Paranoia

66

The next morning I checked my e-mail at home and found a message from "Arthur":

Boss very impressed by your presentation & wants to see more right away.

I stared at it for a minute, and I decided not to reply.

A little while later I showed up, unannounced, at my dad's apartment, with a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. I parked in a space right in front of his triple-decker. I knew Dad spent all his time staring out the window, when he wasn't watching TV. He didn't miss anything that was going on outside.

I'd just come from the car wash, and the Porsche was a gleaming hunk of obsidian, a thing of beauty. I was stoked. Dad hadn't seen it yet. His "loser" son, a loser no more, was arriving in style – in a chariot of 450 horsepower.

My father was stationed in his usual spot in front of the TV, watching some kind of low-rent investigative show about corporate scandals. Antwoine was sitting next to him in the less comfortable chair, reading one of those color supermarket tabloids that all look alike; I think it was the Star.

Dad glanced up, saw the donut carton I was waving at him, and he shook his head. "Nah," he said.

"I'm pretty sure there's a chocolate frosted in here. Your favorite."

"I can't eat that shit anymore. Mandingo here's got a gun to my head. Why don't you offer him one?"

Antwoine shook his head too. "No thanks, I'm trying to lose a few pounds. You're the devil."

"What is this, Jenny Craig headquarters?" I set down the box of donuts on the maple-veneer coffee table next to Antwoine. Dad still hadn't said anything about the car, but I figured he'd probably been too absorbed in his TV show. Plus his vision wasn't all that great.

"Soon as you leave this guy's going to start crackin' the whip, making me do laps around the room," Dad said.

"He doesn't stop, does he?" I said to Dad.

Dad's face was more amused than angry. "Whatever floats his boat," he said. "Though nothing seems to get him off like keeping me off my smokes."

The tension between the two of them seemed to have ebbed into some kind of a resigned stalemate. "Hey, you look a lot better, Dad," I lied.

"Bullshit," he said, his eyes riveted on the pseudo-investigative TV story. "You still working at that new place?"

"Yeah," I said. I smiled bashfully, figured it was time to tell him the big news. "In fact -"

"Let me tell you something," he said, finally turning his gaze away from the TV and giving me a rheumy stare. He pointed back at the TV without looking at it. "These S.O.B.s – these bastards – they'll cheat you out of every last fucking nickel if you let them."

"Who, the corporations?"

"The corporations, the CEOs, with their stock options and their big fat pensions and their sweetheart deals. They're all out for themselves, every last one of them, and don't you forget it."

I looked down at the carpet. "Well," I said quietly, "not all of them."

"Oh, don't kid yourself."

"Listen to your father," Antwoine said, not looking up from the Star. There almost seemed to be a little affection in his voice. "The man's a fount of wisdom."

"Actually, Dad, I happen to know a little something about CEOs. I just got a huge promotion – I was just made executive assistant to the CEO of Trion."

There was just silence. I thought he hadn't been listening. He was staring at the TV. I thought that might have sounded a little arrogant, so I softened it a bit: "It's really a big deal, Dad."

More silence.

I was about to repeat it when he said, "Executive assistant? What's that, like a secretary?"

"No, no. It's, like, high-level stuff. Brainstorming and everything."

"So what exactly do you do all day?"

The guy had emphysema, but he knew just how to take the wind out of me. "Never mind, Dad," I said. "I'm sorry I brought it up." I was, too. Why the hell did I care what he thought?

"No, really. I'm curious what you did to get that slick new set of wheels out there."

So he had noticed, after all. I smiled. "Pretty nice, huh?"

"How much that vehicle cost you?"

"Well, actually -"

"Per month, I'm talking." He took a long suck of oxygen.

"Nothing."

"Nothing," he repeated, as if he didn't get it.

"Nada. Trion covers the lease totally. It's a perk of my new job."

He breathed in again. "A perk."

"Same with my new apartment."

"You moved?"

"I thought I told you. Two thousand square feet in that new Harbor Suites building. And Trion pays for it."

Another intake of breath. "You proud?" he said.

I was stunned. I'd never heard him say that word before, I didn't think. "Yeah," I said, blushing.

"Proud of the fact that they own you now?"

I should have seen the razor blade in the apple. "Nobody owns me, Dad," I said curtly. "I believe it's called 'making it.' Look it up. You'll find it in the thesaurus next to 'life at the top,' 'executive suite,' and 'high net-worth individuals.' " I couldn't believe what was coming out of my mouth. And all this time I'd been railing about being a monkey on a stick. Now I was actually boasting about the bling bling. See what you made me do?

Antwoine put down his newspaper and excused himself, tactfully, pretending to do something in the kitchen.

