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my glass, and caught it just in time. “No, that’s not right. He just expects me to keep myself busy between External Assets jobs.”
    “Paper clip audits.” Andy took a sip of Laphroaig. I didn’t bother to correct his misapprehension: External Assets, which Lockhart runs, is about paper clip audits the way the FBI is about arresting thieves, i.e. not at all but it’s extremely convenient for them that most people outside the organization don’t realize that. “Sounds to me like they want to see what you can do. Hmm.” Rueful amusement tugged at the sides of his lips. “So what are you going to do?”
    “I’m building a spreadsheet. One with a lot of very interesting pivot tables.” Andy peered at me with an expression of mild disbelief. “Getting clearances for the data to feed it is a bitch, and it’s anybody’s guess whether it’s going to deliver anything useful, but if you don’t ask you don’t get . . .”
    “Ask for
what
?” He hunched down in his chair. He was still a little shaky from the events of a couple of hours ago, despite all the whisky. “You’ve
always
hated admin work.”
    “It’s not admin; it’s data mining.” I smiled blandly. “Big data, forward threat analysis. It’s a really neat idea from the suggestions box—my hat’s off to whoever came up with it. What I’m doing is proof of concept; there’s no way I could get a budget to do it properly. But if it works, then I can present it for discussion and maybe get something rolling.”
    “Threat analysis and data mining?” Andy isn’t easily impressed: he has a habitual pose of arid detachment, an expression of distant amusement as if the slings and arrows of office politics (and the tentacles and curses of sudden-death engagement) are merely flying all around for his entertainment. But I’d got his undivided attention tonight: rescuing him from sudden death did that. “What kind of threats are you hunting, and where?”
    “I’m looking for outbreaks. Not sure what, or where, so I’m trying to spread the widest net that comes to hand. Anything peculiar. A rash of spontaneous human combustion in Stevenage, or rabies in Ravensthorpe; could be anything. The point is to try and build a tripwire for anomalies.”
    “But the police already—” He stopped. I shook my head.
    “Not the police. Sure they’ll be on the line as soon as they confirm a fire-breathing lizard has come ashore in Liverpool, but what about the other stuff? We live in dangerous times. What got me thinking was, how many of the sort of problems we get called in to piss on start out small and get treated by the wrong emergency services? Body snatchers in Bath, zombies in Z—Zurich.” My metaphor engine had just broken: I took another sip of whisky. “A lot of possession cases show up as anomalous behavior, and while the ambulance service often bring the police in, it’s frequently mis-categorized as a mental health issue. So I’m trying to work out how to mine the National Health Service data warehouses for early signs of demonic possession. That’s what the task was about. ‘Everybody knows vampires don’t exist,’ it said: ‘develop a data mining utility to provide three sigma confirmation of the null hypothesis based on evidence from the NHS Spine.’ I don’t know who put it on the stack but it’s
inspired
! I mean I couldn’t have come up with a better ten-percent project if I’d designed it myself.”
    Andy stared at me slack-jawed for a couple of seconds, then raised his left hand and theatrically closed his mouth. “Refill time.” He shoved his glass across the desk, towards the bottle. “Then you’re going to tell me why you’re telling me this.”
    “You haven’t guessed already?” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.
    “You need a minion to run interference for you with the nice Data Protection Commissioner with the taser, right?”
    “Right.” I topped up his tumbler.
    He hesitated momentarily. “Deal. Because