knew all this, on deep background, three years ago.”

I blink. “Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”

“Me.” She looks impatient. “And Angleton. And everybody else with BLUE HADES clearance who’s been working on the project. Except for you, and a couple of others, who’ve been kept in a mushroom box against the day.”

“Damn.” I pick up my glass and drain what’s left of the beer. “I need another drink.” Pause. “You too?”

“Make mine a double vodka martini on ice.” She pulls a face. “I can’t seem to kick the habit.”

I stand up and walk inside to the bar, where the middle-aged barwoman is sitting on a stool poring over the Sudoku in the back of the Express. “Two double vodka martinis on ice.” I say diffidently.

The woman puts her magazine down. She stares at me like I crawled out from under a rock. “You’re going to say shaken, not stirred, ain’t cha?” She’s got a Midwestern accent: probably another defector, I guess. “You know how bad that tastes?”

“Make it one shaken, one stirred, then. Off the ice. And easy on the vermouth.” I wink.

I go back towards the corner I’d claimed, then pause in the archway. Mo’s leaning back in the sofa, infinitely familiar. For a moment my breath catches in my throat and I have to stop and try to commit the picture to memory in case it turns out to be one of the last good times. Then I force myself to get my legs moving again.

“They’ll be over in a minute,” I say, dropping onto the sofa beside her.

“Good.” She stares at the windows overlooking the beach. “You know the Black Chamber wanted to get their hands on JENNIFER MORGUE. That’s what McMurray was doing there.”

“Yes.” So she thinks I want to talk about business?

“We couldn’t let them do that. But luckily for us, Billington . . . well, he wasn’t entirely sane to begin with, and when he came up with the idea of implementing a Hero trap, that made things a lot easier.”

“Easier?” It’s a good thing I don’t have a drink in my hand.

“Absolutely.” She nods. “Imagine if Billington had simply gone to the Black Chamber and said, ‘Ten billion and it’s yours,’ keeping his fix-it plan to himself. But instead, he gets this idea that he’s got to act in solitary as the prime mover in the scheme, and of course he’s the archetype of the billionaire megalomaniac, so he does the obvious thing: leverages his assets. The Hero trap—the geas he built around that yacht—required a hero to trigger it. He figured the plot structure is deterministic: the hero falls into the bad guy’s hands, the bad guy monologues—and at that point, he was going to destroy the trap, neuter the hero, who is just another civil servant at this point, stripped of the resonances of the Bond invocation—and allow his plan to proceed to completion.”

“Except . . .”

“You know the alternative plot?” She glances at the book I’ve been reading: a biography of a playboy turned naval intelligence officer, news agency manager, and finally spy novelist.

“What?” I shake my head. “I thought it was—”

“Yes, it’s so neat you can draw a flow chart. But it’s nondeterministic, Bob: the Bond plot structure has a number of forks in it before it converges on the ending, with Mr. Secret Agent Man and his love interest getting it on in a lifeboat or the honeymoon suite of the QE2 or something. Including the approach to the villain. Billington didn’t look into it deeply enough; he assumed that the Hero archetype would come looking for him and fall into his clutches directly.”

“But.” I snap my fingers, trying to collect my scattered thoughts. “You. Me. He got me, but I wasn’t the real Bond-figure, right? I was a decoy.”

She nods. “It happens. If the love interest ends up on the villain’s yacht, being held prisoner, then the hero has to go after her. Or him. The real trick was the idea—I think it was Angleton’s—of using the Good Bond Girl as a decoy by dressing her up in a tux and a shoulder holster. And then to figure out how to use this to get the Black Chamber to put one over on Billington.”

“Ramona. She knew that I thought I was the agent in place, so she naturally assumed I really was the agent.”

“Right. And this also let us identify a leak in our own organization, because how else did Billington make you so rapidly? Which turns out to have been Jack. Last of the public school assholes, hung out to dry out where he couldn’t do any damage—so he develops a sideline in selling intel to what he thinks is another disgruntled outsider.”

“Urk.” I suddenly remember the electrodynamic rig Griffin had stuck in his safe house and briefly wonder just what the hell else he might have been picking up on it, sitting pretty in the middle of the Caribbean with no supervision.

Mo falls silent. I realize she’s waiting for something. My tongue’s frozen: there are questions I want to ask, but it’s a bad idea to ask something when you’re not sure you want to hear the answer. “Did you enjoy being . . . Bond?” I finally manage.

“Did I?” She raises an eyebrow. “Hell.” She frowns. “Did you?” she demands.

“But I wasn’t—”

“But you thought you were.”

