10. THE NIGHTMARE STACKS

THERE IS A RAILWAY UNDER LONDON, BUT IT’S PROBABLY NOT the one you’re thinking of.

Scratch that. There are many railways under London. There are the tube lines that everyone knows about, hundreds of kilometers, dozens of lines, carrying millions of people every day. And there are the London commuter rail lines, many of which run underground for part or all of their length. There are the other major railway links such as CrossRail and the Eurostar tunnel into St. Pancras. There’s even the Docklands Light Railway, if you squint.

But these are just the currently operational lines that are open to the public. There are other lines you probably don’t know about. There are the deep tube tunnels that were never opened to the public, built to serve the needs of wartime government. Some of them have been abandoned; others turned into archives and secure stores. There are the special platforms off the public tube stations, the systems built during the 1940s and 1950s to rush MPs and royalty away from the capital at an hour’s notice in time of war. These are the trains of government, buried deep and half-forgotten.

And then there are the weird ones. The Necropolis railway that ran from behind Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey, along the converted track bed of which I ran last night. The coal tunnels that distributed fuel to the power stations of South London and the buried generator halls that powered the tube network. And the MailRail narrow-gauge tunnels that for over a century hauled sacks of letters and parcels between Paddington and Whitechapel, until it was officially closed in 2003.

Closed?

Not so fast.

The stacks, where the Laundry keeps its dead files, occupy two hundred-meter stretches of disused deep-dug tube tunnel not far from Whitehall. They’re thirty meters down, beneath the hole in the ground where Service House is currently being rebuilt by a private finance initiative (just in time for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN). How do you think we get files in and out? Or librarians in and out, for that matter?

Angleton has a job for me to do, down in the stacks. And so it is that at one thirty I’m sitting in my office, nursing a lukewarm mug of coffee and waiting for the little man with the handcart to call, when the NecronomiPod begins to vibrate and make a noise like a distressed U-boat.

"'Lo?"

It’s Mo. "Bob?" She doesn’t sound too happy.

"Yeah? You at home?"

"Right now, yes… not feeling too well."

I hunch over instinctively. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes." Oh, right. "Listen, about last night—thanks. And thanks for letting me lie in. I’m just wrung-out today, so I’ve begged off my weekly and I was thinking about taking the afternoon to do what we talked about earlier, to go visit Research and Development. But there’s a little job I needed to do in the office and I was wondering if you could…"

I glance at the clock on my desktop. "Maybe; depends what, I’m off to the stacks in half an hour."

"The stacks? In person?" She cheers up audibly. "That’s great! I was hoping you could pull a file for me, and if you’re going there—"

"Not so fast." I pause. "What kind of file?"

"A new one, a report I asked for. I can give you a reference code; it should be fresh in today."

"Oh, right." Well, that shouldn’t be a problem—I can probably fit it in with my primary mission. "What’s the number?"

"Let me…" She reads out a string of digits and I read it back to her. "Yes, that’s it. If you could just bring it home with you this evening?"

"Remind me again, who was it who didn’t want work brought home?"

"That’s different. This is me being lazy, not you overdoing it!"

I smile. "If you say so."

"Love you."

"You too. Bye."

AT SEVEN MINUTES PAST TWO, I HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND A squeak of wheels that stops outside my door. I pick up a pair of brown manila files I’m through with and stand. "Archive service?" I ask.

The man with the handcart is old and worn before his time. He wears a blue-gray boiler suit and a cloth cap that has seen better days; his skin is as parched as time-stained newsprint. He looks at me with the dumb, vacant eyes of a residual human resource. "Archive service," he mumbles.

"These are going back." I hand over the files, and he painstakingly inscribes their numbers on a battered plywood clipboard using a stub of pencil sellotaped to a length of string. "And I’m going with them."

He stares at me, unblinking. "Document number," he says.

I roll my eyes. "Give me that." Taking the clipboard I make up a shelf reference number and write it down in the next space, then copy it onto my left wrist with a pen. "See? I am a document. Take me."

