"One moment." My paranoia is growing. I take out my phone and peer at him through its camera. TRUESEER tells me that I am, indeed, looking at my boss, who is looking increasingly irritated. I make the shiny vanish. "Okay. From the top: the Fuller Memorandum is missing, the Russians have gotten all upset, cultists are throwing their toys out of the pram, and everyone wants to know about the Teapot. Oh, and someone in Research and Development says that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn't going to wait a couple of years, but is due to kick off in a few weeks or months at the most. What am I missing?"

Angleton stares at me coldly. "You're missing the spy, boy."

"The"—I nearly swallow my tongue—"spy?"

"Yes: Helen Langhorn. Aged seventy-four, widow of Flight Lieutenant Adrian Langhorn, long-term resident of Cosford, working part-time at the museum as a volunteer. Met her husband while she was in the WRAAF back in 1963. Which is a pretty interesting occupation for her to have been in, considering that she was also a captain in the Russian Army and a GRU Illegal who was inserted into the UK in 1959, when she was barely out of her teens."

I make an inarticulate gurgling noise. "But she—the hangar—she wasn't—she can't have—"

Angleton waits for me to wind down. "The many-angled ones are not the only enemy this country has ever faced, boy. Some of us remember." (It's okay for him to say that—I was about ten when the cold war ended!)

"Helen Langhorn's primary assignment did not come to an end just because the Soviet Union collapsed. To outward appearances her utility had been in decline for many years, after her husband failed to achieve advancement, costing her access to people and bases; once she hit sixty with no long-term prospects they wrote her off. That is one of the risks one runs with long-term Illegals—their entire life may be marginalized by one or two unfortunate and unpredictable errors. There are probably fifty others like her in the UK—retired bank managers and failed politicians' wives pruning their privet hedges and daydreaming of the revolution that failed them. Or perhaps they accept it gladly, happy to no longer be a pawn on the chessboard. But in any case, Helen's career appears to have undergone a brief second flowering in the last few years."

"But she"—I flap my jaws inarticulately—"she was halfway to dementia!"

"Was she?" Angleton raises a skeptical eyebrow. "She was on the front desk of a museum gallery barely two hundred meters from Hangar 12B, where Airframe 004 is being cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other three white elephants airworthy. You may think that no more than a coincidence, but I don't."

"You never told me what that stuff about the white elephants was about—"