I nod tiredly. “I’m not talking about Dracula here, Andy. I know damn well there’s not enough nutritional content in human blood to live off. But someone’s taking these blood samples and I want to know why, and more importantly what they’re doing with them. It looks like some kind of necromantic ritual to me. And the nocturnal fatality thing is, um, well. It doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. I’m thinking in terms of a cultist group who have fucked up by not spreading their net wide enough.”

Andy straightens. “Oh, if you put it that way . . . okay, I’m convinced. We’re going back to the ops room, right now.”

“Hey! If we do that—”

“Bob.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Do you want Mo to kill me?”

“Eh? No! What’s Mo got to do with this?”

“Because she will kill me if I let you rush in without backup—especially when backup is available. See? I am aware that you are, to say the least, somewhat better able to handle yourself in field operations than I am. But you’re not omnipotent and it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve run into something you couldn’t handle by yourself. Also, the good news is, if you’re right and it’s cultists then it is not some sort of contagious prion disease. So we’re not looking at it exponentiating, going pandemic, and de-populating London. There’s time for us to go back to the office to touch base, and then you can go and visit this cleaning agency or the bank or whatever with a full OCCULUS team* for backup.”

I nod, reluctantly. “But time is critical—”

“Yes. Which is why we’re going back to the office right now. Are you with me?”

“Shit.”

“Good man.”

8.

CONFRONTATION!

BY TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, ANDY AND I HAVE RETURNED to the New Annex briefing room, made our report, and learned (by way of one of Jez’s gophers) that the cleaning outfit is a subsidiary of G4S and all the victims of the K syndrome outbreak were indeed working in the same skyscraper, and, furthermore, were all on the night shift. Which is excellent progress. Angleton has been called away to deal with some other bush fire; Lockhart’s in the driving seat. Unfortunately that’s where the good news ends. The skyscraper in question—well, at forty-five stories it’s a skyscraper by British standards—is the headquarters of a major British financial institution; indeed, a household name as prominent and honorable as Northern Rubble and RatWest. Unlike the aforementioned institutions, this one didn’t end up in public ownership in 2008. But it’s not somewhere we can just go barging into mob-handed without attracting all sorts of unwelcome attention. Not to mention spooking the cultists. So we’re going to have to deploy our minions Stealth and Misdirection for this job.