“I’ll take the job,” she said. A cold night in the dark with no electricity had made up her mind for her.
“Great, first I need you to sign this—” He slid a sheet of paper titled Nondisclosure Agreement across the desk—“then I’ll talk you through this—” a much fatter document titled Employment Contract: Transhuman Investigations Division. “It’ll take a while. Then I can brief you on the job.”
It did not escape her attention that the NDA came first: but she signed it anyway. It was pretty much what she expected. All the obligations for secrecy were on her, and all the benefits went to HiveCo. The employment contract was a little better. It guaranteed an hourly rate plus a higher pay band when on jobs, plus actual sick pay and annual leave—“This looks like I’m on salary?” she asked.
“Next clause.”
“One month probationary period, then I’m permanent, subject to three months’ notice if I want to leave?”
“Unless we fire you for gross misconduct.” Gibson’s expression was unreadable, but Wendy got the message loud and clear. We need you. Which also meant, she realized, we’re getting you cheap while we can. But with no experience in this higher-level role she had no bargaining leverage—
“This non-compete.” She put her finger on the next clause. “You know that shit is legally unenforceable in the UK?”
Gibson smiled. “That is the current law, yes.”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m not having it.” She crossed her arms and glowered.
In the end they compromised: three months’ notice with three months’ non-compete, and a no-headhunting agreement on top, rather than the two years’ non-compete the contract started out with. HR had given Gibson some wiggle room for negotiating. Then they signed both copies, after which Gibson shook her hand across the desk and said, “Welcome to Investigations! I knew we’d come to an arrangement. Now you’ve got an appointment in Secure Briefing C for your first assignment.”
“Wait.” Wendy stood. “Don’t I get the usual HR dog and pony show? Induction, code of conduct, training in procedures, uniform kit?”
“You get all of that except a uniform,” Gibson said as he walked around his desk, “but we’ll fit it in when you’ve got some dead time—there’s an urgent job waiting for you, and I want you to hit the ground running. Right after lunch, if not before.”
Secure Briefing C was in a part of the building Wendy hadn’t visited previously. That wing was secured with a smart badge reader that her ID now had permission to open. Other than that, it looked much like any other HiveCo site office until Gibson waved his own badge at a reader outside an unmarked door and ushered her into something out of an X-Men movie. Exposed ductwork and cables lined a hollow concrete cube that contained a transparent-walled room suspended from hooks in the ceiling. Even the furniture in the glass room was transparent—off-the-shelf Louis Ghost chairs and a matching transparent table. The only opaque artifact it contained was a Microsoft Surface tablet sitting on the table.
“What is this?” Wendy asked, looking around as Gibson shut the outer door and turned a handle. Her ears popped and the hiss of air conditioning dampened.
“Anti-eavesdropping precautions. We’re suspended inside a Faraday cage with a pressure-controlled, filtered air supply. There are no hiding places for drones or bugs.” Someone had doodled a pentacle from a seventies Hammer Horror movie on the bare cement below the transparent floor. Now it lit up, glowing an eerie green like a poisonous deep-sea creature warning off its predators. “Ah, good, grid’s up. Have a seat, Deere.”
“What kind of eavesdropping needs this, sir?”
“Demons.” Gibson said it matter-of-factly. “Also vampires.” He gestured at the ceiling where a couple of LED lights reflected violet highlights off the Perspex roof. “The UV spots are to deal with them.” Above the dangling overhead lights, another pentacle-in-a-circle diagram pulsed red. “Not to mention gates into the dreamlands. You can’t be too careful these days.”
Wendy took a couple of seconds to catch up. “I thought we were in the business of apprehending criminals, sir.”
“Yes, but there are criminals and there are criminals.”
“All this—” her gesture swept the room—“you’re talking about magical shit? I thought we were dealing with transhumans…”
“Same thing,” he said dismissively. “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Where do you think your power comes from, anyway?” Before she could answer he tapped the computer screen, then plugged a small USB key into one port. “It’s a physical authentication token,” he told her. “We don’t just rely on passwords for this stuff.” He stabbed the ball of his thumb with a sterile needle, then smeared a trace of blood onto a glass window in the USB stick. “Soul lock confirmed.” The Windows login screen vanished to reveal a PowerPoint project and a green-screen window that, after a moment, Wendy recognized as a terminal emulator connected to the Police National Computer system. (And how that worked inside a shielded room was anybody’s guess.) “Okay, here we go. First, I want to show you the security camera feed from a robbery at a Pennine Bank branch on Kensington High Street three weeks ago. Then we’ll get to the really interesting stuff—what the perps said in the interview suite.”
If you caught the robbers why are you showing me this? Wendy wondered. But she was on the clock at her new working pay grade, so she nodded and went with the flow.
The video side of the presentation divided the screen into quadrants, each showing the view from a different camera covering the interior of a bank branch. The bank was laid out old-style, with three counters separating the clerks from the members of the public queuing in the lobby. A couple of ATMs had been installed along one wall. To one side of the counters there was an armored door with a mirror-glass window, and there were open-plan desks out in front for staff dealing with customer transactions that didn’t involve cash. It was clearly a busy time of day—12:54 according to
