My jaw flaps uselessly. See, it’s the sudden cognitive whiplash that does it. One moment you’re cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you’re in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you’re not primed to expect it, and so far this morning I’ve been trying to think my way into Pete’s problem space, which is really just a training-wheels situation. Pete, for his part, is looking at me as if my head’s begun spinning round spouting ectoplasm and he’s wondering if an exorcism is called for. I wave a hand at him, then try to get a grip on myself. Dr. Wills is still talking when I finally get my voice back. “What exactly have you turned up?” I ask.

“Bodies. Are you people responsible for them?”

“No, I just went looking on a hunch.” I take a deep breath. “How many of that cluster were false positives?”

“None of them. I think you’d better come round here right now, Mr. Howard. We’re going to need to know everything you know if we’re going to contain this outbreak.”

I make a snap decision. “I’ll be round within two hours. With backup. Please don’t go public until we’ve spoken, for any reason at all.”

Then I hang up, and quickly dial another number, the duty officer’s desk line.

“Bob Howard speaking. As a result of information I have just received, I am declaring Code Blue, Code Blue, Code Blue. This is not a drill.” I have never said those words before, in the decade-plus I’ve worked for the Laundry. “I need the emergency first response team to meet me in Briefing Room 201 in fifteen minutes. I’m heading up there right now, and I will be going off-site in an hour. Bye.” I hang up.

“What does Code Blue mean?” Pete asks curiously.

“That the shit has just hit the fan.” I twitch, then drain my coffee mug. “Nothing you can help with; sorry, you’re on your own—I’m out of here.”

And with that, I head for the stairs up to Mahogany Row.

• • •

NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS:

The Laundry is a government agency. It runs on rules: like all bureaucracies, it is designed to get the job done, regardless of the abilities of the individual human cogs in the machine.

However, once you get above a certain level, the practice of magic is somewhat idiosyncratic. Some people have a natural aptitude for it, perhaps for the same reason that abilities are not evenly distributed among computer programmers. Some folks can’t handle abstract reasoning and formal logic, others thrive on it.