Paranoia

12

I'd placed an ad in three local papers looking for a home healthcare aide for my dad. The ad made it clear anyone was welcome, the requirements weren't exactly strict. I doubted there was anyone left out there – I'd already been to the well too many times.

Exactly seven responses came in. Three of them were from people who somehow misunderstood the ad, were themselves looking to hire someone. Another two phone messages were in foreign accents so thick I couldn't even be sure they were trying to speak English. One was from a perfectly reasonable-sounding, pleasant-voiced man who said his name was Antwoine Leonard.

Not that I had much free time, but I arranged to meet this guy Antwoine for coffee. I wasn't going to have him meet my father until he had to – I wanted to hire him first, before he could see what he was going to have to deal with, so he couldn't back out so easily.

Antwoine turned out to be a huge, scary-looking black dude with prison tats and dreadlocks. My guess was right: just as soon as he could, he told me he'd just got out of prison for auto theft, and it wasn't his first stint in the slam-mer. He gave me the name of his parole officer as a reference. I liked the fact that he was so open about it, didn't try to hide it. In fact, I just liked the guy. He had a gentle voice, a surprisingly sweet smile, a low-key manner. Granted, I was desperate, but I also figured that if anyone could handle my dad, he could, and I hired him on the spot.

"Listen, Antwoine," I said as I got up to leave. "About the prison thing?"

"It's a problem for you, isn't it?" He looked at me directly.

"No, it's not that. I like you being so straight with me about it."

He shrugged. "Yeah, well -"

"I just think you don't need to be so totally honest with my dad."

The night before I started at Trion, I got to bed early. Seth had left a phone message inviting me to go out with him and some friends of ours, since he wasn't working that night, but I said no.

The alarm clock went off at five-thirty, and it was like something was wrong with the clock: it was still nighttime. When I remembered, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, a weird combination of terror and excitement. I was going into the big game, this was it, practice time was over. I showered and shaved with a brand-new blade, went slow so I didn't cut myself. I'd actually laid out my clothes before I went to sleep, picked out my suit and tie, gave my shoes a glossy shine. I figured I'd better show up on the first day in a suit no matter how out-of-it I looked; I could always take off the jacket and tie.

It was bizarre – for the first time in my life I was making a six-figure salary, even though I hadn't actually gotten any of the paychecks yet, and I was still living in the rat hole. Well, that would change soon enough.

When I got into the silver Audi A6, which still had that new-car smell, I felt more high-end, and to celebrate my new station in life I stopped at a Starbucks and got a triple grande latte. Almost four dollars for a goddamned cup of coffee, but hey, I was making the big bucks now. I cranked up the volume on Rage Against the Machine all the way to the Trion campus so that by the time I got there Zack de la Rocha was screaming "Bullet in the Head" and I was screaming, "No escape from the mass mind rape!" along with him, wearing my perfect corporate Zegna suit and tie and Cole-Haan shoes. I was pumped.

Amazingly, there were a fair number of cars in the underground garage, even at seven-thirty. I parked two levels down.

The lobby ambassador in B Wing couldn't find my name on any list of visitors or new employees. I was a nobody. I asked her to call Stephanie, Tom Lundgren's admin, but Stephanie wasn't in yet. Finally she reached someone in HR, who told her to send me up to the third floor of E Wing, a long walk.

For the next two hours I sat in the Human Resources reception area with a clipboard, filling out form after form: W-4, W-9, credit union account, insurance, automatic deposit to my bank account, stock options, retirement accounts, nondisclosure agreements… They took my picture and gave mean ID badge and a couple of other little plastic cards that attached to my badge holder. They said things like TRION – CHANGE YOUR WORLD and OPEN COMMUNICATION and FUN and FRUGALITY. It was kind of Soviet, but it didn't really bother me.

One of the HR people took me on a quickie tour of Trion, which was pretty impressive. A great fitness center, ATM cash machines, a place to drop off your laundry and dry cleaning, break rooms with free sodas, bottles of water, popcorn, cappuccino machines.

In the break rooms they had big glossy color posters up that showed a group of square-shouldered men and women (Asian, black, white) posed triumphantly on top of planet Earth under the words DRINK RESPONSIBLY! DRINK FRUGALLY! "The typical Trion employee consumes five beverages a day," it said. "Simply by taking one less cold beverage per day, Trion could save $2.4 million a year!"

You could get your car washed and detailed; you could get discount tickets to movies, concerts, and baseball games; they had a baby gift program ("one gift per household, per occurrence"). I noticed that the elevator in D Wing didn't stop on the fifth floor – "Special Projects," she explained. "No access." I tried not to register any particular interest. I wondered if this was the "skunkworks" Wyatt was so interested in.

Finally, Stephanie came by to take me up to the sixth floor of B Wing. Tom was on the phone but waved me in. His office was lined with photos of his kids – five boys, I noticed – individually and in groups, and drawings they'd done, stuff like that. The books on the shelf behind him were all the usual suspects – Who Moved My Cheese?; First, Break All the Rules; How to Be a CEO. His legs were pistoning away like crazy, and his face looked like it had been scrubbed raw with a Brillo pad. "Steph," he said, "can you ask Nora to come by?"

A few minutes later he slammed down the phone and sprang to his feet, shook my hand. His wedding band was wide and shiny.

"Hey, Adam, welcome to the team!" he said. "Man, am I glad we bagged you! Sit down, sit down." I did. "We need you, buddy. Bad. We're all stretched thin here, really raked. We're covering twenty-three products, we've lost some key staff, and we're stretched way thin. The gal you're replacing got transferred. You're going to be joining Nora's team, working on the refresh of the Maestro line which, as you'll find out, is running into some heavy weather. There are some serious fires to put out, and – here she is!"

Nora Sommers was standing at the doorway, one hand on the doorjamb, posing like a diva. She extended the other hand coyly. "Hi, Adam, welcome! So glad you're with us."

"Nice to be here."

"It was not an easy hire, I'll tell you frankly. We had a lot of really strong candidates. But as they say, cream rises to the top. Well, shall we get right to it?"

Her voice, which had almost had a girlish lilt to it, seemed to deepen instantly as soon as we walked away from Tom Lundgren's office. She spoke faster, almost spitting out her words. "Your cubicle's right over here," she said, jabbing the air with her index finger. "We use Web phones here – I assume you know how?"

"No worries."

"Computer, phone – you should be all set. Anything else, just call Facility Services. All right, Adam, I should warn you, we don't hold hands around here. It's a pretty steep learning curve, but I have no doubt you're up to it. We throw you right in the pool, sink or swim." She looked at me challengingly.

"I'd rather swim," I said with a sly smile.

"Good to hear it," she said. "I like your attitude."

13

I had a bad feeling about Nora. She was the type who'd put cement boots on me, bundle me into the trunk of a Cadillac, and throw me in the East River. Sink or swim, tell me about it.

She left me at my new cube to finish reading orientation stuff, learn code names for all the projects. Every high-tech company gives their products code names; Trion's were types of storms – Tornado, Typhoon, Tsunami, and so on. Maestro was codenamed Vortex. It was confusing, all the different names, and on top of it I was trying to get the lay of the land for Wyatt. Around noon, when I was starting to get really hungry, a stocky guy in his forties, graying black hair in a ponytail, wearing a vintage Hawaiian shirt and round black heavy-framed glasses, appeared at my cube.

"You must be the latest victim," he said. "The fresh meat hurled into the lion cage."

"And you all seem so friendly," I said. "I'm Adam Cassidy."

"I know. I'm Noah Mordden. Trion Distinguished Engineer. It's your first day, you don't know who to trust, who to align yourself with. Who wants to play with you, and who wants you to fall flat on your face. Well, I'm here to answer all your questions. How would you like to grab some lunch in the subsidized employee cafeteria?"

Strange guy, but I was intrigued. As we walked to the elevator, he said, "So, they gave you the job no one else wanted, huh?"

"That right?" Oh, great.

"Nora wanted to fill the slot internally, but no one qualified wanted to work for her. Alana, the woman whose job you're filling, actually begged to get out from under her thumb, so they moved her somewhere else in-house. Word on the street is, Maestro's on the bubble." I could barely hear him; he was muttering quietly as he strode toward the elevator bank. "They're always quick to pull the plug when something's failing. Around here, you catch a cold and they're measuring you for a coffin."

I nodded. "The product's redundant."

"A piece of crap. Also doomed. Trion's also coming out with an all-in-one cell phone that has the exact same wireless text-messaging packet, so what's the point? Put the thing out of its misery. Plus, it doesn't help that Nora's a bitch on wheels."

"Is she?"

"If you didn't figure that out within ten seconds of meeting her, you're not as bright as your advance billing. But do not underestimate her: she's got a black belt in corporate politics, and she has her lieutenants, so beware."

"Thank you."

"Goddard's into classic American cars, so she's into them too. Owns a couple of restored muscle cars, though I've never seen her drive any of them. I think the point is for Jock Goddard to know she's cut from the same cloth. She's slick, that Nora."

The elevator was crowded with other employees going down to the third floor cafeteria. A lot of them wore Trion-logo golf or polo shirts. The elevator stopped on every floor. Someone behind me joked, "Looks like we got the local." I think someone cracks that joke in every single corporate elevator around the world every single day.

The cafeteria, or employee dining room as it was called, was immense, buzzing with the electricity of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Trion employees. It was like a food court in a fancy shopping mall – a sushi bar, with two sushi chefs; a gourmet choose-your-own-topping pizza counter; a burrito bar; Chinese food; steaks and burgers; an amazing salad bar; even a vegetarian/vegan counter.

"Jesus," I said.

"Give the people bread and circuses," Noah said. "Juvenal. Keep the peasants well fed and they won't notice their enslavement."

