Paranoia

35

Jock Goddard's office was no bigger than Tom Lundgren's or Nora Sommers's. This realization blew me away. The goddamned CEO's office was maybe a few feet bigger than my own pathetic cubicle. I walked right by it once, sure I was in the wrong place. But the name was there – AUGUSTINE GODDARD – on a brass plaque on his door, and he was in fact standing right outside his office, talking to his admin. He had on one of his black mock turtlenecks, no jacket, and wore a pair of black reading glasses. The woman he was talking to, who I assumed was Florence, was a large black woman in a magnificent silver-gray suit. She had skunk stripes of gray running through her hair on either side of her head and looked formidable.

They both looked up as I approached. She had no idea who I was, and it took Goddard a minute, but then he recognized me – it was the day after the big meeting – and said, "Oh, Mr. Cassidy, great, thanks for coming. Can I get you something to drink?"

"I'm all set, thanks," I said. I remembered Dr. Bolton's advice, then said, "Well, maybe some water." Up close he seemed even smaller, more stoop-shouldered. His famous pixie face, the thin lips, the twinkling eyes – it looked exactly like the Halloween masks of Jock Goddard that one of the business units had had made for last year's companywide Halloween party. I'd seen one hanging from a pushpin on someone's cubicle wall. Everyone in the unit wore one and did some kind of skit or something.

Flo handed him a manila file – I could see it was my HR file – and he told her to hold all calls and showed me into his office. I had no idea what he wanted, so my guilty conscience went into full swing. I mean, here I'd been skulking around the guy's corporation, doing spy-versus-spy stuff. I'd been careful, sure, but there'd been a couple of goofs.

Still, could it really be anything bad? The CEO never swings the axe himself, he always has his henchmen do it. But I couldn't help but wonder. I was ridiculously nervous, and I wasn't doing much of a job of hiding it.

He opened a small refrigerator concealed in a cabinet and handed me a bottle of Aquafina. Then he sat down behind his desk and immediately leaned back in his high leather chair. I took one of two chairs on the other side of the desk. I looked around, saw a photograph of an unglamorous-looking woman who I assumed was his wife, since she was around the same age. She was white-haired, plain, and amazingly wrinkled (Mordden had called her the shar-pei) and she wore a Barbara Bush-style three-strand pearl necklace, probably to conceal the wattles under her chin. I wondered if Nick Wyatt, so consumed with bilious envy toward Jock Goddard, had any idea who Augustine Goddard came home to every night. Wyatt's bimbos were changed, or rotated, every couple of nights and they all had tits like a center-fold; that was a job requirement.

One entire shelf was taken up with old-fashioned tin models of cars, convertibles with big tail fins and swooping lines, a few old Divco milk trucks. They were models from the forties and fifties, probably when Jock Goddard was a kid, a young man.

He saw me looking at them and said, "What do you drive?"

"Drive?" For a moment I didn't get what he was talking about. "Oh, an Audi A6."

"Audi," he repeated as if it were a foreign word. Okay, so maybe it is. "You like it?"

"It's okay."

"I would have thought you'd drive a Porsche 911, or at least a Boxster, or something of that sort. Fella like you."

"I'm not really a gearhead," I said. It was a calculated response, I'll admit, deliberately contrarian. Wyatt's consigliere, Judith Bolton, had even devoted part of a session to talking about cars so I could fit in with the Trion corporate culture. But my gut now told me that one-on-one I wasn't going to pull it off. Better to avoid the subject entirely.

"I thought everyone at Trion was into cars," Goddard said. I could see he was being arch. He was making a jab at the slavishness of his cult following. I liked that.

"The ambitious ones, anyway," I said, grinning.

"Well, you know, cars are my only extravagance, and there's a reason for that. Back in the early seventies, after Trion went public and I started making more money than I knew what to do with, I went out one day and bought a boat, a sixty-one-footer. I was so damned pleased with this boat until I saw a seventy-footer in the marina. Nine damned feet longer. And I felt this twinge, you understand. My competitive instincts were aroused. Suddenly I'm feeling – oh, I know it's childish, but I can't help it, I need to get me a bigger boat. So you know what I did?"

"Bought a bigger boat."

"Nope. Could have bought a bigger boat no sweat, but then there'd always be some other jackass with a bigger boat. Then who's really the jackass? Me. Can't win that way."

I nodded.

"So I sold the damned thing. I mean the next day. Only thing keeping that craft afloat was fiberglass and jealousy." He chuckled. "That's why this small office. I figured if the boss's office is the same as every other manager's, at least we're not going to have much office-envy in the company. People are always going to compete to see whose is bigger – let 'em focus on something else. So, Elijah, you're a new hire."

"It's Adam, actually."

"Damn, I keep doing that. I'm sorry. Adam, Adam. Got it." He leaned forward in his chair, put on his reading glasses, and scanned my HR file. "We hired you away from Wyatt, where you saved the Lucid."

"I didn't 'save' the Lucid, sir."

"No need for false modesty here."

"I'm not being modest. I'm being accurate."

He smiled as if I amused him. "How does Trion compare to Wyatt? Oh, forget I asked that. I wouldn't want you to answer it anyway."

"That's okay, I'm happy to answer it," I said, all forthrightness. "I like it here. It's exciting. I like the people." I thought for a split second, realizing how kiss-ass this sounded, such complete bullshit. "Well, most of them."

His pixie eyes crinkled. "You took the first salary package we offered you," he said. "Young fellow with your credentials, your track record, you could have negotiated for a good bit more."

I shrugged. "The opportunity interested me."

"Maybe, but it tells me you were eager to get the hell out of there."

This was making me nervous, and anyway, I knew Goddard would want me to be discreet. "Trion's more my kind of place, I think."

"You getting the opportunity you hoped for?"

"Sure."

"Paul, my CFO, mentioned to me your intervention on GoldDust. You've obviously got sources."

"I stay in touch with friends."

"Adam, I like your idea for retooling the Maestro, but I worry about the ramp-up time of adding the secure encryption protocol. The Pentagon's going to want working prototypes yesterday."

"Not a problem," I said. The details were still fresh in my head like I'd crammed for an organic chemistry final. "Kasten Chase has already developed the RASP secure access data security protocol. They've got their Fortezza crypto card, Palladium secure modem – the hardware and software solutions have already been developed. It might add two months to incorporate into the Maestro. Long before we're awarded the contract, we'd be good to go."

Goddard shook his head, looked befuddled. "The whole goddamned market has changed. Everything is e-this and i-that, and all the technology's converging. It's the age of all-in-one. Consumers don't want a TV and a VCR and a fax and computer and stereo and phone and you-name-it." He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He was obviously floating the idea to see what I thought. "Convergence is the future. Don't you think?"

I looked skeptical, took a deep breath and said, "The long answer is…No."

After a few seconds of silence, he smiled. I'd done my homework. I'd read a transcript of some informal remarks Goddard had made at one of those future-of-technology conferences, in Palo Alto a year ago. He'd gone on a rant against "creeping featurism," as he called it, and I'd committed it to memory, figuring I could pull it out at a Trion meeting some time.

"How come?"

"That's just featuritis. Loading on the chrome at the expense of ease of use, simplicity, elegance. I think we're all getting fed up with having to press thirty-six buttons in sequence on twenty-two remote controls just to watch the evening news. I think it already pisses a lot of people off to have the CHECK ENGINE light go on in your car, and you can't just pop the hood and check it out – you've got to take it in to some specialty mechanic with a diagnostic computer and an engineering degree from MIT."

"Even if you're a gearhead," Goddard said with a sardonic smile.

"Even if. Plus, this whole convergence thing is a myth anyway, a buzzword that's dangerous if you take it seriously. Bad for business. Canon's fax-phone was a flop – a mediocre fax and an even lousier phone. You don't see the washing machine converging with the dryer, or the microwave converging with the gas oven. I don't want a combination microwave-refrigerator-electric range-television if I just want something to keep my Cokes cold. Fifty years after the computer was invented, it's converged with – what? Nothing. The way I see it, this convergence bullshit is just the jackalope all over again."

"The what?"

"The jackalope – a mythical creation of some nutty taxidermist, made up out of a jackrabbit and an antelope. You see 'em on postcards all over the West."

"You don't mince words, do you?"

"Not when I'm convinced I'm right, sir."

He put down the HR file, leaned back in his chair again. "What about the ten-thousand-foot view?"

"Sir?"

"Trion as a whole. Any other strong opinions?"

"Some, sure."

"Let's hear 'em."

Wyatt was always commissioning competitive analyses of Trion, and I'd committed them to memory. "Well, Trion Medical Systems is a pretty robust portfolio, real best-in-class technologies in magnetic resonance, nuclear medicine, and ultrasound, but a little weak in the service stuff like patient information management and asset management."

He smiled, nodded. "Agreed. Go on."

"Trion's Business Solutions unit obviously sucks – I don't have to tell you that – but you've got most of the pieces in place there for some serious market penetration, especially in IP-based and circuit-switched voice and ethernet data services. Yeah, I know fiber optic's in the toilet right now, but broadband services are the future, so we've gotta hang tough. The Aerospace division has had a rough couple of years, but it's still a terrific portfolio of embedded computing products."

"But what about Consumer Electronics?"

"Obviously it's our core competency, which is why I moved here. I mean, our high-end DVD players beat Sony's hands down. Cordless phones are strong, always have been. Our mobile phones are killer – we rule the market. We've got the marquee name – we're able to charge up to thirty percent more for our products, just because they say Trion on the label. But there are just way too many soft spots."

