Yes, but back then Angleton at least had the good grace to tell me what the fuck I was supposed to be doing! This time around it's just I want you to be my tethered goat. That and the 440 volt DC rail fifteen centimeters below my spine give me a tingling sensation like my balls want to climb right up my throat and hide. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that there's a back door into the stacks, or that it's a hinky little narrow-gauge tube system constructed by a Quango and forgotten by everyone except train spotters, but to find myself actually riding it . . . that's something else.

Angleton had the decency to scribble me a written order, and a good thing too, otherwise I would have thrown a strop. The librarians don't appreciate unannounced visitors, much less informal withdrawals, and like so many of our more eccentric outposts they have their own inimitable and unspeakable ways of dealing with vandals and intruders. If they catch me, a signed order from a DSS ought to make them pause long enough to give me a fair hearing before they rip my lungs out; but, really and truly, it is usually best to just put in a request and wait for the little man with the cart.

I try not to think too hard about everything that can go wrong with Angleton's plan. Instead, I lie back and think of libraries.

The Laundry keeps its archive stacks in a former tube tunnel. It was originally going to be a station, but during World War Two it was converted into an emergency bunker and in the end they never got around to connecting it up to the underground network. There are six levels rather than the usual three, two levels built into each half of a cylindrical tunnel eight meters in diameter and nearly a third of a kilometer long. That makes for a lot of shelves—not quite in the same league as the British Library, but close. And it's not just books that occupy the stacks. We store microfiche cards in binders, row after row of them, and there are rooms full of filing cabinets full of CD-ROMs. There's a lot of stuff down here, a lot of moldering secrets and fatal lies: a complete transcript of every numbers channel transmitted since 1932, the last words of every spy hanged during the Second World War, every sermon preached by a minister in the Church of Night—our minister—before his followers found out and tore him toe from nail . . .