Paranoia

46

I was screwed.

Kevin Griffin knew I wasn't on the Lucid project back at Wyatt, knew I wasn't any superstar either. He knew the real story. He was probably already back at his cubicle looking me up on the Trion intranet, amazed to see me listed as executive assistant to the president and CEO. How long would it be before he started talking, telling stories, asking around? Five minutes? Five seconds?

How the hell could this have happened, after all the careful planning, the laying of the groundwork by Wyatt's people? How could they have let Trion hire someone who could sabotage the whole scheme?

I looked around, dazed, at the cafeteria's deli counter. Suddenly I didn't have any appetite. I took a ham-and-cheese sandwich anyway, because I needed the protein, and a Diet Pepsi, and went back to my new office.

Jock Goddard was standing in the hall near my office talking to some other executive type. He caught my eye, held up an index finger to let me know he wanted to talk to me, so I stood there awkwardly at a distance while he finished his conversation.

After a couple of minutes Jock put a hand on the other man's shoulder, looking solemn, then led the way into my office.

"You," he said as he sat down in the visitor's chair. The only other place to sit was behind my desk, which felt all wrong – he was the goddamned CEO! – but I had no choice. I sat down, smiled at him hesitantly, didn't know what to expect.

"I'd say you passed with flying colors," Goddard said. "Congratulations."

"Really? I thought I blew it," I said. "I didn't exactly feel comfortable taking someone else's side."

"That's why I hired you. Oh, not to take sides against me. But to speak truth to power, as it were."

"It wasn't truth," I said. "It was just one guy's opinion." Maybe that was going a little too far.

Goddard rubbed his eyes with a stubby hand. "The easiest thing in the world for a CEO – and the most dangerous – is to be out of touch. No one ever really wants to give me the unvarnished truth. They want to spin me. They've all got their own agenda. Do you like history?"

I'd never thought of history as something you could "like." I shrugged. "Some."

"During the Second World War, Winston Churchill set up an office outside of the chain of command whose job was to give him the straight, blunt truth. I think he called it the Statistical Office or something. Anyway, the point was, no one liked to give him bad news, but he knew he had to hear it or he couldn't do his job."

I nodded.

"You start a company, have fortune smile upon you a few times, and you can get to be almost a cult figure among folks who don't know any better," Goddard continued. "But I don't need my, er, ring kissed. I need candor. Now more than ever. There's an axiom in this business that technology companies inevitably outgrow their founders. Happened with Rod Canion at Compaq, Al Shugart at Seagate. Apple Computer even kicked out Steve Jobs, remember, until he came riding back in on his white horse and saved the place. Point is, there are no old, bold founders. My board has always had deep wells of faith in me, but I suspect those wells are starting to run dry."

"Why do you say that, sir?"

"The 'sir' stuff has got to stop," Goddard snapped. "The Journal piece was a shot across the bow. It wouldn't surprise me if it came from disgruntled board members, some of whom think it's time for me to step down, retire to my country house, and tinker with my cars full-time."

"You don't want to do that, do you?"

He scowled. "I'll do whatever's best for Trion. This damned company is my whole life. Anyway, cars are just a hobby – you do a hobby full-time and it's no fun anymore." He handed me a thick manila folder. "There's an Adobe PDF copy of this in your e-mail. Our strategic plan for the next eighteen months – new products, upgrades, the whole kit and caboodle. I want you to give me your blunt, unvarnished take – a presentation, whatever you want to call it, an overview, a helicopter ride."

"When would you like it?"

"Soon as you possibly can. And if there's any particular project you think you'd like to get involved in, as my emissary, be my guest. You'll see there are all kinds of interesting things in the pipeline. Some of which are quite closely held. My God, there's one thing in the works, codenamed Project AURORA, which may reverse our fortunes entirely."

"AURORA?" I said, swallowing hard. "I think you mentioned that in the meeting, right?"

"I've given it to Paul to manage. Truly mind-blowing stuff. A few kinks in the prototype that still need to be ironed out, but it's just about ready to be unveiled."

"Sounds intriguing," I said, trying to sound casual. "I'd love to help out on that."

"Oh, you will, no doubt about that. But all in good time. I don't want to distract you just yet from some of the housecleaning issues, because once you get caught up in AURORA…well, I don't want to send you in too many directions at once, spread you too thin." He stood up, clasped his hands together. "Now I've got to head over to the studio to tape the Webcast, which is not something I'm looking forward to, let me tell you."

I smiled sympathetically.

"Anyway," Goddard said, "sorry to plunge you in that way, but I have a feeling you're going to do just fine."

47

I arrived at Wyatt's house at the same time as Meacham, who made some crack about my Porsche. We were shown in to Wyatt's elaborate gym, in the basement level but, because of the landscaping, it wasn't below ground. Wyatt was lifting weights at a reclining bench – a hundred fifty pounds. He wore only a skimpy pair of gym shorts, no shirt, and looked more bulked-up than ever. This guy was Quadzilla.

He finished his set before he said a word, then got up and toweled himself off.

"So you get fired yet?" he said.

"Not yet."

"No, Goddard's got things on his mind. Like the fact that his company's falling apart." He looked at Meacham, and the two men chortled. "What'd Saint Augustine have to say about that?"

The question wasn't unexpected, but it came so abruptly I wasn't quite prepared. "Not that much," I said.

"Bullshit," Wyatt said, coming closer to me and staring, trying to intimidate me with his physical presence. Hot damp air rose from his body, smelling unpleasantly like ammonia: the odor of weight lifters who ingest too much protein.

"Not that much that I was around for," I amended. "I mean, I think the article really spooked them – there was a flurry of activity. Crazier than usual."

"What do you know about 'usual'?" said Meacham. "It's your first day on the seventh floor."

"Just my perception," I said lamely.

"How much of the article's true?" said Wyatt.

"You mean, you didn't plant it?" I said.

Wyatt gave me a look. "Are they going to miss the quarter or not?"

"I have no idea," I lied. "It's not like I was in Goddard's office all day." I don't know why I was so stubborn about not revealing the disastrous quarter numbers, or the news about the impending layoffs. Maybe I felt like I'd been entrusted with a secret by Goddard, and it would be wrong to break that confidence. Christ, I was a goddamned mole, a spy – where did I get off being so high and mighty? Why was I suddenly drawing lines: this much I'll tell you, this much I won't? When the news about the layoffs came out tomorrow, Wyatt would go medieval on me for holding back. He wouldn't believe I hadn't heard. So I fudged a little. "But there's something going on," I said. "Something big. Some kind of announcement coming."

I handed Wyatt a folder containing a copy of the strategic plan Goddard had given me to review.

"What's this?" Wyatt said. He set it down on the weight bench, pulled a tank top over his head, and then started leafing through the document.

"Trion's strategic plan for the next eighteen months. Including detailed descriptions of all the new products in the pipeline."

"Including AURORA?"

I shook my head. "Goddard did mention it, though."

"How?"

"He just said there was this big project codenamed AURORA that would turn the company around. Said he'd given it to Camilletti to run."

