"Hmm. Doesn't fit." The pall hanging over him is threatening to throw a miniature thunderstorm. "You didn't run into"—he jerks his chin sharply over his shoulder: in the hall, one of the Plumbers is reinscribing a Dho-Nha curve on the wall with a protractor and a Rotring pen full of colloidal silver ink—"until after, so it's not that . . ."

"What's not that?" I ask.

Andy takes a deep breath.

"Angleton's missing, work is following people home, and the Russians are trying to put the dead back into 'dead letter drop.' You know the old saying, twice is coincidence but three times is enemy action? Well, right now I think it applies . . ."

"Was our visitor Russian?" Mo leans forward.

"Don't know." Andy looks mulish. "Did you get any indication of what he wanted?"

"He kept asking something," I volunteer. "In at least two different languages, neither of which I speak."

"Oh great," he mutters. Stretching, he shakes his head. "Been a bad day so far, going to be a long one as well. Don't suppose there's any chance of a cup of tea?"

"Certainly—for you I can recommend the special herbal teas, monk's hood and spurge laurel, although if you insist I can make a pot of Tetley's . . ."

"That'd be fine." Mo's sarcasm flies right past him, which is the final warning I need that Andy is about ready to drop. Time to ease up on him a little, maybe, if he grovels for it.

"I'll get it," I say, standing up. "So let me see . . . Boris is running some kind of operation code named BLOODY BARON which involves something going down in Amsterdam which required Mo's offices, and—"

They're both shaking their heads at me. "No, no," says Andy, and:

"Amsterdam was CLUB ZERO," says Mo. "It's a sideshow, and . . . did you bring that letter?" Andy produces an envelope. She pockets it: "Thanks."

"Actually, it all boils down to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN," Andy says heavily. "The other operations are side projects; CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is where it all starts."

"Oh yes?" I ask casually, although those words send a chill up my spine.

"Yes." He laughs halfheartedly. "It appears we may have been working under some false operating assumptions," he adds. "The situation seems to be deteriorating . . ."

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world.

You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don't even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There's a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?