"I guess."

"Contented cows give better milk."

"Whatever works," I said, looking around. "So much for frugality, huh?"

"Ah. Take a look at the vending machines in the break rooms – twenty-five cents for peanut satay chicken, but a buck for a Klondike bar. Fluids and caffeinated substances are free. Last year the CFO, a man named Paul Camilletti, tried to eliminate the weekly beer bashes, but then managers started spending their own pocket money to buy beer, and someone circulated an e-mail that set out a business case for keeping the beer bashes. Beer costs X per year, whereas it costs Y to hire and train new employees, so given the morale-boosting and employee-retaining costs, the return on investment, ya de ya de ya, you get it. Camilletti, who's all about making the numbers, gave in. Still, his frugality campaign rules the day."

"Same way at Wyatt," I said.

"Even on overseas flights, employees are required to fly economy. Camilletti himself stays at Motel 6 when he travels in the U.S. Trion doesn't have a corporate jet – I mean, let's be clear, Jock Goddard's wife bought one for him for his birthday, so we don't have to feel sorry for him."

I got a burger and Diet Pepsi and he got some kind of mysterious Asian stir-fry thing. It was ridiculously cheap. We looked around the room, holding our trays, but Mordden didn't find anyone he wanted to sit with, so we sat at a table by ourselves. I had that first-day-of-school feeling, when you don't know anyone. It reminded me of when I started Bartholomew Browning.

"Goddard doesn't stay at Motel 6s too, does he?"

"I doubt it. But he's not too in-your-face about his money. He won't take limos. He drives his own car – though granted he has a dozen or so, all antiques he's restored himself. Also, he gives his top fifty execs the luxury car of their choice, and they all make a shitload of money – really obscene. Goddard's smart – he knows you've got to pay the top talent well in order to retain them."

"What about you Distinguished Engineers?"

"Oh, I've made an obscene amount of money here myself. I could in theory tell everyone to go fuck themselves and still have trust funds for my kids, if I had any kids."

"But you're still working."

He sighed. "When I struck gold, just a few years after I started here, I quit and sailed around the world, packing only my clothes and several heavy suitcases containing the Western canon."

"The western cannon?"

He smiled. "The greatest hits of Western literature."

"Like Louis L'Amour?"

"More like Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Kafka, Freud, Dante, Milton, Burke -"

"Man, I slept through that class in college," I said.

He smiled again. Obviously he thought I was a moron.

"Anyway," he said, "once I'd read everything, I realized that I'm constitutionally unable not to work, and I returned to Trion. Have you read Йtienne de la Boйtie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude?"

"Will that be on the final?"

"The only power tyrants have is that relinquished by their victims."

"That and the power to hand out free Pepsis," I said, tipping my can toward him. "So you're an engineer."

He gave a polite smile that was more of a grimace. "Not just any engineer, take note, but, as I said, a Distinguished Engineer. That means I have a low employee number and I can pretty much do whatever I want. If that means being a thorn in Nora Sommers's side, so be it. Now, as for the cast of characters on the marketing side of your business unit. Let's see, you've already met the toxic Nora. And Tom Lundgren, your exalted VP, who's basically a straight shooter who lives for the church, his family, and golf. And Phil Bohjalian, old as Methuselah and just about as technologically up-to-date, who started at Lockheed Martin when it was called something else and computers were as big as houses and ran on IBM punch cards. His days are surely numbered. And – lo and behold, it's Elvis himself, venturing into our midst!"

I turned to where he was looking. Standing by the salad bar was a white-haired, stoop-shouldered guy with a heavily lined face, heavy white eyebrows, large ears, and a sort of pixieish expression. He was wearing a black turtleneck. You could sense the energy in the room change, rippling around him in waves, as people turned to look, whispered, everyone trying to be blasй and subtle.

Augustine Goddard, Trion's founder and chief executive officer, in the flesh.

He looked older than in the pictures I'd seen. A much younger and taller guy was standing next to him, saying something. The younger guy, around forty, was lean and really fit, black hair run through with gray. Italian-looking, movie-star handsome like an action hero who was aging really well, but with deeply pitted cheeks. Except for the bad skin, he reminded me of Al Pacino in the first couple of Godfather movies. He was wearing a great charcoal-gray suit.

"That Camilletti?" I asked.

"Cutthroat Camilletti," Mordden said, digging into his stir-fry with chopsticks. "Our chief financial officer. The czar of frugality. They're together a lot, those two." He spoke through a mouthful of food. "You see his face, those acne vulgaris scars? Rumor has it they say 'eat shit and die' in Braille. Anyway, Goddard considers Camilletti the second coming of Jesus Christ, the man who's going to slash operating costs, increase profit margins, launch Trion stock back into the stratosphere. Some say Camilletti is Jock Goddard's id, the bad Jock. His Iago. The devil on his shoulder. I say he's the bad cop who lets Jock be the good cop."

I finished my burger. The CEO and his CFO were in line, paying for their salads, I noticed. Couldn't they just walk out without paying? Or butt to the front of the line or something?

"It's also very Camilletti to get lunch in the employee dining room," Mordden continued, "to demonstrate to the masses his commitment to slashing costs. He doesn't cut costs, he 'slashes' them. No executive dining room at Trion. No personal executive chef. No catered lunches brought in, not for them, oh no. Break bread with the peasants." He took a swallow of Dr Pepper. "Where were we in my little Playbill, my Who's Who in the Cast? Ah, yes. There's Chad Pierson, Nora's golden-haired boy and protйgй, boy wonder and professional suckup. MBA from Tuck, moved from B school right into product marketing at Trion, recently did a stint in Marketing Boot Camp, and no doubt he's going to consider you a threat to be eliminated. And there's Audrey Bethune, the only black woman in…"

Noah fell silent suddenly, poked more stir-fry into his mouth. I saw a handsome blond guy around my age gliding quickly up to our table, a shark through water. Button-down blue shirt, preppy-looking, a jock. One of those white-blond guys you see in multipage magazine ad spreads, consorting with other specimens of the master race at a cocktail party on the lawn of their baronial estate.

Noah Mordden took a hasty swig of his Dr Pepper and stood up. He had brown stir-fry stains on the front of his Aloha shirt. "Pardon me," he said uncomfortably. "I have a one-on-one." He left his dishes spread out on the table and bolted just as the white-blond guy got there, hand outstretched.

"Hey, man, how you doing?" the guy said. "Chad Pierson."

I went to shake his hand, but he did one of those hip-hop too-cool-to-shake-hands-the-normal-way hand-slide things. His fingernails looked manicured. "Man," he said, "I've heard so much about you, you stud!"

"All bullshit," I said. "Marketing, you know."

He laughed conspiratorially. "Nah, you're supposed to be the man. I'm hangin' with you, learn a trick or two."

"I'm going to need all the help I can get. They tell me it's sink-or-swim around here, and it definitely looks like the deep end."

"So, Mordden give you his cynical egghead shit?"

I smiled neutrally. "Gave me his take."

"All negative. He thinks he's in some kind of soap opera, some Machiavelli-type deal. Maybe he is, but I wouldn't pay him much attention."

I realized that I'd just sat with the unpopular kid on the first day of school, but that just made me want to defend Mordden. "I like him," I said.

"He's an engineer. They're all weird. You play hoops?"

"Some, sure."

"Every Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime in the gym there's always a pick-up game, we gotta get you on the court. Plus maybe you and me can go out for a drink some time, catch a game, whatever."

"Sounds great," I said.

"Anyone tell you about the Corporate Games beer bash yet?"

"Not yet."

"I guess that's not exactly Mordden's thing. Anyway, it's a blast." He was hyper, torquing his body from side to side like a basketball player looking for a lane to make a monster dunk. "So, bud, you're going to be at the two o'clock, right?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

"Cool. Nice having you on the team, bud. We're gonna do some damage, you and me." He gave me a big smile.

14

Chad Pierson was standing at a whiteboard, writing up a meeting agenda with red and blue markers, when I walked into Corvette. This was a conference room like every other conference room I'd ever seen – the big table (only high-tech-designer black instead of walnut), the Polycom speakerphone console sitting in the middle of the table like a geometric black widow spider, a basket of fruit and ice bucket of soft drinks and juice boxes.

He gave me a quick wink as I sat down on one of the long sides of the table. There were a couple of other people already there. Nora Sommers was sitting at the head of the table, wearing black reading glasses on a chain around her neck, reading through a file and occasionally muttering something to Chad, her scribe. She didn't seem to notice me.

Next to me sat a gray-haired guy in a blue Trion polo shirt tapping away on a Maestro, probably doing e-mail. He was thin but had a potbelly, skinny arms and knobby elbows poking out of his short-sleeved shirt, a fringe of gray hair and unexpectedly long gray sideburns, big red ears. He wore bifocals. If he'd had a different kind of shirt on, he'd probably be wearing a plastic shirt pocket protector. He looked like an old-style nerd engineer from the Hewlett-Packard-calculator days. His teeth were small and brown, like he chewed tobacco.

This had to be Phil Bohjalian, the old-timer, though from the way Mordden talked about him, I half expected him to be using a quill and parchment. He kept sneaking nervous, furtive glances at me.

Noah Mordden slipped quietly into the room, didn't acknowledge me or anyone else for that matter, and opened his notebook computer at the far end of the conference table. More people filed in, laughing and talking. There were maybe a dozen people in the room now. Chad finished at the white-board and put his stuff down in the empty seat next to me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Glad you're with us," he said.

Nora Sommers cleared her throat, stood up, walked over to the white-board. "Well, why don't we get started? All right, I'd like to introduce our newest team member, to those of you who haven't yet had the privilege of meeting him. Adam Cassidy, welcome."

