Paranoia

77

"This better be important, buddy," Seth said. "It's like after midnight."

"This is. I promise."

"Yeah, you only call when you want something anymore. Or death of a parent, that kinda thing."

He was joking, and he wasn't. Truth is, he had a right to be pissed off at me. I hadn't exactly been in touch with him since I'd started at Trion. And he'd been there when Dad died, through the funeral. He'd been a much better friend than I'd been.

We met an hour later at an all-night Dunkin' Donuts near Seth's apartment. The place was almost deserted, except for a few bums. He was wearing his same old Diesel jeans and a Dr. Dre World Tour T-shirt.

He stared at me. "What the hell happened to you?"

I didn't keep any of the grisly details from him – what was the point anymore?

At first he thought I was making it up, but gradually he saw that I was telling the truth, and his expression changed from amused skepticism to horrified fascination to outright sympathy.

"Oh, man," he said when I'd wound up my story, "you are so lost."

I smiled sadly, nodded. "I'm screwed," I said.

"That's not what I mean." He sounded testy. "You fucking went along with this."

"I didn't 'go along with this.' "

"No, asshole. You fucking had a choice."

"A choice?" I said. "Like what choice? Prison?"

"You took the deal they offered, man. They got your balls in a vise, and you caved."

"What other option did I have?"

"That's what lawyers are for, asshole. You could have told me, I could have gotten one of the guys I work for to help out."

"Help out how? I took the money in the first place."

"You could have brought in one of the lawyers at the firm, scare the shit out of them, threaten to go public."

I was silent for a moment. Somehow I doubted it really would have been that simple. "Yeah, well, it's too late for that now. Anyway, they would have denied everything. Even if one of your firm's lawyers agreed to represent me, Wyatt would have set the whole goddamned American Bar Association after me."

"Maybe. Or maybe he would have wanted the whole thing to stay quiet. You might have been able to make it go away."

"I don't think so."

"I see," Seth said, oozing sarcasm. "So instead, you bent over and took it. You went along with their illegal scheme, agreed to become a spy, pretty much guaranteed yourself a prison sentence -"

"What do you mean, 'guaranteed' myself a prison sentence?"

"- And then, just to feed your insane ambition, here you are, fucking over the one guy in corporate America who ever gave you a chance."

"Thanks," I said bitterly, knowing he was right.

"You pretty much deserve what you get."

"I appreciate the help and moral support, friend."

"Put it this way, Adam – I may be a pathetic loser in your eyes, but at least I came by my loserdom honestly. What are you? You're a total fraud. You're fucking Rosie Ruiz."

"Huh?"

"She won the Boston Marathon like twenty years ago, set a women's record, remember? Barely broke a sweat. Turned out she'd jumped in half a mile from the finish line. Took the fucking subway to get there. That's you, man. The Rosie Ruiz of corporate America."

I sat there, my face growing redder and hotter, feeling more and more miserable. Finally I said, "Are you done yet?"

"For now, yeah."

"Good," I said. "Because I need your help."

78

I'd never been to the law firm where Seth worked, or pretended to work. It took up four floors in one of those downtown skyscrapers, and it had all the trappings people want in a high-end law firm – mahogany paneling, expensive Aubusson carpets, modern art on giant canvases, lots of glass.

He got us an appointment first thing in the morning with his boss, a senior partner named Howard Shapiro who specialized in criminal defense work and used to be a U.S. Attorney. Shapiro was a short, chubby guy, balding, round black glasses, a high voice and rapid-fire delivery, frenetic energy. He kept interrupting me, prodding me to get my story over with, looking at his watch. He took notes on a yellow pad. Once in a while he gave me wary, puzzled looks, as if he was trying to figure something out, but for the most part he didn't react. Seth, who was on good behavior, mostly sat there watching.

"Who beat you up?" Shapiro said.

"His security guys."

He made a note. "When you told him you were pulling out?"

"Before. I stopped returning their calls and e-mails."

"Teach you a lesson, huh?"

"I guess."

"Let me ask you something. Give me an honest answer. Say you get Wyatt what he wants, the chip or whatever it is. You don't think he'll leave you alone?"

"I doubt it."

"You think they're going to keep pushing you?"

"Probably."

"You're not afraid this whole thing might blow up in your face and you'll be left holding the bag?"

"I've thought about it. I know the folks at Trion are mighty pissed off their acquisition fell through. There'll probably be some sort of an investigation, and who knows what'll happen."

"Well, I got more bad news for you, Adam. I hate to tell you, but you're a tool."

Seth smiled.

"I know that."

"It means you have to strike first, or you're hosed."

"How?"

"Say this thing blows up and you're caught. Not unlikely. You throw yourself on the mercy of the court without cooperating, and you're going to go to jail, simple as that. Guarantee it."

I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. Seth winced.

"Then I'd cooperate."

"Too late. No one's going to cut you any slack. Also, the only proof against Wyatt is you – but there'll be lots of proof against you, I bet."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Either they find you, or you find them. I've got a buddy in the U.S. Attorney's office, guy I trust. Wyatt's a big fish. You can serve him up on a silver platter. They'll be very interested."

"How do I know they won't arrest me, throw me in jail too?"

"I'll make a proffer. Call him up, tell him I've got something I think he might be interested in. I'll say, I'm not going to give you any names. If you're not going to work out a deal with my guy, you're not going to see him. You want to deal, you give him a queen for a day."

"What's a 'queen for a day'?"

"We go in, sit down with the prosecutor and an agent. Anything that's said in that meeting cannot be directly used against you."

I looked at Seth, raised my eyebrows, and turned back to Shapiro. "Are you saying I could get off?"

Shapiro shook his head. "With that little prank you pulled at Wyatt, the loading-dock guy's retirement party, we'll have to fashion a guilty plea to something. You're a dirty witness, the prosecutor's going to have to show you didn't get off scot-free. You won't get a total pass."

"More than a misdemeanor?"

"Could be probation, to probation and a felony, to a felony and six months."

"Prison," I said.

Shapiro nodded.

"If they're willing to deal," I said.

"Correct. Look, you're in a shitstorm of trouble, let's speak frankly. The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 made the theft of trade secrets a federal criminal offense. You could get ten years in prison."

"What about Wyatt?"

"If they catch him? Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, a judge has to take into account the defendant's role in the offense. If you're a ring-leader, the offense level is increased by two levels."

"So they'll hit him harder."

"Right. Also, you didn't personally benefit materially from the espionage, right?"

"Right," I said. "I mean, I did get paid."

"You just got your Trion salary, which was for the work you did for Trion."

I hesitated. "Well, Wyatt's people continued to pay me, into a secret bank account."

Shapiro stared at me.

"That's bad, right?" I said.

"That's bad," he said.

"No wonder they agreed to it so easily," I groaned, more to myself than to him.

"Yeah," Shapiro said. "You put the hook in yourself. So, you want me to make the call or no?"

I looked at Seth, who nodded. There didn't seem to be any other choice.

"Why don't you guys wait outside," Shapiro said.

79

We sat in the waiting area outside his office, silent. My nerves were stretched to the breaking point. I called my office and asked Jocelyn to reschedule a couple of appointments.

Then I sat there for a few minutes, just thinking. "You know," I said, "the worst thing about it is, I gave Wyatt the keys so he could rob us blind. He's already derailed our big acquisition, and now he's going to fuck us over totally – and it's all my fault."

Seth stared at me for a long while. "Who's 'us'?"

"Trion."

He shook his head. "You're not Trion. You keep saying 'we' and 'us' when you talk about Trion."

"Slip of the tongue," I said.

"I don't think so. I want you to take a bar of whatever ten-dollar French-milled soap you use now and write on your bathroom mirror, 'I am not Trion, and Trion is not me.' "

"Enough," I said. "You're sounding like my dad now."

"Ever occur to you maybe your dad wasn't wrong about everything? Like a stopped clock's right twice a day, huh?"

"Fuck you."

Then the door opened and Howard Shapiro was standing there. "Sit down," he said.

I could tell from his face that things hadn't gone well. "What'd your buddy say?" I asked.

"My buddy got transferred to Main Justice. His replacement is a real prick."

"How bad?" I asked.

"He said, 'You know what, you take a plea and we'll see what happens.' "

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you take a guilty plea in chambers, and no one will know about it."

"I don't get it."

"If you give him a great case, he's willing to write you a great Five-K. A Five-K is a letter the prosecutor writes to the judge asking him to depart from the sentencing guidelines."

