Esme sighs and the tension seems to lessen, her shoulders slumping slightly.
"Alright. Well, lets get this done with. Follow me." She continues on to the stairwell and you follow her down. She leads the way down a line of shelves to one of the large stone support pillars. She places her hand on the pillar and closes her eyes for a moment. There is the sound of a metal clink and then a section of the pillar swings open very slightly. Esme gets her finger tips into the space and with a grunt pulls open the section, revealing a hollow space within. A metal deadbolt, retracted, sticks out of the inner side of the door and a hole with a metal ladder leading down.
Esme mounts the ladder with a bit of difficulty and motions for you to follow.
"Close the door before you do though."
You wait for her to climb down a bit before you follow, closing the door and climbing through the dark tunnel for at least a minute before coming out in a small, bare stone room containing nothing but an overhead light and a large metal door. Esme sits down against the wall and adjusts her shawl a bit before starting to speak, very quickly.
"Ok. Here's the big stuff. I'm a spy. Nicholas is too, though he's really more of a bodyguard...anyways. This entire building is a front. Well...kind of. We do actually run the library and it is actually a library but its paid for by..." She stops, apparently realizing she's blurting all this out, and sighs, tapping her hands together at a loss of what to say. After a moment she lets her hands fall limp into her lap.
"Me and Alexander knew each other when we were children. We're both from a country called Eurstoya, across the sea. He left, 15 years ago I think, and came here. This country is called Milos; it used to be a monarchy of sorts but a few years back there was a military coup and it became whatever this is now. Might makes right...fascist...Darwinist Oligarchy, I don't know. Alexander was pretty high up in the government before the coup and got even higher afterwards thanks to his talents. But then the war between Milos and Eurstoya started and he was called a traitor, enemy of the ministry and the state. There are still posters of him around, rewards for his capture and propaganda against him. I'm not really sure what happened to him; just sort of vanished. Might have been killed right at the start and just reported alive as a boogeymen man, might have got away."
She's quiet a moment, mind somewhere far away, trapped momentarily in reminiscence. She shakes it off.
"Anyway, the military back home approached me to help in the war effort. My talents are good for implanting information and pulling it out again so I'm pretty invaluable for agents who need to learn skills quickly or pass off a field report in a few seconds instead of a few hours. Or interrogation, but that hasn't happened yet. So me and Nicholas stay here, run the library, and help when we're needed or when someone needs a safe house. That's what this is by the way," She gestures around her.
"So, that's the gist of it. Now I'm guessing you have questions?"