by Tom Holt
Then a bell rang, and everyone stopped talking. There was a flurry of activity as everyone ditched their coffee-cups as though they were red-hot and started filing out of the room. As far as he could tell, not one doughnut had been eaten. He waited till the bottleneck in the doorway had eased, then put his untouched cup down on the table and moved towards the door, determined to be the last to leave. As he hung back, he overheard one important looking man say to another, “Not today, then. Ah well,” at which the other man sighed and shook his head. Mr Pecheur, he observed, was limping badly, though nobody seemed unduly concerned. He tried to catch up with him in Reception, but he hobbled into an open lift and was whisked away before Maurice could get within hailing distance.
When he got back to the basement, he found the door blocked by a tall stack of cardboard boxes, about fifty of them. They were all a uniform height, width and length, and almost too heavy to move.
When he woke up the next morning, he quite naturally assumed it had all been a dream. Then he realised that it hadn’t, and he was going to be late.
In the event, he got to the office with thirty seconds to spare. There was no one on the front desk, so he scrambled down the stairs to the sub-basement. No boxes this time; instead, taped to the door, was a brown envelope.
He went in, sat down on one of the boxes he’d eventually managed to manhandle through the doorway yesterday afternoon, and opened it. Inside was a Starbucks till receipt. He turned it over and saw, written in green pencil:
679/OOHTY/66Gj87B9/Duluth
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/1
3933a44-4JGfGT-iop-88Z88Z
**** ***** *** ***** * a
SANDERSON
qwertyuiop_sansipar_WHEEp_20
Well, yes, he thought. And then he looked at it again, and remembered; Sanderson. There had been a box with Sanderson written on it, one of the first he’d come to. He thought about it for a moment, then got up and found the blue exercise book. It was empty. At some point during his absence, someone had come down here and neatly snipped out the pages he’d spent all of yesterday morning filling in.
No matter. He walked down Row One, found the box labelled SANDERSON, went back to where he’d left the piece of paper, checked it just to make sure it did say SANDERSON, went back to the box and looked at it.
Now what?
It was just possible that compiling a permanent, easily accessible register of which box was where contravened some abstruse but perfectly-reasonable-when-you-knew-all-the-circumstances security or confidentiality protocol. He couldn’t imagine what it could be, but he was prepared to acknowledge that an entirely rational speech could be made that would end with the sentence, “So you see, you can’t just leave a list of all the boxes lying about where anyone could find it; just think what could happen,” and that that speech might make sense and be convincing. So, there could be a reason why he shouldn’t draw up a list; and since it was inconceivable – no, since it’d be horribly inconvenient to believe that his employers had snuck down here last night and sabotaged his day’s work through sheer malice (because then he’d have to resign, because no one could work for people like that) – that they’d rip pages out of his book without a good reason, he had to assume that such a protocol existed, and was a fundamental part of The Rules. Furthermore, he could believe that there could be a reason why knowledge of The Rules was on a need-to-know basis, and that The Rules stated that he didn’t need to know. In fact, from his perspective, it was probably better that way. After all, it was how they’d done things at Overthwart & Headlong, and practically every other large organisation he’d received anecdotal evidence about from his friends. The technical term for it, he gathered, was Manage ment, and it must work, or why does everyone do it that way?
He lifted SANDERSON off the shelf. It was surprisingly heavy, and he had to put it down on the floor, adjust his grip and try again. This time he managed to stagger with it to the doorway and squeeze through. He put it down carefully, straightened his much-aggrieved back, lumbered through to where he’d left the scrap of paper and looked at it. A theory was just starting to take shape in his mind; if it was correct, his entire future with Carbonec (which could just be quite good) hung on whether he got the next bit right.
He’d never been much good at learning things by heart – times tables, irregular verbs, lines in school plays – but that was partly because he’d never had a strong enough incentive. In the event, he found he could do it, just about. He spent an hour and a quarter memorising the jumbles of letters and numbers; then he took the scrap of paper, tore it into the tiniest bits he could manage and ate them. They tasted a bit like out-of-date breakfast cereal without milk, a taste he’d had personal experience of at various points in his career. Even so, he made a mental note to buy a box of matches at his earliest opportunity.
