Choudhury manages to look long-suffering. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Anything!” Shona makes a curse of the word. “Whatever might interest Panin.”

I blink. Suddenly a rather unpalatable thought occurs to me. Forget dates that interest Panin: What about dates relevant to the Teapot? Assuming the Teapot in question is the one I’m thinking of.

Trying not to be too obvious about it, I pull out my phone and start hunting. There’s an ebook reader, and a Wikipedia client, and a bunch of other stuff. What was Ungern Sternberg’s adjutant called again…?

“Bob, what are you doing?” It’s Iris.

I grin apologetically. “Checking a different calendar.” 19 August 1921. That’s when the mutineers murdered Teapot. At least, that’s when they said they did the deed. And the ninetieth anniversary is coming up in the next week: How interesting. I quickly scan for other significant anniversaries on that date: Salem witch trial executions, Hungerford massacre, twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR… “No, sorry, nothing there,” I say, putting my phone away. Liar, liar, pants on fire.

It’s like this: If you were going to try and break the geas that restrains an extra-dimensional horror called the Eater of Souls, wouldn’t you pick the anniversary of its last taste of freedom? Dates have resonance, after all, and this particular horror has been living quietly among human beings, the lion lying down with the lamb, for so long that our patterns of thought have imprinted upon it.

Isn’t that just the sort of nutso thing that the cultists might be up to? Trying to free a vastly powerful occult force from its Laundry-imposed chains? And isn’t this exactly the sort of thing that Panin might anticipate? Well maybe. There’s a slight motivational gap: Just what makes cultists tick, anyway? Besides the obvious-having your head turned by a hugely powerful glamour, being bound by a geas, that sort of thing-what’s in it for them? Fucked if I know: I mean, what makes your average high school shooter tick, for that matter?

Suddenly, not knowing is making me itch-but the only person who can answer for sure is the one person I don’t dare to ask: Angleton.

“Maybe we could wire Bob?” Shona suggests.

What? I shake my head. “What do you mean?”

“If Panin makes contact again, it would really help if you had a recording angel,” she points out.

“There was a word in that sentence: if.” I look at Iris for support but she’s nodding thoughtfully along with Shona. “Panin’s not going to make contact on working hours, and if it’s all right by you, I’d rather not wear a wire during all my off-duty life. Now, if you want me to use that business card and wear a recorder while we’re talking, that’s another matter. But I think we ought to have something to trade with him before we go there, otherwise he’s not going to give us anything for free.”

“Point,” says Iris.

Vikram looks at me through slitted eyes. “We should wire him anyway,” he suggests maliciously, “just in case.”

I sink back in my chair, racking my brain for plausible defenses. We’ve only been in this meeting for half an hour and already it feels like a decade: what a morning! But it could be worse: I’ve got to run Angleton’s little errand at two o’clock…

10. THE NIGHTMARE STACKS

THERE IS A RAILWAY UNDER LONDON, BUT IT’S PROBABLY NOT the one you’re thinking of.

Scratch that. There are many railways under London. There are the tube lines that everyone knows about, hundreds of kilometers, dozens of lines, carrying millions of people every day. And there are the London commuter rail lines, many of which run underground for part or all of their length. There are the other major railway links such as CrossRail and the Eurostar tunnel into St. Pancras. There’s even the Docklands Light Railway, if you squint.

But these are just the currently operational lines that are open to the public. There are other lines you probably don’t know about. There are the deep tube tunnels that were never opened to the public, built to serve the needs of wartime government. Some of them have been abandoned; others turned into archives and secure stores. There are the special platforms off the public tube stations, the systems built during the 1940s and 1950s to rush MPs and royalty away from the capital at an hour’s notice in time of war. These are the trains of government, buried deep and half-forgotten.

And then there are the weird ones. The Necropolis railway that ran from behind Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey, along the converted track bed of which I ran last night. The coal tunnels that distributed fuel to the power stations of South London and the buried generator halls that powered the tube network. And the MailRail narrow-gauge tunnels that for over a century hauled sacks of letters and parcels between Paddington and Whitechapel, until it was officially closed in 2003.

Closed?

Not so fast.

The stacks, where the Laundry keeps its dead files, occupy two hundred-meter stretches of disused deep-dug tube tunnel not far from Whitehall. They’re thirty meters down, beneath the hole in the ground where Service House is currently being rebuilt by a private finance initiative (just in time for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN). How do you think we get files in and out? Or librarians in and out, for that matter?

Angleton has a job for me to do, down in the stacks. And so it is that at one thirty I’m sitting in my office, nursing a lukewarm mug of coffee and waiting for the little man with the handcart to call, when the NecronomiPod begins to vibrate and make a noise like a distressed U-boat.

“’Lo?”

It’s Mo. “Bob?” She doesn’t sound too happy.

“Yeah? You at home?”

“Right now, yes… not feeling too well.”

I hunch over instinctively. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes.” Oh, right. “Listen, about last night-thanks. And thanks for letting me lie in. I’m just wrung-out today, so I’ve begged off my weekly and I was thinking about taking the afternoon to do what we talked about earlier, to go visit Research and Development. But there’s a little job I needed to do in the office and I was wondering if you could…”

I glance at the clock on my desktop. “Maybe; depends what, I’m off to the stacks in half an hour.”

“The stacks? In person?” She cheers up audibly. “That’s great! I was hoping you could pull a file for me, and if you’re going there-”

“Not so fast.” I pause. “What kind of file?”

“A new one, a report I asked for. I can give you a reference code; it should be fresh in today.”

“Oh, right.” Well, that shouldn’t be a problem-I can probably fit it in with my primary mission. “What’s the number?”

“Let me…” She reads out a string of digits and I read it back to her. “Yes, that’s it. If you could just bring it home with you this evening?”

“Remind me again, who was it who didn’t want work brought home?”

“That’s different. This is me being lazy, not you overdoing it!”

I smile. “If you say so.”

“Love you.”

“You too. Bye.”

AT SEVEN MINUTES PAST TWO, I HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND A squeak of wheels that stops outside my door. I pick up a pair of brown manila files I’m through with and stand. “Archive service?” I ask.

The man with the handcart is old and worn before his time. He wears a blue-gray boiler suit and a cloth cap that has seen better days; his skin is as parched as time-stained newsprint. He looks at me with the dumb, vacant eyes of a residual human resource. “Archive service,” he mumbles.

“These are going back.” I hand over the files, and he painstakingly inscribes their numbers on a battered plywood clipboard using a stub of pencil sellotaped to a length of string. “And I’m going with them.”