But Pitney and Schneider kept a really close eye on them. Watching for outside payments. Watching their expenditures. Watching for activity under some other alias. Reading their reports.
Only twice did Pitney find he had made a mistake in his hiring. Had gotten someone who was trouble, beholden to someone else. In short, was a ringer.
When hiring people, one of the questions was who to send where. Which hire should go to which sector capital?
Pitney sent a request to Diener asking which sectors were most likely to be trouble, in terms of requiring some sort of action from the Department. Diener sent the request on to Schneider, who gave him back an ordered list of the Empire’s sectors. She simply ordered the sectors by the number of spies they had deployed against the Imperial Palace and the Imperial Administration, which put Piotr Shubin’s Odessa Sector at the top of the list.
Pitney had just the guy for Odessa sector. Victor Donleavy had been a rising young star in the Imperial Police undercover investigations group when Pitney had left. He, too, had run up against being too competent for the powers that be, and had gone independent. He was now going by the alias of Troy Donahue.
Donahue was a chameleon. He could look like anybody or anything. He had all the miscellaneous advantages of having been in the Imperial Police undercover group, including a set of non-standard VR nanites. Donahue could rile up a crowd and then disappear into the crowd itself. You would either remember him as the life of the party or not remember him having been there, depending on what he wanted people to remember. He wasn’t averse to wet work if needs be, and he was good at it.
And, best of all, he was an Imperial loyalist right to the bone.
Pitney had been thrilled when he contacted Donahue and he himself expressed an interest. He was the perfect operative to put in Voronezh, the capital city of the planet Odessa, capital planet of the Odessa sector.
Donahue was the first person Pitney told the truth about the Department. It was necessitated by the need to get rid of his two ringers. He had asked Diener about it, and Diener had passed back two Imperial death warrants. Donahue would be the perfect guy to deal with them on his way to Odessa.
One departure Pitney had made from Section Six, at least as it was run later on. He had to talk to his own operatives at first. He simply didn’t have enough operatives out there yet to identify more operatives. Staffing up required him to be in personal contact.
“Hi, Troy.”
“Hi, Tony.”
“OK, I got an assignment for you. Odessa Sector.”
“Nice. Pretty girls there.”
“Yeah. You need to set up in the capital, Voronezh. You’re gonna be a furniture salesman for Galactic Holdings office furniture division, working on contacts within the government. You know anything about furniture?”
“I sat in a chair once,” Donahue said.
“Good enough. You’ll get catalogs and shit from the Galactic Holdings outfit. Premium Interiors. Cover name is Barry Donnelly. Read up on furniture and interior design for offices and stuff on the way there.”
“Got it.”
“I have one other thing for you,” Pitney said. “I made two bad hires. Not too bad out of the numbers I’m working, but I need to clean that up. They’re going to have terrible accidents. Fatal. They’re on your way.”
“For a corporate outfit?”
“No. I haven’t been completely straight with you.”
“I didn’t expect you to be, actually,” Donahue said.
Pitney snorted.
“Yeah. Well, the Galactic Holdings gig is itself a cover. We work directly for the Emperor. We’re his little private intelligence service.”
“No shit.”
“No shit,” Pitney said. “Super secret, so forget you heard it. But all our assignments come from His Majesty himself. No one else.”
Donahue looked skeptical.
“Look,” Pitney said. “Let’s say you’re the Emperor. You need something done. Who do you ask?”
“Somebody in the administration.”
“Yeah, and by tomorrow morning, a thousand people know about it. The next day it’ll be a million. Try again.”
“I see where you’re going,” Donahue said.
“Yeah. What the Emperor did is look around in the Palace and say, Who could I get to set up an organization that won’t leak, won’t report through a thousand layers, and won’t be on the books? Where I can just call a guy and say, Take care of this for me. And I was in investigations, and I was in Imperial Police before that, so he called me in to his office and gave me the job.”
“He called you in to his office personally?”
“Yeah,” Pitney said. “And he sent the Imperial Guard out of the room so it was just him and me.”
Pitney didn’t mention Burke. That was yet another secret.
“And the assignments come from him?”
“Yeah. Directly. Him only. If I need something, I can call the Co-Consul. They’re the only ones who even know the organization exists. But only the Emperor himself can give me assignments. Not even the Co-Consul.”
“What’s with the Galactic Holdings connection?” Donahue asked.
“The family that owns them has been Throne loyalists for hundreds of years. When I need something from them, like a cover or an alias or something, I call the boss over there and he gives me whatever I want. Because he knows it’s for the Emperor.”
“So these two guys who need to have a bad accident...?”
Pitney held up the two Imperial death warrants.
“I can’t let you have these,” Pitney said. “But I got ‘em. On that shit, it’s all strictly on the up-and-up and by the rules.”
“All right, Tony. Who are these two unfortunate accident victims?”