He glanced at his watch. 10.45. Forty-five minutes till coffee and doughnuts.
Forty-three minutes later, he’d managed to locate 679/OOHTY/66Gj87B9/Duluth, 3933a44-4JGfGT-iop-88Z88Z and qwertyuiop_sansipar_WHEEp_20; he’d chosen to do them first because they were the hardest ones to remember. He put the boxes next to SANDERSON outside the door, brushed the worst of the dust off his clothes and set off up the stairs to the back office. As he went he looked round as unobtrusively as he could to see if he could spot any CCTV cameras or similar hardware anywhere in the room; he couldn’t, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
At least this time he wasn’t the last to arrive. He took a position at the furthest end of the room, well away from the doughnuts; they were the only factor in the equation he couldn’t as yet account for, and also the one he most mistrusted. He didn’t help himself to coffee, just in case, though on balance he reckoned it was probably safe.
After a while, Mr Pecheur detached himself from the throng and hobbled over to him. He smiled.
“Everything OK?” he asked.
Ah, Maurice thought. It’s so nice to be right, just for a change. “Fine,” he said.
Mr Pecheur gave him a rather eloquent nod of approval and went away, straight to Mr Nacien. They spoke together very briefly, and then Mr Nacien went and talked to someone else, who went and talked to someone else. At this point, Maurice lost sight of who was talking to whom, but he’d seen enough to convince him that his hypothesis had been vindicated. His other eye was firmly on the doughnuts, none of which had been touched.
When the bell went, the room began to empty, as it had done yesterday. He located Mr Pecheur and nipped smartly across to intercept him.
“Hello again,” Mr Pecheur said. He was smiling.
“I wonder,” Maurice said. “Could you spare me just a second?”
He’d said the right thing. “Of course,” Mr Pecheur said. “Come over here, sit down. Have a coffee. And a doughnut.”
This time, Maurice poured himself a coffee, and another for Mr Pecheur. He hesitated, then put a doughnut on a small plate, which he laid down on the table in front of Mr Pecheur, who grinned and shook his head. “So,” Mr Pecheur said, “how are you settling in?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
Nod; and Maurice couldn’t help wondering how a perfectly ordinary-sized neck could possibly support such a huge head. “Shoot,” said Mr Pecheur. “What do you want to know?”
Maurice lifted his cup to his mouth but didn’t actually drink. “I just wondered,” he said, “if you could tell me if I’ve got this straight. You see, I’ve been trying to figure it out for myself, from first principles, and I think I’ve sort of made sense of most of it. But it’d be nice to have it confirmed. If that’s OK, I mean.”
Mr Pecheur gave him a long, slow look. “No harm in trying,” he said.
“Thanks.” Maurice put his cup down and drew a deep breath. “All right, here’s my theory. I’d love to know what you think of it.”
Then his nerve faltered for a moment; but Mr Pecheur gave him a faint encouraging smile. He took another deep breath and said, “I think it’s like
this. I think—”
“Let me just stop you there.”
Maurice’s heart missed a beat. “What? Oh, I—”
“You’ve got a bit of cobweb,” Mr Pecheur said gravely, “on your forehead.”
“Ah.” Maurice dabbed at his face. “Gone?”
“All gone. Now, you were saying.”
“I think,” Maurice said, “that what you do here at Carbonec is, you store—”
“We.”
“Sorry?”
“What we do here at Carbonec,” Mr Pecheur said. “Go on.”
“What we,” Maurice said, “do here at Carbonec, we store exceptionally sensitive and confidential records and materials on behalf of wealthy clients prepared to pay very well indeed for guaranteed total security and, um, confidentiality. How am I doing so far?”