"Does the judge have to do what the prosecutor wants?"

"Of course not. Also, there's no guarantee this prick will really write you a decent Five-K. Be honest, I don't trust him."

"What's his definition of a 'great case'?" asked Seth.

"He wants Adam to make an introduction of an undercover."

"An undercover agent?" I said. "That's insane! Wyatt'll never go for it. He won't meet with anyone but me. He's not an idiot."

"What about wearing a wire?" Seth asked. "Would he agree to that?"

"I won't agree to that," I said. "I get scanned for electronic devices every time I'm in Wyatt's presence. I'd get caught for sure."

"That's all right," said Shapiro. "Our friend in the U.S. attorney's office won't agree to it anyway. The only way he'll play ball is if you introduce an undercover."

"I won't do it," I said. "He'll never go for it. And what guarantee is there that I won't get jail time even if I do?"

"None," Shapiro admitted. "No federal prosecutor is going to give you a one-hundred-percent promise that a judge'll give you probation. The judge may not go for it. But whatever you decide, he's giving you seventy-two hours to make up your mind."

"Or what?"

"Or the chips fall where they may. He'll never give you queen for a day if you don't play by his rules. Look, they don't trust you. They don't think you can do this on your own. And face it, it's their ball."

"I don't need seventy-two hours," I said. "I've already decided. I'm not playing."

Shapiro looked at me strangely. "You're going to keep working for Wyatt."

"No," I said. "I'm going to handle this my own way."

Now Shapiro smiled. "How so?"

"I want to set my own terms."

"How so?" Shapiro said.

"Let's say I get some really concrete evidence against Wyatt," I said. "Serious, hard-core proof of his criminality. Could we take that directly to the FBI and make a better deal?"

"Theoretically, sure."

"Good," I said. "I think I want to do this myself. The only one who's going to get me out of this is me."

Seth half-smiled, reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. " 'Me' meaning 'me,' or 'me' meaning 'we'?"

80

I got an e-mail from Alana saying that she was back, her trip to Palo Alto had been cut short – she didn't explain, but I knew why – and she'd love to see me. I called her at home, and we talked a while about the funeral, and how I was doing, and all that. I told her I didn't much feel like talking about Dad, and then she said, "Are you aware you're in serious trouble with HR?"

My breath stopped. "Am I?"

"Oh, boy. Trion's Personnel Policy Manual expressly forbids workplace romances. Inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace harms organizational effectiveness through its negative impact on participants and coworkers."

I let my breath out slowly. "You're not in my management chain. Anyway, I felt that we were organizationally quite effective. And I thought our sexual behavior was quite appropriate. We were practicing horizontal integration." She laughed, and I said, "I know that neither one of us has time, but don't you think we'll be better Trion employees if we take off a night? I mean really get out of town. Be spontaneous."

"That sounds intriguing," she said. "Yes, I think that could definitely boost productivity."

"Good. I booked a room for us tomorrow night."

"Where?"

"You'll see."

"Uh-uh. Tell me where," she said.

"Nope. It'll be a surprise. As our fearless leader likes to say, sometimes you just gotta get in the car."

She picked me up in her blue Mazda Miata convertible, drove us out to the country while I gave directions. In the silences I obsessed about what I was about to do. I was into her, and this was a problem. Here I was, using her to try to save my own skin. I was so going to hell.

The drive took forty-five minutes, on a stop-and-go road past a parade of identical shopping malls and gas stations and fast-food places, and then a narrow and very winding road through woods. At one point she peered at me, noticed the bruise around my eye, said, "What happened? You get into a fight?"

"Basketball," I said.

"I thought you weren't going to play with Chad anymore."

I smiled, didn't say anything.

Finally we came to a big, rambling country inn, white clapboard with dark green shutters. The air was cool and fragrant, and you could hear birds chirping, and no traffic.

"Hey," she said, removing her sunglasses. "Nice. This place is supposed to be excellent."

I nodded.

"You take all your girlfriends here?"

"Never been here before," I said. "I read about it, and it seemed like the perfect getaway." I put my arm around her narrow waist and gave her a kiss. "Let me get your bags."

"Just one," she said. "I travel light."

I took our bags up to the front door. Inside it smelled of wood fires and maple syrup. The couple who owned and ran the place greeted us like old friends.

Our room was sweet, very country-inn. There was an enormous four-poster bed with a canopy, braided throw rugs, chintz curtains. The bed faced a huge old brick fireplace that clearly got a lot of use. The furnishings were all antiques, the rickety kind that make me nervous. There was a captain's chest at the foot of the bed. The bathroom was enormous, with an old iron clawfoot tub in the middle of the room – the kind that looks great, but if you want to take a shower you have to stand in the tub with a little handheld shower thing and spray yourself the way you wash a dog, and try not to splash water all over the floor. The bathroom was connected to a little sitting area off the bedroom furnished with an oak desk and an old telephone on a rickety telephone table.

The bed squeaked and groaned, as we found out when we both plopped down on it after the innkeeper had left. "God, imagine what this bed has seen," I said.

"A lot of chintz," Alana said. "Reminds me of my grandmother's house."

"Is your grandmother's house as big as this place?"

She nodded once. "This is cozy. Great idea, Adam." She slipped a cool hand under my shirt, stroked my stomach, and then moved south. "What were you saying about horizontal integration?"

A roaring fire was going in the dining room when we came down for dinner. There were maybe ten or twelve other couples already seated at the tables, mostly older than us.

I ordered an expensive red Bordeaux, and I could hear Jock Goddard's words echoing in my head: You used to drink Budweiser, now you're sipping some first-growth Pauillac.

The service was slow – there seemed to be one waiter for the whole dining room, a Middle Eastern guy who barely spoke English – but it didn't bother me. We were both sort of blissed-out, floating on a postcoital high.

"I noticed you brought your computer," I said. "In the trunk of your car."

She grinned sheepishly. "I don't go anywhere without it."

"Are you sort of tethered to the office?" I asked. "Pager, cell phone, e-mail, all that?"

"Aren't you?"

"The good thing about having only one boss," I said, "is that it cuts down on some of that."

"Well, you're lucky. I've got six direct reports and a bunch of really arrogant engineers I have to deal with. Plus a huge deadline."

"What kind of deadline?"

She paused, but for just a moment. "The rollout's next week."

"You're shipping a product?"

She shook her head. "It's a demo – a big public announcement, demonstration of a working prototype of the thing we're developing. I mean, it's a really big deal. Goddard hasn't told you about it?"

"He might have, I don't know. He tells me about all kinds of stuff."

"Not the kind of thing you'd forget. Anyway, it's taking up all my time. A real time suck. Night and day."

"Not totally," I said. "You've had time for two dates with me, and you're taking tonight off."

"And I'll pay for it tomorrow and Sunday."

The overworked waiter finally showed up with a bottle of white wine. I pointed out his error, and he apologized profusely and went off to get the right one.

"Why didn't you want to talk to me at Goddard's barbecue?" I asked.

She looked at me incredulously, her sapphire-blue eyes wide. "I was serious about the HR manual, you know. I mean, workplace romances really are discouraged, so we've got to be discreet. People talk. People especially love gossiping about who's screwing who. And then if something happen s…"

"Like a breakup or something."

"Whatever. Then it becomes awkward for everyone."

The conversation was starting to spin in the wrong direction. I tried to bring it back on course. "So I guess I can't just pop in on you one day at work. Show up on the fifth floor unannounced with a bouquet of lilies."

"I told you, they'd never let you in."

"I thought my badge lets me in anywhere in the building."

"Maybe most places, but not the fifth floor."

"Meaning you can get onto the executive floor, but I can't get onto yours?"

She shrugged.

"You have your badge with you?"

"They've trained me not to go to the bathroom without it." She pulled it out of her little black purse and flashed it at me. It was attached to a key ring with a bunch of other keys.

I grabbed it playfully. "Not as bad as a passport picture, but I wouldn't submit this head shot to a modeling agency," I said.

I inspected her badge. Hers had the same stuff on it as mine, the 3-D holograph Trion seal that changed color as light passed over it, the same pale blue background color with TRION SYSTEMS printed over and over on it in tiny white letters. The chief difference seemed to be that hers had a red-and-white stripe across the front.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," she said.

