“Yeshua ben Yusuf won’t save you, boy, for that you need to be fast and smart and move in daylight. Vampirism may be contagious, but it is memetically so, rather than genetic: before you can acquire it you need to be a practiced logician, if not a practitioner in your own rights. You and I are, of course, immune to that particular cognitive parasite—we have our own abnormality. But I assume you are aware of the Black pre-prints? Areas of research that are discouraged due to the high frequency of spontaneous human combustion among people who think too hard about certain questions? One might wonder why a group of quantitative analysts were pointed in the direction of those particular algorithms, and by whom. If someone was considering the possibility of raising an army of vampirism-augmented sorcerers, perhaps they might start by conducting experiments on a limited scale . . . It is in any event a complex jigsaw and if you wish to assemble it fully you will first need to locate the source of that troublesome and ubiquitous disbelief that pervades our organization.”

“You’re telling me that the Scrum are probably pawns in a game of vamp versus vamp?”

“No, Bob, you deduced that for yourself. You may or may not be correct. I do not know. However, I would strongly advise you to investigate further.”

“So, er . . . who is he?”

Angleton crosses his arms. He looks annoyed. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” I stare at him in disbelief.

“I am not omnipotent, boy. Or omniscient. We are discussing the possible existence of a very powerful sorcerer, immune from K syndrome and probably more than a century old, who has encrusted our organizational premises with an obfuscatory geas going back decades. They predate my arrival and probably know enough about me to stay out of my way.” His expression of irritation deepens.

“Okay, so let’s say there is a long-term PHANG in the Laundry, and you don’t know who he is—surely at least you have a suspect in mind?” (Yes, he. If we’re talking about someone older than Angleton, we’re talking about a prewar sorcerer. Pre–First World War.)

Angleton shakes his head. “I have suspicions. But I don’t want to share them with you; they might lead you down a blind alley.”

“If you insist.” I pause. “So we have this invisible blood-sucking mole within the organization. But there’s also another long-term PHANG outside the big tent, and he’s lately set up the Scrum to, to start a fight with our PHANG?” Angleton nods. “But they must have been doing this on and off for decades!”