Chapter 7: Catherine Alone

Catherine arrived back at her flat. She shared it with no one, valuing her independence over even the idea of a live-in male to wait on her. In spite of Government encouragement and tax breaks, she had avoided becoming a sponsor and taking a man under her supervision. As long as she could satisfy her desires at venues like the Regina Club, she saw no need to complicate her life with a live-in man.

There was mail on her door mat. There was a letter from a friend – she knew the handwriting – some ads for local food delivery companies and a credit card bill. One piece she discarded without opening it. She knew by the envelop it was another appeal from the Department of Sponsors Affairs, asking for women to come forward and sponsor a man. It would take more than a letter from the Minister and the offer of a few thousand in tax benefits to make that amount of bother worthwhile, she thought.

Her computer was sitting on her desk in one corner of the sitting room. She thought about logging on and checking her emails but then decided against it. Work could wait until the following morning, she decided.

Bed beckoned and soon she was asleep, revisiting in a dream-scape her encounter with Leopard Head, except that, in her dream, at her command, he could transform into a leopard or return as she desired.

She woke late and looked at the clock. She was still feeling aroused by her dream. The thoughts of transforming a man to a beast or a wild beast to a helpless man left her smiling as she stretched a hand down to burrow her fingers inside her pants for a few moments of intense pleasure.

The realities of the day asserted themselves. She put memories of her real and dreamed encounters with Leopard Head to one side as she thought about work.

At least I don’t have to be in the office, she thought, pulling on a comfortable grey tee-shirt. She dragged a comb through her hair, which fell in black curtains either side of her face without much encouragement, and turned to her computer.

The meeting session was just getting under way.

“Morning, Catherine.”

Her boss was online already, of course, but, Catherine noticed, she wasn’t the last by any means to join the call. “Morning, Doc,” Catherine responded. Doctor Aileen McConaghy’s unit was part of the Government Communications Evaluation and Research Centre. The unit was based in Cheltenham but her staff did not need to travel in to the office for every meeting. Others of the team logged in until there were six of them including Catherine and Dr McConaghy.

Catherine scanned the screen. She was proud to be part of the team. These days she felt that her contribution was valued. That was a change that had come with the political changes. When she had been learning her craft she had put up with the borderline-racist stereotyping of her interest in cryptography and data analysis. “This is Catherine,” one of her previous bosses - who had never really worked out if she was of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese heritage - had introduced her, “very inscrutable.” After New Order had come to power and declared that men weren’t suitable for employment in such roles, she had enjoyed bestowing on him the same inscrutable look when she gave him the news that he wouldn’t be working for the department any longer. His reaction had been anything but inscrutable, she remembered with pleasure...

“Three projects to talk about today,” Aileen began. “Communications intercepts, financial data interpretation and location analysis. Sue, can you give us a heads up on your patch, please?”

“Of course.” Sue Turner kicked things off “Well, you will all be aware that we are coming up to a year since the Fordswell Bombing and naturally HM Government is feeling a little concerned in case someone thinks this is a good birthday to celebrate. We’ve been monitoring the ‘persons of interest’ list watching for mentions on email and the usual media. There’s been nothing of concern which means either there’s nothing happening or we’ve missed it completely.”

Aileen winced at the thought but she knew Sue was thorough and the risk of her missing something was small. “Let’s hope it’s the former. Janice, financials?”

“Nothing to suggest any anniversary activity in terms of local cash movement, certainly. At least not between any of the groups we know about. There are the regular relatively low value spikes of money movement that are associated with people smuggling. The Male Control Force get the data once we’ve checked it out. They follow up the ones they can but in all fairness they’re resource limited and unless we pick up a pattern of something major going on, I think they will just focus on the careless ones. My team are carrying on trying to see if there are nodes of transmission that might lead us to trafficking groups but there’s little point in going after individual absconders. MCF seem to think the country is better of without them.”

“I don’t think that’s what Florence Daniels at the Home Office would say. Still, as you say, it’s the MCF’s call, not ours. Catherine?”

Catherine’s specialism was location data. Using the information collected by various government and private systems that could provide details of the whereabouts of ‘persons of interest’ – these days invariably men – Catherine’s team of analysts could conjure up movement tracks and possible connection points, places where groups of individuals have been co-located and places that individuals may have visited in succession. “Apart from the regular stuff we’ve got two projects on the go. We’re upgrading the ident card location data analysis to take advantage of the new cards. The improved chips mean that location can be detected passively – that is without a man actually having to present the card to a reader. That’s good and bad. We’ll obviously have much more data that we can work with but, on the down side, we’ll obviously have much more data that we can work with.” She smiled. “We’re going to run some simulations to see what the impact will be on processing requirements, Doc, but we will definitely need some bigger boxes up there in the Cotswolds.”