“Mhari.” I look at my soup bowl. It’s empty. Time to lay my cards on the table: “Until forty years ago, the Laundry had an elaborate early warning program looking for v—for cases of a certain syndrome. It got de-funded. More recently, everybody knows that this syndrome doesn’t exist. If you challenge them on this point they will go to elaborate lengths to confabulate a rationalization for why this is so. More recently still, your Scrum shows up on my radar precisely as and when I go looking for you-know-what. And you know what else? You developed this condition about one month before I undertook the first systematic search for you-know-what by anyone in the Laundry in more than half a century.” I meet her gaze. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Someone with access to HR personnel records set you up. I suspect they anticipated that our history would predispose me to shut you down with extreme prejudice.”

Her pupils dilate. “You couldn’t do that—”

Something is pressing on my mind, like a warm, damp pillow. I shove back, hard, and she squeaks in surprise. “Mhari. The Bob you knew is—” I was about to say dead, but that’s over-dramatizing things a little, and in any case, I dodged on a technicality. “I’m not the same. Put it this way. If you were in OpExec, would you send the Bob you used to know to look into a nest of vampires?”

She must already have guessed, but she’s pinching the edge of the table with each hand. Gripping it, actually, as if she’s afraid of being blown away. Her eyes are wide: Did I push back too hard? “What are you?”

“I’m the person who’s trying to save your life, because right now you’re treading water in the dark and there’s something very nasty circling underneath. Tell me, do you know what happens to the people you feed on afterwards?”

“The—what do you mean?”

I close my eyes again. “You don’t know?”

“Know what? Bob, you aren’t making any sense!”

Waiters appear, disappear: our soup bowls vanish, replaced by artistic compositions in salmon. “I think someone decided to run a very dangerous experiment,” I tell her. “With total deniability. Set it up, then shut it down again, with nobody any the wiser. Only someone else, a rival, decided to hijack the project and that is why you’re still alive and we’re sitting here happily having dinner as I put the pieces together.” I pick up my fork. “You weren’t meant to live this long, and now you’re a problem for them.”

“Who are they?”