“You tried to tell Emma Dearest what to do, didn’t you?” Mhari smiles sympathetically. “I’m surprised she didn’t shoot you. Oscar, you don’t do that to Laundry personnel. They’re all warded, anyway. But when—if—you’ve got one of these, it’s like the you-gotta-believe-me thing, only better. You can tell someone you work for the government, any department at all, and they’ll simply believe you. I’ve seen their people march into police crime scenes and tell the detectives they work for the Home Office and be believed. Or into military bases. You could tell people you work for the SFO and, well, you saw Mr. Howard, didn’t you?”

“Huh. Didn’t think much of him.”

Mhari leans against Oscar; he raises his arm to make room for her. She compares her memories to the warm and dynamic presence beside her: the idiot ex comes off infinitely worse. “Neither do I, frankly. I don’t know what I saw in him. But he’s going to come in useful along the way, I think. The point is, once the Laundry have us pegged as working for them they’re not going to consider the other possibilities until it’s much too late. They place too much trust in trust—they assume their people are loyal, or at least rendered incapable of rebelling by their coercive geases. You know, the binding oath they made you swear. Do you feel any different?”

Oscar tenses for a moment. “Loyalty has always seemed to be a two-way street to me,” he murmurs, which is music to her ears because it’s exactly what he ought to be saying at this point, even though she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t mean it. Oscar sometimes seems blind to his own mildly suppressed sociopathic tendencies. “By my estimate they owe me at least ten million. If they really wanted my loyalty . . .”

“Exactly.” She turns and nibbles on his earlobe, extracting a sharp intake of breath. “How are Pippa and the kids doing, anyway?”

“How are—? I don’t know and don’t care, frankly. She took them off to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks, something about seeing they spent some time with their grandfather. He refuses to set foot in the UK until it leaves the EU for some reason.” She feels his free hand working its way around her shoulder, outlining her bra strap. “So I’m free for a while. Listen, I’m thirsty and this grape piss simply isn’t cutting the mustard. How about you?”

“I could kill for a drink,” she says wistfully. They’ve been dry for over a week at this point.

“Well then, why don’t we? There are plenty of homeless people out round the back of the hotel who won’t miss a couple of tubes full.”