Oh Jeez. I clear my throat. "I've only had an hour and a half with the case files, so I may be misreading this stuff," I admit. Shit, stop making excuses. It just makes you look lame. "BLOODY BARON appears to be a monitoring committee tasked with—well. The cold war never entirely ended, did it? There are too many vested interests on all sides who want to keep it simmering. And the upshot is that Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction. Hence the current gas wars and economic blackmail."

Iris winces. (I'm wincing inside: if you had our heating bills last winter, you'd be wincing too.) "Enough of the macro picture, if you don't mind. What's the micro?"

"FSB activity in London has been rising steadily since 2001." I shrug.

"The Litvinenko assassination, that embarrassing business with the wifienabled rock in Moscow in '05, diplomatic expulsions; the old confrontation is still bubbling under. But BLOODY BARON is new to me, I will admit."

I glance at the file on the table in front of me. "Anyway, there's an organization. We don't know their real designation because nobody who knows anything about them has ever defected and they don't talk to strangers, but folks call them the Thirteenth Directorate—not to be confused with the original Thirteenth Directorate, which was redesignated the Fifth Directorate back in the 1960s. Nasty folks—they were the ones responsible for wet work, Mokryye Dela.

"The current bearers of the name seem to have been forked off the KGB back in 1991, when the KGB was restructured as the FSB. They're an independent wing, much like us."

The Laundry was originally part of SOE, back during the Second World War; we're the part that kept on going when SOE was officially wound up at the end of hostilities.

"They're the Russian OCCINTEL agency, handling demonology and occult intelligence operations. Mostly they stay at home, and their activities are presumably focused on domestic security issues. But there's been a huge upsurge—unprecedented—in overseas activity lately. Thirteenth Directorate staff have been identified visiting public archives, combing libraries, attending auctions of historic memorabilia, and contacting individuals suspected of having contact with the former parent agency back before the end of the real cold war. They've been focusing on London, but also visible in Tallinn, Amsterdam, Paris, Gdansk, Ulan Bator . . . the list doesn't make any obvious sense."

I swallow. "That's all I've got, but there's more, isn't there?"

Everyone's looking at me, except for Gustaffson, who's watching Iris. She nods. "That's the basic picture. Vikram?"

Choudhury looks at me curiously. "Is Mr. Howard replacing Dr. Angleton on this committee?"