"Document… number…" His eyes cross for a moment: "Come." He puts his hands to the handcart and begins to push it along, then glances back at me anxiously. "Come?"

For an RHR he’s remarkably communicative. I tag along behind him as he finishes his round, collecting and distributing brown manila envelopes that smell of dust and long-forgotten secrets. We leave the department behind, heading for the service lifts at the back; Rita doesn’t even raise her head to nod as I walk past.

The heavy freight lift takes forever to descend into the subbasement, creaking and clanking. The lights flicker with the harsh edge of fluorescent tubes on the verge of burnout, and the ventilation fans provide a background white buzz of noise that sets my teeth on edge. There’s nobody and nothing down here except for storerooms and supply lockers: people visit, but only the dead stay.

Handcart man shuffles down a narrow passage lined with fire doors. Pausing before one, he produces an antiquated-looking key and unlocks a padlock-and-chain from around the crash bar. Then he pushes his cart through into a dimly lit space beyond.

"How do you re-lock that?" I ask him.

"Lock… at night," he mumbles, throwing a big switch like a circuit breaker that’s mounted on the wall just inside the door.

We’re in a narrow, long room with a couple of handcarts parked along one wall. The other side of the room is strange. There’s a depression in the floor, and a hole in each of the narrow ends: rails run along the depression between the holes. Such is the wildly unusual scale of it all that it takes me several seconds to blink it back into the correct perspective and see that I’m standing on the platform of an underground railway station—a narrow-gauge system with tracks about sixty centimeters apart, and an electrified third rail. I hear a sullen rumbling from one of the tunnel mouths, and feel a warm breath of wind on my face, like the belch of a very small dragon. The original MailRail track only ran east to west, but extensions were planned back in the 1920s; I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find one here, for what else would commend this extremely boring sixties office block to the Laundry as a temporary headquarters?

I look at handcart man. "Can I ride this?" I ask.

Instead of answering, he pulls a second lever. I shrug. You’d think I’d have learned better than to ask zombies complex questions by now, wouldn’t you?

The rumbling builds to a loud roar, and a remarkable object rolls out of the tunnel and screeches to a halt in the middle of the room.

It’s a train, of course—three carriages, all motorized. But it’s tiny. You could park it in my front hall. The roofs of the carriages barely rise waist-high, and they sport external handles. Handcart man shambles to the front carriage and hinges the roof right up. Not even breaking a sweat, he begins to load the files from his cart into a storage bin.

"Hey, what about"—I focus on the second carriage. It’s got wire mesh sides, and what looks like a bench—"me?"

Handcart man lifts a box of files out of the front carriage, deposits it in his cart, and lowers the lid. Then he walks to the second carriage, lifts the roof, and looks at me expectantly.

"I was afraid you were going to say that," I mutter, and climb in. The wooden bench seat is about five centimeters above the track bed, and I have to lean backward as he drops the lid with a clang. The carriage is only big enough for a single passenger. It smells musty and dry, as if something died in here a long time ago.

Turning my head sideways, I watch as handcart man walks over to the big circuit breaker and yanks it down and up, down and up. It must be some kind of trackside signal, because a moment later I feel a motor vibrate under me, and the train starts to roll forward. I make myself lie down: it’d be a really great start to the mission to scrape my face off on the tunnel roof. And a moment later I’m off, rattling feetfirst into the darkness under London, on a false-flag mission…

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME I’M FALLING FEETFIRST INTO A PIECE of railway history, another part of the plot is unfolding. Let me try to reconstruct it for you:

A red-haired woman holding a violin case is making her way along a busy high street in London. Wearing understated trousers and a slightly dated Issey Miyake top, sensible shoes, and a leather bag that’s showing its age, she could be a college lecturer or a musician on her way to practice: without the interview suit, nobody’s going to mistake her for an auction house employee or a civil servant. Which shows how deceptive appearances can be.

