Brains has been given a good talking-to, and is being subjected to the Security Theater Special Variety Show for breaching about sixteen different regulations by installing beta software on an employee's personal phone. Reminding Oscar-Oscar that if he hadn't done so they'd have lost the Eater of Souls to a cultist infiltrator appears to be futile. Right now, everyone in Admin has joined in the world's biggest arse-kicking circle dance, except possibly for Angleton, who is shielding me from the worst of it. Because they haven't forgotten that I've been a naughty boy too—if it wasn't for me, they wouldn't have needed all those bulldozers at Brook-field, would they? Although Angleton has had a measure of success in pointing out to certain overenthusiastic disciplinarians that if it wasn't for the feeders I summoned, they'd have had the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh trying to open up a long distance call to the Sleeper in the Pyramid, paid in the coin of London's dead.

AS FOR THE MAN HIMSELF—CALL HIM TEAPOT , CALL HIM Angleton, call him Sir—I haven't seen him since I woke up here, and I won't be seeing him until the Auditors hear my final report and I go back on active duty. But I have this to say:

I used to think he scared the shit out of me, but now I know better. I know what he's like, from the inside. The effects of Iris's botched binding faded fast, and I probably only borrowed a tiny fraction of his power. I didn't know how to use it properly, either. But I have been destiny-entangled before, and I know what it was like then, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Angleton was in a flatlined coma for the entire duration of my funny turn.

I also learned this much: Angleton isn't bound to the Laundry by the ramshackle geas that Fuller and his fellow eccentric occultists threw together in the 1930s. He's a free agent—or at least as free as any of us are, be we beasts, men, or gods. The reason he puts up with us? I don't know. It may be long habit—he's lived the life of an Englishman for so long now that he self-identifies as such. But I have a theory.

Angleton knows what's coming. He knows exactly what is going to bleed through the walls of reality, when the stars burn down from the pitiless heavens and our ever-thinking numbers begin to corrode the structure of reality. And he believes we're his best hope for his own survival.

Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I'll be waiting with a shotgun.

Glossary of abbreviations, acronyms, and organizations

AIVD Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (General Intelligence and Security Service) [Netherlands]

BA British Airways [UK]

BLACK CHAMBER Cryptanalysis agency officially disbanded in 1929 (secretly retasked with occult intelligence duties) [US]

CESG Communications-Electronics Security Group (division within GCHQ) [UK]