Bridge smiled. “Well, just remember that you didn’t hear it from me.”
Montgomery paused at the door. “Where are you staying? Did they put you up somewhere?”
“Little guest house on the edge of town. I gather Agenbeux isn’t exactly teeming with hotels.”
“Well, do keep me apprised, Ms Short. And if there’s anything you need to know about how the facility is run, I’m the man to ask.”
Bridge waited till he was out of sight before rolling her eyes.
29
Naturally, she approached it like a programmer.
She’d spent the weekend in the CTA unit office, going through the preliminary Agenbeux staff files to eliminate personnel who scored as low-risk on the standard metrics. Identifying a mole was more of an art than a science, to be sure, and an HR file could only say so much. If nothing came up from her questioning of the people remaining, still a daunting fifty-three members of staff, she’d go back to the people she initially eliminated and take a closer look. But, at this early stage, it seemed safe to give them a pass for now.
One section where nobody got a pass was the project facility’s upper management, from coding directors through studio managers, and all the way up to Voclaine and Montgomery themselves. No matter what their files said, no matter how they measured up on the metrics, everyone with direct report underlings was to be questioned and examined.
The method of questioning was equally formulaic. Big spreadsheet, methodical set of questions, checkboxes and custom drop-downs for answers, metrics to flag and score responses, the works. If anyone asked, Bridge would shrug and say a nice young man in the civil service had made it for her, and she just filled in the blanks. They’d believe that without a second thought. The French-English split on the project was roughly 65/35 per cent, but the male-female ratio stood at 90/10. And many of those ten per cent were maintenance staff, not coders.
Bridge lowered the window blinds around the room, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
Ten. And breathe, and count. Nine. And breathe, and count. Eight…
When she reached zero she opened her eyes, exhaled hard, and began calling the interviewees. They filed in, inevitably annoyed at the interruption to their work by this busybody from London, and reluctantly answered her busybody questions.
Are your working hours shorter than you expected, longer than you expected, or about what you expected?
“Longer.”
“Shorter, but less so than I expected. I thought the French had really short hours?”
“Longer than what they told me, but I knew they underestimated. They always do.”
“I don’t really notice, once I get stuck into the code.”
“Longer, because it takes too much time to get through the entrance security.”
“Longer. That’s why I smoke.”
Does the work here fulfil your professional desires?
“Yes.”
“Absolutely. This is the future, man.”
“Not really, but it’s a step up toward management.”
“I wish I could tell people about it.”
“It might, if people would stop wasting my time with stupid questions.”
Do you feel your opinion and viewpoint are considered valuable to the direction of the project?
“God, no. I just do what I’m told.”
“I’m a project lead. They’d struggle to achieve their aims without me.”
“Sometimes. Mainly when they happen to be the same as my manager’s.”
“We’re just the workers. Nobody listens to us.”
“No, but they should. I’ve found some possible implementation flaws, but my project lead won’t escalate.”
Given the chance to move to another role here, what would you choose and why?
“I’d be a project lead. We do all the work while they take all the credit.”
“No, I think I’m most useful where I am.”
“I might move to Target Balancing. I’m really interested in that procedure.”
“I’d run the place. And a damn sight better, let me tell you.”
Do you think you’re paid well enough?
(A trick question: answering ‘yes’ would immediately raise Bridge’s suspicions. Nobody did.)
Are you under any undue stress?
“What do you think?”
“Yeah, it’s stressful. That’s what we signed up for, what we’re paid for.”
“Define ‘undue’.”
“People round here are cry-babies, they can’t handle a bit of pressure.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Every bloody day.”
Do you feel comfortable addressing issues with your direct superior?
“Why shouldn’t I? We’re all on the same side, aren’t we?”
“I can barely talk to him about what I had for lunch.”
“No idea, I haven’t had any issues to discuss.”
How difficult is it to conceal your work here from family and friends?
“I just don’t talk about work at all.”
“I have to be careful how much I drink, you know?”
“I wish I didn’t have to. I mean, couldn’t I at least tell my girlfriend?”
“We’re doing important work, but all my friends think I make the stupid tills for Leclerc.”
“Not difficult at all. It’s ‘top secret’ for a reason, right?”
* * *
By the second day Bridge had become rather efficient at getting people in and out of the process, but she calculated she’d still need the rest of the week to interview everyone on the initial suspect list. Every night she forwarded her notes to Henri Mourad in Paris, marking people she thought particularly nervous or noteworthy, and he ran double-checks on them. But so far, nobody had thrown up any hard evidence beyond Bridge’s instincts.
The evening after meeting Montgomery, the site manager, Bridge had stopped at a tabac on her way back to the guest house and bought cigarettes. She’d lied to him on instinct; she was trained to keep every line of conversation open, never shut down an enquiry, because it could lead to vital information. So when he’d asked if she smoked, she unconsciously assumed he did too, and was hoping to cash in on smoker’s camaraderie. France was a long way behind the UK, but smoking rates were decreasing here like everywhere else. In fact, he’d only asked because of her enquiry about the CCTV. Montgomery didn’t smoke, and judging by his skin and fingertips, had probably never smoked in his life.
