The group mingled for a few minutes after Smith's departure, taking in the grandiose Centre of Operations and making slightly maddening small-talk. Stuart's reaction was slightly muted if only because he had previously been shown the C.O, glorious though it was. As the relative 'expert' among them, he offered, managing not to grit his teeth, to boil the kettle in the kitchenette to the side and make the drinks. Rather than take an actual drinks order, he simply shouted over his shoulder across the huge room to each of the team in turn, asking them what they wanted. There was one primary cupboard, well-stocked by the BUC, and a slightly bizarre-looking stack of nine cupboards arranged artfully to the side like an installation piece. One for each member. The BUC had also kindly arranged, if slightly underwhelmingly following the top-of-the-range laptops, for each member to have a nice white mug with their name written on the side in inoffensive black lettering. Checking the correct drink was in the correctly-named recepticle, he turned to his own. The tea had been infusing for a few minutes, and he gave the bag one last vigorous stir before squeezing the teabag against the side of his own mug and flicking it expertly into the bin.

It had been a moment of disappointing tact that had him use his own respective mug; one of the few things he had bothered to bring in his suitcase had been his own cup, a proper teacup of colossal proportions, with the epithet [i]'He who must be obeyed'[/i] embossed on the side. While an accepted law of those offices flying under his flag in Westminster, he presumed it might be considered too aggressive a joke for a group of perfect strangers, or, worse, taken as literally as it was meant. It was his ninth cup of identical design. He had frequented eight different departments in his final role in Westminster and had his PA make it known that his tea was to be delivered to him in no other recepticle, and that nobody else was to use it. It was a running joke, that he encouraged, that each of those cups was The Chalice of Dread. The ninth Chalice of Dread was a replacement for the sixth, which had been thrust into the computer monitor of its resident department. It was an unfortunate incident in which the Secretary of State lost, in order, a memory stick containing the exclusive records of the UK's sex offenders, the screen of the aforementioned computer monitor, and, shortly after, his job. For his own part, Stuart lost his temper and, as a result, the sixth Chalice of Dread. Its replacement was bought, in an act of outstanding toadying, by the Defence Secretary's replacement. This was the one that Stuart had bought to America. His lips grazed the top of the capital 'S' of his name as he sipped his tea. It didn't taste right from a mug. Or perhaps his tea-fu was under par. Could go either way.

He joined the others for only a moment before a smartly-dressed young woman exited the lift. She looked slightly tired, to no great surprise at this late hour (they really did work all round the clock), but professional nonetheless. She addressed the group.

"Evening everybody," she said, "I'm Alice, from the IT department."

There was a rustle, which she pre-empted, "IT is a little different here. Most things are. You'll get used to it. Anyway, as new agents, I've had to do a bit of a spot-check on you all. We like to know everything, but, often, so do the people we're dealing with. Some of you," she looked proudly at Biermann, "Have done an excellent job of keeping a low-profile. Most of the rest of you worked for the state in one form or another. You, well, don't exist any more. You're still citizens, don't worry, but I could Google each and every one of you and you just won't be there. There's not one photo of any of you on the internet. Anywhere. Nix. Nada. Except Mr Front," her eyes lingered on Stuart, somehow glassy and steely at the same time, "As a non-US citizen, it has taken a [i]little[/i] more effort to erase you, but we're nearly there. If you'd like to follow me for a moment."

Stuart shrugged, and followed her into one of the offices adjoined to the C.O. It wasn't the biggest, but was as plushly furnished as the rest of the floor and filled with leafy plants, whose sunlight-deprived existences were somewhat baffling. Alice shut the door, and locked it.

"These are soundproof, so, don't worry," she said, gesturing to the sofa nestled underneath a canopy of green. It faced an enormous display screen connected to the computer, at which Alice was furiously typing, the actual monitor obscured by her head, "I thought I'd deal with this privately, to spare you the embarrassment. It appears to have been quite the sorry saga."

"You could say that," Stuart bristled, his grip on the mug tightening slightly. A photograph of himself outside the courthouse loaded on the display screen.

"But the BUC is magnanimous, and Alice is a genious, and between us, Alice and the BUC are able to make all this go away. The online stuff, at least - and who keeps newspapers these days? In a couple of minutes, all of this will be gone."

Tabs were frantically loading in the browser, each an article from a different newspaper, and every one about Stuart. Many of them used the same grim photo.

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"That's not possible," he said, resolutely.

"What did I tell you about Alice being a genious?" she said, spinning round in the chair, "Each and every one of these articles, each and every grim photo of you online - all of those are going to vanish."

"What about government records? I [i]worked[/i] for the bloody government," he said, "They keep track of these things."

Alice snorted in a particularly unladylike fashion, "Yeah, they owed us a favour. Besides, we know perfectly well that the information was safe. You took care of that yourself, as you know, Mr Front."

He shrugged, "You have to have a nuclear option in this game."

"Indeed you do," said the woman from IT, "And Mr Smith has told me to explain to you that we can go nuclear, too. Look, this stuff is [i]shady[/i], Mr Front. I'm not an expert on British law, but the way you work is shady by anybody's book. Phone-tapping, hacking, bribery, blackmail..." she telegraphed his protestation, "No, don't worry. We [i]like[/i] shady. We do all that stuff ourselves and want the kind of people that knows how it goes."

Ah.

"We like people like you. We are people like you. And the thing is with people like us, is that we know what people like us are like, Mr Front. Even if we weren't the kind of people that can make people disappear, and I'm not saying that we are or that we aren't, or whether or not we rig trials, but even if we didn't do shady, we can drop the Stuart-bomb. There's enough dirt here to put you in jail for... well, I do IT, not maths. You get my point. There's more than one way to skin a Stuart, anyway."

"I trust that you won't," Stuart smiled with his mouth and gave a different expression with his eyes. She did not flinch.

"All I'm saying is, we know what you're like, and we'd like you to take your confidentiality form thingy seriously. Now, come here and let's delete you from the Matrix forever - apart from in our own records, of course. Put your hand on mine," Stuart gingerly approached her in the chair, and crouched slightly to be roughly her seated height. She booted a programme named 'Fairy Godmother'. The only things visible on-screen were two illustrations of a plump woman in a ball gown with a wand and a man in a suit that Stuart recognised as himself. These were situated either side of a big red button in the middle. 

"One little click," said Alice, and together they clicked the big red button. The illustration of Stuart exploded - with slightly more gore than perhaps was necessary. Text dropped from the top of the monitor that read 'Stuart Anthony Front is gone forever'.

"Just like that?"

"Just like that," Alice nodded, "As I said, you're still on [i]our[/i] records, so I can't really stop the others from looking you up if they want to. I suggest you make a good first impression."

She lead him back out into the main O.C and addressed the group again, "Right, I'm going to bed. Welcome to the BUC, everybody. I'm sure I'll see you again. From now, as Mr Smith will have told you, the only people with clearance to get to this floor are himself, Miss Hamill, and yourselves. Then again, I'm in the IT department. There's nothing we can't do," she paused on that note, "Sleep tight!"

And like that, she was gone. Stuart sipped his tea. It had gone slightly cold. His cheeks hurt, too. He had been doing a lot of smiling.