"Huh. Camilletti's in charge of all acquisitions, and my sources say Project AURORA was put together from a collection of companies Trion's secretly bought over the last few years. Did Goddard say what it was?"

"No."

"You didn't ask?"

"Of course I asked. I told him I'd be interested in taking part in something so significant."

Wyatt, paging through the strategic plan, was silent. His eyes were scanning the pages rapidly, excitedly.

Meanwhile, I handed Meacham a scrap of paper. "Jock's personal cell number."

"Jock?" said Meacham in disgust.

"Everyone calls him that. It doesn't mean we're asshole buddies. Anyway, this should help you trace a lot of his most important calls."

Meacham took it without thanks.

"One more thing," I said to Meacham as Wyatt continued reading, fascinated. "There's a problem."

Meacham stared at me. "Don't fuck with us."

"There's a new hire at Trion, a kid named Kevin Griffin, in Sales. They hired him away from you – from Wyatt."

"So?"

"We were sort of friends."

"Friends?"

"Sort of. We played hoops together."

"He knew you at the company?"

"Yep."

"Shit," Meacham said. "That is a problem."

Wyatt looked up from the document. "Nuke him," he said.

Meacham nodded.

"What does that mean?" I said.

"It means we'll take care of him," Meacham said.

"This is valuable information," Wyatt said at last. "Very, very useful. What does he want you to do with it?"

"He wants my overall take on the product portfolio. What's promising, what isn't, what might run into trouble. Whatever."

"That's not very specific."

"He told me he wants a helicopter ride over the terrain."

"Piloted by Adam Cassidy, marketing genius," Wyatt said, amused. "Well, get out a notepad and a pen and start taking notes. I'm going to make you a star."

48

I was up most of the night: unfortunately, I was starting to get used to this.

The odious Nick Wyatt had spent more than an hour giving me his whole take on the Trion product line, including all sorts of inside information, stuff very few other people would know. It was like getting Rommel's take on Montgomery. Obviously he knew a hell of a lot about the market, since he was one of Trion's principal competitors, and he had all sorts of valuable information, which he was willing to give up for the sole purpose of making Goddard impressed with me. His short-term strategic loss would be his long-term strategic gain.

I raced back to the Harbor Suites by midnight and got to work on PowerPoint, putting the slides together for my presentation to Goddard. To be honest, I was pretty amped up about it. I knew I couldn't coast; I had to keep performing at peak. As long as I had the benefit of inside information from Wyatt, I'd impress Goddard, but what would happen when I didn't? What if he asked my opinion on something, and I revealed my true, ignorant self? Then what?

When I couldn't work on the presentation anymore, I took a break and checked my personal e-mail on Yahoo and Hotmail and Hushmail. The usual junk-mail spam – "Viagra Online BUY IT HERE VIAGRA NO PRESCRIPTION" and "BEST XXX SITE!" and "Mortgage Approval!" Nothing more from "Arthur." Then I signed on to the Trion Web site.

One e-mail leaped out at me: It was from KGriffin@trionsystems.com. I clicked on it.

SUBJ: You

FROM: KGriffin

TO: ACassidy

Dude! Great seeing you! Nice to see you looking so slick & doing so well – way to go! Very impressed by your career here. Is it something in the water? Give ME some!

I'm getting to know people around Trion & would love to take you to lunch or whatever. Let me know!

Kev

I didn't reply – I had to figure out how to handle it. The guy had obviously looked me up, saw my new title, couldn't figure it out. Whether he wanted to get together out of curiosity, or to brownnose, this was big trouble. Meacham and Wyatt had said they'd "nuke" him, whatever that meant, but until they did whatever they were going to do, I'd have to be extra careful. Kevin Griffin was a loaded gun lying around, waiting to go off. I didn't want to go near it.

Then I signed off, and signed back on using Nora's user ID and password. It was two in the morning, and I figured she had to be offline. It would be a good time to try to get into her archived e-mail, go through it all, download anything that had to do with AURORA, if there was anything.

All I got was INVALID PASSWORD, PLEASE RE-ENTER.

I re-entered her password, this time more carefully, and got INVALID PASSWORD again. This time I was certain I hadn't made a mistake.

Her password had been changed.

Why?

When I finally crashed for the night, my mind was racing, running through all the possibilities as to why Nora had changed her password. Maybe the security guard, Luther, had come by one night when Nora happened to be staying a little later than usual, and he was expecting to see me, engage in a conversation about Mustangs or whatever, but he saw Nora instead. He might wonder what she was doing there in that office, might even – it wasn't totally unlikely – confront her. And then he'd give her a description and she'd figure it out; it wouldn't take her long at all.

But if that's what had happened, she wouldn't just change her password, would she? She'd do more than that. She'd want to know why I was in her office, when she hadn't given me permission to be there. Where that could lead, I didn't want to think about…

Or maybe it was all innocent. Maybe she'd just changed her password routinely, the way every Trion employee was supposed to do every sixty days.

Probably that's all it was.

I didn't sleep well at all, and after a couple of hours of tossing and turning I decided to just get up, take a shower and get dressed, and head into work. My Goddard work was done; it was my Wyatt work, my espionage, that was way behind. If I got into work early enough, maybe I could try to find out something about AURORA.

I glanced in the mirror as I walked out. I looked – like shit.

"You up already?" Carlos the concierge said as my Porsche pulled up to the front curb. "Man, you can't keep hours like this, Mr. Cassidy. You get sick."

"Nah," I said. "Keeps me honest."

49

At a little after five in the morning the Trion garage was just about empty. It felt strange being there when it was all but deserted. The fluorescent lights buzzed and washed everything in a kind of greenish haze, and the place smelled of gasoline and motor oil and whatever else dripped from cars: brake fluid and coolant and probably spilled Mountain Dew. My footsteps echoed.

I took the back elevator to the seventh floor, which was also deserted, and walked down the dark executive corridor to my office, past Colvin's office, Camilletti's office, other offices of people I hadn't met yet, until I came to mine. All the offices were dark and closed; no one was in yet.

My office was all potential – not much more than a bare desk and chairs and a computer, a Trion-logo mousepad, a filing cabinet with nothing in it, a credenza with a couple of books. It looked like the office of an itinerant, a drifter, someone who could up and leave in the middle of the night. It was badly in need of some personality – framed photographs, some sporting-goods collectibles, something jokey and funny, something serious and inspirational. It needed an imprint. Maybe, once I caught up on my sleep, I'd do something about it.

I entered my password, logged in, checked my e-mail again. Sometime in the last few post-midnight hours a companywide e-mail had gone out to all Trion employees worldwide asking them to watch the company Web site later on today, at five o'clock Eastern Standard Time, for "an important announcement from CEO Augustine Goddard." That should set off the rumor mills. The e-mails would be flying. I wondered how many people at the top – a group that now included me, bizarrely enough – knew the truth. Not many, I bet.

Goddard had mentioned that AURORA, the mind-blowing project he wouldn't talk about, was Paul Camilletti's turf. I wondered if there was anything in Camilletti's official bio that might shed some light on AURORA, so I entered his name in the company directory.

