IT IS TRADITIONAL, AT THIS JUNCTURE IN THE NARRATIVE, TO insert yet another Hollywood-style montage of diligent bureaucrats sleeplessly combing the archives in search of clues to the identity of the enemy mole within their organization. (Optional: one of them is stabbed in the jugular by said mole while working late. They use their last five minutes not to call for an ambulance, but to compose an amusing cryptogram naming their assailant, and to finger-paint it on the underside of their desk using their own blood as ink. Where it is found the next morning by Facilities and promptly cleaned up before anyone with a clue gets to see it.)

Well fuck that shit.

What actually happens is called Division of Labor, with a nod and a wink to security protocols. Andy and I send Pete away to draw up a questionnaire about vampires and why people think they don’t exist, emphasis on the “why.” We want to find out if vampire denialism is a statistical anomaly, so we plan to use his church as a control cohort. If anyone asks he can soft-soap it as an enquiry into the level of belief in supernatural phenomena among his parishioners. (We remind him to keep this away from Alex for the time being.)

Andy has a whole bunch of clearances for keyword access to confidential files. I have a whole bunch of clearances for etcetera. We’re not going to search secret sources at this point—the flaming hoops we’d have to jump through would leave us seriously scorched. As it is, our confidential clearances overlap but are disjoint sets, so we go to the Security Coordination desk and ask the blue-suiter on duty to generate lists specific to each of us and a shared list we can split down the middle. We both have blanket permission for archive searches on anything over a century old, and for newer stuff that’s classified but has passed its expiration date. (This being the Laundry we don’t publish our declassified archives for the general public, but employees can get access more or less at will once it has expired.) Most of this material is available from our computerized document retrieval system these days, so it’s a lot like doing a university library literature search, except grubbier and more esoteric.

Search keyword: vampire.

Searching.

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Did you know that if you search for “vampire” in books on amazon.com you will get approximately 33,770 results?