Oh Jesus. Wheels within wheels-committee members who haven’t been briefed, Russian secret demonologists, cold war 2.0. What have I got myself into?

“Oh dear.” Choudhury nods, mollified. “Allow me to express my sympathies.” He has a fat conference file in front of him: he taps the contents into line with tiny, fussy movements. His suit is black and shiny, like an EDS consultant’s in the old days.

“Well then. We have been tracking a number of interesting financial aspects of the KGB activity. They appear to be spending money like water-we have requested information on IBAN transactions and credit card activity by the mobile agents we have identified, and while they’re not throwing it away on silly luxury items they have certainly been working on their frequent flier miles. One of them, Agent Kurchatov, managed to fly half a million kilometers in the last nine months alone-we believe he’s a high-bandwidth courier-as an example. And they’ve been bidding in estate auctions. The overall pattern of their activity focuses on memorabilia from the Russian Civil War, specifically papers and personal effects from the heirs of White Russian leaders, but they’ve also been looking into documents and items relating to the Argenteum Astrum, which is on our watch list-BONE SILVER STAR-along with documents relating to Western occultist groups of the pre-war period. Aleister Crowley crops up like a bad penny, naturally, but also Professor Mudd, who tripped an amber alert. Norman Mudd.”

Civil war memorabilia…? A nasty thought strikes me, but Vikram looks as if he’s about to continue. “What’s special about Mudd?” I ask.

Choudhury looks irritated. “He was a mathematics professor and an occultist,” he says, “and he knew F.” The legendary F-the Laundry’s first Director of Intelligence, reporting to Sir Charles Hambro at 64 Baker Street -headquarters of the Special Operations Executive. Whoops. He cocks his head to one side: “If you don’t mind…?”

I shake my head. “Sorry. I’m new to this.” Touchy, isn’t he? “Please continue.”

“Certainly. It looks as if the Thirteenth Directorate are taking an unusual interest in the owners of memorabilia associated with the late Baron Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, conqueror of Mongolia, Buddhist mystic, and White Russian leader. In particular, they seem to be trying to trace an item or items that Agent S76 retrieved from Reval in Estonia on behalf of our old friend F.” Choudhury looks smugly self-satisfied, as if this diversion into what is effectively arcane gibberish to me is supposed to be enlightening. “Any questions?” he asks.

For once I keep my gob shut, waiting to see if anyone else is feeling as out-of-the-loop as I am. I don’t have to wait long. Shona bulls ahead, bless her: “Yeah, you bet I’ve got questions. Who is this Baron Roman Von Stauffenberg or whoever? When was he-did he die recently?”

“Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky’s soldiers captured him.” Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: “He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork. And he had a man nicknamed Teapot who followed him around and strangled people the Baron was displeased with. I suppose we could all do with that, ha-ha.” He doesn’t notice-or doesn’t care about-Iris’s fish-eyed glare. “But, aha, yes, he was one of those Russian occultists. He converted to Buddhism-Mongolian Buddhism, of a rather bloody sect-but stayed in touch with members of a certain Theosophical splinter group he had fallen in with when he was posted to St. Petersburg. Obviously they didn’t stay there after the revolution, but Ungern Sternberg would have known of his fellows in General Denikin’s staff, and possibly known of F, due to his occult connections. And the, ah, anti-Semitism.”

He looks pained. All intelligence agencies have skeletons in their closets: ours is our first Director of Intelligence, whose fascist sympathies were famous, and only barely outweighed by his patriotism.

“What can that possibly have to do with current affairs?” Shona’s evident bafflement mirrors my own. “What are they looking for?”

“That’s an interesting question,” says Choudhury, looking perturbed. He glances at me, his expression unreadable. “Mr. Howard might be able to tell us-”

“Um. What?”

My confusion must be as obvious as Shona’s, because Iris chips in: “Bob has only just come in on the case-Dr. Angleton didn’t see fit to brief him earlier.”

“Oh my goodness.” Choudhury looks as if he’s swallowed a toad. Live. “But in that case, we really must talk to the doctor-”

“You can’t.” Iris shakes her head, then looks at me again. “Bob, we-the committee-asked Angleton to investigate the link between Ungern Sternberg, F, and the current spike in KGB activity.” She looks back at Choudhury. “Unfortunately, he was last seen on Wednesday evening. He’s now officially AWOL and a search is under way. This happened the same night as Agent CANDID closed out CLUB ZERO. The next morning, CANDID and Mr. Howard were assaulted by a class three manifestation, and I don’t believe it’s any kind of coincidence that Agent Kurchatov was seen visiting the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens that morning-and left on an early evening flight back to Moscow.

“Let me be straightforward: all the signs suggest that the Thirteenth Directorate are suddenly playing very dangerous games on our turf. If the cultists who CLUB ZERO shut down turn out to be a front for the Thirteenth Directorate, then we have to assume that CLUB ZERO is connected with BLOODY BARON-and that turns it from a low-key adversarial tactical analysis into a much higher priority for us. They’re not usually reckless, and they’re not pushing the old ideological agenda anymore-they wouldn’t be acting this openly for short-term advantage-so we need to find out what they’re doing and put a stop to it, before anyone else gets hurt. Yes, Bob? What is it?”

I put my hand down. “This might sound stupid,” I hear myself saying, “but has anyone thought about, you know, asking them?”

I’M NOT BIG ON HISTORY.

When I was at school, I dropped the topic as soon as I could, right after I took my GCSEs. It seemed like it was all about one damn king after another, or one war after another, or a bunch of social history stuff about what it was like to live as an eighteenth-century weaver whose son had run off with a spinster called Jenny, or a sixteenth-century religious bigot with a weird name and a witch-burning fetish. Tedious shite, in other words, of zero relevance to modern life-especially if you were planning on studying and working in a field that was more or less invented out of whole cloth in 1933.

The trouble is, you can ignore history-but history won’t necessarily ignore you.

History, it turns out, is all around us. Service House-where I used to have my cubicle-is where the Laundry moved in 1953. Before that, it used to belong to the Foreign Office. Before that, we worked out of an attic above a Chinese laundry in Soho, hence the name. Before that…

There was no Laundry, officially.

The Laundry was a wartime work of expedience, magicked into existence by a five-line memo headlined ACTION THIS DAY and signed Winston Churchill. It was directed at a variety of people, including a retired major general and sometime MI6 informer, whose dubious status was probably the deciding factor in keeping his ass out of an internment camp along with the rest of the Nazi-sympathizing Directorate of the British Union of Fascists-that, and his shadowy connections to occultists and mathematicians, his undoubted genius as a tactician and theorist of the arts of war, and the nuanced reports of his political officer, who figured his patriotism had a higher operator precedence than his politics. That man was F: Major-General J. F. C. “Boney” Fuller. He’s been in his grave for nearly half a century, and would doubtless be spinning in it fast enough to qualify for carbon credits as an environmentally friendly power source if he could see us today in all our multi-ethnic anti-discriminatory splendor.