The second thing they didn’t know was that Izzy’s husband Fréderic hated Bridge. It was partly a simple clash of personalities. Fréderic was a dour and serious man, with no discernible sense of humour. He and Izzy had met while they were both doing charity aid work in East Africa, and over the years Fred had risen up through the ranks of do-gooders to his current position as a logistics manager for Médecins Sans Frontières. He was practically a Marxist.
And that was the other reason he disliked Bridge; because of her job. Or rather, the job everyone at the table thought she had.
As far as her friends and family were concerned, Brigitte Sharp was a junior civil servant for the British Government, currently working at the Department of Trade and Industry. Her job was intensely boring, with very average pay, and something she simply couldn’t talk about. Not that most people were dying to discuss paperwork at the DTI anyway, but on the rare occasions someone asked, they’d understand when she made excuses and said she wasn’t allowed to. It also gave her a reason to occasionally jet off somewhere, under the pretence of tagging along with a junior minister to a trade negotiation, or being forced to attend a dreadfully dull import/export dinner. Bridge worked hard to make her job sound so uninteresting that nobody would even contemplate asking her to talk about it.
In fact, she’d spent her day wrestling with whether or not to take the observation mission Giles had offered her in Zurich. She could see the sense in what he and Dr Nayar said. If she didn’t go back into the field soon, she might never return at all. But was it what she wanted? She’d spent so much time over the past three years working her way through a process of recovery with an ultimate aim of making her ready for OIT again, she’d hardly stopped to wonder if she was sighting up the wrong target.
She enjoyed her work. She liked the CTA unit, and her colleagues, though Ciaran and Monica exasperated her from time to time. There was an old saying, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.” Bridge had often wondered why it never ended, “…or your work colleagues.” SIS was the only adult job she’d ever had, but she’d heard enough horror stories from friends to know it was the same in regular offices too, and that the occasional problems she had with other members of the CTA unit were relatively minor by comparison to some.
Her only longstanding issue was who truly ran the unit. Giles was in overall charge, but had other responsibilities besides the CTA. Officially they were all the same rank, but by default Giles gave his orders to Ciaran. That made sense to Bridge; Ciaran was the unit’s founding member, was older than both she and Monica, and had worked at SIS longer than either of them. But Monica didn’t like it. She regarded herself as more qualified than Ciaran and Bridge because of her prior experience in GCHQ, before she was headhunted for SIS. She had a point; her knowledge of electronic surveillance, digital countermeasures, and online security was deep and thorough. But as Giles often reminded them, this was a very different agency, and required a broader base of skills and resources. He’d brought Bridge into the unit because of her reputation as a hacker and zero-day aficionado, for example. And Ciaran was an excellent chatter analyst, able to dive into the gigabytes of surveillance data collected every week by GCHQ, along with his own bots that crawled chatrooms known to be frequented by suspected hostile actors, and surface with insight and meaning.
The three of them were pretty damned good together. Why mess with that? Why did Giles want to break that up, by making her the only OIT in the unit again? What on earth did he have in mind?
“Earth to Brigitte…come in, spacegirl, your time is up…”
Julia waved a hand in front of Bridge’s face, breaking her train of thought. She smiled. “Sorry, Jules, I was out there for a minute. Thinking about work.”
The wine arrived, something expensive that Karen had picked out. Julia handed Bridge a glass, laughing, “Well, we can’t have that. Get some drink down your neck, girl.” She pointed at the single women. “The trouble with you two is, you don’t appreciate how good it feels to get away from the couch potato once you land one. Cheers!”
They all drank, and Bridge pretended not to care. True, she and Karen were both single. But Karen had a new pinstriped suitor every other month; they just never stuck. “They all look at the mirror more than at me,” she once complained. Bridge had gently suggested she might have more luck dating men who didn’t work in the City, but Karen looked at her as if she’d grown an extra head.
“Like Bridge is ever going to make me an aunt,” said Izzy. “Can you imagine her in white?”
“Who says I need to get married to have kids? Anyway, you wore white.”
“Bridge, I’d grown out of my all-black stage while you were still at uni. You, on the other hand…”
Karen laughed. “She’s got you there, baby girl.”
Bridge opened her mouth to protest, but checked herself before saying anything, and realised Izzy was right. She’d come straight from work, and was wearing black jeans tucked into her black leather boots, a black cotton shirt, a cardigan, and her usual black leather jacket slung over the back of her chair. She could muster an argument that the cardigan was technically dark grey, not black, but that would only make things worse.
“Honestly, I wonder sometimes if you don’t work at the DTI at all,” said Karen, and
