"You give me a written evaluation." She has another piece of paper, this one containing a short list of bullet points. "As I said, a preliminary estimate of the cost of repairing such a . . . relic. A half-gram sample excised from the corpse of another identical instrument. All necessary materials to be provided by the customer. If you can assess the nature of the bindings that hold it together, my employers would like to be able to replicate them."

He stares at her. "Who are you from? Who sent you here?"

"I'm from the government department responsible for keeping instruments like this out of your shop. Unfortunately there is a time for business as usual, and then . . . well. Can you do it?"

Mr. Dower stares at the wall behind her. "If I must."

"Good. If you attach your invoice to the report I will see that it is processed promptly."

"When do you need the report?" he asks, shaking himself as if awakening from a dream.

"Right now." She walks over to the door and flips the sign to CLOSED.

"But I—" He swallows.

"I'm required to stay within arm's reach of the instrument at all times. And to remove it from your premises when you are not working on it." The woman doesn't smile; in fact, her expression is faintly nauseated.

"Why? To prevent me stealing it?"

"No, Mr. Dower: to prevent it from killing you."

I'M BACK IN MY OFFICE AFTER THE BLOODY BARON MEETING. The committee have minuted that I am to try and think myself into Angleton's shoes (ha bloody ha); the coffee mug is cooling on the mouse mat beside my cranky old HP desktop as I sit here, head in hands, groaning silently and wishing I'd paid more attention in history classes rather than staring at the back of Zoe McCutcheon's head and thinking about—let's not go there. (Sixteen-year-old male: fill in the blanks.) All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me—why can't we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?

There's a pile of dusty manila folders sitting on my desk. Angleton said they were interesting, right before he went missing, and if that wasn't a deliberate clue I'll eat my pants. He's a slithy old tove and I wouldn't put it past him to have meant something significant, damn him. But all I've got is a list of hastily scrawled file reference numbers, pointers into the shelf positions documents are stored at in the stacks—nothing as simple as filenames, of course, that would be giving valuable information to the enemy. How like Angleton.