“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it.”
She found she was standing over him. Her paper coffee cup was quivering in her hand, half-squished. He was wincing as he regarded her. He glanced at her coffee as if she might sling it in his face.
“Tell me what you mean,” she demanded in a grating voice. “Now.”
He sighed again. “Imagine that there might already be a black wing of the Ministry for the Future. That even I myself might have started it after you hired me as your chief of staff.”
“You started it?”
“No, I’m not saying that, please. I’m like everyone else. I have some friends in the office. Whatever they do as friends, it would not be quite right to tell you about, precisely so that if something got out and you were asked questions, you could honestly say that you didn’t know about it.”
“Plausible deniability?”
“Well, no. That I think refers to having a good lie in hand. This would be more like proper functioning of an agency, keeping things as they should be. If ever questions were asked, which hopefully would not happen, but if they did, you would say you didn’t know about it. If there were improprieties, others would take the fall, and on you could go with the ministry undamaged.”
“As if it would happen that way!”
“Well, it has before. Pretty often in fact. It’s a common form of organization. Most unorthodox operations take place without their political heads knowing they exist. Certainly never the details, even if they’re aware in a general sense that such things exist. As I thought you might be.”
The previous night’s events all of a sudden crashed into her and shook her to the core, and she shouted, “I won’t be lied to!”
The bodyguards across the little park looked over at them.
“I know,” Badim said, looking pinched and unhappy. “I’m sorry. I haven’t felt good about it. I’ll tender my resignation this afternoon, if you like. Happy to fall on my sword right here and now. But I will remind you that you were just talking about the possible need for such a thing.”
“The fuck I was,” she said. She waited for her heart to slow down, thinking that over. Too many thoughts were jamming her head at once, creating something like a roar. “I didn’t really mean it. And even if I did, I’ll be damned if I’ll have secrets being kept from me in my own fucking agency!”
“I know,” he said, looking down. He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Tell me, did this not happen to you when you were a minister in Ireland’s government?”
“What do you mean?” she cried.
“I mean, you were head of foreign affairs, wasn’t it? Did you think you knew everything your agency was doing?”
“Yes, I did.”
He shook his head. “Surely not. Of course I don’t know for sure. But Ireland was in a civil war for a long time, and that always has aspects that are out of the country. Right? So, your security forces almost certainly kept things from you, and they probably understood you to be knowing about that, and wanting to keep it that way.” He shrugged. “It’s certainly been true in Nepal and India, and at Interpol too for that matter.” Interpol was the agency Mary had hired him out of.
She sat down beside him, hard. Her coffee cup was smashed; carefully she sipped the remainder of the coffee out of one of the folded spots in the rim, put the cup on the ground.
“So I’m naïve, is it? An innocent stateswoman in the world of Realpolitik? Which is no doubt the reason they gave me this job?”
“I’m not saying that. I think they assumed you knew what you were doing.”
“So what has this black wing of yours done so far? And who does it consist of?”
“Well, but this is just what you should not be asking. No no, please”— he held up a hand as if to ward off the blow she was about to give him— “people might resign if they knew that their actions were known to higher-ups. Anyway you might not even know these people, I’m not sure how acquainted you are with our whole staff.”
He watched her calm down. She picked up her crushed coffee cup and sipped from it again. “I’m head of whatever happens operationally,” he went in a low voice, as if sharing a secret to conciliate her. “That’s what a chief of staff does. People who help me when doing the needful gets tricky, they would naturally come from various divisions. Cyber security of course, it’s in the nature of their work to be preemptive sometimes. Nat cat guys are often helpful, they’re used to getting dirty— I mean just physically dirty, you know, working with machines and such. They’re at the coal face. They see the damage being done, and they get impatient to do something about it.”
That struck a nerve, and her sleepless night came back all in a rush, not that it had ever left. Her stomach was a knot that the sandwich didn’t quite fit into.
“I met someone like that last night,” she said. She reached out and grasped the back of Badim’s hand. “That’s the kind of person kidnapped me last night! He was sick of doing nothing, of nothing happening.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He turned his hand up so that it held hers. “Tell me what happened?”
She took her hand back and told him briefly, leaving parts out.
“We probably should have been guarding you more closely,” he said when she was done.
“It was close enough, as it turned out. Besides, I think you offered it once, but I said no. I hate that kind of thing.”
“Even so. It might be just for a while. They’ll probably pick this guy up soon.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“It’s hard to stay off the grid for long.”
“But not impossible.”
“No,” he admitted. “Not impossible.”
She shifted back into the bench, shuddered. Really things were