His photo was there, stern and forbidding and yet more handsome than in person. A thumbnail biography: born in Geneseo, New York, educated in public schools in upstate New York – translation, probably didn't grow up with money – Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, meteoric rise in some consumer-electronics company that was once a big rival to Trion but was later acquired by Trion. Senior VP at Trion for less than a year before being named CFO. A man on the move. I clicked on the hyperlinks for his reporting chain, and a little tree chart popped up, showing all the divisions and units that were under him.

One of the units was the Disruptive Technologies Research Unit, which reported directly to him. Alana Jennings was marketing director.

Paul Camilletti directly oversaw the AURORA project. Suddenly, he was very, very important.

I walked by his office, my heart hammering away, and saw, of course, no sign of him. Not at quarter after five in the morning. I also noticed that the cleaning crew had already been by: there was a fresh liner in his admin's trash can, you could see the undisturbed vacuuming lines on the carpet, and the place still smelled like cleaning fluid.

And there was no one in the corridor, likely no one on the entire floor.

I was about to cross a line, do something risky at a whole new level.

I wasn't worried so much about a security guard coming by. I'd say I was Camilletti's new assistant – what the hell did they know?

But what if Camilletti's admin came in really early, to get a jump on the day? Or, more likely, what if Camilletti himself wanted to get an early start? Given the big announcement, he might well have to start placing calls, writing e-mails, making faxes to Trion's European offices, which were six or seven hours ahead. At five-thirty in the morning, it was noon in Europe. Sure, he could e-mail from home, but I couldn't put it past him to get in to his office unusually early today.

So to break into his office today, I realized, was insanely risky.

But for some reason I decided to do it anyway.

50

Yet the key to Camilletti's office was nowhere to be found.

I checked all the usual places – every drawer in his admin's desk, inside the plants and paper-clip holder, even the filing cabinets. Her desk was open to the hallway, totally exposed, and I began to feel nervous poking around there, where I so clearly didn't belong. I looked behind the phone. Under the keyboard, under her computer. Was it hidden on the underside of the desk drawers? No. Underneath the desk? Also no. There was a small waiting-room area next to her desk – really just a couch, coffee table, and a couple of chairs. I looked around there, but nothing. There was no key.

So maybe it wasn't exactly unreasonable that the company's chief financial officer might actually take a security precaution or two, make it hard for someone to break into his office. You had to admire that, right?

After a nerve-wracking ten minutes of looking everywhere, I decided it wasn't meant to be, when suddenly I remembered an odd little detail about my own new office. Like all the offices on the executive floor, it was equipped with a motion detector, which is not as high-security as it sounds. It's actually a common safety feature in the higher-end offices – a way to make sure that no one ever gets locked inside his own office. As long as there's motion inside an office, the doors won't lock. (More proof that the offices on the seventh floor really were a little more equal.)

If I moved quickly I could take advantage of this…

The door to Camilletti's office was solid mahogany, highly polished, heavy. There was no gap between the door and the deep pile carpet; I couldn't even slide a piece of paper under it. That would make things a bit more complicated – but not impossible.

I needed a chair to stand on, not his admin's chair, which rolled on casters and wouldn't be steady. I found a ladderback chair in the sitting area and brought it next to the glass wall of Camilletti's office. Then I went back to the sitting area. Fanned out on the coffee table were all of the usual magazines and newspapers – the Financial Times, Institutional Investor, CFO, Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0, Barron's…

Barron's. Yes. That would do. It was the size and shape and heft of a tabloid newspaper. I grabbed it, then – looking around once again to make sure I wasn't caught doing something I couldn't even begin to explain – I climbed up on the chair and pushed up one of the square acoustic ceiling panels.

I reached up into the empty space above the suspended ceiling, into that dark dusty place choked with wires and cables and stuff, felt for the next ceiling panel, the one directly over Camilletti's office, and lifted that one too, propped it up on the metal grid thing.

Taking the Barron's, I reached over, lowered it slowly, waving it around. I lowered it as far as I could reach, waved it around some more – but nothing happened. Maybe the motion detectors didn't reach high enough. Finally I stood up on tiptoe, crooked my elbow as sharply as I could, and managed to lower the newspaper another foot or so, waving it around wildly until I really began to strain some muscles.

And I heard a click.

A faint, unmistakable click.

Pulling the Barron's back through, I put the acoustic ceiling panel back, sat it snugly in place. Then I got down from the chair, moved it back where it belonged.

And tried Camilletti's doorknob.

The door came open.

In my workbag I'd brought a couple of tools, including a Mag-Lite flashlight. I immediately drew the Venetian blinds, closed the door, then switched on the powerful beam.

Camilletti's office was as devoid of personality as everyone else's – the generic collection of framed family photos, the plaques and awards, the same old lineup of business books they all pretended to read. Actually, this office was pretty disappointing. This wasn't a corner office, didn't have floor-to-ceiling windows like at Wyatt Telecomm. There was no view at all. I wondered whether Camilletti disliked having important guests visit such a humble office. This might be Goddard's style, but it sure didn't seem to be Camilletti's. Cheapskate or no, he seemed grandiose. I'd heard that there was a fancy visitors' reception suite on the penthouse of the executive building, A Wing, but no one I knew had ever seen it. Maybe that's where Camilletti received bigwigs.

His computer had been left on, but when I clicked the space bar on the modernistic black keyboard, and the monitor lit up, I could see the ENTER PASSWORD screen, the cursor blinking. Without his password, of course, I couldn't get into his computer files.

If he'd written down his password somewhere, I sure as hell couldn't find it – in drawers, under the keyboard, taped to the back of the big flat-panel monitor. Nowhere. Just for kicks I entered his user name (PCamilletti@trionsystems.com) and then the same password, PCamilletti.

Nope. He was more cautious than that, and after a few attempts I gave up.

I'd have to get his password the old-fashioned way: by stealth. I figured he probably wouldn't notice if I swapped out the cable between his keyboard and CPU with a Keyghost. So I did.

I admit I was even more nervous being inside Camilletti's office than I'd been inside Nora's. You'd think by now I'd be an old pro about breaking into offices, but I wasn't, and there was a vibe in Camilletti's office that scared the shit out of me. The guy himself was terrifying, and the consequences of being caught didn't bear thinking about. Plus I had to assume that the security precautions in the executive-level offices were more elaborate than in the rest of Trion. They had to be. Sure, I'd been trained to defeat most standard security measures. But there were always invisible detection systems that didn't set off any alarm bells or lights. That possibility scared me most of all.

I looked around, groping for inspiration. For some reason the office seemed somehow neater, more spacious than others I'd been in at Trion. Then I realized why: there were no filing cabinets in here. That's why it seemed so uncluttered. Well, so where were all his files?

When I finally figured out where they had to be, I felt like an idiot. Of course. They weren't in here, because there wasn't any room, and they weren't in his admin's area, because that was too open to the public, not secure enough.

They had to be in the back room. Like Goddard, every top-level Trion executive had a double office, a back conference room the same size as the front. That was the way Trion got around the equality-of-office-space problem. Hey, everyone's office is the same size; the top guys just get two of them.

