"Yes, there is. You should really use code names and the index in case the file's been assigned a new number, you know. It happens sometimes. Do you have a codeword for me? I could look it up for you . . ."

"I'm sorry, my colleague just gave me a list of document reference numbers," I explain. "And he's, uh, off sick. So I'm trying to figure out what's missing. I was worried that the file had been sent over and got misplaced, but if it's missing in the stacks I suppose that just means it's been renumbered. Or he wrote down the wrong reference. Or something." I don't believe that last one for a split second—no way would Angleton get a file number wrong—but I don't want some nosy librarian poking her nose into my investigation. "Bye." I put the phone down and lean back, thinking.

Let's see: Angleton was working on BLOODY BARON. When I came back to the office he gave me a list of ten files to read, then he went missing. This coincides with an upswing in Russian activity, including a marked willingness to use extreme measures. Nine files came from the stacks, and they turn out to be tedious backgrounders relating indirectly to the historical investigation side of BLOODY BARON. The tenth file isn't on its shelf. All I've got is a number, not a name.

I think it's time to do some unofficial digging . . .

MEANWHILE, BACK TO THE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION:

It is nearly six o'clock when Mr. Dower finishes typing his report.

He's lost track of the time, his head locked inside the scope of his postmortem on the instrument. He's read about its like before. Their design is attributed to a deaf-mute German violinist in Paris in the early 1920s, but nobody actually built one until the ghastly Dr. Mabuse commissioned an entire string section from a certain Berlin instrument maker in 1931. (It should be no surprise that the instrument maker prospered under the subsequent regime, but was executed after a summary trial by SMERSH investigators in 1946.) This particular instrument made its way to the West in the luggage of a returning GI, was retrofitted with electric pickups during the 1950s, and after a spectacular run of accidents was acquired by a reclusive collector in 1962—believed by some to be a front for a British government department who, as a matter of state policy, did not like to see such instruments in the wrong hands.

He dreads to think what its reappearance portends. On the other hand, the young woman who brought it to him—Mr. Dower thinks of everyone aged under fifty as "young"—seemed to have a sober appreciation of its lethality.