She shakes her head. “I won’t be back.” Reaching into her bag she pulls out another envelope. “Print out one copy of your report-and no more-and place it in this envelope. Then seal it and post it.” There is no address on the envelope. “After you have done that, you should destroy your records. Erase your word processor files, burn the tapes, whatever it takes. You will be held responsible if your report leaks.”
“But there’s no-” He takes the envelope. “You’re sure?”
“If you post that envelope I will have the contents on my desk by morning,” she tells him, staring at him with pale green eyes as unquiet as a storm surge.
“I don’t want to see that thing ever again,” he tells her.
“You won’t.”
“But you want to know how to make more-”
“No.” Her face is as smooth as plaster, as if any hint of human emotion might crack the surface of her glaze: “I want to prove to my superiors that the cost is too high.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not given the magnitude of the threat we face. Desperate measures are called for; I merely believe this one to be too desperate. Good-bye, Mr. Dower. I trust we shall never meet again.”
BACK IN THE OFFICE:
Photograph One: A large slate, resting on a table beside a wooden measuring rod. According to the rod it is twenty inches high and (inferred using a ruler) eighteen inches wide. Cleaved along a plane, it reveals a well-preserved fossil of what appears to be a starfish of class Asteroidea. On closer inspection, there is something wrong with the fossil. Although it possesses the characteristic five-fold symmetry, each tentacle tip appears to be blunt, as if truncated. Moreover, the body doesn’t show signs of radial segmentation-it’s an integral whole, giving an effect more like a cross section through an okra fruiting body, or perhaps an oversized echinoderm-a sea cucumber. Photograph Two: Is another large slab of broken rock, this time revealing the partially dissected and fossilized arm of a juvenile BLUE HADES… Photograph Three: Is in the pile Bob has just dumped on the floor.
I rub my eyes and quietly snarclass="underline" “Fuck this shit!” The temptation to start jumping up and down and shouting is well-nigh irresistible, but my office shares a plasterboard partition with that of an easily distracted computer-phobic project manager, and the last time I punched the wall he made me come round and put all of his GANT chart stickies back in the right order on pain of being forced to attend a training course on critical path analysis. Which is deeply unfair, in my book-if the lines on one of Roskill’s charts don’t join up, all that happens is a project goes over budget: nobody gets eaten or goes insane (unless the Auditors decide to get involved)-but there’s no arguing with him: ex-RAF type, thinks he runs the country.
It’s almost too late for lunch, and all I’ve succeeded in figuring out so far is that F had a lot of interesting correspondents in the Baltic states, not to mention a huge and not entirely rational hard-on for the Bolsheviks. (Mind you, he was a bit unhinged in more ways than that.) On the other hand, this Ransome chap seems to have had his head screwed on. A journalist, obviously, but corresponding with a colonel in the War Office? And his correspondence ended up filed in the Laundry archives? That’s pretty suggestive. And those photographs…! Roman Von Ungern Sternberg clearly had a disturbed childhood if his idea of fossil-collecting involved elder race relics. No wonder Daddy ended up in the loony bin and Mummy shacked up with a boringly conventional country squire with no questionable hobbies.
I look at the stack of files: nine of the bloody things, brown manila envelopes with dates and security classifications scribbled on their front, beneath the familiar Dho-Nha geometry curve of the Internal Security Sigil (“read this without authorization and your eyeballs will melt,” or words to that effect in one of the simpler Enochian metalanguages). They’re identified by number, using a system we call the Codex Mathemagica-four three-digit quads, just like IP addresses (and isn’t that a significant coincidence, given that the Laundry archives predate the internet by thirty years? Although the Laundry stacks use decimal as a native format, not two hex digits, now that I think about it: Does that mean their original numeric routines were written to manage BCD primitives?)-with no overall meaning except that they’re unique in the index…
Nine folders.
I rummage around on my desk for the original paper Angleton gave me. Weren’t there ten files there? Ten sets of numbers? I can’t find the note, damn it, but I know where I entered the document retrieval request. I wake my computer and call up the transaction log. Yup, ten files requested.
I look under my desk. Then I look behind my desk. Then I look in the circular filing cabinet, just in case. I recount the folders, double-checking inside them just in case the missing file has been interleaved.
Nine folders. Shit.
Have you ever found yourself in a cold sweat, your palms clammy and your clothes sticking to the small of your back? Heart hammering, even though you’re sitting down? Mouth dry as a mummy’s tomb?
I am a rough, tough, hardened field agent (yeah, right). I have been in the Laundry for nearly a decade. I’ve met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I’ve even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn’t know any better). But I’ve never lost a classified file before, and I don’t ever want there to be a first time.
I force myself to sit down and close my eyes for what feels like an hour, but is actually just under two minutes according to the clock on my computer’s screen. When I open my eyes, the problem is still there, but the sweat is beginning to dry and the panicked feeling has receded… for now. So I get down on my knees and start picking up the photographs, working through them until I am certain I’ve got them all in sequence, and then I put them in the correct envelope and very carefully stack it on my chair.
I pick up a Post-it pad and copy the number on the front of the envelope. Then I repeat, eight times, for the remaining envelopes. Then I hunt across my desk until-aha!-I find Angleton’s original spidery scrawl, numbers swimming before my eyes like exotic fish.
Ten numbers. I go through them checking off the files I’ve got, until I identify the number that’s missing. 10.0.792.560. Right.
I call up the requisition and look for 10.0.792.560. Sure enough, it’s there. So I ordered it, but it isn’t in my office. Double shit. I dumpster-dive the transaction file, looking for my request: Did they fill it? Oh. Oh my. DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF.
I just about faint with relief, but manage to force myself to pick up the phone and dial the front desk number. “Hello? Archives?” The voice at the far end is female, distracted, a little squawky, and all human-for which I am gratefuclass="underline" not all the archive staff are warm-blooded.
“Hi, this is Bob Howard in Ops? Back on Thursday I requested an archival document retrieval, ten dead files. I’m going through them now, and one of them is missing. I’ve got a file number, and an annotation saying DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF. Can you tell me what that means?”
“It means”-she sounds irritated-“the librarian couldn’t find your file. They looked where it was supposed to be and it wasn’t there.”
“Oh. Is there a direct mapping between the document reference number and a given shelf?”
“Yes, there is. You should really use code names and the index in case the file’s been assigned a new number, you know. It happens sometimes. Do you have a codeword for me? I could look it up for you…”
“I’m sorry, my colleague just gave me a list of document reference numbers,” I explain. “And he’s, uh, off sick. So I’m trying to figure out what’s missing. I was worried that the file had been sent over and got misplaced, but if it’s missing in the stacks I suppose that just means it’s been renumbered. Or he wrote down the wrong reference. Or something.” I don’t believe that last one for a split second-no way would Angleton get a file number wrong-but I don’t want some nosy librarian poking her nose into my investigation. “Bye.” I put the phone down and lean back, thinking.