The door to the conference room was unlocked. I shined the Mag-Lite around the room, saw a small copying machine, noticed that each wall was lined with mahogany file cabinets. In the middle was a round table, like Goddard's but smaller. Each drawer was meticulously labeled in what looked like an architect's hand. Most of them seemed to contain financial and accounting records, which probably had good stuff in them if only I knew where to look.

But when I saw the drawers labeled TRION CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT, I lost all interest in anything else. Corporate development is just a biz buzzword for mergers and acquisitions. Trion was known for gobbling up startups or small and midsize companies. More in the go-go years of the late nineteen-nineties than now, but they still acquired several companies a year. I guessed that the files were here because Camilletti oversaw acquisitions, focusing mainly on cost issues, how good an investment, all that.

And if Wyatt was right that Project AURORA was made up of a bunch of companies Trion had secretly acquired, then the solution to the mystery of AURORA had to be here.

These cabinets were unlocked, too, another stroke of luck. I guess the idea was that if you couldn't get into Camilletti's back office, you weren't going to even get near the file cabinets, so to lock them would be a pointless annoyance.

There were a bunch of files here, on companies Trion had either acquired outright or bought a chunk of or looked at closely and decided not to get involved. Some of the company names I recognized, but most I didn't. I dipped into a folder on each company to try to figure out what it did. This was pretty slow work, and I didn't even know what I was looking for, really. How the hell was I supposed to know if some small startup was part of AURORA, when I didn't even know what AURORA was? It seemed totally impossible.

But then my problems were solved.

One of the corporate development drawers was labeled PROJECT AURORA.

And there it was. Simple as that.

51

Breathing shallowly, I pulled the drawer open. I half expected the drawer to be empty, like the AURORA files in HR. But it wasn't. It was jam-packed with folders, all color-coded in some way I didn't understand, each stamped TRION CONFIDENTIAL. This was clearly the good stuff.

From what I could tell, these files were on several small startups – two in Silicon Valley, California, and another couple in Cambridge, Massachusetts – that had recently been acquired by Trion in conditions of strictest secrecy. "Stealth mode," the files said.

I knew this was something big, something important, and my pulse really started pounding. Each page was stamped SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL. Even in these top-secret files kept in the CFO's locked office, the language was obscure, veiled. There were sentences, phrases, like "Recommend acquire soonest" and "Must be kept below the radar."

So the secret of AURORA was here.

I didn't really get it, much as I pored over the files. One company seemed to have developed a way to combine electronic and optical components in one integrated circuit. I didn't know what this meant. A note said that the company had solved the problem of "the low yield of the wafers."

Another company had figured out a way to mass-produce photonic circuits. Okay, but what did that mean? A couple more were software firms, and I had no idea what they did.

One company called Delphos Inc. – this one actually seemed interesting – had come up with a process for refining and manufacturing some chemical compound called indium phosphide, made of "binary crystals from metallic and nonmetallic elements," whatever that meant. This stuff had "unique optical absorption and transmission properties," its disclosure statement said. Apparently it was used for building a certain kind of laser. From what I could tell, Delphos Inc. had effectively cornered the market on indium phosphide. I was sure that better minds than mine could figure out what massive quantities of indium phosphide were good for. I mean, how many lasers could anyone need?

But here was the interesting part: the Delphos file was stamped ACQUISITION PENDING. So Trion was in negotiations to buy the company. The file was thick with financials, which were just a blur before my eyes. There was a document of ten or twelve pages, a term sheet for the acquisition of Delphos by Trion. The bottom line seemed to be that Trion was offering five hundred million dollars to buy the company. It looked like the company's officers, a bunch of research scientists from Palo Alto, as well as a venture-capital firm based in London that owned most of the company, had agreed to the terms. Yeah, half a billion dollars sure can grease the skids. They were just dotting the i's. An announcement was tentatively scheduled for a week from now.

But how was I supposed to copy these files? It would take forever – hours of standing at a copy machine. By now it was six o'clock in the morning, and if Jock Goddard got in at seven-thirty, you'd better believe Paul Camilletti got in before that. So I really had to get the hell out of here. I didn't have time to make copies.

I couldn't think of any other way but to take them. Maybe move some files from somewhere else to fill up the empty space, and then…

And then raise all kinds of alarms the second Camilletti or his assistant tried to access the AURORA files.

No. Bad idea.

Instead, I took a key page or two from each of the eight company files, switched on the copying machine, and photocopied them. In less than five minutes I replaced the pages into the file folders and put the copies into my bag.

I was done, and it was time to get the hell out of here. Lifting a single slat in the front office window blinds, I peered out to make sure no one was coming.

By quarter after six in the morning I was back in my own office. For the rest of the day I was going to have to carry around these top-secret AURORA files, but that was better than leaving them in a desk drawer and risk having Jocelyn discover them. I know it sounds paranoid, but I had to operate on the assumption that she might go through my desk drawers. Maybe she was "my" administrative assistant, but her paycheck came from Trion Systems, not me.

Exactly at seven, Jocelyn arrived. She stuck her head in my office, eyebrows up, and said, "Good morning," with a surprised, meaningful lilt.

"Morning, Jocelyn."

"You're here early."

"Yeah," I grunted.

Then she squinted at me. "You – you been here a while?"

I blew out a lungful of air. "You don't want to know," I said.

52

My big presentation to Goddard kept getting postponed and postponed. It was supposed to be at eight-thirty, but ten minutes before, I got an InstaMail message from Flo telling me that Jock's E-staff meeting was running over, let's make it nine. Then another instant message from Flo: the meeting shows no sign of breaking up, let's push it back to nine-thirty.

I figured all the top managers were duking it out over who'd get the brunt of the cuts. They were probably all in favor of layoffs, in some general sense, but not in their own division. Trion was no different from any other corporation: the more people under you on the org chart, the more power you had. Nobody wanted to lose bodies.

I was starving, so I scarfed down a protein bar. I was exhausted also, but too wired to do anything but work some more on my PowerPoint presentation, make it even slicker. I put in an animated fade between slides. I stuck in that stick-figure drawing of the head-scratching guy with the question mark over his head, just for comic relief. I kept paring down the text: I'd read somewhere about the Rule of Seven – no more than seven words per line and seven lines or bullets per page. Or was it the Rule of Five? You heard that, too. I figured Jock might be a little short of patience and attention, given what he was going through, so I kept making it shorter, punchier.

The more I waited, the more nervous I got, and the more minimalist my PowerPoint slides became. But the special effects grew cooler and cooler. I'd figured out how to make the bar graphs shrink and grow before your eyes. Goddard would be impressed.

Finally, at eleven-thirty I got a message from Flo saying I could head over to the Executive Briefing Center now, since the meeting was just wrapping up.

People were leaving as I got there. Some I recognized – Jim Colvin, the COO; Tom Lundgren; Jim Sperling, the head of HR; a couple of powerful-looking women. None of them looked very happy. Goddard was surrounded by a gaggle of people who were all taller than him. It hadn't really sunk in before how small the guy was. He also looked terrible – red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes, the pouches under his eyes even bigger than normal. Camilletti stood next to him, and they seemed to be arguing. I heard only snatches.

