Nine folders. Shit.

Have you ever found yourself in a cold sweat, your palms clammy and your clothes sticking to the small of your back? Heart hammering, even though you're sitting down? Mouth dry as a mummy's tomb?

I am a rough, tough, hardened field agent (yeah, right). I have been in the Laundry for nearly a decade. I've met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I've even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn't know any better). But I've never lost a classified file before, and I don't ever want there to be a first time.

I force myself to sit down and close my eyes for what feels like an hour, but is actually just under two minutes according to the clock on my computer's screen. When I open my eyes, the problem is still there, but the sweat is beginning to dry and the panicked feeling has receded . . . for now. So I get down on my knees and start picking up the photographs, working through them until I am certain I've got them all in sequence, and then I put them in the correct envelope and very carefully stack it on my chair.

I pick up a Post-it pad and copy the number on the front of the envelope. Then I repeat, eight times, for the remaining envelopes. Then I hunt across my desk until—aha!—I find Angleton's original spidery scrawl, numbers swimming before my eyes like exotic fish.

Ten numbers. I go through them checking off the files I've got, until I identify the number that's missing. 10.0.792.560. Right.

I call up the requisition and look for 10.0.792.560. Sure enough, it's there. So I ordered it, but it isn't in my office. Double shit. I dumpster-dive the transaction file, looking for my request: Did they fill it? Oh. Oh my. DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF.

I just about faint with relief, but manage to force myself to pick up the phone and dial the front desk number. "Hello? Archives?" The voice at the far end is female, distracted, a little squawky, and all human—for which I am grateful: not all the archive staff are warm-blooded.

"Hi, this is Bob Howard in Ops? Back on Thursday I requested an archival document retrieval, ten dead files. I'm going through them now, and one of them is missing. I've got a file number, and an annotation saying DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF. Can you tell me what that means?"

"It means"—she sounds irritated—"the librarian couldn't find your file. They looked where it was supposed to be and it wasn't there."

"Oh. Is there a direct mapping between the document reference number and a given shelf?"