In downtown Vantaa, the capital city of Helsinki, the capital planet of the Helsinki Sector, there was a tony bar and eatery called Bits ‘n’ Pieces. The Men’s bathroom in Bits ‘n’ Pieces was upstairs. Pat Giesling came out of the bathroom and headed for the stairs. A member of the kitchen staff, wearing an apron, was approaching the stairs from the other direction. He waved Giesling on ahead.
Giesling had taken two steps down the stairs when the cook behind him grabbed him by the jaw and the top of the head, and twisted and tilted his head. Giesling’s neck snapped, and the cook let go. Giesling tumbled down the long flight of stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom.
Apron gone, the second man ran down the stairs.
“Did you see that? My gosh. Is he OK?”
There was a doctor in the house, and he pronounced Giesling dead – from the crazy angle of his head, probably from a broken neck. The police came and interviewed the eyewitness. They took his name, scanned his VR, and got his local address. He was from out of town, and was staying in a hotel nearby. They let him go, knowing they could contact him if they needed more information.
When the police did try to contact him later, there was no one at the hotel by that name, the room had been empty that week, and the VR ID they scanned was that of a seventy-year-old woman in the Honshu Sector who didn’t speak English.
Mort Baker got on the subway train in downtown Heidelberg, headed out to dinner with a friend. Another man got on the car behind his, and made his way between cars into Baker’s car, and sat down behind him.
Two stops later, the man behind him got up to get off the train. When he reached for the safety bar on the back of Baker’s seat, his wrist bumped Baker in the neck. The pulse injector strapped to his wrist under his shirt injected Baker with a quick-acting medication.
Baker slumped in his seat as the other man got off the train. When the train reached the end of the line an hour later, Baker was still there, dead of a massive coronary. So said the autopsy, anyway, which found no trace of the already-decomposed medication.
The businessman walked across the lobby of the Capital Tower Hotel in downtown Voronezh. He walked up to the hotel desk, where a pretty young clerk looked up at him.
> “Yes, sir. May I help you?”
“Yes. You should have a room for Barry Donnelly.”
“Let me check, sir.”
He looked around the lobby. Troy Donahue – a.k.a. Victor Donleavy – had never been here before, but it looked like all big hotels in big city centers. The bar over there, the restaurant in that direction, large potted plants scattered around.
“Yes, sir. We have you right here. You’re on the eighty-ninth floor. That’s in our long-term-stay section.”
“Very good. Thank you. And has my luggage made it from the spaceport yet?”
The clerk hesitated as she checked in VR.
“Not yet, sir. We’ll send it right up when it arrives.”
“Thank you.”
He pushed her his bill-to address as Barry Donnelly, and she pushed him his key code.
“Have a pleasant stay, sir.”
Donahue headed off to the elevator bank.
His first order of business in town, other than selling furniture, was to get back in touch with a couple of old friends who he thought were on Odessa. See if he could get some serious equipment.
Gilley had warned him he should be thinking in terms of how we would take out a guy who traveled around in an armored limousine. If, you know, the subject came up at some point.
And Donahue knew just the thing.
The Fine Tuning
Ultimately it took a couple months, but the heads of Budgets, Oversight, and Projects had finally gotten a handle on figuring out what all the extra groups were about.
“All right. What have we got so far?” Gladys King asked.
“About a third of the extra groups are ‘special projects’ groups of one sort or another,” Liam Aronson said.
“What does that mean, exactly?” King asked.
“They’re groups that someone created to do occasional side projects he needed done? That’s what it sounds like,” Natacha Meknikov said.
“Yes, except these normally employed the friends or family of the manager they reported to, and lots of those people never actually did anything,” Aronson said. “Most never showed up to work.”
“So a combination of nepotism, cronyism, and ghost employees?” King asked. “That’s quite a setup. Do you have a list of those?”
“Yes,” Aronson replied, pushing her the list in VR.
“OK, so all these people are g-o-n-e, gone,” King said. “What else we got?”
“Another third or so are groups that were split up somewhere along the way to create two groups,” Aronson said. “Most of those divisions don’t make any sense.”
“Give us an example,” Meknikov said.
“OK. There used to be a group that took care of specifying and ordering all the space-based food for the Imperial Navy and Imperial Marines.”
“What is there now?” King asked.
“Four groups. One that specifies and orders all the food for the Imperial Navy, one that does drinks for the Imperial Navy, and the same for the Imperial Marines, one for food and one for drinks.”
“Don’t they eat the same stuff aboard ship?” Meknikov asked.
“In practice, yes, because it’s too hard to maintain and queue and prepare two different food streams. So they eat their way through one and then the other. This is just the carriers, by the way. The other ships are unmanned.”
“How do they assure proper nutrition if they don’t have both food and drink under one group?” King asked. “I mean, if the drinks are fortified somehow, and deficient somewhere else, the food group wouldn’t know which thing to supplement.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t work in a lot of different ways, but it made the manager above them look more important because he had three extra groups.”