She fluttered her red fingernails at me, and all heads turned. I smiled modestly, ducked my head.

"We were very fortunate in being able to steal Adam away from Wyatt, where he was one of the key players on Lucid. We're hoping he'll apply some of his magic to Maestro." She smiled beatifically.

Chad spoke up, looking from side to side as if he were sharing a secret. "This bad boy's a genius, I've talked to him, so everything you've heard is true." He turned to me, his baby-blues wide, and shook my hand.

Nora went on, "As we all know far too well, we're getting some serious pushback on Maestro. The knives are out throughout Trion, and I don't have to name names." There was some low chortling. "We have a rather large, looming deadline – a presentation before Mr. Goddard himself, where we will make the case for maintaining the Maestro product line. This is far more than a functional staff update, more than a checkpoint meeting. This is life or death. Our enemies want to put us in the electric chair; we're pleading for a stay of execution. Are we clear about that?"

She looked around menacingly, saw obedient nods. Then she turned around and slashed through the first item in the agenda with a purple marker, a little too violently. Whipping back around, she handed a sheaf of stapled papers to Chad, who began passing them around to his right and left. They looked like some kind of specs, a product definition or product protocol or whatever, but the name of the product, presumably on the top sheet, had been removed.

"Now," she said, "I'd like us to do an exercise – a demonstration, if you will. Some of you may recognize this product protocol, and if so, keep it to yourselves. As we work to refresh the Maestro, I want us all to think outside the box for a couple of moments, and I'd like to ask our newest star to look this over and give us his thoughts."

She was looking right at me.

I touched my chest and said stupidly, "Me?"

She smiled. "You."

"My…thoughts?"

"That's right. Go/no-go. Greenlight this project or no. You, Adam, are the gatekeeper on this proposed product. Tell us what you think. Do we go for it, or not?"

My stomach dropped. My heart started thudding. I tried to control my breathing, but I could feel my face flushing as I thumbed through it. It was all but inscrutable. I really didn't know what the hell it was for. I could hear little nervous noises in the silence – Nora clicking the top of the Expo marker off and on, twisting it with a scrunchy noise. Someone was playing with the little plastic flex-straw on his Minute Maid apple juice box, pushing it in and pulling it out, making it squeak.

I nodded slowly, wisely as I scanned it, trying not to look like a deer caught in the headlights, which was how I felt. There was some gobbledygook there about "market segment analysis" and "rough estimate of size of market opportunity." Man oh man. The nerve-wracking music from Jeopardy was playing in my head.

Scrunch, scrunch. Squeak, squeak.

"Well, Adam? Go or no-go?"

I nodded again, trying to look fascinated and amused at the same time. "I like it," I said. "It's clever."

"Hmm," she said. There was some low chuckling. Something was up. Wrong answer, I guessed, but I could hardly change it now.

"Look," I said, "based solely on the product definition, of course, it's hard to say much more than -"

"That's all we have to go on at this point," she interrupted. "Right? Go or no-go?"

I riffed. "I've always believed in being bold," I said. "I'm intrigued. I like the form factor, the handwriting recognition specs… Given the usage model, the market opportunity, I'd certainly pursue this further, at least to the next checkpoint."

"Aha," she said. One side of her mouth turned up in an evil smile. "And to think our friends in Cupertino didn't even need Adam's wisdom to greenlight this stink bomb. Adam, these are the specs for the Apple Newton. One of the biggest bombs Cupertino ever dropped. Cost them over five hundred million dollars to develop, and then, when it came out, they lost sixty million bucks a year on it." More chuckles. "But it sure gave Doonesbury and Jay Leno plenty of material back in 1993."

People were looking away from me. Chad was biting the inside of his cheek, looking grave. Mordden seemed to be in another world. I wanted to rip Nora Sommers's face off, but I did the good-loser thing.

Nora looked around the table, from one face to the next, her eyebrows arched. "There's a lesson here. You've always got to drill down, look beyond the marketing hype, get under the hood. And believe me, when we present to Jock Goddard in two weeks, he's going to be getting under the hood. Let's keep that at top of mind."

Polite smiles all around: everyone knew Goddard was a gearhead, a car nut.

"All right," she said. "I think I've made my point. Let's move on."

Yeah, I thought. Let's move on. Welcome to Trion. You've made your point. I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

15

The meeting between my dad and Antwoine Leonard did not go smoothly. Well, actually, it was a total, unmitigated disaster. Put it this way: Antwoine encountered significant pushback. No synergy. Not a strategic fit.

I arrived at Dad's apartment right after I finished my first day at Trion. I parked the Audi down the block, because I knew Dad was always looking out of his window, when he wasn't watching his thirty-six-inch TV screen, and I didn't want to get grief from him about my new car. Even if I told him I'd gotten a big raise or something, he'd find a way to put some nasty spin on it.

I got there just in time to see Maureen wheeling a big black nylon suitcase up to a cab. She was tight-lipped, wearing her "dressy" outfit, a lime green pantsuit with a riot of tropical flowers and fruits all over it, and a perfectly white pair of sneakers. I managed to intercept her just as she was yelling at the driver to put her suitcase in the trunk and handed her a final check (including a generous bonus for pain and suffering), thanked her profusely for her loyal service, and even tried to give her a ceremonial peck on the cheek, but she turned her head away. Then she slammed the door, and the cab took off.

Poor woman. I never liked her, but I couldn't help but feel sorry for the torture my father had put her through.

Dad was watching Dan Rather, really mostly yelling at Rather, when I arrived. He despised all the network anchormen equally, and you didn't want to get him started on the "losers" on cable. The only cable shows he liked were the ones where opinionated right-wing hosts bait their guests, try to piss them off, froth at the mouth. That was his kind of sport these days.

He was wearing one of those sleeveless white undershirts that are sometimes called "wifebeaters." They always gave me the willies. I had bad associations with them – whenever he "disciplined" me as a kid, he seemed to be wearing one. I could still remember, clear as a snapshot, the time when, eight years old, I accidentally spilled Kool-Aid on his Barcalounger, and he took the strap to me, standing over me – stained ribbed undershirt, red sweating face – roaring, "See what you made me do?" Not the most pleasant memory.

"When's this new guy getting here?" he said. "He's already late, isn't he?"

"Not yet." Maureen refused to spend a minute showing him the ropes, so unfortunately there'd be no overlap.

"What're you all dressed up for? You look like an undertaker – you're making me nervous."

"I told you, I started a new job today."

He turned back to Rather, shaking his head in disgust. "You got fired, didn't you?"

"From Wyatt? No, I left."

"You tried to coast like you always do, and they fired you. I know how these things work. They can smell a loser a mile off." He took a couple of heavy breaths. "Your mother always spoiled you. Like hockey – you coulda gone pro if you applied yourself."

"I wasn't that good, Dad."

"Easy to say that, isn't it? Makes it easier if you just say that. That's where I really fucked you up – I put you through that high-priced college so you could spend all your time partying with your fancy friends." He was only partly right, of course: I did work-study to put myself through college. But let him remember what he wanted to remember. He turned to look at me, his eyes bloodshot, beady. "So where are all your fancy friends now, huh?"

"I'm okay, Dad," I said. He was on one of his jags, but fortunately the doorbell rang, and I almost ran to answer it.

Antwoine was right on time. He was dressed in pale blue hospital scrubs, which made him look like an orderly or a male nurse. I wondered where he picked them up, since he'd never worked in a hospital, as far as I knew.

"Who's that?" Dad shouted hoarsely.

"It's Antwoine," I said.

"Antwoine? What the hell kinda name is Antwoine? You hired some French faggot?" But Dad had already turned to see Antwoine standing at the front door, and his face had gone purple. He was squinting, his mouth open in horror. "Jesus – Christ!" he said, puffing hard.

"How's it going?" Antwoine said, giving me a bone-crushing handshake. "So this must be the famous Francis Cassidy," he said, approaching the Barcalounger. "I'm Antwoine Leonard. Pleasure to meet you, sir." He spoke in a deep, pleasant baritone.

Dad kept staring, puffing in and out. Finally he said, "Adam, I wanna talk to you, right now."

"Sure, Dad."

"No – you tell An-twoine or whatever the hell his name is to get outta here, let you and me talk."

Antwoine looked at me, puzzled, wondering what he should do.

"Why don't you bring your stuff to your room?" I said. "It's the second door on the right. You can start unpacking."

He carried two nylon duffel bags down the hall. Dad didn't even wait for him to get out of the room before he said, "Number one, I don't want a man taking care of me, you understand? Find me a woman. Number two, I don't want a black man here. They're unreliable. What were you thinking? You were gonna leave me alone with Leroy? I mean, look at your homeboy here, the tattoos, the braids. I don't want that in my house. Is this so damned much to ask?" He was puffing harder than ever. "How can you bring a black guy in here, after all the trouble I have with those goddamned kids from the projects breaking into my apartment?"

"Yeah, and they always turn right around when they figure out there's nothing here worth stealing." I kept my voice down, but I was pissed. "Number one, Dad, we don't really have a choice here, because the agencies won't even deal with us anymore, because you've made so many people quit, okay? Number two, I can't stay with you, because I've got a day job, remember? And number three, you haven't even given the guy a chance."

Antwoine came back down the hall toward us. He approached my father, almost menacingly close, but he spoke in a soft, gentle voice. "Mr. Cassidy, you want me to leave, I'll leave. Hell, I'll leave right now, I don't got no problem with that. I don't stay where I'm not wanted. I don't need a job that bad. As long as my parole officer knows I made a serious attempt to get a job, I'm cool."

Dad was staring at the TV, an ad for Depends, a vein twitching under his left eye. I'd seen that face before, usually when he was chewing someone out, and it could scare the shit out of you. He used to make his football players run till someone puked, and if anyone refused to keep going, they got the Face. But he'd used it so many times on me that it had lost its power. Now he pivoted around and turned it on Antwoine, who'd no doubt seen a hell of a lot worse in the joint.

