Page 6 of Salt Kiss
“Hello, new guy,” he says cheerfully. He’s older than me by a couple of decades, with plenty of lines around his eyes and a starburst scar on the side of his mouth. He has a broad face with a lantern jaw, and a twinkling gaze. He looks like the kind of guy whose laughter fills a bar—also the kind of guy a bartender looks to for help with an unruly patron. But I don’t miss the quick, efficient flick of that same twinkling gaze over the wall of screens in front of him. A former 1/9 like him would be more than a gentle giant. And Mark doesn’t strike me as the kind of employer to hire someone for their genial personality alone.
“I’m Tristan Thomas, sir,” I say, taking his offered hand and then sitting in the chair next to him. “Ms. Lim said you’d be showing me around today?”
“Kink club orientation, right, right,” Goran says, reaching for a sheaf of papers. “We have a bit of an unusual situation with your position.”
“A bit of one?” I ask as I accept the papers and then a pen. I use the long desk in front of the security screens to start flipping through everything. My employment contract. Another NDA. A direct deposit form. “Everything in this place is unusual.”
Goran laughs, and I’m right, it’s a sound that fills a room. It almost makes me smile, it’s that nice to hear. “Damn right it is, but you’ll like it. You just got back from Carpathia, right? Well, the food is better, and the view too. Plus you’ll never meet a more unhinged son of a bitch than Mark Trevena—never a boring day with him around.”
“Right,” I say. I start signing my way through the papers without giving them more than a cursory once-over. Like I said, the military has ruined me for signing my life away.
“But your position is unusual even for here. See, I’m the head of Lyonesse’s security, but as his personal bodyguard, you’ll report to Mr. Trevena directly. Or put another way, he’s your boss but come to me with all the boring shit, and I’ll handle it.”
“Got it. Are there other people on Lyonesse’s security team?”
Goran leans back in his chair. “There are ten of us—eleven including you—and then an outside team we contract with for larger events. Since Mr. Trevena’s primary residence is here, the team is available for your relief shifts whenever Mr. Trevena is in DC. But when he travels, you’ll be on call twenty-four-seven. All done already? You don’t waste too much time reading the fine print, huh?”
I slide the papers his way, pen placed neatly on top. “Nothing’s worse than where I’ve been.” I mean it in a gallows humor sort of way, likeha-ha, isn’t it funny that I spent the last eight years of my life getting yelled at, shot at, getting scared and scorned and was somehow still lonely even around sixty other people?but Goran’s face goes still when I say it.
“Yeah,” he says, and something in his voice makes me wonder if he was in Carpathia back when President Colchester was there, when the war was still awarand not aconflict.
The Walking Dead re-earned their nickname several times over in Carpathia—highest killed-in-action ratio of any Marine battalion. And for a minute, the difference between Marine and soldier disappears, and we’re just two men hiding scars on the insides of our thoughts, scars in the shape of mountains and forests and too-empty villages.
“Yeah,” he says again, heavily, and then stands. “Come on. We’ll find someone to man the cameras, and then I’ll take you for the nickel tour before I give you to the boss.”
I’m given a laptop,earpiece, gun, and harness. Then I meet two of the other security team members and get acquainted with the shift rotations—skeleton crew during the day, with increasing shift coverage toward the evening. The club is busiest from dinner till two or three in the morning; Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest of them all, with members drinking, fucking, and making use of private rooms until dawn. I get the impression that Goran runs an amiable but tight ship, and the two team members I meet seem to respect him immensely.
On an upper floor, we stop by some glass-walled offices and meet the club’s manager, Dinah—a slender woman with dark, jewel-toned skin, undercut purple curls, and a cell phone that won’t stop chiming with club business as we make introductions—and Sedge, a fair and freckled young man with nearly colorless eyes, who’s Mark’s administrative assistant. We also meet a pale woman with a wary expression and dark hair in waves over her shoulders. Andrea, the club’s treasurer. I don’t know if she is the treasurer of the club’s money or of its hoard of information. I wonder if she helps Mark with his sometimes-blackmail.
She doesn’t seem to like me.
But Goran’s cheerfulness bulldozes through any awkward moments, and then we’re touring the building: the large open hall in the center, ringed with balconies and with a stage at the front; the private rooms, furnished in the most luxurious depravity and outfitted with panic buttons and cameras for the safety of guests and club employees alike; the decadent, speakeasy-style bar on the second-highest floor.
“They’ll tell you in some corporate bullshit seminar that you can only have one priority,” Goran says as we take the elevators down past the ground floor and to a subfloor. “But you’re better than that, so I can tell you that we have two priorities here at Lyonesse. The first is to keep everyone here safe—guests and employees. The second is to keep this floor locked down at all fucking costs.”
The elevator doors open not to a dank concrete corridor but to a spacious vestibule lit with blue lights. Glass double doors are opposite our elevator, and beyond them, I see a second set. I also see a thumbprint scanner, a retina scanner, and a surfeit of cameras.
I don’t need Goran to tell me what’s down here. “The information.”
“Membership dues,” Goran says, sounding pleased at my deduction. “Servers are down here. All sorts of fancy stuff to keep them cool and air-gapped and whatever else. We don’t need to know all the tech-y shit, but it’s our job to make sure no one comes down here except Mr. Trevena, Dinah, and Andrea. It’s rigged up pretty tight against someone trying to get something, but it’s not foolproof.”
“Rigged up?”
Goran nods at the locks. “Any attempt to open the doors without a valid thumb and retina scan will trigger an alarm. The floor around the servers is built with weight sensors—if there’s any kind of unauthorized approach to the machines, the room responds by sealing itself off with aluminum shutters, and the servers will power down. Nothing online and no way out until we let you out.”
“And that’s not foolproof?”
He scratches his neck. “There’s a lot of machinery to shut down, and it has to go offline in the right way so nothing is corrupted, or something—I don’t know. The upshot is that someone conceivably could have nearly a full minute to connect with the servers and try to get something.”
“But then they’d still be locked in the room.”
“Yeah. Unless they rolled out from under the doors before they came all the way down—but you have less than sixty seconds from triggering the sensor to the room being sealed off. So it’s unlikely someone could get what they wanted and then make it back out in time, but unlikely isn’t impossible, and we’d do well not to forget that.”
I look through the two sets of doors again, able to make out a larger room beyond, lit with more blue light. I wonder what kind of information people surrender when they come—and if it’s worth it, knowing someone has the potential to blackmail you at a moment’s notice.
As if sensing where my thoughts are, Goran says, “It doesn’t have to be information about yourself, you know.”
I glance back at him, confused. “What else would people give, sir?”
