Hire Purchase

Sunshine beats upon a rain soaked street, somewhere outside the conference centre on the Western Approach.  The weather contradicts itself as it has done many times too recently.  Her interview went surprisingly well.  One hundred candidates began the morning, tested on their knowledge, their understanding of subtleties that could lead to cases being brought, gangs being broken, actual results that lead to actual convictions.  By lunch there had been fewer than eighty remaining.  By three in the afternoon, only eighteen.  It was a pressure cooker environment in there and difficult to ascertain how true to the real experience were she to be selected by the assessors.

She had been lead officer on so many different cases over the years that she found it impossible to know how to do the job badly.  People did, obviously, else where would be the need for training, recruitment, promotion.  But she had it in her blood by now and the certainty she felt in performing her job had become that sort of grinding boredom you get when there is no longer any challenge at all.  Dave Speirs, her partner back in the beat, had called her Columbo for the sheer volume of her hunches that she had turned into something more concrete.  'A living, breathing, law keeping machine,; he had called her.  Speirs was still working cases for the fraud squad and seemed happy with the security a steady job bought him, and Tina.

Bollocks to that lifestyle! Caileen was too hard bitten to settle down now.  She was still only in her forties and felt the same drive now as she had as a new recruit fresh out of her psychology undergrad.  There had been sexual partners but never lovers.  There had been offers of jobs in other fields.  But she was a detective through and through and this, state security, was the greatest detecting job she could imagine.  Increased powers, access to so many databases it made your brain hurt. Chasing the men and women who put this country and its inhabitants most at risk.

She stormed the one on one interview, she knew she did well at the psychological profiling - that was her special area of interest - and now only one portion of the puzzle remained: a job offer.  Caileen stood on the glistening pavement squinting as the burst of late afternoon sun obscured the bus stop arrivals screen. Fuck it.  She had worked her behind off for this day, and it was a Friday to boot, she turned her back on the bus stop and walked towards the nearest Wetherspoon's and sank a couple of real ales in the corner away from potential prying eyes.

Refreshed, she ordered a Vindaloo to arrive at her flat shortly after her and jumped on a tram.  There were no seats available and she was needing a piss, but she had been on stakeouts when she just had to suck it up and this was easy by comparison.

Her shoes had only just fallen beside the sofa when her phone buzzed and she hauled herself back up again to collect her prawn mouth melter.  She grabbed her bag on the way and opened the door head down looking for her purse.  And that's how they got her.  Muslin over the head, cosh on the temple, down in two seconds flat.  Dressed as a couple of paramedics, her assailants got her downstairs and into the waiting ambulance outside.  The man waiting on the landing above hers calmly descended and closed the door behind him, taking a decent quality three dimensional video as he went.  The cameras mounted on a cage around his shoulders and over the head, LASERs scanning the dimensions as the visible light cameras recorded the finer details of shade and branding.  He switched a light on in every room he entered, walked around the perimeter of her furnishings.  He opened her drawers, her fridge, her hall cupboard.  Nothing was searched but it need not be yet: they would 3D print a version of her home for the holding cells, she would think she had come down with the worst case of flu ever experienced for a couple of days, able only to stagger from bed to toilet and back again, via the water filter in the fridge.

When she woke up on day four, almost completely recovered, they would have every bit of evidence from her private life that existed for her.  Trained teams of researchers would be guiding her dreams throughout the experience as well, discovereing titbits, fun facts and true motivations from the here and now as much as her deepest darkest past. Caileen was chosen to join up, she just had no idea what that meant.

Yet.