“But—” Utterly gobsmacked, Wendy stared across the table. “What’s the catch?” she demanded, barely able to credit her own ears.
“The catch is, you’re being regraded. You’ll be reporting directly to me, as a Field Investigator (Transhuman). No more Bill. Your hours for detection and retrieval assignments booked through HiveCo Security will be paid at fifty an hour.” He slid a contract towards her. “You need to sign here and here.”
Wendy’s eyes slitted as she stared at the paper. Hang on a moment. “You said they fucked up my contract,” she muttered to herself. Louder: “So this is HR’s fault. I want this backdated.”
Gibson straightened. “I don’t have the authority to backdate the regrading—it’s a promotion,” he pointed out. “I can recommend that they take it to payroll and do something about it, but—”
“That’s perfectly all right.” Wendy took the contract in hand and smiled, starting to stand. “You don’t have to pay me and I don’t have to work here any more.”
Gibson surrendered. “All right! I’ll see if I can shake something loose. I don’t think I can make backdating the promotion fly, but you were supposed to be on a higher grade plus retainer all along, so you’re due a bunch of hours you haven’t been paid for…”
Wendy nodded. “Six months,” she said. She sat down again, calculating rapidly. Twenty hours a week for six months at a tenner an hour for sitting around with her thumb up her ass added up to five large—enough to pay off her credit card and keep the student loan company from repossessing the furniture. And that was before taking into account her worked hours at nearly double her previous pay grade. “That’s my minimum if you want me to stay. Not budging on that.” She leaned forward and began to read the contract. “This is sweet.” She read some more. “Still looking for the catch.” She glanced up. “Where is it buried?”
Gibson watched her. “It depends on what you mean by a catch,” he said slowly. “Really, it was probably just an HR cock-up—unless someone had the knives out for you. You were pegged as a level two transhuman and former trainee constable, hence the rentabody jobs and the prisoner transports. But you’re not, are you? You graduated from Hendon Police College and made detective, in addition to being a level three-plus. Incidentally, why did you leave the force?”
“I had a polite disagreement with Chief Inspector Grabby Hands.” Chief Inspector Barrett. “It was him or me, and he had rank. Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” Gibson nodded to himself, as if confirming a suspicion. He seemed indecently satisfied, but she was damned if she could see why. “Their loss, our gain, and incidentally you may have exposed an issue between HR and the Met which will have to be dealt with—but that’s not your problem. Leave it to me. It’ll make it easier to get your pay backdated, though,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“What exactly is it you want me to do?” Wendy leaned forward. “You said something about transhuman field investigations…”
“Well spotted.” Gibson cracked a smile. “We’re bidding for a Home Office contract to supply thief-taking services to the Bench. They’re outsourcing stuff these days, as you’ve probably noticed, and this is a time of cuts. What are the Met down to—sixty percent of their 2010 budget in just five years? It’s austerity inherited from the previous government, but the New Management sees no reason to reverse it. They’re outsourcing certain tasks to the private sector—specialities where they lack a history of institutional coverage.”
“By specialities you mean transhuman crime?” She sat up, small print forgotten.
“Yes, Deere, and you’re both a detective and a transhuman. They’ve already brought back the Bloody Code, is it any surprise that they’re bringing back the old thief-takers, too? But this time they’re imposing modern management practices: nobody wants to see a Jonathan Wilde with superpowers.”
She filed the name for later, planning a Wikipedia attack once she got her head around where this discussion was heading. “You’re going to be billing them a lot more than fifty an hour for me,” she stated.
Gibson nodded. “Yes. And they’ll pay, too.” He raised a finger. “But don’t imagine you can get in on the business as a freelancer. They’re only talking to big outsourcing agencies: G4S, Serco, and us. Still, fifty an hour plus twenty-one seventy when you’re on standby is only a starting salary. Transhumans are all unique, and if you can deliver the goods I can recommend a raise in due course.”
“Well…” At a loss for words, Wendy picked up the contract. The gear train of the dismal engine propelling her seemingly inexorable descent into poverty had seized: she was in a state of barely controlled shock. “I—I need to think about this.”
“Take your time.” He smiled at her. “Go home, read it carefully, and come back tomorrow morning. I’ll talk you through it. There’s a nondisclosure agreement and an exclusivity clause once you sign on, just so you know what to expect. I’ll see if I can sort out your back pay in the meantime. How does that sound?”
“How long do you think it’ll be before I’m needed?” she asked.
“No time at all, we’ve already got a contract pending. Starts tomorrow.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?” She leaned forward. “The first forty-eight hours are golden…”
“Signature first, then nondisclosure agreement. I can’t brief you ahead of time.”
Wendy tried again. “Can you give me a clue what this is about? Just a silhouette, sir?”
“There’s a transhuman thief. You’re a transhuman thief-taker.” He shrugged. “There may also be some stolen goods that need retrieving. That’s what thief-takers traditionally did, wasn’t it? That and dragging the perps down to the Old Bailey for sentencing before they danced the Tyburn Tango.”
“I
