“I think that’s a great idea. Okay, let’s nip out for a midnight snack. And then . . .”

He stands, rising smoothly to his feet, and offers her a hand. “And then?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Mammals, Discovery Channel, you know the Bloodhound Gang song.” Mhari grins, alive with anticipation, and slides her stockinged feet back into her heels. There’s nothing like a bit of glam to make people let you get close enough to strike, she thinks. That goes for institutions as well as individuals.

“And then,” Oscar slides an arm around her waist as they head towards the door, “we should talk exit strategies.”

12.

GREEN LIME

LIFE GOES ON.

Over the next week, Mo gradually recovers some of her usual humor and level-headedness: a couple of visits to the security-cleared therapist are approved, and a discreet prescription or two. I try to do the supportive husband thing, with mixed results: I also request my own visits with the security-cleared therapist. Meanwhile, back in the office, I throw myself into the mundane administrivia of life: mentoring Pete (who in turn is mentoring Alex), minuting meetings of COBWEB MAZE and BLOODY BARON, helping Andy fill out the forms necessary to justify assigning him a permanent new office, writing up critical reports on the proposed network infrastructure of the Dansey House redevelopment,* and trying to find time to schedule my annual training workload in the middle of all this.

I’m also taking extended lunch breaks, because unfortunately Sally Carlyle made her little make-work (it was clearly—let’s be honest about this—a “get Bob out of my hair” gambit) stick to the minutes. So I’m spending a not insignificant portion of my time reading vampire novels. There’s a stack a meter deep in the corner of my office, expensed from Waterstones.

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.

The giant hairball of nodes, names, and lines in different colors (labelled “drinks,” “fucks,” “turns,” “fights,” and “author is confused”) is growing into a mammoth file on my computer. I must confess it’s mildly distracting, and not too onerous a chore, but oy! the misconceptions. Ancient solitary predatory creatures of the night, my ass. Fashion sense, my ass. (I’ve had Dick in my office. When he’s not trying to cause maximum eyeball trauma while staying just within the envelope defined by the bank’s dress code, he looks like a hipster. A trailing edge hipster, if such a thing is possible; as deliberately uncool as an experimental fusion reactor.)