Lockhart looks as if he’s swallowed the proverbial early-morning frog; Andy isn’t much happier either. As for me, I might be off the hook but I’m not doing the happy dance. Mhari has somehow reactivated herself and is fully aware that I’m on her case, which means she’s either going to try and stab me or fuck me: possibly both, in no particular order. (And yes, the ambiguous use of the verb “to fuck” in the preceding sentence is intentional.)

“Maybe she fell into something and was too busy swimming to think about the big picture?” Andy proposes charitably. Uncharitably, I decide that this is Andy’s week for being charitable to fuck-ups (but I keep this opinion to myself).

It’s a suggestion that has some merit, but Jez is shaking her head. “No, you saw the file. She’s got form for contingency exercises. Even if her schemes didn’t often pan out, she was capable of forward planning. I know Gilbert, and he wouldn’t have written what he did on her annual review in ’02 if she was just another mendacious bubblehead. Unstable and destructive, but also fast-thinking and potentially a high-flyer.” (Lockhart rolls an eye at me: What’s that supposed to mean?) “I think she worked out what she’d fallen into right at the outset. And she moved her plans forward just as we sent someone to round her up? That’s not a coincidence. I think we were deliberately spoofed.”

I’m shaking my head. “She’s not smart enough to plan something like that,” I explain. “I mean, she was mercurial and able to go from kiss to kill in about five seconds flat, but long-term planning wasn’t her strong point.”

However, Lockhart and Jez and Andy are nodding their heads at me like a row of bobbleheads, and I get an inkling that maybe I’m not privy to something.

“Bob, Bob.” It’s Andy. “You were close to her for a while, but you only had one angle on her. We’ve got full access to her file and she’s more complex than that. Her private life and her actual work performance—at least, as of a decade ago—look like they belong to two different people. She’s very good at performative compartmentalization. It’s a major asset in an officer and she should have gone far within the organization, but, well. We—and by we, I mean we, the Laundry—clearly failed to get the best out of her, and in the end, she fired us. Gave us no sensible options other than to let her leave on more or less her own terms. And now she’s reactivated herself—again, on her own terms. Do you really think she’d have ended up as a project manager in an elite rocket science team inside one of our biggest investment banks if she was an attention-deficit basket case?”