Chapter 146. The Fine Art of Looking Busy

Everyone is probably familiar with that rare feeling when monotonous, exhausting work suddenly seems to fly by. It does not matter what you are doing: compiling an annual financial report, working through complicated equations for homework, or simply methodically cleaning the house after a party. Something inside you clicks almost imperceptibly, and before you know it, you are looking at a perfectly finished result. Creative types and cheap romantics call it “inspiration,” while more sophisticated psychoanalysts refer to it as a mental trance or a state of flow.

But let some jerk from the department next door walk up to your desk and toss out the same stupid, obligatory, “Hey, how’s it going?” and all the magic instantly crumbles to dust. The idiot walks away thirty seconds later, leaving you alone with that dreary, sticky routine. The flow is gone. The wheels are spinning uselessly in the mud.

My [Special Command] allowed me to slip into a state of hyperfocus almost instantly. But there was a hard downside to that ability, one I had deliberately built into it myself: any outside interaction would knock me out of the trance, and every such interruption cost me mental charges. That was exactly what had happened to me just now.

I had been yanked out of computational flow long before I planned to finish the first data set. I found myself standing in the middle of the office with a yellowed, thirty-year-old shipping invoice in my hand. That was exactly where my structural analysis had been interrupted. It was a stupid, disorienting feeling. I drew a short, deep breath and glanced at my heavy wristwatch. Only fifty minutes had passed in real time.

“Mr. Ross, you look so serious and focused, you'd think you were getting ready to cut the blue wire on an armed bomb,” a coquettish, slightly hushed female voice came from the doorway. Betty stood there, leaning against the frame with a broad smile. “I hope I'm not distracting you too much from saving the world?”

“Yes, ma’am. You are,” I replied as bluntly as possible, without a trace of obligatory politeness. My voice came out dry and firm. “My methodology requires an extremely high level of concentration on long-term analytical tasks to achieve maximum efficiency. When that process is interrupted, the mental algorithm breaks down. Getting back into the flow will require significant time and internal resources.”

Betty’s flirtatious, radiant smile instantly slipped away, replaced by a strained, frightened expression. At that moment, she reminded me remarkably of a little girl who had reached out in delighted anticipation to pet a fluffy house cat, only for it to suddenly arch its back, hiss, and rake its claws across her palm.

Still, my internal auditor immediately flagged the behavioral error. Damaging my relationship with someone who had done nothing wrong was tactically unsound. Picking a fight with my immediate superior on my very first day was an even more reliable way to create unnecessary trouble and sabotage my adaptation operation. In the end, I was entirely responsible for the disruption. I had failed to lock the door and establish external boundaries.

“Ms. Sarandon, I'm sorry. I simply forgot to warn you in advance about the specifics of my methods for working with archival data,” I said, gently but firmly changing my tone and nipping the conflict in the bud. “That was my oversight. It won't happen again.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Ross. You don't have to be so formal,” she said with an immediate sigh of relief, effortlessly slipping back into her usual flirtatious manner. She touched the curls at the back of her head. “The way you talk makes me feel like some strict schoolteacher standing in front of a child. And I thought we'd already agreed. Just call me Betty.”

“All right, Betty. Then you can just call me Tom,” I said, managing a light, controlled smile, purely to reinforce her loyalty and establish a friendly rapport. “What brings you here? Did something happen in the department?”

“No, everything's quiet. I just noticed how quickly the stack of processed documents on your desk is growing,” she said, nodding approvingly toward the neatly arranged folders my [Special Command] had managed to sort before the interruption. “I figured someone as valuable as you ought to refuel a little. Lunch break just started, after all.”

I was not particularly hungry. After the morning’s upheaval, my body was operating in energy-saving mode. Still, my corporate experience told me that the local cafeteria was the best place to gather informal intelligence quickly. In half an hour, I could study the internal hierarchy, identify hidden conflicts between departments, and pick up a couple of genuinely useful practical tips that would never appear in any official manual.

“I'd be happy to,” I said, rising from my desk.