Kids and shoppers and office workers in suits and shop staff in uniforms move around her; she threads her way between them, not looking in shop windows or diverting her attention from the destination in hand. Here’s a side street, and she turns the corner wide—avoiding a baby buggy, its owner nattering on her mobile—and strides along it before turning into another, wider street at a corner where a bland seventies office rises six stories above the pavement.

The office has glass doors and a reception desk fronting an austere atrium; a bank of lifts behind it promises a rapid ascent into crowded beige cubicle heaven. The woman approaches reception, and holds up an ID card of some sort. The guard nods, signs her in, then waves her on to the lift bank on the right. She could be a session musician turning up at one of the TV production companies listed on the wall panel beside the reception desk, or a member of staff on her way back from a lunchtime lesson.

But she’s not.

The lift control panel shows five numbered floors. As the door slides closed, the woman pushes the third-floor button, then first floor (twice), then the fourth floor. The lift begins to move. The illuminated floor display tracks it up from ground to first, second, third—and it goes out. Then, safely stranded between indicated floors, the doors open.

There are no cubicles here: only rooms with frosted glass doors that lock shut, and red security lights to warn against intrusion. Some of the rooms are offices, and some of them are laboratories, although the experiments that are conducted in them require little equipment more exotic than desktop computers and hand-wired electronic circuitry.

The red-haired woman makes her way through the building with ease born of familiarity, until she finds room 505. She knocks on the door. "Come in," the occupant calls, his voice muffled somewhat by the wood.

Mo opens the door wide. "Dr. Mike," she says, smiling.

"Mo?" He has a large head for his average-sized torso: brown hair fighting a hard-bitten retreat, bound in a ponytail; his eyebrows, owlishly peaked, rise quizzically at her approach. "Good to see you!"

"It’s been too long." She walks in and they embrace briefly. "Are you busy?"

"Not immediately, no." His desk tells a different story, piled high in untidy snowdrifts of paper—there’s a laser printer on a table in one corner, and a heavy-duty shredder right below it—with a coffee mug balanced atop one particularly steep pile. The mug reads: DURING OFF HOURS TRAINS STOP HERE. There’s a bookcase beside the desk, crammed full of phrase books and travel guides, except for one shelf, which is occupied by a tiny Z-gauge model railway layout. "Were you passing through or can I be of service in some way?"

"I was hoping to talk to you," she confesses. "About…" She shrugs. "Mind if I sit down?"

"It’s the cross-section growth coefficient, isn’t it?" he asks, and one of his eyebrows tries to climb even farther. "Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable. Everyone has been asking about it this week." He sighs, then backs towards his own chair, bearish on his short legs.

"I got an edited, probably garbled, version of it from Andy last week," she explains. "The original paper isn’t on the intranet so I thought I’d ask you about it." She nods at the door. "In person."

"Yes… very wise." His expression relaxes moment by moment.

"The scholars of night have been busy."

"Word leaked." Saturnine, he rests one hand on a graph-ruled notepad. "Or so I gather from Angleton."

"That’s interesting." Mo rests her violin against the side of her chair and crosses her legs. "He’s missing too, you know."

"That’s very interesting!" Now Ford’s expression lightens. "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things."

Mo nods. "Footwear and naval architecture I know, but I never could get my head around why you’d put wax in the ceiling. Some kind of late-Victorian loft-space insulation?"

"No, it’s—" Ford stops. "Okay, you won that round. Is this about the paper, or the leak?"

"The paper." She leans forward expectantly.

"The first rule of paper is, there is no paper—well no, not exactly, but it’s not the kind of result I could punt at Nature, is it?"

"Right. So who reviewed it?"

Ford nods. "That’s the right question. Whose hat are you wearing?" Mo’s eyes go very cold. "There’s a little girl in Amsterdam whose parents don’t have much time for hair-splitting right now. Not that I’m accusing you of playing games, but I need to know. See, I’m conducting some research in applied epistemology. It would be rather unfortunate if you made a mistake in your logic and the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have gotten themselves worked up over nothing."

"The Brotherhood? I say, are they still going?" He meets her cold stare with one of his own. "That is simply not on. I rather thought we’d put a stop to their antics in Afghanistan a few years ago."

