salute [h.s]

chapter 1 - covert communications & interesting introductions

Piper had thought that working for the SIS was going to be more glamourous.

After all, this was the Secret Intelligence Service – this was MI6. She had pictured a life like something out of a spy novel. She imagined far away destinations and hands on work and adrenaline, heart pounding races against time.

Instead, she sat in front of her computer all day fixing software issues. She was a typical IT employee working in an atypical environment. Some days, she felt like she was a character right off of the IT Crowd – hello, IT; have you tried turning it off and on again.

The worst part of it all was that she wasn't allowed to talk about her work. She had a cover story just like everyone else in the department did but because she was such a low level employee in her department, her cover story wasn't even interesting. When people asked her what she did, she had to rhyme off what she had been told – oh, I work in telemarketing; sure it can be a real drag sometimes; yes people do hang up on me quite often; no, I don't receive any life satisfaction from going to work each day – and she could see on her friends faces the sheer disappointment, that slow downturn of their mouths as they stopped smiling and started squinting at her all wrong. She could see it in their eyes, the is she really working as a telemarketer, still?

That was the other thing. Everyone seemed to think she was older than she was and her real age was also hidden behind her cover. Technically, if things had gone according to plan in her life, she would have just been graduating uni. Instead, she had been bumped up through the grade system of her secondary schools and had started at MIT at fifteen. She had graduated with honours at eighteen, completed a Masters and a Ph.D. by twenty two, and had been approached by SIS immediately upon her graduation. Most of her friends and colleagues were of a much older age than her and believed she was the same age as them, making her stagnant telemarketing job even more pathetic.

She longed to tell them that she was working for the Secret Intelligence Service, that she was an agent – actually, she wasn't really an agent yet but she was working her way there – but that was impossible with the amount of security that the SIS made their employees wade through. Which meant that all of Piper's friends thought she was pathetic and her mother called her endlessly to suggest new jobs opening up in her friend's computer factory (no matter how many times she told her mother she worked with computers, not on them, she never seemed to catch on). Her mother also complained endlessly about how Piper still didn't have a husband (she was only twenty three for Christ's sake) and once again, Piper couldn't tell her that you're right mum, I don't have a husband but it's because I have no time to go out when I spend my days fixing the computers of people who are protecting the country!

All she really longed for, deep down, was for something interesting to happen at work.

She was sure somewhere in the Technology department, or T Branch, something was going on. It just wasn't happening around her. Of course, she wasn't really surprised since she was working in the internal IT department. When she had been recruited, she had been lured in with talks of R&D and field support, the jobs that really would have lit that adventurous fire inside her. It wasn't until after training that she had been informed that those perks would only come after she had worked at entry level to the Service's satisfaction.

She had been taking on every little challenge, every extra opportunity she could so that she would move up faster in the department, which was why she was spending her Saturday night working the graveyard shift in IT, manning the phones.

There were people here and there but other than that, it was mostly quiet on the floor. A couple of people in lab coats had run through in a panic earlier, but she hadn't caught wind of why they were in such a rush. She had sat in front of her computer, scrolling through gossip rags that were featuring pictures of Kate, William and George, idly wondering why she hadn't pursued her childhood dream of being a princess. Certainly it was more glamourous than this.