Paranoia

23

By the time I got home, I was a wreck, even worse than before. I wasn't cut out for this line of work. I wanted to go out and get smashed again, but I had to get to bed, get some sleep.

My apartment seemed even smaller and more squalid than ever. I was making a six-figure salary, so I should have been able to afford one of those apartments in the new tall buildings on the wharf. There was no reason for me to stay in this hellhole except that it was my hellhole, my reminder of the low-life underachieving bum I really was, not the well-dressed, slick poseur I'd become. Plus I didn't have the time to look for a new place.

I hit the light switch by the door and the room stayed dark. Damn. That meant the bulb in the big ugly lamp by the sofa, the main light source in the room, had burned out. I always kept the lamp switched on so I could turn it on and off at the door. Now I had to stumble through the dark apartment to the little closet where I kept the spare bulbs and stuff. Fortunately I knew every inch of the tiny apartment, literally with my eyes closed. I felt around in the corrugated cardboard box for a new bulb, hoping it was a hundred-watt and not a twenty-five or something, and then navigated through the room to the sofa table, unscrewed the thing that keeps the shade on, unscrewed the bulb, put in the new one. Still no light came on. Shit: a fitting end to a lousy day. I found the little switch on the lamp's base and turned it, and the room lit up.

I was halfway to the bathroom when the thought hit me: How'd the lamp get switched off? I never turned it off there – never. Was I losing my mind?

Had someone been in the apartment?

It was a creepy feeling, some flicker of paranoia. Someone had been here. How else could the lamp have been switched off at its base?

I had no roommates, no girlfriend, and no one else had the key. The sleazy management company that ran the building for the sleazy absentee slumlord never accessed the units. Not even if you begged them to send someone over to fix the radiators. No one was ever in here but me.

Looking over at the phone directly beneath the lamp, this old black Panasonic telephone/answering-machine combo whose answering machine part I never used anymore, now that I had voice mail through the phone company, I saw something else was off. The black phone cord lay across the phone's keypad, on top of it, instead of coiled to one side of the phone the way it always was. Granted, these were dumb little details, but you do notice these things when you live alone. I tried to remember when I'd last made a phone call, where I'd been, what I'd been doing. Was I so distracted that I hung up the phone wrong? But I was sure the phone hadn't been like this when I left this morning.

Someone had definitely been in here.

I looked back at the phone/answering-machine thing and realized something else was wrong, and this wasn't even subtle. The answering machine that I never used had one of those dual-tape systems, one microcassette for the outgoing message, another to record incoming messages.

But the cassette that recorded incoming messages was gone. Someone had removed it.

Someone, presumably, who wanted a copy of my phone messages.

Or – the idea suddenly hit me – who wanted to make sure I hadn't used the answering machine to record any phone calls I'd received. That had to be it. I got up, started searching for the only other tape recorder I had, a small microcassette thing I'd bought in college for some reason I no longer remembered. I vaguely remembered seeing it in my bottom desk drawer some weeks ago when I'd been searching for a cigarette lighter. Pulling open the desk drawer, I rummaged through it, but it wasn't there. Nor was it in any of the other desk drawers. The more I looked, the more certain I was that I'd seen the tape recorder in the bottom drawer. When I looked again, I found the AC power adapter that went with it, confirming my suspicion. That recorder was gone too.

Now I was certain: whoever had searched my apartment had been looking for any tape recordings I might have made. The question was, who had searched my apartment? If it was Wyatt and Meacham's people, that was totally infuriating, outrageous.

But what if it wasn't them? What if it was Trion? That was so scary I didn't even want to think about it. I remembered Mordden's blank-faced question: What are you caught up in?

24

Nick Wyatt's house was in the poshest suburb, a place everyone's heard of, so rich that they make jokes about it. It was easily the biggest, fanciest, most outrageously high-end place in a town known for big, fancy, and outrageously high-end estates. No doubt it was important to Wyatt to live in the house that everyone talked about, that Architectural Digest put on its cover, that the local journalists were always trying to find excuses to get into and write about. They loved doing awestruck, jaw-dropping takes on this Silicon San Simeon. They loved the Japanese thing – the fake Zen serenity and spareness and simplicity clashing so grotesquely with Wyatt's fleet of Bentley convertibles and his totally un-Zen stridency.

In Wyatt Telecommunications's PR department one guy's entire job was handling Nick Wyatt's personal publicity, planting items in People and USA Today or wherever. From time to time he put out stories about the Wyatt estate, which was how I knew it had cost fifty million dollars, that it was way bigger and fancier than Bill Gates's lake house near Seattle, that it was a replica of a fourteenth-century Japanese palace that Wyatt had had built in Osaka and shipped in pieces to the U.S. It was surrounded by forty acres of Japanese gardens full of rare species of flowers, rock gardens, a man-made waterfall, a man-made pond, antique wooden bridges flown in from Japan. Even the irregularly cut stones paving the driveway had been shipped from Japan. Of course I didn't see any of this as I drove up the endless stone driveway. I saw a stone guardhouse and a tall iron gate that swung open automatically, seemingly miles of bamboo, a carport with six different-colored Bentley convertibles like a roll of Lifesavers (no American muscle cars for this guy), and a huge low-slung wooden house surrounded by a tall stone wall.

I'd gotten the order to report for this meeting from Meacham by secure e-mail – a message to my Hushmail account from "Arthur," sent through the Finnish anonymizer, the remailer that made it untraceable. There was a whole vocabulary of code language that made it look like a confirmation of an order I'd placed with some online merchant, but actually told me when and where and so on.

Meacham had given me precise instructions on where and how to drive. I had to drive to a Denny's parking lot and wait for a dark blue Lincoln, which I then followed to Wyatt's house. I guess the point was to make sure I wasn't being followed there. They were being a little paranoid about it, I thought, but who was I to argue? After all, I was the guy on the hot seat.

As soon as I got out of the car, the Lincoln pulled away. A Filipino man answered the door, told me to take off my shoes. He led me into a waiting room furnished with shoji screens, tatami mats, a low black lacquered table, a low futon-looking squarish white couch. Not very comfortable. I thumbed through the magazines arrayed artistically on the black coffee table – The Robb Report, Architectural Digest (including, naturally, the issue with Wyatt's house on the cover), a catalog from Sotheby's.

Finally, the houseman or whatever you call him reappeared and nodded at me. I followed him down a long hallway and walked toward another almost-empty room where I could see Wyatt seated at the head of a long, low black dining table.

As we approached the entrance to the dining room I suddenly heard a high-pitched alarm go off, incredibly loud. I looked around in bewilderment but before I could figure out what was going on I was grabbed by the Filipino man and another guy who appeared out of nowhere, and the two of them wrestled me to the ground. I said, "What the fuck?" and struggled a little, but these guys were as powerful as sumo wrestlers. The second guy then held me while the Filipino patted me down. What were they looking for, weapons? The Filipino guy found my iPod MP3 music player, yanked it out of my workbag. He looked at it, said something in whatever they speak in the Philip-pines, handed it to the other guy, who looked at it, turned it over, said something gruff and indecipherable.

I sat up. "This how you welcome all Mr. Wyatt's guests?" I said. The houseman took the iPod and, entering the dining room, handed it to Wyatt, who was watching the action. Wyatt handed it right back to the Filipino without even looking at it.

I got to my feet. "Your guys never seen one of those before? Or is outside music not allowed in here?"

"They're just being thorough," Wyatt said. He was wearing a tight black long-sleeved shirt that looked like it was made of linen, and probably cost more than I made in a month, even now at Trion. He seemed to be more tanned than normal. He must sleep in a tanning bed, I thought.

"Afraid I might be packing?" I said.

"I'm not 'afraid' of anything, Cassidy. I like everyone to play by the rules. If you're smart and don't try to get tricky, everything will go fine. Don't even think about trying to take out an 'insurance policy,' because we're way ahead of you." Funny, the idea had never occurred to me until he mentioned it.

"I don't follow."

"I'm saying that if you plan to do something foolish like try to tape-record our meetings or any phone calls you get from me or anyone else associated with me, things will not go well for you. You don't need insurance, Adam. I'm your insurance."

A beautiful Japanese woman in a kimono appeared with a tray and handed him a rolled hot towel with silver tongs. He wiped his hands and handed it back to her. Up close you could tell that he'd had a facelift. The skin was too tight, gave his eyes an almost Eskimo cast.

"Your home phone isn't secure," he continued. "Neither is your home voice mail or computer or your cell phone. You're to initiate contact with us only in case of emergency, except in response to a request from us. All other times you'll be contacted by secure, encrypted e-mail. Now, may I see what you have?"

I gave him the CD of all recent Trion hires I'd downloaded from the Web site, and a couple of sheets of paper, covered with typed notes. While he was reading through my notes, the Japanese woman came back with another tray and began to set before Wyatt an array of tiny, perfect, sculptural pieces of sushi and sashimi on lacquered mahogany boxes, with little mounds of white rice and pale-green wasabi and pink slices of pickled ginger. Wyatt didn't look up; he was too absorbed in the notes I'd brought him. After a few minutes he picked up a small black phone on the table, which I hadn't noticed before, and said something in a low voice. I thought I heard the word "fax."

Finally he looked at me. "Good job," he said. "Very interesting."

Another woman appeared, a prim middle-aged woman, lined face, gray hair, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She smiled, took the sheaf of papers from him, left without saying a word. Did he keep a secretary on call all night?

Wyatt picked up a pair of chopsticks and lifted a morsel of raw fish to his mouth, chewed thoughtfully while he stared at me. "Do you understand the superiority of the Japanese diet?" he said.

