I shake my head, unlock the computer, and haul down a shiny new VM from our classified information repository. (It seems a bit excessive to create and download a whole new Windows Vista guest instance in order to open a new notepad document and type a few notes, but that’s how we’re supposed to roll these days.) I’m partway through typing up some notes on the DRESDEN RICE mess and Angleton’s advice pertaining thereto when there’s a knock on the door. “Come in!” I call. As the door opens, the cat looks up in sudden alarm and scrambles for cover under my desk. Oh great. It’s Andy. “Well?” he asks, with the expression of a friend who can’t quite bring himself to ask how the blind date he fixed up on a dare went.

“Come in and sit down,” I suggest, “but watch your feet.”

“Watch for”—Andy spots the litter tray—“what?”

“It’s the stray that was hanging around the dumpsters; it followed me in.” Andy sits down. “I was going to take it to the Cat and Dog Home at lunchtime but Trish has unilaterally decided I’m adopting it.”

“She probably thought you needed the humanizing touch,” Andy agrees as he sits down. There’s another knock on the door.

“Yes?” I call.

“Hello, Bob. Got a minute?” It’s Pete. He spots Andy: “Oh, hello.”

I give up any thought of getting any actual work done, shut down and save the VM, and push my keyboard away. “You might as well both make yourselves at home. Pay no attention to the hairy squatter, it’s going to the Cat and Dog—”

“Oh hello,” says Pete, kneeling and peering under my desk. “Aren’t you a fine one?”

He is answered by a curious chirrup. I glance at Andy.

“Has it been positively vetted?” he asks.

“Very droll.” The vicar is allowing his index finger to be sniffed from the shadows.

“I’m serious,” Andy adds. “Strange animals, lurking around our back door, waiting to be taken in—could it be bugged?”

“What, you mean like the crazy CIA project from the sixties? Electric Kitty? No, Acoustic Kitty?”

Andy shrugs. “Or like our paper clips. Destiny-entangle it with a littermate, keep littermate in a summoning grid, anything one cat hears the other cat hears also. You just have to figure out a way of making it sing.”

“Well that’s a—”

Pete stands up, holding a buzzing black furball. He looks at me accusingly. “You are not going to take Spooky here to a cat shelter! You are going to take—er—her home and give her the love and affection she so obviously deserves.” He scritches the little monster under its chin: it buzzes like a badly grounded transformer.