"Did you say parole officer?"

"You heard me right."

"You're a fucking convict?"

"Ex-con."

"The hell you trying to do to me?" he said, staring at me. "You trying to kill me before the disease does? Look at me, I can't hardly move, and you put me alone in the house with a fucking convict?"

Antwoine didn't even seem to be annoyed. "Like your son says, you ain't got nothing worth stealing, even if I wanted to," he said calmly, through sleepy eyes. "At least give me a little credit, if I wanted to pull off some kinda scam, I wouldn't take a job here."

"You hear that?" Dad puffed, enraged. "You hear that?"

"Plus, if I'm going to stay, we gotta come to agreement on a couple of things, you and me." Antwoine sniffed the air. "I can smell the smokes, and you're going to have to cut that shit out right now. That's the shit that got you here." He reached out one huge hand and tapped the arm of the Barcalounger. A compartment popped open, which I'd never seen before, and a red-and-white pack of Marlboros popped up like a jack-in-the-box. "Thought so. That's where my dad always hid his."

"Hey!" my dad yelled. "I don't believe this!"

"And you're gonna start a workout routine. Your muscles are wasting away. Your problem isn't your lungs, it's your muscles."

"Are you out of your fuckin' mind?" Dad said.

"You got the respirtary disease, you gotta exercise. Can't do anything about the lungs, those are gone, but the muscles we can do something about. We're gonna start with some leg lifts in your chair, get your leg muscles working again, and then we're going to walk for one minute. My old man had the emphysema, and me and my brother -"

"You tell this big – tattooed nigger," Dad said between puffs, "to get his stuff – out of that room – and get the hell out of my house!"

I almost lost it. I'd just had a supremely lousy day, and my temper was short, and for months and months I'd been busting my ass trying to find someone who'd put up with the old guy, replacing each one as he made them leave, a whole long parade, a huge waste of time. And here he was, summarily dismissing the latest who, granted, may not have been an ideal candidate, but was the only one we had. I wanted to let into him, let fly, but I couldn't. I couldn't scream at my father, this pathetic dying old man with end-stage emphysema. So I held it in, at the risk of exploding.

Before I could say anything, Antwoine turned to me. "I believe your son hired me, so he's the only one who can fire me."

I shook my head. "No such luck, Antwoine. You're not getting out of here – not so easy. Why don't you get started?"

16

I needed to blow off steam. It was everything – the way Nora Sommers had rubbed my face in it, being unable to tell her to go fuck herself, the impossibility of my surviving at Trion long enough to steal even a coffee mug, the general feeling of being in way over my head. And then, the cherry on the cake: my dad. Keeping the anger in, stopping myself from telling him off – you fucking ungrateful bigot, die already! – was corroding my insides.

So I just showed up at Alley Cat, knowing that Seth would be working that night. I just wanted to sit at the bar and get shitfaced on free booze.

"Hey, homey," Seth said, delighted to see me, "your first day at the new place, huh?"

"Yeah."

"That bad, huh?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Seriously bad. Wow." He poured me a Scotch like I was some old drunk, a regular. "Love the haircut, dude. Don't tell me you got drunk and woke up with that haircut."

I ignored him. The Scotch went immediately to my head. I hadn't eaten any supper, and I was tired. It felt great.

"How bad could it be, bud? It's your first day, they like show you where the bathroom is, right?" He looked up at the basketball game on TV, then back at me.

I told him about Nora Sommers and her cute little Apple Newton trick.

"What a bitch, huh? What'd she come down on you so hard for? What'd she expect – you're new, you don't know anything, right?"

I shook my head. "No, she -" Suddenly I realized that I'd left out a key part of the story, the part about my allegedly being a superstar at Wyatt Telecom. Shit. The anecdote only made sense if you knew the dragon lady was trying to take me down a peg. My brain was fried. Trying to extricate myself from this minor slip seemed an insurmountable goal, like climbing Mount Everest or swimming across the Atlantic. Already I'd gotten caught in a lie. I felt gooey inside and very tired. Fortunately someone caught Seth's eye, signaled to him. "Sorry, man, it's half-price hamburger night," he announced as he went to fetch someone a couple of beers.

I found myself thinking about the people I'd met today, the "cast of characters" as the bizarro Noah Mordden had referred to them, who were now parading through my head, getting more and more grotesque. I wanted to debrief with somebody, but I couldn't. Mostly I wanted to download, talk about Chad and Phil Whatever, the old-timer. I wanted to tell someone about Trion and what it was like and about my sighting of Jock Goddard in the cafeteria. But I couldn't, because I didn't trust myself to remember where the Great Wall ran, which part no one was supposed to know about.

The Scotch buzz began to fade, and this humming low note of anxiety, a pedal note, was slowly growing louder, gradually getting higher-pitched, like microphone feedback, high and ear-splitting. By the time Seth came back, he'd forgotten what we were talking about. Seth, like most guys, tends to focus more on his own stuff than on anyone else's. Saved by male narcissism.

"God, women love bartenders," he said. "Why is that?"

"I don't know, Seth. Maybe it's you." I tipped my empty glass toward him.

"No doubt. No doubt." He glugged another few ounces of Scotch in there, refreshed the ice. In a low, confiding voice, barely audible over the din of whooping voices and the blaring ballgame, he said, "My manager says he doesn't like my pour. Keeps making me use a pour tester, practice all the time. Plus he's always testing me now. 'Pour for me! Too much! You're giving away the store!' "

"I think your pour's perfectly fine," I said.

"I'm really supposed to write up a ticket, you know."

"Go ahead. I'm making the big bucks now."

"Na-ah, they let us comp four drinks a night, don't worry about it. So, you think you've got it bad at work. My boss at the firm is always giving me shit if I'm like ten minutes late."

I shook my head.

"I mean, Shapiro doesn't know how to use the copier. He doesn't know how to send a fax. He doesn't even know how to do a Lexis-Nexis search. He'd be totally sunk without me."

"Maybe he wants someone else to do the shitwork."

Seth didn't seem to hear me. "So did I tell you about my latest scam?"

"Tell me."

"Get this – jingles!"

"Huh?"

"Jingles! There – like that!" He pointed up at the TV, some cheesy low-production-value ad for a mattress company with a stupid, annoying song they were always playing. "I met this guy at the law firm who works for an ad agency, he told me all about it. Told me he could get me an audition with one of those jingle companies like Megamusic or Crushing or Rocket. He said the easiest way to break in is by writing one of them."

"You can't even read music, Seth."

"Neither can Stevie Wonder. Look, a lot of the really talented guys can't read music. I mean, how long does it take to learn a thirty-second piece of music? This girl who does all those JCPenney ads, he said she can barely read music, but she's got the voice!"

A woman next to me at the bar called out to Seth, "What kind of wine do you have?"

"Red, white, and pink," he said. "What can I get you?"

She said white, and he poured some into a water glass.

He circled back to me. "The big bucks is in the singing, though. I just got to put a reel together, a CD, and pretty soon I'll be on the A list – it's all who you know. You following me? No work, mucho bucks!"

"Sounds great," I said with not enough enthusiasm.

"You're not into this?"

"No, it sounds great, it really does," I said, mustering a little more enthusiasm. "Great scam." In the last couple of years, Seth and I talked a lot about scamming by, about how to do the least work possible. He loved hearing my stories of how I used to goof off at Wyatt, how I used to spend hours on the Internet looking at The Onion or Web sites like BoredAtWork.com or ILove-Bacon.com or FuckedCompany.com. I especially liked the sites that had a "manager" button you could click when your manager passed by, that killed the funny stuff and put back up whatever boring Excel spreadsheet you were working on. We both took pride in how little work we could get away with. That's why Seth loved being a paralegal – because it allowed him to be marginal, mostly unsupervised, cynical, and uncommitted to the working world.

I got up to take a leak and on the way back bought a pack of Camel straights from the vending machine.

"Again with this shit?" Seth said when he spied me tearing the plastic off the cigarette pack.

"Yeah, yeah," I said in a leave-me-alone tone.

"Don't come to me for help wheeling your oxygen tank around." He pulled a chilled martini glass out of the freezer, poured in a little vermouth. "Watch this." He tossed the vermouth out, over his shoulder, then poured in some Bombay Sapphire. "Now that's a perfect martini."

I took a long swig of the Scotch as he went to ring up the martini and deliver it, enjoyed the burn at the back of my throat. Now it was really starting to kick in. I felt a little unsteady on the bar stool. I was drinking like your proverbial coal miner with a paycheck in his pocket. Nora Sommers and Chad Pierson and all the others had begun to recede, to shrink, to take on a harmless, antic, cartoon-character aura. So I had a shitty first day, what was so unusual about that? Everyone felt a little out-of-their-element on the first day in a new job. I was good, I had to keep this in mind. If I weren't so good, Wyatt would never have chosen me for his mission. Obviously he and his consigliere Judith wouldn't be wasting their time on me if they didn't think I could pull it off. They'd have just fired me and tossed me into the legal system to fend for myself. I'd be bent over that bunk in Marion.

I began to feel a pleasant, alcohol-fueled surge of confidence bordering on megalomania. I'd been parachuted into Nazi Germany, with little more than K rations and a shortwave radio, and the success of the allies was riding entirely on me, nothing less than the fate of Western civilization.

"I saw Elliot Krause today downtown," Seth said.

I looked at him, uncomprehending.

"Elliot Krause? Remember? Elliot Port-O-San?"

My reaction time had slowed; it took me a few seconds, but then I burst out laughing. I hadn't heard Elliot Krause's name in years.

