Because I’ve wasted time carping I end up with the bottom of the pile and have to spend half an hour wading through the Express (“Does the Spirit of Diana Make You Fat? Are Elves Communists?”), the Mail (“Elven Scum Are Coming for Your Daughters!”), and the Sun (“Phwoar, Get a Load of Santa’s Lovely Helper’s Jubblies!”). This forcible dunking in the collective subconscious of the British public leaves me feeling dirty, but I’m relieved to discover that I rate zero column-inches in the Mail and The Sun. There is a short piece on page eleven of the Express, wherein the ink-on-paper equivalent of a talk-radio shock jock expresses dismay that in last night’s Paxo Roast the great man didn’t interrogate “the boffin from the Ministry of Magic” with red-hot pliers and pilliwinks, but as I don’t even rate a name check I’ve got to concede that the SA might be taking my meteoric rise to national celebrity status a bit too seriously. So I’m just getting ready to breathe a sigh of relief when Mhari excitedly says, “Ooh, that’s interesting!” and punctures my balloon.
“What is?” I lean towards her.
“It’s the Telegraph business section.” She holds up a quarter-page piece, solid text and a very unwelcome and familiar photograph. “Did you guys know about this?”
The SA leans forward and adjusts his half-moon spectacles. “Oh dear,” he says very softly. “Oh dear me.”
“What is it?” Vikram asks tensely.
“American Televangelist in Outsourcing Deal with Serco,” reads Mhari. “Dr. Raymond Schiller’s GP Security has just inked a thirty-six-million-pound initial contract to handle domestic security operations on behalf of…”
She keeps on reading, but I know instantly that we’re fucked. GP Security is now officially in bed with one of the biggest government outsourcing corporations in the UK, and you don’t have to be a genius to put two and two together.
*
I spend the next couple of days drinking bad coffee, making list after list of things I’m not supposed to say in public while bearing in mind that the people I’ll be briefing on the committee under parliamentary privilege have all got security clearances that theoretically cover most contingencies, living on canteen food, and going home to Persephone’s town house to crash for a few hours each night. My accounting procedures and project management standards homework is unaccountably neglected: can’t think why. In between I snatch time to chew over the DELIRIUM file contents with Mo and the Senior Auditor a few times, but we don’t reach any firm conclusions about it. It’s disturbing, true, but not that different from any number of other public-private partnership stitch-ups. This sort of thing happens all the time in the state sector these days, and the only thing that makes this case different is the unacknowledged remit of the agencies involved.
Then it’s suddenly four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and instead of the usual weekly wrap-up meeting, I’m enduring a grilling in a conference room in Whitehall. My interrogator is the Right Honorable Lord Swiveleyes of Stow-on-the-Wold, a retired Big Cheese from MI5 who is eking out his political afterlife in the Lords—and he is slowly driving me mad. He has a maddeningly rhythmic cadence that’s just too slow, as if he’s trying to lull me to sleep, but it’s entirely deliberate, then every so often he speeds up abruptly and throws me a curveball. I hate being cross-examined by barristers.
I’m tired because I slept badly—stayed up too late giving my revision notes a final once-over, then had too many nightmares about being interviewed live on TV by a gently smiling journalist with a giant extradimensional wood louse for a tongue—but I can’t afford to lose track in front of the Defense Select Committee. It would be Very Bad Form—possibly bad enough that they’d consign me to the Tower of London, given the way this session is going. If only I’d woken up this morning, headed for Heathrow, and hijacked an airliner to Syria. (Yes I know they’re supposed to shoot them down when they’re hijacked these days. Not that they’re flying a normal service again, after the events in Yorkshire: but that’s the point.) I’m standing under the spotlights in my monkey suit, trying not to admit that anyone in the organization I work for broke the law. Any law. Because they’re out for blood—and mine will do, if nobody juicier comes to hand.
They hauled me in for two reasons. Firstly, I’m senior enough to represent the organization in public, and secondly, I’m junior enough they think they can squeeze me for gossip before they go on to interrogate higher-level folks using the ammunition I negligently left lying around. So it’s a no-win situation for me, and for the organization. Oh, and because I’ve been on TV, they (or their staffers and spads) know who I am. So there is no escape.
The worst part? They keep asking the same fucking question, over and over, from different angles. (Who do they think they are, Paxo?)
“Where exactly were you when you first learned of the existence of elves, Mr. Howard?” my tormentor repeats for the fourth time, hunching forward over his microphone. (He pronounces the word elves in portentous tones, as if he thinks they’re some kind of TV special effect.)
I try not to roll my eyes.
“I was first made aware of the existence of a gracile hominid species distinct from our own kind—Homo sapiens sapiens—seven months ago, in a weekly briefing paper circulated by our scientific liaison department. Professor McPherson of the Natural History Museum’s Department of Paleontology delivered a lecture to some of my colleagues describing the recent discovery of a ritual burial site in the Republic of Ireland. Approximately a thousand years ago—”
There is a brief muttering among the assembled MPs, civil servants, and assistants behind the horseshoe-shaped ring of conference tables that focus around the podium I’m standing at. “Silence, please!” calls the chair. “Please continue, Mr. Howard.”
“Thank you. As I said, I came across this report in a weekly news bulletin that crossed my email inbox, but I confess I only skimmed it at the time and didn’t pay close attention.”
And the inevitable derail happens: “Why not?” the Keen Young Thing on the edge of the front row demands triumphantly, as if I just confessed to treasonable negligence.
“As I’m sure the Right Honorable member is aware, the Division has a variety of roles and responsibilities. My personal duties at the time had absolutely nothing to do with tracking new discoveries in paleontology. I am certain everyone here is as up to date on the deliberations of the Commons Select Committee on Intellectual Property Rights as I was, at that time”—this doesn’t even provoke a titter: they’re really looking for blood—“on a discovery by another department that was assessed by those involved as being of purely historical interest.”
“But you would agree that your organization was aware, on some level, of the existence of H. alfarensis, Mr. Howard? As much as seven months ago?”
Oh for fuck’s sake. “Individuals within the organization were aware that another hominid species, presumed extinct, had persisted into the historical record.” I put a heavy emphasis on the presumed extinct. “This isn’t unprecedented. The hobbits, H. floresiensis, died out about ten thousand years ago; elves, we thought, had become extinct somewhat more recently. I’d like to emphasize that there was no evidence of anomalous technology or occult capabilities associated with the Specimen B burial site. All we had was an Iron Age ritual burial of an executed—beheaded—nonhuman.”