I put the empty bottle down. Can’t get away from it, can I? “Yes.” The waitress is on her way: either it’s a quiet night or my Obtain Bar Service feat just leveled up alarmingly. When she departs I continue. “Someone in the Cabinet Office will have seen it for sure. Questions will be asked, it’ll be on the PM’s morning briefing, and I’ll be up before the beak, won’t I?” Boris chuckles and Mhari giggles. “So I assume we’ll be debriefing first…” Then, right on cue, Mhari’s phone buzzes.
“Yup: looks like we have a meeting scheduled for nine hundred hours, Room 406, chaired by the Senior Auditor.” Mhari frowns. I wince slightly at the specter of the SA. He’s not someone you want to get on the wrong side of. I must look aghast because she adds: “Mo is on the invite list, so I’m pretty sure this is not about you.”
“What?”
“Trust me, if the Auditors were planning a Bob roast they wouldn’t invite your wife to the barbecue.” Then Mhari glances up from her smartphone screen, and despite the reassuring words she looks troubled: “He’s booked half the Audit Committee, plus Vik Choudhury and a couple of heavy hitters from the Executive Committee. It’s all very Mahogany Row; I can’t figure it out. But they wouldn’t roll the Senior Auditor out to chair it if this was anything less than critical, don’t you think?”
“Well fuck.” I pick up my third (and, I remind myself, final) beer. “You know what this means.”
Boris looks at me, then Mhari looks at me, and we chorus: “The reward for a job not fucked up is another job.”
*
I finish my beer and dutifully stagger off to my hotel room, while Mhari returns to the office—she works the night shift these days—and Boris heads home. I assume he has a home. Right now, I don’t. I live out of a suitcase pretty much constantly. I’m traveling so much that Accounts doesn’t even blink at my subsistence claims any more. I’m in London so little that it’s cheaper to pay for the odd hotel night using loyalty points than to find a permanent room somewhere, and I’m still hoping to patch things up enough to go home.
But in the here and now, I am coming to hate liminal spaces like airport terminals and hotel rooms.
Sleep takes a while to arrive. I can dimly sense the minds and dreams of the other hotel guests around me: walls and floor and ceiling are no barrier to souls. It’s kind of soothing. Some insomniacs count sheep. I keep separate tallies of shaggers, porn channel junkies, and insomniacs. Eventually I manage to tune my brain to the slumber channel and drift off for a few hours, untroubled by the usual nightmares.
Morning arrives much too soon in the shape of a bleeping hotel alarm clock and a DJ on Capital Radio yattering excitedly about somebody’s new album, and how the London stock exchange is reopening and sterling seems to have arrested its slide because the Chancellor is pointing a fire hose of Treasury money at the smoking wreckage of West Yorkshire. It is still unclear whether the Secretary of State for Defense is going to fall on his sword; he seems to be trying to hang on, but the Prime Minister has just said that he “has complete confidence” in him, and you know what that means. I turn the radio off and shamble in the direction of the shower cubicle.
This is an office day rather than a public speaking gig, so I throw the suit in the suit carrier, pull on combat pants, tee shirt, and hoodie, and check my email and calendar schedule over a full cooked hotel breakfast. I’m still yawning as I check out and catch a bus to the office, and I’m nearly there when I realize I’ve forgotten to shave and my shaver is in the bottom of the suitcase left in the left-luggage room back at the hotel. Great.
Our temporary headquarters is the New Annex, which we moved into for six months just over five years ago. It’s still in use even though Facilities has been unable to get the bloodstains out of the walls and its security is terminally compromised. The first HQ redevelopment stalled due to site contamination, then the fallback plan—a new headquarters up the M1 in Leeds—was trashed less than two weeks ago, along with the rest of Leeds city center. London property prices are so nosebleedingly insane that we can’t even find temporary quarters in the capital, so we’re stuck with the New Annex even though it’s unfit for purpose and should be demolished.
But the past weeks have brought changes, some of them externally visible. We didn’t have armed police standing by the entrance before, making it obvious that we are something more important than a fly-by-night call center operation. Now we’ve got two of them, and they’re not your regular SO19 bods, either: they’re wearing matte black Imperial Stormtrooper gear with Metropolitan Police badges, full face helmets, and really scary-looking guns instead of the usual assault rifles. They check me for tentacles and I show them my warrant card, then they let me in. Security, we haz it: rah. Only I fumble and drop my card, bend to pick it up, and realize I showed them my driving license by mistake.
The main staircase is closed off above the ground floor so I have to take the indoor fire escape up to the fourth floor to get to the designated meeting room. It’s a steep climb so when I reach the second-floor landing I pause to dump my suit carrier and messenger bag in my office, then grab a mug of what passes for coffee from the kitchenette next door to the number three briefing room.
“Hey, Mr. Howard! Have you got a minute?”
I manage not to spill my coffee. It’s one of the new guys, from Facilities: young (was I ever that young?), eager (was I ever that enthusiastic?), and unaware that it is a really bad idea to startle a DSS before he’s had his morning coffee. “Yes?” I demand, my pulse slowing, quite proud of myself for neither grunting nor snarling.
“Um, hi, I’m Jon, and I’m supposed to be auditing the network cable runs for the Ops offices in this wing because there’s this overdue requirement for a structured cabling refresh, and I need to get access to your office so I can inspect the junction box and make sure it’s properly terminated?”
Jon has a hipster beard and wears thick-rimmed glasses and a checked shirt with a button-down collar that doesn’t quite conceal his tattoos, but in every other respect it’s eerily like looking at myself in a time-shifted mirror set to fifteen years ago. I find it oddly depressing. He seems eager to please, and killing him would result in altogether too much paperwork of an excruciatingly dull variety, so I just shake my head. “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes, but I can fit you in afterwards—knock on my office door around eleven thirty?”
“Sure!” He nods happily.