"They’re a broad franchise: they’ve got any number of fronts." She makes a gesture of dismissal. "Whoever. I’m looking into this on my own initiative. Do you have a draft I can see?"

"I think I could manage that." He begins to hunt through the papers on his desk. "Ah, here." He passes her three pages, held together by a paper clip.

Mo peers at the top page. "Wait, I can’t read—"

"Ah. Just a moment." Ford waves his left hand across the paper and mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

Mo blinks. "Was that entirely safe?"

He grins. "No."

"I, uh, see." She peers at the abstract. "That’s interesting. Let me paraphrase. You’ve tried to quantify memetic transmission effects among a population exposed to class three abominations and find… belief in them spreads? And it’s a power function?"

He nods. "You must understand, previous models all seem to have looked at how possession spreads through a sparse network, like classical epidemiological studies of smallpox transmission, for example. But that’s flawed: if you posit an uncontrolled outbreak, then people can see their neighbors, random strangers, being possessed. And that in turn weakens the observer-mediated grid ultrastructure, making it easier for the preta to tunnel into our reality. It’s a feedback loop: the more people succumb, the weaker everyone else’s resistance becomes. I modeled it using linear programming and the results are, well, they speak for themselves."

"And the closer we come to the Transient Weak Anomaly the more outbreaks we’re going to see, and the—it contributes to the strength of the TWA?" She looks at him sharply.

"Substantially, yes." Dr. Mike shuffles uncomfortably in his chair.

"Well, shit." She folds the paper neatly and slides it into her handbag. "And here I was hoping Andy had gotten the wrong end of the stick."

"Second-order effects are always gonna getcha." He shrugs apologetically. "I don’t know why nobody looked into it from this angle before."

"Not your problem, not my problem."

"Says Wernher von Braun, yes, and who says satire is dead?"

"Tom Lehrer. Or maybe Buddy Holly."

"Right. But you said something that interests me strangely. How did the Black Brotherhood—or whoever wants us to think they’re the BBs—get the news?"

"That’s what a lot of people are asking themselves right now." She gives him a peculiar look. "It made quite a stir, unfortunately. Lots of wagging tongues. Unfortunately Oscar-Oscar are drawing blanks and they can’t Audit the entire organization—at least not yet. We’ll have to examine the second-order consequences if the cultists learn they’ve got a turbocharger, though. If you can come up with anything…"

"Angleton would be the one to talk to about that," he says slyly. "After all, he’s the head of the Counter-Possession Unit."

"Angleton’s missing—" Mo freezes.

For a moment they sit in silence. Then Dr. Mike raises one preposterous eyebrow. "Are you certain of that?"

★★★

I’M GLAD I’M NOT CLAUSTROPHOBIC.

Well, I’m not very claustrophobic. Lying on my back in a coffin-sized railway carriage, rattling down a steep incline in a tunnel less than a meter in diameter that was built in the 1920s is not my idea of a nice relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Especially knowing that the station staff are zombies and I’m barreling headfirst into the depths of a high security government installation with only my warrant card to speak for me, on a mission of somewhat questionable legality.

Pull yourself together, Bob. You’ve been in darker holes.

Yes, but back then Angleton at least had the good grace to tell me what the fuck I was supposed to be doing! This time around it’s just I want you to be my tethered goat. That and the 440 volt DC rail fifteen centimeters below my spine give me a tingling sensation like my balls want to climb right up my throat and hide. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a back door into the stacks, or that it’s a hinky little narrow-gauge tube system constructed by a Quango and forgotten by everyone except train spotters, but to find myself actually riding it… that’s something else.

Angleton had the decency to scribble me a written order, and a good thing too, otherwise I would have thrown a strop. The librarians don’t appreciate unannounced visitors, much less informal withdrawals, and like so many of our more eccentric outposts they have their own inimitable and unspeakable ways of dealing with vandals and intruders. If they catch me, a signed order from a DSS ought to make them pause long enough to give me a fair hearing before they rip my lungs out; but, really and truly, it is usually best to just put in a request and wait for the little man with the cart.