I carefully straightened my Corps dress jacket and hung it over the back of my chair, leaving myself in nothing but my uniform shirt and tie. Discipline had to be maintained, but excessive formality only got in the way when you were trying to collect gossip in a cafeteria.

The dining hall at the local administrative center was roughly one-tenth the size of the enormous hangar at P-SWAT. That made sense. The personnel density here was several times lower. Not all of the Corps’ administrators and supply officers worked in this gray brick building. Some of the logistics personnel were stationed on the other side of the District of Columbia, while the key figures had offices directly inside the Pentagon. This place was essentially an accounting branch. There was no point inflating the number of accountants just to calculate and issue paychecks, internal bonuses, and benefits for roughly two thousand field personnel every two weeks.

To my mild surprise, the food at the local cafeteria was not free. Unlike the engineering center, where Selina could charge enormous restaurant budgets to provide meals for her technicians, the government showed considerably less concern for the accountants. Catering here was handled by an outside company under a strict outsourcing arrangement. The Corps leadership clearly did not consider the outside cooks or food servers working in the building capable of carrying away any critically important classified information. Who cares about old payment records?

Still, I had no complaints about the quality of the menu. The local classic hamburger cost mere cents, yet it was half again as large, fresher, and visibly juicier than the equivalent from McDonald’s. After the miserable, bland barracks food I had been eating, this lunch might as well have been fine dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

I grabbed a plastic tray and methodically began loading it with plates, taking a little of everything and plenty of it.

“Wow, Tom. I see you're a serious fan of eating well. Although... I guess you have to keep those impressive muscles fueled somehow,” Betty, standing directly behind me in line, playfully nudged me in the side with her elbow and pointed toward the drink station. “By the way, friendly advice: skip that sour grapefruit juice and get the strawberry nectar instead. Trust me, it's absolutely divine here.”

I silently reached out and took both cups from the shelf, the grapefruit and the strawberry. Considering the bedlam and chaos that always reigned in the P-SWAT cafeteria, I decided it would be far more efficient to pack myself as full of calories as possible right here and now, in peace and quiet, and simply skip the army dinner back at the base to save time. Calories were fuel. And a former auditor could definitely use the fuel today.

For the enormous, heavy plastic tray loaded with enough food to leave a big, solidly built man like me completely stuffed, the outsourced cashier charged me exactly fifteen dollars. By Washington standards, that was practically pocket change. At any decent diner in the city, a meal with this many calories would have cost me at least three times as much.

The moment I picked an empty table toward the back of the room and set my tray down, the open space around me seemed to shrink instantly. A small flock of local female employees in their late thirties appeared beside me as if on cue, all more or less Betty’s age. My practiced auditor’s eye immediately picked up the one detail they all had in common, and it was the important one: not a single one of them wore a wedding ring on the ring finger of her left hand. Then, accompanied by the clatter of forks, I was hit with the standard, predictable lineup of questions straight out of some dating manual.

“So, Tom, what’s your zodiac sign? You seem like such a Scorpio.”

“Tom, what do you do for fun? I bet you practically live at the gym.”

“Tom, what do you usually do on weekends? Have you had a chance to explore the city yet?”

I answered calmly, keeping my voice even and giving them no unnecessary details or personal flourishes. At the same time, my brain was calculating their motives and the trajectory of the conversation. I knew perfectly well where they were steering this and what they were after. Just for the sake of curiosity, I cast a cautious glance toward the male employees sitting at the neighboring tables. There was no jealousy, anger, or simmering irritation in their eyes. If anything, their faces showed genuine, silent sympathy for the coworker who had just been caught in the crossfire.

If I had been ten years younger, back when my career was just getting started, I probably would have been grinning from ear to ear over this avalanche of female attention. But now these women, permanently stuck in the role of perpetual brides-to-be, with their heavy makeup, strained smiles, and obvious extra weight, inspired little more than mild boredom in me. Apparently, after spending so much time around the slender, graceful, predatory Selina, my aesthetic standards had climbed to a height ordinary office clerks could never hope to reach. I had simply gotten too spoiled.

“Tom, have you decided what you're going to spend your very first Corps paycheck on?” Betty leaned a little closer, resting her chin on her plump palm.