I took my badge out of my pocket and handed it to her. The basic difference was in the little transponder chip inside. The chip inside the badge was encoded with information that either opened a door lock or didn't. Her card got her into the fifth floor in addition to all the main entrances, the garage, and so on.

"You look like a scared rabbit here." She giggled.

"I think I felt that way on my first day."

"I didn't know employee numbers went this high."

The red-and-white stripe on her card had to be for quick visual identification. Meaning that there must be at least one additional checkpoint beyond waving the badge at the badge reader. Someone had to check you out as you entered. That made things a lot more difficult.

"When you leave to go down to lunch or up to the gym – must be a huge hassle."

She shrugged, uninterested. "It's not too bad. They get to know you."

Right, I thought. That's the problem. You can't get in the door unless the chip inside your proximity access badge has been coded right, and even once you're on the floor, you have to pass by a guard for facial confirmation. "At least they don't make you go through that biometric crap," I said. "We had to do that at Wyatt. You know – the fingerprint scan. A friend of mine at Intel even had to go through a retinal scan every day, and all of a sudden he started needing glasses." This was a total lie, but it got her attention. She looked at me with a curious grin, unsure whether I was joking.

"I'm kidding about the glasses part, but he was convinced all that scanning was going to ruin his eyesight."

"Well, there's this one inner area with biometrics, but only the engineers go in there. It's where they do work on the prototype. But I just have to deal with Barney or Chet, the poor security guards who have to sit in that little booth."

"It can't be as ridiculous as it was at Wyatt in the early stages of the Lucid," I said. "They made us go through this badge-exchange ritual where you had to hand your ID card to the guard, and then the guy gave you a second badge to wear on the floor." I was totally bullshitting, parroting back something Meacham had told me about. "So let's say you realize you left your car headlights on, or you forgot something in the trunk of your car, or you want to run down to the cafeteria to grab a bagel or something…"

She shook her head absently, snorted softly. She'd run out of what little interest she had in the intricacies of the badge-access system at work. I wanted to pump her for more information – like, do you have to hand your ID card to the guard, or do you just show it to them? If you had to hand the guard your card, the risk was a lot higher of the guard discovering a fake badge. Does the scrutiny get any more lax at night? Early in the morning?

"Hey," she said, "you haven't touched your wine. Don't you like it?"

I dipped a couple of fingertips into my glass of wine. "Delicious," I said.

This little act of stupid juvenile male goofiness made her laugh, loud and whooping, her eyes crinkling into slits. Some women – okay, most women – might have asked for the check at that point. Not Alana.

I was into her.

81

Both of us were stuffed from dinner, a little unsteady from too much wine. Actually, Alana seemed a little more toasted than me. She fell back on the creaky bed, her arms outstretched as if to embrace the whole room, the inn, the night, whatever. That was the moment for me to follow her onto the bed. But I couldn't, not yet.

"Hey, you want me to get your laptop from the car?"

She groaned. "Oh, I wish you hadn't mentioned it. You've been talking about work way too much."

"Why don't you just admit you're a workaholic, too, and be done with it?" I did my AA meeting riff: "Hi, my name is Alana, and I'm a workaholic. 'Hi, Alana!' "

She shook her head, rolled her eyes.

"The first step is always to admit you're powerless over your workaholism. Anyway, I left something in your car, so I'm going down there anyway." I held out my hand. "Keys?"

She was leaning back on the bed, looking too comfortable to move. "Mmph. Okay, sure," she said reluctantly. "Thanks." She rolled over to the edge of the bed, fished her car keys out of her purse, handed the key ring to me with a swanning, dramatic gesture. "Come back soon, huh?"

The parking area was dark and deserted by now. I looked back at the inn, about a hundred feet away, made sure our room didn't look over the parking lot. She couldn't see me.

I popped the trunk of her Miata and found her computer bag, a gray flannel-mohair-textured nylon satchel. I wasn't kidding: I had left something in here, a small knapsack. There was nothing else of particular interest in her trunk. I swung the satchel and knapsack onto my shoulder and got into her car.

I looked back toward the inn again. Nobody was coming.

Still, I kept the interior dome light off and let my eyes get used to the dark. I'd attract less attention this way.

I felt like a creep, but I had to be realistic about my situation. I really didn't have a choice. She was my best way into AURORA, and now I had to get inside. It was the only way I could save myself.

Quickly I unzipped the satchel, pulled out her laptop, and powered it on. The car's interior went blue from the computer screen. While I waited for it to boot up, I opened my knapsack and pulled out a blue plastic first aid kit.

Inside, instead of Band-Aids and such, were a few small plastic cases. Each contained a soft wax.

By the blue light I looked at the keys on her key ring. A few looked promising. Maybe one of them would open file cabinets on the AURORA project floor.

One by one, I pressed each key onto a rectangle of wax. I'd practiced this a few times with one of Meacham's guys, and I was glad I did; it took a while to get the hang of it. Now the password prompt on her screen was blinking at me.

Shit. Not everyone password-protected their laptops. Oh, well: at least this wasn't going to be a wasted errand. From the knapsack I pulled out the miniature pcProx reader that Meacham had given me and connected it to my handheld. I pressed the start button, then waved Alana's badge at it.

The little device had just captured the data on Alana's card and stored it on my handheld.

Maybe it was just as well that her laptop was password-protected. There was a limit to how much time I could spend out in the parking lot without her wondering where the hell I'd gone. Just before I shut down her computer, just for kicks, I decided to type in some of the usual-suspect passwords – her birth date, which I'd memorized; the first six digits of her employee number. Nothing happened. I typed in ALANA, and the password prompt disappeared, and a plain screen came up.

Oh, man, that was easy. I was in.

Jesus. Now what? How much time could I risk spending on this? But how could I pass the opportunity up? It might never come again.

Alana was an extremely well-organized person. Her computer was set up in a clear, logical hierarchy. One directory was labeled AURORA.

It was all here. Well, maybe not all, but it was a gold mine of technical specs on the optical chip, marketing memos, copies of e-mails she'd sent and received, meeting schedules, staff rosters with access codes, even floor plans…

There was so much that I didn't have time even to read through the file names. Her laptop had a CD drive; I had a little spindle of blank CDs in the knapsack. I grabbed one, popped it into her CD drive.

Even on a super-fast computer like Alana's, it took a good five minutes to copy all the AURORA files to a disk. That's how much there was.

"What took you so long?" she said poutily when I returned.

She was under the covers, her naked breasts visible, and she looked sleepy. A Stevie Wonder ballad – "Love's in Need of Love Today" – was playing softly on a little CD player she must have brought.

"I couldn't figure out which was your trunk key."

"A car guy like you? I thought you drove off and left me here."

"Do I look stupid?"

"Appearances can be deceiving," she said. "Come to bed."

"I'd never have figured you for a Stevie Wonder fan," I said. Truly, I would never have guessed, given her collection of angry women folk singers.

"You don't really know me yet," she replied.

"No, but give me a little time," I said. I know everything about you, I thought, yet I don't know anything. I'm not the only one keeping secrets. I put her laptop on the oak desk next to the bathroom. "There," I said, returning to the bedroom, taking off my clothes. "In case you're seized with some brilliant inspiration, some amazing brainstorm in the middle of the night."

Naked, I approached the bed. This beautiful naked woman was in bed, playing the role of seductress, when really I was the seducer. She had no idea what sort of game I was playing, and I felt a flush of shame mixed, oddly, with a tug of arousal. "Get up here," she said in a dramatic whisper, staring at me. "I just had a brainstorm."

We both got up after eight, unusually late for us hyper-driven type A workaholics – and fooled around in bed for a while before showering and going down to a country breakfast. I doubt people in the country actually eat this way, or they'd all weigh four hundred pounds: rashers of bacon (only at country bed-and-breakfasts does bacon come in "rashers"), mounds of grits, freshly baked hot blueberry muffins, eggs, French toast, coffee with real cream… Alana really chowed down, which surprised me, for such a pencil-thin girl. I enjoyed watching her eat so ravenously. She was a woman of appetites, which I liked.

We went back up the room and fooled around some more, and hung out and talked. I made a point of not talking about security procedures or proximity badges. She wanted to talk about my dad's death and funeral, and even though the subject depressed me, I talked about it a little. Around eleven we reluctantly left, and the date was over.

I think we both wanted it to keep going, but we also needed to get home to our own nests for a while, get some work done, go back to the salt mines, make up for this delicious night away from work.