I try not to think too hard about everything that can go wrong with Angleton’s plan. Instead, I lie back and think of libraries.

The Laundry keeps its archive stacks in a former tube tunnel. It was originally going to be a station, but during World War Two it was converted into an emergency bunker and in the end they never got around to connecting it up to the underground network. There are six levels rather than the usual three, two levels built into each half of a cylindrical tunnel eight meters in diameter and nearly a third of a kilometer long. That makes for a lot of shelves—not quite in the same league as the British Library, but close. And it’s not just books that occupy the stacks. We store microfiche cards in binders, row after row of them, and there are rooms full of filing cabinets full of CD-ROMs. There’s a lot of stuff down here, a lot of moldering secrets and fatal lies: a complete transcript of every numbers channel transmitted since 1932, the last words of every spy hanged during the Second World War, every sermon preached by a minister in the Church of Night—our minister—before his followers found out and tore him toe from nail…

The train tilts so that my feet are raised, and the clattering rush begins to slow. I’ve only been here for three or four minutes but it feels like hours in the roaring dark. I cross my arms around my body, hugging myself, and try not to think about premature burials. Instead I try to remember more secrets and lies: such as the recordings of every spy and defector executed by Abu Nidal. (Famously paranoid, if he suspected a recruit of spying he had them buried in a coffin, fed through a tube while being interrogated: after which they would be executed by a bullet fired down the same pipe. I gather he killed more of his own followers than any hostile power.) The last confessions of every member of the Green Hand Sect arrested and interrogated by the Kripo in Saxony in the late 1930s. (Which led to secret and unsanctioned executions—which the Occupying Powers declined to investigate, after a brief, horrified review of the Nazi-era records.) There is even a sealed box of DVDs containing high-resolution scans of the mechanical blueprints from the Atrocity Archives. (That one was my own contribution to the stacks, I’m afraid.)

The carriage squeals to a halt. A few seconds later, I hear the clatter of lids being raised. I take this as my cue and, bracing myself, I push against the roof.

I sit up to find myself in another room, this time with a rounded tunnel-like roof and raw brick walls. It’s dimly lit by red lights set deep in shielded sockets; it smells of corruption and memories. A pair of residual human resources are lethargically unloading the wagon in front of me. I lever myself off the bench seat and clamber over the side of the carriage, trying not to bash my head on the low, curving ceiling. There are human-sized doors at either end of the platform, but I don’t dare try them at random—I’m pushing my luck just by being here. Instead, I approach one of the shambling human figures, and thrust my ink-stained forearm under what’s left of its rotting nose. "Document," I say, stabbing my opposing index finger at the numbers: "File me!"

Leathery fingers close lightly around my wrist and tug me towards a half-loaded handcart. I grab onto the edge of it and the hand drops away; I suppress a shudder. (One of the office unions is currently taking HR to court over the use of residuals, claiming it’s a violation of their human rights; HR’s argument is that once you’re dead you have no rights to violate, but the union’s lawyers have said that if they lose the case they’ll bring a counter-suit for interfering with corpses—either that, or they’ll demand equal pay for the undead.)

After a couple of minutes, one of the working stiffs shuffles over to a control board on one wall and starts pulling handles. With a grumbling buzz of motors and the screech of steel wheels on rails, the mail train rolls forward into the next tunnel mouth, on its way back to the realm of worms and darkness. Then they take their handcarts and shamble slowly towards the farthest door.

I walk alongside, resting one hand on the file cart at all times. Doors open and close. Using my free hand, I produce my warrant card and orders, then hold them clenched before me. We walk down whitewashed brick-lined passages like the catacombs beneath a recondite order’s monastery, dimly lit by yellowing bulbs. A cool breeze blows endlessly towards my face, into the depths of the MailRail tunnels.