"…Need to raise the metabolism of this place," Camilletti was saying.

"…All kinds of resistance, demoralization," Goddard muttered.

"The best way to deal with resistance is with a bloody ax," said Camilletti.

"I usually prefer plain old persuasion," Goddard said wearily. The others standing in a circle around them were watching the two go at it.

"It's like Al Capone said, you get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone," said Camilletti. He smiled.

"I suppose next you're going to tell me you've got to break eggs to make an omelet."

"You're always one step ahead of me," Camilletti said, patting Goddard on the back as he walked off.

Meanwhile I busied myself hooking up my laptop to the projector built into the conference table. I pushed the button that lowered the blinds electrically.

Now it was just Goddard and me in the darkened room. "What do we have here – a matinee?"

"Sorry, just a slide show," I said.

"I'm not so sure it's a good idea to turn off the lights. I'm liable to fall fast asleep," said Goddard. "I was up most of the night, agonizing over all this bushwa. I consider these layoffs a personal failure."

"They're not," I said, then cringed inwardly. Who the hell was I to try to reassure the CEO? "Anyway," I added quickly, "I'll keep it brief."

I started with a very cool animated graphic of the Trion Maestro, all the pieces flying in from offscreen and fitting perfectly together. This was followed by the head-scratching guy with the question mark floating above his head.

I said, "The only thing more dangerous than being in today's consumer-electronics market is not to be in the market at all." Now we were in a Formula One-type racecar moving at warp speed. "Because if you're not driving the car, you're liable to get run over." Then a slide came up that said TRION CONSUMER ELECTRONICS – THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY.

"Adam."

I turned around. "Sir?"

"What the hell is this?"

Sweat broke out at the back of my neck. "That was just intro," I said. Obviously too much of it. "Now we get down to business."

"Did you tell Flo you were planning to do, what the hell is this called, Power – PowerPoint?"

"No…"

He stood up, walked over to the light switch, and put the lights on. "She would have told you – I hate that crap."

My face burned. "I'm sorry, no one said anything."

"Good Lord, Adam, you're a smart, creative, original-thinking young man. You think I want you wasting your time trying to decide whether to go with Arial eighteen point or Times Roman twenty-four point, for God's sake? How about you just tell me what you think? I'm not a child. I don't need to be spoon-fed this darned cream of wheat."

"I'm sorry -" I began again.

"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you. Low blood sugar, maybe. It's lunchtime, and I'm starved."

"I can go down and get us some sandwiches."

"I have a better idea," Goddard said.

53

Goddard's car was a perfectly restored 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible, sort of a custardy ivory, beautifully streamlined, with a chrome grille that looked like a crocodile's mouth. It had whitewall tires and a magnificent red leather interior and it gleamed like something you'd see in a movie. He powered down the cloth top before we emerged from the garage into the sunshine.

"This thing really moves," I said, surprised, as we accelerated onto the highway.

"Three-twenty cubic inch, straight eight," Goddard said.

"Man, it's a beauty."

"I call it my Ship of Theseus."

"Huh," I said, chuckling like I knew what he was talking about.

"You should have seen it when I bought it – it was a real junk heap, my goodness. My wife thought I'd taken leave of my senses. I must have spent five years of weekends and evenings rebuilding this thing from the ground up – I mean, I replaced everything. Completely authentic, of course, but I don't think there's a single part left from the original car."

I smiled, leaned back. The car's leather was buttery-smooth and smelled pleasantly old. The sun was on my face, the wind rushing by. Here I was sitting in this beautiful old convertible with the chief executive officer of the company I was spying on – I couldn't decide if it felt great, like I'd reached the mountaintop, or creepy and sleazy and dishonest. Maybe both.

Goddard wasn't some deep-pockets collector like Wyatt, with his planes and boats and Bentleys. Or like Nora, with her Mustang, or any of the Goddard clones at Trion who bought collectible cars at auction. He was a genuine old-fashioned gearhead who really got engine grease on his fingers.

He said, "You ever read Plutarch's Lives?"

"I don't think I even finished To Kill a Mockingbird," I admitted.

"You don't know what the devil I'm talking about when I call this my Ship of Theseus, do you?"

"No, sir, I don't."

"Well, there's a famous riddle of identity the ancient Greeks loved to argue over. It first comes up in Plutarch. You may recognize the name Theseus, the great hero who slew the Minotaur in the Labyrinth."

"Sure." I remembered something about a labyrinth.

"The Athenians decided to preserve Theseus's ship as a monument. Over the years, of course, it began to decay, and they found themselves replacing each rotting timber with a new one, and then another, and another. Until every single plank on the ship had been replaced. And the question the Greeks asked – it was sort of a philosophers' conundrum – was: Is this really the Ship of Theseus anymore?"

"Or just an upgrade," I said.

But Goddard wasn't joking around. He seemed to be in a serious frame of mind. "I'll bet you know people who are just like that ship, don't you, Adam?" He glanced at me, then back at the road. "People who move up in life and start changing everything about themselves until you can't recognize the original anymore?"

My insides clutched. Jesus. We weren't talking Buicks anymore.

"You know, you go from wearing jeans and sneakers to wearing suits and fancy shoes. You become more refined, more socially adept, you've got more polished manners. You change the way you talk. You acquire new friends. You used to drink Budweiser, now you're sipping some first-growth Pauillac. You used to buy Big Macs at the drive-through, now you're ordering the…salt-crusted sea bass. The way you see things has changed, even the way you think." He was speaking with a terrifying intensity, staring at the highway, and when he turned to look at me from time to time his eyes flashed. "And at a certain point, Adam, you've got to ask yourself: are you the same person or not? Your costume has changed, your trappings have changed, you're driving a fancy car, you're living in a big fancy house, you go to fancy parties, you have fancy friends. But if you have integrity, you know deep down that you're the same ship you always were."

My stomach felt tied up in knots. He was talking about me; I felt this queasy sense of shame, embarrassment, as if I'd been caught doing something embarrassing. He saw right through me. Or did he? How much did he see? How much did he know?

"A man has to respect the person he's been. Your past – you can't be a captive to it, but you can't discard it, either. It's part of you."

I was trying to figure out how to respond when he announced breezily, "Well, here we are."

It was an old-fashioned, streamlined, stainless steel dining car from a passenger train, with a blue neon sign in script that said THE BLUE SPOON. Beneath that, red neon letters said AIR CONDITIONING. Another red neon sign said OPEN and BREAKFAST ALL DAY.

He parked the car and we got out.

"You've never been here before?"

"No, I haven't."

"Oh, you'll love it. It's the real thing. Not one of those phony retro-repro things." The door slammed with a satisfying thunk. "It hasn't changed since1952."