"He's a partner in some law firm, of course."

"Specializing in…environmental law, right?" I said, choking with laughter, spitting out a mouthful of Scotch.

"Do you remember his face?"

"Forget his face, remember his pants?"

This was why I liked spending time with Seth. We talked in Morse code; we got each other's references, all the inside jokes. Our shared history gave us a secret language, the way twins talk to each other when they're babies. One summer in high school when Seth was working at a snooty tennis club doing grounds maintenance during a big international tennis match, he let me sneak in without paying. They'd brought in some of those rented "portable restroom facilities" for the influx of spectators – Handy Houses or Port-O-Sans or Johnny On the Job, whatever cute name they had, I don't remember – those things that look like big old refrigerators. By the second or third day they'd gotten full, the Handy House crew hadn't bothered to come by and pump them out, and they reeked.

There was this preppy kid named Elliot Krause we both hated, partly because he'd stolen Seth's girlfriend, and partly because he looked down on us as working-class kids. He showed up at the tournament, dressed in a faggoty tennis sweater and white duck pants, Seth's girlfriend on his arm, and he made the mistake of going into one of the Handy Houses to relieve himself. Seth, who was spearing trash at the moment, saw this and gave me an evil smile. He ran over to the booth, jammed the wooden handle of his trash-picker-upper thing through the latch, and me and a friend of ours, Flash Flaherty, started rocking the Porta Potti back and forth. You could hear Elliot inside shouting, "Hey! Hey! What the hell's going on?" and you could hear the sloshing of the unspeakable contents, and finally we got the thing flipped over, with Elliot trapped inside. I don't want to think about what the poor guy was floating in. Seth lost his job but he insisted that it was worth it – he'd have paid good money just for the privilege of seeing Elliot Krause emerge in his no-longer-white tennis whites, retching, covered in shit.

By this point, recalling Elliot Krause putting his shit-splashed glasses back on his shit-covered face as he stumbled out of the Handy House, I was laughing so hard I lost my balance and sprawled onto the floor. For a couple of seconds I lay there, unable to get up. People crowded around me, giant heads leaning in, asking if I was okay. I was definitely looped. Everything had gotten smeary. For some reason I flashed on an image of my father and Antwoine Leonard, and the thought struck me as screamingly hilarious, and I couldn't stop laughing.

I felt someone grab me by the shoulder, someone else grab me by the elbow. Seth and another guy were helping me out of the bar. Everyone seemed to be watching me.

"Sorry, man," I said, feeling a wave of embarrassment wash over me. "Thanks. My car's right here."

"You're not driving, bud."

"It's right here," I insisted feebly.

"That's not your car. That's an Audi or something."

"It's mine," I said firmly, punctuating the statement with a vigorous nod. "Audi – A6, I think."

"What happened to Bondo?"

I shook my head. "New car."

"Man, this new job, they paying you a lot more?"

"Yeah," I said, then I added, my words slurred, "not that much more."

He whistled for a cab, and he and the other guy hustled me into it. "You remember where you live?" Seth said.

"Come on," I said. "Of course I remember."

"You want a coffee for the ride home, sober you up a little?"

"Nah," I said. "I got to get to sleep. Work tomorrow."

Seth laughed. "I don't envy you, man," he said.

17

In the middle of the night my cell phone rang, ear-splittingly loud, only it wasn't the middle of the night. I could see a shaft of light behind the shades. The clock said five-thirty – A.M.? P.M.? I was so disoriented I had no idea. I grabbed the phone, wished I hadn't left it on.

"Yeah?"

"You're still asleep?" a voice said, incredulous.

"Who is this?"

"You left the Audi in a tow zone." Arnold Meacham, I realized at once: Wyatt's security Nazi. "It's not your car, it's leased by Wyatt Telecommunications, and the least you can do is take decent care of it – not leave it lying around like a discarded condom."

It came back to me: last night, getting wasted at Alley Cat, somehow getting home, forgetting to set the alarm…Trion!

"Oh, shit," I said, jolting upright, my stomach doing a flip. My head throbbed, felt enormous, like one of those aliens on Star Trek.

"We set out the rules quite clearly," Meacham said. "No more carousing. No partying. You're expected to function at peak capacity." Was he talking faster and louder than normal? He sure seemed to be. I could barely keep up.

"I know," I croaked lamely.

"This is not an auspicious start."

"It was real – real busy yesterday. My first day, and my father -"

"I really don't give a shit. We have an explicit agreement, which you're expected to abide by. And what have you turned up on the skunkworks?"

"Skunkworks?" I flung my legs around to the floor, sat on the edge of the bed, massaged my temples with my free hand.

"Classified, codeword projects. What the hell do you think you're there for?"

"No, it's too early," I said. "Too soon, I mean." Slowly my brain was starting to function. "I was escorted everywhere yesterday. There wasn't a minute when I was left alone. It would have been far too risky for me to do anything sneaky. You don't want me blowing this assignment on the first day."

Meacham was silent for a few seconds. "Fair enough," he said. "But you should have an opportunity quite soon, and I expect you to take advantage of it. I want a report by close of business today, are we clear?"

18

By lunchtime I began to feel less like the walking wounded, and I decided to go up to the gym – the "fitness center," excuse me – to get in a quick workout. The fitness center was on the roof of E Wing, in a sort of bubble, with tennis courts, all sorts of cardio equipment, treadmills and StairMasters and elliptical trainers all outfitted with individual TV/video screens. The locker room had a steam room and sauna and was as spacious as any high-end sports club I'd ever seen.

I'd changed and was about to hit the machines and the weights when Chad Pierson sauntered into the locker room.

"There he is," Chad said. "How's it going, big guy?" He opened a locker near mine. "You here for B-ball?"

"Actually, I was going to -"

"There's probably a game on, you wanna play?"

I hesitated a second. "Sure."

There was no one else on the basketball court, so we waited around for a couple of minutes, dribbling and taking shots. Finally, Chad said, "How about a little one-on-one?"

"Sure."

"To eleven. Winners out?"

"Okay."

"Listen, how 'bout we put a little wager on the game, huh? I'm not really a competitive guy – maybe that'll juice it up a little."

Yeah, right, I thought. You're not competitive. "Like a six-pack or something?"

"Come on, man. A C-note. Hundred bucks."

A C-note? What, were we in Vegas with the Rat Pack? Reluctantly, I said, "Okay, sure, whatever."

A mistake. Chad was good, played aggressively, and I was hungover. He went to the top of the three-point line, shot, and sank it. Then, looking pleased with himself, he made a pistol with his finger and thumb, blew the smoke off the barrel, and said, "Smokin'!"

Backing me in, he hit a few fadeaway jumpers and immediately took the lead. From time to time he'd do this little Alonzo Mourning move where he waggled both hands back and forth like a sharpshooter slinging his guns around at a shootout. It was supremely annoying. "Looks like you didn't bring your A game, huh?" he said. His expression seemed benevolent, even concerned, but his eyes gleamed with condescension.

"Guess not," I said. I was trying to be a nice guy, enjoy the game, not go after him like a dick, but he was beginning to piss me off. When I drove, I wasn't in sync, didn't have a feel yet. I missed a few shots, and he blocked a couple. But then I scored a few points off him, and before long it was six to three. I began to notice he kept driving right.

He pumped his fist, did his stupid finger-pistol thing. He drove right, hit another jumper. "Money!" he crowed.

It was at that point that I sort of hit a mental toggle switch and let the competitive juices flow. Chad kept driving to the right and shooting right, I noticed. It was obvious he couldn't go left, didn't have a decent left hand. So I started taking away his right, forcing him left, then I hit a layup.

I'd guessed right. He had no left hand. He missed shots going left, and a couple of times I easily picked off the ball as his dribble crossed over. I got in front of him, then suddenly jumped back and to the right, forcing him to switch directions quickly. Mostly, as I got into the rhythm of the game, I'd been driving, so Chad must have figured I didn't have a jump shot. He looked stunned when my jump shot started dropping.

"You've been holding out on me," he said through gritted teeth. "You do have a jump shot – but I'm going to shut it down."

I started playing with his mind a little. I faked going for a jump shot, forcing him up in the air, then blew right by him. This worked so well that I tried it again; Chad was so unnerved that it worked even better the second time. Pretty soon the score was even.

I was getting under his skin. I'd do a little stutter step, just a little movement, fake to the left, and he'd jump left, giving me space to drive right. With each score you could see he was getting more and more rattled.

I drove in and shot a layup, then hit my fadeaway. I was ahead now, and Chad was getting red-faced, short of breath. No more cocky repartee.

I was ahead, ten to nine, when I drove hard and then suddenly stopped short. Chad reeled back and fell on his ass. I took my time, got my feet set, and put up my shot – all net. I made a little pistol with my thumb and fore-finger, blew off the smoke, and, with a nice big smile, said, "Smokin'."

Half backing up, half collapsing against the padded gym wall, Chad gasped, "Well, you surprised me, big guy. You've got more game than I thought." He took a deep gulp of air. "This was good. Lot of fun. But I'm going to kick your ass next time, buddy – I know your game now." He grinned, like he was only kidding, reached out and put a clammy, sweaty hand on my shoulder. "I owe you a Benjamin."

"Forget about it. I don't like playing for money anyway."

"No, really. I insist. Buy yourself a new tie or something."

"No way, Chad. Won't take it."

"I owe you -"

"You don't owe me anything, man." I thought for a moment. There's nothing people love to part with more than advice. "Except maybe a Nora tip or two."

His eyes lit up; I was playing on his field now. "Aw, she does that to all the newbies. It's her own form of hazing, doesn't mean anything more than that. It's nothing personal, believe me – I got the same treatment when I started here."

