“Did it have a name, this project?”

“Yes. The books and posters are called MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY, but she said I’d find it in the stacks under a very strange reference—KGB.2.YA—what’s so funny? Bob? Are you choking? Bob? Bob? Do you need help?”

Kiss Good-Bye 2 Your Ass: I love the Laundry sense of humor.

“I’m okay,” I finally wheeze as I exhale the last of my half-lungful of coffee. “Let’s go check it out.”

KGB.2.YA. How bad can it be?

• • •

IN THE END WE GO BACK TO MY OFFICE, WHEREUPON A COUPLE of emails and a phone call confirm that Pete has actually been sent an orientation pack (not arrived yet) and assigned to my guest chair for the next week. Doubtless this is my punishment for increasing the departmental headcount and simultaneously downsizing our office floorspace with Angleton’s help. (I gather Andy is still in full-on Office Flying Dutchman mode . . .) “Looks like we’re hot-desking or something,” I explain. “Let’s do lunch and I’ll take you to the archives afterwards.”

The Dansey House refurbishment may be stalled, but the archive stacks, deep beneath the basement, are still in business. They’re built inside segments of deep-running tube tunnels that were excavated before and after the Second World War, to double as air raid shelters and blitz-proof government offices. Nuclear weapons made them obsolete for their original purpose and the London Underground never asked to have their tube station back, so we hung on to it and filled it with microfiche cards and, latterly, storage servers. You thought the gigantic new London water mains were installed to supply the capital with drinking water? Well, yes they were—but only after we’ve used them as a heat sink for our equipment racks.

But we don’t end up in the deep stacks. Before lunch I take Pete to visit old Basil in Archives to ask for the shelf locator of KGB.2.YA. This is necessary because Basil is one of our pensioners—the ones who don’t retire so much as they subside into the furniture—and the most advanced technology he can operate reliably is his hearing aid (which whistles irritatingly, like a mosquito scraping its fingernails down a blackboard). He doesn’t answer his email, instant messaging might as well be rocket science, and a voice call is inevitably frustrated by the intermittently faulty induction loop on his desk phone. Luckily Basil is okay if you visit him in person, so I procure a map and a signed authorization chitty before taking Pete to the canteen for lunch (British Institutional Keg Curry and naan for me, beans on toast for him).

Afterwards, back in my office: “You have got to be shitting . . . sorry.” I peer at the hand-scrawled carbon-copy again, double-checking it. “You’re sure that was the right reference?”