I nod. “Just a little unfocused today.”
“You and me both.” She manages a little laugh by way of conversational punctuation. “Well, I need to be off.” She takes a too-big mouthful of coffee and winces. “Sorry I’m leaving you with the washing up again.”
“That’s okay, I’ve got an extra hour.” No point showing up before Iris’s steering group meeting, is there? “Take care.”
“I will.” She picks up her handbag and the violin case and heads for the door, heels clicking: “Bye,” and she’s away, looking more like an accountant than a combat epistemologist.
I putter around for a while, then get dressed (jeans, tee shirt, gun belt, and linen blazer—mine is not a customer-facing job at present, and I hate ties) and prepare to head out. At the last minute I remember the NecronomiPod, sleeping (but not dead) beside the laptop. I grab it along with my usual phone and head for the bus stop.
“WELCOME TO BLOODY BARON,” SAYS IRIS, OFFERING ME A recycled cardboard folder with MOST SECRET stamped on the cover: “You have two hours to familiarize yourself with the contents before the Monday afternoon team meeting.”
She smiles brightly as she drops it on my desk, right on top of the archive box full of dusty paperwork that I’ve just signed for, care of the wee man with the handcart who does the twice-daily run to the stacks: “There will be an exam. On the upside, I’ve given your structured cabling files to Peter-Fred and the departmental email security awareness committee meeting for Wednesday is canceled due to illness—Jackie and Vic are spouting from both ends, apparently, and aren’t expected in until next week—so you’ve got some breathing space.”
“Thanks.” I try not to groan. “I’ll try not to obsess about Peter-Fred fucking up the wiring loom too much.”
“Don’t worry.” She waves a hand vaguely: “The cabling’s all going to be outsourced from next year anyhow.”
That gets my attention. “Outsourced?” I realize that shouting might deliver entirely the wrong message about my suitability for return to work and moderate my voice: “There are four, no, five, no—several, very good reasons why we do our own cabling, starting with security and ending with security. I really don’t think outsourcing it is a very good idea at all, unless it’s the kind of outsourcing which is actually insourcing to F Division via a subcontractor arrangement to satisfy our PPP quota requirements . . .”
And that’s another ten minutes wasted, bringing Iris up to speed on one of the minutiae of my job. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know where the dividing line between IT support scut-work and OPSEC protocol lies, although she catches on fast when I explain the predilection of class G3 abominations for traveling down Cat 5e cables and eating clerical staff, not to say anything about the ease with which a bad guy could stick a network sniffer on our backbone and do a man-in-the-middle attack on our authentication server if we let random cable installers loose under the floor tiles in the new building.
Finally she leaves me alone, and I open the cover on BLOODY BARON and start reading.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER I’M THOROUGHLY SPOOKED BY MY reading—so much so that I’ve had to put the file down a couple of times when I caught myself scanning the same sentence over and over again with increasing disbelief. It comes as something of a relief when Iris knocks on my door again. “Showtime,” she says. “You coming?”
I shake the folder at her. “This is nuts!”
“Welcome to the monkey house, and have a banana.” She taps her wristwatch. “Room 206 in four minutes.”
I lock up carefully—the files I requisitioned from the stacks aren’t secret or above, but it’d still be professionally embarrassing if anyone walked in on them—and sketch a brief ward over the door. It flickers violet, then fades, plugging into the departmental security parasphere. I hurry towards the stairs.
Room 206 is up a level, with real windows and an actual view of the high street if you open the dusty Venetian blinds. There’s a conference table and a bunch of not-so-comfortable chairs (the better to keep people from falling asleep in meetings), and various extras: an ancient overhead slide projector, a lectern with a broken microphone boom, and a couple of tattered security awareness posters from the 1950s: “Is your co-worker a KGB mole, a nameless horror from beyond spacetime, or a suspected homosexual? If so, dial 4-SECURITY!” (I suspect Pinky has been exercising his curious sense of humor again.)
“Have a chair.” Iris winks at me. I take her up on the invitation as the door opens and three more attendees show up. Shona I recognize from previous encounters in ops working groups—she’s in-your-face Scottish, on the plump side, and has a brusque way of dealing with bureaucratic obstacles that doesn’t exactly encourage me to insert myself in her line of fire. I think she’s something to do with the Eastern Europe desk. “This is Shona MacDonald,” says Iris. “And Vikram Choudhury, and Franz Gustaffson, our liaison from the AIVD—Unit G6.” Franz nods affably enough, and I try to conceal my surprise. It’s an unusual name for the Netherlands, but I happen to know that his father was Danish. The last time I saw him, he was on what I was sure was a one-way trip to a padded cell for the rest of his life after sitting through one PowerPoint slide too many at a certain meeting in Darmstadt. The fine hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
“We’ve met,” I say, guardedly.
“Have we?” Franz looks at me with interest. “That’s interesting! You’ll have to tell me all about it later.”
Oh. So they only managed to save part of him.
“Allow me to introduce Bob, Bob Howard,” Iris tells them, and I nod and force a bland smile to cover up the horror.
“Mr. Howard is an SSO 3 and double-hats as our departmental IT security specialist and also as personal assistant to Dr. Angleton. A decision was taken to add him to this working group.” I notice the descent into passive voice; also some disturbing double takes from around the table, from Shona and Gustaffson. “He also—this is one of those coincidences I was talking about earlier—happens to be married to Agent CANDID.”
At which name Gustaffson drops all pretense at impassivity and stares at me as if I’ve just grown a second head. I nod at him. What the hell? Mo has a codeword all of her own? Presumably for overseas assignments like the Amsterdam job, but still . . .
“Bob. Would you be so good as to summarize your understanding of the background to BLOODY BARON for us?”
Oh Jeez. I clear my throat. “I’ve only had an hour and a half with the case files, so I may be misreading this stuff,” I admit. Shit, stop making excuses. It just makes you look lame. “BLOODY BARON appears to be a monitoring committee tasked with—well. The cold war never entirely ended, did it? There are too many vested interests on all sides who want to keep it simmering. And the upshot is that Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don’t need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction. Hence the current gas wars and economic blackmail.”
Iris winces. (I’m wincing inside: if you had our heating bills last winter, you’d be wincing too.) “Enough of the macro picture, if you don’t mind. What’s the micro?”