As we drove, I found myself grooving on the country road, the trees dappled with sunlight, the fact that I'd just spent the night with the coolest and most gorgeous and funniest and sexiest woman I'd ever met.

Man, what the hell was I doing?

82

By noon I was back in my apartment, and I immediately called Seth.

"I'm going to need some more cash, man," he said.

I'd already given him several thousand dollars, from my Wyatt-funded account, or wherever the money really came from. I was surprised he'd run through it already.

"I didn't want to fuck around, get cheap stuff," he said. "I got all professional equipment."

"I guess you had to," I said. "Even though it's one-time use."

"You want me to pick up uniforms?"

"Yeah."

"What about badges?"

"I'm working on that," I said.

"Aren't you nervous?"

I hesitated a moment, thought about lying just to bolster his courage, but I couldn't. "Totally," I said.

I didn't want to think about what might happen if things went wrong, though. Some prime real estate in my brain was now being colonized by worry, obsessively working through the plan I'd come up with after meeting with Seth's boss.

And yet there was another part of my brain that wanted to just escape into a daydream. I wanted to think about Alana. I thought about the irony of the whole situation – how this calculated scheme of seduction had led down this unexpected path, how I felt rewarded, wrongly, for my treachery.

I'd alternate between feeling crummy, guilty about what I was doing to her, and being overwhelmed by my attachment to her, something I really hadn't felt before. Little details kept popping into my mind: the way she brushed her teeth, scooping up water from the tap with a cupped hand instead of using a glass; the graceful hollow of her lower back swelling into the cleft of her butt, the incredibly sexy way she applied her lipstick… I thought about her velvet-smooth voice, her crazy laugh, her sense of humor, her sweetness.

And I thought – this was by far the strangest thing – about our future together, a generally scary thought to a guy in his twenties, but somehow this wasn't at all scary. I didn't want to lose this woman. I felt like I'd stopped into a 7-Eleven to buy a six-pack of beer and a lottery ticket, and I'd won the lottery.

And because of that, I never wanted her to find out what I was really up to. That terrified me. That dark, awful thought kept popping up, interrupting my silly fantasy, like one of those kids' clown toys with the weighted bottom that always go sproing upright every time you bat them down.

A smudgy black-and-white image would be spliced into my gauzy color fantasy reel – a frame from a surveillance camera: me sitting in my car in the dark parking lot copying the contents of her laptop onto a CD, pressing her keys into the wax, copying her ID badge.

I'd bat back the evil clown doll and there we are on our wedding day, Alana walking down the aisle, gorgeous and demure, escorted by her father, a silver-haired, square-jawed guy in a morning suit.

The ceremony's performed by Jock Goddard as justice of the peace. Alana's family's all in attendance, her mother looking like Diane Keaton in Father of the Bride, her sister not as pretty as Alana but sweet, and they're all thrilled – this is a fantasy, remember – that she's marrying me.

Our first house together, a real house and not an apartment, like in an old leafy Midwestern town; I was imagining the great house Steve Martin's family lives in, in Father of the Bride. We're both rich high-powered corporate execs, after all. Somewhere in the background, Nina Simone is singing "The Folks Who Live on the Hill." I'm hoisting Alana effortlessly over the threshold and she's laughing at how cornball and clichй I'm being, and then we boink in every room of the house to initiate the place, including the bathroom and the linen closet. We rent movies together while sitting in bed eating take-out Chinese food from the carton with wooden chopsticks, and every so often I sneak a look at her, and I can't believe I'm actually married to this unbelievable babe.

Meacham's goons had brought back my computers and such, which was fortunate, because I needed them.

I popped the CD into my computer with all the stuff I'd copied from Alana's laptop. A lot of it was e-mails concerning the vast marketing potential of AURORA. How Trion was poised to own the "space," as they say in tech-speak. The huge increases in computing power it promised, how the AURORA chip really would change the world.

One of the more interesting documents was a schedule of the public demonstration of AURORA. It was to happen on Wednesday, four days from now, at the Visitors Center at Trion headquarters, a mammoth, modernistic auditorium. E-mail alerts, faxes, and phone calls were to go out only the day before to all the media. Obviously it was going to be an immense public event. I printed the schedule out.

But I was intrigued, most of all, by the floor plan and the security procedures that all AURORA team members were given.

Then I opened one of the pullout garbage drawers in the kitchen island. Wrapped in a trash bag were a few objects I'd stored in Zip-Loc bags. One was the Ani DiFranco CD I'd left around my apartment, expecting her to pick it up, as she did. The other was the wineglass she'd used here.

Meacham had given me a Sirchie fingerprint kit, containing little vials of latent print powder, transparent fingerprint lifting tape, and a fiberglass brush. Putting on a pair of latex gloves, I dusted both the CD and the wineglass with a little of the black graphite powder.

By far the best thumbprint was on the CD. I lifted that carefully on a strip of tape, put it in a sterile plastic case.

Then I composed an e-mail to Nick Wyatt.

It was addressed, of course, to "Arthur":

Monday evening/Tuesday morning will complete assignment & obtain samples. Tuesday early morning will hand over at time and place you specify. Upon completion of assignment I will terminate all contact.

I wanted to strike the right note of resentfulness. I didn't want them to suspect anything.

But would Wyatt himself show up at the rendezvous?

I guess that was the big unanswered question. It wasn't crucial that Wyatt show up, though I sure wanted it to be him. There was no way to force Wyatt to be there himself. In fact, insisting on it would probably just warn him not to show. But by now I knew enough of Wyatt's psychology to be fairly confident that he wouldn't trust anyone else.

You see, I was going to give Nick Wyatt what he wanted.

I was going to give him the actual prototype of the AURORA chip, which I was going to steal, with Seth's help, from the secure fifth floor of D Wing.

I had to give him the real thing, the actual AURORA prototype. For a number of reasons it couldn't be faked. Wyatt, being an engineer, would probably know right away whether it was the genuine item or not.

But the main reason was, as I'd learned from Camilletti's e-mails and Alana's files, that for security reasons, the AURORA prototype had been inscribed with a micromachined identification mark, a serial number and the Trion logo, etched with a laser and visible only under a microscope.

That's why I wanted him to be in possession of the stolen chip. The real thing.

Because the moment Wyatt – or Meacham, if it had to be – took delivery of the pilfered chip, I had him. The FBI would be notified far enough in advance to coordinate a SWAT team, but they wouldn't know names or locations or anything until the very last minute. I was going to be in complete control of this.

Howard Shapiro, Seth's boss, had made the call for me. "Forget about dealing with the bureau chief in the U.S. Attorney's office," he said. "Something dicey like this, he's going to go to Washington, and that's going to take forever. Forget it. We go right to the FBI – they're the only ones who'll play the game at this level."

Without naming names, he struck a deal with the FBI. If everything came off successfully, and I delivered Nick Wyatt to them, I'd get probation, and nothing more.

Well, I was going to deliver Wyatt. But it was going to be my way.

83

I got into work early on Monday morning, wondering whether this was going to be my last day at Trion.

Of course, if everything went well, this would just be another day, a blip in a long and successful career.

But the chances that everything in this incredibly complicated scheme would go right were pretty small, and I knew it.

On Sunday, I'd cloned a couple of copies of Alana's proximity badge, using a little machine Meacham had given me called a ProxProgrammer and the data I'd captured from Alana's ID badge.

Also, I'd found among Alana's files a floor plan for the fifth floor of D Wing. Almost half the floor was marked with cross-hatching and labeled "Secure Facility C."

Secure Facility C was where the prototype was being tested.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what was in the secure facility, where in that area the prototype was kept. Once I got in, I'd have to wing it.

I drove by my dad's apartment to grab my industrial-strength work gloves, the ones I'd used when I worked as a window cleaner with Seth. I was sort of hoping to see Antwoine, but he must have gone out for a while. I got this funny feeling while I was there, like I was being watched, but I wrote it off as just your basic free-floating anxiety.

The rest of Sunday, I'd done a lot of research on the Trion Web site. It was amazing, really, how much information was available to Trion employees – from floor plans to security badging procedures to even the inventory of security equipment installed on the fifth floor of D Wing. From Meacham I'd gotten the radio frequency the Trion security guards used for their two-way radios.

I didn't know everything I needed to know about the security procedures – far from it – but I did find out a few key things. They confirmed what Alana had told me over dinner at the country inn.

