Volume 2, Chapter 2

It is the morning after my return. I had intended to rise early but was tired and felt lazy. Maria calls, saying we should catch up for a chat but she can’t talk now. It was Maria who recruited me into the SIS. My former lover back in the US shares the name ‘Maria’. Well, Kiwi Maria was also my lover for a while, kind of.

Why call if you can’t talk? Oh, I know. We can’t talk on this line. I must find the phone that Maria gave me earlier in the year when we first met. Here it is. Yes, two missed calls.

“Hi, this is Inka.”

“Yes. Thank you for calling back. As you will have guessed, this is business more than pleasure.”

“Always a pleasure to talk to you, though, Maria.”

“Thank you. Now there is a new staff member at your university we want you to surveil, Suu Maung. She is from Myanmar and is in accounting. And there is a staff member at the University of Auckland who is of interest too, Peter Eldon Merrick III, who is a plasma physicist, whatever that is.”

“Now let me guess. American?”

“I knew we were right about your analytic powers,” Maria replies, laughing. “We will brief you further later on but you may as well be aware of those names right away. We should have talked to you about them while you were still in Wellington but time ran away on us. I will be up in Auckland around Christmas time and we can talk further then.”

“Good. I had better see if I can develop my academic contacts at the University of Auckland. I should be doing that anyway for my career.”

“Remember, you have two careers, now! Must go. Looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.”

Time to have a shower and then swiftly into my muesli and yoghurt.

My office at the university welcomes me with its familiarity. An academic visitor had been hanging out here for about ten weeks but has been gone for a while and has left little or no trace. Time to work through the emails that I wasn’t able to get to on my phone over the last day or two. This is tedious but, good, it is morning tea time already. Both my immediate office neighbours, Marion and Carolyn, come with me, which is unusual. They must want to welcome me back. As we walk over to the tea room I mention that of course we won’t see McDuff there, usually a permanent fixture. He made it very clear yesterday that it was his last day. “You know why he’s leaving, don’t you?” Marion asked.

“No, I wondered about that.”

“I heard that he had sex with a student and a complaint was made.”

“I am assuming the student was female. Did she make the complaint? ”

“Yes, a young woman. But I don’t know who made the complaint. It didn’t sound like it was her, as I heard it anyway. Do you know, Carolyn?”

“No. I only know what you told me,” Carolyn replied.

“I am kind of surprised about McDuff,” I venture.

I think I will definitely contact him.

The tea room is reasonably full. Aroha comes in to pick up a cup of tea as we are about to leave and I walk back with her to her office. I ask her what she knows about McDuff. She doesn’t know any more than Marion, though she did emphasise how quickly it all had happened. The complaint was made only a couple of weeks ago.

“Do you think it was properly handled?” I ask.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it but it does seem very rushed. I certainly wouldn’t want to meddle with something the Dean was handling. At various times, I have offered to help him transition into the role but he has gone his own way largely and developed his own approach, which is fine, of course.”

“Yesterday I told McDuff we should catch up,“ I say. “I had better carry through on that.”

“I hope you do, “ Aroha replies. “I wouldn’t want to contact him myself but it is natural for you, having been away.”

Back in my office, I text McDuff suggesting we meet midday on Saturday. He replies immediately, agreeing. Now I should look up the Burmese woman in Accounting. What was her name again? Here she is on the departmental website. Dr. Suu Maung with a Bachelor of Economics from the Yangon University of Economics, Master of Accounting from Universiti Malaya, PhD in Accounting from Stanford University. Well qualified! I wonder how I can meet her. What is happening in the world of Accounting at the University of South Auckland? There is a regular seminar series and, would you believe it, the seminar next week is a panel discussion on growing female participation in the Accounting profession with panel members including Suu Maung as well as female members of two local Accountancy firms. I am free at that time. Good. Put it in my calendar.

It is time to recall what I learned in the single accountancy course I included in my undergraduate degree at the University of Helsinki. Actually I learned very little, for my motive at the time was to disrupt the hegemony of the capitalist system as practiced through control of the world’s financial institutions. It turned out that the teacher was a quirky individual who had majored in Sociology and moved into Accounting in order to find employment. He found he preferred teaching to actually being an accountant. I got the impression that he would have been very happy to talk politics but felt constrained by the focus of the vast majority of students. If I learned anything it was that there isn’t just one way of drawing up accounts and how you did that depended on your interests and purposes, though heavily constrained by government regulation as well as conventions and practices. I felt part way through the course that enrolling was a mistake and served no useful purpose but in the end I passed with an adequate grade.

I doubt I’ll be able to do much about Peter Eldon Merrick III anytime soon but I may as well look him up. First of all, look up Plasma Physics. The wisdom of Wikipedia tells me plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter. OK, so what are the other three? Well there are liquids and solids and then of course there are gases. Plasma is the fourth. Got it. But what is it? Something to do with atoms and molecules losing their electrons which then float free. It conducts electricity. Well with all those electrons floating around it is not surprising, I suppose. It is used in plasma TVs. Of course; I never thought of that. Apart from dark matter and dark energy (let’s not go over to the dark side just at the moment) it is the most abundant form of energy in the universe. Well, you live and learn.

What are Merrick’s qualifications? AB Chicago, PhD Princeton. Where did he go? Ah, post-doc University of Uppsala. There’s a connection. Sweden is right next to Finland and my mother is Swedish. Then Assistant Professor, University of California, San Diego, later becoming Associate Professor, presumably with tenure. The next move is to the University of Auckland as Full Professor. Those are the basic facts.

A thought occurs to me. Are my internet searches being monitored by hostile powers? I must ask Maria about it when I see her.