There’s a buzz, and I push the door open. The office inside is tiny, occupied by the middle-aged security guard who was playing solitaire on his phone when I interrupted his brilliantly exciting afternoon. “Yus?” he asks resentfully.

“We called ahead.” I try not to look disapprovingly at his game: rule #1 of working at remote offices is never to piss off site security. “We need access to the stores.” I hold up the slightly rusty key ring I checked out from Archives Reception, and Pete produces a file from somewhere inside his bulky leather jacket and slides out an authorization form.

“G’wan in. You gointa be long?”

“Don’t know yet.” I glance at Pete, make eye contact, and nod infinitesimally. “We’ll let you know. When do you go off-shift?”

“I gotta be out by five.”

“Okay. If we’re still going, knock on the door ten minutes before you’re ready to leave and we’ll wrap up.”

“Lemme see that badge again?”

I show him my warrant card, and he scrawls something that might be cryptographically related to my name and departmental number on a dog-eared sheet clipped to a board hanging by the door. Then he goes back to his solitaire game.

I turn the key, reach round the door to flick on the light switch, and together Pete and I enter the KGB.2.YA archive.

• • •

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT FINDS IT extremely difficult to throw anything away. Like your mad old aunt who lives in a flat with sixteen commemorative Royal Family tea sets, thirty cubic meters of yellowing newspapers, and an incontinent dachshund, the government hangs on to stuff until long after it becomes obvious that it lacks any conceivable use:

• As late as 1982, they kept a strategic reserve of 160 steam locomotives in a vast underground complex at Corsham, near Bath, in case they had to rebuild the British railway network after a nuclear war. (They also kept a Second World War jeep factory, five million battery-powered radios, and twenty-three million body bags at the same depot.)
• The official Government Random Number Generator used for seeding new encryption keys is a thing of legend, running as it does on a type of punched paper tape that hasn’t been manufactured since the 1950s. (We had to invent some really neat hacks using digital cameras to read it into our oldest trailing-edge minicomputers in order to use those numbers . . .)
• And rumor has it that the Central Ammunition Depot hanging off Box Tunnel still contains two thousand barrels of iron-tipped English longbow arrows, in case it becomes urgently necessary to re-fight the Battle of Crécy.

But these pale into insignificance compared to the glorious, pointless obsolescence that fills the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY warehouse.

“Dear God,” whispers Pete, “it’s full of posters!”