There were only two ways in or out of the fifth floor, both manned. You waved your badge at a card reader to get through the first set of doors, but then you had to show your face to a guard behind a bulletproof glass window, who compared your name and photograph to what he had on his computer screen, then buzzed you through to the main floor.

And even then, you weren't anywhere near Secure Facility C. You had to walk down corridors equipped with closed-circuit video cameras, then into another area set up with not only security cameras but motion detectors, before you came to the entrance to the secure area. That was unmanned, but in order to unlock the door you had to activate a biometric sensor.

So getting to the AURORA prototype was going to be grotesquely difficult, if not impossible. I wasn't even going to be able to get through the first, manned checkpoint. I couldn't use Alana's card, obviously – nobody would mistake me for her. But her card might be useful in other ways once I got onto the fifth floor.

The biometric sensor was even tougher. Trion was on the cutting edge of most technologies, and biometric recognition – fingerprint scanners, hand readers, automated facial-geometry identification, voice ID, iris scans, retina scans – was the next big thing in the security business. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but finger scans are generally considered the best – reliable, not too fussy or tricky, not too high a rate of false rejections or false acceptances.

Mounted on the wall outside Secure Facility C was an Identix fingerprint scanner.

In the late afternoon, I placed a call, from my cell phone, to the assistant director of the security command center for D Wing.

"Hey, George," I said. "This is Ken Romero in Network Design and Ops, in the wiring group?" Ken Romero was a real name, a senior manager. Just in case George decided to look me up.

"What can I do for you?" the guy said. He sounded like he'd just found a turd in his Cracker Jack box.

"Just a courtesy call? Bob wanted me to give you guys a heads-up that we're going to be doing a fiber reroute and upgrade on D-Five early tomorrow morning."

"Uh huh." Like: why are you telling me?

"I don't know why they think they need laser-optimized fifty micron fiber or an Ultra Dense Blade Server, but hey, it's not coming out of my pocket, you know? I guess they've got some serious bandwidth-hog applications running up there, and -"

"What can I do for you, Mister -"

"Romero. Anyway, I guess the guys on the fifth floor didn't want any disruptions during the workday, so they put in a request to have it done early in the A.M. No big deal, but we wanted to keep you guys in the loop 'cause the work's going to set off proximity detectors and motion detectors and all that, like between four and six in the morning."

The assistant security chief actually sounded sort of relieved that he didn't have to do anything.

"You're talkin' the whole darned fifth floor? I can't shut off the whole darned fifth floor without -"

"No, no, no," I said. "We'll be lucky if my guys can get through two, maybe three wiring closets, the way they take coffee breaks. No, we're aiming for areas, lemme see, areas twenty-two A and B, I think? Just the internal sections. Anyway, your boards are probably going to light up like Christmas trees, probably going to drive you guys frickin' bonkers, but I wanted to give you a heads-up -"

George gave a heavy sigh. "If it's just twenty-two A and B, I suppose I can disable those…"

"Whatever's convenient. I mean, we just don't want to drive you guys bonkers."

"I'll give you three hours if you need it."

"We shouldn't need three hours, but I guess better safe than sorry, you know? Anyways, appreciate your help."

84

Around seven that evening I checked out of the Trion building, as usual, and drove home. I got a fitful night's sleep.

Just before four in the morning, I drove back and parked on the street, not in the Trion garage, so there wouldn't be a record of my re-entering the building. Ten minutes later, a panel truck labeled J.J. RANKENBERG & CO – PROFESSIONAL WINDOW CLEANING TOOLS, EQUIPMENT, AND CHEMICALS SINCE 1963 pulled up. Seth was behind the wheel in a blue uniform with a J.J. Rankenberg patch on the left pocket.

"Howdy, cowboy," he said.

"J.J. himself let you have this?"

"The old man's dead," Seth said. He was smoking, which was how I could tell he was nervous. "I had to deal with Junior." He handed me a folded pair of blue overalls, and I slipped them over my chinos and polo shirt, not easy to do in the cab of the old Isuzu truck. It reeked of spilled gasoline.

"I thought Junior hates you."

Seth held up his left hand and rubbed his thumb and fingers together, meaning moolah. "Short-term lease, for a quickie job I got for my girlfriend's dad's company."

"You don't have a girlfriend."

"All he cared was, he doesn't have to report the income. Ready to rock 'n' roll, dude?"

"Press send, baby," I said. I pointed out the D Wing service entrance to the parking garage, and Seth drove down into it. The night attendant in the booth glanced at a sheet of paper, found the company name on the admit list.

Seth pulled the truck over to the lower-level loading dock and we took out the big nylon tote bags stuffed with gear, the Ettore professional squeegees and the big green buckets, the twelve-foot extension poles, the plastic gallon jugs filled with piss-yellow glass cleaner liquid, the ropes and hooks and Ski Genie and bosun chair and the Jumar ascenders. I'd forgotten how much miscellaneous junk the job required.

I hit the big round steel button next to the steel garage door, and a few seconds later the door began rolling open. A paunchy, pasty-faced security guard with a bristly mustache came out with a clipboard. "You guys need any help?" he asked, not meaning it.

"We're all set," I said. "If you can just show us to the freight elevator to the roof…"

"No problem," he said. He stood there with his clipboard – he didn't seem to be writing anything down on it, he just held it to let us know who was in charge – and watched us struggle with the equipment. "You guys can really clean windows when it's dark out?" he said as he walked us over to the elevator.

"At time-and-a-half, we clean 'em better when it's dark out," said Seth.

"I don't know why people get so uptight about us looking in their office windows when they're working," I said.

"Yeah, that's our main source of entertainment," Seth said. "Scare the shit out of people. Give the office workers a heart attack."

The guard laughed. "Just hit 'R,' " he said. "If the roof access door's locked, there should be a guy up there, I think it's Oscar."

"Cool," I said.

When we got to the roof, I remembered why I hated high-rise window cleaning. The Trion headquarters building was only eight stories high, no more than a hundred feet or so, but up there in the middle of the night it might as well have been the Empire State Building. The wind was whipping around, it was cold and clammy, and there was distant traffic noise, even at that time of night.

The security guard, Oscar Fernandez (according to his badge), was a short guy in a navy-blue security uniform with a two-way radio clipped to his belt squawking static and garbled voices. He met us at the freight elevator, shifting his weight awkwardly from foot to foot as we unloaded our stuff, and showed us to the roof-access stairs.

We followed him up the short flight of stairs. While he was unlocking the roof door, he said, "Yeah, I got the word you guys would be coming, but I was surprised, I didn't know you guys worked so early."

He didn't seem suspicious; he just seemed to be making conversation.

Seth repeated his line about time-and-a-half, and we replayed our bit about giving the office workers heart attacks, and he laughed too. He said he guessed it kind of made sense anyway that people didn't want us disrupting their work during normal working hours. We looked like legit window cleaners, we had all the right equipment and the uniforms, and who the hell else would be crazy enough to climb out on the roof of a tall building lugging all that junk?

"I've only been on nights a couple weeks anyway," he said. "You guys been up here before? You know your way around?"

We said we hadn't done Trion yet, and he showed us the basics – power outlets, water spigots, safety anchors. All newly constructed buildings these days are required to have rooftop safety anchors mounted every ten to fifteen feet apart, about six feet in from the edge of the building, strong enough to support five thousand pounds of weight. The anchors usually stick up like plumbing vent pipes, only with a U-bolt on top.

Oscar was a little too interested in how we rigged up our gear. He hung around, watching us fasten the locking steel carabiners. These were attached to half-inch orange-and-white kernmantle climbing rope and connected to the safety anchors.

"Neat," he said. "You guys probably climb mountains in your spare time, huh?"

Seth looked at me, then said, "You a security guard in your spare time?"

"Nah," he said, then he laughed. "I just mean you got to like climbing off tall places and stuff. That would scare the shit out of me."

"You get used to it," I said.

Each of us had two separate lines, one to climb down on, the other a back-up safety line with a rope grab, in case the first one broke. I wanted to do it right, and not just for appearance's sake. Neither one of us felt like getting killed by dropping off the Trion building. During those unpleasant couple of summers when we worked for the window cleaning company we kept hearing about how there was an industry average of ten fatalities a year, but they never told us if that was ten in the world or ten in the state or what, and we never asked.

I knew that what we were doing was dangerous. I just didn't know where the danger was going to come.

After another five minutes or so, Oscar finally got bored, mostly because we stopped talking to him, and he went back to his station.