His deputy François Voclaine, on the other hand, was a perpetual inhabitant of the smoking compound. It was a bare yard ringed by a steel fence bolted on to the side of the building, accessible only from inside and invisible from the road. Bridge visited the compound two or three times a day, enough to keep up the pretence and eavesdrop on office gossip, but not so much that she felt in danger of becoming a real smoker again. Almost every time she did, though, Voclaine was there.
The first time she encountered him was mid-morning on Thursday, when she went out for a quick smoke after conducting interviews with some senior coders. She’d started lower down the ranks to get herself in form and up to speed before tackling the more likely suspects on the project teams, and it had worked. After the first half-dozen interviews she’d eased into it, asking each question with enough confidence that she could focus more on the subject’s emotional reaction than the mere words of their answer. Today had continued well, and she was confident about working through some of the senior project leads in the afternoon.
Voclaine stood alone, wearing his trademark scowl. He saw her light up and called over, “Hey, Miss Short. Come here and share a fag with an old warhorse, I want to know how you’re settling in.” He spoke in rapid French; vernacular, colloquial and thick with what Bridge guessed was a Normandy accent. She wondere
d if he was still stinging from her sudden French outburst yesterday, and trying to catch her out.
“I’m fine,” she replied in French, walking over to his corner, “just never been to this region before. I’m a Saint-Étienne girl.”
Voclaine snorted. “With a name like Short?”
Bridge shrugged. “English father.”
Voclaine made a disapproving noise, but said nothing. There had been no time, and seemingly no real need, to construct an elaborate biography or ‘legend’ for the HR inspector Bridget Short. The legend was fully backstopped, if anyone cared to look, but they’d left the personal history similar enough to Bridge’s own bio that she wouldn’t have to learn an entire fake life.
“So why do you work in London? Why not serve the Republic?”
“Father, again. He was a civil servant, got me a job in the department.” That was one detail created especially for the cover, as an easy explanation.
Voclaine took a drag on his cigarette, and narrowed his eyes at Bridge. It occurred to her that he’d reversed their natural roles entirely, and with ease. Suddenly she was the one being interrogated by a suspicious questioner. “And why the hell does London think we need you here? What does an ‘HR inspector’ do?”
Every instinct in her body wanted to scowl back and reply with as much contempt as the question had been asked. She’d had a lifetime of barely competent middle-aged men questioning her skills and attitude, her bona fides, her basic right to do her job and hold the position she did. Giles was an exception, and that was one reason she’d never looked for a position outside the CTA unit. Twenty-first century or not, the vast majority of the higher ranks in the Service were still filled by men, and most of them retained a distinctly twentieth-century attitude toward women, dividing them into either Secretary or Mata Hari as they saw fit. Anyone who sat at a computer most of the day must, therefore, be a secretary and act accordingly. Bridge had clashed with more than one senior officer over that.
But here, today, she wasn’t herself. Today she was Bridget Short, and Ms Short needed to make the people who worked at Agenbeux like her. The fastest way to do that, especially in a male-dominated environment like this, was to acquiesce and play to their egos.
“Productivity here is very high, and you’ve managed to retain nearly all the staff you’ve taken on,” she smiled. “That’s very unusual for Government projects in England. So I’m here to find out what you and Mr Montgomery are doing to make Agenbeux such a success. I know it’s not very exciting, but at least I get to come back to France and claim it on expenses.” She didn’t quite wink, but her expression was close enough.
Voclaine scowled, crushed his cigarette butt under his heel, and lit another in silence. The moment stretched, and Bridge wondered what she’d said wrong. Had she misjudged him? Her mind raced, playing back the workplace tour alongside the last two minutes of this conversation, searching for a mistake. Her neck grew warm, and the pleasant French summer had little to do with it. Finally, he spoke. “We’re under budget and on time, Miss Short. But you want to spend our money on fine food and expensive wine?”
Bridge was taken aback. She’d thought Voclaine to be a blue-collar labour man, a worker at heart, who’d take any opportunity to stick one to his bosses. And yet, he was worrying about budget and expenses. “That’s, that’s not really what I meant, Mr Voclaine, and besides, my expenses are being paid for by Whitehall. I really don’t think…”
She trailed off as a smirk spread across Voclaine’s face, slowly becoming a smile, then an outright grin. She’d been had.
“I was joking,” he laughed, and dropped a heavy arm around her shoulder. “Ah, the look on your face. Now, I think perhaps we’ve both jumped to conclusions that we shouldn’t, eh? So you can make it up to me by using those lovely expenses to buy dinner tonight. Email me the address where you’re staying, and I’ll pick you up at eight.”