I shrugged. "I like tempura and stuff."

He scoffed, shook his head. "I'm not talking about tempura. Why do you think Japan leads the world in life expectancy? A low-fat, high-protein diet, rich in plant foods, high in antioxidants. They eat forty times more soy than we do. For centuries they refused to eat four-legged creatures."

"Okay," I said, thinking: And your point is…?

He took another mouthful of fish. "You really ought to get serious about enhancing the quality of your life. You're, what, twenty-five?"

"Twenty-six."

"You've got decades ahead of you. Take care of your body. The smoking, the drinking, the Big Macs and all that crap – that shit's got to stop. I sleep three hours a night. Don't need more than that. Are you having fun, Adam?"

"No."

"Good. You're not there to have fun. Are you comfortable at Trion in your new role?"

"I'm learning the ins and outs. My boss is a serious bitch -"

"I'm not talking about your cover. I'm talking about your real job – the penetration."

"Comfortable? No, not yet."

"It's pretty high-stakes. I feel your pain. You still see your old friends?"

"Sure."

"I don't expect you to dump them. That might raise suspicions. But you better make goddamned sure you keep your mouth shut, or you'll be in a world of shit."

"Understood."

"I assume I don't need to remind you of the consequences of failure."

"I don't need to be reminded."

"Good. Your job's difficult, but failure is far worse."

"Actually, I sort of like being at Trion." I was being truthful, but I also knew he'd take it as a jab.

He looked up, smirked as he chewed. "I'm delighted to hear that."

"My team is making a presentation before Augustine Goddard pretty soon."

"Good old Jock Goddard, huh. Well, you'll see quickly he's a pretentious, sententious old gasbag. I think he actually believes all the ass-kissing profiles, that 'conscience of high-tech' bullshit you always see in Fortune. Really believes his shit doesn't stink."

I nodded; what was I supposed to say? I didn't know Goddard, so I couldn't agree or disagree, but Wyatt's envy was pretty transparent.

"When are you presenting to the old fart?"

"Couple weeks."

"Maybe I can be of some assistance."

"I'll take whatever help I can get."

The phone rang, and he picked it right up. "Yes?" He listened for a minute. "All right," he said, then hung up. "You hit something. In a week or two you'll be receiving a complete backgrounder on this Alana Jennings."

"Sure, like I got on Lundgren and Sommers."

"No, this is of another magnitude of detail."

"Why?"

"Because you'll want to follow up. She's your way in. And now that you have a code name, I want the names of everyone connected in any way with AURORA. Everyone, from project director all the way down to janitor."

"How?" As soon as I said it, I regretted it.

"Figure it out. That's your job, man. And I want it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"That's right."

"All right," I said, with just a little defiance creeping into my voice. "But then you'll have what you need, right? And we'll be done."

"Oh, no," he said. He smiled, flashing his big white chompers. "This is only the beginning, guy. We've barely scratched the surface."

25

By now I was working insane hours, and I was constantly zonked. In addition to my normal work hours at Trion, I was spending long hours, late into the night, every night, doing Internet research or going over the competitive-intelligence files that Meacham and Wyatt sent over, the ones that made me sound so smart. A couple of times, on the long, traffic-constipated drive home, I almost fell asleep at the wheel. I'd suddenly open my eyes, jolt awake, stop myself at the last second from veering into the lane of oncoming traffic or slamming into the car in front of me. After lunch I'd usually start to fade, and it took massive infusions of caffeine to keep me from folding my arms and passing out in my cubicle. I would fantasize about going home early and getting under the covers in my dark hovel and falling deep asleep in the middle of the afternoon. I was living on coffee and Diet Pepsi and Red Bull. You could see dark circles under my eyes. At least workaholics get some kind of sick buzz out of it; I was just whipped, like a flogged horse in some Russian novel.

But running on fumes wasn't even my biggest problem. The thing was, I was losing track of what my "real" job was and what my "cover" job was. I was so busy just getting by from meeting to meeting, trying to stay on top of things enough that Nora wouldn't smell blood in the water and go after me, that I barely had time to skulk around and gather information on AURORA.

Every once in a while I'd see Mordden, at Maestro meetings or in the employee dining room, and he'd stop to chat. But he never mentioned that night when he either did or didn't see me coming out of Nora's office. Maybe he hadn't seen me in her office. Or maybe he had and he was for some reason not saying anything about it.

And then every couple of nights I'd get an e-mail from "Arthur" asking me where I was with the investigation, how things were going, what the hell was taking me so long.

I stayed late almost every night, and I was hardly ever at home. Seth left a bunch of phone messages for me and after a week or so gave up. Most of my other friends had given up on me, too. I'd try to squeeze in half an hour here or there to drop by Dad's apartment and check in on him, but whenever I'd show up, he was so pissed off at me for avoiding him that he barely looked at me. A sort of truce had settled in between Dad and Antwoine, some kind of a Cold War. At least Atwoine wasn't threatening to quit. Yet.

One night I got back into Nora's office and removed the little key logger thing, quickly and uneventfully. My Mustang-loving-guard friend usually came by on his rounds at between ten o'clock and ten-twenty, so I did it before he showed up. It took less than a minute, and Noah Mordden was nowhere in sight.

That tiny cable now stored hundreds of thousands of Nora's keystrokes, including all her passwords. It was just a matter of plugging the device into my computer and downloading the text. But I didn't dare do it right there at my cubicle. Who knew what kind of detection programs they had running on the Trion network? Not a risk worth taking.

Instead, I logged on to the corporate Web site. In the search box I typed in AURORA, but nothing came up. Surprise, surprise. But I had another thought, and I typed in Alana Jennings's name and pulled up her page. There was no photo there – most people had their pictures up, though some didn't – but there was some basic information like her telephone extension, her job title (Marketing Director, Disruptive Technologies Research Unit), her department number, which was the same as her mailstop.

This little number, I knew, was extremely useful information. At Trion, just like at Wyatt, you were given the same department number as everyone else who worked in your part of the company. All I had to do was to punch that number into the corporate database and I had a list of everyone who worked directly with Alana Jennings – which meant that they all worked in the AURORA Project.

That didn't mean I had the complete list of AURORA employees, who might be in separate departments on the same floor, but at least I had a good chunk of them: forty-seven names. I printed out each person's Web page and slipped the sheets into a folder in my workbag. That, I figured, should keep Wyatt's people happy for a while.

When I got home that night, around ten, intending to sit down at my computer and download all the keystrokes from Nora's computer, something else grabbed my attention. Sitting in the middle of my "kitchen" table – a Formica-topped thing I'd bought at a used furniture place for forty-five bucks – was a crisp-looking, thick, sealed manila envelope.

It hadn't been there in the morning. Once again, someone from Wyatt had slipped into my apartment, almost as if they were trying to make the point that they could get in anywhere. Okay, point made. Maybe they figured this was the safest way to get something to me without being observed. But to me it seemed almost like a threat.

The envelope contained a fat dossier on Alana Jennings, just as Nick Wyatt had promised. I opened it, saw a whole bunch of photos of the woman, and suddenly lost interest in Nora Sommers's keystrokes. This Alana Jennings was, not to put too fine a point on it, a real hottie.

I sat down in my reading chair and pored over the file.

It was obvious that a lot of time and effort and money had gone into it. P.I.s had followed her around, taken close note of her comings and goings, her habits, the errands she ran. There were photos of her entering the Trion building, at a restaurant with a couple of female friends, at some kind of tennis club, working out at one of those all-women health clubs, getting out of her blue Mazda Miata. She had glossy black hair and blue eyes, a slim body (that was fairly evident from the Lycra workout togs). Sometimes she wore heavy-framed black glasses, the kind that beautiful women wear to signal that they're smart and serious and yet so beautiful that they can wear ugly glasses. They actually made her look sexier. Maybe that was the point.

After an hour of reading the file, I knew more about her than I ever knew about any girlfriend. She wasn't just beautiful, she was rich – a double threat. She'd grown up in Darien, Connecticut, went to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, and then went to Yale, where she'd majored in English, specializing in American literature. She also took some classes in computer science and electrical engineering. According to her college transcript she got mostly As and A minuses and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. Okay, so she was smart, too; make that a triple threat.

Meacham's staff had pulled up all kinds of financial background on her and her family. She had a trust fund of several million dollars, but her father, a CEO of a small manufacturing company in Stamford, had a portfolio worth a whole lot more than that. She had two younger sisters, one still in college, at Wesleyan, the other working at Sotheby's in Manhattan.

Since she called her parents almost every day, it was a fair guess that she was close with them. (A year's worth of phone bills were included, but fortunately someone had predigested them for me, summarized who she called most often.) She was single, didn't seem to be seeing anyone regularly, and owned her own condo in a very upper-crust town not far from Trion headquarters.

She shopped for groceries every Sunday at a whole-foods supermarket and seemed to be a vegetarian, because she never bought meat or even chicken or fish. She ate like a bird, a bird from the tropical rainforest – lots of fruits, berries, nuts. She didn't do bars or happy hours, but she did get the occasional delivery from a liquor store in her neighborhood, so she had at least one vice. Her house vodka seemed to be Grey Goose; her house gin was Tanqueray Malacca. She went out to restaurants once or twice a week, and not Denny's or Applebee's or Hooters; she seemed to like high-end, "chef-y" places with names like Chakra and Alto and Buzz and Om. Also she went to Thai restaurants a lot.

