“What was the second option?”
“Say fuck it and become a real manager, in an industry that pays real wages.” Voclaine raised his wine glass and winked. “The games industry is shit now, anyway. I still have old friends there, and they all wish they could escape.”
Bridge smiled, relieved at the mention of a wife and child. It might not stop him getting fresh, but it would reduce the chance of him trying anything serious. “Escape like you did,” she said. “And I bet your family is much happier for it.”
Their food arrived. As the waiter slid plates onto the table, Voclaine smiled back. “I wouldn’t know. I send them a cheque every month, call my son at university every two weeks, and that’s enough contact for me. I’m a free spirit.” That was when he placed his hand on her knee, and while he tried to laugh it off as drunken high spirits after she removed it, Bridge suspected Voclaine was nowhere near as drunk as he made out. Did he simply want to use the wine as an excuse? Or was he hoping Bridge would drop her guard, too, and let something slip?
She poked at her salad, thinking about Voclaine as a coder, and what she’d seen in the server logs before leaving the guest house. According to the logs, Voclaine frequently checked out assorted code branches of the Exphoria project — in other words, transferred the data to his terminal, effectively telling the rest of the team that he was working on it. Some of these sessions lasted half a day or more. That in itself rang alarm bells in Bridge’s mind, but stranger still was Voclaine’s habit of also making commits, or changes to the code. He really was working on it, and as far as she could tell, none of the other coders were flagging up errors or reverting his work.
It was always possible someone else was using Voclaine’s login and terminal to work on the code incognito, and that had been Bridge’s first thought. But it would be difficult, and now that she knew Voclaine was a coder himself, the question was why anyone would bother. The only plausible reason would be sabotage; if you were writing flaws and errors into the code, naturally you wouldn’t do it from your own login. And the lack of CCTV cameras in the facility, perversely for security purposes, meant anyone could use Voclaine’s terminal and remain unseen. But they’d have to get into an office he shared with Montgomery, know his login, and stay there for hours at a time undetected. That seemed impossible, and it left just one conclusion: that Voclaine’s code was good, and he was using Exphoria as an opportunity to show he still had skills, despite years of getting fat on a manager’s wage.
It was also the only thing that made sense. The notion that Voclaine, or anyone, could sabotage a project like this by writing bad code was ridiculous. Coders were always reluctant to tell their boss if his commits were bad, for obvious reasons. But on a project like this, with so much money at stake, and so many highly-skilled people reviewing every line? It was inconceivable that seventy-plus coders, reviewers, and testers would all lack the balls to point out bad code just because it was written by a senior manager.
So Voclaine’s actions were highly unusual, but hardly treason. Perhaps not even espionage. The logs confirmed what she’d been told, that there was no sign of unverified data extraction or copying. Whatever his reasons for working on the code, they didn’t seem to involve copying them onto external storage.
For the second time tonight, Bridge was frustrated that her cover wasn’t suited to asking the kind of technical questions she so desperately needed answers to. She wished they could have sent her in as a tester, or better still a coder. But she knew why they hadn’t. Nobody would trust a last-minute addition to the engineering team, and as soon as she started to ask those kinds of questions people would become yet more suspicious. The mole might even directly suspect she was SIS or French DGSI. At least this way, her being a government employee was built into the cover, and allowed her to talk to anyone she liked without raising suspicion. In the long run, that kind of access was probably more useful than being able to ask geeky questions.
Plus, now that Voclaine had opened up about his past as a games programmer, Bridge could simply ask questions under a pretence of ignorance. But she let the matter drop for now, not wanting to push too hard. Instead she laughed at Voclaine’s bad jokes, told him girlish anecdotes about flat-sharing in London, and lied that she had absolutely every intention of marrying an eligible French bachelor one day, bien sûr.
It was exhausting, and as she drove back to the guest house — having bundled Voclaine in a taxi, politely but firmly declining his offer to share a ride while removing his wandering hand from her waist — Bridge considered herself lucky for not having to go through that crap in her everyday life. How regular women managed it without wanting to kill someone, she’d never know. But it had been worth it; she’d learned more about François Voclaine in two hours of dinner than she ever could from thirty minutes of fake HR questions.
And now he was her prime suspect.
31
The next day was Friday, and Bridge interviewed the last of the