Dad laughed harshly, turned to look at me. "So lemme get this straight." He sucked in some more oxygen. "You don't own the car or the apartment, that right? You call that a perk?" A breath. "I'll tell you what that means. Everything they give you they can take away, and they will, too. You drive a goddamn company car, you live in company housing, you wear a company uniform, and none of it's yours. Your whole life ain't yours."

I bit my lip. It wasn't going to do me any good to let loose. The old guy was dying, I told myself for the millionth time. He's on steroids. He's an unhappy, caustic guy. But it just came out: "You know, Dad, some fathers would actually be proud of their son's success, you know?"

He sucked in, his tiny eyes glittering. "Success, that what you call it, huh? See, Adam, you remind me of your mother more and more."

"Oh, yeah?" I told myself: keep it in, keep the anger in check, don't lose it, or else he's won.

"That's right. You look like her. Got the same social-type personality – everyone liked her, she fit in anywhere, she coulda married a richer guy, she coulda done a lot better. And don't think she didn't let me know it. All those parent nights at Bartholomew Browning, you could see her getting all friendly with those rich bastards, getting all dressed up, practically pushing her tits in their faces. Think I didn't notice?"

"Oh, that's good, Dad. That's real good. Too bad I'm not more like you, you know?"

He just looked at me.

"You know – bitter, nasty. Pissed off at the world. You want me to grow up to be just like you, that it?"

He puffed, his face growing redder.

I kept going. My heart was going a hundred beats a minute, my voice growing louder and louder, and I was almost shouting. "When I was broke and partying all the time you considered me a fuckup. Okay, so now I'm a success by just about anyone's definition, and you've got nothing but contempt. Maybe there's a reason you can't be proud of me no matter what I do, Dad."

He glared and puffed, said, "Oh yeah?"

"Look at you. Look at your life." There was like this runaway freight train inside me, unstoppable, out of control. "You're always saying the world's divided up into winners and losers. So let me ask you something, Dad. What are you, Dad? What are you?"

He sucked in oxygen, his eyes bloodshot and looking like they were going to pop out of his head. He seemed to be muttering to himself. I heard "Goddamn" and "fuck" and "shit."

"Yeah, Dad," I said, turning away from him. "I want to be just like you." I headed for the door in a slipstream of my own pent-up anger. The words were out and couldn't be unsaid, and I felt more miserable than ever. I left his apartment before I could wreak any more destruction. The last thing I saw, my parting image of the guy, was his big red face, puffing and muttering, his eyes glassy and staring in disbelief or fury or pain, I didn't know which.

67

"So you really work for Jock Goddard himself, huh?" Alana said. "God, I hope I didn't ever say anything negative to you about Goddard. Did I?"

We were riding the elevator up to my apartment. She'd stopped at her own place after work to change, and she looked great – black boat-neck top, black leggings, chunky black shoes. She also had on that same delicious floral scent she wore on our last date. Her black hair was long and glossy, and it contrasted nicely with her brilliant blue eyes.

"Yeah, you really trashed him, which I immediately reported."

She smiled, a glint of perfect teeth. "This elevator is about the same size as my apartment."

I knew that wasn't true, but I laughed anyway. "The elevator really is bigger than my last place," I said. When I'd mentioned that I'd just moved into the Harbor Suites she said she'd heard about the condos there and seemed intrigued, so I'd invited her to stop by to check it out. We could have dinner at the hotel restaurant downstairs, where I hadn't had a chance to eat.

"Boy, quite the view," she said as soon as she entered the apartment. An Alanis Morissette CD was playing softly. "This is fantastic." She looked around, saw the plastic wrap still on one of the couches and a chair, said archly, "So when do you move in?"

"As soon as I have a spare hour or two. Can I get you a drink?"

"Hmm. Sure, that would be nice."

"Cosmopolitan? I also do a terrific gin-and-tonic."

"Gin-and-tonic sounds perfect, thanks. So you've just started working for him, right?"

She'd looked me up, of course. I went over to the newly stocked liquor cabinet, in the alcove next to the kitchen, and reached for a bottle of Tanqueray Malacca gin.

"Just this week." She followed me into the kitchen. I grabbed a handful of limes from the almost-empty refrigerator and began cutting them in half.

"But you've been at Trion for like a month." She cocked her head to one side, trying to make sense of my sudden promotion. "Nice kitchen. Do you cook?"

"The appliances are just for show," I said. I began pressing the lime halves into the electric juicer. "Anyway, right, I was hired into new-products marketing, but then Goddard was sort of involved in a project I was working on, and I guess he liked my approach, my ideas, whatever."

"Talk about a lucky break," she said, raising her voice above the electric whine of the juicer.