“No!” The very question is freighted with significance I don’t want to explore. “I don’t do high society, I don’t smoke, I don’t like being beaten up, being taken prisoner, being tortured, or fighting people, and I’m no good at the womanizing bit.” I dry-swallow. “How about you?”

“Well,” she pauses to consider, “I’m no good at womanizing either.” Her cheek twitches. “Is that what this is about, Bob? Did you figure I was cheating on you?”

“I was—” I clear my throat “—unsure where I stood.”

“We need to talk about this. Get it out in the open sometime. Don’t we?”

I nod. It’s about all I can do.

“I didn’t jump into bed with anybody else,” she says briskly. “Does that make you feel better?”

No, it doesn’t. Now I feel like a shit for having asked in the first place. I make myself nod.

“Well, great.” She crosses her arms, then taps her fingers on her upper arm: “Where have our drinks gotten to?”

“I ordered the martinis. I guess she’s taking her time.” Quick, change the subject. I really don’t want us to fall down one of those embarrassing conversational potholes where the silence stretches out into an eloquent statement of mutual miscommunication: “So, how did you manage to disguise yourself as Eileen? You really had me convinced at first.”

“Oh, that was no big deal.” Mo looks relieved. She smiles at me and my heart beats faster. “You know Brains has a sideline in cosmetology? Says some of his best friends are drag queens. Well, we’ve got enough surveillance background on Eileen to know what she looks like, so I got Brains out to the York to provide make-up services before the assault. Stick a class two glamour on top of the basics—a wig, the right clothes, some latex paint—and her own daughter wouldn’t make her. We used Pale Grace™ for the finishing touch; it might be bugged, but we made sure I wouldn’t see anything until I was aboard the ship. So I just headed for the control room using the maps we had on file from Angleton’s—”

I raise a hand. “Hold it.”

“What?” Mo stares at me.

“Have you got your violin?” I whisper, hunkering down.

“No, why—”

Shit. “Our drinks are well overdue.”

“And?”

“And this plot was set up by a document that’s classified CASE BROCCOLI GOLDENEYE, Angleton said, and Predictive Branch said I needed to be here, and . . .”

“And?”

I kneel on the floor and pull my mobile phone out, flick the switch to silence it, then put it in camcorder mode. I sneak it out from behind the sofa, then pull it back and inspect the bar. There’s nobody there. I swear quietly, and call up my thaumic scratchpad application. Then I tip my glass upside down over the table, and draw my fingers through the resulting beer suds frantically, wishing I hadn’t downed the pint and left myself mere drops to work with.

“Have you got that stupid piece of paper on you?”

“What, the license to kill? It’s just a prop, it doesn’t mean anything—”

“So pass it here, then. We haven’t had plot closure yet, and you’re not the only one who can use cosmetics and a class two glamour.

“Shit,” Mo whispers back at me, and rolls forwards onto the floor. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“What, that we’ve been followed home by a manifestly evil mistress of disguise who is hankering for revenge because we got her husband stomped into pink slime by a chthonian war machine?”

There’s a disturbingly solid click-chunk from the front door, like a Yale lock engaging.

“Do you know the ending of Diamonds Are Forever? The movie version with Sean Connery?” I meet Mo’s eyes for a moment, and in a disturbing flash of clarity I realize that she means a whole lot more to me than the question of who she has or hasn’t been having sex with. Then she nods and rolls away from the floor in front of the sofa, and I hit the button on my phone just as there’s a flat percussive bang: not the ear-slamming concussion I expect from a pistol, but muffled, much quieter.

I look round.

The middle-aged barwoman is waving a pistol inexpertly around the room, the long tube of a silencer protruding from its muzzle: she looks subtly familiar this time. “Over here!” I call.

She makes the classic mistake: she glances my way and blinks, gun muzzle wavering. “Come out where I can see you!” Eileen snaps querulously.

“Why? So you can kill us more easily?” I’m ready to jump up and dive through the window if necessary, but she can’t see me—the concealment spell is still working, at least until the remaining beer evaporates. I go back to folding a paper airplane out of Mo’s license, my fingers shaking with tension.

“That would be the idea,” she says. “A lovers’ quarrel, male agent kills partner then shoots self. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

“No shit?” Mo asks. I squint and try to spot her, but one thing we’ve both got going for us is that pubs tend to be gloomy and poorly lit, and this one’s no exception.

Eileen spins round through ninety degrees and unloads a bullet into the wall of optics behind the bar.