"Such as?"

"Well, it's crazy that we don't have a real Blackberry-killer. Wireless communications devices should be our playground. Instead, it's like we're just ceding the ground to RIM and Handspring and Palm. We need some serious hip-top wireless devices."

"We're working on that. We've got a pretty interesting product in the pipeline."

"Good to hear," I said. "I do think we're really missing the boat on technology and products for transmitting digital music and video over the Internet. We really should focus on R &D there, maybe partnering. Huge potential for revenue generation."

"I think you're right."

"And, forgive me for saying it, but I think it's sort of pathetic that we don't have a serious kid-targeted product line. Look at Sony – their PlayStation game console can make the difference between red ink and black ink some years. The demand for computers and home electronics seems to slump every couple of years, right? We're fighting electronics makers in South Korea and Taiwan, we're waging price wars over LCD monitors and digital video decks and cell phones – this is a fact of life. So we should be selling to kids -'cause children don't care about recessions. Sony's got their PlayStations, Microsoft's got its Xbox, Nintendo has GameCube, but what do we have for television video games? Diddly squat. It's a major weakness in a consumer-oriented product line."

I'd noticed he was sitting upright again, looking at me with a cryptic smile on his crinkly face. "How would you feel about priming the retooling of the Maestro?"

"Nora owns that. I wouldn't feel comfortable about it, frankly."

"You'd report to her."

"I'm not sure she'd like that."

His grin got crooked. "She'd get over it. Nora knows what side her bread's buttered on."

"Obviously I won't fight you on it, sir, but I think it might be bad for morale."

"Well, then, how would you like to come work for me?"

"Don't I already?"

"I mean here, on the seventh floor. Special assistant to the chairman for new-product strategy. Dotted line responsibility to the Advanced Technology unit. I'd give you an office, just down the hall. But no bigger than mine, you understand. Interested?"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I felt like bursting from excitement and nerves.

"Well, sure. Reporting directly to you?"

"That's right. So, do we have a deal?"

I gave a slow smile. In for a penny, I thought, and all that. "I think more responsibility calls for more money, sir, don't you?"

He laughed. "Oh, does it?"

"I'd like the additional fifty thousand I should have asked for when I started here. And I'd like forty thousand more in stock options."

He laughed again, a robust, almost Santa Claus-y ho-ho. "You've got balls, young man."

"Thank you."

"I'll tell you what. I'm not going to give you fifty thousand more. I don't believe in incrementalism. I'm going to double your salary. Plus your forty thousand options. That way you'll feel all sorts of pressure to bust your ass for me."

To keep from gasping, I bit the inside of my lip. Jesus.

"Where do you live?" he asked.

I told him.

He shook his head. "Not quite appropriate for someone of your level. Also, the hours you're going to be working, I don't want you driving forty-five minutes in the morning and another forty-five minutes at night. You're going to be working late nights, so I want you living close by. Why don't you get yourself one of those condos in the Harbor Suites? You can afford it now. We've got a lady who works with the Trion E-staff, specializes in corporate housing. She'll set you up with something nice."

I swallowed. "Sounds okay," I said, trying to suppress the little nervous chuckle.

"Now, I know you've said you're not a gearhead, but this Audi…I'm sure it's perfectly nice, but why don't you get yourself something fun? I think a man should love his car. Give it a chance, why don't you? I mean, don't go overboard or anything, but something fun. Flo can make the arrangements."

Was he saying they were going to give me a car? Good God.

He stood up. "So, are you on board?" He stuck out his hand.

I shook. "I'm not an idiot," I said good-naturedly.

"No, that's obvious. Well, welcome to the team, Adam. I look forward to working with you."

I stumbled out of his office and toward the bank of elevators, my head in a cloud. I could barely walk right.

And then I caught myself, remembered why I was here, what my real job was – how I'd gotten here, into Goddard's office, even. I'd just been promoted way, way above my ability.

Not that I even knew what my ability was anymore.

36

I didn't have to break the news to anyone: the miracle of e-mail and instant messaging had already taken care of that for me. By the time I got back to my cube, the word was all over the department. Obviously Goddard was a man of immediate action.

No sooner had I reached the men's room for a much-needed pee than Chad burst in and unzipped at the urinal next to me. "So, are the rumors true, dude?"

I looked impatiently at the wall tile. I really needed to go. "Which rumors?"

"I take it congratulations are in order."

"Oh, that. No, congratulations would be premature. But thanks, anyway." I stared at the little automatic-flush thing that was attached to the American Standard urinal. I wondered who invented that, whether they got rich and their family made cute jokes about the family fortune being in the toilet. I wanted Chad to just leave already.

"I underestimated you," he said, letting loose a powerful stream. Meanwhile my own internal Colorado River was threatening the Hoover Dam.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Oh, yeah. I knew you were good, but I didn't know how good. I didn't give you credit."

"I'm lucky," I said. "Or maybe I just have a big mouth, and for some reason Goddard likes that."

"No, I don't think so. You've got some kind of Vulcan mind-meld going with the old guy. You, like, know all the right buttons to push. I'll bet you two don't even need to talk. That's how good you are. I'm impressed, big guy. I don't know how you did it, but I'm seriously impressed."

He zipped up, clapped me on the shoulder.

"Let me in on the secret, will ya?" he said, but he didn't wait for a reply.

When I got back to my cubicle, Noah Mordden was standing at my cubicle inspecting the books on top of the file cabinet. He was holding a gift-wrapped package, which looked like a book.

"Cassidy," he said. "Our too-cool-for-school Widmerpool."

"Excuse me?" Man, was the guy into cryptic references.

"I want you to have this," he said.

I thanked him and unwrapped the package. It was a book, an old one that smelled of mildew. Sun Tzu on The Art of War was stamped on the cloth front cover.

"It's the 1910 Lionel Giles translation," he said. "The best, I think. Not a first edition, which is impossible to come by, but an early printing at least."

I was touched. "When did you have time to buy this?"

"Last week, online, actually. I didn't intend it to be a departure gift, but there you are. At least now you'll have no excuse."

"Thank you," I said. "I'll read it."

"Please do. I suspect you'll need it all the more. Recall the Japanese kotowaza, 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.' You're fortunate that you're being moved out of Nora's orbit, but there are great perils in rising too quickly in any organization. Hawks may soar, but chipmunks don't get sucked into jet engines."

I nodded. "I'll keep that in mind," I said.

"Ambition is a useful quality, but you must always cover your tracks," he said.

He was definitely hinting at something – he had to have seen me coming out of Nora's office – and it scared the shit out of me. He was toying with me, sadistically, like a cat with a mouse.

Nora summoned me to her office by e-mail, and I braced myself for a shitstorm. "Adam," she called out as I approached. "I just heard the news."

She was smiling. "Sit down, sit down. I am so happy for you. And maybe I shouldn't reveal this, but I'm delighted that they took my enthusiasm about you seriously. Because, you know, they don't always listen."

"I know."

"But I assured them, if you do this, you won't be sorry. Adam's got the right stuff, I told them, he's going to go the extra mile. You've got my word on it. I know him."

Yeah, I thought, you think you know me. You have no idea.

"I could see you were concerned about relocating, so I made a few calls," she said. "I'm so happy things are turning out right for you."

I didn't reply. I was too busy thinking about what Wyatt would say when he heard.

37

"Holy shit," Nicholas Wyatt said.

For a split second his polished, self-contained, deep-tanned shell of arrogance had cracked open. He gave me a look that almost seemed to border on respect. Almost. Anyway, this was a whole new Wyatt, and I enjoyed seeing it.

"You are fucking kidding me." He continued staring. "This better not be a joke." Finally he looked away, and it was a relief. "This is un-fucking-believable."

We were sitting on his private plane, but it wasn't moving anywhere. We were waiting for his latest bimbo girlfriend to show up so the two of them could take off for the Big Island of Hawaii, where he had a house in the Hualalai resort. It was me, Wyatt, and Arnold Meacham. I'd never been in a private jet before, and this one was sweet, a Gulfstream G-IV, interior cabin twelve feet wide, sixty-something feet long. I'd never seen all this empty space in an airplane. You could practically play football in here. No more than ten seats, a separate conference room, two huge bathrooms with showers.

Believe me, I wasn't flying to the Big Island. This was just a tease. Meacham and I would get off before the plane went anywhere. Wyatt was wearing some kind of black silk shirt. I hoped he got skin cancer.

Meacham smiled at Wyatt and said quietly, "Brilliant idea, Nick."

"I gotta give credit to Judith," Wyatt said. "She came up with the idea in the first place." He shook his head slowly. "But I doubt even she could have seen this coming." He picked up his cell, hit two keys.

"Judith," he said. "Our boy is now working directly for Mister Big himself. The Big Kahuna. Special executive assistant to the CEO." He paused, smiled at Meacham. "I kid you not." Another pause. "Judith, sweetheart, I want you to do a crash course with our young man here." Pause. "Right, well, obviously this is top priority. I want Adam to know that guy inside and out. I want him to be the best fucking special assistant the guy's ever hired. Right." And he ended the call with a beep. Looking back at me, he said, "You just saved your own ass, my friend. Arnie?"

Meacham looked like he'd been waiting for this cue. "We ran all the AURORA names you gave us," he said darkly. "Not a single fucking one of them popped up with anything."