We sat at a booth that was upholstered in red Naugahyde. The table was gray fake-marble Formica with a stainless steel edge, and there was a tabletop jukebox. There was a long counter with swiveling stools bolted to the floor, cakes and pies in glass domes. No 1950s memorabilia, fortunately; no Sha-Na-Na playing on the jukeboxes. There was a cigarette vending machine, the kind where you pull on the handles to make the pack drop down. They served breakfast all day (Country Breakfast – two eggs, home fries, sausage or bacon or ham, and hotcakes, for $4.85), but Goddard ordered a sloppy joe on a bun from a waitress who knew him, called him Jock. I ordered a cheeseburger and fries and a Diet Coke.

The food was a little greasy, but decent. I'd had better, though I made all the right ecstatic sounds. Next to me on the Naugahyde seat was my workbag with the pilfered files in it from Paul Camilletti's office. Just their presence made me nervous, as if they were emanating gamma waves through the leather.

"So let's hear your thoughts," Goddard said through a mouthful of food. "Don't tell me you can't think without a computer and an overhead projector."

I smiled, took a gulp of Coke. "Well, to begin with, I think we're shipping way too few of the large flat-screen TVs," I said.

"Too few? In this economy?"

"A buddy of mine works for Sony, and he tells me they're having serious problems. Basically, NEC, which makes the plasma display panels for Sony, is having some kind of production glitch. We've got a sizeable lead on them. Six to eight months easy."

He put down his sloppy joe and gave me his complete attention. "You trust this buddy of yours?"

"Totally."

"I won't make a major production decision on rumor."

"Can't blame you," I said. "Though the news'll be public in a week or so. But we might want to secure a deal with another OEM before the price on those plasma display panels jumps. And it sure will."

His eyebrows shot up.

"Also," I continued, "Guru looks huge to me."

He shook his head, turned his attention back to his sloppy joe. "Ah, well, we're not the only ones coming out with a hot new communicator. Nokia's planning to wipe the floor with us."

"Forget Nokia," I said. "That's all smoke and mirrors. Their device is so tangled up in turf battles – we won't see anything new from them for eighteen months or more, if they're lucky."

"And you know this – from this same buddy of yours? Or a different buddy?" He looked skeptical.

"Competitive intelligence," I lied. Nick Wyatt, where else? But he'd given me cover: "I can show you the report, if you want."

"Not now. You should know that Guru's run into a production problem so serious the thing might not even ship."

"What kind of problem?"

He sighed. "Too complicated to go into right now. Though you might want to start going to some of the Guru team meetings, see if you can help."

"Sure." I thought about volunteering again for AURORA, but decided against it – too suspicious.

"Oh, and listen. Saturday's my annual barbecue at the lake house. It's not the whole company, obviously – just seventy-five, a hundred people tops. In the old days we used to have everyone out to the lake, but we can't do that anymore. So we have some of the old-timers, the top officers and their spouses. Think you can spare some time away from your competitive intelligence?"

"Love to." I tried to act blasй, but this was a big deal. Goddard's barbecue was really the inner circle. Given how few got invited, the Goddard lakehouse party was the subject of major one-upsmanship around the company, I'd heard: "Gosh, Fred, sorry, I can't make it Saturday, I've got a…sort of barbecue thing that day. You know."

"No salt-crusted sea bass or Pauillac, alas," Goddard said. "More like burgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad – nothing fancy. Bring your swim trunks. Now, on to more important matters. They have the best raisin pie here you've ever tasted. Their apple is great, too. It's all homemade. Though my favorite is the chocolate meringue pie." He caught the eye of the waitress, who'd been hovering nearby. "Debby," he said, "bring this young man a slice of the apple, and I'll have the usual."

He turned to me. "If you don't mind, don't tell your friends about this place. It'll be our little secret." He arched a brow. "You can keep a secret, can't you?"

54

I got back to Trion on a high, wired from my lunch with Goddard, and it wasn't the mediocre food. It wasn't even that my ideas flew so well. No, it was the plain fact that I'd had the big guy's undivided attention, maybe even admiration. Okay, maybe that was overstating it a little. He took me seriously. Nick Wyatt's contempt for me seemed bottomless. He made me feel like a squirrel. With Goddard I felt as if his decision to single me out as his executive assistant might actually have been justified, and it made me want to work my ass off for the guy. It was weird.

Camilletti was in his office, door closed, meeting with someone important-looking. I caught a glimpse of him through the window, leaning forward, intent. I wondered whether he'd type up notes on his meeting after his visitor left. Whatever he entered into his computer I'd soon have, passwords and all. Including anything on Project AURORA.

And then I felt my first real twinge of – of what? Of guilt, maybe. The legendary Jock Goddard, a truly decent human being, had just taken me out to his shitty little greasy-spoon diner and actually listened to my ideas (they weren't Wyatt's anymore, not in my mind), and here I was skulking around his executive suites and planting surveillance devices for the benefit of that sleazeball Nick Wyatt.

Something was seriously wrong with this picture.

Jocelyn looked up from whatever she was doing. "Good lunch?" she asked. No doubt the admin gossip network knew I'd just had lunch with the CEO.

I nodded. "Thanks. You?"

"Just a sandwich at my desk. Lots to do."

I was heading into my office when she said, "Oh, some guy stopped by to see you."

"He leave a name?"

"No. He said he was a friend of yours. Actually, he said he was a 'buddy' of yours. Blond hair, cute?"

"I think I know who you're talking about." What could Chad possibly want?

"He said you left something for him on your desk, but I wouldn't let him into your office – you never said anything about that. Hope that's okay. He seemed a little offended."

"That's great, Jocelyn. Thank you." Definitely Chad, but why was he trying to snoop around my office?

I logged into my computer, pulled up my e-mail. One item jumped out at me – a notice from Corporate Security sent to "Trion C-Level and Staff":

SECURITY ALERT

Late last week, following a fire in Trion's Department of Human Resources, a routine investigation uncovered the presence of an illegally planted surveillance device.

Such a security breach in a sensitive area is, of course, of great concern to all of us at Trion. Therefore, Security has initiated a prophylactic sweep of all sensitive areas of the corporation, including offices and workstations, for any signs of intrusion or placement of devices. You will be contacted soon. We appreciate your cooperation in this vital security effort.

Sweat immediately broke out on my forehead, under my arms.

They'd found the device I'd stupidly planted during my aborted break-in at HR.

Oh, Christ. Now Security would be searching offices and computers in all the "sensitive" areas of the company, which for sure included the seventh floor.

And how long before they found the thing I'd attached to Camilletti's computer?

In fact – what if there were surveillance cameras in the hallway outside Camilletti's office that had recorded my break-in?

But something didn't seem right. How could Security have found the key logger?

No "routine investigation" would have uncovered the tricked-up cable. Some fact was missing; some link in the chain hadn't been made public.

I stepped out of my office and said to Jocelyn, "Hey, you see that e-mail from Security?"

"Mmm?" She looked up from her computer.

"Are we going to have to start locking everything up? I mean, what's the real story here?"

She shook her head, not very interested.

"I figured you might know someone in Security. No?"

"Honey," she said, "I know someone in just about every department in this company."

"Hmph," I said, shrugged, and went to the rest room.

When I came back, Jocelyn was talking into her telephone headset. She caught my eye, smiled and nodded as if she wanted to tell me something. "I think it's time for Greg to go bye-bye," she said into the phone. "Sweetie, I've got to go. Nice catching up with you."

