The office was a good size for pacing, but pacing was
probably a sign of frustration at lack of control, so Jeronica wasn’t going to
give in to her desire to stand up and stalk from one end of the room to the
other. Instead she leaned back in her
chair and took three deep breaths, holding them for four seconds each before
exhaling again. The chair creaked slightly. When she was sure that she was calm enough
she unlocked the computer again and navigated to the corporate intranet. The blue logo appeared in the corner of her
browser and she noted with interested that it had been updated slightly. She had to pinch the monitor screen to zoom
in to be able to see the exact difference, and even then she had to open an art
program and find the eyedropper tool to sample colours, but all the vowels in
the name of the logo were now in a slightly different shade than the consonants. Clearly internal-IT had finally succeeded in
getting their list of changes made with the vendor. She tapped her desk intercom and instructed
her PA to find out exactly when, overnight, the change had been made. Diarmarthid, Head of IT, would be looking to
capitalise on a success like that. Then
she summoned up the corporate org-chart, full-screened it, and leaned back in
her chair again.
Jeremy had exactly no direct reports; he occupied a
gold-hued box at the top of the org chart with no lines connecting him
anywhere. In actual fact the immediate
top level below him all reported to him, but a careful matrix management
structure had it so that they technically reported in to each other in
non-transitive ways so that no-one could gain an advantage. The layer below that was even more complex in
its organisation, with reporting going upwards except where it occasionally
went sideways, and in one case, down.
Jeronica was in the middle of the second layer, as was Manguy, Margoyle,
Diarmarthid and had been Stephanotte.
The lines around them were a spider’s web of treachery and political
connivance which they all walked with the careful skill of a tightrope walker
with detached retinas.
Jeronica had responsibility for Foreign, Romantic and
Domestic Affairs with a side-interest in Healthcare in Developing Nations;
Manguy was a specialist in Military, Political and Demographic rearrangements,
and Margoyle had lately been tasked with the problem of Sweden but typically
took responsibility for Trans-local and grass-roots uprisings and
Steganography. All three of them could reasonably
consider Soft Power to be an area that they could manage, so Stephanotte’s
departure was going create infighting.
Well, she thought, more infighting than usual.
A thought crossed her mind, and she leaned forward again,
tapping at the keyboard. It took a little
bit of work, but inside five minutes she established that the org-chart had
been updated late last night and that the last two revisions were password
protected. She tsked softly; Manguy was
unsubtle in her opinion, and opened the org-charts stored on her computer. Even evening a new copy was downloaded and
compared with the previous. The
difference was slight, but not unexpected: a single reporting line had been
removed.
Jeronica leaned back again.
Margoyle had reported into Stephanotte.
Which meant that now she was uncertain if Manguy had changed the org
chart or if Margoyle had. Curiouser and
curiouser as a silly little girl had once said.
A message box slid up in the corner of her screen. “The intranet was updated at 02:47. The contract with [REDACTED] was signed at
21:23.” Jeronica committed the numbers
to memory and sent a message back. “Purchase
two bottles of Champagne and deliver them to Diarmarthid. The card should read ‘Congratulations’. Make sure that the consonants and vowels use
exactly the same shades as the logo.”
She leant back in the chair again. What to do about Stephanotte?
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