Bridge sighed and smiled, letting Voclaine have his moment of victory. But then she slipped out from under his arm, flicked her cigarette through the bars of the steel fence, and turned to go back inside the building. “I have my own car, thank you,” she said, holding up her lanyard to the contactless security reader. The door clicked open in response. “Email me a good restaurant in town, and I’ll meet you there at eight-thirty.”
30
“Behave yourself, François,” she laughed, removing his hand from her knee.
Voclaine had been seated at the table when Bridge arrived, and two glasses through what she hoped was only his first bottle of wine. She was fifteen minutes late, but for two very good reasons. First, and most obvious, she was a woman in France. No reasonable person would expect her to be punctual.
Second, and more important, Henri Mourad had forwarded the Exphoria server log dumps. Bridge requested them before she left London, but it had taken Emily Dunston several days to authorise and compile them, and when she returned to the guest house that evening they were finally waiting for her. She’d originally planned to leave early, and follow Voclaine from his house to the restaurant to make sure he didn’t do anything weird. But that was a mere shot in the dark. By contrast, even a cursory skim over the logs before having dinner with the second most-senior person at the facility would surely be beneficial.
But it made her late, so she dressed rather more casually than she’d first intended. She threw on a skirt and vest, pulled on a pair of tights and wedge heels, and hoped a wrap around her shoulders would suffice as a minor nod to elegance. Head-to-toe black, but unlike in England, she didn’t expect anyone here to comment. They’d just assume she was Parisian. And as it turned out, any worries she had about being underdressed vanished when she entered the restaurant, and saw Voclaine was still wearing his office clothes.
“Ah, you’ve dressed to apologise. Very good, and I accept.” He smiled, nodding at the chair opposite. Bridge wondered how long it had been since he took a woman to dinner, if he regarded this as dressing up. “Now drink.” He poured her a glass of wine from a local vineyard.
“You’re from further north, aren’t you?” she asked after they toasted. “Do you work in this region often?”
Voclaine shrugged. “A few times. I go wherever they send me. Same as you, I expect.”
“True, although I don’t get to come to France as often as I’d like.”
“Oh? Where do you normally go?”
The look in Voclaine’s eye confirmed to Bridge that this was definitely his first bottle. As in the smoking compound, he’d turned the tables. His questions were no more innocent chit-chat than her own, and combined with what she’d seen in the logs, she was now certain this dinner wasn’t a coincidence born of an awkward misunderstanding. He’d planned it from the start.
“I can’t say,” she smiled, taking a sip of wine. “Same as you, I expect?”
Voclaine laughed, recognising Bridge’s own turnaround, and finished his glass. “Then I think we both need more wine,” he said, refilling their glasses.
They ordered food; a plate of meat and potatoes for Voclaine, a salad and cheese selection for Bridge. The waiter huffed at the very word “végétarienne”, but had the grace to confirm she could get a salad without chicken, if for some strange reason that was truly what she wanted.
Voclaine fixed her with a look of disbelief as the waiter retreated. “You grew up in France, but you don’t eat meat?”
“Funny, but I don’t remember them crying ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité, carnivoré’ at the gates of the Bastille,” said Bridge. Voclaine grunted in disagreement. She decided to change tack and play to his vanity. “Tell me, what did you do before…well, this sort of thing? I’ve been in the civil service since I left university, which is kind of dull. I expect you’ve had a much more interesting life than me.”
He shrugged. “I started in computers, in the ’90s, when France was still at the cutting edge of software. I made computer g
ames, if you can believe that. Physics engines, inverse kinematics…’ He paused and smiled sympathetically, trying to explain the jargon. “They’re like building blocks in a piece of software that make the objects you see on screen behave the way you expect them to. Very low-level stuff, essential to the product, you see,” he added, just in case a mere woman wouldn’t realise that.
Bridge held her tongue. Unlike her real self, Bridget Short was not a coder, and had no reason to know what Voclaine was talking about. Ms Short probably didn’t play video games, and certainly hadn’t made Unreal Tournament mods in her spare time at uni. On the other hand, an HR inspector would have enough cultural familiarity to make assumptions. Such as how this explained Voclaine’s idiosyncratic social skills.
“It sounds very glamorous,” said Bridge, leaning forward. “Why did you leave?”
Voclaine shrugged. “I was too good. I kept being promoted, and before I knew what was happening, I woke up one day and realised I’d been a manager for the past five years.”
“Surely that’s a good thing? More responsibility, better pay…”
“…And no time to actually write code. The higher up the chain you go, the less chance you’ll get to do the thing you took the job for in the first place. I had to make a choice. Either I could effectively demote myself, return to the coding ranks, and be happy but earning a fraction of what I’d built myself up to. But that wasn’t really an option, because by then I’d somehow got saddled with a wife and son along the way. There’s no way I could have supported them on a coder’s salary.”
The Exphoria Code Page 13