Let’s see: Angleton was working on BLOODY BARON. When I came back to the office he gave me a list of ten files to read, then he went missing. This coincides with an upswing in Russian activity, including a marked willingness to use extreme measures. Nine files came from the stacks, and they turn out to be tedious backgrounders relating indirectly to the historical investigation side of BLOODY BARON. The tenth file isn’t on its shelf. All I’ve got is a number, not a name.
I think it’s time to do some unofficial digging…
MEANWHILE, BACK TO THE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION:
It is nearly six o’clock when Mr. Dower finishes typing his report.
He’s lost track of the time, his head locked inside the scope of his postmortem on the instrument. He’s read about its like before. Their design is attributed to a deaf-mute German violinist in Paris in the early 1920s, but nobody actually built one until the ghastly Dr. Mabuse commissioned an entire string section from a certain Berlin instrument maker in 1931. (It should be no surprise that the instrument maker prospered under the subsequent regime, but was executed after a summary trial by SMERSH investigators in 1946.) This particular instrument made its way to the West in the luggage of a returning GI, was retrofitted with electric pickups during the 1950s, and after a spectacular run of accidents was acquired by a reclusive collector in 1962-believed by some to be a front for a British government department who, as a matter of state policy, did not like to see such instruments in the wrong hands.
He dreads to think what its reappearance portends. On the other hand, the young woman who brought it to him-Mr. Dower thinks of everyone aged under fifty as “young”-seemed to have a sober appreciation of its lethality.
He shudders fastidiously as the last of five pages of single-spaced description hisses out of the ink-jet printer. It joins the half dozen contact pages of photographs, including his fiber-optic examination of the interior of the instrument, and an invoice for just over two thousand pounds. He shakes the bundle of pages together, and binds them neatly with a paper clip from a desk drawer. Then they go inside the envelope the woman who called herself Cassie May gave him. He licks the flap and seals it, then, in a moment of curiosity, he switches on the anti-counterfeit lamp he keeps by the cash register and examines it under ultraviolet light. Nothing shows up: it bears none of the UV-fluorescent dots the Post Office prints on envelopes to control their routing.
If “Cassie May” thinks she can retrieve an unmarked envelope from the postal system she’s welcome to it, in Mr. Dower’s books. He turns back to the computer and deletes his work, then sighs and glances at the clock. Five minutes to closing time: no point keeping the shop open any longer. He stands and stretches, switches the computer off, and goes through an abbreviated version of his regular closing routine; no point banking the cash register contents (his takings before the woman’s visit barely amounted to petty cash). He pulls on his coat, turns his coffee mug upside down on the draining board, switches off the lights, and opens the front door.
The woman is waiting for him. She smiles. “Have you finished your report?” she asks.
Mr. Dower nods, confused. “I was going to post it, as you requested.” He pats his coat pocket.
“I’m in a hurry. There’s a rush on. If you don’t mind…?” She looks at him impatiently.
“Of course.” He pulls out the envelope and hands it to her. “My invoice is enclosed.”
“You don’t need to worry about that side of things.” She slides the envelope into her black patent leather handbag and smiles.
“I suppose not. You people always pay your debts eventually.”
“Yes, you can be absolutely certain of that.”
He turns back to the door and fumbles with his key ring. Which is why he doesn’t see her withdraw a silenced pistol from her bag, raise it to the back of his head, and discharge a single round into his cerebellum. The gun makes little sound-just the racking click of its action-but as she fires, the suppressor fitted to its muzzle frosts over with clear fluid, air in contact with it liquefying as it chills to just above absolute zero. Mr. Dower slumps forward against the door. The woman’s arm follows him down with absolute precision and discharges a second round into the top of his skull, but it is unnecessary: he is already dead.
She looks around with green eyes as deep as sacrificial cenotes, eyes in which a sensitive witness might see luminous worms writhing. But there are no sensitive witnesses to see through the glamour: just the ordinary post-work crowd hurrying about their business on the London streets. For a moment her face shimmers, the facade sliding-her attention is strained, flying in too many directions to maintain the illusion effectively-but then she notices and pulls herself together. She returns the chilly pistol to her bag. Then, turning on one spiked heel, she strides away from the corpse: just another professional woman on her way home from the office. Nobody has witnessed the killing, and it will be twenty minutes before a passing policeman realizes that the drunk sleeping in the doorway is never going to rise again.
7. BEER AND TEA
YOU CAN FOCUS ON THINKING YOURSELF INTO THE OTHER guy’s shoes until the cows come home, but it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good if he’s actually wearing sandals. More to the point, what if he’s got an entire shoe rack to choose from, and the pair you need is the one that’s missing? There is a chicken-and-egg problem here, or more accurately a sole-and-bootstrap one, and I’m not going to solve it by sitting in my office. Nor am I going to fix matters by hollering down the speaking tube at the gnomes buried in the stacks, not with just two delivery runs a day.
On the other hand, if you go and actually look at the other guy’s footprints you might just find something new. And so, in a spirit of enquiry, I set out to burgle Angleton’s office.
Now, it just so happens that Angleton has officially been declared missing. And I am his assistant trainee tea-boy. In a more paranoid working environment I might just be under suspicion of having disappeared him myself: perish the thought and pass the ammunition. But Angleton is reckoned to be sufficiently formidable that… well, let’s say it’s unlikely. Besides, we don’t generally play politics with the kid gloves off. (There are exceptions, such as the late and unlamented Bridget; but they’re exactly that: exceptions. The hard fact is that all the real players can turn the game board into a smoking hole in the map. Which generally forces them to tread lightly.)
Skulking past Iris’s office window, I tiptoe around the coffee station and duck down the back staircase, through the fire doors, round the bend, down the fire escape stairs, and then pause outside the unmarked green metal door. I do not encounter anyone in the process, but you can never be sure-there are cameras, and there is Internal Security, and if you’re really unlucky there are the caretakers from the night shift. This is a security agency after all. However slipshod and dustily eccentric it might appear at times, you should never take things for granted if you are perpetrating monkey business.
I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy fun icons glow at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I point the camera at the door and peer into the shiny screen. Sure enough, in addition to Angleton’s trademark Screaming Mind someone has ploddingly inscribed a Langford Death Parrot, with a sympathetic link to a web stats counter so they can monitor how many intruders it’s headcrashed from the comfort of their laptop. Tch, what are standards coming to? I pause as a nasty thought strikes me and I triple-check the door frame, then the ceiling above the entrance, then the other side of the corridor, just in case-but no, nothing. This is strictly amateur hour stuff, so rather than zapping the LDP I pull out my conductive pencil and sketch in a breakpoint and then an exception list with a single item: the signature of my new ward. The Screaming Mind already knows me well. Three minutes later I put the phone away, place my hand on the doorknob, twist and push.