And at least I've got a seat with a table. I reread my instructions as the train shudders and lurches through the parched countryside. It's a low-priority field job: to investigate reports of eerie manifestations of a disturbing nature from one of the airframes stored in the hangar annex to the Royal Air Force Museum. The museum houses a lot of historic war-birds. Violent death tends to go with the territory, and a few ghosts—echoes in the informational substrate of reality—wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary. My job is to dispel any annoying manifestations, reassure the locals, close out the case, etcetera. It's sufficiently routine and predictable that I'd normally send the office junior, but for some reason, Angleton pulled me into his office this morning. "Bob, I'd like you to deal with this one yourself," he said, handing me the brief. "It'll get you out of the office for a day."

"But I'm busy!" I protested, a tad limply—the lack of aircon was getting to me, and I'm not good at standing up to Angleton at the best of times. "I've got to respond to the RFP on structured cabling requirements for the new subbasement extension in D Block"—don't call it a crypt, the government doesn't do crypts, the Spanish Inquisition does crypts—"and go over Claire's training budget. Can't Peter-Fred do it? He's finished Exorcism 101, it's about time he had a field trip . . ."

"Nonsense!" Angleton said crisply. "You can take the paperwork with you, but I specifically want you to go and look at this one."

There's a warning gleam in his eyes: I've seen it before. "Oh no you don't," I replied. "Not so fast!" I raised an eyebrow and waited for the explosion.

Angleton is old school—so old school that I'm pretty sure I've seen his face in a departmental photo taken during the war, back when the Laundry was an obscure department of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, tasked with occult intelligence gathering and counter-demonology. He doesn't look a day older today than he did back then, sixty-five years ago—dress him in a bandage and he could star in a remake of The Mummy. Ice-blue eyes with slightly yellowish scleras, skin like parchment left out for too long in a desert sandstorm, dry as bone and twice as chilly as ice. And I never want to hear his laugh again. But I digress. The thing about Angleton is that, despite (or in addition to) being the honorary departmental monster, he has a sense of humor. It bears about the same relationship to mirth that his cadaverous exterior does to Paris Hilton's—but it's there. (He has the heart of a young boy: keeps it in a reliquary under the coffin he sleeps in.) And right then, I figured he was winding me up for the punch line.