First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“Is that who I think it is?” he asked, looking toward the front of the store. I followed his gaze. Standing next to the cushioned-linoleum display was a man in a long dark coat. When he saw us watching him, he reached into his pocket and flashed a badge of some sort.

“Shit,” I murmured under my breath. “Flanker.”

“He probably wants to buy a carpet,” said Bowden with a heavy helping of misplaced optimism.

Commander Flanker was our old nemesis from SO-1, the SpecOps department that policed other SpecOps departments. Flanker had adapted well to the disbanding of the service. Before, he made life miserable for SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt, and now he made life miserable for ex-SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt. We had crossed swords many times in the past, but not since the disbandment. We regarded it as a good test of our discretion and secrecy that we had never seen him at Acme Carpets. Then again, perhaps we were kidding ourselves. He might know all about us but thought flushing out renegade operatives just wasn’t worth his effort—especially when we were actually doing a service that no one else wanted to do.

I walked quickly to the front of the shop.

“Good morning, Ms. Next,” he said, glancing with ill-disguised mirth at my name embroidered above the company logo on my jacket. “Literary Detective at SO-27 to carpet layer? Quite a fall, don’t you think?”

“It depends on your point of view,” I said cheerfully. “Everyone needs carpets—but not everyone needs SpecOps. Is this a social call?”

“My wife has read all your books.”

“They’re not my books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content—for the first four anyway.”

“Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”

“Did you come all this way to give me your wife’s analysis of my books?”

“No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”

“It isn’t working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”

“Axminster.”

“We can certainly help you with that,” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices—and we’ve a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”

“It was Axminster Purple I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn’t a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably was an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I’d been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA—the Cheese Enforcement Agency.

“You’re not here for the carpets, are you?”

“I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in ’86, and you’ve been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”

“Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”

“No. I’ve come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it’s considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That’s all changed.”

“It has?”

“I’m afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There’s a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user’s head vanish in a ball of fire.”

“That’s a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,’ right?”

“No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim’s head really does vanish in a ball of fire. It’s a killer, Next—and addictive. It’s apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”

This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I’d furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I’d tried most of what I’d flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone—until now.

“Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there’d been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.

/> “It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it’s so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”

He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.

“The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”

He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I had seen some X-14. It’d been chained up in the back of Pryce’s truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I’d traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn’t snitch on him, not yet—not before I had more information.