"What does that mean?" I asked. God, did I hate the guy.

"No Social Security numbers, no nothing. Don't fuck with us, buddy."

"What are you talking about? I downloaded them directly from the Trion directory on the Web site."

"Yeah, well, they're not real names, asshole. The admin names are real, but the research-division names are obviously cover names. That's how deep they're buried – they don't even list their real names on the Web site. Never heard of such a thing."

"That doesn't sound right," I said, shaking my head.

"Are you being straight with us?" Meacham said. "Because if you aren't, so help me, we will fucking crush you." He looked at Wyatt. "He totally fucked up the personnel records – got diddly-squat."

"The records were gone, Arnold," I shot back. "Removed. They're being super-careful."

"What do you have on the broad?" Wyatt broke in.

I smiled. "I'm seeing 'the broad' next week."

"Like boyfriend-girlfriend stuff?"

I shrugged. "The woman's interested in me. She's on AURORA. She's a direct link into the skunkworks."

To my surprise, Wyatt just nodded. "Nice."

Meacham seemed to sense which way the wind was blowing now. He'd been stuck on how I'd blown the HR operation, and how the AURORA names on the Trion Web site were for some reason fake, but his boss was focusing on what was going right, on the amazing turn of events, and Meacham didn't want to be out of lockstep. "You're going to have access to Goddard's office now," he said. "There's any number of devices you can plant."

"This is so fucking incredible," Wyatt said.

"I don't think we need to be paying him his old Wyatt salary," Meacham said. "Not with what he's making at Trion now. Christ, this goddamned kite's making more than me."

Wyatt seemed amused. "Nah, we made a deal."

"What'd you call me?" I asked Meacham.

"There's a security risk in having us transfer corporate funds into an account for this kid, no matter how many shells it goes through," Meacham said to Wyatt.

"You called me a 'kite,' " I persisted. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I thought it's untraceable," Wyatt said to Meacham.

"What's a 'kite'?" I said. I was a dog with a bone; I wasn't letting this drop, no matter how much I annoyed Meacham.

Meacham wasn't even listening, but Wyatt looked at me and muttered, "It's corporate-spy talk. A kite's a 'special consultant' who goes out there and gathers the intel by whatever means necessary, does the work."

"Kite?" I said.

"You fly a kite, and if it gets caught in a tree, you just cut the string," Wyatt said. "Plausible deniability, you ever hear of that?"

"Cut the string," I repeated dully. On one level I wouldn't mind that at all, because that string was really a leash. But I knew when they talked about cutting the string, they meant leaving me high and dry.

"If things go bad," Wyatt said. "Just don't let things go bad, and no one has to cut the string. Now, where the hell is this bitch? If she's not here in two minutes, I'm taking off without her."

38

So I did something then that was totally insane but felt great. I went out and got myself a ninety-thousand-dollar Porsche.

There was a time when I would have celebrated some great piece of news by getting hammered, maybe splurging on champagne or a couple of CDs. But this was a whole new league. I liked the idea of cutting my Wyatt apron strings by exchanging the Audi for a Porsche, lease courtesy of Trion.

Ever been in a Porsche dealership? It's not like buying a Honda Accord, okay? You don't just walk in off the street and ask for a test drive. You have to go through a lot of foreplay. You've got to fill out a form, they want to talk about why you're here, what do you do, what's your sign.

Also, there's so many options you could go out of your mind. You want bi-xenon headlights? Arctic Silver instrument panel? You want leather or supple leather? You want Sport Design wheels or Sport Classic II wheels or Turbo-Look I wheels?

What I wanted was a Porsche, and I didn't want to wait four to six months for it to be custom built in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. I wanted to drive it off the lot. I wanted it now. They had only two 911 Carrera coupes on the lot, one in Guards Red and one in metallic Basalt Black. It came down to the stitching on the leather. The red car had black leather that felt like leatherette and, worst of all, had red stitching on it, which looked cowboy-western and gross. Whereas the Basalt Black model had a terrific Natural Brown supple leather interior, with a leather gearshift and steering wheel. I came right back from the test drive and said let's do it. Maybe he'd sized me up as the kind of guy who was just looking, or wouldn't in the end be able to pull the trigger, but I did it, and he assured me I was making a smart move. He even offered to have someone return the leased Audi to the Audi dealership – totally zipless.

It was like flying a jet; when you floored it, it even sounded like a 767. Three hundred twenty horsepower, zero to sixty in five-point-zero seconds, unbelievably powerful. It throbbed and roared. I popped in my latest favorite burned CD and blasted the Clash, Pearl Jam, and Guns N' Roses while redlining it to work. It made me feel like everything was happening right.

Even before I moved into my new office, Goddard wanted me to find a new place to live, more convenient to the Trion building. I wasn't exactly going to argue; it was long past time.

His people made it easy for me to abandon the dump I'd lived in for so long and move into a new apartment on the twenty-ninth floor of the south tower of the Harbor Suites. Each of the two towers had like a hundred and fifty condos, on thirty-eight floors, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms. The towers were built on top of the swankiest hotel in the area, whose restaurant was top-rated in Zagat's.

The apartment looked like something out of an In Style photo shoot. It was around two thousand square feet, with twelve-foot ceilings, hardwood parquet and stone floors. There was a "master suite" and a "library" that could also be used as a spare bedroom, a formal dining room, and a giant living room.

There were floor-to-ceiling windows with the most staggering views I'd ever seen. The living room itself looked over the city, spread out below, in one direction, and over the water in another.

The eat-in kitchen looked like a showroom display at a high-end kitchen-design firm, with all the right names: Sub-Zero refrigerator, Miele dishwasher, Viking duel-fuel oven/range, cabinets by Poggenpohl, granite countertops, even a built-in wine "grotto."

Not that I'd ever need the kitchen. If you wanted "in-room dining," all you had to do was pick up the wall phone in the kitchen and press a button, and you could get a room service meal from the hotel, even have a cook from the hotel restaurant come up on short notice and make dinner for you and your guests.

There was an immense, state-of-the-art health club, a hundred thousand square feet, where a lot of rich people who didn't live here worked out or played squash or did Taoist yoga, followed by saunas and protein smoothies at the cafй.

You didn't even park your own car. You drove it up to the front of the building, and the valet would whisk it away somewhere and park it for you, and you called down to get it back.

The elevators zoomed at such supersonic speed that your ears popped. They had mahogany walls and marble floors and were about the same size as my old apartment.

The security here was a whole hell of a lot better too. Wyatt's goons wouldn't be able to break in here so easily and search my stuff. I liked that.

None of the Harbor Suites apartments cost less than a million, and this baby was over two million, but it was all free – furnishings included – courtesy of Trion Systems, as a perk.

Moving in was painless, since I kept almost nothing from my old apartment. Goodwill and the Salvation Army came and took away the big ugly plaid couch, the Formica kitchen table, the box spring and mattress, all the assorted junk, even the cruddy old desk. Crap fell out of the couch as they dragged it away – Zig-Zag papers, roaches, assorted druggie paraphernalia. I kept my computer, my clothes, and my mother's black cast-iron frying pan (for sentimental reasons – not that I ever used it). I packed all my stuff into the Porsche, which tells you how little there was, because there's almost zero luggage space in a Porsche. All the furniture I ordered from that fancy furniture store Domicile (the agent's suggestion) – big, puffy, overstuffed couches you could get swallowed up in, matching chairs, a dining table and chairs that looked like they came out of Versailles, a huge bed with iron railing, Persian area rugs. Super-expensive Dux mattress. Everything. A shitload of money, but hey – I wasn't paying for any of it.

In fact, Domicile was delivering all the furniture when the doorman, Carlos, called up to me to tell me that I had a visitor downstairs, a Mister Seth Marcus. I told him to send Seth right up.

The front door was already open for the delivery people, but Seth rang the doorbell and stood there in the hall. He was wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt and ripped Diesel jeans. His normally lively, even manic, brown eyes looked dead. He was subdued – I couldn't tell if he was intimidated, or jealous, or pissed off that I'd disappeared from his radar screen, or some combination of all three.

"Hey, man," he said. "I tracked you down."

"Hey, man," I said, and gave him a hug. "Welcome to my humble abode." I didn't know what else to say. For some reason I was embarrassed. I didn't want him to see the place.

He stayed where he was in the hall. "You weren't going to tell me you were moving?"

"It kind of happened suddenly," I said. "I was going to call you."

He pulled a bottle of cheap New York State champagne from his canvas bicycle-courier bag, handed it to me. "I'm here to celebrate. I figured you were too good for a case of beer anymore."

"Excellent!" I said, taking the bottle and ignoring the dig. "Come on in."

"You dog. This is great," he said in a flat, unenthusiastic voice. "Huge, huh?"

"Two thousand square feet. Check it out." I gave him the tour. He said funny-cutting stuff like "If that's a library, don't you need to have books?" and "Now all you need to furnish the bedroom is a babe." He said my apartment was "sick" and "ill," which was his pseudogangsta way of saying he liked it.

He helped me take the plastic wrap and tape off one of the enormous couches so we could sit on it. The couch had been placed in the middle of the living room, sort of floating there, facing the ocean.

"Nice," he said, sinking in. He looked like he wanted to put his feet up on something, but they hadn't brought in the coffee table yet, which was a good thing, because I didn't want him putting his mud-crusted Doc Martens on it.

"You getting manicures now?" he said suspiciously.