She went out to movies at least once a week, and usually bought her tickets ahead of time on Fandango; she occasionally saw your typical chick flick but mostly foreign films. Apparently this was a woman who'd rather watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs than Porky's. Oh, well. She bought a lot of books online, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, mostly trendy serious fiction, some Latin American stuff, and a fair number of books about movies. Also, recently, some books on Buddhism and Eastern wisdom and crap like that. She'd also bought some movies on DVD, including the whole Godfather boxed set as well as some forties noir classics like Double Indemnity. In fact, she'd bought Double Indemnity twice, once in video a few years earlier, and once, more recently, on DVD. Obviously she'd only gotten a DVD player within the last two years; and obviously that old Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck flick was a favorite of hers. She seemed to have bought every record ever made by Ani DiFranco and Alanis Morissette.

I stored these facts away. I was beginning to get a picture of Alana Jennings. And I was beginning to come up with a plan.

26

Saturday afternoon, dressed in tennis whites (which I'd bought that morning – normally I play tennis in ragged cutoffs and a T-shirt) and wearing a ridiculously expensive Italian diver's watch I'd recently splurged on, I arrived at a very hoity-toity, very exclusive place called the Tennis and Racquet Club. Alana Jennings was a member, and according to the dossier she played here most Saturdays. I confirmed her court time by calling the day before, saying I was supposed to play her tomorrow and forgot the time, couldn't reach her, when was that again? Easy. She had a four-thirty doubles game.

Half an hour before her scheduled game I had a meeting with the club's membership director to get a quick tour of the place. That took a little doing, because it was a private club; you couldn't just walk in off the street. I had Arnold Meacham ask Wyatt to arrange to have some rich guy, a club member – a friend of a friend of a friend, a couple of degrees removed from Wyatt – contact the club about sponsoring me. The guy was on the membership committee, and his name obviously pulled some weight at the club, because the membership director, Josh, seemed thrilled to take me around. He even gave me a guest pass for the day so I could check out the courts (clay, indoor and out), maybe pick up a game.

The place was a sprawling Shingle Style mansion that looked like one of those Newport "cottages." It sat in the middle of an emerald-green sea of perfectly manicured lawn. I finally shook Josh at the cafй by pretending to wave at someone I knew. He offered to arrange a game for me, but I told him I was cool, I knew people here, I'd be fine.

A couple of minutes later I saw her. You couldn't miss this babe. She was wearing a Fred Perry shirt and she had (for some reason the surveillance photos didn't really show this) bodacious ta-tas. Her blue eyes were dazzling. She came into the cafe with another woman around her age, and both of them ordered Pellegrinos. I found a table close to hers, but not too close, and behind her, out of her line of sight. The point was to observe, watch, listen, and most of all not be seen. If she noticed me, I'd have a major problem next time I tried to loiter nearby. It's not like I'm Brad Pitt, but I'm not exactly butt-ugly either; women do tend to notice me. I'd have to be careful.

I couldn't tell if the woman Alana Jennings was with was a neighbor or a college friend or what, but they clearly weren't talking business. It was a fair guess that they didn't work together on the AURORA team. This was unfortunate – I wasn't going to overhear anything juicy.

But then her cell phone rang. "This is Alana," she said. She had a velvety-smooth, private-school voice, cultured without being too affected.

"You did?" she said. "Well, it sounds like you've solved it."

My ears pricked up.

"Keith, you've just slashed the time to fab in half, that's incredible."

She was definitely talking business. I moved a little closer toward her so I could hear more clearly. There was a lot of laughter and the clinking of dishes and the thop thop of tennis balls, which was making it hard to hear much of what she was saying. Someone squeezed by my table, a big guy with a huge gut that jostled my Coke glass. He was laughing loudly, obliterating Alana's conversation. Move, asshole.

He waddled by, and I heard another snatch of her conversation. She was now talking in a hushed voice, and only random bits floated my way. I heard her say: "…Well, that's the sixty-four-billion-dollar question, isn't it? I wish I knew." Then, a little louder: "Thanks for letting me know – great stuff." A little beep tone, and she ended the call. "Work," she said apologetically to the other woman. "Sorry. I wish I could keep this thing off, but these days I'm supposed to be on call 'round the clock. There's Drew!" A tall, studly guy came up to her – early thirties, bronzed, the broad and flat body of a rower – and gave her a kiss on the cheek. I noticed he didn't kiss the other woman.

"Hey, babe," he said.

Great, I thought. So Wyatt's goons didn't pick up on the fact that she was seeing someone after all.

"Hey, Drew," she said. "Where's George?"

"He didn't call you?" Drew said. "That space shot. He forgot he's got his daughter for the weekend."

"So we don't have a fourth?" the other woman said.

"We can pick someone up," said Drew. "I can't believe he didn't call you. What a wuss."

A lightbulb went on over my head. Jettisoning suddenly my carefully worked-out plan of anonymous observation, I made a bold split-second decision. I stood up and said, "Excuse me."

They looked over at me.

"You guys need a fourth?" I said.

I introduced myself by my real name, told them I was checking the place out, didn't mention Trion. They seemed relieved I was there. I think they assumed from my Yonex titanium pro racquet that I was really good, though I assured them I was just okay, that I hadn't played in a long time. Basically true.

We had one of the outdoor courts. It was sunny and warm and a little windy. The teams were Alana and Drew versus me and the other woman, whose name was Jody. Jody and Alana were about evenly matched, but Alana was by far the more graceful player. She wasn't particularly aggressive, but she had a nice backhand slice, she always returned serves, always got the ball, no wasted movements. Her serve was simple and accurate: she almost always got it in. Her game was as natural as breathing.

Unfortunately, I'd underestimated Pretty Boy. He was a serious player. I started out shaky, pretty rusty, and I double-faulted my first serve, to Jody's visible annoyance. Soon, though, my game came back. Meanwhile, Drew was playing like he was at Wimbledon. The more my game returned, the more aggressive he got, until it was ridiculous. He started poaching at the net, crossing over the court to get shots that were meant for Alana, really hogging the ball. You could see her grimace at him. I began to sense some kind of history between the two of them – some serious tension here.

There was this whole other thing going here – the battle of the Alpha Males. Drew started serving right at me, hitting them really hard, sometimes too long. Though his serves were viciously fast, he didn't have much control, and so he and Alana started losing. Also, I got onto him after a while, anticipating that he was going to poach, disguising my shots, hitting the ball behind him. Pretty Boy had pressed that same old competition button in me. I wanted to put him in his place. Me want other caveman's woman. Pretty soon I was working up a sweat. I realized I was working way too hard at it, being too aggressive for this mostly social game; it didn't look right. So I dialed back and played a more patient point, keeping the ball in play, letting Drew make his mistakes.

Drew came up to the net and shook my hand at the end. Then he patted me on the back. "You're a good fundamental player," he said in this fake-chummy way.

"You too," I said.

He shrugged. "I had to cover a lot of court."

Alana heard that, and her blue eyes flashed with annoyance. She turned to me. "Do you have time for a drink?"

It was just Alana and me, on the "porch," as they called it – this mammoth wooden deck overlooking the courts. Jody had excused herself, sensing through some kind of female windtalking that Alana didn't want a group, saying that she had to get going. Then Drew saw what was happening, and he excused himself too, though not as graciously.

The waitress came around, and Alana told me to go first, she hadn't decided what she wanted. I asked for a Tanqueray Malacca G & T. She gave me a startled glance, just a split second, before she regained her composure.

"I'll second that," Alana said.

"Let me go check and see if we have that," the waitress, a horsy blond high-school student, said. A few minutes later she came back with the drinks.

We talked for a while, about the club, the members ("snotty," she said), the courts ("best ones around by far"), but she was too sophisticated to do the whole boring what-do-you-do? thing. She didn't mention Trion, so neither did I. I began to dread that part of the conversation, wasn't sure how I'd smooth over the bizarre coincidence that we both worked at Trion, and hey, you used to have my very exact job! I couldn't believe I'd volunteered to join their game, vaulted myself right into her orbit instead of keeping a low profile. It was a good thing we'd never seen each other at work. I wondered whether the AURORA people used a separate entrance. Still, the gin went to my head pretty quickly, and it was this beautiful sunny day, and the conversation really flowed.

"I'm sorry about Drew being so out of control," she said.

"He's good."

"He can be an asshole. You were a threat. Must be a male thing. Combat with racquets."

I smiled. "It's like that Ani DiFranco line, you know? ' 'Cause every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.' "

Her eyes lit up. "Exactly! Are you into Ani?"

I shrugged. " 'Science chases money, and money chases its tail -' "

" 'And the best minds of my generation can't make bail,' " she finished. "Not many men are into Ani."

"I'm a sensitive guy, I guess," I deadpanned.

"I guess. We should go out some time," she said.

Was I hearing right? Had she just asked me out?

"Good idea," I said. "So, do you like Thai food?"

27

I got to my dad's apartment so exhilarated from my mini-date with Alana Jennings that I felt like I was wearing a suit of armor. Nothing he did or said could get to me now.

As I climbed the splintery wooden-deck front steps I could hear them arguing – my dad's high-pitched, nasal squawk, sounding more and more like a bird, and Antwoine's rumbling reply, deep and resonant. I found them in the first-floor bathroom, which was filled with steam billowing out of a vaporizer. Dad was lying facedown on a bench, a bunch of pillows under his head and chest propping him up. Antwoine, his pale-blue scrubs soaking wet, was thumping on Dad's naked back with his huge hands. He looked up when I opened the door.

"Yo, Adam."

"This son of a bitch is trying to kill me," Dad screeched.

