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The Erasure Agency was not an organisation given to slackness. It was tight, efficient, and naturally secretive – as it had to be; leaks could jeopardise an operation in the time it took to tap a keyboard. What this did mean was that James had not had so much as two days' notice. Forty-eight hours had not quite passed since he had been invited into the head of his previous department's office, and given the news. He had been bashfully aware that McNair had been mentioning his name to the 'right people' for a while, now, but had simply assumed that it was barely more than a gesture of generosity. He'd certainly never expected anything to come of it.

[i]“Thanks for seeing me, James,” said McNair, maybe twenty years his senior, as the two men shook hands. He gestured to a seat opposite his own. James sat.

“Not at all.”

“I've had a request,” McNair spoke slowly and deliberately. The contrast was particularly evident against James' bulletlike speech-patterns. A wide grin was just about visible beneath a convincing effort to conceal it, “To transfer you to the Central Agency. Congratulations!”

There was a pause. He couldn't quite believe it. He thought he'd lucked out getting his current job with C-East. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that he might be working for central.

“When do they want me to start?” he couldn't stop himself from beaming.

“Thursday.”

“I don't know what to say. Thank you so much for this!”

“Don't thank me. All I did was let people know how much potential you have, and they snapped you up. Anyway, as far as I'm aware, you'll be doing similar stuff as you have been with us; all-round support to whatever needs supporting, but even that's an estimate. You know how hush-hush they all are.”[/i]

The email with proper details had arrived later that evening. Where he was to go, to whom he was to report – his new salary. The figure for C-East had been astonishingly high, even for him, a junior employee, but this one was practically eye-watering. Not that the money mattered. Wealth was nice, but there were bigger things in life. Besides, he'd long been told that, if the Agency sensed you were only in it for the paycheque, they wouldn't look at you twice, just like the medical industry. It made sense; they were both about making people better. 

So it was that, that Thursday, he approached the C-Central Erasure Agency, head held high. He looked like any young professional; blonde hair neatly parted, tie perfectly knotted. He had splashed out on a new suit and pair of dress shoes for the occasion – it was visibly expensive and a gorgeous piece of tailoring by anybody's standards, but it didn't quite suit him. They were an older man's clothes; his eyes shone too much, too blue. Briefcase in hand, he had a change of trousers and a pair of slightly more practical boots with him – still appropriately smart attire (as was literally everything he owned), but slightly less impressionable for the first meeting. To look at him, you wouldn't have known his heart was fluttering in his chest like a startled moth. Certainly, the way he entered the building cleanly through the correct staff entrance (as opposed to the more welcoming visitor's entrance) and passed the fiddly identification protocols without incident, passers-by could be forgiven for thinking he had been there before. In fact, he had, yesterday, for research purposes. With a little information, you could do anything.

The building was particularly grand. C-East was somewhat more rough-and-ready, with bits of the building needing re-touching, whereas C-Central, which had no fewer than sixteen storeys, six of which underground, was pristene from top to bottom. The corridors were wider, and taller, the doors big enough for three to fit through abreast, and James couldn't escape the feeling of being dwarfed as he found the meeting room on floor two. He would have preferred to take the stairs for such a short distance, but new buildings like these were fazing out stairs altogether as obsolete technology, so tried to walk slowly down the corridor. He made a conserted effort not to look like he was dawdling, but, ultimately, he was trying to kill time. Even having scouted out the location and procedures, he had left his appartment in very good time, just in case. This meant he was now five minutes early - he had been told to report at fourteen hundred hours – not thirteen hundred and fifty-five. Mentally timing himself, he found the right room after an appropriately laboured stroll, just one minute prior to the specified time. Not too bad.

He knocked, and entered. Only two others were there, a girl even younger than himself (could she possibly be an Agent?) and a man slightly more in keeping with the age precedent McNair had set – he actually looked a little like him, funnily enough, grizzly and chiselled, but he didn't appear particularly happy to be there. Weren't there supposed to be nine of them? Well, of the two, not-McNair was clearly the more senior, and was looking, or glowering, at the newcomer anyway.

“James Hart. I am in the right place, aren't I?”