The kernmantle rope attaches to a thing called a Sky Genie, a kind of long sheet-metal tube in which you wind the rope around a forged aluminum shank. The Sky Genie – gotta love the name – is a descent-control device that works by friction and pays out the rope slowly. These Sky Genies were scratched and looked like they'd been used. I held it up and said, "You couldn't buy us new ones?"

"Hey, they came with the truck, whaddaya want? What are you worried about? These babies'll support five thousand pounds. Then again, you look like you've put on a couple pounds the last few months."

"Fuck you."

"You have dinner? I hope not."

"This isn't funny. You ever look at the warning label on this?"

"I know, improper use can cause serious injury or even death. Don't pay attention to that. You're probably scared to remove mattress tags too."

"I like the slogan – 'Sky Genie – Gets You Down.' "

Seth didn't laugh. "Eight stories is nothing, guy. You remember the time when we were doing the Civic -"

"Don't remind me," I interrupted. I didn't want to be a big pussy, but I wasn't into his black humor, not standing up there on the roof of the Trion building.

The Sky Genie got hooked up to a nylon safety harness attached to awaist belt and padded seat board. Everything in the window-cleaning business had names with the words "safety" or "fall-protection" in them, which just reminds you if anything goes even slightly wrong you're fucked.

The only thing we'd set up that was slightly out of the ordinary was a pair of Jumar Ascenders, which would enable us to climb back up the ropes. Most of the time when you're cleaning the windows on a high-rise you have no reason to go back up – you just work your way down until you're on the ground.

But this would be our means of escape.

Meanwhile, Seth mounted the electric winch to one of the roof anchors with a D-ring, then plugged it in. This was a hundred-and-fifteen-volt model with a pulley capable of lifting a thousand pounds. He connected it to each of our lines, making sure that there was enough play that it wouldn't stop us from climbing down.

I tugged on the rope, hard, to check that everything was locked in place, and we both walked over to the edge of the building and looked down. Then we looked at each other, and Seth smiled a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing smile.

"Are we having fun yet?" he said.

"Oh, yeah."

"You ready, buddy?"

"Yeah," I said. "Ready as Elliot Krause in the Port-O-San."

Neither one of us laughed. We climbed onto the guardrail slowly and then went over the side.

85

We only had to rappel down two stories, but it wasn't easy. We were both out of practice, we were lugging some heavy tools, and we had to be extremely careful not to swing too far to either side.

Mounted on the building's faзade were closed-circuit TV surveillance cameras. I knew from the schematics exactly where they were mounted. I also knew the specs on the cameras, the size of the lenses, their focal range and all that.

In other words, I knew where the blind spots were.

And we were climbing down through one of them. I wasn't concerned about Building Security seeing us rappelling down the side of the building, since they were expecting window cleaners early in the morning. What I was concerned about was that, if anyone looked, they'd realize we weren't actually cleaning any windows. They'd see us lowering ourselves, slowly and steadily, to the fifth floor. They'd see that we weren't even positioning ourselves in front of a window, either.

We were dangling in front of a steel ventilation grate.

As long as we didn't swing too far to one side or the other, we'd be out of camera range. That was important.

Bracing our feet against a ledge, we got out our power tools and set to work on the hex bolts. They were securely fastened, through the steel and into concrete, and there were a lot of them. Seth and I labored in silence, the sweat pouring down our faces. It was possible that someone walking by, a security guard or whoever, might see us removing the bolts that held the vent grate in place and wonder what we were doing. Window cleaners worked with squeegees and buckets, not Milwaukee cordless impact wrenches.

But this time of the morning, there weren't many people walking by. Anyone who happened to look up would probably figure we were doing routine building maintenance.

Or so I hoped.

It took us a good fifteen minutes to loosen and remove each bolt. A few of them were rusted tight and needed a hit of WD-40.

Then, on a signal from me, Seth loosened the last bolt, and we both carefully lifted the grate away from the steel skin of the building. It was super heavy, a two-man job at least. We had to grip it by its sharp edges – luckily I'd brought gloves, a good pair for both of us – and angle it out so that it rested on the window ledge. Then Seth, grasping the grille for leverage, managed to swing his legs into the room. He dropped to the floor of the mechanical equipment room with a grunt.

"Your turn," he said. "Careful."

I grabbed an edge of the grate and swung my legs into the airshaft and dropped to the floor, looking around quickly.

The mechanical room was crowded with immense, roaring equipment, mostly dark, lit only by the distant spill from the floodlights mounted on the roof. There was all kinds of HVAC stuff in here – heat pumps, centrifugal fans, huge chillers and compressors, and other air filtration and air-conditioning equipment.

We stood there in our harnesses, still hooked up to the double ropes, which dangled through the ventilation shaft. Then we unsnapped the harness belts and let go.

Now the harnesses hung in midair. Obviously we couldn't just leave them out there, but we'd rigged them up to the electric winch up on the roof. Seth pulled out a little black remote-control garage-door opener and pressed the button. You could hear this whirring, grinding noise far off, and the harnesses and ropes began to rise slowly in the air, pulled by the electric winch.

"Hope we can get 'em back when we need 'em," Seth said, but I could barely hear him over the thundering white noise in the room.

I couldn't help thinking that this whole thing was little more than a game to Seth. If he was caught, no big deal. He'd be okay. I was the one who was in deep doodoo.

Now we pulled the grate in tight so that, from the outside, it looked like it was in place. Then I took an extra length of the kernmantle, ran it through the grips, then around a vertical pipe to tie the thing down.

The room had gone dark again, so I took out my Mag-Lite, switched it on. I walked over to the heavy-looking steel door and tried the lever.

It opened. I knew that the doors to mechanical rooms were required to be unlocked from the inside, to make sure no one got trapped, but it was still a relief to know we could get out of here.

In the meantime, Seth took out a pair of Motorola Talkabout walkietalkies, handed me one, and then pulled out from his holster a compact black shortwave radio, a three-hundred-channel police scanner.

"You remember the security frequency? Something in the four hundreds UHF, wasn't it?"

I took a little spiral-bound notebook from my shirt pocket, read off the frequency number. He began to key it in, and I unfolded the floor map and studied my route.

I was even more nervous now than when I was climbing down the side of the building. We had a pretty solid plan, but too many things could go wrong.

For one, there might be people around, even this early. AURORA was Trion's top-priority program, with a big deadline a mere two days off. Engineers worked weird hours. Five in the morning, there probably wouldn't be anyone around, but you never knew. Better to stay in the window-washer uniform, carrying a bucket and a squeegee – cleaning people were all but invisible. Unlikely anyone would stop to ask what I was doing here.

But there was a gruesome possibility that I might run into someone who recognized me. Trion had tens of thousands of employees, and I'd met, I don't know, fifty of them, so the odds were in my favor I wouldn't see someone who knew me. Not at five in the morning. Still…So I'd brought along a yellow hard hat, even though window washers never actually wear them, jammed it down on my head, then put on a pair of safety glasses.

Once I was out of this dark little room, I'd have to walk several hundred feet of hallway with security cameras trained on me all the way. Sure, there were a couple of security guys in the command center in the basement, but they had to look at dozens of monitors, and they were probably also watching TV and drinking coffee and shooting the shit. I didn't think anyone would pay me much attention.

Until I reached Secure Facility C, where the security definitely got harsh.

"Got it," Seth said, staring at the police scanner's digital readout. "I just heard 'Trion Security' and something else Trion."

"Okay," I said. "Keep listening, and alert me if there's anything I should know."

"How long you gonna take, you think?"

I held my breath. "Could be ten minutes. Could be half an hour. Depends on how things go."

"Be careful, Cas."

I nodded.

"Wait, here you go." He'd spotted a big yellow wheeled cleaning bucket in the corner, rolled it over to me. "Take this."

"Good idea." I looked at my old buddy for a moment, wanting to say something like "Wish me luck," but then I decided that sounded too nervous and mushy. Instead, I gave him the thumbs-up, like I was cool about all this. "See you back here," I said.

"Hey, don't forget to turn your thingy on," he said, pointing to my Talkabout.

I shook my head at my own forgetfulness and smiled.

Opening the door slowly, I looked out, saw no one coming, stepped into the hall, and closed the door behind me.

86

Fifty feet up ahead, a security camera was mounted high on the wall, next to the ceiling, its tiny red light winking.

Wyatt said I was a good actor, and now I'd really need to be. I had to look casual, a little bored, busy, and most of all not nervous. That'd take some acting.

