“What happened?” Mo asks.

“He missed a meeting this morning. I went to look in on him-he wasn’t in his office. A couple of hours later I ran into Sally Alvarez from Accounting, and she said he’d missed a meeting, too. So I began asking around, and it transpires that he didn’t check in this morning. Nobody’s seen him since he went home yesterday evening.” Andy’s bright and brittle tone reminds me of a thin layer of paint applied to cover the ominous cracks in the plaster that widen and shift over time…

“Why didn’t you phone him at home?” asks Mo.

“Because there’s no home phone number on file for him!” Andy grins manically. “No address, for that matter, would you believe it? HR don’t have any contact details at all! Just a bank account and a PO Box for correspondence.”

“But that’s-”

“Ridiculous?” Andy’s smile slips. “Yes, I’d have said so, but remember this is Angleton we’re talking about. Did either of you see him yesterday?”

The phrase “Yes, I did” escapes before I can press my lips together. Mo gives me a withering look. “I’m not concealing anything,” I tell her: “Nothing to hide!”

Andy goes for the jugular. “Tell me. Everything.”

“Not much to tell.” I slump back on my chair. “I was on my way home, but I figured I’d drop in on him on the way.” I frown, then wince as the butterfly stitches on my forehead tell me not to be an idiot. “Thing is, the other day-he sent me to Cosford to see something in a hangar-”

“The exorcism that went wrong,” Andy interrupts.

“No, not the exorcism-something else, something in the museum. It’s his usual showing-not-telling thing: he wanted me to see it before he explained. So I dropped in to talk to him because I didn’t manage to get to Hangar 12B in the end. He spun me some kind of line about an RAF squadron that was decommissioned in 1964, some photoreconnaissance unit or other, and gave me some file references to follow up next week. Squadron 666, he said. Yes, it was tangentially connected, but there’s no bloody way of knowing what he’s got in mind until you follow the trail of bread crumbs he lays out for you-you know how he is, mind as twisty as a derivatives trader. Then he said something about wanting me to deputize for him on a codeword committee, something like BLOODY BARON.”

“Damn. What time was this?”

“About twelve, twelve fifteen, I think. It was right after my session with Iris and Jo Sullivan. Why?”

“Because he was in the Ways and Means monthly breakout session on pandemic suppression systems that ran from two to four, according to at least six eyewitnesses.” Andy looks gloomy. “Whatever happened, it wasn’t you.” He glances at Mo. “What time did Boris call you?”

She jerks upright and pulls her hand away from me. “Around noon. Why?”

“Hmm. Doesn’t fit.” The pall hanging over him is threatening to throw a miniature thunderstorm. “You didn’t run into”-he jerks his chin sharply over his shoulder: in the hall, one of the Plumbers is reinscribing a Dho-Nha curve on the wall with a protractor and a Rotring pen full of colloidal silver ink-“until after, so it’s not that…”

“What’s not that?” I ask.

Andy takes a deep breath.

“Angleton’s missing, work is following people home, and the Russians are trying to put the dead back into ‘dead letter drop.’ You know the old saying, twice is coincidence but three times is enemy action? Well, right now I think it applies…”

“Was our visitor Russian?” Mo leans forward.

“Don’t know.” Andy looks mulish. “Did you get any indication of what he wanted?”

“He kept asking something,” I volunteer. “In at least two different languages, neither of which I speak.”

“Oh great,” he mutters. Stretching, he shakes his head. “Been a bad day so far, going to be a long one as well. Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea?”

“Certainly-for you I can recommend the special herbal teas, monk’s hood and spurge laurel, although if you insist I can make a pot of Tetley’s…”

“That’d be fine.” Mo’s sarcasm flies right past him, which is the final warning I need that Andy is about ready to drop. Time to ease up on him a little, maybe, if he grovels for it.

“I’ll get it,” I say, standing up. “So let me see… Boris is running some kind of operation code named BLOODY BARON which involves something going down in Amsterdam which required Mo’s offices, and-”

They’re both shaking their heads at me. “No, no,” says Andy, and:

“ Amsterdam was CLUB ZERO,” says Mo. “It’s a sideshow, and… did you bring that letter?” Andy produces an envelope. She pockets it: “Thanks.”

“Actually, it all boils down to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN,” Andy says heavily. “The other operations are side projects; CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is where it all starts.”

“Oh yes?” I ask casually, although those words send a chill up my spine.

“Yes.” He laughs halfheartedly. “It appears we may have been working under some false operating assumptions,” he adds. “The situation seems to be deteriorating…”

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world.

You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don’t even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There’s a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?

We human beings live at the bottom of a thin puddle of oxygen-nitrogen vapor adhering to the surface of a medium-sized rocky planet that orbits a not terribly remarkable star in a cosmos which is one of many. We are not alone. There are other beings in other universes, other cosmologies, that think, and travel, and explore. And there are aliens in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and dwellers in the red-hot blackness and pressure of the upper mantle, that are stranger than your most florid hallucinations. They’re terrifyingly powerful, the inheritors of millennia of technological civilization; they were building starships and opening timegates back when your ancestors and mine were clubbing each other over the head with rocks to settle the eternal primate disagreement over who had the bigger dick.

But the Deep Ones and the Chthonians are dust beneath the feet of the elder races, just as much so as are we bumptious bonobo cousins. The elder races are ancient. Supposedly they colonized our planet back in the pre-Cambrian age. Don’t bother looking for their relics, though-continents have risen and sunk since then, the very atmosphere has changed density and composition, the moon orbits three times farther out, and to cut a long story short, they went away.

But the elder races are as dust beneath the many-angled appendages of the dead gods, who-

You stopped reading about a paragraph back, didn’t you? Admit it: you’re bored. So I’ll just skip to the point: we have a major problem. The dimensions of the problem are defined by computational density and geometry. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce-

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic-has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we’re going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system’s ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.

No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper-if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we’d all starve. No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks-induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.