As she pauses on the window ledge to check her harness, Persephone feels more alive than she has in ages.
2. SKILLS MATRIX
MS. MACDOUGAL SQUINTS AT ME DISAPPROVINGLY OVER THE top of her Gucci spectacles: “This year you’re going to take at least three weeks of Professional Development training, Mr. Howard. No ifs, no buts. With great power comes great authority, and if you want to stay on track for SSO 5(L) you will need to acquire an intimate and sympathetic understanding of the way people work outside the narrow scope of your department.”
I will say this for Emma MacDougaclass="underline" she may be a fire-breathing HR dragon, but she doesn’t short us on training opportunities. “What should I be looking at?” I ask her.
“The Fast Stream track: leadership and people management skills,” she says without batting an eyelid. I nearly choke on my coffee. (It’s a sign of how far I’ve come lately that when I’m summoned to the departmental HR manager’s office I rate the comfy chair and the complimentary refreshments.) “This is foundation work for your PSG and Grade Seven/SCS induction.” Which is HR-speak for promotion: Professional Skills for Government and Senior Civil Service. “Your divisional heads have endorsed you for SCS, and I gather you’ve shown up on the radar Upstairs”—she means Mahogany Row—“so they’ll be taking a look at you in due course to decide whether you’re suitable for further promotion. So it’s my job to see you get the grounding you need in essential operational delivery and stakeholder management. You’re going to have to go back to school—Sunningdale Park.”
I grin uncertainly at her buzz-words. Where I come from, stakeholder management is all about making sure you’ve got your vampire where you want it. “Isn’t Sunningdale Park for regular Civil Service?”
“Yes. So what?”
“But”—we don’t exist is on the tip of my tongue—“this is the Laundry.” Which really doesn’t exist, as far as most of the civil service is concerned; we’re so superblack that the COBRA Committee has never heard of us. (In actual fact we’re a subdivision of SOE, an organization that was officially disbanded in 1945.) Our senior management, Mahogany Row, are so superblack that most of us don’t ever see them; as far as I can tell, you hit a certain level in the Laundry and you vanish into such total obscurity that you might as well not be in the same organization. “Isn’t Sunningdale Park big on teamwork and horizontal networking across departmental boundaries? Who am I supposed to tell them I work for?”
“Oh, all our fast track candidates are assigned a plausible cover story with backup documentation.” Emma stares at me thoughtfully. “I think…Yes, wait a minute.” She turns to her very expensive tablet PC and rattles off a memo. “You’re going to be a network security manager from, ah, the Highways Agency. Securing our nation’s vital arteries of commerce against the scum of the internet, road tax dodgers and drunk drivers, and so on.” A carnivorous smile plays across her lips as she continues: “You’re being promoted because they need someone who understands these machines”—her fingers linger on the keyboard—“to supervise the GPS and number-plate recognition side of the National Road-Pricing Scheme.”
“But I’ll be about as popular as herpes!” I protest. The NRPS is the nanny state poster-child project of the decade—monitoring vehicle number plate movements and billing the owners for road usage, automatically fining them if they move between two monitoring sites faster than the national speed limit permits. It’s hugely overambitious, hated by everyone from Jeremy Clarkson to the Ambulance Service, supposedly due to be self-funded out of revenue raised from fines, and destined to overrun its budget faster than you can say “public-private prolapse.”
“Exactly; nobody’s going to want to get too close to you.” Her wicked grin erupts. “Isn’t that what you were worried about a moment ago?”
“But—but—” I surrender. “Okay.” I’ve got to admit, it’s the perfect cover. “But what about the networking and schmoozing side of things?”
“Your second-level story is that you’re looking for an exit strategy from the Highways Agency; they’ll talk to you out of pity.” She shrugs. “You don’t need me to draw you a diagram, Mr. Howard. I’ll set up the training account and book you in as soon as possible; the rest is up to you.”
THAT EVENING I BREAK THE BAD NEWS TO MO. “THEY’RE SENDING me to management school.”
“That’ll be an eye-opener, I’m sure.” She peers at me over her rimless spectacles, then picks up the open bottle: “More wine?”
“Yes please. They’re trying to turn me into one of them.” I shudder slightly at the memory of managers past. Bridget and Harriet, banes of my life, who lost a game of king-of-the-castle to Angleton. Andy, who is a nice guy with a bad habit of dropping me in it occasionally. Iris, the best line manager I ever had, who turned out to have hidden depths of a most peculiar and unpleasant kind. I generally have terrible luck with managers—except for Angleton, who isn’t a manager exactly (he just scares the crap out of everyone who tries to use him as a chess piece). Sitting uneasily somewhere outside the regular org chart, off to one side, doing special projects for Mahogany Row, he hardly counts.
“You’re wrong,” Mo says crisply, and pours a goodly dollop of pinot noir into my glass. “If they tried to turn you into another pointy-haired clone they’d destroy your utility to the organization—and beating swords into plowshares is not in the game plan. They’re gearing up to fight a shooting war.” She tops up her own glass. “Here’s to your imminent officer’s commission, love.”
“They’ll make me wear a tie!” I protest.
“No they won’t.” She pauses to reconsider. “Well, if they’re sending you on regular civil service training courses at the National School of Government you probably ought to dress the part, but there’s no need to go over the top.” She looks at me appraisingly, and there’s something very professional about her gaze. Like me, my wife works for the Laundry; unlike me, she keeps one foot in the outside world, holding down a part-time lectureship in Philosophy of Mathematics at King’s College. (Maintaining that much contact with everyday life is central to keeping Agent CANDID sane—I’ve seen what the other half of her job does to her, and it’s heartbreaking.) “You’re going there as a student so you can probably get away with business casual, especially at your grade and given a technical specialty as a background.”
“Huh.” I finally raise my glass and take a sip of wine. “But I’m going to be stuck there for a whole week. Stranded in deepest Ruralshire without you. There’s on-site accommodation, run by some god-awful outsourcing partnership; there probably isn’t even a pub within a fifteen kilometer radius.”
“Nonsense. It’s suburbia; you can get into town of an evening, there’s a bus service, and there are bars and restaurants on campus.”
The kitchen timer goes off right then, yammering until she walks over and silences it, then opens the oven door. That’s my cue to stand up and start hauling out plates and serving spoons. Dinner is a for-two curry set from Tesco, and we’ve been married long enough to have worked out the division of labor thing: you know the drill.
(It’s funny how, despite the yawning abyss that has opened up beneath the foundations of reality, we cling desperately to the everyday rituals of domestic life. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt…)