by Tony Batton
"Based on your facial expression, if you're planning to ask for more, it won't be a credible request."
"Two hundred thousand per year? Sterling? Are you serious?"
Nichol smiled. "Make partner and you'll be earning that in a month."
Michael swallowed hard. He glanced at his drink, wondering if he was hallucinating.
"As a side note, why did I write that down? It’s so I could watch your reaction without having to guard my own. It's much harder to hide your reaction when you have to look down." He turned to look at the ocean. "We pay our lawyers so much because they are the very best. They could go anywhere they want, do anything they wish. We don't want them to want or wish to be anywhere else."
There was a soft ringing. Kara pulled a phone from her pocket and answered the call, listening briefly then turned to Nichol. "You're needed at the big house."
The senior partner stood and shook Michael's hand. "I look forward to working with you."
"If I accept."
Nichol slapped him hard on the shoulder. "If you accept." He walked away across the sand.
Kara promptly refilled their glasses. "I expect you're still feeling giddy after reading that piece of paper."
"That's a fair assessment."
"Savour it. But you know what economists say? There's no such thing as a free lunch. You're going to earn that £200k. Believe me, I certainly did." She drummed her fingers on the table. "Of course now I earn a lot more."
"So what's next?"
"Now we drink as much of this whisky as we like. Tomorrow we fly back after breakfast."
"So soon?"
"Did you think this was a holiday?"
"I've hardly recovered from the flight here. I thought I was going to have a nice swim this afternoon, but somehow you added archery and clay-pigeon shooting to the itinerary."
"Yeah, well there aren’t any real pigeons, and the site manager gets annoyed when I shoot the seagulls."
Michael swallowed. "You’re a little too comfortable with those weapons. I think you only missed the bullseye on the archery target once."
Kara frowned. "Gust of wind." She raised her glass. "You need to drink more, then you'll sleep just fine."
"Is that your professional advice?"
"Consider it an accurate prediction. Now enjoy the peace and quiet. It'll be the last rest you have in a long time."
Eight
Jenson saw the familiar form of the GCHQ building from several miles away, winter sun glinting off the giant doughnut of glass and aluminium. The UK’s most secretive office building housed nearly five thousand people in reasonable comfort and the utmost security. Until Project Parallel had been cancelled, Jenson had been a regular visitor.
The helicopter landed well short of the site. Two big Jaguars were waiting to collect them. Kelly inspected the vehicles meticulously, much to the irritation of the security service personnel, before allowing Jenson to climb inside. Then they sped through concentric rings of security, while Jenson considered again what the meeting would be about. When government projects were cancelled there were always rounds of recrimination: exercises in finger pointing. Many times, he was the one being pointed at.
Reaching the building, they were scanned and given a physical pat down. Once inside they were given bright red visitor badges, ensuring all GCHQ staff gave them a wide berth and a scowl. Square-faced security guards marched them through the building to the secure conference facilities that had been built specifically for Parallel because the project had been classified above top secret, off limits even to the majority of those who worked in the building.
Jenson saw Warwick Saxton as he walked through the door. The operational director of MI5 looked up from his position at the head of the huge boardroom table.
"Trust we didn't inconvenience you too much, Mr Jenson," said Saxton. "I hear you were off making sandcastles."
Jenson forced a smile onto his face. "For you, Warwick, nothing is an inconvenience." He took a seat. "Although I am curious to know why we are here. You terminated this project twelve months ago."
Saxton steepled his fingers. "Questions have been asked about what we spent all that money on."
Jenson glanced at Kelly, who shook her head. "I’ve not been made aware of these concerns."
"You’re being made aware now." Saxton flipped open a folder in front of him. "The questions relate to ZAT’s historical dealings. And also to your ability to deliver a project on time and on budget. If you have misled us then a great deal of public money will have been wasted."
"If you hadn’t cancelled the project, the money wouldn’t have been wasted." Jenson took a long, slow breath. "I’m confident we provided all the necessary information as part of our bid."
Saxton nodded. "In fact, you provided us with several thousand pages of data. Most of it glossy marketing material or outlandishly optimistic predictions. So we’d appreciate a distillation around those two points I just mentioned. Just in case anything has changed."
"If you mean ZAT’s connections with the off-book supply of arms, that was over a decade ago and has been fully reported on."
"You were in charge of the company at the time?"
"I founded ZAT. Why you are bringing this up now? Should my legal counsel be at this meeting?"
Saxton tapped his fingers lightly on the table. "Once lost, trust is hard to regain."
"I would understand the difficulty if we were going ahead, but we’re not, even though everyone agreed that the project was necessary."
"And do you still think it is?"
"Yes." Jenson cleared his throat. "You have a problem. We all have a problem. One that is only going to get worse." He paused and gestured to the whole room. "We are drowning in data. It’s not just the web, or even the ‘Deep Web’. Your cameras, your recorders, your agents, your net-crawlers, are all producing volumes of intelligence that you cannot keep up with and so, to a large extent, cannot comprehend. You need a way to intelligently process, coordinate, prioritise and make recommendations to turn this Big Data from a problem into an opportunity." Jenson leaned forward and stabbed a finger on the table. "That is what this project would have allowed you to do. In the fight against terrorism, espionage and crime – in doing pretty much anything that needs computing power – this would have given what your own analysts described as an unfair advantage over everyone else."