Keep watching the Weather Channel or whatever the hell is on now, I mentally willed whoever was in the command center. Drink your coffee, eat your donuts. Talk basketball or football. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

My work boots squeaked softly as I walked down the carpeted hall, wheeling the cleaning bucket.

No one else around. That was a relief.

No, I thought, it's actually better if there're other people walking by. Takes the focus off of you.

Yeah, maybe. Take what you get. Just hope no one asks where I'm going.

I turned the corner into a large open cubicle-farm area. Except for a few emergency lights, it was dark.

Pushing the bucket through an aisle down the middle of the room, I could see even more security cameras. The signs in the cubicles, the weird unfunny posters, all indicated that engineers worked here. On a shelf above one of the cubicles was a Love Me Lucille doll, staring malevolently at me.

Just doin' my job, I reminded myself.

On the other side of this open area, I knew from the map, was a short corridor leading directly to the sealed-off half of the floor. A sign on the wall (SECURE FACILITY C – ADMITTANCE ONLY TO CLEARED PERSONNEL, and an arrow) confirmed it for me. I was almost there.

This was all going a lot more smoothly than I'd expected. Of course, there were motion detectors and cameras all around the entrance to the secure facility.

But if the call I'd made to Security the day before had worked, they'd have shut off the motion detectors.

Of course, I couldn't be sure of that. I'd know in a few seconds, when I got closer.

The cameras would almost certainly be on, but I had a plan for that.

Suddenly a loud noise jolted me, a high-pitched trill from my Talkabout.

"Jesus," I muttered, heart racing.

"Adam," came Seth's voice, flat and breathy.

I pressed the button on its side. "Yeah."

"We got a problem."

"What do you mean?"

"Get back here."

"Why?"

"Just get the fuck back here."

Oh, shit.

I spun around, left the cleaning bucket, started to run until I remembered I was being watched. I forced myself to slow down to a stroll. What the hell could have happened? Did the ropes give us away? Did the ventilation grate drop? Or did someone open the door to the mechanical room, find Seth?

The walk back took forever. An office door swung open just ahead, and a middle-aged guy came out. He was wearing brown double-knit polyester slacks and a short-sleeved yellow shirt, and he looked like an old-line mechanical engineer. Getting an extra-early start on the day, or maybe he'd been up all night. The guy glanced at me, then looked down at the carpet without saying anything.

I was a cleaning guy. I was invisible.

A couple dozen surveillance cameras had captured my image, but I wasn't going to attract anyone's attention. I was a cleaning guy, a maintenance guy. I was supposed to be here. No one would look twice.

Finally I reached the mechanical room. I stopped in front of the door, listening for voices, prepared to run if I had to, if someone was in there with Seth, even though I didn't want to leave him there. I could hear the faint squawk of the police scanner, that was all.

I pulled the door open. Seth was standing just on the other side of the door, the radio near his ear.

He looked panicked.

"We gotta get out of here," he whispered.

"What's -"

"The guy on the roof. On the seventh floor, I mean. The security guy who took us to the roof."

"What about him?"

"Must have come back out to the roof. Curious, whatever. Looked down, didn't see us. Saw the ropes and the harnesses, and no window cleaners, and he freaked. I don't know, maybe he got scared something happened to us, who knows."

"What?"

"Listen!"

There was squawking over the police scanner, a babble of voices. I heard a snatch: "Floor by floor, over!"

Then: "Bravo unit, come in."

"Bravo, over."

"Bravo, suspected illegal entry, D David wing. Looks like window cleaners – abandoned equipment on the roof, no sign of the workers. I want a floor-by-floor search of the whole building. This is a Code Two. Bravo, your men cover the first floor, over."

"Roger that."

I stared at Seth. "I think Code Two means urgent."

"They're searching the building," Seth whispered, his voice barely audible over the roar of the machinery. "We have to get the fuck out of here."

"How?" I hissed back. "We can't drop the ropes, even if they're still in place! And we sure as hell can't get out through the mantrap on this floor!"

"What the hell are we going to do?"

I inhaled deeply, exhaled, tried to think clearly. I wanted a cigarette. "All right. Find a computer, any computer. Log on to the Trion Web site. Look for the company security procedures page, see where the emergency points of egress are. I'm talking freight elevators, fire stairs, whatever. Any way we can get out, even if we have to jump."

"Me? So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going back out there."

"What? You're fucking kidding me. This building is crawling with security guards, you moron!"

"They don't know where we are. All they know is we're somewhere in this wing – and there's seven floors."

"Jesus, Adam!"

"I'll never get this chance again," I said, running toward the door. I waved my Motorola Talkabout at him. "Tell me when you find a way out. I'm going into Secure Facility C. I'm going to get what we came for."

87

Don't run.

I had to keep reminding myself. Stay calm. I walked down the hall, trying to look blasй when my head was about to explode. Don't look at the cameras.

I was halfway to the big open cubicle area when my walkie-talkie bleeped at me, two quick tones.

"Yeah?"

"Listen, man. It's asking me for an ID. The sign-on screen."

"Oh, shit, right, of course."

"Want me to sign on as you?"

"Oh God no. Use…" I whipped out the little spiral notebook. "Use CPierson." I spelled it out for him as I kept walking.

"Password? Got a password?"

"MJ twenty-three," I read off.

"MJ…?"

"I assume it's for Michael Jordan."

"Oh, right. Twenty-three's Jordan's number. This guy some kind of amazing hoops player?"

Why was Seth blathering on? He must have been scared out of his mind.

"No," I said, distracted, as I entered the cubicle area. I took off the yellow hard hat and the safety glasses, since I no longer needed them, stowed them under a desk as I passed by. "Just arrogant, like Jordan. They both think they're the best. One of them's right."

"All right, I'm in," he said. "The Security page, you said?"

"Company security procedures. See what you can find out about the loading dock, whether we can get back down there using the freight elevator. That might be our best escape route. I gotta go."

"Hurry it up," he said.

Straight ahead of me was a gray-painted steel door with a small, diamond-shaped window reinforced with wire mesh. A sign on the door said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

I approached the door slowly, at an angle, and looked through the window. On the other side was a small, industrial-looking waiting room, a concrete floor. I counted two CCTV cameras mounted high on the wall near the ceiling, their red lights blinking. They were on. I could also see the little white pods in each corner of the room: the passive infrared motion detectors.

No LED lights on the motion detectors, though. I couldn't be sure, but they seemed to be off. Maybe Security really had shut them down for a few hours.

In one hand I was holding a clipboard, trying to look official, like I was obeying printed instructions. With my other hand I tried the doorknob. It was locked. Mounted on the wall to the left of the door frame was a little gray proximity sensor, just like you saw all over the building. Would Alana's badge open it? I took out my copy of her badge, waved it at the sensor, willing the red light to turn green.

And I heard a voice.

"Hey! You!"

I turned slowly. A Trion security guard was running toward me, another guard lagging behind him.

"Freeze!" the first man shouted.

Oh, shit. My heart leaped in my chest.

Caught.

Now what, Adam?

I stared at the guards, my expression changing from startled to arrogant. I took a breath. In a quiet voice, I said, "You find him yet?"

"Huh?" said the first guard, slowing to a stop.

"Your goddamned intruder!" I said, my voice louder. "The alarm went off five fucking minutes ago, and you guys are still running around like idiots, scratching your asses!" You can do this, I told myself. This is what you do.

"Sir?" the second guard said. They both were frozen in place, looking at me, bewildered.

"You morons have any idea where the point of entry was?" I was shouting at them like a drill sergeant, tearing them new assholes. "You think we could have made it any easier for you guys? For Christ's sake, you do an exterior perimeter check, that's the first thing you do. Page twenty-three of the goddamned manual! You do that, and you'd find a ventilation grille dislodged."

"Ventilation grille?" said the first one.

"Are we going to have to spray-paint the trail in fucking Day-Glo colors? Should we have given you guys engraved invitations to a Bendix surprise security audit? We've run this drill in three area buildings in the past week, and you guys are the worst bunch of amateurs I've seen." I took the clipboard and the attached pen and began writing. "Okay, I want names and I want badge numbers. You!" The two guards had begun to retreat, backing up slowly. "Get the fuck back here! You think Corporate Security's all about the Krispy Kremes? Heads are going to roll, I promise you that, when we file our report."

