How many secretaries, when asked about shadowy office goings-on, riposte breezily, "My troika was pursued by wolves"?
Deep in the Home Office budget, it is possible to discover that the shadowy Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism paid out more than £4m in grants to local authorities in May 2009.
Otherwise you and Gavin Kroff would be conferring in a shadowy office in the sepulchral quiet of a university building at dusk.
Still, Sill, with a strong assist from cinematographer Greg Cotten, presents a vivid, butterscotch-coated, neo-noir world of shadowy offices, apartments and diners that deftly elevates the L.A.-shot film and makes the first-time feature helmer a talent to watch.
It includes a mysteriously ill patriarch, a Rasputin-like confidante of the country's president, a shadowy Samsung office that has disappeared and reappeared before, and an alleged bribe in the form of a horse.
The spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity — not because she works with Agent Mulder in some shadowy basement office, but because that is government policy — said the ministry had begun making the files public because it had been inundated with U.F.O.-related requests under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.
And furthermore, for every fascinating, highly relevant paper I found lurking in cyberspace, I shuddered to wonder how many more might be secretly taunting me from their shadowy place on the shelves of government, NGO, business, and academic offices.
I bike 5km (3 miles) to work every day, weaving through Ming dynasty-era alleyways, gliding past shadowy government offices, darting among flatbed tricycles hauling mysterious metal tanks.
The company, he said, reports to a shadowy Communist Party agency called Office 39, which gathers foreign hard currency for Mr. Kim through drug trafficking, counterfeiting, arms sales and other illicit activities.
He keeps the blinds drawn, and the atmosphere in his office is shadowy and confessional.
Weeks later, with no reply from Mr. Bremer, she shook her head in the shadowy light of her office, darkened by one of frequent blackouts here.