Mr Pecheur neither spoke nor moved. Maurice went on, “The total security bit isn’t exactly obvious to the naked eye, but I guess that’s the point. If the place was surrounded with razor wire and concrete bollards, that’d be a really good way of telling everyone we’d got stuff worth taking a lot of trouble to steal. But that sub-basement’s a long way underground; it’s pretty warm down there so I’m guessing the walls are fairly thick—”
“Four feet of reinforced concrete,” Mr Pecheur said quietly. “Go on.”
“There’s just the one door,” Maurice continued. “It looks ordinary enough, but when I had a good look at it just now – well, it’s not wood, but it’s too light for steel.”
Mr Pecheur folded his hands in his lap. “In 1957,” he said, staring over Maurice’s shoulder, “there was a meteorite strike in south-western Siberia. The meteorite itself was only about the size of a five-pound frozen chicken, but the crater was just over a mile wide. When they recovered it, they realised it was a completely unknown element.” He grinned. “Crazy stuff. Omskium, they called it. Broke all the rules. Lighter than aluminium, but so incredibly, unbelievably dense—” He was silent for a moment, then went on. “Well, they did as you’d expect from the Soviets; hushed it up, squirrelled the rock away somewhere while they tried to figure out if you could make a weapon out of it. It sort of got mislaid when the Soviet Union went down, and nobody’s seen it since. People have speculated, though on what grounds I really couldn’t say, that if ever anyone were to invent a technology capable of working that stuff without blowing up half a continent, there’d be just about enough of it in the rock to make, say, a standard-sized office door.”
“Ah.” Maurice wasn’t quite sure what to say about that. “Well, anyway, that’s the security side of things. The confidentiality side, I’m guessing, is probably even more important, as far as the clients are concerned. I imagine that’s our main pitch when we’re selling to a client. Complete confidentiality; in fact, our service is so confidential, we tell them that even we don’t know what we’ve got – so, if MI5 or the CIA or the White Fish Authority come round with a subpoena and a lie-detector machine, we can say, No, we have no knowledge of any such deposit, and get away with it. Which is why,” he added with an apologetic look, “there can’t be anything like an index, or file cards, or a register. Sorry about that. I hadn’t realised.”
If the corner of Mr Pecheur’s mouth twitched upwards at this point, it can only have been by a few fractions of an inch. Probably it didn’t, and Maurice was imagining it. “Sorry about what?”
For the first time since he’d got the job, Maurice felt like he was starting to get the hang of things. “Total confidentiality’s all very well,” he said, and his voice was just a little bit louder and more confident. “But it must be possible to find and retrieve people’s stuff when they need it. So, we have just one employee who knows what stuff we’ve got and where it is; the lowest of the low…” (Mr Pecheur’s mighty head moved up and down just a little bit) “… so lowly that, naturally, senior management are barely aware of his existence. He memorises everything; only he knows.”
Mr Pecheur cleared his throat. “There are excellent precedents for doing it that way,” he said. “Take Iceland. Back in the Middle Ages they had the most sophisticated and extensive legal code in Europe. Never wrote a word of it down. One man was elected every few years to learn it all by heart, and if you wanted to know the law about something, you trotted along and asked him and he’d tell you. Apart from him, though, nobody else in the entire country had a fucking clue. And,” Mr Pecheur added, “building on that foundation, in time Iceland grew to be one of the most adventurous and innovative players the world of investment banking has ever seen. So there you are.”
“Quite,” Maurice said. “Then, as soon as this employee’s grasp of what there is and where it’s at reaches a point where it poses a confidentiality threat, we promote him to a supervisory or executive grade and hire another minimum-wage oik to replace him. That’s why we’ve got forty-odd people who do next to nothing. Each time we replace him, everyone else gets promoted a grade, with a corresponding wage hike.” Mr Pecheur nodded again. “Since we can charge what we like for our hyper-confidential service, we just stick the fees up a bit to cover it, and everybody’s fine.”
Mr Pecheur was smiling. “And Dave Nacien reckoned you were stupid,” he said. “Just goes to show, nobody’s right all the time. Though you do do an excellent impression of an idiot. Protective mimicry, I guess.”
