"Let me be straightforward: all the signs suggest that the Thirteenth Directorate are suddenly playing very dangerous games on our turf. If the cultists who CLUB ZERO shut down turn out to be a front for the Thirteenth Directorate, then we have to assume that CLUB ZERO is connected with BLOODY BARON—and that turns it from a low-key adversarial tactical analysis into a much higher priority for us. They're not usually reckless, and they're not pushing the old ideological agenda anymore—they wouldn't be acting this openly for short-term advantage—so we need to find out what they're doing and put a stop to it, before anyone else gets hurt. Yes, Bob? What is it?"

I put my hand down. "This might sound stupid," I hear myself saying, "but has anyone thought about, you know, asking them?"

I'M NOT BIG ON HISTORY.

When I was at school, I dropped the topic as soon as I could, right after I took my GCSEs. It seemed like it was all about one damn king after another, or one war after another, or a bunch of social history stuff about what it was like to live as an eighteenth-century weaver whose son had run off with a spinster called Jenny, or a sixteenth-century religious bigot with a weird name and a witch-burning fetish. Tedious shite, in other words, of zero relevance to modern life—especially if you were planning on studying and working in a field that was more or less invented out of whole cloth in 1933.

The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won't necessarily ignore you.

History, it turns out, is all around us. Service House—where I used to have my cubicle—is where the Laundry moved in 1953. Before that, it used to belong to the Foreign Office. Before that, we worked out of an attic above a Chinese laundry in Soho, hence the name. Before that . . .

There was no Laundry, officially.

The Laundry was a wartime work of expedience, magicked into existence by a five-line memo headlined ACTION THIS DAY and signed Winston Churchill. It was directed at a variety of people, including a retired major general and sometime MI6 informer, whose dubious status was probably the deciding factor in keeping his ass out of an internment camp along with the rest of the Nazi-sympathizing Directorate of the British Union of Fascists—that, and his shadowy connections to occultists and mathematicians, his undoubted genius as a tactician and theorist of the arts of war, and the nuanced reports of his political officer, who figured his patriotism had a higher operator precedence than his politics. That man was F: Major-General J. F. C. "Boney" Fuller. He's been in his grave for nearly half a century, and would doubtless be spinning in it fast enough to qualify for carbon credits as an environmentally friendly power source if he could see us today in all our multi-ethnic anti-discriminatory splendor.

But who cares?

That is, indeed, the big-ticket question.