Now I think things with Mo are patched up—at least insofar as they can be, when she’s still having screaming gallows-chamber nightmares three times a week. Hell, I’m having nightmares about what she did, and we’re both resorting to alcohol as a sleeping aid more often than is strictly healthy. I’d go and scream at her supervisory board if I thought it would do any good, but the problem is that somebody has to do these jobs, and if not Mo, then who? So I confine myself to writing a stiffly worded memo petitioning them to please fucking ease up on her for a while, because if she gets another assignment like Vakilabad there’s a good chance it will break her. And then I pace her with the whisky bottle each evening.

Meanwhile, Andy is drifting from abandoned store room to temporarily vacant cubicle like a damned soul in exile, clutching his laptop; Pete is getting his teeth into the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY job, prototyping Facebook awareness campaigns and an official Laundry Twitter feed,* and I am attending too many committee meetings.

In addition to GOD GAME BLACK, GOD GAME RAINBOW, COBWEB MAZE, and BLOODY BARON, they have dropped another fucking committee process on my head. For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we’ve assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar. It’s a sign that not everybody in the bureaucracy is taking our new photophobic colleagues entirely seriously, because it’s a really big security no-no to give a project a moniker that bears any relationship whatsoever to its subject matter. Breaches compartmentalization or something. But for some reason all you have to do is utter the word “vampire” and people around here pull out the pointy plastic choppers and the opera cape like they’re some sort of joke.

It’s not, actually, very funny. It’s like turning up for work one morning at the Met Office and discovering that the earnest people who bring us the shipping forecast are all jovial Young Earth creationists who think Global Warming is a conspiracy by climatologists who are trying to use it to get rich. Or discovering that the Department for Trade and Industry is run by a Reiki practitioner whose special advisor is an astrologer. Or like finding out that the Ministry of Defense is lobbying for the urgent renewal of our strategic nuclear deterrent because it is vitally important to be able to nuke the capital of the Soviet Union at five minutes’ notice.* For some reason we seem to have a screamingly huge organizational blind spot—a part of our remit that nobody even believes exists.