When I’m not conducting goat-sucker population control exercises, part of my new job is to digest a book of accounting rules several centimeters thick. (This is the abbreviated training-wheels version, you understand, for the very junior Vice President in Charge of Janitorial Supplies.) Another part of my job involves spending two-hour sessions holed up in an office with the long-suffering Emma MacDougal from HR. Emma is tutoring me on how management works: not the MBA everything-is-a-process employees-are-perfectly-spherical-interchangeable-blobs variety that all the smiling sociopaths in suits are getting in the private sector, but how this very eccentric job-for-life corner of the Civil Service works internally, with a specific emphasis on house-training the newly minted sorcerer. Apparently I wasn’t expected to hit this grade for another five years, but CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and vacant org chart boxes are calling, so needs must.
It’s not my favorite part of the job, but I can’t see a way around it. If my office needs redecorating I can’t moan at my boss anymore, I am the boss. So I need to know how to fill out the right magic scrolls to summon Facilities, recite the correct incantation to invoke Painters and Decorators, and propitiate the demons of Accounts by documenting peeling wallpaper and rising damp. Which is to say, I’m learning a whole lot about how this organization works, in ways I’d barely even noticed before.
It’s quite humbling, really. I was intimately familiar with the endless upgrades to the structured cabling runs that keep our in-house networks running, but I had little or no idea about how my proposals for work got turned into the budget items, job specifications, and contract tenders that resulted in people in overalls coming in to lift floor tiles and install runs of Cat5e cabling. Bureaucracy is like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it is below the waterline, and if you spend all your time rubbernecking at the tentacle monsters while you let the ship of state drift, before you know it the canteen will be out of tea bags and the engine room crew will go on work-to-rule.
This is a long and rambling way of explaining why I don’t get to leave the office until well after 6:00 p.m.
I spend the first half of the afternoon with Emma chewing over the high-level org chart and procedures for submitting job requests to IT Services from outside (the irony is not lost on me), and then I spend a couple of hours with Boris and Vik analyzing the reception my appearance on Newsnight got. We have had a dozen or so write-ups in newspapers (nothing making the front page), a minor “boffin puts foot in mouth at new agency” tag on The Register, which got picked up by BuzzFeed for some reason, and three requests for interviews from local radio stations, all of which were politely turned down on my behalf before they reached my inbox. The request from the Today program on Radio 4 is a lot harder to ignore, but I gather policy (per the SA and the shadowy coterie of senior administrators who rule on such things) is to (a) play for time, and (b) spread the misery around, so they’re going to try and break out of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, then send Mhari round to flash her choppers at them. She can’t plead incendiary tendencies under arc lights to dodge a radio interview, can she? Hah.
I get everything nailed down by five o’clock, but then realize I’ve barely had time to check my email all day, so I head back to my office. And that’s when I find I have a visitor.
“Ah, Bob, do come in.” It’s the SA, sitting primly in my visitor’s chair. “Are you terribly busy right now?”
Cold sweat breaks out up and down my spine. “No, not really—” Oh god what have I done—
Dr. Armstrong looks thoughtful. “I have a little errand for you.” A momentary pause. “You are not in trouble,” he adds.
“Uh—” I manage not to startle. “Oh. An errand.” I walk to my desk, stiff-legged with relief, and sit down, then hit the DO NOT DISTURB light switch. “Do tell.” Bastard, thanks for taking a year off my life like that. It’s unfair of me to blame Dr. Armstrong for my own guilty conscience, even when I know I haven’t done anything, but he’s the Senior Auditor: he doesn’t pay house calls, as a rule.
“I have a little out-of-the-office errand I was going to attend to this evening but I’ve been delayed and I was wondering if you could take care of it for me? It’s just a short diversion on your way home.”
“I suppose so.” By home, I hope he means the hotel, otherwise it’s in the opposite direction from where I’m going. “What is it?”
He leans towards me, intent. “This is not to be discussed outside your office or mine, and your report will be classified Secret and prepared under NOELEC protocol.” I have to write my report using a manual typewriter or a pen, in other words, on handmade paper inside a warded containment grid. I’d be seriously annoyed if this didn’t flag the SA’s “little errand” as highly sensitive. “Understood?”
I nod. “What’s up?”
Dr. Armstrong glances sidelong at the door. “I received a signal from an old acquaintance this afternoon,” he says, “using a prearranged code. He’s in London and he wants to talk to someone. I”—for a moment an expression of savage frustration flickers across his face—“I’m tied up with setup for TITANIC for the foreseeable future. Burning the midnight oil. It couldn’t come at a worse time, in fact it’s probably connected, but I need someone reliable—you—to go and listen to the man, hear what he has to say, and report back to me.”
A contact with a prearranged code that gets the SA’s attention can’t be anything trivial. I tense. “I can do that, but you’ll need to give me something more. Otherwise I won’t know when to pay attention.”
The SA nods, shadowing his eye sockets. “His name is Bill McKracken and he’s a US Postal Service inspector. He flew in from New York on a red-eye this morning and he’s due to fly out from Heathrow late this evening.” I wince. (I’ve done the London/New York day trip myself; in economy class the jet lag is brutal.) “He just felt like a chat, for old time’s sake.” Dr. Armstrong’s smile is terrifying.
“You said he’s a postal inspector. You mean the, uh, he’s one of the Comstock people?”
“The Comstock people don’t exist, Bob.” He doesn’t meet my eyes. “He’s just a postal inspector.” He slides a folded sheet of paper onto my desk, covered in his cramped, neat handwriting. “There you go. I’ll take your report later tonight or first thing in the morning. Ta-ta.”
The SA unfolds from his chair like an origami giraffe, waits for me to switch off the DO NOT DISTURB sign, then leaves without a backwards glance. And that’s when I realize that things are even worse than I imagined. Because the “Comstock people” don’t officially exist, and if they’re jetting in from New York to ask for our assistance things must be really bad.
*