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“You really wanted that undercover assignment, didn’t you?” Owen said to me as we left Merlin’s office after briefing Kim.
“Kinda,” I admitted. “But I get why it wasn’t me. If I suddenly popped up, looking for a job with them, I might as well be wearing a light-up button saying, ‘Hi! I’m here to infiltrate you!’ Still, it would be really cool. And better than working on updating our marketing materials.”
“Maybe while Kim’s on assignment, you could go back to your old job as Merlin’s assistant.”
The idea tempted me for a moment, but then I sighed and said, “It’s probably best if I don’t. I’d have to leave again when Kim came back, and then I’d have to pick up where I left off with the marketing. I really ought to try staying in one job here for more than a few months.”
*
I may not have been going undercover, but I wasn’t off the hook in our efforts to defend the company against the Collegium. I spent enough time in Rod’s office that I was beginning to think maybe I should just resign my marketing job and consider what I was doing security.
At first, we just pored over paperwork. “I don’t know why you need me for this,” I grumbled on Friday afternoon, after several days of reading personnel files. “Company paperwork isn’t going to be magically veiled or altered, is it?”
“It depends on who did it. I haven’t been in this job forever, you know. The person before me may have hidden plants in plain sight. And you never know if a reference letter or transcript might have been altered.”
I stared in dismay at the stacks of files that all looked meaningless to me. “I don’t even know what to look for.”
“If something’s been magically altered or hidden, we’ll consider that a red flag.”
It was tedious work, both of us having to look at the same document together, him reading what he saw and me making sure that’s what I saw. It reminded me of my early days at the company, when that was what I did all day. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was ridiculously easy to recruit MSI immunes, as boring as their jobs could be. In the time we’d been combing through the records of employees who’d begun work before Rod took over in personnel, we’d yet to find anything remotely fishy.
When we finally reached the bottom of the stack, I wanted to throw all the files in the air in celebration, but my joy was tempered by the fact that finding nothing meant we hadn’t gained anything.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone in that dismay. Rod sat there, frowning. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “We should have found at least one.”
“Well, if the personnel director was in on it, he’d hardly have put the real info in the records at all,” I said, grasping at straws. “Maybe they didn’t even bother keeping two sets of books, so to speak.”
“True,” he said, nodding. “I guess we need to check the paperwork of the people who came in under my watch—reference letters should be a good start.”
“Is there a way to find people who might have applied under the former person but were hired under you?”
“That’s a good thought. Maybe the initial applications had some indication that these were people who were vouched for.” He got up from his desk and went to the outer office, calling out, “Isabel, I’m going to need some more files.”
While they were going through whatever filing system they used, I stood and stretched. Rod came in with a reassuringly small stack of files. “That’s it?” I asked.
“It’s enough. Unless you just like reading employment files.”
I forced a grin. “My, what a lovely small stack.”
We returned to our seats at his desk, and he opened the first file. He didn’t even have to start reading before I pointed out, “This is one of them.”
“How do you know?”
“That reference letter is blank. There’s just a symbol on it, something like a starburst with a rune-like letter in the middle. I bet Owen could tell us what it is.”
He leaned over the page. “It looks like a regular reference letter to me.”
I squinted at the symbol. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Then for a split second, I somehow squinted hard enough to make it look small and distant. “Hey, wait,” I said, frantically reaching for the pile of files we’d just gone through. I tossed aside the first three, but then there it was, on the top of the fourth employment file: that same symbol, very tiny. “See, there it is,” I said.
He leaned over to look. “I don’t see anything.”
“Then it must be veiled, and you’d have to be in the know to unlock the spell. Maybe they’ve coded all the Collegium people. That reference letter must have been just in case the new personnel director was also Collegium. If he had been, the symbol would have been enough, but since it was you, you see a normal reference letter.”
He pushed the stack of files toward me. “Well, since you’re the one who can see the symbol, have fun with that. Do you want some coffee?”
“No thanks. I’d probably spill it on your files.”
“Okay, then. I’ll let you work. I’ll be back in a bit.”
