I rub my eyes and quietly snarl: "Fuck this shit!" The temptation to start jumping up and down and shouting is well-nigh irresistible, but my office shares a plasterboard partition with that of an easily distracted computer-phobic project manager, and the last time I punched the wall he made me come round and put all of his GANT chart stickies back in the right order on pain of being forced to attend a training course on critical path analysis. Which is deeply unfair, in my book—if the lines on one of Roskill's charts don't join up, all that happens is a project goes over budget: nobody gets eaten or goes insane (unless the Auditors decide to get involved)—but there's no arguing with him: ex-RAF type, thinks he runs the country.

It's almost too late for lunch, and all I've succeeded in figuring out so far is that F had a lot of interesting correspondents in the Baltic states, not to mention a huge and not entirely rational hard-on for the Bolsheviks. (Mind you, he was a bit unhinged in more ways than that.) On the other hand, this Ransome chap seems to have had his head screwed on. A journalist, obviously, but corresponding with a colonel in the War Office? And his correspondence ended up filed in the Laundry archives? That's pretty suggestive. And those photographs . . . ! Roman Von Ungern Sternberg clearly had a disturbed childhood if his idea of fossil-collecting involved elder race relics. No wonder Daddy ended up in the loony bin and Mummy shacked up with a boringly conventional country squire with no questionable hobbies.

I look at the stack of files: nine of the bloody things, brown manila envelopes with dates and security classifications scribbled on their front, beneath the familiar Dho-Nha geometry curve of the Internal Security Sigil ("read this without authorization and your eyeballs will melt," or words to that effect in one of the simpler Enochian metalanguages). They're identified by number, using a system we call the Codex Mathemagica—four three-digit quads, just like IP addresses (and isn't that a significant coincidence, given that the Laundry archives predate the internet by thirty years? Although the Laundry stacks use decimal as a native format, not two hex digits, now that I think about it: Does that mean their original numeric routines were written to manage BCD primitives?)—with no overall meaning except that they're unique in the index . . .

Nine folders.

I rummage around on my desk for the original paper Angleton gave me. Weren't there ten files there? Ten sets of numbers? I can't find the note, damn it, but I know where I entered the document retrieval request. I wake my computer and call up the transaction log. Yup, ten files requested.

I look under my desk. Then I look behind my desk. Then I look in the circular filing cabinet, just in case. I recount the folders, double-checking inside them just in case the missing file has been interleaved.