"Once in a while," I admitted in a small voice. I couldn't believe he noticed a little detail like my fingernails. Jesus. "Gotta look like an executive, you know."

"What's with the haircut? Seriously."

"What about it?"

"Don't you think it's, I don't know, sort of fruity?"

"Fruity?"

"Like all fancy looking. You putting shit in your hair, like gel or mousse or something?"

"A little gel," I said defensively. "What about it?"

He squinted, shook his head. "You got cologne on?"

I wanted to change the subject. "I thought you worked tonight," I said.

"Oh, you mean the bartending gig? Nah, I quit that. It turned out to be totally bogus."

"Seemed like a cool place."

"Not if you work there, man. They treat you like you're a fucking waiter."

I almost burst out laughing.

"I got a much better gig," he said. "I'm on the 'mobile energy team' for Red Bull. They give you this cool car to drive around in, and you basically hand out samples and talk to people and shit. Hours are totally flexible. I can do it after the paralegal gig."

"Sounds perfect."

"Totally. Gives me plenty of free time to work on my corporate anthem."

"Corporate anthem?"

"Every big company's got one – like, cheesy rock or rap or something." He sang, badly: "Trion! – Change your world! Like that. If Trion doesn't have one, maybe you could put in a word for me with the right guy. I bet I'd get royalties every time you guys sing it at a corporate picnic or whatever."

"I'll look into it," I said. "Hey, I don't have any glasses. I'm expecting a delivery, but it hasn't come yet. They say the glass is mouth-blown in Italy – wonder if you can still smell the garlic."

"Don't worry about it. The champagne's probably shit anyway."

"You still working at the law firm too?"

He looked embarrassed. "It's my only steady paycheck."

"Hey, that's important."

"Believe me, man, I do as little as possible. I do just enough to keep Shapiro off my back – faxes, copies, searches, whatever – and I still have plenty of time to surf the Web."

"Cool."

"I get like twenty bucks an hour for playing Web games and burning music CDs and pretending to work."

"Great," I said. "You're really getting one over on them." It was pathetic, actually.

"You got it."

And then I don't know why I came out with it, but I said, "So, who do you think you're cheating the most, them or yourself?"

Seth looked at me funny. "What are you talking about?"

"I mean, you fuck around at work, you scam by, doing as little as possible – you ever ask yourself what you're doing it for? Like, what's the point?"

Seth's eyes narrowed in hostility. "What's up with you?"

"At some point you got to commit to something, you know?"

He paused. "Whatever. Hey, you want to get out of here, go somewhere? This is sort of too grown-up for me, it's giving me hives."

"Sure." I'd been debating calling down to the hotel to send up a cook to make us dinner, because I thought Seth might be impressed, but then I came to my senses. It would not have been a good idea. It would have sent Seth over the edge. Relieved, I called down to the valet and asked them to bring my car around.

It was waiting for me by the time we got down there.

"That's yours?" he gasped. "No fucking way."

"Way," I said.

His cynical, aloof composure had finally cracked. "This baby must cost like a hundred grand!"

"Less than that," I said. "Way less. Anyway, the company leases it for me."

He approached the Porsche slowly, awestricken, the way the apes approached the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he stroked the gleaming Basalt Black door.

"All right, buddy," he demanded, "what's your scam? I want a piece of this."

"Not a scam," I said uncomfortably as we got in. "I sort of fell into this."

"Oh, come on, man. This is me you're talking to – Seth. Remember me? Are you selling drugs or something? Because if you are, you better cut me in."

I laughed hollowly. As we roared away, I saw a stupid-looking car parked on the street that had to be his. A huge blue-silver-and-red can of Red Bull was mounted on top of a dinky car. A joke.

"That yours?"

"Yep. Cool, huh?" He didn't sound so enthusiastic.

"Nice," I said. It was ridiculous.

"You know what it cost me? Nada. I just gotta drive it around."

"Good deal."

He leaned back in the supple leather seat. "Sweet ride," he said. He took a deep breath of the new-car smell. "Man, this is great. I think I want your life. Wanna trade?"

39

It was totally out of the question, of course, for me to meet again with Dr. Judith Bolton at Wyatt headquarters, where I might be seen coming or going. But now that I was hunting with the big cats, I needed an in-depth session. Wyatt insisted, and I didn't disagree.

So I met her at a Marriott the next Saturday, in a suite set up for business meetings. They'd e-mailed me the room number to go to. She was already there when I arrived, her laptop hooked up to a video monitor. It's funny, the lady still made me nervous. On the way I stopped for another hundred-dollar haircut, and I wore decent clothes, not my usual weekend junk.

I'd forgotten how intense she was – the ice-blue eyes, the coppery red hair, the glossy red lips and red nail polish – and how hard-looking at the same time. I gave her a firm handshake.

"You're right on time," she said, smiling.

I shrugged, half-smiled back to say I got it but I wasn't really amused.

"You look good. Success seems to agree with you."

We sat at a fancy conference table that looked like it belonged in someone's dining room – mine, maybe – and she asked me how it was going. I filled her in, the good stuff and the bad, including about Chad and Nora.

"You're going to have enemies," she said. "That's to be expected. But these are threats – you've left a cigarette butt smoldering in the woods, and if you don't put them out you may have a forest fire on your hands."

"How do I put them out?"

"We'll talk about that. But right now I want to focus on Jock Goddard. And if you take away nothing else today, I want you to remember this: he's pathologically honest."

I couldn't help smiling. This from the chief consigliere to Nick Wyatt, a guy so crooked he'd cheat on a prostate exam.

Her eyes flashed in annoyance, and she leaned in toward me. "I'm not making a joke. He's singled you out not just because he likes your mind, your ideas – which of course aren't your ideas at all – but because he finds your honesty refreshing. You speak your mind. He likes that."

"That's 'pathological'?"

"Honest is practically a fetish with him. The blunter you are, the less calculating you seem, the better you'll play." I wondered briefly if Judith saw the irony in what she was doing – counseling me in how to pull the wool over Jock Goddard's eyes by feigning honesty. One hundred percent synthetic honesty, no natural fibers. "If he starts to detect anything shifty or obsequious or calculating in your manner – if he thinks you're trying to suck up or game him – he'll cool on you fast. And once you lose that trust, you may never regain it."

"Got it," I said impatiently. "So from now on, no gaming the guy."

"Sweetheart, what planet are you living on?" she shot back. "Of course we game the old geezer. That's lesson two in the art of 'managing up,' come on. You'll mess with his head, but you have to be supremely artful about it. Nothing obvious, nothing he'll sniff out. The way dogs can smell fear, Goddard can smell bullshit. So you've got to come across as the ultimate straight shooter. You tell him the bad news other people try to sugarcoat. You show him a plan he likes – then you be the one to point out the flaws. Integrity's a pretty scarce commodity in our world – once you figure out how to fake it, you'll be on the good ship Lollipop."

"Where I want to be," I said dryly.

She had no time for my sarcasm. "People always say that nobody likes a suckup, but the truth is, the vast majority of senior managers adore suckups, even when they know they're being sucked up to. It makes them feel powerful, reassures them, bolsters their fragile egos. Jock Goddard, on the other hand, has no need for it. Believe me, he thinks quite highly of himself already. He's not blinded by need, by vanity. He's not a Mussolini who needs to be surrounded by yes-men." Like anyone we know? I wanted to say. "Look who he surrounds himself with – bright, quick-witted people who can be abrasive and outspoken."

I nodded. "You're saying he doesn't like flattery."

"No, I'm not saying that. Everyone likes flattery. But it's got to feel real to him. A little story: Napoleon once went hunting in the Bois de Boulogne with Talleyrand, who desperately wanted to impress the great general. The woods were teeming with rabbits, and Napoleon was delighted when he killed fifty of them. But when he found out later that these weren't wild rabbits – that Talleyrand had sent one of his servants to the market to buy dozens of rabbits and then set them loose in the woods – well, Napoleon was enraged. He never trusted Talleyrand again."

"I'll keep that in mind next time Goddard invites me rabbit hunting."

"The point is," she snapped, "that when you flatter, do so indirectly."

"Well, I'm not running with rabbits, Judith. More like wolves."

"There you go. Know much about wolves?"

I sighed. "Bring it on."

"It's all laid bare. There's always an Alpha male, of course, but what's interesting to keep in mind is that the hierarchy's always being tested. It's highly unstable. Sometimes you'll see the Alpha male wolf drop a fresh piece of meat on the ground right in front of the others and then move away a couple of feet and just watch. He's outright daring the other ones to even sniff at it."

"And if they do, they're supper."

"Wrong. The Alpha usually doesn't have to do anything more than glare. Maybe posture a bit. Raise his tail and ears, snarl, make himself look big and fierce. And if a fight does break out, the Alpha will attack the least vulnerable parts of the transgressor's body. He doesn't want to seriously maim a member of his own pack, and certainly not kill anyone. You see, the Alpha wolf needs the others. Wolves are small animals, and no individual wolf is going to bring down a moose, a deer, a caribou, without help from a pack. Point is, they're always testing."

"Meaning that I'm always going to be tested." Yeah, I didn't need an MBA to work for Goddard. I needed a veterinary degree.

