Billington laughs. Actually, it's more of a titter, high-pitched and unnerving. "Come now, Mr. Howard! Do you really think I don't already know about your boss's paltry little two-billion-pound bait-worm? Please! I'm not stupid.
I know all about you and your colleague Ms. Random, and the surveillance team in the safe house run by Jack Griffin.
I even remember your boss, James, from back before he became quite so spectral and elevated. I know much more than you give me credit for." He pauses. "In fact, I know everything."
Whoops. If he's telling the truth, that would put a very bad complexion on things. "Then what am I doing here?" I ask, hoping like hell that he's bluffing. "I mean, if you're omnipotent and omniscient then just what is the point of abducting me — not to mention Ramona — and dragging us aboard your yacht?" (That's a guess about Ramona, but I don't see where else he might be keeping her.) "Don't tell me you haven't got better things to do with your time than gloat; you're trying to close a multi-billion-dollar auction, aren't you?" He just looks at me with those peculiar, slotted lizard-eyes and I have a sudden cold conviction that maybe making money is the last thing on his mind right now. "You're here for several reasons," he says, quite agreeably.
"Hair of the dog?" He raises an eyebrow, and the gorilla hurries over to the sideboard.
"I wouldn't mind a glass of water," I confess "Hah." He nods to himself. "The archetype hasn't taken full effect yet, I see."
"Which archetype"
McMurray clears his throat. "Boss, do I need to know this"
Billington casts him a fish-eyed stare: "No, I don't think you do. Quick thinking."
"I'll just go and check in on Ramona then, shall I? Then I'll go polish the binnacle and check for frigging in the rigging or something." McMurray slithers out through the door at high speed Billington nods thoughtfully.
"He's a smart subordinate." He raises an eyebrow at me.
"That's half the problem, you know."
"Half what problem?"
"The problem of running a tight ship." The gorilla hands Billington a glass of whisky, then plants a glass full of mineral water in front of me before returning to his position by the door. "If they're smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable — ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it.
If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down. You should take McMurray as a role model, Mr. Howard, if you ever make it back to your petty little civil service cubicle farm. He's a consummate senior field agent and a huge asset to his employers.
No manager in their right mind would ever terminate him, but because he likes fieldwork he doesn't spend enough time in the office to get a leg up the promotion ladder. And he knows it." He falls silent. I take advantage of the break in his spiel to take a mouthful of water. "That's why I headhunted him away from the Black Chamber," Billington adds.
When I finish coughing, he looks at me thoughtfully.
"You strike me as being a reasonably adaptable, intelligent young man. It's really a shame you're working for the public sector. Are you sure I can't bribe you? How would a million bucks in a numbered account in the Caymans suit you"
"Get lost." I struggle to maintain my composure.
"If it's just that silly little warrant card you guys carry, we can do something about it," he adds slyly.
Ouch. That's a low blow. I take a deep breath: "I'm sure you can, but — "
He snorts. And looks amused. "It's to be expected. They wouldn't have sent you if they thought you had an easy price.
It's not just money I can offer, Mr. Howard. You're used to working for an organization that is deliberately structured to stifle innovation and obstruct stakeholder-led change. My requirements are a bit, shall we say, different. A smart, talented, hard-working man — especially a morally flexible one — can go far. How would you like to come on board as deputy vice-president for intelligence, Europe, Middle East, and Africa division? A learning sinecure, initially, but with your experience and background in one of the world's leading occult espionage organizations I'm sure you'd make your mark soon enough."
I give it a moment's thought, long enough to realize that he's right — and that I'm not going to take the offer. He's offering me crumbs from the rich man's table, and not even bothering to find out in advance if that's the sort of diet I enjoy. Which means he's doing me the compliment of not taking the prospect of my defection seriously, which means he considers me to be a reliable agent. And now I stop to think about it, I realize to my surprise that I am. I may not be happy about the circumstances under which I took the oath, and I may gripe and moan about the pay and conditions, but there's a big difference between pissing and moaning and seriously contemplating the betrayal of everything I want to preserve. Even if I've only just come to realize it.
"I'm not for sale, Ellis. Not for any price you can pay, anyway. What's this archetype business"
He nods minutely, examining me as if I've just passed some sort of important test. "I was getting to that." He rotates his chair until he's half-facing the big monitor off to my right. He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soulsucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box.
(Not that there's much difference.) For a moment I almost begin to relax, but then I recognize what he's calling up and my stomach flip-flops in abject horror.
"I do everything in PowerPoint, you know." Billington grins, an expression which I'm sure is intended to be impish but that comes across to his intended victim — me — as just plain vicious. "I had to have my staff write some extra plugins to make it do everything I need, but, ah, here we are ..."
He rapidly flips through a stack of tediously bulleted talking points until he wipes into a screen that's mercifully photographic in nature. It's a factory, lots of workers in gowns and masks gathered around worktops and stainless steel equipment positioned next to a series of metal vats.
"Eileen's Hangzhou factory, where our Pale Grace(TM) Skin Hydromax(R) range of products are made. As you probably already figured out, we apply a transference-contagion glamour to the particulate binding agent in the foundation powder, maintained by brute force from our headquarters operation in Milan, Italy. Unlike most of the cosmetics on the market, it really does render the wrinkles invisible. The ingredients are a bit of a pain, but she's got that well in hand; instead of needing an endless supply of young women just to keep one old bat pretty we can make do with only about ten parts per million of maid's blood in the mix. It's just one of the wonders of modern stem cell technology. Shame we can't find a replacement for the stress prostaglandins, but those are the breaks."
He clicks his mouse. "Here's the other end of the operation." It's a room full of skinny, suntanned guys in short-sleeved shirts hunched over cheap PCs, row upon row of them: "My floating offshore programmer ranch, the SS Hopper. You've probably read about it, haven't you? Instead of offshoring to Bangalore, I bought an old liner, wired it, and flew in a number of Indian programmers to live on board. It stays outside the coastal limit and with satellite uplinks it might as well be in downtown Miami. Only they're not, um, actually programming anything. Instead, they're monitoring the surveillance take from the mascara. Because the Pale Grace(TM) Bright Eyes(R) products don't just link into the transferencecontagion glamour, they contain particles nano-engraved with an Icon of Bhaal-She'vra that backdoors them into my surveillance grid. That's actually the main product of my sixty-nanometer fab line these days by the way, not the bespoke microprocessors everyone thinks it makes. It's a very useful similarity hack — anything the wearer can see or hear, my monitors can pick up, and we've got flexible batch manufacturing protocols that ensure every single cosmetics product is uniquely coded so we can tell them apart. It's almost embarrassing how much intelligence you can gather from this sweep, especially as Eileen's affiliates are running a loyalty scheme that encourages users to register their identity with us at time of sale for free samples, so that we know who they are."