She trailed off as a smirk spread across Voclaine’s face, slowly becoming a smile, then an outright grin. She’d been had.
“I was joking,” he laughed, and dropped a heavy arm around her shoulder. “Ah, the look on your face. Now, I think perhaps we’ve both jumped to conclusions that we shouldn’t, eh? So you can make it up to me by using those lovely expenses to buy dinner tonight. Email me the address where you’re staying, and I’ll pick you up at eight.”
Bridge sighed and smiled, letting Voclaine have his moment of victory. But then she slipped out from under his arm, flicked her cigarette through the bars of the steel fence, and turned to go back inside the building. “I have my own car, thank you,” she said, holding up her lanyard to the contactless security reader. The door clicked open in response. “Email me a good restaurant in town, and I’ll meet you there at eight-thirty.”
30
“Behave yourself, François,” she laughed, removing his hand from her knee.
Voclaine had been seated at the table when Bridge arrived, and two glasses through what she hoped was only his first bottle of wine. She was fifteen minutes late, but for two very good reasons. First, and most obvious, she was a woman in France. No reasonable person would expect her to be punctual.
Second, and more important, Henri Mourad had forwarded the Exphoria server log dumps. Bridge requested them before she left London, but it had taken Emily Dunston several days to authorise and compile them, and when she returned to the guest house that evening they were finally waiting for her. She’d originally planned to leave early, and follow Voclaine from his house to the restaurant to make sure he didn’t do anything weird. But that was a mere shot in the dark. By contrast, even a cursory skim over the logs before having dinner with the second most-senior person at the facility would surely be beneficial.
But it made her late, so she dressed rather more casually than she’d first intended. She threw on a skirt and vest, pulled on a pair of tights and wedge heels, and hoped a wrap around her shoulders would suffice as a minor nod to elegance. Head-to-toe black, but unlike in England, she didn’t expect anyone here to comment. They’d just assume she was Parisian. And as it turned out, any worries she had about being underdressed vanished when she entered the restaurant, and saw Voclaine was still wearing his office clothes.
“Ah, you’ve dressed to apologise. Very good, and I accept.” He smiled, nodding at the chair opposite. Bridge wondered how long it had been since he took a woman to dinner, if he regarded this as dressing up. “Now drink.” He poured her a glass of wine from a local vineyard.
“You’re from further north, aren’t you?” she asked after they toasted. “Do you work in this region often?”
Voclaine shrugged. “A few times. I go wherever they send me. Same as you, I expect.”
“True, although I don’t get to come to France as often as I’d like.”
“Oh? Where do you normally go?”
The look in Voclaine’s eye confirmed to Bridge that this was definitely his first bottle. As in the smoking compound, he’d turned the tables. His questions were no more innocent chit-chat than her own, and combined with what she’d seen in the logs, she was now certain this dinner wasn’t a coincidence born of an awkward misunderstanding. He’d planned it from the start.
“I can’t say,” she smiled, taking a sip of wine. “Same as you, I expect?”
Voclaine laughed, recognising Bridge’s own turnaround, and finished his glass. “Then I think we both need more wine,” he said, refilling their glasses.
They ordered food; a plate of meat and potatoes for Voclaine, a salad and cheese selection for Bridge. The waiter huffed at the very word “végétarienne”, but had the grace to confirm she could get a salad without chicken, if for some strange reason that was truly what she wanted.
Voclaine fixed her with a look of disbelief as the waiter retreated. “You grew up in France, but you don’t eat meat?”
“Funny, but I don’t remember them crying ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité, carnivoré’ at the gates of the Bastille,” said Bridge. Voclaine grunted in disagreement. She decided to change tack and play to his vanity. “Tell me, what did you do before…well, this sort of thing? I’ve been in the civil service since I left university, which is kind of dull. I expect you’ve had a much more interesting life than me.”
He shrugged. “I started in computers, in the ’90s, when France was still at the cutting edge of software. I made computer games, if you can believe that. Physics engines, inverse kinematics…’ He paused and smiled sympathetically, trying to explain the jargon. “They’re like building blocks in a piece of software that make the objects you see on screen behave the way you expect them to. Very low-level stuff, essential to the product, you see,” he added, just in case a mere woman wouldn’t realise that.
Bridge held her tongue. Unlike her real self, Bridget Short was not a coder, and had no reason to know what Voclaine was talking about. Ms Short probably didn’t play video games, and certainly hadn’t made Unreal Tournament mods in her spare time at uni. On the other hand, an HR inspector would have enough cultural familiarity to make assumptions. Such as how this explained Voclaine’s idiosyncratic social skills.
“It sounds very glamorous,” said Bridge, leaning forward. “Why did you leave?”
Voclaine shrugged. “I was too good. I kept being promoted, and before I knew what was happening, I woke up one day and realised I’d been a manager for the past five years.”
“Surely that’s a good thing? More responsibility, better pay…”
“…And no time to actually write code. The higher up the chain you go, the less chance you’ll get to