Maurice was on a roll now. “Morning coffee is essential because that’s when we do all the supervision, which is an essential and much-hyped part of our service. So you ask me ‘Is everything OK?’, and I nod. Mr Nacien asks you, ‘Everything OK?’ and you nod. And so on, up to board and CEO level, and nobody has to ask questions that could actually yield meaningful answers and thereby jeopardise confidentiality. This didn’t happen yesterday, of course, because I’d only just started.”
Mr Pecheur clapped his hands together slowly three times. “That’s good,” he said. “You know what, it took me six weeks before I figured that out, when I was your age. And I’m smart.”
“Thank you. Truth serum—”
“Yes, thank you. I can see you’ve got the gist of it.”
“Truth serum,” Maurice said, politely but firmly, “is to weed out industrial espionage spies sent in to infiltrate Carbonec, which happens a lot because we’ve got such an amazing reputation, so other players in the industry are desperate to find out what we’re actually doing here. When I went for my interview, all the other applicants turned out to be spies, so I got the job.” He stopped, and looked at Mr Pecheur, whose face had hardened since he’d last looked at it. “Or not,” he added quickly. “Maybe I’m completely wrong about that.”
Slowly and deliberately, Mr Pecheur lifted his coffee-cup to his lips and drank two swallows. “The thing about truth serum is,” he said, “after a while – twenty years, maybe, something like that – you can grow immune to its effects. Not everyone,” he added with a sly smile, “just some people. It’s a matter of individual biochemistry. Of course,” he added pleasantly, “not all of us know that. Good if it was to stay that way.”
Maurice looked down at his own untouched coffee. “Actually,” he said, “I’m more of a tea drinker myself. Do you think it’d be all right if—?”
“No.”
“Right. Thanks. I’m guessing that sugar counteracts the effect or something.”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Also,” Mr Pecheur went on, “it turns the mixture into a hypervolatile high explosive, something like nitroglycerine but a tad more frisky, if you get my meaning. We don’t encourage it.”
“No, of course not.” Maurice stood up quickly. “Well, I’d better be getting on with some work,” he said. “Lots to do, time is money and all that. Thank you ever so much for—”
“Yes.”
It took him three days, working through his lunch hour, to find the last two boxes, during which time other boxes arrived and two more notes were Sellotaped to the Omskium door. He didn’t mind. For the first time in his working life, h
e felt motivated, empowered, corporate, happy. This surprised him. The work itself was ninety-nine parts futile tedium and one part exhausting manual labour, the sub-basement was dark and gloomy and the only time he saw other human beings was the morning coffee ritual, on which occasions he stayed as far away from the others as he could manage and only spoke, reluctantly, when spoken to. No matter. Outweighing such minor irritants was the glorious sense of wellbeing that came from knowing what was going on, combined with the moderate certainty that he was doing tolerably well and his job was reasonably secure. True, he spent a great deal of time walking up and down the rows of shelves not finding what he was looking for; but so what? It wasn’t his time he was wasting, it was Carbonec’s, and there was nobody competing with him, checking to see if he was thirty seconds late coming in or trying to make him look stupid in front of the boss. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve strolled out at twelve noon and not come back in till three, or spent an entire afternoon sitting with his feet up playing games on his LoganBerry. Oddly enough, he didn’t want to do either. Knowing he could was far more rewarding than actually doing it, and meanwhile there were boxes to be found, and forty-odd bone-idle colleagues relying on him to keep the wheels of industry turning. One day, he told himself, one day in the not-too-distant future, so long as I play my cards right and keep my nose clean and to the grindstone, I’ll be one of the bone-idle supervisors, and won’t that be nice?
When he woke up on Saturday morning, he felt a strange sense of disappointment. He wasn’t going in to work today. Oh.
Crazy. After all, work is the price you have to pay for fun, and fun only happens in the evenings and at weekends. Nevertheless. Far away, across the rooftops of London, he thought he could just hear the faint voices of the boxes calling him; come and sort us, and we will take you to the promised land. Well, the promised floor, anyhow: three storeys up, where the work stopped and the offices began.