I must’ve misheard.
She pulls a document out of her folder and pushes it in front of me. “We’ll need you to sign this confidentiality agreement before you sign the consultancy contract. If the first month goes well, we’ll consider an extension.”
Too staggered to say anything, I skim the three-page agreement. It says in a nutshell that I am to keep the details of my future work and special assignments secret. If I reveal anything, even to a family member, I consent to pay a six-figure fine.
I’ve come this far…
We sign the papers, shake hands, and say goodbye. I start on Monday. Living with my mom at twenty-six doesn’t make me proud, but it makes moving to another city for a month or more much easier than if I were renting.MINDFUCH will pay for my hotel room for the duration of the initial contract in addition to my salary.
Is that amazing or what?
I rush to the restroom at the end of the corridor. When I’m done, I head to the elevator area and press the down triangle. The elevator arrives and I walk in. Just before the sliding doors touch, someone sticks a hand in the narrow space between the doors. They reopen.
The hottie from the interview panel, wearing his suit jacket and tie once again, steps in.
“Ground floor, I presume?” he asks in his deep, caressing voice.
I nod, spaced by the scent, sight, and sound of him.
“My name is Maximilian Delaroche,” he says. “Please, call me Max.”
“Delighted!”
Yikes. Why did I say that? Who says that anymore?
He magnanimously ignores my cringeworthy response. “I am the head of the Very Special Assignments Department and your immediate supervisor.”
“Splendid.”
Did I just say “splendid”?
Please shoot me now.
While we ride down, my cheeks flame and my breathing becomes shaky. Some of it is caused by me being alone in an office elevator with a hyper-sexy hunk. But mostly it’s because he’s giving me that searching, inquisitive look again as if there’s something about me he can’t figure out.
But what? MINDFUCH just hired me. My profile fits their current needs to a tee, and the interview seems to have gone well, despite my honest answers. So, what justifies the level of curiosity in his cobalt eyes? It’s almost like he’s wondering the same thing I’ve been wondering all day.Why me?
There are thousands of jugglers in this country, the overwhelming majority of them better than me at their art. Fan makers are harder to come by. There are only a dozen left in the whole of France. But I’m the least experienced of the lot. I don’t consider fan making my trade like Gran and Mom.
Given all that, what then is the real reason MINDFUCH hired me?
7
MAX
Yasmina, the head of the Strategic Planning and Rationalizing Department, motions toward the park’s entrance. Like ducklings, we follow her.
“In the 1560s,” she says, “Catherine de Medici commissioned a Florentine landscape architect to create a small park near the Louvre.”
She leads us into the Tuileries Garden. By “us” I mean a group of five MINDFUCH staffers including Lucie, our new computer guy Aurélien, his direct supervisor Claude, and me, Lucie’s direct supervisor.
Unlike Claude and Aurélien, Yas is one of the few MINDFUCH staffers who have been read in. She knows the true purpose of the agency, being our liaison office with France, lobbying and furthering Mount Evor’s foreign policy agenda.
While most staffers believe that MINDFUCH is part of the bloated French government, the senior management and a handful of rank-and-file employees know that this agency is not what it seems. The initiated staffers make up barely 10 percent of the personnel. All the othersknow as little about Mount Evor as Lucie does. Which is to say, nothing.
We start from the Place de la Concorde end with the Orangerie and Jeu de Paume galleries and promenade along the Terrace de Feuillants to the round pond.
“Catherine’s Tuileries Garden was very Italian Renaissance,” Yasmina says. “They had mazes, an echo wall and a magnificent artificial grotto built by the famous ceramic designer Bernard Palissy.”