I glance at the drying suds then roll to my hands and knees and creep around the sofa, trying to stay low. I think the paper plane’s balanced right—it had better be, I’m only going to get the one chance to use it. There are forms, and this is . . . well, it might work. If it doesn’t we’re trapped in a locked pub with a madwoman with a gun, and our invisibility spell has a half-life measured in seconds rather than minutes. There are two martini glasses on the bar, one of them half full: Maybe Eileen wanted to steady her nerves first? There’s probably an unconscious or dead bartender out back. What a mess: I don’t think an intruder’s ever penetrated the Village before. I doubt it would be possible without the blowback from the Hero trap to help.

There’s a creak from a floorboard and another shot goes flying, to no apparent effect. Eileen looks spooked. She takes a step backwards towards the bar, gun muzzle questing about, and then another step. My heart’s pounding and I’m feeling lightheaded with anger—no, with rage—You think anyone would ever believe I’d hurt Mo? And then she’s at the bar.

There’s a glassy chink.

Eileen spins round, and pulls the trigger just as the half-full martini glass levitates and flies at her face. She manages to shoot the ceiling, then recoils. “Ow! Bitch!” I raise the paper dart and take aim. She wipes her eyes as she brings her gun down to bear on a faint distortion in the air, a snarl of satisfaction on her face: “I see you now!”

I flick the Zippo’s wheel and then throw the flaming dart at her martini-irrigated head.

She laughs shakily. “No, you’re all right!” And she hugs me hard.

“Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

There’s a mess on the floor, fire extinguisher foam half-concealing the scorch marks, and we skirt it carefully on our way to the door. Security has placed us under a ward of compulsion and we’ll be seen by the Auditors tomorrow: but for the time being, we’ve got the run of the Village. Mo seems to want to head back to our quarters, but I pull back. “No, let’s go walk on the beach.” And she nods.

“You knew that was coming,” she says as we jump down off the concrete wall and onto the rough pebbles.

“I had an idea something bad was in the air.” The onshore breeze is blowing, and the sun is shining. “I didn’t know for sure, or I’d have been better prepared.”

“Bullshit.” She punches me lightly on the arm, then puts an arm around my waist.

“No, would I lie to you?” I protest. I stare out to sea. Somewhere out there Ramona is lying in a watery hostel, learning what she really is. A new life lies ahead of her: she won’t be able to come ashore after the change is complete. Hey, if I really was James Bond, I could have a girl in every port—even the drowned ones.

“Bob. Would you have left me for her?”

I shiver. “I don’t think so.” Actually, no. Which is not to say Ramona didn’t have glamour of the non-magical kind as well, but there’s something about what I have with Mo—

“Well, then. And you’re cut up about the idea that I might have been cheating on you.”

I consider this for a few seconds. “Surprised?”

“Well.” She’s silent, too. “I was worried. And I’m still worried about the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“The possibility that we’re going to be haunted by the ghost of James Bond.”

“Oh, I dunno.” I kick a pebble towards the waterline, watch it skitter, alone. “We could always do something totally un-Bond-like, to break any remaining echoes of the geas.”

“You think?” She smiles. “Got any ideas?”

My mouth is dry. “Yeah—yes, as a matter-of-fact I do.” I take her in my arms and she puts her arms around me, and rests her face against the side of my neck. “If this was really the end of a Bond story, we’d go find a luxury hotel to hole up in, order a magnum of champagne, and fuck each other senseless.”

She tenses. “Ah, I hadn’t thought of that.” A moment later, and faintly: “Damn.”

“Well. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But—” My heart is pounding again, and my knees are even weaker than they were when I realized Eileen hadn’t shot her. “We’ve got to do it in such a way that it’s completely incompatible with the geas.”

“Okay, wise guy. So you’ve got a bright idea for an ending that simply wouldn’t work in a Bond book?”

“Yes. See, the thing is, Bond’s creator—like Bond himself—was a snob. Upper-crust, old Etonian, terribly conventional. If he was around today he’d always be wearing a tailored suit, you’d never catch him in ripped jeans and a Nine Inch Nails tee shirt. And it goes deeper. He liked sex, but he was deeply ingrained with a particular view of gender relationships. Man of action, woman as bit of fluff on the side. So the one thing Bond would never expect one of his girls to say is—” it’s now or never “—will . . . will you marry me?” I can’t help it; my voice ends up a strangled squeak, as befits the romantic interest doing something as shockingly unconventional as proposing to the hero.

“Oh, Bob!” She hugs me tighter: “Of course! Yes!” She’s squeaking, too, I realize dizzily: Is this normal? We kiss. “Especially if it means we can hole up in a luxury hotel, order in a magnum of champagne, and fuck each other senseless without being haunted by the ghost of James Bond. You’ve got a sick and twisted mind—that’s why I love you!”

“I love you, too,” I add. And as we walk along the beach, holding hands and laughing, I realize that we’re free.