Savant (7 page)

Within another two minutes, Pitu 3 had been stretchered out of the corridor. Metoo and the Police Operator remained outside Tobe’s door, and Tobe remained, where he had been standing, in the middle of his office.

Two more Service Operators had set themselves up outside Tobe’s office, in the corridor on either side of his door.

Metoo realised that the Police Operator was about to cross the threshold, without any thought to the data that covered the floor.

She anticipated the move, and put her hand on his upper arm, firmly.

“Don’t,” she said.

“He needs to be extracted,” said the Operator.

“Not like that, he doesn’t,” answered Metoo.

Chapter Ten

N
AMED
O
PERATOR
S
TRAZINSKY
had pushed his chair away from the screen in front of him, and thrown the switch on the facing edge of the counter. He was running his hands up and down his thighs, partly to relieve his anxiety, and partly to wipe away the sweat that had collected in his palms. His hands should have been raised. He remembered Protocol, and lifted his hands into the air, as if in a gesture of surrender.

A
TONE SOUNDED
on the Service Floor. The remaining eight Operators stopped what they were doing, pushed their chairs back from their screens, and threw the switches on the facing edges of their counters. Eight pairs of hands were raised into the air.

The first man into the room was Ranked Operator Dudley. He was on duty on the Service Floor, and had the dubious privilege of taking over from Strazinsky. It was his first Code Yellow in thirty years with Service, including twelve as a Ranked Operator. He had found his niche and had no ambition to climb the career ladder any further. He was a short, neat man with the sort of dry sense of humour that was virtually unheard of among Operators. He was also, completely and utterly, reliable, and there was a little more confidence in the room when he was there.

“Verify headset,” he said, before he had even sat down in the seat that Strazinsky vacated for him. The headset arrived just as he finished keying in his Morse signature. He did not hesitate for a moment, and was already reviewing visual and aural material before his second had arrived, and even before Strazinsky had left the Service Floor with his escort.

No one on the Service Floor that day had ever witnessed the phenomenon before. No one working at College Service had ever witnessed such an event, and only a handful of the most senior staff at Service Central had ever been part of so potentially serious an incident. They had all trained for such an eventuality, but it was still virtually impossible to know what any man would do in a crisis, even an Operator.

A genuine Code Yellow required a total change of Service Floor staff. All Operators were suspended from their duties and replaced with two of their colleagues. This meant taking Operators out of Recreation and Repast, in the first instance. If the problem persisted, Resting Operators would be Roused, and, finally, supplemented from senior staff at Service Central. Tech and support were not switched out, but were supplemented with an additional pair of hands for each rack.

Each of the eight original Operators donned his cotton-lined neoprene gloves, and stood behind his chair as the new Operator took his seat, and his colleague pulled out the dicky seat from under the counter, and took up position a little higher and to the left of the primary Operator.

Strazinsky was escorted to an interview room directly off the Service Floor, so that he was close to his station, if he was needed. The room was a two metre cube with a table, two chairs, and, on the wall to the left of the door, a vid-con screen.

T
HE
C
OLLEGE ONLY
had five Ranked Operators, so that only one of them was on duty at any one time, but there was always a second available for emergencies. Strazinsky was relieved that McColl was on-call. They had known each other for some time, and McColl was the only Ranked Operator that Strazinsky still found approachable. The tendency for Service Operators to be insular ran deep, and, for the most part, there was a direct link between how naturally private an Operator was and how far he advanced in his career. McColl was a rare being, in that he was both psychologically self-sufficient and affable.

The meeting required the presence of at least three people: the interviewee, the interviewer and the observer.

“Who will observe?” asked Strazinsky as he and McColl sat on the chairs in the interview room, facing the screen.

“I will,” said McColl. Strazinsky looked at him, slightly baffled, and then realised what was happening.

This was big.

“Who will interview me?” asked Strazinsky.

The vid-con screen lit up with drifting snow, and then settled, showing a chair and a computer array, somewhere that Strazinsky didn’t recognise.

“Let’s see, shall we?” asked McColl.

A man walked into shot on the screen, his back to the camera. He turned to sit in the chair, but Strazinsky didn’t recognise him. The man wore a dark suit with a light shirt and a dark tie. The picture seemed indistinct, and, while he didn’t recognise him, Strazinsky thought that the man on the screen could be mistaken for half-a-dozen different people that he did know. He had an anonymous, regular face. He was medium height, medium weight and average colouring, apparently without any identifying marks or features.

The man cleared his throat and looked out of the screen at Strazinsky and McColl.

“Agent Operator Henderson, interviewing,” he said. “Interviewee?” he asked, and there was a pause before Strazinsky answered, leaning forward slightly, and speaking more slowly and clearly than usual. He was nervous.

“Named Operator Strazinsky, Agent Operator,” he said.

“No time for titles,” said Henderson. “Observing?”

“Ranked Operator McColl, sir,” McColl said, briskly.

“Initial Protocol,” said Henderson. “Yes/No questions and answers only, if you please.”

If you please
, thought Strazinsky.
If you please?

