(See, I’m calling him rude names. That’s to prove to myself that I’m not scared of him like everybody else. See? I’m not terrified!)

The dark green metal door’s shut when I come to it. But the red security light isn’t on, so I knock. “Boss?” I ask softly.

I hear a muffled noise, as of something very large and massive shuffling around in a confined space. Then there’s a grunt, and a heavy thud. I rest my palm lightly on the pitted brass door handle. “Boss?” I repeat.

Heavy breathing. “Enter.”

I push the door open, with trepidation.

Angleton’s office feels like it’s the size of a self-respecting broom closet, even though it’s actually quite large. All four walls are shelved floor-to-ceiling in ledgers-not books, but binders full of microfiche cards. In the middle of the room sits his legendary desk, an olive-drab monolith that looks like it came out of a Second World War aircraft carrier; a monstrous hump like a 1950s TV set sits on top of it, like a microfiche reader. Except that it isn’t. Microfiche readers don’t come with organ pedals and hoppers to gulp down mountains of cards. Angleton’s desk is a genuine Memex, the only one I’ve seen outside of the National Cryptologic Museum run by the NSA in Maryland.

To those who don’t need to know, Angleton is just a dry old guy who rides herd on the filing cabinets in Arcana Analysis and does stuff for the Counter-Possession Unit. His job title is Detached Special Secretary, which doesn’t mean what you think it means: scuttlebutt is that it’s short for Deeply Scary Sorcerer.

He’s nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone: with his wizened mannerisms-like a public school master from the 1930s, Mr. Chips redux-people tend to underestimate him on first acquaintance. It’s a mistake they only make once. Whether or not they survive.

“Ah, Robert.” He looks up from the Memex screen, his face stained pale blue by its illumination. “Please be seated.”

I sit down. The chair, a relic of the cold war, squeaks angrily. “I fucked up.”

“Hold it for a minute, please.” He peers at something on the screen again, twisting a couple of dials and adjusting a vernier scale. Then he lifts a hinged lid covering the front of the Memex and begins to type rapidly on a stenographer’s keyboard. Paper tape spools out and over into a slot behind the keyboard. He inspects it for a moment, then reaches over to a panel and pulls out two organ stops. There’s a bright flash and a click, and he closes the lid over the keyboard with a look of satisfaction. “Saved.”

(The Memex is an electromechanical hypertext machine, running on microfiche: it’s fiddly, slow, lacks storage capacity, and needs a lot of maintenance. I once asked him why he stuck with it; he grunted something about Van Eck radiation and changed the subject.)

“Now, Robert. What did you think of the elephant?”

“Never got to see it.” I shake my head. “I said I-”

“Oh dear.” Angleton looks mildly irritated: I shiver.

“That’s what I came to tell you; I’ve just finished filing an R60 and Iris told me to sign off sick for the week. I killed a bystander by accident. It’s a real fuck-up.”

“So you didn’t see the white elephant.”

I do a double take. “Boss? Hello? Major FATACC incident while carrying out the primary assignment! What’s so important about a museum piece?”

“Harrumph.” He reaches out and flicks a switch: the Memex screen goes dark. “I thought it was high past time you were briefed on the Squadron.”

“The Squadron? That would be 666 Squadron RAF, right? I looked them up on the web-they were deactivated in 1964, weren’t they?”

Angleton’s thin smile tells me exactly what he thinks of the world wide web.

“Not exactly. They were just redeployed in support of a higher mission.”

I remember the blue-glowing instrument panel lighting up the hangar from behind canvas screens, and shudder. “What kind of…?”

“They’re part of the contingency planning for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, boy.” He looks momentarily annoyed, as if the impending end of the world as we know it is a minor inconvenience. “Bystanders,” he murmurs: “Whatever will they think of next?”

“The white elephant,” I prompt, but I’m too late.

“Never mind that now, boy, you can go back and look at it later.” He looks at me, concern and irritation wrinkling his face further, and this time he’s actually looking, studying me with those merciless washed-out eyes as if I’m a sample on a dissection tray: “Hmm. If Iris told you to take the rest of the week off, I suppose you ought to do as she says. A bystander, eh? What was a bystander doing there?”

“She was a volunteer at the museum-she was bringing us tea.”

Angleton’s eyes narrow. “Was she indeed?” He picks up a pen and a pad and scrawls a list of numbers on it. “Well, when you feel like getting back to work, you might want to go down to the stacks and retrieve these documents from the dead file store. I think you’ll find them very interesting.” He signs the note and slides it across the table at me. The document references are just catalog numbers identifying files by their shelf location, no actual codewords referring to named projects. Typical of Angleton, to be so elliptical about things. “And I’d like you to deputize for me on the BLOODY BARON committee.”

“Iris is putting me on light administrative duties,” I protest.

Angleton smiles humorlessly. “Then you’ll have something to do when you’re bored,” he says. “Be off with you!”

I EMERGE FROM THE STAFF ENTRANCE TO THE C &A ON THE high street, blinking like a groundhog caught in the headlights of an onrushing Hummer.

It is a Wednesday, just before the lunchtime rush, and the pavements are full of shoppers and people with nowhere better to go. A herd of buses rumble past, farting clouds of sulphurous biodiesel and lunging at cyclists. But I am not at work. Something is wrong with the world, something is broken: a wire has come loose in my soul.

I start to walk.

I don’t want to go home just yet: it’s sixty to seventy minutes of riding on two buses, but then I’ll have nothing to do but sit staring at the walls for the rest of the afternoon. If it was a normal summer’s day I could go for a walk on Wandsworth Common-it’s only about a mile or two from here-but the sky is overcast and gray, threatening rain later on. Or I could go into town. Maybe get the tube to Euston and visit the British Library. I’ve got a reader’s card, and there are some interesting manuscripts I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, relevant to the job… No, I can hear Iris ticking me off in the back of my head, telling me that’s not what I ought to be doing when I’m on medical leave.

In the end, I walk to the next bus stop just in time to see the tail end of the herd vanishing round the corner, and wait nearly ten minutes for the next bunch of buses to arrive, with only my iPod for company-that, and a couple of students, a pensioner pushing a shopping bag on wheels, and an Uncle Fester type in a dirty trench coat who is pointedly not making eye contact with anyone.

I sit on the top deck for forty minutes as it slowly migrates towards Victoria, then hop off and head for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for lunch. It’s stowed out, as you can imagine, because I’ve hit peak lunch time; but it makes a welcome change from the dismal little pie shop round the corner from the New Annexe. I emerge into daylight with a full stomach and my sense of well-being marginally restored. It’s trying to rain, lonely drips spattering the pavement and evaporating before they can join up. I shuffle along with the tourists and foreign language students and shirking office workers, staring into shop windows and feeling faintly wistful, something nagging at the back of my mind.