It was lunchtime in an open-plan office, eight floors above the lobby level of a tower in Canary Wharf. North of Barclays, west of Santander, deep in the beating heart of global commerce. The office was a small clot of strangeness congealed in the pulsing circulation of an investment bank. They were in the bank, but not quite of it, this scrum of half a dozen Pigs and Chickens. They wore the suits and sometimes talked the talk, but held themselves apart; and when they left at night, they passed through a glassed-in corridor lined with metal detectors before they retrieved their personal phones and wallets and watches from metal lockers beneath the eyes of security guards. Some of them had worked in proprietary trading before joining this group; others had come straight out of academia, trailing the long shadows of student loans behind them (taken on by the bank as part of their golden handshake). But now they were in the bank but not of it, for the Scrum were not permitted any customer-facing contact at all. Indeed, they were employed by a shell company, the better to enable the parent’s corporate management to deny their very existence.

There were other signs of distinction about them. Their hours were not governed by the ring of the trading floor bell in Paternoster Square, or any other market for that matter. (Electrons never sleep.) Nor did they directly support any of the parent institution’s trading teams. They had a designated Product Owner, it was true, to whom the Scrum Master (or in their case, Scrum Mistress) was answerable, both for handover of deliverables and negotiation of new goals, and the Owner actually worked with a committee of traders and analysts. But the office was carefully structured to keep the members of the Scrum as tightly insulated from their parent organization as possible.

That way, deniability could be maintained for as long as possible.

• • •

I WASN’T HERE, I DIDN’T SEE THIS, AND I CAN ONLY OFFER THIS fictionalized reconstruction, dredged from the turbid depths of my imagination and seasoned with facts.