A twist in the passage brings us to another pair of riveted iron doors, painted battleship gray. It’s probably their original wartime livery. I’m close to lost by this point, for I’ve never been in the lower depths of the stacks before: all my dealings have been with the front desk staff on the upper levels. The lead zombie places a claw-fingered hand on the door and pushes, seemingly effortlessly. The door swings open onto a different shade of darkness, a nocturnal gloom that raises gooseflesh on my neck. I tighten my grip on the cart and swear at myself silently. I left my ward with Mo, didn’t I? I hastily raise my warrant card and orders and grip them with my teeth, then fumble for the NecronomiPod with my free hand. Should have replaced it…

As my bearer walks forward I thumb-tap the all-seeing eye into view and bring the phone’s camera to bear. What I see does not fill me with joy: the dark on the other side of the portal isn’t just due to an absence of light, it’s the result of a very powerful ward. Being of a nasty and suspicious disposition it strikes me as likely that it’s part of a security cordon—after all, this is a secret document repository I’m trying to break into, isn’t it? And I know what I’d plant just inside the back door if I was in charge of security: Shelob, or a good emulation thereof, the better to trap intruders in my sticky web.

It’s time to break from my assigned shelf space so, not entirely regretfully, I let go of the document cart. Before the dead man walking can take me in hand again, I remove the papers from my mouth, then lick the ink on my wrist and frantically rub it on my jacket. "Not a document!" I crow, showing my smeary skin to the walking corpse. "No need to push, file, stamp, index, brief, debrief, or number me!"

It stands still for a moment, rocking gently on the balls of its feet, and I can almost see the exception handler triggering in the buggy necrosymbolic script that animates and guides its behavior. A sudden thought strikes me and I raise my warrant card. "Command override!" I bark. "Command override!"

The zombie freezes again, its claws centimeters from my throat. "Overrr-ride," it creaks. "Identify authorization." The other zombie, standing behind it, hisses like a truck’s air brake.

"In the name of the Counter-Possession Unit, on the official business of Her Majesty’s Occult Service, I override you," I say, very slowly. A harsh blue light from my warrant card shows me more of its death mask than I have any desire to remember. The next bit is hard: my Enochian is rusty, and I’m told I have an abominable accent, but I manage to pull together the ritual phrases I need. These residual human resources are minimally script-able, as long as you’ve got the access permissions and know what you’re doing. The consequences of getting it wrong are admittedly drastic, but I find that the prospect of a syntax error getting your brains gnawed out through a hole in your skull concentrates the mind wonderfully. (If only we could convince Microsoft to port Windows to run on zombies—although knowing how government IT sector outsourcing is run, that’s probably redundant.) "Accept new program parameters. Subroutine start…" Or words to that effect, in questionable medieval cod-Latin gibberspeak.

After fifteen minutes of chanting I’m cold with sweat and shaking with tension. My audience are displaying no signs of acquiring a taste for pate de foie programmer, which is good, but if security is paranoid enough they’ll be flagged as overdue any minute now. "End subroutine, amen," I intone. The zombies stand where they are. Oops, have I crashed them? I pull out my phone and fire up its poxy excuse for a personal ward, then stick it in my jacket’s breast pocket. There’s only one way to find out if this is going to work, isn’t there? I snap my fingers. "What are you waiting for?" I ask, reaching into one of my pockets again. "Let’s go to work."

The Hand of Glory has seen better days—the thumb is worn right down to the base of the big joint, and only two of the fingers still have unburned knuckles—but it’ll have to do. "Do we have ignition, do we have fucking ignition," I snarl under my breath, and a faint blue glow like a guttering candle rises from each of the stumps. I climb into one of the document carts, carefully holding on to the waxy abomination, and the residual human resource gives me a tentative shove towards the dark.

There’s a tunnel out of nightmares in the library in the underside of the world. I’m not sure I can quite describe what happens in there: cold air, moist, the dankness and silence of the crypt broken only by the squeaking of the overloaded wheels of my cart. A sense of being watched, of a mindless and terrible focus sweeping across me, averted by the skin of the Hand of Glory’s burning fingertips. A rigor fit to still the heart of heroes, and only the faint pulsing ward-heart of my phone to bring me through it with QRS complex intact. There is a reason they use residual human resources to run the files to and from the MailRail system: you don’t need to be dead to work here, but it really helps.

