River threw a quick glance at the nearby row of Boris bikes, shook his head, and ran down into the tube station.
Not far from Regent’s Park, below a recently renovated local authority swimming baths, lurk several subterranean levels unknown to the public. Here, Service members—joes and handlers alike; desk staff too, when their annual appraisals demand—undergo various forms of hand-to-hand combat training, partly to improve their chances of surviving assault by an armed opponent, should such circumstances arise, but largely to ensure they can maim an unsuspecting victim should the opportunity present itself. Pens, coffee cups, spectacles, pocket change: all and any can be used to inflict permanent damage on a potential enemy.
How to do the same to a subordinate is a skill you pick up on the job.
There were six of them at the meeting in the Park, five Second Desks and Dame Ingrid Tearney, but to all intents and purposes, four of them might have been the articles of furniture their informal designation suggested. Because, like most other meetings with this cast list, this was all about Tearney and Taverner: Dame Ingrid, who’d helmed the Service for the best part of a decade, and intended to carry on doing so until they gave her a state funeral or made her queen, and Diana Taverner—“Lady Di”—who was Second Desk (Ops), and ruled the hub at Regent’s Park, which gave her life-and-death control over joes in the field, but meant she had to hold doors open for the Dame.
It was no secret that she coveted the top job. But, twelve years younger than Tearney, her window of opportunity was closing with every passing day.
The meeting was about resources. Every meeting was about resources these days, whatever their agenda—the bumpy road of austerity having rattled the Service’s axles as much as anyone else’s—but this one was literally about resources, and how there were going to be fewer of them for the foreseeable future, even though there had already been fewer of them for the recent past. Cuts were in the interests of efficiency, according to a Treasury Department nobody was ever going to mistake for an embodiment of that virtue, and cuts were, more to the point, going to happen, so the Service might as well learn to live with them. Especially since, with the recent reshuffle, the Service had no defender Down the Corridor.
Because their new boss—the new Home Secretary—was Regent’s Park’s loudest critic. The fact that, decades previously, Peter Judd’s application to join the Service had been given the thumbs down was widely held to have played no small part in fostering this antipathy, but his psychological assessment had been so damning—had basically been written in block capitals, using red ink—that even now, old hands agreed, it cut both ways. On the downside, they were paying the price for having pissed off a narcissistic sociopath with family money, a power complex and a talent for bearing a grudge; but on the up, had Judd actually been allowed into the Service, he’d almost certainly have escalated the Cold War into a hot one, if his intervening years in diplomatic roles were anything to go by. But failures in diplomacy often score highly with the public, and Judd’s star remained obstinately in the ascendant. For the moment at least, the Service would have to live with him.
Besides, while it cut both ways, every two-edged sword has a handle. Which was what Tearney was grasping now, preparing to wield the blade where it would do her most good.
“I know this isn’t what any of you want to hear,” she said. “But the figures are in on projected spending levels for the next two quarters. There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that the bad news isn’t as bad as it might be.” She paused, allowing a rueful grin to sweep round the table like a Mexican wave, breaking only on the stony reef of Diana Taverner. That was fine. Dame Ingrid knew how to play a room, and isolating the troublemaker was always a good move.
She removed her glasses, which were looped round her neck by a chain, and allowed them to drop onto her bosom. Her wig, today, was the blonde halo—a sure indication, for Dame Ingrid–watchers, of serious intent; its downy appearance meant to soften the blows that were coming.
“There’ll be no recruitment at Desk-support level for the remainder of the financial year. In fact, come the Autumn Statement, we might well find ourselves having to shed those appointed within the last two years—I know, I know, and I’m sorry.” She looked it, too. But this was one of Ingrid Tearney’s natural strengths; what she lacked in comeliness, she made up for in apparent empathy. “But these are the realities we’re dealing with, and it will do none of us any good to kick against them.”
Taverner, of course, was first to ignore that.
“I need admin support.”
“But you’re doing so well without it, Diana.”
“Ingrid, I’m spending half my time chasing up office supplies.”
“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.”
She was sure it wasn’t. Taverner’s junior had transferred across the river a while back, and for ten months she’d been holding down two roles: acting as her own assistant, as she’d put it in a memo. Given the tendency of Taverner’s assistants to burn out within eighteen months tops, there were those who were anticipating a schizophrenic meltdown soon, but Dame Ingrid wasn’t holding her breath. If Diana Taverner ever self-destructed, she’d find a way of doing so to her own advantage.
She said, “Diana. We all know you’ve been hamstrung by the lack of assistance this past year, but Finance feels it’s better to make sacrifices at office level than to risk having to make them on the streets. I’m sure you understand that.”
Because not to do so would have been tantamount to declaring she’d sooner put the public in danger than make her own coffee.
“And besides, and this is something I was going to bring up anyway, it’s not gone unnoticed what a splendid job you’ve been doing flying solo. Finance was most complimentary about your solution to the, ah, logistical difficulties we’ve been facing with Confidential Storage. Most impressive.”
Dame Ingrid’s use of capitals was a trait all were familiar with. It meant footnotes were following.
She said, “For those of you who don’t know, Diana’s solution to our Information Overload was actioned as of the end of Q1, and I believe I’m right in saying that your own sector’s process has now been completed—Diana?”
Taverner gave the slightest of nods; acknowledging not so much the implied praise as Dame Ingrid’s skill in placing it so neatly. Well played. She could already sense the killer thrust which was surely on its way.
But which was temporarily diverted by one of her fellow D2s.
“This would be the rehousing of operational records?”
“That’s right, George,” Ingrid Tearney said sweetly. “So good of you to pay attention. And as we all know, where Ops goes, the rest of us follow, like children trotting after the Pied Piper. There’ll be a memo circulated, but, in brief, we can expect our on-site paperwork mountains to become, well, molehills in the near future. If it works for Ops, it’ll work for everyone. Operations was always going to be the biggest problem. When Ops go wrong it creates so much paperwork.”
“But not as much as our successes do,” Taverner said through not-quite-gritted teeth.
“Of course, my dear. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”
“Of course not.”
Confidential Storage, to use Dame Ingrid’s capitals, had long been an issue. Confidentiality was key, obviously, but the rather more prosaic problem of where to keep everything had grown exponentially. Digitalisation was no cure-alclass="underline" encryption was one thing, and Ingrid Tearney had enormous faith in Regent’s Park’s ability to render all and any information in its possession incomprehensible—it was, after all, a branch of the Civil Service. But fear of records being, to employ the modish word, disambiguated was a lesser concern: a more alarming threat was the cyber-equivalent of a dirty bomb, a virtual attack that would render departmental records so much spam.