"McNamara," the second guard said reluctantly.

"Valenti," said the first.

I jotted down their names. "Badge numbers? Aw, Christ, look – one of you get this goddamned door open, and then both of you, get the hell out of here."

The first one approached the card reader, waved his badge at it. There was a click and the light turned green.

I shook my head in disgust as I pulled the door open. The two guards turned and began loping back down the hall. I heard the first one say to the other sullenly, "I'm going to check with Dispatch right now. I don't like this."

My heart was hammering so loud it had to be audible. I'd bullshitted my way out of that, but I knew all I'd done was to buy a couple of minutes. The guards would radio in to their dispatch and find out the truth immediately – there was no "surprise security audit" going on. Then they'd be back with a vengeance.

I watched the motion detector, mounted high on the wall in this small lobby area, waiting to see whether a light would flash on, but it didn't.

When the motion detectors were on, they triggered the cameras, shifted them in the direction of any moving object.

But the motion detectors were off. That meant the cameras were fixed, couldn't move.

It's funny, Meacham and his guy had trained me to beat security systems that were more sophisticated than this. Maybe Meacham was right – forget about the movies, in reality corporate security always tends to be sort of primitive.

Now I could enter the little lobby area without being seen by the cameras, which were pointed at the door that opened directly into Secure FacilityC. I took a few tentative steps into the room, flattening my back against the wall. I sidled slowly over to one of the cameras from behind. I was in the camera's blind spot, I knew. It couldn't see me.

And then the Talkabout bleeped to life.

"Get the hell out!" Seth's voice screeched. "Everyone's been ordered to the fifth floor, I just heard it!"

"I – I can't, I'm almost there!" I shouted back.

"Move it! Jesus, get the hell out of there!"

"No – I can't! Not yet!"

"Cassidy -"

"Seth, listen to me. You've got to get the hell out of here – stairs, freight elevator, whatever. Wait for me in the truck outside."

"Cassidy -"

"Go!" I shouted, and I clicked off.

A blast of sound jolted me – a throaty mechanical hoo-ah blaring from an alarm horn somewhere very close.

Now what? I couldn't stop here, just feet from the entrance to the AURORA Project! Not this close!

I had to keep going.

The alarm went on, hoo-ah, hoo-ah, deafeningly loud, like an air-raid siren.

I pulled the spray can out of my overalls – a can of Pam spray, that aerosol cooking oil – then leaped up at the camera and sprayed the lens. I could see an oil slick on the glass eyeball. Done.

The siren blared.

Now the camera was blind, its optics defeated – but not in a way that would necessarily attract attention. Anyone watching the monitor would see the image suddenly go blurry. Maybe they'd blame the network wiring upgrade they'd been warned about. The blurred-out image probably wouldn't draw much attention in a bank of TV monitors. That was the idea, anyway.

But now that careful planning seemed almost pointless, because they were coming, I could hear them. The same guards I'd just bamboozled? Different ones? I had no idea, of course, but they were coming.

There were footsteps, shouts, but they sounded far away, just background chatter against the ear-splitting siren.

Maybe I could still make it.

If I hurried. Once I was inside the AURORA laboratory, they probably couldn't come after me, or at least not easily. Not unless they had some kind of override, which seemed unlikely.

They might not even know I was in there.

That is, if I could get in.

Now I circled the room, keeping out of camera range until I reached the other camera. Standing in its blind spot, I leaped up, sprayed the oil, hit the lens dead on.

Now Security couldn't see me through the monitors, couldn't see what I was about to try.

I was almost in. Another few seconds – I hoped – and I'd be inside AURORA.

Getting out was another matter. I knew there was a freight elevator there, which couldn't be accessed from outside. Would Alana's badge activate it? I sure hoped so. It was my only shot.

Damn, I could barely think straight, with that siren blasting, and the voices getting louder, the footsteps closer. My mind raced crazily. Would the security guards even know of the existence of AURORA? How closely held was the secret? If they didn't know about AURORA, they might not be able to figure out where I was headed. Maybe they were just running through the corridors of each floor in some wild, uncoordinated search for the second intruder.

Mounted on the wall to the immediate left of a shiny steel door was a small beige box: an Identix fingerprint scanner.

From the front pocket of my overalls I pulled the clear plastic case. Then, with trembling fingers, I removed the strip of tape with Alana's thumbprint on it, its whorls captured in traces of graphite powder.

I pressed the tape gently on the scanner, right where you'd normally put your thumb, and waited for the LED to change from red to green.

And nothing happened.

No, please, God, I thought desperately, my brain scrambled by terror, and by the unbearably loud hoo-ah of the alarm. Make it work. Please, God.

The light stayed red, stubbornly red.

Nothing was happening.

Meacham had given me a long session on how to defeat biometric scanners, and I'd practiced countless times until I thought I'd gotten it down. Some fingerprint readers were harder to beat than others, depending on what technology they used. This was one of the most common types, with an optical sensor inside it. And what I'd just done was supposed to work ninety percent of the time. Ninety percent of the time this goddamned trick worked!

Of course, there's the other ten percent, I thought, as I heard footsteps thunder nearer. They were close, now, that much I knew. Maybe a few yards away, in the cubicle farm.

Shit, it wasn't working!

What were the other tricks they'd taught me?

Something about a plastic bag full of water…but I didn't have anything like a plastic bag with me… What was it? Old fingerprints remainedon the surface of the sensor like handprints on a mirror, the oily residue of people who'd been admitted. The old fingerprints could be re-activated with moisture…

Yes, it sounds wacky, but no crazier than using a piece of tape with a lifted print on it. I leaned over, cupped my hands over the little sensor, breathed on it. My breath hit the glass, condensed at once. It disappeared in a second, but it was long enough -

A beep, sounding almost like a chirp. A happy sound.

A green light on the box went on.

I'd passed. The moisture from my breath had activated an old fingerprint.

I'd fooled the sensor.

The shiny steel door to Secure Facility C slid slowly open on tracks just as the other door behind me opened and I heard, "Stop right there!"

And: "Stay right there!"

I stared at the huge open space that was Secure Facility C, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My eyes couldn't make sense of it.

I must have made a mistake.

This couldn't be the right place.

I was looking at the area marked Secure Facility C. I was expecting laboratory equipment and banks of electron microscopes, clean rooms, supercomputers and coils of fiber-optic cable…

Instead, what I saw was naked steel girders, bare unpainted concrete floors, plaster dust and construction debris.

An immense, gutted space.

There was nothing here.

Where was the AURORA Project? I was in the right place, but there was nothing here.

And then a thought came to me which made the floor beneath my feet buckle and sway: Was there in fact no AURORA Project after all?

"Don't move a fucking muscle!" someone shouted from behind me.

I obeyed.

I didn't turn around to face the guards. I froze.

I couldn't move if I wanted to anyway.

88

Slack-jawed, dizzy, I turned slowly and saw a cluster of guards, five or six of them, among them a couple of familiar faces. Two of them were the guys I'd scared off, and they were back, furious.

The security guard, the black guy who'd caught me in Nora's office – what was his name, again? The guy with the Mustang? He was pointing a pistol at me. "Mister – Mister Sommers?" he gasped.

Next to him, in jeans and a T-shirt that looked like they'd been thrown on moments ago, his blond hair a tousled mess, was Chad. He was holding his cell phone. I knew at once why he was here: he must have tried to sign on, found that he was already signed on, and so he made a call…

"That's Cassidy. Call Goddard!" Chad bellowed at the guard. "Call the goddamned CEO!"

"No, man, that's not the way we do it," the guard said, staring, his gun still aimed at me. "Step back," he shouted. A couple of other guards were fanning out to either side. He said to Chad, "You don't call the CEO, man. You call the security director. Then we wait for the cops. That's my orders."

"Call the fucking CEO!" Chad screamed, waving his cell phone. "I've got Goddard's home number. I don't care what time it is. I want Goddard to know what his goddamned executive assistant, this fucking hustler, did!" He pressed a couple of buttons on the phone, put it to his ear.

"You asshole," he said to me. "You are so fucked."

It took a long time before anyone answered. "Mr. Goddard," Chad said in a low, deferential voice. "I'm sorry to call so early in the morning, but this is extremely important. My name is Chad Pierson, and I work at Trion." He spoke a few minutes more, and slowly his malevolent grin began to fade.

"Yes, sir," he said.

He thrust the phone at me, looking deflated. "He says he wants to talk to you."