First Basil nudged us into taking Old George’s Scrum-shaped experiment away from him. Then he bamboozled Old George into loaning him not-Marianne the assassin, by presenting a common front. Finally, he removed himself from the firing line, warned Old George that the Laundry working group on PHANGs was coming for him, and thereby triggered a game of “let’s you and him fight.”

Foxes are fast movers—and they bite.

• • •

AT PRECISELY THREE MINUTES PAST SEVEN O’CLOCK, AT EXACTLY the moment that I’m rolling around in Steven Howe’s intestines with ringing ears as a demented vampire hunter with a pistol and a selection of explosives tries to kill me, Old George launches an assault on the New Annex.

If he was able to call on the support of all his minions, you would not be reading this account of his attack; but Basil has cunningly stripped him of his deadliest proxies and waved the flag of an immediate threat before him. There is insufficient notice to prepare adequately for the offensive. Old George is therefore winging it.

Old George is very well-informed, for an outsider. He knows about the night watch. He knows about our alarm systems. Finally, Old George is armed for bear. He may be desperate, but he’s also a two-hundred-year-old ritual magician and occult practitioner who is immune to K syndrome, and a vampire on top.

At this time of evening the building is largely deserted. The cleaners have been and gone; a couple of night watch bodies roam the ground floor and basement level. Lights burn on the second floor, in a couple of briefing rooms and the duty officer’s den. So it is that when a black Mercedes pauses briefly outside the main entrance and a man gets out, nobody is paying enough attention to the external CCTV feed.

Old George wears a charcoal gray trench coat with its collar turned up, and a homburg pulled low over his ears. The trench coat conceals a multitude of sins, not least of which is a silk lining that Old George has embroidered by hand himself over a period of many months, with enough defensive wards and charms to armor an aircraft carrier. The hat has properties of its own, its brim casting a shadow that renders the wearer’s face unrecognizable. Anonymous and all but invisible, he marches up to the front door of the New Annex and touches the keypad. The pad smokes as he lets himself in.