"No you don't, Supe! You don't get the half of it. This guy isn't your average Liberal — those guys usually basic opportunists. He's a zealot! He'd like to beat us with truncheons! I went to one of his debates, and he showed up with a baseball bat! He tried to hit me with it!"
"What were you doing at the time?"
"What does it matter? Violence is never an acceptable response. I've thrown pies at better men than him —"
Hershie grinned. Thomas hadn't invented pieing, but his contributions to the art were seminal. "Thomas, the man is a federal Minister, with obligations. He can't just write me off — he'll have to pay me."
"Sure, sure," Thomas crooned. "Of course he will — who ever heard of a politician abusing his office to advance his agenda? I don't know what I was thinking. I apologise."
#
Hershie touched down on Parliament Hill, heart racing. Thomas's warning echoed in his head. His memories of Woolley were already morphing, so that the slick, neat kid became feral, predatory. The Hill was marshy and cold and gray, and as he squelched up to the main security desk, he felt a cold ooze of mud infiltrate its way into his super-bootie. There was a new RCMP constable on duty, a turbanned Sikh. Normally, he felt awkward around the Sikhs in the Mounties. He imagined that their lack of cultural context made his tights and emblem seem absurd, that they evoked grins beneath the Sikhs' fierce moustaches. But today, he was glad the man was a Sikh, another foreigner with an uneasy berth in the Canadian military-industrial complex. The Sikh was expressionless as Hershie squirted his clearances from his comm to the security desk's transceiver. Imperturbably, the Sikh squirted back directions to Woolley's new office, just a short jaunt from the exalted heights of the Prime Minister's Office.
The Minister's office was guarded by: a dignified antique door that had the rich finish of wood that has been buffed daily for two centuries; an RCMP constable in plainclothes; a young, handsome receptionist in a silk navy power-suit; a slightly older office manager whose heart-stopping beauty was only barely restrained by her chaste blouse and skirt; and, finally, a pair of boardroom doors with spotless brass handles and a retinal scanner.
Each obstacle took more time to weather than the last, so it was nearly an hour before the office manager stared fixedly into the scanner until the locks opened with a soft clack. Hershie squelched in, leaving a slushy dribble on the muted industrial-grade brown carpet.
Woolley knelt on the stool of an ergonomic work-cart, enveloped in an articulated nest of displays, comms, keyboards, datagloves, immersive headsets, stylii, sticky notes and cup-holders. His posture, hair and expression rivaled one-another for flawlessness.