Henderson cleared his throat again, bringing Strazinsky to his senses.

“Yes,” said Strazinsky.

Over the next couple of hours, Strazinsky said yes and no thousands of times. The interview technique was not new, but it proved highly efficient in times of heavy stress. It did not allow for the interviewee to analyse his thoughts too much or try to describe a situation that he didn’t have the imagination or the vocabulary to do justice too. The Yes/No system allowed the interviewer to follow any path he chose, picking out what was important, and homing in on it with the interviewee.

Civilians were seldom required to undergo such intense interviews, and the method was seldom used on them. Creatives often found it difficult to stick to the Yes/No formula, with their tendency to use more qualifications, both verbal and gestural, and often did better telling a story, wholesale, or making pictures or acting out scenes. The best interviewees were the empirical personality types, which included most grades of Drafted, particularly Service Operators. The Yes/No interview was fast and efficient, and a low-stress way of getting the best information in the shortest time. Interviewees were not asked to think or speculate, so, during the course of the interview their answers became automatic responses, which were considered more reliable as evidence, if and when the time came.

“Is your name Strazinsky?”

“Yes.”

“Is your designation Ranked Operator?”

“No.”

“Do you work station 3?”

“No.”

“Were you called in on a Code Green?”

“Yes.”

The first dozen questions established the basic facts that were already a matter of record, and by the end of them Strazinsky was feeling a little more relaxed. He would have to explain nothing. If he was asked to explain what had happened, he might not have been able to.

His instincts had told him that there was no case for upgrading to Code Yellow, and yet, he had done it. He would not be asked about his instincts or about his decisions. He would not be asked to explain himself. There was no wrong answer. He would not be asked, “What were your criteria for instigating Code Yellow?”

Interviews were used to glean the facts of an event on the Service Floor, quickly, without recourse to surveillance, which was always reviewed, but not always prioritised. When it was prioritised, as on this occasion, it could take twice as long to review footage as it would simply to view it in real-time, and as much as ten times as long to review footage as it would take for an experienced interviewer to extract the same information.

Strazinsky had spent more than 36 hours at Station 2, Code Green, before the ramp-up to Code Yellow. Service Central needed all the relevant information now, not in three days time. Agent Operator Henderson had allowed a four hour window for the extraction of the key facts.

Chapter Eleven

“T
OBE,
”
SAID
M
ETOO
, “it’s time to go home.”

“I’ve got a tutorial,” said Tobe.

“It’s been cancelled. The Student isn’t well.”

“I’ll work.”

“It’s time to go home.”

“Who’s that?” asked Tobe. Metoo didn’t know who he was referring to; he seemed to be looking right at her. She hesitated.

“Who’s that?” asked Tobe. Metoo turned, and realised that the Police Operator was still standing at her shoulder. She’d been so busy trying to work out how to keep Tobe calm and get him home that she had quite forgotten he was there. She fished around in her mind for a benign, plausible answer.

“Who’s that?” asked Tobe.

“Nobody,” said Metoo, answering reflexively. She knew as soon as she said it that it wouldn’t work.

“Somebody’s there, not nobody.”

He could be so bloody literal at times.

“Who’s that?” asked Tobe.

“This is...” she began, hesitating as she turned to the Operator, gesturing up at him with a shrug.

“... Saintout,” said the Police Operator.

“French,” said Tobe.

“Yes... French... a long time ago,” said Saintout, pushing his bottom lip out in an oddly Gallic expression that was not lost on Metoo.

“He’s my friend,” said Metoo, intending to make Saintout seem as unthreatening as possible.

“Tobe’s your friend,” said Tobe. “French is not your friend.”

“You are my friend,” said Metoo, glad to have something useful to latch on to. “Do you remember what friends do?”

“Tobe’s your friend, so Tobe helps you,” said Tobe.

“Exactly. Will you help me now, Tobe?”

“Tobe’s your friend.”

Metoo took that to mean yes.

“Just hop across the floor, and come home with me.”

“The floor,” said Tobe, looking down.

Metoo was afraid that she’d drawn attention to the wrong thing, and was annoyed at herself for asking the sort of combination question that Tobe found impossible to answer. She tried to bring his attention back.

“Let’s go home,” she said, quickly. Tobe continued to look at the floor, turning his body slightly away from her.

Metoo waited for a moment, gesturing frantically with her hand to Saintout to get out of sight. Saintout moved to his left until he could no longer see into the office, or be seen from it, but stayed close enough to be useful if Tobe became a threat.

“Tobe,” said Metoo, and then again, “Tobe.”

Tobe swivelled back to face her again. His head was still bent, but he was looking up through his fringe at her.

“Take me home, please?” she asked.

Tobe tiptoed out of his office, gently stepping into the small gaps left between his calculations. He crossed the floor without apparently disturbing anything.

Metoo put her hands out, her arms horizontal to either side of her body, keeping the Operators at bay. The two men on either side of the door nodded at her to acknowledge that they understood her instruction. Saintout brought his right hand up to his waist, in case he needed to deploy his weapon.