Oh, yes. There it was. The perfect question I had been patiently waiting for. Now I could put an end to this whole subject once and for all.

“I’m going to visit every jewelry store in the district,” I said coolly, cutting off an impressive piece of juicy steak with my knife and popping it into my mouth. “I’ll pick out the finest, flawless diamond ring I can find and propose to my girlfriend. She deserves it.”

“Oh... that’s so romantic!” Betty sighed theatrically.

“She must be so happy. Congratulations, Tom!”

“I hope you’ll invite me to the wedding. We need an excuse to pop some champagne in the department.”

Their voices instantly filled with sugary sweetness and obligatory congratulations, but the predatory, assessing spark that had been fixed on me just a minute earlier went out completely. The local tactical mission had been executed flawlessly. These women would not be flirting with me and wasting my time during working hours anymore. At least, not for a while. My analytical mind understood that in two or three months, they would inevitably notice the absence of a ring on my own finger, and another wave of awkward questions would follow. By then, however, I would have some much firmer answers prepared.

I returned to my office, locked the door behind me, and methodically went back to work.

The hyperfocus finally broke at exactly quarter to four. Every last scrap of paperwork in the room had been neatly sorted by year, filed into folders, and arranged into perfectly ordered stacks. Work that would have taken an entire team of ordinary staff clerks at least two weeks of uninterrupted manual labor had taken me barely half a day to tear through on my own.

Beside me, at the edge of the desk, lay a sheet containing a detailed list of missing documents, generated by my ability. After studying the list, I mentally divided it exactly in half. I would request the first batch right now and deliberately put off the second until next week. Why? To create the appearance of a long, difficult, exhausting process for management to observe. Showing results too quickly would only create unnecessary pressure.

I still had fifteen minutes before the office officially closed. Out of old office habit, I could have gone online and mindlessly scrolled through the news, but instead I simply leaned farther back against the stiff chair. I needed to let my overheated brain cool down. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and mentally stepped into my own Palace of Memory.

The peculiar feature of my [Special Command] was that any data sets I processed while in hyperfocus did not simply vanish afterward. They settled in the halls of my mind as perfectly organized, structured tables. My brain was now operating at roughly the speed of a modern server, so it took exactly one minute of real time to skim through and analyze the most interesting financial statements with painstaking attention.

First, my inner auditor decided to dig into the actual payroll records of my new acquaintances. The numbers turned out to be extremely interesting. As head of the engineering center, Selina officially received one hundred and seventy thousand dollars a month from the government, including all the allowances attached to her rank of major. My own salary, once all the bonuses were included, was nearly three times hers. A substantial, undeniable argument to keep in my back pocket. It would come in handy the next time she arrogantly tilted that elegant head of hers in my presence.

Leon was doing even better. His line showed nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month. Serious money, justified by his prestigious rank of colonel and a whole string of classified combat decorations. At the moment, he held the second-highest income in the Corps, immediately behind me. Megan came next in third place. She did not have many combat medals to her name, but the ministry generously made up the difference with bonuses for successfully completing humanitarian missions to deliver fresh water to drought-stricken regions and developing countries.

But my most valuable discovery was a different hidden provision in the regulations. I clearly confirmed that heading any department within the organization automatically came with a fixed thirty-thousand-dollar increase to the base monthly salary. I had never considered myself greedy or avaricious. Money was simply a tool for maintaining control and ensuring my personal security. But that dry little figure on the payroll immediately and significantly increased my motivation. The chair where the hungover Dillon was currently sitting around doing nothing had to become mine. It was simply the logical next step in optimizing the personnel structure.

At exactly four o’clock, I left my office. On my way out, I said a warm, professionally appropriate goodbye to my colleagues and handed Betty the first half of the list of missing documents. She solemnly promised to track them down in the central archive before my next visit.

As I walked toward the exit of the gray brick box, I could feel a pleasant warmth spreading through me. My first day in the administrative sector had gone perfectly. Unlike the barracks pigsty that was P-SWAT, this was somewhere I would actually look forward to coming to work.