She gave me a sidelong glance. "The point, Adam, is that the testing is always subtle. But at the same time, the leader of a wolf pack wants strength on his team. That's why occasional displays of aggression are acceptable – they demonstrate the stamina, the strength, the vitality of the entire pack. This is the importance of honesty, of strategic candor. When you flatter, do it subtly and indirectly, and make sure that Goddard thinks he can always get the unvarnished truth from you. Jock Goddard realizes what a lot of other CEOs don't – that candor from his aides is vital if he's going to know what's going on inside his company. Because if he's out of touch with what's really happening, he's history. And let me tell you something else you need to know. In every male mentor-protйgй relationship there's a father-son element, but I suspect it's even more germane in this case. You likely remind him of his son, Elijah."

Goddard had called me that a couple of times by mistake, I recalled. "My age?"

"Would have been. He died a couple of years ago at the age of twenty-one. Some people think that since the tragedy Goddard has never been the same, that he got a little too soft. The point is, just as you may come to idealize Goddard as the father you wish you had" – she smiled, she knew about my Dad somehow – "you may well remind him of the son he wishes he still had. You should be aware of this, because it's something you may be able to use. And it's something to watch out for – he may cut you some undeserved slack at times, yet at other times he may be unreasonably demanding."

She turned to her laptop and tapped at a few keys. "Now, I want your undivided attention. We're going to watch some television interviews Goddard has given over the years – an early one from Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, several from CNBC, one he did with Katie Couric on The Today Show."

A video image of a much younger Jock Goddard, though still impish, pixielike – was frozen on the screen. Judith whirled around in her chair to face me. "Adam, this is an extraordinary opportunity you've been handed. But it's also a far more dangerous situation than you've been in at Trion, because you'll be far more constrained, far less able to move about the company unnoticed or just 'hang out' with regular people and network with them. Paradoxically, your intelligence-gathering assignment has just become hugely more difficult. You're going to need all the ammunition you can collect. So before we finish today, I want you to know this fellow inside and out, are you with me?"

"I'm with you."

"Good," she said, and gave me her scary little smile. "I know you are." Then she lowered her voice almost to a whisper. "Listen, Adam, I have to tell you – for your own sake – that Nick is getting very impatient for results. You've been at Trion for how many weeks? – and he has yet to know what's going on in the skunkworks."

"There's a limit," I began, "to how aggressive -"

"Adam," she said quietly, but with an unmistakable note of menace. "This is not someone you want to fuck with."

40

Alana Jennings lived in a duplex apartment in a redbrick town house not far from Trion headquarters. I recognized it immediately from the photograph.

You know how when you just start going out with a girl and you notice everything, where she lives and how she dresses and her perfume, and everything seems so different and new? Well, the strange thing was how I knew so much about her, more than some husbands know about their wives, and yet I'd spent no more than an hour or two with her.

I pulled up to the town house in my Porsche – isn't that part of what Porsches are for, to impress chicks? – and climbed the steps and rang the doorbell. Her voice chirped over the speaker, said she'd be right down.

She was wearing a white embroidered peasant blouse and black leggings and her hair was up, and she wasn't wearing the scary black glasses. I wondered whether peasants ever actually wore peasant blouses, and whether there really were peasants in the world anymore, and if there were, whether they thought of themselves as peasants. She looked too spectacularly beautiful. She smelled great, different from most of the girls I usually went out with. A floral fragrance called Fleurissimo; I remembered reading that she'd pick it up at a place called the House of Creed whenever she went to Paris.

"Hey," I said.

"Hi, Adam." She had glossy red lipstick on and was carrying a tiny square black handbag over one shoulder.

"My car's right here," I said, trying to be subtle about the brand-new shiny black Porsche ticking away right in front of us. She gave it an appraising glance but didn't say anything. She was probably putting it together in her mind with my Zegna jacket and pants and open-collar black casual shirt, maybe the five-thousand-dollar Italian navy watch too. And thinking I was either a show-off or trying too hard. She wore a peasant blouse; I wore Ermenegildo Zegna. Perfect. She was pretending to be poor, and I was trying to look rich and probably overdoing it.

I opened the passenger's side door for her. I'd moved the seat back before I got here so there'd be plenty of legroom. Inside, the air was heavy with the aroma of new leather. There was a Trion parking sticker on the left rear side of the car, which she hadn't yet noticed. She wouldn't see it from inside the car either, but soon enough she would, when we were getting out at the restaurant, and that was just as well. She was going to find out soon enough, one way or another, that I worked at Trion too, and that I'd been hired to fill the job she used to have. It was going to be a little weird, the coincidence, given that we hadn't met at work, and the sooner it came up the better. In fact, I was ready with a dumb line of patter. Like: "You're kidding me. You do? So do I! How bizarre!"

There were a few moments of awkward silence as I drove toward her favorite Thai restaurant. She glanced up at the speedometer, then back at the road. "You should probably watch it around here," she said. "This is a speed trap. The cops are just waiting for you to go over fifty, and they really sock you."

I smiled, nodded, then remembered a riff from one of her favorite movies, Double Indemnity, which I'd rented the night before. "How fast was I going, officer?" I said in that sort of flat-affect film-noir Fred MacMurray voice.

She got it immediately. Smart girl. She grinned. "I'd say around ninety." She had the vampish Barbara Stanwyck voice down perfectly.

"Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket."

"Suppose I let you off with a warning this time," she came back, playing the game, her eyes alive with mischief.

I faltered for only a few seconds until the line came to me. "Suppose it doesn't take."

"Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles."

I smiled. She was good, and she was into it. "Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder."

"Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder."

"That tears it," I said. End of scene. Cut, print, that's a take.

She laughed delightedly. "How do you know that?"

"Too much wasted time watching old black-and-white movies."

"Me too! And Double Indemnity is probably my favorite."

"It's right up there with Sunset Boulevard." Another favorite of hers.

"Exactly! 'I am big. It's the pictures that got small.' "

I wanted to quit while I was ahead, because I'd pretty much exhausted my supply of memorized noir trivia. I moved the conversation into tennis, which was safe. I pulled up in front of the restaurant, and her eyes lit up again. "You know about this place? It's the best!"

"For Thai food, it's the only place, as far as I'm concerned." A valet parked the car – I couldn't believe I was handing the keys to my brand-new Porsche to an eighteen-year-old kid who was probably going to take it out on a joyride when business got slow – and so she never saw the Trion sticker.

It was actually a great date for a while. That Double Indemnity stuff seemed to have set her at ease, made her feel that she was with a kindred spirit. Plus a guy who was into Ani DiFranco, what more could she ask for? Maybe a little depth – women always seemed to like depth in a guy, or at least the occasional fleeting moment of self-reflection, but I was all over that.

We ordered green papaya salad and vegetarian spring rolls. I considered telling her I was a vegetarian, like she was, but then I decided that would be too much, and besides, I didn't know if I could stand to keep up the ruse for more than one meal. So I ordered Masaman curry chicken and she ordered a vegetarian curry without coconut milk – I remembered reading that she was allergic to shrimp – and we both drank Thai beer.

We moved from tennis to the Tennis and Racquet Club, but I quickly steered us away from those dangerous shoals, which would raise the question of how and why I was there that day, and then to golf, and then to summer vacations. She used "summer" as a verb. She figured out pretty quickly that we came from different sides of the tracks, but that was okay. She wasn't going to marry me or introduce me to her father, and I didn't want to have to fake my family background too, which would be a lot of work. And besides, it didn't seem necessary – she seemed to be into me anyway. I told her some stories about working at the tennis club, and doing the night shift at the gas station. Actually, she must have felt a little uncomfortable about her privileged upbringing, because she told a little white lie about how her parents forced her to spend part of her summers doing scutwork "at the company where my dad works," neglecting to mention that her dad was the CEO. Also, I happened to know she had never worked at her father's company. Her summers were spent on a dude ranch in Wyoming, on safari in Tanzania, living with a couple of other women in an apartment paid for by Daddy in the Sixth in Paris, interning at the Peggy Guggenheim on the Grand Canal in Venice. She wasn't pumping gas.

When she mentioned the company where her father "worked," I braced myself for the inevitable subject of what-do-you-do, where-do-you-work. But it never happened, until much later. I was surprised when she brought it up in a strange way, kind of making a game of it. She sighed. "Well, I suppose now we have to talk about our jobs, right?"

"Well…"

"So we can talk endlessly about what we do during the day, right? I'm in high-tech, okay? And you – wait, I know, don't tell me."

My stomach tightened.

"You're a chicken farmer."

I laughed. "How'd you guess?"

"Yep. A chicken farmer who drives a Porsche and wears Fendi."

"Zegna, actually."

"Whatever. I'm sorry, you're a guy, so work is probably all you want to talk about."

"Actually, no." I modulated my voice into a tone of bashful sincerity. "I really prefer to live in the present moment, to be as mindful as I can. You know, there's this Vietnamese Buddhist monk who lives in France, named Thich Nhat Nanh, and he says -"

"Oh, my God," she said, "this is so uncanny! I can't believe you know Thich Nhat Nanh!"

I hadn't actually read anything this monk had written, but after I saw how many books of his she'd ordered from Amazon I did look him up on a couple of Buddhist Web sites.

"Sure," I said as if everyone had read the complete works of Thich Nhat Nanh. " 'The miracle is not to walk on water, the miracle is to walk on the green earth.' " I was pretty sure I had that right, but just then my cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. "Excuse me," I said, taking it out and glancing at the caller ID.

"One quick second," I apologized, and answered the phone.

"Adam," came Antwoine's deep voice. "You better get over here. It's your dad."

