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just can’t be forgiven. Presumably Alan Diment had been one of the few older agents left untouched by the scandal. I had heard they’d put him in charge, but I’d never thought he’d be dumb enough to do something like this.
    I grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulled him up off the floor, and slammed him back against the bar. I thrust my face right into his. He didn’t even struggle, just looked back at me with his big, sad eyes. I showed him my golden fist, and his eyes widened even more as I made golden spikes rise out of the knuckles.
    “You are in trouble, Alan,” I said. “Real trouble. Tell me what you know. Tell me everything that’s going on here. And this would not be a good time to grow a pair and fall back on your supposed authority.”
    “No one’s dead! No one’s hurt!” Diment said quickly. “This was just supposed to be an information-gathering operation! That is what spies do, after all, isn’t it? Look, they made me be head of MI 13. I didn’t want the job; I was looking forward to taking early retirement. But after that stupid Satanic Conspiracy thing wiped out all the top levels of the organisation, I was the only one left who knew how things worked. The only one with any real experience. I’d put the years in, so they gave me an office and a secretary and told me to get on with it. Keep your head down, they said, and don’t make any waves. Just hold the fort until we can find someone more suitable to do the job.
    “But . . . the Government had been through its own purge, because of the Conspiracy, and there were a lot of new faces around, settling into positions of power, desperate to make their mark. They were the ones who put the pressure on. They wanted to prove MI 13 was still fit for purpose. That it was still capable of bringing in the bacon . . . I was told I had to do something, come up with some big new idea, to keep them from . . . disposing of me.
    “So I talked to a few old friends, chaps I went to school with, who were working for Black Heir. You know, the Government department tasked with clearing up the mess left behind after alien encounters . . . Of course you know. These friends loaned me a few useful bits of alien tech, and I talked some of my people who were Members of the Wulfshead into quietly introducing that alien tech into the plasma screens. Wasn’t difficult . . . The club management may be absolute fiends when it comes to external security, but they never considered there might be a threat from inside their precious club.
    “Anyway, I soon had some of my people sitting on the other side of the screens, keeping their eyes and ears open and writing down anything that seemed . . . interesting. I sorted through it all and sent anything that seemed important Upstairs. And that should have been it. But then certain people in positions of power started deliberately releasing the secrets, to do damage to people they disapproved of. I think a lot of that was down to interdepartmental fighting . . .
    “They said they were very pleased with me! At first . . . Enough to take the pressure off, for a while, but then they started getting greedy. They didn’t just want the secrets, they wanted the people who knew the secrets. Because they weren’t seen as people any more, just useful assets to be exploited. So the word came down, and it was more than my life was worth to say no. I was told to grab a few useful people from the Wulfshead tonight. They even gave me a shopping list. Take a few, they said, not enough to draw anyone’s attention . But no one expected you to be here. They took one look at you and panicked. Said, ‘Take everyone!’ Make a clean sweep of it, while we can. Before you figured out what was happening and shut it down. I told them it was a bad idea! But they wouldn’t listen . . .”
    I turned Alan Diment around with my armoured hand and showed him to the nearest plasma screen.
    “You know who I am!” I said loudly. “Give back the people