“Thank you,” I replied, gazing about at the magnificently bizarre building, an odd mix of randomly shaped modernism with large voids, oddly shaped glass panels, bright colors and soaring internal verticals. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

“Designed by Will Alsop just before he went sane,” replied Duffy. “We were very lucky. I understand you know Colonel Wexler, who heads up the SLS?”

A lean woman with a face pinched by hard workout walked forward to greet me. She was in her mid-fifties, did not look well disposed to joy in any form and was wearing the standard SLS combat fatigues, replete with the distinctive camouflage pattern of book spines for blending into library spaces.

When I was at SpecOps, she was at the Search/Destroy division of SO-5, and you didn’t get to join them until you’d killed eight people with a gun, four with a blunt instrument or two with your hands—it was a sliding-scale sort of thing. Wexler’s appointment to the SLS was enough to precipitate a 32 percent drop in late returns.

“Welcome to Wessex Library Service,” she said in a voice that sounded like a twelve-mile run washed down with two raw eggs, “and good to see you again.”

We shook hands.

“You too, Mel. Husband well?”

“Dead.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged. “I killed the man who did it with my thumbs,”

she said. “I’ve not washed this one since.” She showed me a grubbylooking thumb.

Duffy quickly intervened with an embarrassed cough. “Colonel Wexler offers her full support, don’t you, Colonel?”

“Of course,” she said in a hollow tone. “What sort of leadership can we expect from you? Decisive and bold or faltering and ambivalent?”

“The first, I hope.”

“Good,” said Colonel Wexler, visibly pleased. “The previous chief librarian refused to sanction dawn raids to retrieve overdue books. But that will change under you, yes?”

“I’ll be giving it all due consideration,” I said, meaning that I’d do no such thing.

“That’s a start,” she said. “I’d also like you to review the rules regarding spine bending and turning over the corners of pages. If we let simple things like that slide without punishment, we could open the floodgates to poor reading etiquette and a downward spiral to the collapse of civilization.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Will you memo your ideas to me?” She said she would, and we shook hands again and moved off. “She’s certifiably insane, isn’t she?” I asked once we were out of earshot.

“I’m afraid so,” replied Duffy, “but loyal to a fault. She and the rest of the SLS would die protecting any book in the library— with the possible exception of those bloody awful Emperor Zhark novels and anything written by Daphne Farquitt.”

“That’s good to know.”