I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy fun icons glow at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I point the camera at the door and peer into the shiny screen. Sure enough, in addition to Angleton's trademark Screaming Mind someone has ploddingly inscribed a Langford Death Parrot, with a sympathetic link to a web stats counter so they can monitor how many intruders it's headcrashed from the comfort of their laptop. Tch, what are standards coming to? I pause as a nasty thought strikes me and I triple-check the door frame, then the ceiling above the entrance, then the other side of the corridor, just in case—but no, nothing. This is strictly amateur hour stuff, so rather than zapping the LDP I pull out my conductive pencil and sketch in a breakpoint and then an exception list with a single item: the signature of my new ward. The Screaming Mind already knows me well. Three minutes later I put the phone away, place my hand on the doorknob, twist and push.

Angleton's office: here be monsters. Silent and cold, it is home to the ghosts of a war colder by far than the one the ignorant public thought we won in 1989—a room walled in floor-to-ceiling file drawers, a gunmetal desk with organ-pedals and teletype keyboard, dominated by a hooded microfiche reader—the silent heart of an intelligence stilled, no longer beating out the number station signals across the Iron Curtain. I half-expect to see cobwebs in the corners, to smell the stale cigarette ash of a thousand tense nights beneath the arctic skies, waiting for the bombers.

I shake myself. History lies thick as winter snow in this room: I could drown beneath its avalanche weight if I don't pull myself together. And in any case, Angleton was here—in his office I mean, not in this actual spot—before the cold war. I've seen a photograph from 1942, the man himself smiling at the camera, visibly no older (or younger) than he is today. It's an open question, the extent to which he was involved in the occult affairs of government before the Second World War. Just how far back does he go? Human Resources don't have a home address on file, which is itself suggestive. I wonder . . .