Headhunter Page 7

  *

  Back at the workstation he fires up the machines and pulls a cold bottle of water from the fridge. The place is clean - someone has been sent in to do this whilst he was outside. Is that the security guys taking advantage of the quiet, or the cleaner merely waiting to do it when he isn't around so she needn't be anywhere near him any more than necessary. He sees again the button-pop off her dress, the tone of her skin and the faint blue of the veins meandering beneath.

  The two computers exhale their hot breath into the room and the air-con fights back, hissing out the cold in a silent argument. The screens show that a glut of responses have come in, some of the data filtering through the dams he's built upstream and he scans through, begins decrypting and finding where they're from, which name-tags they correspond to.

  He mentally ticks off another two of those Horner seems most eager to see and feels the relief and anticipates the satisfaction that it will give his boss. In all there are five responses and a response implies consent. They've not opened lines for clear communication or correspondence. This was not about talking, it was about laying out a gift upon the doorstep of each of them, an offer of redress and how to claim it.

  There were now more than thirty respondents and less than twenty who had yet to respond. Hogg had been able to track the progress of the contacts they sent out and could see which had been delivered and accessed so he knew that a handful had still even to see what they had been sent. The rest, a dozen of them, were in possession of the message but had not yet reacted. Many would suspect a trap of course, but there was much to demonstrate otherwise and maybe these dozen were simply more cautious than the others, or less literate in the medium. Perhaps they simply did not possess the means to verify the truth of what they were seeing. Perhaps they were just thinking things over.

  The alternative was that they had chosen not to respond and though Hogg didn't know precisely what that might mean, he knew it wasn't anything good, not the way Horner's face twitched and tightened that little bit more each time Hogg told him about the holdouts.

  He looked again at the dozen to see which had been silent longest. The longer they did not reply, it followed, the more cause to worry. As he quickly saw, nine of the twelve had only been in receipt for a short space of time; a few days at most.

  Two had been almost a week, but one of those didn't seem to concern Horner.

  But there was one whose lack of a response stood out most. One of the first to go out, and received and accessed fairly promptly. One of the names that seemed most to etch tension into Horner's face.

  Stripes.

  A randomly assigned name, as they all were, or so Hogg believed. They were all so innocuous and mundane that they had to be random.

  Branch. Nimbus. Hind. They seemed featureless, meaningfully devoid of meaning.

  But that was not to say that meaning could not be assigned, even unconsciously. Hogg saw something in his mind when he read that word, Stripes.

  He saw a tiger, stalking in the long grass, poised and watching.