"This is how you loosen the phlegm in the lungs," Antwoine said. "That shit get all gunked up in there 'cause of all the damaged cilias." He went back to it, making a hollow thump. Dad's back was sickly pale, paper-white, droopy and saggy. It seemed to have no muscle tone. I remembered what my father's back used to look like, when I was a kid: ropy, sinewy, almost frightening. This was old-man skin, and I wished I hadn't seen it.

"The bastard lied to me," Dad said, his voice muffled by the pillows. "He told me I was just going to breathe in steam. He didn't say he was going to crack my goddamned ribs. Jesus Christ, I'm on steroids, my bones are fragile, you goddamned nigger!"

"Hey, Dad," I yelled, "enough!"

"I'm not your prison bitch, nigger!" he said.

Antwoine showed no reaction. He kept clapping on Dad's back, steadily, rhythmically.

"Dad," I said, "this man is a whole lot bigger and stronger than you. I don't think it's a good idea to alienate him."

Antwoine looked up at me with sleepy, amused eyes. "Hey, man, I had to deal with Aryan Nation every day I was jammed up. Believe me, a mouthy old cripple's no big deal."

I winced.

"You god damned son of a bitch!" Dad shrieked. I noticed he didn't use the N-word.

Later Dad was parked in front of the TV, hooked up to the bubbler, the tube in his nose.

"This arrangement is not working out," he said, scowling at the TV. "Have you seen the kind of rabbit-food shit he tries to give me?"

"It's called fruits and vegetables," Antwoine said. He was sitting in the chair a few feet away. "I know what he likes – I can see what's in the pantry. Dinty Moore beef stew in the big can, Vienna sausages, and liverwurst. Well, not as long as I'm here. You need the healthy stuff, Frank, build up your immunity. You catch a cold, you end up with pneumonia, in the hospital, and then what am I going to do? You're not going to need me when you're in the hospital."

"Christ."

"Plus no more Cokes, that shit is over. You need fluids, thin your mucus, nothing with the caffeine in it. You need potassium, you need calcium 'cause of the steroids." He was jabbing his index finger into his palm like he was a trainer for the world heavyweight champion.

"Make whatever rabbit-food crap you want, I won't eat it," Dad said.

"Then you're just killing yourself. Takes you ten times more energy to breathe than a normal guy, so you need to eat, build up your strength, your muscle mass, all that. You expire on my watch, I'm not taking the rap."

"Like you really give a shit," Dad said.

"You think I'm here to help you die?"

"Looks that way to me."

"If I wanted to kill you, why would I do it the slow way?" Antwoine said. "Unless you think this is fun for me. Like maybe I enjoy this shit."

"This is a blast, isn't it?" I said.

"Hey, wouldja check out the watch on that man?" Antwoine suddenly said. I'd forgotten to take off the Panerai. Maybe subconsciously I thought it wouldn't even register with him or my dad. "Let me see that." He came up to me, inspected it, marveling. "Man, that's gotta be a five-thousand-dollar watch." He was pretty close. I was embarrassed – it was more than he made in two months. "That one of those Italian diving watches?"

"Yep," I said hastily.

"Oh, you gotta be shittin' me," Dad said, his voice like a rusty hinge. "I don't fucking believe this." Now he was staring at my watch too. "You spent five thousand dollars on a goddamned watch? What a loser! Do you have any idea how I used to bust my hump for five thousand bucks when I was putting you through school? You spent that on a fucking watch?"

"It's my money, Dad." Then I added, feebly, "It's an investment."

"Oh, for Christ's sakes, you think I'm an idiot? An investment?"

"Dad, look, I just got a huge promotion. I'm working at Trion Systems for, like, twice the salary I was getting at Wyatt, okay?"

He looked at me shrewdly. "What kinda money they paying you, you can throw away five thousand – Jesus, I can't even say it."

"They're paying me a lot, Dad. And if I want to throw my money away, I'll throw it away. I've earned it."

"You've earned it," he repeated with thick sarcasm. "Any time you want to pay me back for" – he took a breath – "I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars I dumped on you, be my guest."

I came this close to telling him then how much money I threw his way, but I pulled back just in time. The momentary victory wouldn't be worth it. Instead I told myself over and over, this is not your dad. It's an evil cartoon version of Dad, animated by Hanna-Barbera, distorted out of recognition by prednisone and a dozen other mind-altering substances. But of course I knew that wasn't quite true, that this really was the same old asshole, just with the dial turned up a couple of notches.

"You're living in a fantasy world," Dad went on, then took a loud breath. "You think just 'cause you buy the two-thousand-dollar suits and the five-hundred-dollar shoes and the five-thousand-dollar watches you're going to become one of them, don't you?" He took a breath. "Well, let me tell you something. You're wearing a fucking Halloween costume, that's all. You're dressing up. I tell you this 'cause you're my son and no one else is going to give it to you straight. You're nothing more than an ape in a fucking tuxedo."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I mumbled. I noticed Antwoine tactfully walking out of the room. My face went all red.

He's a sick man, I told myself. He has end-stage emphysema. He's dying. He doesn't know what he's saying.

"You think you're ever gonna be one of them? Boy, you'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You think they're gonna take you in and let you join their private clubs and screw their daughters and play fucking polo with them." He sucked in a tiny lungful of air. "But they know who you are, son, and where you come from. Maybe they'll let you play in their sandbox for a while, but as soon as you start to forget who you really are, someone's going to fucking remind you."

I couldn't restrain myself any longer. He was driving me crazy. "It doesn't work that way in the business world, Dad," I said patiently. "It's not like a club. It's about making money. If you help them make money, you fulfill a need. I'm where I am because they need me."

"Oh, they need you," Dad repeated, drawing out the word, nodding. "That's a good one. They need you like a guy taking a shit needs a piece of toilet paper, you unnerstand me? Then when they're done wiping away their shit, they flush. Lemme tell you, all they care about is winners, and they know you're a loser and they're not going to let you forget it."

I rolled my eyes, shook my head, didn't say anything. A vein throbbed at my temple.

A breath. "And you're too stupid and full of yourself to know it. You're living in a goddamned fantasy world, just like your mother. She always thought she was too good for me, but she wasn't shit. She was dreaming. And you ain't shit. You went to a fancy prep school for a couple of years, and you got a high-priced do-nothing college degree, but you still ain't shit."

He took a deep breath, and his voice seemed to soften a little. "I tell you this because I don't want you to be fucked over the way they fucked me over, son. Like that fucking candy-ass prep school, the way all the rich parents looked down on me, like I wasn't one of them. Well, guess what. Took me a while to figure it out, but they were right. I wasn't one of them. Neither are you, and the sooner you figure it out, the better off you'll be."

"Better off, like you," I said. It just slipped out.

He stared at me, his eyes beady. "At least I know who I am," he said. "You don't fucking know who you are."

28

The next morning was Sunday, my only chance to sleep late, so of course Arnold Meacham insisted on meeting me early. I'd replied to his daily e-mail using the name "Donnie," which told him I had something to deliver. He e-mailed right back, told me to be at the parking lot of a particular Home Depot at nine A.M. sharp.

There were a lot of people here already – not everyone slept late on Sunday – buying lumber and tile and power tools and bags of grass seed and fertilizer. I waited in the Audi for a good half hour.

Then a black BMW 745i pulled into the space next to mine, looking a little out of place among the pickup trucks and SUVs. Arnold Meacham was wearing a baby-blue cardigan sweater and looked like he was on his way to play golf somewhere. He signaled for me to get into his car, which I did, and I handed him a CD and a file folder.

"And what do we have here?" he asked.

"List of AURORA Project employees," I said.

"All of them?"

"I don't know. At least some."

"Why not all?"

"It's forty-seven names there," I said. "It's a decent start."

"We need the complete list."

I sighed. "I'll see what I can do." I paused for a second, torn between not wanting to tell the guy anything I didn't have to – the more I told him, the more he'd push me – and wanting to brag about how much progress I'd been making. "I have my boss's passwords," I finally said.

"Which boss? Lundgren?"

"Nora Sommers."

He nodded. "You use the software?"

"No, the Keyghost."

"What'll you do with them?"

"Search her archived e-mail. Maybe go into her MeetingMaker and find out who she meets with."

"That's penny-ante shit," Meacham said. "I think it's time to penetrate AURORA."

"Too risky right now," I said, shaking my head.

"Why?"

A guy rolled a shopping cart stacked with green bags of Scott's starter fertilizer by Meacham's window. Four or five little kids ran around behind him. Meacham looked over, electrically rolled up his window, turned back to me. "Why?" he repeated.

"The badge access is separate."

"For Christ's sake, follow someone in, steal a badge, whatever. Do I need to put you back in basic training?"

"They log all entries, and every entrance has a turnstile, so you can't just sneak in."

"What about the cleaning crew?"

"There's also closed-circuit TV cameras trained on every entry point. It's not so easy. You don't want me to get caught, not now."

He seemed to back down. "Jesus, the place is well defended."

"You could probably learn a trick or two."

"Fuck you," he snapped. "What about HR files?"

"HR's pretty well protected too," I said.

"Not like AURORA. That ought to be relatively easy. Get us the personnel files on everyone you can who's associated in any way with AURORA. At least the people on this list." He held up the CD.

"I can try for it next week."

"Do it tonight. Sunday night's a good time to do it."

"I've got a big day tomorrow. We're making a presentation to Goddard."

He looked disgusted. "What, you're too busy with your cover job? I hope you haven't forgotten who you really work for."

"I've got to be up to speed. It's important."

