S am arrived at the office early. The brutal combination of the caravan’s mattress, the late night cranes lifting new caravans into place and the early morning sun shining in through the gap in the curtains meant that she had given up trying to sleep. She sneaked out while Marvin snored on, wondering how on earth he managed it.
She was first in the office and sat down with a coffee and a croissant. It was peaceful and civilised without anyone else in the office. Perhaps she had got so used to working alone in the DefCon4 office that she didn’t really want people around her. Sam’s mind strayed to Weenie’s niece, Candelina. Perhaps the whole of Weenie’s family were oddballs and outsiders, but something about that young woman made Sam frown with the recollection. She smiled down at Doug. Uncomplicated and loyal Doug.
She was on her second coffee when a van pulled up outside. It was a white panel van with the words Bungee Contract Services emblazoned on one side. Sam watched the driver get out and walk round to the entrance of the office with a large sack. He pulled out a key and let himself into the foyer. Sam couldn’t see what he was doing in there, but moments later, he reappeared with a different sack, loaded it into the van and drove off again.
Sam went through to the foyer and looked at the sack that was wedged into a plywood cubby hole. This one was marked incoming mail. Sam realised that the one the driver had taken was its twin in outgoing mail. The bags were marked up with the branding and logo of the Royal Mail, as she’d have expected, but the van that she had just seen was definitely not Royal Mail.
Interesting.
Sam rummaged in the incoming mail sack and pulled out a handful of envelopes. She flicked through them and found that they were all addressed to the depot scanning department.
She walked back to her desk and pulled out her diagram of the office floor plan and the flow of documentation around it. It seemed as though she now had an extra piece of information. She had wondered where the depot scans came from, and now it seemed as if they arrived as paper documents, from a fake postman.
She added Bungee Contract Services as a box on her picture and showed the depot scans coming from there. She changed the box into a little van, so that she would remember it was a transportation step. It jolted her slightly when she saw that she had drawn her own Piaggio Ape rather than anything that looked like a normal commercial vehicle.
Sam didn’t know a great deal about the world of logistics, apart from being a customer who sometimes got deliveries. Moving to a caravan had made that a much less predictable experience, but she had an appreciation of how it was supposed to work. Surely the point of having scanners along the route of a parcel’s journey was to get fast updates on its progress? Pieces of paper being driven around in a van made no sense at all. You’d want the scan data to be sent electronically so as to arrive moments after the scan had happened.
She wondered what was in the outgoing mail. She would take a look later in the day.
Rich hadn’t replied to her Synergenesis query text. That was odd in itself. Rich was welded to his technology. He had a young person’s fear of staying out of touch. And, without wishing to flatter herself, her ex-boyfriend never passed up an opportunity to contact her.
But from Rich, on the subject of his new company venture, there was total radio silence.