She looked at me. "Typical Security nonsense," she said with a knowing scowl. "I'm telling you, they'd claim credit for the sun and the rain if they could get away with it. It's like I thought – they're taking credit for a piece of dumb luck. One of the computers down in HR wasn't working right after the fire, so they called in Tech Support, and one of the techs saw something funny attached to the keyboard or something, some kind of extra wiring, I don't know. Believe me, the guys in Security aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer."

"So this 'security breach' is bogus?"

"Well, my girlfriend Caitlin says they really did find some kind of spy thingy, but it's not like those Sherlock Holmeses in Security would've ever found it if they didn't catch a lucky break."

I snorted amusement, went back to my office. My insides had just turned to ice. At least my suspicions were correct – Security got "lucky" – but the bottom line was, they'd discovered the Keyghost. I'd have to get back into Camilletti's office as soon as possible and retrieve the little Keyghost cable before it was discovered.

On my computer screen an instant message box had popped up while I was gone.

To: Adam Cassidy

From: ChadP

Yo Adam – I had a very interesting lunch with an old friend of yours from WyattTel. You might want to give me a call

– C

Now I felt like the walls were closing in. Trion Security was doing a sweep of the building – and then there was Chad.

Chad, whose tone was definitely threatening, as if he'd learned just what I didn't want him to learn. The "very interesting" part was bad, as was the "old friend" part, but worst of all was "You might want to give me a call," which seemed to say, I've got you now, asshole. He wasn't going to call; no, he wanted me to squirm, to sweat, to call him in a panic…and yet how could I not call him? Wouldn't I naturally call him out of simple curiosity about an "old friend"? I had to call.

But right now I really needed to work out. It wasn't as if I could exactly spare the time, but I needed a clear head to deal with the latest developments. On my way out of the office, Jocelyn said, "You wanted me to remind you about the Goddard Webcast at five o'clock."

"Oh, right. Thanks." I glanced at my watch. That was in twenty minutes. I didn't want to miss it, but I could watch it while I was working out, on the little monitors on the cardio equipment. Kill two birds and all that.

Then I remembered my workbag and its radioactive contents. It was just sitting on the floor of my office next to my desk, unlocked. Anyone could open it and see the documents I'd stolen from Camilletti's office. Now what? Lock them in one of my desk drawers? But Jocelyn had a key to my desk. In fact, there wasn't a place I could lock it where she couldn't get in if she wanted.

Returning quickly to my office, I sat down at my desk, retrieved the Camilletti documents from my briefcase, put them in a manila folder, and took them with me to the gym. I'd have to carry these damned files around with me until I got home, when I could secure-fax them, and then destroy them. I didn't tell Jocelyn where I was off to, and since she had access to my MeetingMaker, she knew I had no meeting scheduled.

But she was too polite to ask where I was going.

55

At a few minutes before five, the company gym still hadn't gotten crowded. I grabbed an elliptical trainer and plugged in the headphones. While I warmed up, I surfed the cable channels – MSNBC, CSPAN, CNN, CNBC – and caught up on the market close. Both the NASDAQ and the Dow were down: another lousy day. Right at five I switched to the Trion channel, which normally broadcast tedious stuff like presentations, Trion ads, whatever.

The Trion logo came up, then a freeze-frame of Goddard in the Trion studio – wearing a dark blue open-necked shirt, his normally unruly fringe of white hair neatly combed. The background was black with blue dots and looked sort of like Larry King's set on CNN except for the Trion logo prominently positioned over Goddard's right shoulder. I found myself actually getting kind of nervous, but why? This wasn't live, he'd taped it yesterday, and I knew exactly what he was going to say. But I wanted him to do it well. I wanted him to make a case for the layoffs that was persuasive and powerful, because I knew that a lot of people around the company would be pissed off.

I didn't have to worry. He was not only good, he was amazing. In the whole of the five-minute speech there wasn't a phony note. He opened simply: "Hello, I'm Augustine Goddard, president and chief executive officer of Trion Systems, and today I have the unpleasant job of delivering some difficult news." He talked about the industry, about Trion's recent problems. He said, "I'm not going to mince words. I'm not going to call these layoffs 'involuntary attrition' or 'voluntary termination.' " He said, "In our business, no one likes to admit when things aren't going well, when the leadership of a company has misjudged, goofed, made mistakes. Well, I'm here to tell you that we've goofed. We've made mistakes. As the CEO of the company, I've made mistakes." He said, "I consider the loss of valuable employees, members of our family, to be a sign of grievous failure." He said, "Layoffs are like a terrible flesh wound – they hurt the entire body." You wanted to give the guy a hug and tell him it's okay, it's not your fault, we forgive you. He said, "I want to assure you that I take full responsibility for this setback, and I will do everything in my power to put this company back on a strong footing." He said that sometimes he thought of the company as one big dogsled, but he was only the lead dog, not the guy on the sled with the whip. He said he'd been opposed to layoffs for years, as everyone knew, but, well, sometimes you have to make the hard decision, just get in the car. He pledged that his management team was going to take good care of every single person affected by the layoffs; he said that he believed the severance packages they were offering were the best in the industry – and the very least they could do to help out loyal employees. He ended by talking about how Trion was founded, how industry veterans had predicted its demise time and time again, yet it had emerged from every crisis stronger than ever. By the time he was done I had tears in my eyes and I'd forgotten all about moving my feet. I was standing there on the elliptical trainer watching the tiny screen like a zombie. I heard loud voices nearby, looked around and saw knots of people gathered, talking animatedly, looking stunned. Then I pulled off the headphones and went back to my workout as the place started filling up.

A few minutes later someone got on the machine next to mine, a woman in Lycra exercise togs, a great butt. She plugged her headphones into the monitor, fooled with it for a while, and then tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you have any volume on your set?" she asked. I recognized the voice even before I saw Alana's face. Her eyes widened. "What are you doing here?" she said, part shocked, part accusing.

"Oh, my God," I said. I was truly startled; I didn't need to fake it. "I work here."

"You do? So do I. This is so amazing."

"Wow."

"You didn't tell me you – well, then again, I didn't ask, did I?"

"This is incredible," I said. Now I was faking it, and maybe not enthusiastically enough. She'd caught me off guard, even though I knew this might happen, and ironically I was too rattled to sound plausibly surprised.

"What a coincidence," she said. "Unbelievable."

56

"How long – how long have you worked here?" she said, getting down off the machine. I couldn't quite read her expression. She seemed sort of dryly amused.

"I just started. Like a couple of weeks ago. How about you?"

"Years – five years. Where do you work?"

I didn't think my stomach could sink any lower, but it did. "Uh, I was hired by Consumer Products Division – new products marketing?"

"You're kidding." She stared in amazement.

"Don't tell me you're in the same division as me or something. That I'd know – I'd have seen you."

"I used to be."

"Used to -? Where are you now?"

"I do marketing for something called Disruptive Technologies," she said reluctantly.

"Really? Cool. What's that?"

"It's boring," she said, but she didn't sound convincing. "Complicated, sort of speculative stuff."