I shrugged. "We'll see if it's lucky." I filled two French bistro – style tumblers with ice, a shot of gin, a good splash of cold tonic water from the refrigerator, and a healthy helping of lime juice. I handed her her drink.

"So Tom Lundgren must have hired you for Nora Sommers's team. Hey, this is delicious. All that lime makes a difference."

"Thank you. That's right, Tom Lundgren hired me," I said, pretending to be surprised she knew.

"Do you know you were hired to fill my position?"

"What do you mean?"

"The position that opened up when I was moved to AURORA."

"Is that right?" I looked amazed.

She nodded. "Unbelievable."

"Wow, small world. But what's 'Aurora'?"

"Oh, I figured you knew." She glanced at me over the rim of her glass, a look that seemed just a bit too casual.

I shook my head innocently. "No…?"

"I figured you probably looked me up too. I got assigned to marketing for the Disruptive Technologies group."

"That's called AURORA?"

"No, AURORA's the specific project I'm assigned to." She hesitated a second. "I guess I thought that working for Goddard you'd sort of have your fingers into everything."

A tactical slip on my part. I wanted her to think we could talk freely about whatever she did. "Theoretically I have access to everything. But I'm still figuring out where the copying machine is."

She nodded. "You like Goddard?"

What was I going to say, no? "He's an impressive guy."

"At his barbecue you two seemed to be pretty close. I saw he called you over to meet his buddies, and you were like carrying things for him and all that."

"Yeah, real close," I said, sarcastic. "I'm his gofer. I'm his muscle. You enjoy the barbecue?"

"It was a little strange, hanging with all the powers, but after a couple of beers it got easier. That was my first time there." Because she'd been assigned to his pet project, AURORA, I thought. But I wanted to be subtle about it, so I let it drop for the time being. "Let me call down to the restaurant and have them get our table ready."

"You know, I thought Trion wasn't really hiring from outside," she said, looking over the menu. "They must have really wanted you, to bend the rules like that."

"I think they thought they were stealing me away. I was nothing special." We'd switched from gin-and-tonics to Sancerre, which I'd ordered because I saw from her liquor bills that that was her favorite wine. She looked surprised and pleased when I'd asked for it. It was a reaction I was getting used to.

"I doubt that," she said. "What'd you do at Wyatt?"

I gave her the job-interview version I'd memorized, but that wasn't enough for her. She wanted details about the Lucid project. "I'm really not supposed to talk about what I did at Wyatt, if you don't mind," I said. I tried not to sound too priggish about it.

She looked embarrassed. "Oh, God, sure, I totally understand," she said.

The waiter appeared. "Are you ready to order?"

Alana said, "You go first," and studied the menu some more while I ordered the paella.

"I was thinking of getting that," she said. Okay, so she wasn't a vegetarian.

"We're allowed to get the same thing, you know," I said.

"I'll have the paella, too," she told the waiter. "But if there's any meat in it, like sausage, can you leave it out?"

"Of course," the waiter said, making a note.

"I love paella," she said. "I almost never have fish or seafood at home. This is a treat."

"Wanna stick with the Sancerre?" I said to her.

"Sure."

As the waiter turned to go, I suddenly remembered Alana was allergic to shrimp and said, "Wait a second, is there shrimp in the paella?"

"Uh, yes, there is," said the waiter.

"That could be a problem," I said.

Alana stared at me. "How did you know…?" she began, her eyes narrowing.

There was this long, long moment of excruciating tension while I wracked my brain. I couldn't believe I'd screwed up like this. I swallowed hard, and the blood drained from my face. Finally I said, "You mean, you're allergic to it, too?"

A pause. "I am. Sorry. How funny." The cloud of suspicion seemed to have lifted. We both switched to the seared scallops.

"Anyway," I said, "enough talking about me. I want to hear about AURORA."

"Well, it's supposed to be kept under wraps," she apologized.

I grinned at her.

"No, this isn't tit-for-tat, I swear," she protested. "Really!"

"Okay," I said skeptically. "But now that you've aroused my curiosity, are you really going to make me poke around and find out on my own?"

"It's not that interesting."

"I don't believe it. Can't you at least give me the thumbnail?"

She looked skyward, heaved a sigh. "Well, it's like this. You ever hear of the Haloid Company?"

"No," I said slowly.

"Of course not. No reason you should have heard of it. But the Haloid Company was this small photographic-paper company that, in the late nineteen-forties, bought the rights to this new technology that had been turned down by all the big companies – IBM, RCA, GE. The invention was something called xerography, okay? So in ten, fifteen years the Haloid Company became the Xerox Corporation, and it went from a small family-run company to a gigantic corporation. All because they took a chance on a technology that no one else was interested in."

"Okay."