“Each of which has its own infrastructure, specifiers, buyers, the whole thing,” Meknikov said.
“Yes, even though they spend most of their time sitting around because there isn’t enough work to keep them busy just taking care of one piece of the puzzle.”
“All right. We have to figure out how to get those groups back together, and which group leader to keep out of the two or three or four we have now,” King said.
Aronson nodded.
“Exactly. And then that group leader can get rid of the excess employees. Oversight can take care of that.”
“What’s the other third?” Meknikov asked.
“Most of the rest are groups that coordinate with the sector governors. The sector governors tell them what they want the Imperial government to do, and they arrange it.”
“Wait. What?” Meknikov asked.
“Yeah,” King said. “Isn’t that the tail wagging the dog?”
“Yup,” Aronson said. “These groups make sure the Imperial government does the sector governors’ bidding.”
“Why so many groups for that?” Meknikov asked.
“They’re basically one group for each section of the Imperial government. And they liaison with the similar section in the sector governments. Sometimes there’s more than one group in an area, and they have a subset of the sectors.”
“I don’t think we need to ask His Majesty what he thinks of that setup,” King said. “Those groups are gone, too.”
Another round of layoffs swept the administration, but these were not in the Palace complex. The individual groups were located in the dozens of other buildings within Imperial Park, the thirty-square-mile center of government west of downtown Imperial City, or in the office towers that ringed Imperial Park for several miles in all directions.
The Emperor sent another video message to his department heads, about six months after the first.
“Hello, everybody.
“I first wanted to say most of you are doing a very good job at working within the Empire’s new administrative structure. You’re getting your jobs done, you’re using the six Offices appropriately when you need help, and we are doing a better job for the people we all serve – you and I – which is the point of government in the first place.
“However, the changes we have made are only at the center of the Empire, at the very peak of this huge structure. There are twenty trillion civilian Imperial employees spread out across the more than five hundred thousand planets of the Empire. Based on the historical numbers, that’s about five trillion more people than we need.
“My challenge to you is to find those five trillion people and lay them off. That’s only about ten million people per planet, on planets that have an average of five billion people each, but that doesn’t mean those numbers are going to be easy to achieve. In general, though, you should seek to eliminate a quarter of the Imperial employees under your control.
“One easy target is functions no longer required. The Imperial law has been streamlined and reduced to a fraction of what it was before. I suspect many of the functions that operate under your control are no longer needed or even authorized under the law. Find those, and simply get rid of that whole function, across all the Empire’s planets.
“Another big source of waste I suspect is no-show jobs for friends and relatives of your managers on individual planets. We are instituting a check-in system in VR in Imperial offices. I was surprised this is easy to do within the Imperial VR and QE systems. The same system that allows you to message anyone, anywhere also allows us to make it necessary for them to clock in and out at their work locations.
“Finally, hiring relatives – like putting one’s wife or children on the payroll to increase one’s household income – has been easy. We are going to make that impossible. We have records of who is related to whom, and we have records of who is working for whom. We are implementing a system of cross-referencing those records, and someone will no longer be permitted to work under the span of control of a relative.
“Those last two sources of layoffs will be automatic. You need do nothing there yourselves. But you will be kept abreast of the progress made and how many positions within your structure have been eliminated.
“We n
eed to clean up our act, everybody, and make the Imperial government more efficient. And don’t be afraid of being overzealous. If we overdo it, and we need to put some function back in place, we seem to have no problem in hiring people.
“Let’s set ourselves a goal of six months for a twenty-five percent reduction. Do your part, so we can better serve the people who depend on us to be good custodians of their tax money.”
Liam Aronson had a method for deciding which of the redundant managers to keep when consolidating groups that should never have been split in the first place. The Oversight Office sent each of the redundant managers a message saying the consolidation of the groups was being considered, and the Oversight Office would be interested in their feedback.
If they messaged back with all sorts of specious reasons why consolidating the groups was a bad idea, they were out. If they messaged back saying it was a good idea, and would result in efficiencies, they were the manager he wanted over the consolidated group.
That cleared up most of the instances of consolidation. The others they could handle on a case-by-case basis.
The Empire was soon back down to four thousand and some-odd hundred department managers again.
It was breakfast on a Saturday morning. All three had slept in a little, and Ardmore, Burke, and Drake managed to run into each other at breakfast.
“We’re getting there, slowly,” Drake said.
“What do you mean, Jonah?” Ardmore asked.
“Getting to where we want to be. I got a report yesterday that we’re down to the original department listing, more or less. And we’ve managed to reduce the overall civilian employment of the Empire by twenty percent so far.”
“But that’s great progress, Jonah,” Burke said.
“Yes, yes, but it’s so slow. It’s been nearly two years since I first read your book, Jimmy. It’s only a couple months here, six months there, but it adds up. I’m almost ninety-two, and I just don’t know how long I have. I’d like to see some of this through.”
EMPIRE: Renewal Page 18