Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 970: Sniffing Dog

Ms. Rook read it through once more before she said any of it out loud, and the ops floor let her, because her face had already told them the category.

"Federal Bureau of Awakened Affairs." She set the tablet flat on the map table and turned it so the seal faced Kaiden. "Member Welfare and Labor Standards Division. Eclipse is subject to a member welfare investigation. Working conditions, living conditions, compensation practices, duty of care. A field team arrives tomorrow at eight."

"A field team," Doug repeated. He had his glasses back on, hand out, so Rook passed him the tablet. "The previous one barely just left. This is ridiculous!"

"Keep reading," Rook said.

He kept reading, and the floor watched his face do the same thing hers had done.

"Paragraph four. All proceedings are confidential under federal statute." Doug looked up over the rims. "No recording of interviews or inspection activity. By any party."

"They watched the stream," Nyx said from her desk. "Hobbes walked this compound for most of a day on camera, and the whole country saw the report come back clean. Somebody learned from it."

Vespera held out one hand, and Doug put the tablet in it.

She read the order once and set it down.

"Expensive," she said.

Doug picked the tablet back up and found what she had already seen. "She’s right. Countersigned twice, routed through every desk the first order skipped. Somebody spent real money moving this one."

"On what grounds?" Kaiden asked. "This guild is a week old. What conditions? Half the dorms still smell like paint."

"Sworn statements." Nyx had three windows open across her desk, and she was reading off the middle one. "The complaint basis cites testimony from former guild personnel concerning coercive practices, irregular compensation, and unsafe living arrangements."

"Former personnel?" Luna’s boots hit the floor. "We’ve had former personnel for one fucking day!"

"The statements are dated." Nyx dragged the window forward. "Three of them were sworn before the resignations were filed."

The pump under the stairs ran on to itself while the room caught up.

"They were writing testimony against us while they were still wearing our gear," Aria said. She was still at the corner of Nyx’s desk, and her voice stayed as pleasant as it had been for Lazarus.

"I don’t think this was the creepy gramps," Bastet muttered.

"He wanted to scare us. This is much more than that," Alexandra agreed.

"Radiant Order..." Kaiden murmured under his breath.

"Yeah. Possibly with hidden backers." Nyx sat back.

"And I’m afraid none of this is illegal. At least not in a way that lets us shut the book on them in court easily.

"Radiant employs people who have opinions about their old guild. The Bureau received complaints and acted on them. Every link in the chain is clean, and the chain still only pulls one direction."

"So the people they bought this afternoon get quoted at us tomorrow," Kaiden said.

Nobody improved on that.

Calypso came off the wall by the glass, and her tail was moving again. "Then tomorrow we show the little clipboard people the dorms, they see there is nothing wrong, and they leave. Why the long faces? We have done this dance."

"Because this one isn’t coming to look at buildings," Aria said.

The demoness frowned. "Then what is it coming to look at?"

"Us," Kaiden said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "They’re going to sit our people down one at a time, alone, and ask them what it’s like working for me."

"The first investigation was legit," Luna scoffed. "This... This smells of bullshit. Eclipse is under attack."

...

The night went to work.

Rook had outside counsel confirmed by eleven, two of them, the kind Vespera’s name produced on a Sunday night.

Doug built a witness roster so that no federal officer would stand in any room of that compound without an Eclipse employee standing in it too, taking notes by hand, which no statute anywhere forbade.

Kaiden gathered the staff on the ops floor at midnight and kept it short.

"Tomorrow, everybody answers everything they ask, and tells them the boring truth without polishing it."

He looked around the floor. "They’re going to be rude. Be boring anyway, because boring gives them nothing to quote."

"Understood!" the floor chorused back, ragged and overtired, ready to follow him into a filing cabinet.

Kira and Rika took the confidentiality clause the way other people take a bereavement. They stood in front of Kaiden holding their tablets against their chests, and Rika got as far as "But the archive-" before Rook’s look ended the sentence for her.

"The cameras go dark on the whole lot by the time they arrive," Kaiden confirmed.

By three the building had gone quiet. Out on the lot the gravel sat blue under the floodlights, and the shape lying along the base of the headquarters kept watch.

Six amber eyes stayed open in the dark, on the drive, where the cars would come from.

...

They came at eight exactly. Three gray sedans, nose to tail, and six people got out of them in the same ten seconds, as if they had rehearsed the getting out.

The man who led them across the gravel was tall and silver at the temples, in a suit a full pay grade above Hobbes’s, and he walked past the checkpoint guard’s greeting without turning his head.

"Senior Assessor Whitlock." He held his credentials up at Rook for exactly as long as it took to say it, already moving. "Member Welfare and Labor Standards. My team will need a private room with a door, a list of all personnel on site, and access to your facilities. We will not be requiring an escort."

"You’ll have all three, with visitor badges." Ms. Rook stood in his path with the laminates held out, unhurried. "Site accreditation. Everyone wears one. Your Bureau colleague found the system agreeable in its efficiency."

Whitlock looked at the badges, then at her, and took them without putting one on.

Behind him his people had already spread across the lot in a loose line, and their pens were moving before anyone had asked them a question. One stood photographing the pale rectangle of gravel where the command tent had been, from three angles. Another had stopped at the flagpoles and was counting, apparently, the flagpoles.

"Your file lists a temporary structure here," Whitlock said, in passing, to nobody. "Occupied. Sleeping quarters for guild leadership."

"It came down last week," Doug said. "The building got finished, so we stopped living in a tent."

"Removed prior to inspection." The pen moved. "Noted."

Short of the headquarters, the sixth assessor had stopped walking altogether.

Pebble was on duty.

He lay along the building’s foundation with his head level, his crown of amber eyes distributed among the six strangers on his gravel with an even-handedness that suggested inventory. When the assessor produced a rangefinder and aimed it at him from thirty meters, one eye rotated to the instrument and stayed on it.

"It’s watching me," the assessor reported, pen ready.

"Yes," Kaiden said, coming down the front steps. "He’s watching you. He does that when strangers photograph his family before saying good morning."

"Mister Grey." Whitlock arrived at the foot of the steps and did not offer a hand. He looked up at the three stories of dark glass, already pricing the damage he intended to find in it. "This building went up in under a month. Expedited construction. We’ll want the occupancy certifications."

"You’ll have them."

"And the interviews begin at nine." Whitlock finally put his eyes on him. "Your members, one at a time, alone. Counsel may wait outside the door. You may wait wherever you like, provided it is not within earshot, and I’ll ask you to instruct that thing to hold its position while my team works."

Doug had the witness roster in his hand and got as far as lifting it.

"Interviews under this order are closed proceedings, single subject." Whitlock recited the subsection from memory without looking at him. "Your roster covers rooms. It doesn’t cover my interviews."

Around the edges of the lot, four hundred people decided at the same moment not to be seen listening.

"His position is his own," Kaiden said, pleasant. "He’s a legal person, Assessor. It’s in the file."

"So it is." Whitlock’s smile arrived, thin and unhurried, the first one he’d spent. "Quite a lot of things are in your file, Mister Grey."

He went up the steps past him without waiting for the door to be held.

...