"All the more reason why you'd be in the office working tonight," he said, and he turned the key in the ignition.

29

Early that evening I drove to Trion headquarters. The parking garage was almost entirely empty, the only people there probably security, the people who manned the twenty-four-hour ops centers, and the random work-crazed employee, like I was pretending to be. I didn't recognize the lobby ambassador, a Hispanic woman who didn't look happy to be there. She barely looked at me as I let myself in, but I made a point of saying hi, looking harried or sheepish or something. I went up to my cubicle and did a little real work, some spreadsheets on Maestro sales in the region of the world they call EMEA, for Europe/Middle East/Asia. The trend lines weren't good, but Nora wanted me to massage the numbers to bring out whatever encouraging data points I could.

Most of the floor was dark. I even had to switch on the lights in my area. It was unnerving.

Meacham and Wyatt wanted the personnel files on everyone in AURORA. They wanted to find out each person's employment history, which would tell them what companies they were all hired from and what they did at their last jobs. It was a good way to suss out what AURORA was all about.

But it wasn't as if I could just saunter into Human Resources, pull open some file cabinets, and pluck out whatever files I wanted. The HR department at Trion, unlike most other parts of the company, actually took security precautions. For one thing, their computers weren't accessible through the main corporate database; it was a whole separate network. I guess that made sense – personnel records contained all sorts of private information like people's performance appraisals, the value of their 401(k)s and stock options, all that. Maybe HR was afraid that the rank-and-file would find out how much more the top Trion execs got paid than everyone else and there'd be riots down in the cube farms.

HR was located on the third floor of E Wing, a long hike from New Product Marketing. There were a lot of locked doors along the way, but my badge would probably open each one of them.

Then I remembered that somewhere it was recorded who entered which checkpoints and at what time. The information was stored, which didn't necessarily mean that anybody looked at it or did anything about it. But if there were ever trouble later, it wouldn't look good that on a Sunday night for some reason I walked from New Products to Personnel, leaving digital bread crumbs along the way.

So I left the building, just took the elevator down and took one of the back entrances. The thing about these security systems was that they only kept track of entrances, not exits. When you walked out, you didn't use your badge. This might have been some fire-department code thing, I didn't know. But that meant that I could leave the building without anyone knowing I'd left.

It was dark outside by now. The Trion building was lit up, its brushed-chrome skin gleaming, the glass windows a midnight blue. It was relatively quiet out here at night, just the shush of the occasional car passing by on the highway.

I walked around to E Wing, where a lot of the administrative functions seemed to be housed – Central Purchasing, Systems Management, that sort of thing – and saw someone coming out of a service entrance.

"Hey, can you hold the door?" I shouted. I waved my Trion badge at the guy, who looked like he was on the cleaning crew or something. "Damned badge isn't working right."

The man held the door open for me, didn't give me a glance, and I walked right in. Nothing recorded. As far as the central system was concerned, I was still upstairs at my cubicle.

I took the stairs to the third floor. The door to the third floor was unlocked. This, too, was a fire department law of some kind: in buildings above a certain height you had to be able to go from floor to floor by the stairs, in case of emergency. Probably some floors had a badge-reader station just inside the stair exit. But the third floor didn't. I walked right into the reception area outside Human Resources.

The waiting area had just the right kind of HR look – a lot of dignified mahogany, to say we're serious and this is about your career, and colorful, welcoming, cushy-looking chairs. Which told you that whenever you came to HR you were going to sit there on your butt for an ungodly long time.

I looked around for closed-circuit TV cameras and didn't see any. Not that I was expecting any; this wasn't a bank – or the skunkworks – but I just wanted to make sure. Or as sure as I could be, anyway.

The lights were on low, which made the place look even more stately. Or spooky, I couldn't decide.

For a few seconds I stood there, thinking. There weren't any cleaning people around to let me in; they probably came late at night or early in the morning. That would have been the best way in. Instead, I'd have to try the same old my-badge-won't-work trick, which had gotten me this far. I went back downstairs and headed into the lobby through the back way, where a female lobby ambassador with big brassy red hair was watching a rerun of The Bachelor on one of the security monitors.

"And I thought I was the only one who had to work on Sunday," I said to her. She looked up, laughed politely, turned back to her show. I looked like I belonged, I had a badge clipped to my belt, and I was coming from the inside, so I was supposed to be there, right? She wasn't the talkative type, but that was a good thing – she just wanted to be left alone to watch The Bachelor. She'd do anything to get rid of me.

"Hey, listen," I said, "sorry to bother you, but do you have that machine to fix badges? It's not like I want to get into my office or anything, but I have to or I'm out of a job, and the damned badge-reader won't let me in. It's like it knows I should be home watching football, you know?"

She smiled. She probably wasn't used to Trion employees even noticing her. "I know what you mean," she said. "But sorry, the lady who does that won't be in till tomorrow."

"Oh, man. How am I supposed to get in? I can't wait till tomorrow. I'm totally screwed."

She nodded, picked up her phone. "Stan," she said, "can you help us out here?"

Stan, the security guard, showed up a couple minutes later. He was a small, wiry, swarthy guy in his fifties with an obvious toupee that was jet black while the fringe of real hair all around it was going gray. I could never understand why you would bother to wear a hairpiece if you weren't going to update it once in a while to make it look halfway convincing. We took the elevator up to the third floor. I gave him some complicated blather about how HR was on a hierarchically separate badging system, but he wasn't too interested. He wanted to talk sports, and that I could do, no problem. He was bummed out about the Denver Broncos, and I pretended I was too. When we got to HR, he took out his badge, which probably let him in anywhere he worked in this part of the building. He waved it at the card reader. "Don't work too hard," he said.

"Thanks, brother," I said.

He turned to look at me. "You better get that badge fixed," he said.

And I was in.

30

Once you got past the reception area, HR looked like every other damned office at Trion, the same generic cube-farm layout. Only the emergency lights were on, not the overhead fluorescents. From what I could see walking around, all of the cubicles were empty, as were all the offices. It didn't take long to figure out where the records were kept. In the center of the floor was a huge grid made up of long aisles of beige horizontal files.

I'd thought about trying to do my espionage totally online, but that wouldn't work without an HR password. While I was here, though, I figured I'd leave one of those key logger devices. Later on I could come back and get it. Wyatt Telecom was paying for these little toys, not me. I found a cubicle and installed the thing.

For now, though, I had to root around through the file drawers, find the AURORA people. And I'd have to move fast – the longer I stayed here, the greater the chance I'd be caught.

The question was, how were they organized? Alphabetically, by name? In order of employee number? The more I looked over the file drawer labels, the more discouraged I got. What, did I think I was just going to waltz in and slide open a door and pluck out a few choice files? There were rows of drawers titled BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION and PENSION/ANNUITY/RETIREMENT and SICK, ANNUAL AND OTHER LEAVE RECORDS; drawers labeled CLAIMS, WORK-MEN'S COMPENSATION and CLAIMS, LITIGATED; one area called IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION RECORDS…and on and on. Mind-numbing.

For some reason some sappy golden-oldie song was playing in my head – "Band on the Run," by Paul McCartney in his unfortunate Wings period. A song I really detest, worse even than anything by Celine Dion. The tune is annoying but catchy, like pinkeye, and the words make no sense. "A bell was ringing in the village square for the rabbits on the run!" Um, okay.

I tried one of the file drawers, and of course it was locked; they all were. Each file cabinet had a lock at the top, and they had to be all keyed alike. I looked for an admin's desk, and meanwhile that damned song was circling around in my head… "The county judge…held a grudge"…as I looked for an admin's desk, and sure enough, a key to the files was there, on a ring in an unlocked top center drawer. Boy, Meacham was right; the key's always easy to find.

I went for the alphabetized employee files.

Choosing one name from the AURORA list – Yonah Oren – I looked under O. Nothing there. I looked for another name – Sanjay Kumar – and found nothing there either. I tried Peter Daut: nothing. Strange. Just to be thorough, I checked under those names in the INSURANCE POLICIES, ACCIDENT drawers. Nothing. Same with the pension files. In fact, nothing in any of the files, so far as I could see.

"The jailer man and Sailor Sam…" This was like Chinese water torture – what did those insipid lyrics mean anyway? Did anyone know?

What was strange was that in the places where the records should have been, there sometimes seemed to be little gaps, little loose places, as if the files had been removed. Or was I just imagining this? Just when I was about to give up, I took one more circuit around the rows of file cabinets, and then I noticed an alcove – a separate, open room next to the grid of file drawers. A sign posted on the entrance to the alcove said:

CLASSIFIED PERSONNEL RECORDS -

ACCESS ONLY BY DIRECT AUTHORIZATION

OF JAMES SPERLING OR LUCY CELANO.

I entered the alcove and was relieved to see that things were simple here: the drawers were organized by department number. James Sperling was the director of HR, and Lucy Celano, I knew, was his administrative assistant. It took me a couple of minutes to find Lucy Celano's desk, and maybe thirty seconds to find her key ring (bottom right drawer).

Then I returned to the restricted file cabinets and found the drawer that held the department numbers, including the AURORA project. I unlocked the cabinet, and pulled it open. It made a kind of metallic thunk sound, as if some caster at the back of the drawer had somehow dropped. I wondered how often anyone actually went into these drawers. Did they work with online records mostly, keeping the hard copies just for legal and audit reasons?

And then I saw something truly bizarre: all of the files for the AURORA department were gone. I mean, there was a gap of a foot and a half, maybe two feet, between the number before and the number after. The drawer was half empty.