"Hmm." I didn't want to seem too interested. "You catch Goddard's speech?"

She nodded. "Pretty heavy. I had no idea we were in such bad shape. I mean, layoffs – you sort of figure layoffs are for everyone else, not for Trion."

"How do you think he did?" I wanted to prepare her for the inevitable moment when she looked me up on the intranet and discovered what I really did now. At least later I'd be able to say I wasn't really holding back; I was sort of polling on my boss's behalf – as if I had anything to do with Goddard's speech.

"I was shocked, of course. But it made sense, the way he presented it. Of course, that's easy for me to say, since I probably have some job security. You, on the other hand, as a recent hire -"

"I should be okay, but who knows." I really wanted to get off the subject of what exactly I did. "He was pretty blunt."

"That's his way. The guy's great."

"He's a natural." I paused. "Hey, I'm sorry about the way our date ended."

"Sorry? Nothing to be sorry about." Her voice softened. "How is he, your dad?" I'd left her a voice message in the morning just to say that Dad had made it.

"Hanging in there. In the hospital he has a fresh cast of characters to bully and intimidate, so he has a whole new reason for living."

She smiled politely, not wanting to laugh at the expense of a dying man.

"But if you're up for it, I'd love to have another chance."

"I'd like that too." She got back on the machine and started moving her feet as she punched numbers into the console. "You still have my number?" Then she smiled, genuinely, and her face was transformed. She was beautiful. Really amazing. "What am I saying? You can look me up on the Trion Web site."

Even after seven o'clock Camilletti was still in his office. Obviously it was a busy time, but I wanted the guy to just go home so I could get into his office before Security did. I also wanted to get home and get some sleep, because I was crashing and burning.

I was trying to figure out how I could get Camilletti on my "buddy list" without his permission so I could know when he was online and when he'd signed off, when suddenly an instant-message box from Chad popped up on my computer screen.

ChadP: You never call, you never write.

Don't tell me you're too important now for your old friends?

I wrote: Sorry, Chad, it's been crazy.

There was a pause of about half a minute, then he came back:

You probably knew about these layoffs in advance, huh? Lucky for you you're immune.

I wasn't sure how to answer, so for a minute or two I didn't, and then the phone rang. Jocelyn had gone home, so the calls were routed right to me. The caller ID came up on the screen, but it was a name I didn't recognize. I picked it up. "Cassidy."

"I know that," came Chad's voice, heavy with sarcasm. "I just didn't know if you were at home or in your office. I should have figured an ambitious guy like you gets in early and stays late, just like all the self-help books tell you to do."

"How're you doing, Chad?"

"I'm filled with admiration, Adam. For you. More than ever, in fact."

"That's nice."

"Especially after my lunch with your old friend Kevin Griffin."

"Actually, I barely knew the guy."

"Not exactly what he said. You know, it's interesting – he was less than impressed with your track record at Wyatt. He said you were a big party-hearty dude."

"When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible," I said, doing my best George Bush the Younger.

"He also had no recollection of your being on the Lucid."

"He's in – what, in sales, isn't he?" I said, figuring that if I was going to imply that Kevin was out of the loop it was at least better to be subtle.

"He was. Today was his last day. In case you didn't hear."

"Didn't work out?" There was a little tremor in my voice, which I disguised by clearing my throat, then coughing.

"Three whole days at Trion. Then Security got a call from someone at Wyatt saying that poor Kevin had a nasty habit of cheating on his T &E expense sheets. They had the evidence and everything, faxed it right over. Thought Trion should know. Of course, Trion dropped him like a hot potato. He denied it up and down, but you know how these things work – it's not exactly a court of law, right?"

"Jesus," I said. "Unbelievable. I had no idea."

"No idea they were going to make this call?"

"No idea about Kevin. I mean, like I said, I hardly knew him at all, but he seemed nice enough. Man. Well, I guess you can't do that kind of stuff too often and hope to get away with it."

He laughed so loud I had to pull my ear away from the receiver. "Oh, that's good. You're really good, big guy." He laughed some more, a big hearty laugh, as if I were the best stand-up act he'd ever seen. "You are so right. You can't do that kind of stuff too often and hope to get away with it." Then he hung up.

Five minutes earlier I'd wanted to lean back in my chair and doze off, but now I couldn't, I was way too freaked out. My mouth was dry, so I went to the break room and got an Aquafina. I took the long way, past Camilletti's office. He was gone, his office was dark, but his admin was still there. When I came by half an hour later, both of them were gone.

It was a little after eight. I got into Camilletti's office quickly and easily this time, now that I had the technique down. No one seemed to be around. I pulled the blinds closed, retrieved the little Keyghost cable, and lifted one slat to look around. I didn't see anyone, although I suppose I really wasn't as careful as I should have been. I raised the blinds and then opened the door slowly, looking first right, then left.

Standing against the wall of Camilletti's reception area, his arms folded, was a stocky man in a Hawaiian shirt and horn-rimmed glasses.

Noah Mordden.

He had a peculiar smile on his face. "Cassidy," he said. "Our thirty-fourpin Phinneas Finn."

"Oh, hi, Noah," I said. Panic flooded my body, but I kept my expression blasй. I had no idea what he was talking about, except that I figured it was probably some kind of obscure literary dig. "What are you up to?"

"I could ask you the same thing."

"Come by to visit?"

"I must have gone to the wrong office. I went to the one that said 'Adam Cassidy' on it. Silly me."

"They've got me working for everyone here," I said. It was the best I could think of, and it sucked. Did I really think he'd believe I was supposed to be in Camilletti's office? At eight o'clock at night? Mordden was too smart, and too suspicious, for that.

"You have many masters," he said. "You must lose track of whom you really work for."

My smile was tight. Inside I was dying. He knew. He'd seen me in Nora's office, now in Camilletti's office, and he knew.

It was over. Mordden had found me out. So now what? Who would he tell? Once Camilletti learned I'd been in his office, he'd fire me in an instant, and Goddard wouldn't stand in his way.

"Noah," I said. I took a deep breath, but my mind stayed blank.

"I've been meaning to compliment you on your attire," he said. "You're looking particularly upwardly mobile these days."

"Thanks. I guess."

"The black knit shirt and the tweed jacket – very Goddard. You're looking more and more like our fearless leader. A faster, sleeker Beta version. With lots of new features that don't quite work yet." He smiled. "I notice you have a new Porsche."

"Yeah."

"It's hard to escape the car culture in this place, isn't it? But as you speed along the highway of life, Adam, you might pause and consider. When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Interesting news about the layoffs."

"Well, you're safe, though."

"Is that a question or a proposition?" Something about me seemed to amuse him. "Never mind. I have kryptonite."

"What does that mean?"

"Let's just say I wasn't named Distinguished Engineer simply because of my distinguished career."

"What kind of kryptonite are we talking about? Gold? Green? Red?"

"At last a subject you know something about. But if I showed it to you, Cassidy, it would lose its potency, wouldn't it?"

"Would it?"

"Just cover your trail and watch your back, Cassidy," he said, and he disappeared down the hall.