“Like, what I just said? I feel horrible about that.”
“Like, if he knew what you were helping me with, you’d get fired. Probably arrested. Possibly deported.”
“Oh. Yes. Any one of those would suck.”
“So how does lunch sound, instead, next time our paths cross?”
“It sounds like the proverbial tomorrow. You don’t have to make any empty promises. I was happy to be of assistance.”
“You’re a princess.”
“Thanks. I am. And actually, if there’s any way lunch could ever work out, that would be lovely. If I’ve recovered from watching that damn video by then.”
SIXTEEN
I read an article recently about jobs-related stress. Funnily enough, though, my job wasn’t covered.
I looked at all the factors that were listed and tried to relate them to the times I’d been sent to offices and factories and call centers and other, more mainstream places to work. I found I could relate to quite a few of the issues, from what I’d seen in other people. But what surprised me most was that despite the lack of knives and bullets and explosive devices, there were several areas that corresponded pretty closely with how I felt. In particular, the impact of seeing a tangible result of your labors.
Jobs where I investigated and found there to be no verifiable threat were by definition good for the service, but boring for me.
Where I found a threat and neutralized it, that was bad for the service and satisfying for me.
And where there was a threat that remained unresolved, that was the worst of both worlds.
It doesn’t show up in my service record anywhere, but a while ago I was given a job in Ulaanbaatar. It’s in Mongolia. I was there for a week, and the place I stayed in couldn’t really call itself a hotel. The most it could honestly claim to be was a hostel. It cost six dollars a night. And it had free wireless Internet. So you can imagine how irritated I was when I got back to my expensive room that afternoon in the center of Chicago. Unpacked my shiny new aluminium-bodied MacBook Pro. Fired up the browser. Typed in my Web mail details. And got redirected to a screen that demanded twenty-five dollars for a day’s Wi Fi access.
When I’d parted with the cash, I found I’d received three new e-mails that day. One for cheap Viagra. One for cheap copies of expensive watches. And one with no subject. It was from someone called koala32. I guessed that would be Lucinda. I opened it. A URL had been pasted in, but nothing had been written. I crossed my fingers and followed the link. The Web page it led to took a long time to open. And when something did appear on the screen, it wasn’t very helpfuclass="underline"
Error 404: page not found.
I closed the browser and tried again. The screen was just as slow to react. I sat and watched as nothing happened, until eventually it returned the same error message. This wasn’t the result I wanted. Fothergill’s people could break something loose at any moment. It’s as if computers know when you’re short of time, and deliberately move at a snail’s pace to show you who’s boss. I didn’t have time to mess around so I picked up my phone. I was going to call Lucinda and ask her to check the details she’d sent when I remembered something I’d seen once in a similar situation. A trick someone had used at a logistics firm I’d been sent to infiltrate in the Czech Republic. I moved the cursor to the top left of the screen. Clicked. And dragged it down to the bottom right. The blank space turned blue. And within it, in the center, three words appeared:
File 1
File 2
CCTV
The error message must have been a fake. Just text on the page, not a real status report generated by the system. The server must have opened the page slowly on purpose to simulate a routing problem. And the file names were displayed in a white font on a white background, making them seem invisible. I was impressed. But I didn’t waste any time admiring anyone’s ingenuity. I just clicked on File 1.
The link opened a text file, but there weren’t any words involved. It was only being used as a vehicle to display photographs. There were two. They were both large, high-resolution color shots. The subjects were similar. Both showed the inside of large rooms. The first was some kind of auditorium, like a theater or cinema. It was full of curving rows of fixed red velvet seats. The photographer must have been standing near the stage or screen, looking back at the audience. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people in the shot, out of a capacity of probably two thousand. But they weren’t evenly distributed throughout the space. At least eighty percent of them were concentrated in four main groups, at both sides, near the walls. The remainder were spread out among the other seats, but with fewer and fewer remaining toward the center. The people were lying back, slumped listlessly in their places. I guess there was a chance they were asleep. In theory, at least. But my money said they were all dead.
The background in the second picture was far less luxurious. The floor was plain, scuffed wood. The walls were a dirty, blotchy version of white. The chairs were the interlinked, removable kind. They were arranged in straighter rows, and looked hard and uncomfortable. But they held a similar share of bodies. Again, I’d say well over a hundred. The people were sprawled out in the same way, as if they’d all suddenly fallen asleep. But this time, they were spaced out pretty evenly throughout the room. I couldn’t see any distinct groupings anywhere, front to back or side to side. So either the occupants had been distributed differently from the outset, or whatever had gone to work on them had done a more thorough job.
File 2 turned out to be a spreadsheet, but again it wasn’t being used in the normal way. There were two worksheets—labeled iv and v—and neither contained any numbers. Someone had drawn black outlines around large blocks of cells, and then colored them in to form a kind of pattern or diagram. Some were filled in with red. Some with green. And the rest, yellow. The only marking on either sheet was a lowercase x in a few of the cells. There were four on each side of the first sheet, and three on each side of the second.
The red cells were predominantly bunched up in groups near the edges of the first worksheet. The pattern looked familiar. I thought about it, and realized it reminded me of how the bodies had been arranged in the first picture. I opened the text file again to check, and saw there was a definite correlation. It was as if someone had used the spreadsheet to re-create a kind of bird’s-eye view of the room. Red clearly represented the seats where people had died. I guessed green meant that the people in those ones had survived. Yellow was less obvious. Maybe the people had died later. Or perhaps those seats had been vacant. I was still mulling over the options when another thought struck me. There were hardly any green cells at all in the second sheet. If I was right, that meant nearly the entire population of the second room had been killed. Which left just one element to identify. The x’s. And when I went back to the photo, it was obvious what they were, too. Air vents. Large ones, set into the walls. I was looking at a record of the carnage caused by something airborne. It had to be Spektra. The gas that McIntyre was selling to the Myenese.
I clicked on the final link, and for a moment I thought nothing was going to happen. Then a separate window opened. A video viewer appeared and automatically began playing. I hit the FULL SCREEN button and realized I was looking at the inside of a large inflatable structure, like a blow-up marquee. Or part of one, at least. I could see a long expanse of bulging horizontal panels, like giant cigars. They were bright, shiny white. The part of the wall in the shot was at least fifty feet wide, but the frame wasn’t big enough to see either end. There was no sign of any doors, either. Just windows. There were five, evenly spread out. They were flat, but so thick they were barely transparent. I could just about make out rough cinder-block walls on the far side, interspersed with heavy iron girders. If I was pushed, I’d say it looked like the tent had been built on the inside of an abandoned factory or ware house.