Mhari has the baton (actually a chrome-plated blue laser pointer), the stopwatch, and the whiteboard: she’s running this as a sprint review meeting for Oscar, who sits in the hemispheric Evil Overlord chair opposite the far end of the boardroom table.

“Evan. What did you and Alex learn from JESUS STUFF?”

Evan stands, glances down at his tablet. “We can enter churches. Crosses and religious symbols have no effect on us. I took holy communion without any ill effects. I was unable to acquire a sample of holy water, but I think we can reasonably expect it to have no effect. We tested a Church of England church, a Roman Catholic cathedral, a Reform Jewish synagogue, and a Jehovah’s Witness meeting room. If you want us to continue, Alex and I have identified a mosque and a Sikh temple, but we’ll need a pretext or disguise. Oh, and afterwards we ate out—Italian, with garlic bread as a starter.”

He looks at Mhari expectantly. Mhari, for her part, takes a green Post-it note and plants it on the whiteboard, under the DONE column adjacent to the JESUS STUFF row. She smiles happily. “Strike one!” She turns to Janice. “What about BLOOD BANK?”

“This is going to take a while. Short version: Oh God, yes, human blood. Unfortunately getting it isn’t going to be as easy as walking into a hematology lab and walking out with a six-pack. Blood is expensive enough that it’s ordered centrally on a named-patient basis. On the other hand, it turns out we don’t need much of it, and, oh my god, it’s lovely. Let me see . . .”

Janice runs through her checklist and Mhari adds new Post-it notes in exciting shades of magenta and cyan to the whiteboard under the TO DO and TESTING columns. Finally Janice runs down, reserves of information sucked dry. Evan maintains a leathery silence throughout, punctuated by significant glances in the direction of Oscar, whose expression is one of distant longing, almost hunger. Mhari’s expression, too, is fixed. They’d shared the final sample tube, enough to confirm its importance.

“Blood.” Mhari nods to herself. “Thank you, Janice. So I guess this means we’re back to hitting on the cleaning staff or getting creative with the, uh, mind control thing. John, Dick: did you get any endurance and scope metrics from your experiments?”

“I’ll take this.” John gives Dick a warning look, but Dick merely slouches in his chair, an expression of feline bliss on his saggy face. (He is clearly sleep-deprived and unshaven.) “Dick pulled,” he announces. “Two nights running. In fact, on our first time out Dick walked straight past the bouncers at Vertigo 42 dressed as he is now”—a ripple of disbelief runs around the room—“then walked up to a Russian oligarch, out-stared his bodyguards, and asked the guy’s mistress, quote, ‘Hey, babe, how about we go and play Mr. Policeman Hides His Truncheon?’ Unquote. Yes, he scored.” John is visibly quivering with outrage at this affront to his imagination. “On the way out, he, um, he picked up an aspiring model as well.”