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

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

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

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

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

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

I DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT PS200, AND DO NOT BUY Piccadilly Circus. I don't go to jail, either—not yet—but by the middle of the morning a thirty-year stretch in Wormwood Scrubs would come as a blessed relief.

"Committee of enquiry will come to order."

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