“Pete,” Andy says, calmly enough, “I don’t think you should get into the habit of asking questions on unclassified mailing lists. In fact, before you do that again, just make a point of checking if it’s okay with me or Bob, right? We wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Oh. Um. I see.” Pete is subdued, perhaps a little surprised at how scared we both looked for a moment. Not realizing that we’re not scared for us, we’re scared for him.

“Did you get any results?” I ask, leaning forward.

“Um, yes!” Pete brightens. “Mostly from junior staff and new inductees—I included a time-of-service question and the median was fifteen months. It turns out that of the eighteen responses I got, nobody at all believes in Satan and only two believe in vampires. Those two were recent inductees, by the way, time of service less than twelve months. Age is much more representative than the church survey, averaging thirty-two, outliers as young as twenty-one and as old as, well, one joker wrote in that they were two hundred and thirty-one and what was my blood group, please?”

Pete stops and stares at me. Then at Andy. “That was a joke, right?” he asks uncertainly. “Wasn’t it?”

“Do you still have the responses?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level and even and unfrightening.

“Sure: they’re in a mail archive I created for them . . .”

“What do you think?” I ask Andy.

“I think”—Andy looks as worried as I feel—“it’s probably a joke. Probably.”

“Well, then,” I say, pushing my mostly undrunk pint glass away: “Let’s go and find out, shall we?” I stand up.

“What, right now?” asks Pete.

“When better?”

• • •

BUT WHEN WE GET BACK TO PETE’S OFFICE HE CAN’T FIND HIS mailbox full of survey responses.

I spend a fruitless and frustrating hour digging around with some forensics tools and groveling over logfiles. And finally I work out what happened. Pete did indeed save all his survey responses to a mail archive. But he stashed it on the local drive of the PC he was working on. Which is, of course, connected to our NAS. And for some reason when he logged out the VM image he was working on didn’t get uploaded back to the storage array. So when we came storming back into the office and Pete logged himself in for me, he downloaded a stale copy of the VM he’d been working with, which scribbled all over the local copy with the mail archive. And because we are the Laundry and we are hip to the whole INFOSEC thing, these days our desktop PCs store everything local in a rather expensive PCIe RAM disk card (not even Flash—Flash memory retains data when you pull the plug) with whole disk encryption. And it’s soldered to the PC’s chassis, precisely because we don’t want random interlopers to be able to trivially retrieve erased files.