The AURORA files had been removed.

For a second it felt as if my heart had stopped. I felt light-headed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bright light start to flash. It was one of those xenon emergency strobe lights mounted high on the wall, near the ceiling, just outside the file alcove. What the hell was that for? And a few seconds later there came the unbelievably loud, throaty hoo-ah, hoo-ah of a siren.

Somehow I'd triggered an intrusion-detection system, no doubt protecting the classified files.

The siren was so loud you could probably hear it throughout the whole wing.

31

Any second Security would be here. Maybe the only reason they hadn't shown up yet was that it was a weekend and there were fewer of them around.

I raced to the door, slammed my side against the crash bar, and the door didn't move. The impact hurt like hell.

I tried again; the door was bolted shut. Oh, Jesus. I tried another door, and that too was locked from inside.

Now I realized what that funny metallic thunking sound had been a minute or two earlier – by opening the file drawer I must have set off some kind of mechanism that auto-locked all the exit doors in the area. I ran to the other side of the floor, where there was another set of exit doors, but they wouldn't open either. Even the emergency fire-escape door to a small back stairwell was locked, and that had to be against code.

I was trapped like a rat in a maze. Security would be here any second now, and they'd search the place.

My mind raced. Could I try to pull something over on them? Stan, the security guard, had let me in – maybe I could convince him I'd just accidentally stepped into the wrong area, pulled open the wrong drawer. He seemed to like me, that might work. But then, what if he actually did his job right, asked to look at my badge, saw that I didn't belong anywhere remotely near here?

No, I couldn't chance it. I had no choice, I had to hide.

I was stuck inside here.

"Stuck inside these four walls," Wings wailed sickeningly at me. Christ!

The xenon strobe was pulsing, blindingly bright, and the alarm was going hoo-ah, hoo-ah, as if this were a nuclear reactor during a core melt.

But where could I hide? I figured the first thing I should do was create some sort of a diversion, some plausible, innocent explanation for why the alarm had gone off. Shit, there was no time!

If I was caught here, it was over. Everything. I wouldn't just lose my job at Trion. Far worse. It was a disaster, a total nightmare.

I grabbed the nearest metal trash can. It was empty, so I grabbed a piece of paper off a nearby desk, crumpled it up, took my lighter and lit it. Running back toward the classified-records alcove, I set it against the wall. Then I took out a cigarette from my pack and tossed it into the can too. The paper burned, flamed out, sending up a big cloud of smoke. Maybe, if part of the cigarette were found, they'd blame the old smoldering butt. Maybe.

I heard loud footsteps, voices that seemed to be coming from the back stairwell.

No, please, God. It's all over. It's all over.

I saw what looked like a closet door. It was unlocked. Behind was a supply closet, not very wide, but maybe twelve feet deep, crowded with tall rows of shelves stacked with reams of paper and the like.

I didn't dare put the light on, so it was hard to see, but I could make out a space between two shelves in the rear where I might be able to squeeze myself in.

Just as I pulled the door shut behind me I heard another door open, and then muffled shouts.

I froze. The alarm kept whooping. People were running back and forth, shouting louder, closer.

"Over here!" someone bellowed.

My heart was thundering. I held my breath. When I moved even slightly, the shelf in back of me squeaked. I shifted, and my shoulder brushed against a box, making a rustling sound. I doubted anyone passing by could hear the small noises I was making, not with all that racket out there, the shouting and the sirens and all. But I forced myself to remain totally still.

"- fucking cigarette!" I heard, to my relief.

"- extinguisher! -" someone replied.

For a long, long time – it could have been ten minutes, it could have been half an hour, I had no idea, I couldn't move my arm to check my wrist-watch – I stood there squirming uncomfortably, hot and sweaty, in a state of suspended animation, my feet going numb because of the funny position I was in.

I waited for the closet door to swing open, the light to cascade in, the jig to be up.

I didn't know what the hell I could say then. Nothing, really. I would be caught, and I had no idea how I could possibly explain my way out of it. I'd be lucky just to be fired. I'd likely face legal action at Trion – there was simply no good explanation for my being here. I didn't want to think about what Wyatt would do to me.

And for all my trouble, what had I turned up here? Nothing. All the AURORA records were gone anyway.

I could hear some kind of hosing, squirting sound, obviously a fire extinguisher going off, and by now the shouts had diminished. I wondered whether Security had called in-house firefighters, or the local fire department. And whether the wastebasket fire had explained away the alarm. Or would they keep searching the place?

So I stood there, my feet turning into tingling blocks of ice while sweat ran down my face, and my shoulders and back seized up with cramps.

And I waited.

Once in a while I heard voices, but they seemed calmer, more matter-of-fact. Footsteps, but no longer frantic.

After an endless stretch of time, everything went quiet. I tried to raise my left arm to check the time, but my arm had fallen asleep. I wriggled it, moved my right arm around to pinch at the dead left one until I was able to move it up toward my face and check the illuminated dial. It was a few minutes after ten, though I'd been in there so long I was sure it was after midnight.

Slowly I extricated myself from my contortionist's position, moved noiselessly toward the door of the closet. There I stood for a few moments, listening intently. I couldn't hear a sound. It seemed a safe bet that they'd gone – they'd put out the fire, satisfied themselves that there hadn't been a break-in after all. Human beings, especially security guards who must on some level resent all those computers that have all but put them out of a job, don't trust machines anyway. They'd be quick to blame it on some alarm-system glitch. Maybe, if I were really lucky, no one would wonder why the intrusion-detection alarm had gone off before the smoke alarm had.

Then I took a breath and slowly opened the door.

I looked to either side and straight ahead, and the area seemed to be empty. No one there. I took a few steps, paused, looked around again.

No one.

The place smelled pretty strongly of smoke, and also some kind of chemical, probably from the fire extinguisher stuff.

Quietly, I made my way along the wall, away from any outside windows or glass-paneled doors, until I reached one of the sets of exit doors. Not the main reception doors, and not the rear stairwell doors through which the security guys had entered.

And they were locked.

Still locked.

Christ, no.

They hadn't deactivated the auto-lock. Moving a little more quickly now, the adrenaline surging again, I went to the reception-area doors and pushed against the crash bars, and those too were locked.

I was still locked inside.

Now what?

I had no choice. There was no way to unlock the doors from inside, at least no way that I'd been taught. And I couldn't exactly call Security for help, especially not after what had just happened.

No. I'd just have to stay inside here until someone let me out. Which might not be until the morning, when the cleaning crew came in. Or worse, when the first HR staff arrived. And then I'd have some serious explaining to do.

I was also exhausted. I found a cubicle far from any door or window, and sat down. I was totally fried. I needed sleep badly. So I folded my arms and, like a frazzled student at the college library, passed right out.

32

Around five in the morning I was awakened by a clattering noise. I bolted upright. The cleaning crew had arrived, wheeling big yellow plastic buckets and mops and the kind of vacuum cleaners you strap to your shoulder. There were two men and a woman, speaking rapidly to each other in Portuguese. I knew a little: a lot of our neighbors growing up were Brazilians.

I'd drooled a little puddle of saliva onto whoever's desk this was. I mopped it up with my sleeve, then got up and sauntered over to the exit doors, which they'd propped open with a rubber doorstop.

"Bom dia, como vai?" I said. I shook my head, looking embarrassed, glanced ostentatiously at my watch.

"Bem, obrigado e o senhor?" the woman replied. She grinned, exposing a couple of gold teeth. She seemed to get it – poor office guy, working all night, or maybe in here ridiculously early, she didn't know or care.

One of the men was looking at the scorched metal waste can and saying something to the other guy. Like, what the hell happened here?

"Canзado," I said to the lady: I'm tired, that's how I am. "Bom, atй logo." See you later.

"Atй logo, senhor," the woman said as I walked out the door.

I thought for a second about driving home, changing clothes, turning right back around. But that was more than I could handle, so instead I left E Wing – by now people were starting to come in – and re-entered B Wing and went up to my cubicle. Okay, so if anyone checked the entrance records, they'd see that I'd come in to the building Sunday night around seven, then came back around five-thirty in the morning on Monday. Eager beaver. I just hoped I didn't run into anyone I knew, looking the way I did, like I'd slept in my clothes, which of course I had. Fortunately I didn't see anyone. I grabbed a Diet Vanilla Coke from the break room and took a deep swig. It tasted nasty this early in the morning, so I made a pot of coffee in the Bunn-O-Matic, and went to the men's room to wash up. My shirt was a little wrinkled, but overall I looked presentable, even if I felt like shit. Today was a big day, and I had to be at my best.

An hour before the big meeting with Augustine Goddard, we gathered in Packard, one of the bigger conference rooms, for a dress rehearsal. Nora was wearing a beautiful blue suit and she looked like she'd had her hair done specially for the occasion. She was totally on edge; she crackled with nervous energy. She was smiling, her eyes wide.

She and Chad were rehearsing in the room while the rest of us gathered. Chad was playing Jock. They were doing this back-and-forth like an old married couple going through the paces of a long-familiar argument, when suddenly Chad's cell phone rang. He had one of those Motorola flip phones, which I was convinced he favored so he could end a call by snapping it shut.

"This is Chad," he said. His tone abruptly warmed. "Hey, Tony." He held an index finger in the air to tell Nora to wait, and he went off into a corner of the room.

"Chad," Nora called after him with annoyance. He turned back, nodded at her, held up his finger again. A minute or so later I heard him snap the phone closed, and then he came up to Nora, speaking fast in a low voice. We were all watching, listening in; they were in the center ring.