41

Our dinners were barely half eaten. I drove her home, apologizing profusely all the while. She could not have been more sympathetic. She even offered to come to the hospital with me, but I couldn't expose her to my father, not this early on: that would be too gruesome.

Once I'd dropped her off, I took the Porsche up to eighty miles an hour and made it to the hospital in fifteen minutes – luckily, without being pulled over. I raced into the emergency room in an altered state of consciousness: hyper-alert, scared, with tunnel vision. I just wanted to get to Dad and see him before he died. Every damned second I had to wait at the ER desk, I was convinced, might be the moment Dad died, and I'd never get a chance to say good-bye. I pretty much shouted out his name at the triage nurse, and when she told me where he was, I took off running. I remember thinking that if he was already dead she'd have said something to that effect, so he must still be alive.

I saw Antwoine first, standing outside the green curtains. His face was for some reason scratched and bloodied, and he looked scared.

"What's up?" I called out. "Where is he?"

Antwoine pointed to the green curtains, behind which I could hear voices. "All of a sudden his breathing got all labored. Then he started turning kind of dark in the face, kind of bluish. His fingers started getting blue. That's when I called the ambulance." He sounded defensive.

"Is he -?"

"Yeah, he's alive. Man, for an old cripple he's got a lot of fight left in him."

"He did that to you?" I asked, indicating his face.

Antwoine nodded, smiling sheepishly. "He refused to get into the ambulance. He said he was fine. I spent like half an hour fighting with him, when I should have just picked him up and threw him in the car. I hope I didn't wait too long to call the ambulance."

A small, dark-skinned young guy in green scrubs came up to me. "Are you his son?"

"Yeah?" I said.

"I'm Dr. Patel," the man said. He was maybe my age, a resident or an intern or whatever.

"Oh. Hi." I paused. "Um, is he going to make it?"

"Looks like it. Your father has a cold, that's all. But he doesn't have any respiratory reserve. So a minor cold, for him, is life-threatening."

"Can I see him?"

"Of course," he said, stepping to the curtain and pulling it back. A nurse was hooking up an IV bag to Dad's arm. He had a clear plastic mask on over his mouth and nose, and he stared at me. He looked basically the same, just smaller, his face paler than normal. He was connected to a bunch of monitors.

He reached down and pulled the mask off his face. "Look at all this fuss," he said. His voice was weak.

"How're you doing, Mr. Cassidy?" Dr. Patel said.

"Oh, great," Dad said, heavy on the sarcasm. "Can't you tell?"

"I think you're doing better than your caregiver."

Antwoine was sidling up to take a look. Dad looked suddenly guilty. "Oh, that. Sorry about your face, there, Antwoine."

Antwoine, who must have realized this was as elaborate an apology as he was ever going to get from my father, looked relieved. "I learned my lesson. Next time I fight back harder."

Dad smiled like a heavyweight champ.

"This gentleman saved your life," Dr. Patel said.

"Did he," Dad said.

"He sure did."

Dad shifted his head slightly to stare at Antwoine. "What'd you have to go and do that for?" he said.

"Didn't want to have to look for another job so quick," Antwoine said right back.

Dr. Patel spoke softly to me. "His chest X ray was normal, for him, and his white count is eight point five, which is also normal. His blood gasses came back indicating he was in impending respiratory failure, but he appears to be stable now. We've got him on a course of IV antibiotics, some oxygen, and IV steroids."

"What's the mask?" I said. "Oxygen?"

"It's a nebulizer. Albuteral and Atrovent, which are bronchodilators." He leaned over my father and put the mask back in place. "You're a real fighter, Mr. Cassidy."

Dad just blinked.

"That's an understatement," Antwoine said, laughing huskily.

"Excuse us." Dr. Patel pulled back the curtain and took a few steps. I followed him, while Antwoine hung back with Dad.

"Does he still smoke?" Dr. Patel asked sharply.

I shrugged.

"There are nicotine stains on his fingers. That's completely insane, you know."

"I know."

"He's killing himself."

"He's dying one way or the other."

"Well, he's hastening the process."

"Maybe he wants to," I said.

42

I started my first official day of working for Jock Goddard having been up all night.

I'd gone from the hospital to my new apartment around four in the morning, considered trying to grab an hour of sleep, then rejected the idea because I knew I'd oversleep. That might not be the best way to start off with Goddard. So I took a shower, shaved, and spent some time on the Internet reading about Trion's competitors, poring over News.com and Slashdot for the latest tech news. I dressed, in a lightweight black pullover (the closest thing I had to one of Jock Goddard's trademark black mock turtlenecks), a pair of dress khakis, and a brown houndstooth jacket, one of the few "casual" items of clothing Wyatt's exotic admin had picked out for me. Now I looked like a full-fledged member of Goddard's inner posse. Then I called down to the valet and asked them to have my Porsche brought around.

The doorman who seemed to be on in the early morning and evening, when I most often came and went, was a Hispanic guy in his mid-forties named Carlos Avila. He had a strange, strangled voice as if he'd swallowed a sharp object and couldn't get it all the way down. He liked me – mostly, I think, because I didn't ignore him like everybody else who lived there.

"Workin' hard, Carlos?" I said as I passed by. Normally this was the line he used on me, when I came home ridiculously late, looking wiped out.

"Hardly workin', Mr. Cassidy," he said with a grin and turned back to the TV news.

I drove it a couple of blocks away to the Starbucks, which was just opening, and bought a triple grande latte, and while I was waiting for the Seattle-grunge-wannabe multiple-piercing-victim kid to steam a quart of two-percent milk, I picked up a Wall Street Journal, and my stomach seized up.

There, right on the front page, was an article about Trion. Or, as they put it, "Trion's woes." There was an engraved-looking, stippled drawing of Goddard, looking inappropriately chipper, as if he were totally out of it, didn't get it. One of the smaller headlines said, "Are Founder Augustine Goddard's Days Numbered?" I had to read that twice. My brain wasn't functioning at peak capacity, and I needed my triple grande latte, which the grunge kid seemed to be struggling over. The article was a hard-hitting and smart piece of reporting by a Journal regular named William Bulkeley, who obviously had good contacts at Trion. The gist of it seemed to be that Trion's stock price was slipping, its products were long in the tooth, the company ("generally deemed the leader in telecommunications-based consumer electronics") was in trouble, and Jock Goddard, Trion's founder, seemed to be out of touch. His heart wasn't in it anymore. There was a whole riff about the "long tradition" of founders of high-technology companies who got replaced when their company reached a certain size. It asked whether he was the wrong person to preside over the period of stability that followed a period of explosive growth. There was a lot of stuff in there about Goddard's philanthropy, his charitable efforts, his hobby of collecting and repairing vintage American cars, how he'd completely rebuilt his prize 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible. Goddard, the article said, seemed to be headed for a fall.

Great, I thought. If Goddard falls, guess who falls with him.

Then I remembered: Wait a second, Goddard's not my real employer. He's the target. My real employer is Nick Wyatt. It was easy to forget where my true loyalties were supposed to lie, with the excitement of the first day and all.

Finally my latte was ready, and I stirred in a couple of Turbinado sugar packets, took a big gulp, which scalded the back of my throat, and pressed on the plastic top. I sat down at a table to finish the rest of the article. The journalist seemed to have the goods on Goddard. Trion people were talking to him. The knives were out for the old guy.

On the drive in, I tried to listen to an Ani DiFranco CD I'd picked up at Tower as part of my Alana research project, but after a few cuts I ejected the thing. I couldn't stand it. A couple of songs weren't songs at all but just spoken pieces. If I wanted that, I'd listen to Jay-Z or Eminem. No thanks.

I thought about the Journal piece and tried to come up with a spin in case anyone asked me about it. Should I say it was a piece of crap planted by one of our competitors to undermine us? Should I say the reporter had missed the real story (whatever that was)? Or that he'd raised some good questions that had to be dealt with? I decided to go with a modified version of this last one – that whatever the truth of the allegations, what counted was what our shareholders thought, and they almost all read the Wall Street Journal, so we'd have to take the piece seriously, truth or not.

And privately I wondered who Goddard's enemies were who might be stirring up trouble – whether Jock Goddard really was in trouble, and I was boarding a sinking ship. Or, to be accurate about it, whether Nick Wyatt had put me on a sinking ship. I thought: The guy must be in bad shape – he hired me, didn't he?

I took a sip of coffee, and the lid wasn't quite on tight, and the warm milky brown liquid doused my lap. It looked like I'd had an "accident." What a way to start the new job. I should have taken it as a warning.

43

On my way out of the lobby men's room, where I did my best to blot up the coffee spill, leaving my khakis damp and wrinkled, I passed the small newsstand in the lobby of A Wing, the main building, which sold the local papers plus USA Today, the New York Times, the salmon-colored Financial Times, and the Journal. The normally towering pile of Wall Street Journal s was already half gone and it was barely seven in the morning. Obviously everyone at Trion was reading it. I figured copies of the piece from the Journal' s Web site were in everyone's e-mail by now. I said hi to the lobby ambassador and took the elevator to the seventh floor.

Goddard's chief admin, Flo, had already e-mailed me the details of my new office. That's right, not cubicle, but a real office, the same size as Jock Goddard's (and, for that matter, the same size as Nora's and Tom Lundgren's). It was down the hall from Goddard's office, which was dark like all the other offices on the executive corridor. Mine, however, was lit up.