"‘An unfair advantage at an unfair price’ was one of the comments on the project, if I recall correctly," said Saxton.
"Criticism is cheap," Jenson replied. "We were inventing the future."
"Inventing the future." Saxton nodded. "A wonderful slogan."
"ZAT manufactures advanced technology solutions. That’s our whole purpose."
"But what makes up the majority of your current sales?"
"Weapons and related equipment."
Saxton snapped his fingers and gestured to the room. "Could someone remind me why we were thinking of buying a supercomputer from a weapons manufacturer, rather than a manufacturer of supercomputers?"
"Because," Jenson said, "we’ve been creating bespoke computer processors for over fifteen years. One of our key benefits was that we weren't committed to a pre-defined, and entirely unoriginal, processor roadmap with only marginal improvements over the rest of the market. We don’t iterate, we innovate."
"Which is a good thing if it leads to success," Saxton said.
"We were ready to start building the beta test, but now I guess we’ll never know."
Saxton looked down at some notes in front of him. "Last time your company tried to deliver on a government computer project, you failed."
Jenson sighed. "You're talking about Project Darwin? That was more than a decade ago. It’s also not a fair comparison: it was highly speculative and, as you are no doubt aware, one of the lead designers died before it was completed."
"Rather short-sighted of you to be so reliant on one individual."
"If someone is that brilliant, they’re wor
th relying on."
Saxton took a deep breath. "What if Parallel did work? A number of concerns were raised over handing over our control of all the data to a computer."
"Let’s stay in the realms of fact: this wasn't going to be Skynet."
"Yet I heard you proposed using it to control your micro-drone weapons?"
"Those were never brought to market. Look, Project Parallel is just about analysis, Warwick. At the moment you aren't drawing any conclusions. You're paddling in an ocean of Big Data, lost without a compass. We could have changed that."
"A bold claim."
"We never went live with any part of the system: our agreement was very clear about that. It was clear about a great many things to your advantage, including the ability to walk away at any time."
"Then I guess we’ll just have to see." Saxton shuffled his papers. "How quickly can you build it?"
Jenson blinked, a smile starting to spread over his face.
"Do you want to answer my question?"
"I want to savour the moment. You need us again. I want to know what the hell happened to cause such an about-face."
"Just tell me how quickly you can work-up a prototype, Gregory, or we'll go find a less opinionated tech CEO who will."
Jenson glanced at Kelly. "I’ll have to verify my team’s current deployment, but I think six months should be achievable."
Saxton nodded. "Then you’d best get started. I’ll send the paperwork over to your team, approving the project costs." He stood up. "Try not to exceed them again."
Jenson stood up and extended his hand to Saxton. "I appreciate this, Warwick."
Saxton seemed to hesitate, then shook Jenson's hand. "What I’m most concerned that you appreciate is that we can’t afford for you to screw this up." He paused, then pulled out his phone. "I’m going to send you my new private number. If you have a problem, if you need to make a decision, I want to know about it. This phone is never switched off, day or night. I’m always working."
Jenson nodded. "And until this project is finished, so am I."
Nine
Millie Wright shuffled off the train with a hundred other commuters and made her way out to the waiting shuttle bus. She nodded to the driver then took a seat near the back. A couple of familiar faces glanced her way, so she put her earphones on, closed her eyes, and lost herself in the music. She had had a late night and now, after not nearly enough sleep, she was not in the mood for conversation.
The bus belched and groaned its way into the West London trading estate, finally arriving at the rather uninspiring office block occupied by Millie's employers, Gladstone Software. Two thousand lost souls turned up there every day to earn a living. It wasn't much of a company, nor was it much of a location. But they paid on time every month and the canteen was cheap. You couldn't argue with that.
With a hiss the bus pulled up at the front gate and discharged its cargo. Millie fumbled in her backpack for her security pass, holding up the line behind her, then she pushed her way through the revolving doors and took the lift to level six. A vast floor was flooded with a sea of cubicles, each trapping a single employee for the day. She was at her desk, logged on, precisely thirty seconds early as usual. Why give them any more of her time than she had to?
Now she was here she would get some work done. Of course she didn’t intend that much of it would be for Gladstone. She had a project or two of her own that needed attention, one of which being the reason she had had a late night. Unfortunately today there was a problem.
"Morning, Ms Wright," said her boss, appearing out of nowhere. "Do you have that presentation for me?"
Millie blinked, then smiled carefully. "Just fine-tuning it now."
"Good. After that I need you to check the spreadsheet Finance have prepared."
Millie sighed. She hadn't even started the presentation and she didn’t feel any smoldering motivation to change that. Working in the accounts department of a mid-tier software company paid the bills, but forty hours a week in a cubicle, doing her boss’s bidding, while drinking rancid coffee was hard to swallow. With a grunt she pulled her personal laptop out of her backpack and set it up next to her company machine.