"That's a buddy of mine in the controller's office," he said quietly, grim-faced. "The decision on Maestro has already been made."

"How do you know?" Nora said.

"The controller just put through the order to do a one-time write-off of fifty million bucks for Maestro. The decision's been made at the top. This meeting with Goddard is just a formality."

Nora flushed deep crimson and turned away. She walked over to the window and looked out, and for a full minute she didn't say anything.

33

The Executive Briefing Center was on the seventh floor of A Wing, just down the hall from Goddard's office. We trooped over there in a group, the mood pretty low. Nora said she'd join us in a few minutes.

"Dead men walking!" Chad sang out to me as we walked. "Dead men walking!"

I nodded. Mordden glanced at Chad walking beside me, and he kept his distance, no doubt thinking all kinds of evil thoughts about me, trying to figure out why I wasn't giving Chad the cold shoulder, what I was up to. He hadn't been stopping by my cubicle as often since the night I'd sneaked into Nora's office. It was hard to tell if he was acting strangely, since strange was his default mode. Also, I didn't want to succumb to the situational paranoia – was he looking at me funny, that sort of thing. But I couldn't help wondering whether I had blown the whole mission with one single act of carelessness, whether Mordden was going to cause me serious trouble.

"Now, seating's crucial, big guy," Chad muttered to me. "Goddard always takes the center seat on the side of the table near the door. If you want to be invisible, you sit on his right. If you want him to pay attention to you, either sit to his left or directly across the table from him."

"Do I want him to pay attention to me?"

"I can't answer that. He is the boss."

"Have you been in a lot of meetings with him?"

"Not that many," he shrugged. "A couple."

I made a mental note to sit anywhere Chad recommended against, like to Goddard's right. Fool me once, shame on you, and all that.

The EBC was a truly impressive sight. There was a huge wooden conference table made of some kind of tropical-looking wood that took up most of the room. One entire end of the room was a screen for presentations. There were heavy acoustic blinds that you could tell were supposed to slide down electrically from the ceiling, probably not only to block out light but to keep anyone outside from hearing what went on inside the room. Built into the table were speakerphones and little screens in front of each chair that slid up when a button was pushed somewhere.

There was a lot of whispering, nervous laughter, muttered wisecracks. I was sort of looking forward to seeing the famous Jock Goddard up close and personal, even if I never got to shake his hand. I didn't have to speak or make any part of the presentation, but I was a little nervous anyway.

By five minutes before ten, Nora still hadn't shown up. Had she jumped out of a window? Was she calling around, trying to lobby, making a last-ditch effort to save her precious product, pulling whatever strings she had?

"Think she got lost?" Phil joked.

Two minutes before ten, Nora entered the room, looking calm, radiant, somehow more attractive. She looked like she'd put on fresh makeup, lip-liner and all that stuff. Maybe she'd even been meditating or something, because she looked transformed.

Then, at exactly ten o'clock, Jock Goddard and Paul Camilletti entered the room, and everyone went quiet. "Cutthroat" Camilletti, in a black blazer and an olive silk T-shirt, had slicked his hair back and looked like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. He took a seat way off at a corner of the immense table. Goddard, in his customary black mock turtleneck under a tweedy brown sport coat, walked up to Nora and whispered something that made her laugh. He put his hand on her shoulder; she put her hand on top of his hand for a few seconds. She was acting girlish, sort of flirtatious; it was a side of Nora I'd never seen before.

Goddard then sat down right at the head of the table, facing the screen. Thanks, Chad. I was across the table and to his right. I could see him just fine and I sure didn't feel invisible. He had round shoulders, a little stooped. His white hair, parted on one side, was unruly. His eyebrows were bushy, white, each one looked like a snow-capped mountaintop. His forehead was deeply creased, and he had an impish look in his eyes.

There were an awkward few seconds of silence, and he looked around the big table. "You all look so nervous," he said. "Relax! I don't bite." His voice was pleasant and sort of crackly, a mellow baritone. He glanced at Nora, winked. "Not often, anyway." She laughed; a couple of other people chuckled politely. I smiled, mostly to say, I appreciate that you're trying to put us all at ease.

"Only when you're threatened," she said. He smiled, his lips forming a V. "Jock, do you mind if I start off here?"

"Please."

"Jock, we've all been working so incredibly hard on the refresh of Maestro that I think sometimes it's just hard to get outside ourselves, get any real perspective. I've spent the last thirty-six hours thinking about pretty much nothing else. And it's clear to me that there are several important ways in which we can update, improve Maestro, make it more appealing, increase market share, maybe even significantly."

Goddard nodded, made a steeple with his fingers, looked down at his notes.

She tapped the laminated bound presentation notebook. "We've come up with a strategy, quite a good one, adding twelve new functionalities, bringing Maestro up to date. But I have to tell you quite honestly that if I were sitting where you're sitting, I'd pull the plug."

Goddard turned suddenly to look at her, his great white eyebrows aloft. We all stared at her, shocked. I couldn't believe I was hearing this. She was burning her entire team.

"Jock," she went on, "if there's one thing you've taught me, it's that sometimes a true leader has to sacrifice the thing he loves most. It kills me to say it. But I simply can't ignore the facts. Maestro was great for its time. But its time has come – and gone. It's Goddard's Rule – if your product doesn't have the potential to be number one or number two in the market, you get out."

Goddard was silent for a few moments. He looked surprised, impressed, and after a few seconds he nodded with a shrewd I-like-what-I-see smile. "Are we – is everyone in agreement on this?" he drawled.

Gradually people started nodding their heads, jumping on the moving train as it pulled out of the station. Chad was nodding, biting his lip the way Bill Clinton used to; Mordden was nodding vigorously, like he was finally able to express his true opinion. The other engineers grunted, "Yes" and "I agree."

"I must say, I'm surprised to hear this," Goddard said. "This is certainly not what I expected to hear this morning. I was expecting the Battle of Gettysburg. I'm impressed."

"What's good for any of us as individuals in the short term," Nora added, "isn't necessarily what's best for Trion."

I couldn't believe the way Nora was leading this immolation, but I had to admire her cunning, her Machiavellian skill.

"Well," Goddard said, "before we pull the trigger, hang on for a minute. You – I didn't see you nodding."

He seemed to be looking directly at me.

I glanced around, then back at him. He was definitely looking at me.

"You," he said. "Young man, I didn't see you nodding your head with the rest."

"He's new," Nora put in hastily. "Just started."

"What's your name, young man?"

"Adam," I said. "Adam Cassidy." My heart started hammering. Oh, shit. It was like being called on in school. I felt like a second-grader.

"You got some kind of problem with the decision we're making here, uh, Adam?" said Goddard.

"Huh? No."

"So you're in agreement on pulling the plug."

I shrugged.

"You are, you're not – what?"

"I certainly see where Nora's coming from," I said.

"And if you were sitting where I'm sitting?" Goddard prompted.

I took a deep breath. "If I were sitting where you're sitting, I wouldn't pull the plug."

"No?"

"And I wouldn't add those twelve new features, either."

"You wouldn't?"

"No. Just one."

"And what might that be?"

I caught a quick glimpse of Nora's face, and it was beet red. She was staring at me as if an alien were bursting out of my chest. I turned back toward Goddard. "A secure-data protocol."

Goddard's brows sunk all the way down. "Secure data? Why the hell would that attract consumers?"

Chad cleared his throat and said, "Come on, Adam, look at the market research. Secure data's like what? Number seventy-five on the list of features consumers are looking for." He smirked. "Unless you think the average consumer is Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery."

There was some snickering from the far reaches of the table.

I smiled good-naturedly. "No, Chad, you're right – the average consumer has no interest in secure data. But I'm not talking about the average consumer. I'm talking about the military."

"The military." Goddard cocked one eyebrow.

"Adam -" Nora interrupted in a flat, warning sort of voice.

Goddard fluttered a hand toward Nora. "No, I want to hear this. The military, you say?"

I took a deep breath, tried not to look as panicked as I felt. "Look, the army, the air force, the Canadians, the British – the whole defense establishment in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada – recently overhauled their global communications system, right?" I pulled out some clippings from Defense News, Federal Computer Week – magazines I always happen to have hanging around the apartment, of course – and held them up. I could feel my hand shaking a little and hoped no one else noticed. Wyatt had prepared me for this, and I hoped I had the details right. "It's called the Defense Message System, the DMS – the secure messaging system for millions of defense personnel around the world. It's all done via desktop PCs, and the Pentagon is desperate to go wireless. Imagine what a difference that could make – secure wireless remote access to classified data and communications, with authentication of senders and receivers, end-to-end secure encryption, data protection, message integrity. Nobody owns this market!"

Goddard tilted his head, listening intently.

"And Maestro's the perfect product for this space. It's small, sturdy – practically indestructible – and totally reliable. This way, we turn a negative into a positive: the fact that Maestro is dated, legacy technology, is a plus for the military, since it's totally compatible with their five-year-old wireless transfer protocols. All we need to add is secure data. The cost is minimal, and the potential market is huge – I mean, huge!"

Goddard was staring at me, though I couldn't tell if he was impressed or he thought I'd lost my mind.

I went on: "So instead of trying to tart up this old, frankly inferior product, we remarket it. Throw on a hardened plastic shell, pop in secure encryption, and we're golden. We'll own this niche market, if we move fast. Forget about writing off fifty mil – now we're talking about hundreds of millions in added revenue per year."

"Jesus," Camilletti said from his end of the table. He was scrawling notes on a pad.