Sitting at her desk outside my office was my new administrative assistant, Jocelyn Chang, a fortyish, imperious-looking Chinese-American woman in an immaculate blue suit. She had perfectly arched eyebrows, short black hair, and a tiny bow-shaped mouth decorated with wet-looking peach-colored lipstick. She was labeling a sorter for correspondence. As I approached, she looked up with pursed lips and stuck out her hand. "You must be Mr. Cassidy."

"Adam," I said. I didn't know, was that my first mistake? Was I supposed to maintain a distance, be formal? It seemed ridiculous and unnecessary. After all, almost everyone here seemed to call the CEO "Jock." And I was about half her age.

"I'm Jocelyn," she said. She had some kind of a flat, nasal Boston-area accent, which I hadn't expected. "Nice to meet you."

"You too. Flo said you've been here forever, which I'm glad to hear." Oops. Women don't like being told that.

"Fifteen years," she said warily. "The last three for Michael Gilmore, your immediate predecessor. He was reassigned a couple of weeks ago, so I've been floating."

"Fifteen years. Excellent. I'll need all the help I can get."

She nodded, no smile, nothing. Then she seemed to notice the Journal under my arm. "You're not going to mention that to Mr. Goddard, are you?"

"Actually, I was going to ask you to have it mounted and framed as a gift to him. For his office."

She gave me a long, terrified stare. Then a slow smile. "That's a joke," she said. "Right?"

"Right."

"Sorry. Mr. Gilmore wasn't really known for his sense of humor."

"That's okay. I'm not either."

She nodded, not sure how to react. "Right." She glanced at her watch. "You've got a seven-thirty with Mr. Goddard."

"He's not in yet."

She looked at her watch again. "He will be. In fact, I'll bet he just got in. He keeps a very regular schedule. Oh, hold on." She handed me a very fancy looking document, easily a hundred pages long, bound in some kind of blue leatherette, that said BAIN & COMPANY on the front. "Flo said Mr. Goddard wanted you to read this before the meeting."

"The meeting…in two and a half minutes."

She shrugged.

Was this my first test? There was no way I could read even a page of this incomprehensible gibberish before the meeting, and I sure wasn't going to be late. Bain & Company is a high-priced global management-consulting firm that takes guys around my age, guys that know even less than I do, and works them until they're drooling idiots, making them visit companies and write reports and bill hundreds of thousands of dollars for their bogus wisdom. This one was stamped TRION SECRET. I skimmed it quickly, and all the clichйs and buzzwords jumped right out at me – "streamlined knowledge management," "competitive advantage," "operations excellence," "cost inefficiencies," "diseconomies of scale," "minimizing non-value-adding work," blah blah blah – and I knew I didn't even have to read the thing to know what was up.

Layoffs. Head-harvesting on the cubicle farm.

Groovy, I thought. Welcome to life at the top.

44

Goddard was already sitting at a round table in his back office with Paul Camilletti and another guy when Flo escorted me in. The third guy was in his mid-to late fifties, bald with a gray fringe, wearing an unfashionable gray plaid suit, shirt, and tie right out of a shopping mall men's store, a big bulky class ring on his right hand. I recognized him: Jim Colvin, Trion's chief operations officer.

The room was the same size as Goddard's front office, ten by ten, and with only four guys here and the big round table it felt crowded. I wondered why we weren't meeting in some conference room, someplace a little bigger, more fitting for such high-powered executives. I said hi, smiled nervously, sat in a chair near Goddard, and put down my Bain document and the Trion mug of coffee Flo had given me. I took out a yellowpad and pen and got ready to take notes. Goddard and Camilletti were in shirtsleeves, no jackets – and no black turtlenecks. Goddard looked even older and more tired than last time I'd seen him. He had on a pair of black half-glasses on a string around his neck. Spread out on the table were several copies of the Wall Street Journal article, one of them marked up with yellow and green highlighter.

Camilletti scowled at me as I sat down. "Who's this?" he said. Not exactly 'Nice to have you aboard.'

"You remember Mr. Cassidy, don't you?"

"No."

"From the Maestro meeting? The military thing?"

"Your new assistant," he said without enthusiasm. "Right. Welcome to damage control central, Cassidy."

"Jim, this is Adam Cassidy," Goddard said. "Adam, Jim Colvin, our COO."

Colvin nodded. "Adam."

"We were just talking about this darned Journal piece," Goddard said, "and how to handle it."

"Well," I said sagely, "it's just one article. It'll blow over in a couple of days, no doubt."

"Bullshit," Camilletti snapped, glaring at me with an expression so scary I thought I was going to turn to stone. "It's the Journal. It's front-page. Everyone reads it. Board members, institutional investors, analysts, everyone. This is a friggin' train wreck."

"It's not good," I agreed. I told myself to keep my mouth shut from now on.

Goddard exhaled noisily.

"The worst thing to do is to over-rotate," Colvin said. "We don't want to send up panic smoke signals to the industry." I liked "over-rotate." Jim Colvin was obviously a golfer.

"I want to get Investor Relations in here now, Corporate Communications, and draft a response, a letter to the editor," Camilletti said.

"Forget the Journal," Goddard said. "I think I'd like to offer a face-to-face exclusive to the New York Times. An opportunity to address issues of broad concern to the whole industry, I'll say. They'll get it."

"Whatever," said Camilletti. "In any case, let's not protest too loudly. We don't want to force the Journal to do a follow-up, stir up the mud even more."

"Sounds to me like the Journal reporter must have talked to insiders here," I said, forgetting the part about keeping my mouth shut. "Do we have any idea who might have leaked?"

"I did get a voice mail from the reporter a couple of days ago, but I was out of the country," Goddard said. "So I'm 'unavailable for comment.' "

"The guy may have called me – I don't know, I can check my voice mail – but I surely didn't return his call," said Camilletti.

"I can't imagine anyone at Trion would knowingly have any part in this," Goddard said.

"One of our competitors," Camilletti said. "Wyatt, maybe."

No one looked at me. I wondered if the other two knew I came from Wyatt.

Camilletti went on, "There's a lot of stuff here quoting some of our resellers – British Tel, Vodafone, DoCoMo – about how the new cell phones aren't moving. The dogs aren't eating the dog food. So how does a reporter with a New York byline even know to call DoCoMo in Japan? It's got to be Motorola or Wyatt or Nokia who dropped a dime."

"Anyway," Goddard said, "it's all water under the bridge. My job isn't to manage the media, it's to manage the darned company. And this asinine piece, however skewed and unfair it might be – well, how terrible is it, really? Apart from the grim-reaper headline, what's in here that's all that new? We used to hit our numbers on the dot each quarter, never missed, maybe beat 'em by a penny or two. We were Wall Street's darling. Okay, revenue growth is flat, but good Lord, the entire industry is suffering! I can't help but detect a little Schadenfreude in this piece. Mighty Homer has nodded."

"Homer?" said Colvin, confused.

"But all this tripe about how we may be facing our first quarterly loss in fifteen years," said Goddard, "that's pure invention -"

Camilletti shook his head. "No," he said quietly. "It's even worse than that."

"What are you talking about?" Goddard said. "I just came from our sales conference in Japan, where everything was hunky-dory!"

"Last night when I got the e-mail alert about this article," Camilletti said, "I fired off e-mails to the VP/Finance for Europe and for Asia/Pacific telling them I wanted to see all the revenue numbers as of this week, the QTD sales revenue numbers broken down by customer."

"And?" prompted Goddard.

"Covington in Brussels just got back to me an hour ago, Brody in Singapore in the middle of the night, and the numbers look like crap. The sell-in was strong, but the sell-through has been terrible. Between Asia/Pacific and EMEA, that's sixty percent of our revenue, and we're falling off a cliff. The fact is, Jock, we're going to miss this quarter, and miss big. It's a flat-out disaster."

Goddard glanced at me. "You're obviously hearing some privileged, non-public information, Adam, let's be clear about that, not a word -"

"Of course."

"We've got," Goddard began, faltered, then said, "for God's sake, we've got AURORA -"

"The revenue from AURORA is several quarters off," said Camilletti. "We've got to manage for now. For current operations. And let me tell you, when these numbers come out, the stock's going to take a huge hit," Camilletti went on. He spoke in a low voice. "Our revenues for the fourth quarter are going to be off by twenty-five percent. We're going to have to take a significant charge for excess inventory."

Camilletti paused, gave Goddard a significant look. "I'm estimating a pretax loss of close to half a billion dollars."

Goddard winced. "My God."

Camilletti went on, "I happen to know that CS First Boston is already about to downgrade us from 'overweight' to 'market weight.' That's from a 'buy' to a 'hold.' And that's before any of this comes out."

"Good Lord," Goddard said, groaning and shaking his head. "It's so absurd, given what we know we have in the pipeline."

"That's why we need to take another look at this," Camilletti said, jabbing his copy of the blue Bain document with his index finger.

Goddard's fingers drummed on the Bain study. His fingers, I noticed, were chubby, the back of his hands liver-spotted. "And quite the handsomely bound report it is, too," he said. "You never told me what it cost us."

"You don't want to know," Camilletti said.

"I don't, do I?" He grimaced, as if he'd made his point. "Paul, I swore I would never do this. I gave my word."

"Christ, Jock, if this is about your ego, your vanity -"

"This is about keeping my word. It's also about my credibility."

"Well, you should never have made such a promise. Never say never. In any case, you were talking in a different economy – prehistoric times. The Mesozoic Era, for God's sake. Rocketship Trion, growing at warp speed. We're one of the few high-tech companies that hasn't gone through layoffs yet."

