Chapter 1
People lie and people cheat. Upstanding members of the community lie, cheat and steal. If there are large sums of money involved who wouldn’t? You don’t call it lying and cheating when you do it, you change certain key criteria, recalibrate projected quotas, allow accountants to massage figures, offset your moral responsibility due to others’, perceived, criminal waywardness. You have done it on some small to medium scale and you would do it on a large scale if the money was right. No offence but don’t kid yourself.
In this brave new world of the 21st century there are investment funds that invest in business that’s ethically and environmentally sound, so you need organisations to check those companies are doing what they say they do. The Ethical Investigation Bureau (EIB) was just such an organisation and that was the reason Sonia wanted to work for them, which was why she sat facing the glass brick wall with the opaque, almost black, glass brick window shape in the middle. It was the wrong way round; the light was coming through the wall, not the window, Maybe it was a statement, something Confucius or the Buddha might have said.
Sonia didn’t know if they had glass in ancient China or wherever, anyway she wasn’t thinking about the wall anymore, she had just remembered who the man behind the desk reminded her of. It was ‘Mother’, the sort of creepy boss man in the old Avengers TV series. This realisation messed with her concentration but it didn’t matter since the Mother man behind the desk was re-reading her CV. It was kismet. She used to watch the re-runs with her Dad and brothers in the ’80s and she had always wanted to be Emma Peel, Diana Rigg or Tara King-whichever, maybe a mix of them all (she just about had the looks). However, she didn’t want to work for the ‘wankers’ at MI5 or MI666 because they were ‘dodgy as all get out’; she had been brought up in Coogee (coojee) Sydney from the age of six until eighteen. They showed plenty of British TV in those days, for obvious reasons.
No, she wanted to work for the Ethical Investigation Bureau because they were the good guys. The man behind the desk, who reminded her of ‘Mother’, was Colin York the head of the EIB so she felt pretty close to getting a job. She just needed to stay focused and not say anything sarcy. As long as old mother York didn’t try and get clever or smarmy. Smack him Tara.