I noticed the unstated, And now look at me. He was careful not to criticize Nora; he knew to be wary of me, not to open up. "I'm a big boy," I said. "I can take it."

"I'm saying you won't have to, bud. She made her point – just stay on your toes – and now she'll move on. She wouldn't have done that if she didn't consider you a high-po." High-potential, he meant. "She likes you. She wouldn't have fought to get you on her team if she didn't."

"Okay." I couldn't tell if he was holding out on me or not.

"I mean, if you wanna…like, this afternoon's meeting – Tom Lundgren's going to be there, reviewing the product specs, right? And we've been spinning our wheels for weeks already, stuck in some dumbass debate over whether to add GoldDust functionality." He rolled his eyes. "Like, give me a break. Don't even get Nora started on that crap. Anyway, it's probably a good idea if you have some opinion on GoldDust – you don't have to agree with Nora that it's complete and total bullshit and a huge waste of money. The important thing is to just have an opinion on it. She likes informed debate."

GoldDust, I knew, was the latest big thing in electronic consumer products. It was some engineering industry committee's fancy marketing name for low-power, short-range wireless transmission technology that's supposed to let you connect your Palm or Blackberry or Lucid to a phone or a laptop or a printer, whatever. Anything within twenty feet or so. Your computer can talk to your printer, everything talks to everything else, and no unsightly cables to trip over. It was going to free us all from our chains, from wires and cables and tethers. Of course, what the industry geeks who invented GoldDust didn't figure on was the explosion in WiFi, 802.11 wireless. Hey, even before Wyatt put me through the Bataan Death March, I had to know about WiFi. GoldDust I learned about from Wyatt's engineers, who ridiculed it up and down.

"Yeah, there was always someone at Wyatt trying to push that on us, but we held the line."

He shook his head. "Engineers want to pack everything into everything, no matter what it costs. What do they care if it pushes our price point up over five hundred bucks? Anyway, that'll come up for sure – I'll bet you can really whale on it."

"All I know is what I read, you know?"

"I'll tee it up for you at the meeting, you can whomp it. Earn a couple of strategic brownie points with the boss, can't hurt, right?"

Chad was like tracing paper: he was translucent; you could see his motives. He was a snake and I knew I could never trust him, but he was obviously trying to establish an alliance with me, probably on the theory that it was better for him to be aligned with the hot new talent, be my buddy, than to appear to be threatened by me, which of course he was.

"All right, man, thanks," I said.

"Least I can do."

By the time I got back to my cube there was half an hour before the meeting, so I got on the Internet and did some quick-and-dirty research on GoldDust so at least I could sound like I knew what I was talking about. I was whipping through dozens of Web sites of varying quality, some industry-promo types, and some (like GoldDustGeek.com) run by geeks obsessed with this shit, when I noticed someone standing over my shoulder, watching me. It was Phil Bohjalian.

"Eager beaver, huh?" he said. He introduced himself. "Only your second day, and look at you." He shook his head in wonderment. "Don't work too hard, you'll burn out. Plus you'll make us all look bad." He made a sort of chortle, like this was a line out of The Producers or something, and he exited stage left.

19

The Maestro marketing group met once again in Corvette, everyone sitting pretty much in the same place, as if we had assigned seats.

But this time Tom Lundgren was in the room, sitting in a chair against the wall in the back, not at the conference table. Then, just before Nora called the meeting to order, in walked Paul Camilletti, Trion's CFO, looking spiffy, like a matinee idol out of Love Italian Style, wearing a nubby dark-gray houndstooth jacket over a black mock turtleneck. He took a seat next to Tom Lundgren, and you could feel the entire room go still, electrically charged, as if someone had flipped a power switch.

Even Nora looked a little rattled. "Well," she said, "why don't we get started? I'm pleased to welcome Paul Camilletti, our chief financial officer – welcome, Paul."

He ducked his head, the kind of acknowledgment that said, Don't pay any attention to me – I'm just going to sit here incognito, anonymous, like an elephant in the room.

"Who else is with us today? Who's teleconning in?"

A voice came over the intercom speaker: "Ken Hsiao, Singapore."

Then: "Mike Matera, Brussels."

"All right," she said, "so the gang's all here." She looked excited, jazzed, but it was hard to tell how much of that was a show of enthusiasm she was putting on for Tom Lundgren and Paul Camilletti. "This seems as good a time as any to take a look at forecasts, drill down, get a sense of where we stand. None of us wants to hear that old clichй, 'dying brand,' am I right? Maestro is no dying brand. We are not going to torpedo the brand equity that Trion has built up in this product line just for the sake of novelty. I think we're all on board on that."

"Nora, this is Ken in Singapore."

"Yes, Ken?"

"Uh, we're feeling some pressure here, I have to say, from Palm and Sony and Blackberry, especially in the Enterprise space. Advance orders for Maestro Gold in Asia Pacific are looking a little soft."

"Thank you, Ken," she said hastily, cutting him off. "Kimberly, what's your sense of the channel community?"

Kimberly Ziegler, wan and nervous-looking with a head of wild curls and horn-rimmed glasses, looked up. "My take is quite different from Ken's, I have to say."

"Really? In what way?"

"I'm seeing product differentiation that's benefiting us, actually. We've got a better price point than either Blackberry or Sony's advanced text-paging devices. It's true there's a little wear-and-tear on the brand, but the upgrade in the processor and the flash memory are really going to add value. So I think we're hanging in there, especially in the vertical markets."

Suckup, I thought.

"Excellent," Nora beamed. "Good to hear. I'd also be quite interested to hear whatever feedback that's come in on GoldDust -" She saw Chad holding his index finger in the air. "Yes, Chad?"

"I thought maybe Adam might have a thought or two about GoldDust."

She turned to me. "Terrific, let's hear it," she said as if I'd just volunteered to sit down and play the piano.

"GoldDust?" I said with a knowing smirk. "Like, how 1999 is that? The Betamax of wireless. It's up there with New Coke, cold fusion, XFL football, and the Yugo."

There were some appreciative titters. Nora was watching me closely.

I went on, "The compatibility problems are so massive, we don't even want to go there – I mean, the way GoldDust-enabled devices work only with devices from the same manufacturer, the lack of any standardized code. Philips keeps saying they're going to come out with a new, standardized version of GoldDust – yeah, right, maybe when we're all speaking Esperanto."

Some more laughter, though I noticed in passing that maybe half the people in the room were stone-faced. Tom Lundgren was looking at me with a funny crooked smile, his right leg jackhammering.

I was really grooving now, getting into it. "I mean, the transfer rate is, what, less than one megabit per second? Really pathetic. Less than a tenth of WiFi. This is horse-and-buggy stuff. And let's not even talk about how easy it is to intercept – no security whatsoever."

"Right on," someone said in a low voice, though I didn't catch who it was. Mordden was downright beaming. Phil Bohjalian was watching me through narrowed eyes, his expression cryptic, unreadable. Then I looked over and saw Nora. Her face was flushing. I mean, you could see a wave of red rising from her neck to her wide-set eyes.

"Are you finished?" she snapped.

I felt queasy all of a sudden. This was not the reaction I expected. What, had I gone on too long? "Sure," I said warily.

An Indian-looking guy sitting across from me said, "Why are we revisiting this? I thought you made a final decision on this last week, Nora. You seemed to feel very strongly that the added functionality was worth the cost. So why are you marketing people going back to this old debate? Isn't the matter settled?"

Chad, who'd been studying the table, said, "Hey, come on, guys, give the newbie a break, huh? You can't expect him to know everything – the guy doesn't even know where the cappuccino machine is yet, come on."

"I think we don't need to waste any more time here," said Nora. "The matter's decided. We're adding GoldDust." She gave me a look of the darkest fury.

When the meeting ended, a stomach-churning twenty minutes later, and people began filing out of the room, Mordden gave my shoulder a quick, furtive pat, which should have told me everything. I'd fucked up, big time. People were giving me all sorts of curious looks.

"Uh, Nora," said Paul Camilletti, holding up a finger, "you mind staying behind a sec? I want to go over a few things."

As I walked out, Chad came up to me and spoke in a low voice. "Sounds like she didn't take it well," he said, "but that was really valuable input, guy."

Yeah right, motherfucker.

20

Maybe fifteen minutes after the meeting broke up, Mordden stopped by my cubicle.

"Well, I'm impressed," he said.

"Really," I said without much enthusiasm.

"Absolutely. You've got more spine than I'd have given you credit for. Taking on your manager, the dread Nora, on her pet project…" He shookhis head. "Talk about creative tension. But you should be made aware of the consequences of your actions. Nora does not forget slights. Bear in mind that the most ruthless of the guards in the Nazi concentration camps were women."

"Thanks for the advice," I said.

"You should be on the alert for subtle signs of Nora's displeasure. For instance, empty boxes stacked up next to your cubicle. Or suddenly being unable to log on to your computer. Or HR demanding your badge back. But fear not, they'll give you a strong recommendation, and Trion outplacement services are provided gratis."

"I see. Thanks."

I noticed that I had a voice mail. When Mordden left, I picked up the phone.

It was a message from Nora Sommers, asking me – no, ordering me – to come to her office at once.

She was tapping away at her keyboard when I got there. She gave a quick, sidelong, lizardlike glance and went back to her computer. She ignored me like that for a good two minutes. I stood there awkwardly. Her face had started flushing again – I felt sort of bad that her own skin gave her away so easily.

Finally she looked up again, wheeled around in her chair to face me. Her eyes glistened, but not with sadness. Something different, something almost feral.

"Listen, Nora," I said gently. "I want to apologize for my -"

She spoke so quietly I could barely hear her. "I suggest you listen, Adam. You've done quite enough talking today."

"I was an idiot -" I began.

