Jean groaned inwardly as he read the email. A new secretary over the agency had been installed, and was promising to enable them to do great things. That probably meant there'd be nosy datagathering exercises again, for the third time this year. He'd have to write another report, which wasn't a problem to generate beyond collecting the statistics they always asked for. Why did he always have to justify his existence? Surely sharing data between agencies in different countries was good for military planning? He spun idly in his chair, wondering if he could get away with the old report from the last cabinet reshuffle, and looked across at the desks where the contractors were. They were there to try and get just a little bit more from the agreement than the other side thought they had signed up for. They were having some success. They were able to reach into some parallel segments and exfiltrate data. In fact, just right now, they were pulling out a copy of a historical data index. Jean spun again. He'd set some junior staff to integrating it with their own, see if they could automate it. It would all need sanitised and tagged for source. Hopefully it could be done so that they'd have programs sitting ready for if more deeply classified data was got, so that the whole thing wouldn't need done twice. Of course, the contractors made him nervous. They were from a company that he suspected had been probing, and maybe more than probing, their defences on behalf of other customers. The contractor/customer distinctions got fuzzy here. The easiest way to think of it was that everyone was their own intelligence agency, with their own agenda, but who got paid by the agency directly above them for emitting the right signals, and not worry too much about the big leagues. That was counterintelligence games, far above Jean's pay grade. The historical database? Probably worthless. Unless he spun it right and got a promotion for useful work.