“Where should I begin? Sally thinks it’s a training exercise, testing processes for developing procedures for handling fresh meat. That’s a good blind, but it doesn’t explain why none of them believe in vampires. Except for Basil, of course, good old Basil and his Romanian vampire blancmanges. Um. Someone decided to nobble the process so that the recommendations it comes up with bear no resemblance to actual reality on the ground, in furtherance of some hitherto-unimagined bureaucratic death-match designed to disgrace and discredit a rival? Or someone at the top, despite notionally being cleared for OPERA CAPE, didn’t read the fricking daily pooled intel assessment and still doesn’t believe in fang fuckers so they’re treating it as a joke. Or. Or.” I brandish my email again. “But they minuted it! They set me homework!”

“Do calm down, old boy. What’s so bad about a spot of homework?”

“(Jesus Fuck)—” I subvocalize, rather than inflicting my Tourette’s on Lockhart’s unreliable and occasionally prissy ears. “They reached a consensus that the best way to go about working out the requirements of vampires was to do a literature survey. They then decided that a bunch of amateurs had obviously already done the legwork for them, so all that was necessary was for me to”—I take a deep breath—“read the complete works of Brian Lumley, Anne Rice, Jim Butcher, and Laurell K. Hamilton, and draw a fucking”—I can’t help myself, it just slipped out, honest—“entity-relationship diagram of the hierarchy structures of all the vampires portrayed therein, while documenting their vulnerabilities, kill rate, dietary needs, and so on and so forth as if they’re not all works of fiction.”

I get louder towards the end, until I’m blaring. If Lockhart was of the feline persuasion his ears would be back and his eyes slitted. And as I wind down I half-expect him to deliver a royal bollocking: Lockhart’s military background doesn’t predispose him to handle insubordination delicately. But, for a miracle, he holds his tongue for a while and just looks at me speculatively. The hairy caterpillar is sleeping, or maybe paralyzed with indecision—

“That does indeed sound somewhat irregular, Mr. Howard. Would you mind passing me those papers?”

Lockhart takes the printed-out emails from my nerveless fingertips, then reaches into his desk tidy for a pair of half-moon reading glasses. He scans the pages, lips sagging slightly as if in the grip of the muscle-memory of long-ago readings-aloud in class; and then he shuffles the pages and reads some more, then refers back to the first page. Then he glances up at me. “Why are you still here, Mr. Howard?”

“Because I—” I stop. It’s Lockhart. Of course. “Because you haven’t told me to piss off, yet.”

“Oh. Well, you can leave now. You were absolutely right to draw this to my attention, but the matter needs to be handled delicately. In particular, even you should comprehend the need to understand why the committee was so misconfigured before any remedial action is taken. So I suggest you suck it up and proceed as directed, until you hear otherwise. In the meantime, I shall make enquiries.”