Rook

of secrets. Tall cabinets with shining wood drawers. Folders sealed with wax. Boxes of orderly papers. And then I go past those rooms, put on a coat, and walk into the cold-storage area, where heavy steel cabinets guard the details.
    It’s always there in the details.
    Some things, however, aren’t available online or in the Rookery, and if they’re in one of our other London facilities, I go over on the weekend and prowl through the stacks of the Annexe or Apex House. If the records are somewhere else, I have them shipped over, and battered folders that Ingrid has to sign for show up on my desk, shrink-wrapped in plastic, with various seals stuck all over them. I always like looking at the names of the places they’ve come from. Bath, Stirling, the Orkneys, the Isle of Man, Manchester, Portsmouth, Edinburgh, Whitby, Exeter. We’re all over the place.
    And now I am trawling through the financial figures, which are not hundreds but thousands of pages long. The old Checquy financial methods and systems were nightmarishly convoluted, and even the new arrangements are as complex as you would expect of any gigantic quasi-independent government agency that operates all over the world in secret. Numbers writhein front of my eyes—account numbers, transaction numbers, staff ID numbers, authorization numbers, destination numbers. I have gotten my feet wet in slush funds, been dubious about trust funds, and asked discerning questions about discretionary funds.
    Why am I trawling through the financial records? Well, it’s because I have found in the course of my career that even in this secret world of power and mysticism and hidden wonders, it still usually comes down to the money. And I wonder if my abilities with figures and finances combined with my access to the records of the Checquy are the reason that someone in the Court will destroy me. Perhaps they fear that I will catch them out in some financial wrongdoing.
    Which, as it turns out, I may have done. It’s not huge, but it looks as if Sir Henry’s and Gestalt’s finances are both a little… unorthodox. Now, it may simply be the result of both of them having very peculiar lives. Sir Henry enjoys an extended life span and has operated under a couple of different names and identities, so there are issues there. Money has gotten lost. Meanwhile, Gestalt receives the salary of four people, but it’s not clear how many people’s worth of tax he pays.
    The thing is, this is not concrete. I don’t know for certain that any fraud has been committed by either of them. To confirm any wrongdoing—to go through their finances—would take more time than I have. What I have found would be enough, however, to warrant a massive investigation. Which is why it forms part of my blackmail contingency plan.
    But I don’t think either one’s financial impropriety is enough to warrant my destruction. It’s got to be something else that leads to my betrayal. Thus, every evening, every morning, every car ride, and every lunch hour (on the rare occasions that I get one), when I’m not scrutinizing the details of the Court’s personnel records, I’m going through financial records. Of course, the Checquy’s assets are vast and varied, and I can’t account for everything. But in my role as Rook, I’ve ordered double audits of the major vaults and had them done by rival sections in an effort to ensure that there’s no collaboration. In the meantime, I’m personally reviewing the finances of the bigger projects in the Checquy portfolio. These are quite complex, which makes it easy for financial jiggery-pokery to take place.
    It also makes them a complete bitch to review.
    At the moment, I am mired hip-deep in the funding that is allocated to the Estate every year, and make no mistake—it’s a
lot
of money. It would have to be. Every person who comes out of there at the age of nineteen has the equivalent of a thorough education through university, rigorous military training, and as complete a mastery of his or her powers as possible. The budget has to include the facilities of the best public school in the country, the equipment for diagnosing and testing a wide variety of superhuman abilities, the accommodations for a student population of genetically unstable people, the wages for the best-qualified and most open-minded teachers in the world,
and
security to keep all this a secret. Not to mention therapy for everyone concerned.
    I’m telling you all this because, as