"You know you're not supposed to bring your own computer into the office," said her neighbour, Kevin, peering over from the next cubicle.
She looked up with a quiet sigh. "I wouldn't have to if they didn't give us these five-year-old pieces of junk."
"Don't worry," he whispered, giving her a conspiratorial wink. "I won't tell anyone. Bet it’s good for watching YouTube while you have Powerpoint open."
She half nodded, turning to her main company screen and logging onto the intranet.
"Good weekend?" he asked pleasantly, his chin hanging over the partition.
Before Millie could reply another voice spoke. "Got time to talk?" their boss asked, reappearing from her office. "Because Ms Wright here most certainly does not."
"I was just saying good morning—"
"Then do it at coffee break."
Kevin shrunk back, his face ashen.
"Was that really necessary?" she asked.
Her boss’s glare hardened. "I’m sorry, are you running the department today?"
Millie ground her teeth. "No."
"Then perhaps I can decide what’s necessary. Now is that presentation done?"
"Just pulling my file off the server to give it a final polish."
Her boss gave a sniff and walked off.
"Sorry," whispered Kevin. "Didn’t mean to get us into trouble."
"Forget it," Millie replied. "She should learn to worry about actual problems." She pulled open her own laptop. "And on that point, you've just given me an idea."
The first sign that something was wrong was two people on the far side of the office swearing. Millie watched her boss stride over angrily. "I won’t have language like that on my floor."
"The network is down," said a young woman. "I can’t access the main database."
"Or email," said a bearded man from across the room.
"None of the servers are responding," said an older woman near where Millie was sitting.
"Just switch your computers off and on again. That should—"
"No," said the bearded man. "It’s the servers that are down. It's showing they’ve been wiped?"
Millie bit her lip as her boss walked over to him. "What do you mean ‘wiped’?"
"They have nothing on them."
"Well, can’t you just restore them from a backup?"
"Possibly. This happened last year and it’s not exactly straightforward. Twenty-four hours minimum. I’ll call IT."
Kevin looked at her with a tight expression. "Did you", he lowered his voice to a whisper, "do that?"
Millie shrugged. "That would require substantial hardware knowledge and administrator-level access."
"Yes." He hesitated. "Is that a yes or a no?"
She smiled. "Sometimes things are best left as a mystery." She raised a finger to her lips.
The fire alarm began sounding.
Kevin’s eyes widened. "No!"
She shrugged. "Suddenly I doubt any of us are going to be able to do much work today." She turned to see her boss was now shouting into a phone, imploring the IT department to ‘get down here immediately’.
"Millie gathered up her laptop and her bag. "I, for one, am going to get a proper cup of coffee while they sort this out. Coming?"
Ten
Michael waved off his taxi and strode up the pathway to the front door of his terraced house in Wimbledon. The journey back from Fiji had given him a lot of time to think about his situation, but he had not been able to reach a decision. Perhaps Eve could help him make sense of it all.
"Nice trip?" she asked as he wandered into the kitchen. "I didn’t even know you were looking for a new job."
"I wasn’t. I got headhunted. In a bar."
"What?" She screwed up her nose. "You’re making this up."
"I’d say the same i
f I didn’t know better. I did try calling but your phone was off."
"I was on shift. Who the hell would fly you to Fiji for an interview?"
"Only one of the top law firms in London."
"Well that’s just peachy for some. Back in the real world, the rest of us haven’t spent the weekend on a tropical island."
"Ah, so it’s jealousy I’m seeing."
"Duh? So how did it go?"
"They made me an offer." He reached into his pocket and slid across the handwritten note that Nichol had given him.
She looked at it and her eyes widened. "And in return for all those pounds sterling, just how many pounds of your flesh are they going to require?"
"I'm going to have to work hard, wherever I go."
Eve tilted her head and looked in his eyes. "This is all very exciting, but you’re behaving like you’ve got no choice. Is there something you’re not telling me?"
He forced a smile on his face. "Of course not."
"Then is there something they’re not telling you?" She reached forward and patted his shoulder. "Don’t you think this is all a bit odd? I mean, they fly you to Fiji. They offer you shed loads of money. An ‘offer you can’t refuse’. What are they? Run by the mafia?"
"This is just a great opportunity. I’d be crazy not to consider it."
"Is this just you trying to show that you aren’t your father?"
"Perhaps. I’m making something of myself, not hiding in a barn."
"I agree, but are you sure you can trust them? When something sounds too good to be true, in my experience it usually is."
"Sure you’re not just trying to rain on my parade? And you’re always saying I’m too boring. Isn’t this the kind of thing I should be doing?"
"I think ‘predictable’ is the term I use for you. Just keep your eyes and your mind open… and of course we should go out for dinner to celebrate. Somewhere swanky, since you’ll be paying."
After dinner, Eve headed to bed while Michael finished unpacking. Once everything was put away, he pulled out his mobile phone and withdrew the business card that had sat in his wallet since Friday night. Then he dialled the number.