Goddard started nodding, slowly at first, then more vigorously. "Most intriguing," he said. He turned toward Nora. "What's his name again – Elijah?"

"Adam," Nora said crisply.

"Thank you, Adam," he said. "That's not bad at all."

Don't thank me, I thought; thank Nick Wyatt.

And then I caught Nora looking at me with an expression of pure and undisguised hatred.

34

The official word came down by e-mail before lunch: Goddard had ordered a stay of execution for Maestro. The Maestro team was ordered to crash a proposal for minor retooling and repackaging to meet the military's requirements. Meanwhile, Trion's Government Affairs staff would start negotiating a contract with the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency Department of Acquisition and Logistics.

Translation: slam dunk. Not only had the old product been taken off life support, but it had gotten a heart transplant and a massive blood transfusion.

And the shit had hit the fan.

I was in the men's room, standing in front of the urinal and unzipping my fly, when Chad came sauntering in. Chad, I'd noticed, seemed to have a sixth sense that I was pee-shy. He was always following me into the men's room to talk work or sports and effectively shut off my spigot. This time he came right up to the next urinal, his face all lit up like he was thrilled to see me. I could hear him unzip. My bladder clamped down. I went back to staring at the tile grout above the urinal.

"Hey," he said. "Nice job, big guy. That's the way to 'manage up'!" He shook his head slowly, made a sort of spitting sound. His urine splashed noisily against the little lozenge at the bottom of the urinal. "Christ." He oozed sarcasm. He'd crossed some invisible line – he wasn't even pretending anymore.

I thought, Could you please go now so I can relieve myself? "I saved the product," I pointed out.

"Yeah, and you burned Nora in the process. Was it worth it, just so you could score some points with the CEO, get yourself a little face time? That's not how it works around here, bud. You just made a huge fucking mistake." He shook dry, zipped up, and walked out of the rest room without washing his hands.

A voice mail from Nora was waiting for me when I returned to my cubicle.

"Nora," I said as I entered her office.

"Adam," she said softly. "Sit down, please." She was smiling, a sad, gentle smile. This was ominous.

"Nora, can I say -"

"Adam, as you know, one of the things we pride ourselves on at Trion is always striving to fit the employee to the job – to make sure our most high-potential people are given responsibilities that best suit them." She smiled again, and her eyes glittered. "That's why I've just put through an employee transfer request form and asked Tom to expedite it."

"Transfer?"

"We're all awfully impressed with your talents, your resourcefulness, the depth of your knowledge. This morning's meeting illustrated that just so well. We feel that someone of your caliber could do a world of good at our RTP facility. The supply-chain management unit down there could really use a strong team player like you."

"RTP?"

"Our Research Triangle Park satellite office. In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina."

"North Carolina?" Was I hearing her right? "You're talking about transferring me down to North Carolina?"

"Adam, you make it sound like it's Siberia. Have you ever been to Raleigh-Durham? It's really such a lovely area."

"I – but I can't move, I've got responsibilities here, I've got -"

"Employee Relocation will coordinate the whole thing for you. They cover all your moving expenses – everything within reason, of course. I've already started the ball rolling with HR. Any move can be a little disruptive, obviously, but they make it surprisingly painless." Her smile broadened. "You're going to love it there, and they're going to love you!"

"Nora," I said, "Goddard asked me for my honest thoughts, and I'm a big fan of everything you've done with the Maestro line, I wasn't going to deny it. The last thing I intended to do was to piss you off."

"Piss me off?" she said. "Adam, on the contrary – I was grateful for your input. I only wish you'd shared your thoughts with me before the meeting. But that's water under the bridge. We're on to bigger and better things. And so are you!"

The transfer was to take place within the next three weeks. I was completely freaked out. The North Carolina site was for strictly back-office stuff. A million miles away from R &D. I'd be useless to Wyatt there. And he'd blame me for screwing up. I could practically hear the guillotine blade rushing down on its tracks.

It's funny: not until I walked out of her office did I think about my dad, and then it really hit me. I couldn't move. I couldn't leave the old man here. Yet how could I refuse to go where Nora was sending me? Short of escalating – going over her head, or at least trying to, which would surely backfire on me – what choice did I have? If I refused to go to North Carolina, I'd have to resign from Trion, and then all hell would break loose.

It felt as if the whole building were revolving slowly; I had to sit down, had to think. As I passed by Noah Mordden's office he waggled his finger at me to summon me in.

"Ah, Cassidy," he said. "Trion's very own Julien Sorel. Do be nice to the Madame de Renal."

"Excuse me?" I said. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

In his signature Aloha shirt and his big round black glasses he was looking more and more like a caricature of himself. His IP phone rang, but naturally it wasn't any ordinary ring tone. It was a sound file clipped from David Bowie's "Suffragette City": "Oh wham bam thank you ma'am!"

"I suspect you impressed Goddard," he said. "But at the same time, you must also take care not to unduly antagonize your immediate superior. Forget Stendahl. You might want to read Sun Tzu." He scowled. "The ass you save could be your own."

Mordden's office was decorated with all sorts of strange things. There was a chessboard painstakingly laid out in midgame, an H.P. Lovecraft poster, a large doll with curly blond hair. I pointed to the chessboard questioningly.

"Tal-Botvinnik, 1960," he said, as if that meant anything to me. "One of the great chess moves of all time. In any case, my point is, one does not besiege walled cities if it can be avoided. Moreover, and this is wisdom not from Sun Tzu but from the Roman emperor Domitian, if you strike at a king, you must kill him. Instead, you waged an attack on Nora without arranging air support in advance."

"I didn't intend to wage an attack."

"Whatever you intended to accomplish, it was a serious miscalculation, my friend. She will surely destroy you. Remember, Adam. Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

"She's transferring me to Research Triangle."

He cocked an eyebrow. "Could have been much worse, you know. Have you ever been to Jackson, Mississippi?"

I had, and I liked the place, but I was bummed and didn't feel like engaging in a long conversation with this strange dude. He made me nervous. I pointed to the ugly doll on the shelf and said, "That yours?"

"Love Me Lucille," he said. "A huge flop and one that, I'm proud to say, was my initiative."

"You engineered…dolls?"

He reached over and squeezed the doll's hand, and it came to life, its scary-realistic eyes opening and then actually squinting with the animation of a human being. Its cupid's bow mouth opened and turned down into a frightening scowl.

"You've never seen a doll do that."

"And I don't think I ever want to again," I said.

Mordden allowed a glint of a smile. "Lucille has a full range of human facial expressions. She's fully robotic, and actually quite impressive. Shewhines, she gets fussy and annoying, just like a real baby. She requires burping. She gurgles, coos, even tinkles in her diaper. She exhibits alarming signs of colic. She does everything but get diaper rash. She has speech-localization, which means she looks at whoever's talking to her. You teach her to speak."

"I didn't know you did dolls."

"Hey, I can do anything I want here. I'm a Trion Distinguished Engineer. I invented it for my little niece, who refused to play with it. She thought it was creepy."

"It is kind of homely," I said.

"The sculpt was bad." He turned to the doll and spoke slowly. "Lucille? Say hello to our CEO."

Lucille turned her head slowly to Mordden. I could hear a faint mechanical whir. She blinked, scowled again, and began speaking in the deep voice of James Earl Jones, her lips forming the words: "Eat my shorts, Goddard."

"Jesus," I blurted out.

Lucille turned slowly to me, blinked again, and smiled sweetly.

"The technological guts inside this butt-ugly troll were way ahead of its time," Mordden said. "I developed a full multithreaded operating system that runs on an eight-bit processor. State-of-the-art artificial intelligence on some really tightly compiled code. The architecture's quite clever. Three separate ASICs in her fat tummy, which I designed."

An ASIC, I knew, was geek-speak for a fancy custom-designed computer chip that does a bunch of different things.

"Lucille?" Mordden said, and the doll turned to look at him, blinking. "Fuck you, Lucille." Lucille's eyes slowly squinted, her mouth turned down, and she emitted an anguished-sounding wa-a-h. A single tear rolled down her cheek. He pulled up her frilly pink pajama top, exposing a small rectangular LCD screen. "Mommy and Daddy can program her and see the settings on this little proprietary Trion LCD here. One of the ASICs drives this LCD, another drives the motors, another drives the speech."

"Incredible," I said. "All this for a doll."

"Correct. And then the toy company we partnered with fucked up the launch. Let this be a lesson to you. The packaging was terrible. They didn't ship until the last week in November, which is about eight weeks too late – Mommy and Daddy have already made up their Christmas lists by then. Moreover, the price point sucked – in this economy, Mommy and Daddy don't like spending over a hundred bucks for a fucking toy. Of course, the marketing geniuses in Trion Consumer and Educational thought I'd invented the next Beanie Baby, so we stockpiled several hundred thousand of these custom chips, manufactured for us in China at enormous expense and good for nothing else. Which means Trion got stuck with almost half a million ugly dolls that no one wanted, along with three hundred thousand extra doll parts waiting to be assembled, sitting to this day in a warehouse in Van Nuys."

"Ouch."

"It's okay. Nobody can touch me. I've got kryptonite."

He didn't explain what he meant, but this was Mordden, borderline crazy, so I didn't pursue it. I returned to my cubicle, where I found that I had several voice messages. When I played the second one, I recognized the voice with a jolt even before he identified himself.

"Mr. Cassidy," the scratchy voice said, "I really… Oh, this is Jock Goddard. I was very much taken by your remarks at the meeting today, and I wonder if you might be able to stop by my office. Do you think you could call my assistant Flo and set something up?"