I’m in the darkness for only ten or fifteen seconds, but when I come out I am in soul-deep pain, my heart pounding and my skin clammy, as if on the edge of a heart attack. Everything is gray and grainy and there is a buzzing in my ears, as of a monstrous swarm of flies. It disperses slowly as the light returns.

I blink, trying to get a grip, and I realize that the handcart has stopped moving. Shivering, I sit up and somehow slither over the edge of the cart without tipping the thing over. There’s carpet on the floor, thin, beige, institutional—I’m back in the land of the living. I look round. There’s a wooden table, three doors, a bunch of battered filing cabinets, and another door through which the mailmen are disappearing—black painted wood, with a motto engraved above the lintel: ABANDON HOPE. Trying to remember what I actually saw in there sends my mind skittering around the inside of my skull like a frightened mouse, so I give up. I’m still clutching the Hand of Glory. I hold it up to look at the flames. They’ve burned down deep, and there’s little left but calcined bones. Regretfully, I blow them out one by one, then dispose of the relic in the recycling bin at one side of the table.

No mailmen, but no librarians either. It’s all very Back Office, just as Angleton described it. I head for the nearest door, just as it opens in front of me.

"Hey—"

I blink. "Hello?" I ask.

"You’re not supposed to be here," he says, annoyed if not outright cross. "Visitors are restricted to levels five and six only. You could do yourself a mischief, wandering around the subbasement!" In his shirt and tie and M&S suit he’s like an intrusion from another, more banal, universe. I could kiss him just for existing, but I’m not out of the woods yet.

"Sorry," I say contritely. "I was sent to ask for a new document that’s supposed to have come in this morning…?"

"Well, you’d better come with me, then. Let me see your ID, please."

I show him my warrant card and he nods. "All right. What is it you’re after?"

"A file." I show him the slip of paper on which I’ve written down Mo’s document reference. "It’s new, it should have come in this morning."

"Follow me." He leads me through a door, to a lift, up four levels and along a corridor to a waiting room with a desk and half a dozen cheap powder-blue chairs: I vaguely recognize it from a previous visit. "Give me that and wait here."

I sit down and wait. Ten minutes later he’s back, frowning. "Are you sure this is right?" he asks.

Annoyed, I think back. "Yes," I say. I read the number back to Mo, didn’t I? "It’s a new file, deposited last night."

"Well, it’s not here yet." He shrugs. "It may still be waiting to be allocated a shelf, you know. That happens sometimes, if adding a new file triggers a shelf overflow."

"Oh." Mo won’t be happy, I guess, but it establishes my cover. "Well, can you flag it for me when it comes in?"

"Certainly. If you can show me your card again?" I do so, and he takes a note of my name and departmental assignment. "Okay, Mr. Howard, I’ll send you an email when the file comes into stock. Is that everything?"

"Yes, thanks, you’ve been very helpful." I smile. He turns to go. "Er, can you remind me the way out…?"

He waves a hand at one of the doors. "Go down there, second door on the left, you can’t miss it." Then he leaves.

THE SECOND DOOR ON THE LEFT OPENS ONTO A SMOOTH-FLOORED tunnel lined in white glazed tiles and illuminated by overhead fluorescent tubes of a kind that are sufficiently familiar that, when I reach the end of the tunnel and step through the gray metal door (which locks behind me with a muffled click) I am unsurprised to find myself in a passage between two tube platforms.

Half an hour and a change of line later, I swipe my Oyster card and surface, blinking at the afternoon sun. I pat the inside pocket where I secreted the sheaf of papers that Angleton gave me. And then I head back to my office in the New Annexe, where I very pointedly dial open my secure document safe and install those papers, then lock it and go home, secure in the knowledge of the first half of a job well done.

(Like I said: fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake.)