Becoming Agent Rider

Work Experience

" - monitor for any unusual activity."

There was a long pause, making Alex look over at his mentor for the morning that Crawley had dumped him on. He was at a cubicle in the junior and intermediate analysts' office on the fourth floor and had been zoning out and staring at the computer screen blankly for the last ten minutes or so, having already gotten the general idea of an MI6 analyst's day to day tasks halfway through the explanation.

"Your tie and glasses are fine the way they are," his mentor said, evidently amused. "That's the fifth time in an hour that you've adjusted them."

Alex blinked, looking at his hands, and sheepishly brought them back down to rest on the desk that they were currently sitting at. As soon as he'd walked into the Bank that morning, Crawley had led him to a washroom and made him change out of his usual jeans and hoodie and into a suspiciously well-tailored, if cheap, suit. The business attire, along with a pair of glasses and a different arrangement of his hair, were supposed to help him blend in with the other MI6 employees and make him look a little older. So far, he hadn't gotten any shocked looks so he supposed it was working. He grinned nervously at his mentor. "Sorry, boss. I'm still getting used to this stuff. It's weird to wear such stiff clothing too, you know? And no backpack!"

His mentor chuckled. "You'll get used to it. I bet the novelty of not being in school will wear off in a few weeks. Anyways, as I was saying, we monitor and analyze all sorts of things. Surveillance tapes, monetary transactions, speech patterns, you name it. Most of this - "

Alex let his mind drift again. None of this information was surprising to him so he let himself relax into the fresh out of college intern persona on an experimental program that he and Jones had agreed on using as his cover, asking questions when appropriate.

"Understand?" his mentor asked after wrapping up the explanation fifteen minutes later.

"Yes, I think so," Alex answered.

"Good. I'll just give you these bank and credit card accounts to analyze as a start then," his mentor said, typing away on the keyboard and pulling up a list. "Let me know if you've got any questions. Once you're finished writing up a report for them, I'll give you something else to do."

Nodding, Alex got to work as his mentor went back to his office. He scrolled through the transactions for the first account and made a few notes. It wasn't clear exactly what he was supposed to be looking for but there wasn't anything unusual that he could see. A few patterns, mostly steady income and bills to pay. But no sudden, big purchases. No unexplained money going in. So, within twenty minutes of examining the account transactions, he was bored and couldn't help yawning out loud. The list of fifteen accounts assigned to him for analysis belonged to a motley bunch. Personal and business. Different social classes. A wide range of countries. He continued writing basically the same report in different words for each account. Until he got to the last one. Hitachi. A Japanese multinational conglomerate tech company that offered business solutions.

Given what he knew of the current shareholder situation in Japanese companies, he decided to pay a little more attention to this one. At first, he couldn't see anything unusual. He went over it again. Still nothing. One more time. Something he couldn't pinpoint niggled at the back of his mind. Frowning, he examined the transactions a little more closely. Normal... regular schedule... expected payment... regular schedule... too small of a one time amount to be significant. Alex sighed. This wasn't going anywhere. He tilted his head to rest on the back of his chair, staring blankly at the ceiling in thought.

After a few minutes, he decided on a different approach. Alex exported the account report to Excel and rearranged the transactions so that the income source and destination for payments were grouped by name. Still nothing. Everything appeared to be normal. Maybe he was just being paranoid, Alex thought resignedly. He looked it over once more even as he moved to close the file. And froze a hair's breadth away from clicking the little "x" at the top right corner. Staring at the section that had caught his attention, he frowned as he tried to figure out why it was raising an alarm in his mind. Weekly, pre-authorized deposits into the account. Nothing suspicious about the time. He looked at the numbers. The oldest transaction in that group, 1,346,269 Japanese yen, was perhaps too large of an amount for income. Maybe. Hard to tell since Hitachi was such a large company. The next amount was quite a bit smaller at just 832,040 Japanese yen. 514,229 was next. After that, it was 317,811. Eight weeks of payments so far, with the most recent one at 46,368 Japanese yen. Alex couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong with the numbers in this group. Searching for a pattern, he soon found that the two most recent amounts added up to the third and that pattern continued with the rest of the payments.