The People in My Head: Harry Transk

Harry Transk was a spy. He would walk into a city with a large wad of one hundred dollar bills, several fake identities and credit cards, a selection of expensive suits, and a hit list of companies. He would set up fake recruitment companies and use behavioural interviewing to get executives to talk about how their companies operated and learn their secrets. Sometimes he would take a job as an office cleaner and steal copies of documents or go through the secured recycling bins. For especially difficult companies, he would use software to hack into their computer systems or he would start dating one of the IT managers and then visit her (or him) at work. There was no door that Harry could not open, no piece of information that he could not uncover. If someone wanted to know something, he would find it out for them. If he couldn't find it, it didn't exist.

Harry was proud of his abilities, and while he viewed himself as merely a functionary, he still enjoyed his job. Sadly his talent was terrifying. Unknown to him his employers didn't value efficiency so much as they valued a sense of security. Harry's skills laid bare their own vulnerabilities and increased their paranoia. Slowly they grew more and more afraid that he might one day be tempted to turn his eye to them. The fact of his loyalty was never in question, but the risk he posed should that loyalty ever falter was such that they lived in fear. So he fell victim to another spy. The other man's talent was removing the evidence of things that his superiors wanted to forget. He would never know why he killed Harry, any more than Harry would know why his government was so determined to understand the functioning of multinational corporations.

Harry enjoyed solving mysteries and piecing together puzzles. The answers interested him less than the process that led to the answer. But this was one mystery he would never solve, because he was given the answer before he knew there was a question.