"And to make such a remark in the presence of Camilletti, Mister Bottom Line, Mister Profit Margin… I've got some serious damage control to do with him, thanks to you."

"I should have kept my mouth -"

"You try to undermine me," she said, "you don't know what you've taken on."

"If I'd known -" I tried to get in.

"Don't even go there. Phil Bohjalian told me he passed by your cube and saw you feverishly doing research on GoldDust before the meeting, before your 'casual,' 'offhand' dismissal of this vital technology. Let me assure you of this, Mr. Cassidy. You may think you're some hot shit because of your track record at Wyatt, but I wouldn't get too comfortable here at Trion. If you don't get on the bus, you're going to get run over. And mark my words: I'm going to be behind the wheel."

I stood there for a few seconds while she bore down on me with those wide-set predator eyes. I looked down at the floor, then back up again. "I blew it big-time," I said, "and I really owe you a huge apology. Obviously I misjudged the situation, and I probably brought with me my old Wyatt Telecom biases, but that's no excuse. It won't happen again."

"There won't be an opportunity for it to happen again," she said quietly. She was tougher than any jackbooted state trooper who'd ever flagged me over to the side of the road.

"I understand," I said. "And if anyone had told me the decision had been made, I certainly would have kept my big mouth shut. I guess I was going on the assumption that folks here at Trion had heard about Sony, that's all. My bad."

"Sony?" she said. "What do you mean, 'heard about Sony?' "

Wyatt's competitive-intelligence people had sold him this tidbit, which he'd given me to use at a strategic moment. I figured that saving my ass counted as a strategic moment. "You know, just that they're scrapping their plans to incorporate GoldDust in all their new handhelds."

"Why?" she asked suspiciously.

"The latest release of Microsoft Office isn't going to support it. Sony figures if they incorporate GoldDust, they lose out on millions of dollars of enterprise sales, so they're going with BlackHawk, the local-wireless protocol that Office will support."

"It will?"

"Absolutely."

"And you're sure about this? Your sources are completely reliable?"

"Completely, one hundred percent. I'd stake my life on it."

"You'd stake your career on it as well?" Her eyes drilled into me.

"I think I just did."

"Very interesting," she said. "Extremely interesting, Adam. Thank you."

21

I stayed late that evening.

By seven-thirty, eight, the place was empty. Even the diehard workaholics worked from home at night, logging back on to the Trion network, so there was no need to stay late at the office anymore. By nine o'clock, there was no one in sight. The overhead fluorescent lights stayed on, faintly flickering. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked black from some angles; from other angles you could see the city spread out before you, lights twinkling, headlights streaking by noiselessly.

I sat at my cubicle and started poking around the Trion internal Web site.

If Wyatt wanted to know who'd been hired in to some kind of "skunkworks" that had been started some time in the last two years, I figured I should try to find out who Trion had hired in the last two years or so. That was as good a start as any. There were all sorts of ways to search the employee database, but the problem was, I didn't really know exactly who or what I was looking for.

After a while, I figured it out: the employee number. Every Trion employee gets a number. A lower number means you were hired earlier on. So after looking at a bunch of different, random employee bios, I began to see the range of numbers of people who'd started working here two years ago. Luckily (for my purposes anyway), Trion had been in a real slow period, so there weren't that many. I came up with a list of a few hundred new hires – new being within the last two years – and downloaded all the names and their bios to a CD. So that was a start at least.

Trion had its own, proprietary instant-messaging service called InstaMail. It worked just like Yahoo Messenger or America Online's Instant Messenger – you could keep a "buddy list" that told you when colleagues were online and when they weren't. I noticed that Nora Sommers was logged in. She wasn't here, but she was online, which meant she was working from home.

Which was good, because that meant I could now attempt to break into her office without the risk of her showing up unannounced.

The thought of doing it made my guts clench like a fist, but I knew I had no choice. Arnold Meacham wanted tangible results, like yesterday. Nora Sommers, I knew, was on several Trion new product-marketing committees. Maybe she'd have information on any new products or new technology Trion was secretly developing. At the very least it was worth a close look.

The most likely place where she'd keep this information would be on her computer, in her office.

The plaque on the door said N. SOMMERS. I summoned up the nerve to try the doorknob. It was locked. That didn't entirely surprise me, since she kept sensitive HR records there. I could see right through the plate glass into her darkened office, all of ten feet by ten feet. There was not much in it, and it was, of course, fanatically neat.

I knew there had to be a key somewhere in her admin's desk. Strictly speaking, her administrative assistant – a large, broad-beamed, tough woman of around thirty named Lisa McAuliffe – wasn't only hers. Nominally, Lisa worked for all of Nora's unit, including me. Only VPs got their own admins; that was Trion policy. But that was just a formality. I'd already figured out that Lisa McAuliffe worked for Nora and resented anybody who got in the way.

Lisa wore her hair really short, almost in a crew cut, and wore overalls or painters' pants. You wouldn't think Nora, who always dressed fashionably and femme, would have an admin like Lisa McAuliffe. But Lisa was fiercely loyal to Nora; she reserved her few smiles for Nora and scared the bejesus out of everyone else.

Lisa was a cat person. Her cubicle was cluttered with dozens of cat things: Garfield dolls, Catbert figurines, that sort of thing. I looked around, saw no one, and began to pull open her desk drawers. After a few minutes I found the key ring hidden on the soil of her fluorescent light-compatible plant, inside a plastic paper clip holder. I took a deep breath, took the key ring – it must have had twenty keys on it – and began trying the keys, one by one. The sixth key opened Nora's door.

I flipped on the lights, sat down at Nora's desk, and powered up her computer.

In case anyone happened to come by unexpectedly, I was prepared. Arnold Meacham had pumped me full of strategies – go on the offensive, ask them questions – but what were the odds that a cleaning person, who spoke Portuguese or Spanish and no English, was going to figure out that I was in somebody else's office? So I focused on the task at hand.

The task at hand, unfortunately, wasn't so easy. USER NAME/PASSWORD blinked on the screen. Shit. Password-protected: I should have expected it. I typed in NSOMMERS; that was standard. Then I typed NSOMMERS in the password space. Seventy percent of people, I'd been taught, make their password the same as their user name.

But not Nora.

I had a feeling that Nora wasn't the sort of person who wrote down her passwords on a Post-it note in a desk drawer or something, but I had to make sure. I checked the usual places – under the mouse pad, under the keyboard, in back of the computer, in the desk drawers, but nothing. So I'd have to wing it.

I tried just SOMMERS; I tried her birth date, tried the first and last seven digits of her Social Security number, her employee number. A whole range of combinations. DENIED. After the tenth try, I stopped. Each attempt was logged, I had to assume. Ten attempts was already too many. People generally didn't fumble more than two or three times.

This was not good.

But there were other ways to crack the password. I'd gone through hours of training on that, and they'd supplied me with some equipment that was almost idiotproof. I wasn't a computer hacker or anything, but I was decent at computers – enough to get into a world of trouble back at Wyatt, right? – and the stuff they gave me was ridiculously easy to install.

Basically, it was a device called a "keystroke logger." These things secretly record every keystroke a computer's user makes.

They can be software, like computer programs, or actual hardware devices. But you had to be careful about installing the software versions, because you never knew how closely the corporation's network systems were being monitored; they might be able to detect it. So Arnold Meacham urged me to use the equipment.

He'd given me an assortment of little toys. One was a tiny cable connector that got plugged in between a computer keyboard and the PC. You'd never notice it. It had a chip embedded in it that recorded and stored up to two million keystrokes. You just came back later and took it off the target's computer, and you had a record of everything the person had typed in.

In a total of about ten seconds, I unplugged Nora's keyboard, attached it to the little Keyghost thing, and then plugged that into her computer. She'd never see it, and in a couple of days I'd come back and get it.

But I wasn't going to leave her office empty-handed. I looked through some of the stuff on her desk. Not much here. I found a draft of an e-mail to the Maestro team, which she hadn't yet sent. "My most recent market research," she wrote, "indicates that, though GoldDust is undoubtedly superior, Microsoft Office will instead be supporting BlackHawk wireless technology. Though this may be a disruption to our fine engineers, I'm sure we all agree it's best not to swim against the Microsoft tide…"

Fast work, Nora, I thought. I hoped to hell Wyatt was right.

There were also the file cabinets to go through. Even in a high-tech place like Trion, important files almost always exist on paper, whether originals or hard-copy backups. This is the great truth of the so-called paperless office: the more we all use computers, the more reams of copy paper we seem to go through. I opened the first cabinet I came to, which turned out to be not a file cabinet at all but an enclosed bookcase. Why were some books kept in here, out of sight, I wondered? Then I looked closely at the titles and I whooped out loud.

She had rows and rows of books with titles like Women Who Run with the Wolves and Hardball for Women and Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman. Titles like Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead…but Gutsy Girls Do and Seven Secrets of Successful Women and The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women.

Nora, Nora, I found myself thinking. You go, girl.

Four of her file cabinets were unlocked, and I went for those first, thumbed through the stultifyingly dull contents: ops reviews, product specs, product development files, financial… She documented seemingly everything, probably printed out a copy of every e-mail she sent or received. The good stuff, I knew, had to be in the locked cabinets. Why else would they be locked?

Pretty quickly I located the small file-cabinet key on Lisa's key ring. In the locked drawers I found a lot of HR files on her subordinates, which might have made for interesting reading if I had the time. Her personal financial records indicated that she'd been at Trion a long time, a lot of her options had vested, and she traded actively, so her net worth was in seven figures. I found my file, which was thin and contained nothing scary. Nothing of interest.