"Adam," Goddard said, turning to me and looking over his glasses, "have you had a chance to plow through all this gobbledygook?"

I shook my head. "Just got it a few minutes ago. I've skimmed it."

"I want you to look closely at the projections for consumer electronics. Page eighty-something. You have some familiarity with that."

"Right now?" I asked.

"Right now. And tell me if they look realistic to you."

"Jock," said Jim Colvin, "it's just about impossible to get honest projections from any of the division heads. They're all protecting their head count, guarding their turf."

"That's why Adam's here," Goddard replied. "He doesn't have turf to protect."

I frantically thumbed through the Bain report, trying to look like I knew what I was doing.

"Paul," Goddard said, "we've gone through all this before. You're going to tell me we have to slash eight thousand jobs if we want to be lean and mean."

"No, Jock, if we want to remain solvent. And it's more like ten thousand jobs."

"Right. So tell me something. Nowhere in this darned treatise does it say that a company that downsizes or rightsizes or whatever the hell you want to call it is ever better off in the long run. All you hear about is the short term." Camilletti looked like he was about to respond, but Goddard kept going. "Oh, I know, everyone does it. It's a knee-jerk response. Business stinks? Get rid of some people. Throw the ballast overboard. But do layoffs ever really lead to a sustained increase in share price, or market share? Hell, Paul, you know as well as I do that as soon as the skies clear up again we just end up hiring most of 'em back. Is it really worth all the goddamned turmoil?"

"Jock," Jim Colvin said, "it's what they call the Eighty-Twenty Rule – twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work. We're just cutting the fat."

"The 'fat' is dedicated Trion employees," Goddard shot back. "To whom we issue those little culture badges that talk about loyalty and dedication. Well, it's a two-way street, isn't it? We expect loyalty from them, but they don't get it back from us? Far as I'm concerned, you go down this road, you lose more than head count. You lose a fundamental sense of trust. If our employees have upheld their half of the contract, how come we don't have to? It's a damned breach of trust."

"Jock," Colvin said, "the fact is, you've made a lot of Trion employees very rich in the last ten years."

Meanwhile I was racing through the charts of projected earnings, trying to compare them to the numbers I'd seen over the last couple of weeks.

"This is no time to be high-minded, Jock," Camilletti said. "We don't have that luxury."

"Oh, I'm not being high-minded," Goddard said, drumming his fingers some more on the tabletop. "I'm being brutally practical. I don't have a problem with getting rid of the slackers, the coasters, the rest-'n-vesters. Screw 'em. But layoffs on this scale just lead to increased absenteeism, sick leaves, people standing around the water cooler asking each other about the latest rumor. Paralysis. Put it in a way you can understand, Paul, that's called a decrease in productivity."

"Jock -" Colvin began.

"I'll give you an eighty-twenty rule," Goddard said. "If we do this, eighty percent of my remaining employees are going to be able to focus no more than about twenty percent of their mental abilities on their work. Adam, how do the forecasts look to you?"

"Mr. Goddard -"

"I fired the last guy who called me that."

I smiled. "Jock. Look, I'm not going to dance around here. I don't know most of the numbers, and I'm not going to shoot from the hip. Not on something this important. But I do know the Maestro numbers, and I can tell you these look overly optimistic, frankly. Until we start shipping to the Pentagon – assuming we land that deal – these numbers are way high."

"Meaning the situation could be even worse than our hundred-thousand-dollar consultants tell us."

"Yes, sir. At least, if the Maestro numbers are any indication."

He nodded.

Camilletti said, "Jock, let me put it to you in human terms. My father was a goddamned schoolteacher, okay? Sent six kids through college on a schoolteacher's salary, don't ask me how, but he did. Now he and my mom are living off his measly life's savings, most of which is tied up in Trion stock, because I told him this was a great company. This is not a lot of money, by our standards, but he's already lost twenty-six percent of his nest egg, and he's about to lose a whole hell of a lot more. Forget about Fidelity and TIAA-CREF. The vast majority of our shareholders are Tony Camillettis, and what are we supposed to tell them?"

I had the distinct feeling that Camilletti was making this up, that in reality his investment-banker father lived in a gated community in Boca and played a lot of golf, but Goddard's eyes seemed to glisten.

"Adam," Goddard said, "you see my point, don't you?"

For a moment I felt like a deer frozen in the headlights. It was obvious what Goddard wanted to hear from me. But after a few seconds I shook my head. "To me," I said slowly, "it looks like if you don't do it now, you'll probably have to cut even more jobs a year from now. So I have to say I'm with Mr. – with Paul."

Camilletti reached out a hand and patted me on the shoulder. I recoiled a little. I didn't want it to look like I was choosing sides – against my boss. Not a good way to start off the new job.

"What sort of terms are you proposing?" Goddard said with a sigh.

Camilletti smiled. "Four weeks of severance pay."

"No matter how long they've been with us? No. Two weeks of severance pay for every year they've been with us, plus an additional two weeks for every year beyond ten years."

"That's insane, Jock! In some cases, we'll be paying out a year's severance pay, maybe more."

"That's not severance," muttered Jim Colvin, "that's welfare."

Goddard shrugged. "Either we lay off on those terms, or we don't lay off at all." He gave me a mournful look. "Adam, if you ever go out to dinner with Paul, don't let him choose the wine." Then he turned back to his CFO. "You want the layoffs effective June 1, is that right?"

Camilletti nodded warily.

"Somewhere in the back of my mind," Goddard said, "I have this vague recollection that we signed a one-year severance contract with the CableSign division we acquired last year that expires on May thirty-first. Day before."

Camilletti shrugged.

"Well, Paul, that's almost a thousand workers who'd get a month's salary plus a month's pay for each year served – if we lay them off one day earlier. A decent severance package. That one day'll make a huge difference to those folks. Now they'll get a lousy two weeks."

"June first is the beginning of the quarter -"

"I won't do that. Sorry. Make it May thirtieth. And as for those employees whose stock options are underwater, we'll give 'em twelve months to exercise them. And I'm taking a voluntary pay cut myself – to a dollar. How about you, Paul?"

Camilletti smiled nervously. "You get a lot more stock options than I do."

"We're doing this once," Goddard said. "Doing it once and doing it right. I'm not slicing twice."

"Understood," Camilletti said.

"All right," Goddard said with a sigh. "As I'm always telling you, sometimes you just gotta get in the car, get with the program. But first I want to run this by the entire management team, conference in as many of them as we can get together. I also want to get on the horn to our investment bankers. If it flies, as I fear it will, I'll tape a Webcast announcement to the company," Goddard said, "and we'll release it tomorrow, after the close of trading. And make the public announcement at the same time. I don't want a word of this leaking out before then – it's demoralizing."

"If you'd prefer, I'll make the announcement," Camilletti said. "That way you keep your hands clean."

Goddard glared at Camilletti. "I'm not hanging this on you. I refuse. This is my decision – I get the credit, the glory, the magazine covers, and I get the blame too. It's only right."

"I only say it because you've made so many pronouncements in the past. You'll get skewered -"

Goddard shrugged, but he looked miserable. "Now I suppose they're all going to be calling me Chainsaw Goddard or something."

"I think 'Neutron Jock' has a better ring to it," I said, and for the first time, Goddard actually smiled.

45

I left Goddard's office feeling both relieved and weighted down.

I'd survived my first meeting with the guy, didn't make too big a fool of myself. But I was also in possession of a serious company secret, real inside information that was going to change a lot of people's lives.

Here's the thing: I'd made up my mind that I wasn't going to pass this on to Wyatt and company. It wasn't part of my assignment, wasn't in my job description. It had nothing to do with the skunkworks. I wasn't required to tell my handlers. They didn't know I knew, anyway. Let them find out about the Trion layoffs when everyone else did.

Preoccupied, I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of A Wing to grab a late lunch in the dining room when I saw a familiar face coming at me. A tall, skinny young guy, late twenties, bad haircut, called out, "Hey, Adam!" as he got into the elevator.

Even in that fraction of a second before I could put a name to the face, my stomach clenched. My animal hindbrain had sensed the danger before my cerebrum figured it out.

I nodded, kept on walking. My face was burning.

His name was Kevin Griffin, an affable if goofy-looking guy, and a decent basketball player. I used to shoot hoops with him at Wyatt Telecommunications. He was in sales in the Enterprise Division, in routers. I remembered him as very sharp, very ambitious behind that laid-back demeanor. He always beat his numbers, and he used to joke with me, in a good-natured sort of way, about my casual attitude toward work.

In other words, he knew who I really was.

"Adam!" he persisted. "Adam Cassidy! Hey, what are you doing here?"

I couldn't exactly ignore him anymore, so I turned back. He had one hand on the elevator doors to keep them from closing.

"Oh, hey, Kevin," I said. "You work here now?"

"Yeah, in sales." He seemed thrilled, like this was a high-school reunion or something. He lowered his voice. "Didn't they kick you out of Wyatt because of that party?" He made a sort of sniggering sound, not nasty or anything, just kind of conspiratorial.

"Nah," I said, faltering for a second, trying to sound lighthearted and amused. "It was all a big misunderstanding."

"Yeah," he said dubiously. "Where're you working here?"

"Same old same old," I said. "Hey, nice to see you, guy. Sorry, I've got to run."

He looked back at me curiously as the elevator doors closed.

This was not good.