Then I looked closer and came across a few pieces of paper, printouts of e-mails Nora had received from someone high up at Trion. From what I could tell, the woman named Alana Jennings, who'd had my job before me, had abruptly been transferred somewhere else inside the company. And Nora was pissed – so pissed, in fact, that she escalated her complaint all the way up the food chain to the senior vice president level, a pretty bold move:

SUBJ: Re: Reassignment of Alana Jennings

DATE: Tuesday, April 8, 8:42:19 AM

FROM: GAllred

TO: NSommers

Nora,

I am in receipt of your several e-mails protesting the transfer of ALANA JENNINGS to another division of the company. I understand your upset, since Alana is your highest-ranked employee as well as a valued player on your team.

Regretfully, however, your objections have been overruled on the highest authority. Alana's skill set is urgently needed in Project AURORA.

Let me assure you that you will not lose your head count. You have been granted a backfill requisition, so that youmay fill Alana's position with any interested and qualified employee within the company.

Please let me know if I can do anything further to help.

Best,

Greg Allred

Senior VP, Advanced Research Business Unit

Trion Systems

Helping You Change the Future

And then, two days later, another e-mail:

SUBJ: Re: Re: Reassignment of Alana Jennings

DATE: Thursday, April 10, 2:13:07 PM

FROM: GAllred

TO: NSommers

Nora,

Regarding AURORA, my deepest apologies, but I am not at liberty to disclose the exact nature of this project except to say that it is mission-critical to the future of Trion. Since AURORA is a classified R &D project of the utmost sensitivity, I would respectfully ask you not to pursue the matter further.

That said, I appreciate your difficulty in filling Alana's position internally with someone appropriately qualified. Therefore I am happy to tell you that you are, in this instance, permitted to disregard the general companywide ban on hiring from outside. This slot may be designated a "silver bullet" position, enabling you to hire from outside Trion. I trust and hope this will allay your concerns.

Don't hesitate to call or write with any questions.

Best,

Greg Allred

Senior VP, Advanced Research Business Unit

Trion Systems

Helping You Change the Future

Whoa. Suddenly things were starting to make a little sense. I'd been hired to replace this Alana woman, who'd been moved into something called Project AURORA.

Project AURORA was clearly a top-secret undertaking – a skunkworks. I'd found it.

It didn't seem like a good idea to pull out the e-mails and take them out to the copy machine, so I took a yellow legal pad from a tall stack in Nora's supply closet and began taking notes.

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there on the carpeted floor of her office, writing, but it must have been a good four or five minutes. And suddenly I became aware of something in my peripheral vision. I glanced up, saw a security guard standing in the open doorway watching me.

Trion didn't do rent-a-cops; they had their own security personnel, who wore navy blazers and white shirts and looked sort of like policemen, or church ushers. This guy was a tall, beefy black man with gray hair and a lot of moles, like freckles, on his cheeks. He had large, heavy-lidded, basset-hound eyes and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was standing there, watching me.

For all the time I'd spent mentally rehearsing what I'd say if I was caught, I went blank.

"I see what you got there," the guard said. He wasn't looking at me; he was staring right toward Nora's desk. At the computer – the Keyghost? No, God, please, no.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"I see what you got there. Hell, yeah. I know it."

I freaked, heart racing. Jesus Christ almighty, I thought: I'm hosed.

22

He blinked, kept staring. Had he seen me install the device? And then I was suddenly seized by another, equally sickening thought: had he noticed Nora's name on the door? Wouldn't he wonder why a man was in a woman's office, thumbing through her files?

I glanced over at the name plaque on the open door, right behind the guard. It said N. SOMMERS. N. SOMMERS could be anyone, male or female. Then again, for all I knew he'd been patrolling the halls forever, and he and Nora went way back.

The guard was still standing in the doorway, blocking the exit. What the hell was I supposed to do now? I could try to bolt, but I'd first have to get by the man, which meant I'd have to take a dive at him, tackle him to the ground, get him out of the way. He was big, but old, probably not fast; it might work. So what were we talking about here, assault and battery? On an old guy? Christ.

I thought quickly. Should I say I was new? I ran though a series of explanations in my head: I was Nora Sommers's new assistant. I was her direct report – well, I was – working late at her behest. What the hell did this guy know? He was a goddamned security guy.

He took a few steps into the office, shook his head. "Man, I thought I'd seen everything."

"Look, we've got a huge project due tomorrow morning -" I started to say, indignantly.

"You got a Bullitt there. That's a genuine Bullitt."

Then I saw what he was staring at, moving toward. It was a large color photograph in a silver frame hanging on the wall. A picture of a beautifully restored, vintage muscle car. He was moving toward it in a daze, as if he were approaching the Ark of the Covenant. "Shit, man, that's a genuine 1968 Mustang GT three-ninety," he breathed like he'd just seen the face of God.

The adrenaline kicked in and the relief seeped out of my pores. Jesus.

"Yep," I said proudly. "Very good."

"Man, look at that 'Stang. That pony a factory GT?"

What the hell did I know? I couldn't tell a Mustang from a Dodge Dart. For all I knew that could have been a picture of an AMC Gremlin. "Sure," I said.

"Lotta fakes out there, you know. You ever check under the rear seat, see if it got those extra metal plates, those reinforcements for the dual exhaust?"

"Oh yeah," I said airily. I stood up, extended my hand. "Nick Sommers."

His handshake was dry, his hand large, engulfing mine. "Luther Stafford," he said. "I haven't seen you 'round here before."

"Yeah, I'm never here at night. This damned project – it's always, 'We need it at nine A.M., big rush,' hurry up and wait." I tried to sound casual. "Glad to see I'm not the only one working late."

But he wouldn't drop the car. "Man, I don't think I've ever seen a fast-back pony in Highland Green. Outside the movies, I mean. That looks like the exact same one Steve McQueen used to chase the evil black Dodge Charger off the road and into the gas station. Hubcaps flying all over the place." He gave a low, mellow, cigarette-and-whiskey chuckle. "Bullitt. My favorite movie. I must've seen it a thousand times."

"Yep," I said. "Same one."

He moved in closer. Suddenly I realized that there was a huge gold statuette on the shelf right next to the silver-framed photo. Engraved on the statuette's base, in huge black letters, was WOMAN OF THE YEAR, 1999. PRESENTED TO NORA SOMMERS. Quickly I walked over behind the desk, blocking the security guard's view of the award with my body, as if I too were inspecting the photograph closely.

"Got the rear spoiler and everything," he went on. "Dual exhaust tips, right?"

"Oh, yeah."

"With the rolled edges and everything?"

"Absolutely."

He shook his head again. "Man. You restore it yourself?"

"Nah, I wish I had the time."

He laughed again, a low, rumbling laugh. "I know what you mean."

"Got it from a guy who'd been keeping it in his barn."

"Three-twenty horsepower on that pony?"

"Right," I said, like I knew.

"Look at the turn-signal hood on that baby. I once had a '68 hardtop but I had to get rid of it. My wife made me, after we had the first kid. I've been lusting after it ever since. But I won't even look at that new GT Bullitt Mustang, no sir."

I shook my head. "No way." I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. Was everyone in this company obsessed with cars?

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you got GR-seventy-size tires on fifteen-by-seven American Torque Thrust rims, that right?"

Jesus, could we move off this topic? "Truth is, Luther, I don't know shit about Mustangs. I don't even deserve to own one. My wife just got it for me for my birthday. 'Course, it's going to be me paying off the loan for the next seventy-five years."

He chuckled a little more. "I hear you. I've been there." I noticed him looking down at the desk, and then I realized what he was looking at.

It was a big manila envelope with Nora's name on it in big, bold capital letters in red Sharpie marker. NORA SOMMERS. I looked around the desk for something to slide over it, to cover it up, just in case he hadn't yet read the name, but Nora kept her desk immaculate. Trying to act casual, I yanked at a page of the legal pad and ripped it out quietly, let it drop to the surface of the desk and slid it over the envelope with my left hand. Real cool, Adam. The yellow paper had a few notes on it in my handwriting, but nothing that would make any sense to anyone.

"Who's Nora Sommers?" he said.

"Ah, that's my wife."

"Nick and Nora, huh?" he chortled.

"Yeah, we get that all the time." I smiled broadly. "It's why I married her. Well, I'd better get back to the files, or I'm going to be here all night. Nice to meet you, Luther."

"Same here, Nick."

By the time the security guy left I was so nervous I couldn't do much more than finish copying the e-mails, then turn off the light and relock Nora's office door. As I turned to return the key ring to Lisa McAuliffe's cubicle, I noticed someone walking not too far away. Luther again, I figured. What did the guy want, more Mustang talk? All I wanted was to drop off the keys unseen, and I was out of here.

But it wasn't Luther; it was a paunchy guy with horn-rim glasses and a ponytail.

The last person I expected to see in the office at ten o'clock at night, but then again, engineers worked strange hours.

Noah Mordden.

Had he seen me locking up Nora's office, or maybe even in it? Or was his eyesight not that good? Maybe he wasn't even paying attention; maybe he was in his own world – but what was he doing here?

He didn't say anything, didn't acknowledge me. I wasn't even sure he noticed me at all. But I was the only other person in the vicinity, and he wasn't blind.

He turned into the next aisle down and left a folder in someone's cubicle. Fake-casually, I strolled past Lisa's cubicle and deposited the key ring in the plant, right in the soil where I'd found it, one swift movement, then I kept moving.

I was halfway to the elevators when I heard, "Cassidy."

I turned back.

"And I thought only engineers were nocturnal creatures."

"Just trying to get caught up," I said lamely.

"I see," he said. The way he said it sent a chill up my spine. Then he asked, "In what?"

"Sorry?"

"What are you caught up in?"

"I'm not sure I understand," I said, my heart pounding.

"Try to remember that."

"Come again?"

But Mordden was already on his way to the elevator, and he didn't answer.