"Or the way the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago, which made Motorola brand car radios, eventually got into semiconductors and cell phones. Or a small oil exploration company called Geophysical Service started branching out and getting into transistors and then the integrated circuit and became Texas Instruments. So you get my point. The history of technology is filled with examples of companies that transformed themselves by grabbing hold of the right technology at the right time, and leaving their competitors in the dust. That's what Jock Goddard is trying to do with AURORA. He thinks AURORA is going to change the world, and the face of American business, the way transistors or semiconductors or photocopying technology once did."

"Disruptive technology."

"Exactly."

"But the Wall Street Journal seems to think Jock's washed up."

"We both know better than that. He's just way ahead of the curve. Look at the history of the company. There were three or four points when everyone thought Trion was on the ropes, on the verge of bankruptcy, and then all of a sudden it surprised everyone and came back stronger than ever."

"You think this is one of those turning points, huh?"

"When AURORA's ready to announce, he'll announce it. And then let's see what the Wall Street Journal says. AURORA makes all these latest problems practically irrelevant."

"Amazing." I peered into my wineglass and said oh-so-casually, "So what's the technology?"

She smiled, shook her head. "I probably shouldn't have said even this much." Tilting her head to one side she said playfully, "Are you doing some sort of security check on me?"

68

I knew from the moment she said she wanted to eat at the restaurant at the Harbor Suites that we'd sleep together that night. I've had dates with women where an erotic charge came from "will she or won't she?" This was different, of course, but the charge was even stronger. It was there all along, that invisible line that we both knew we were going to cross, the line that separated us from friends and something more intimate; the question was when, and how, we were going to cross it, who'd make the first move, what crossing it would feel like. We came back up to my apartment after dinner, both a little unsteady from too much white wine and G & Ts. I had my arm around her narrow waist. I wanted to feel the soft skin on her tummy, underneath her breasts, on her upper buttocks. I wanted to see her most private areas. I wanted to witness the moment when the hard shell around Alana, the impossibly beautiful, sophisticated woman cracked; when she shuddered, gave way, when those clear blue eyes became lost in pleasure.

We sort of careened around the apartment, enjoying the views of the water, and I made us both martinis, which we definitely didn't need. She said, "I can't believe I have to go to Palo Alto tomorrow morning."

"What's up in Palo Alto?"

She shook her head. "Nothing interesting." She had her arm around my waist too, but she accidentally-on-purpose let her hand slip down to my butt, squeezing rhythmically, and she made a joke about whether I'd finished unpacking the bed.

The next minute I had my lips on hers, my groping fingertips gently stroking her tits, and she snaked a very warm hand down to my groin. Both of us were quickly aroused, and we stumbled over to the couch, the one that didn't have plastic wrap still on it. We kissed and ground our hips together. She moaned. She fished me greedily out of my pants. She was wearing a white silk teddy under her black shirt. Her breasts were ample, round, perfect.

She came loudly, with surprising abandon.

I knocked over my martini glass. We made our way down the long corridor to my bedroom and did it again, this time more slowly.

"Alana," I said when we were snuggling.

"Hmm?"

"Alana," I repeated. "That means 'beautiful' in Gaelic or something, right?"

"Celtic, I think." She was scratching my chest. I was stroking one of her breasts.

"Alana, I have to confess something."

She groaned. "You're married."

"No -"

She turned to me, a flash of annoyance in her eyes. "You're involved with someone."

"No, definitely not. I have to confess – I hate Ani DiFranco."

"But didn't you – you quoted her…" She looked puzzled.

"I had an old girlfriend who used to listen to her a lot, and now it's got bad associations."

"So why do you have one of her CDs out?"

She'd seen the damned thing next to the CD player. "I was trying to make myself like her."

"Why?"

"For you."

She thought for a moment, furrowed her dark brow. "You don't have to like everything I like. I don't like Porsches."

"You don't?" I turned to her, surprised.

"They're dicks on wheels."

"That's true."

"Maybe some guys need that, but you definitely don't."

"No one 'needs' a Porsche. I just thought it was cool."

"I'm surprised you didn't get a red one."

"Nah. Red's cop bait – cops see red Porsches and they switch on their radar."

"Did your dad have a Porsche? My dad had one." She rolled her eyes. "Ridiculous. Like, his male-menopause, midlife-crisis car."

"Actually, for most of my childhood we didn't even have a car."

"You didn't have a car?"

"We took public transportation."

"Oh." Now she looked uncomfortable. After a minute she said, "So all this must be pretty heady stuff." She waved her hand around to indicate the apartment and everything.

"Yeah."

"Hmm."

Another minute went by. "Can I visit you at work some time?" I said.

"You can't. Access to the fifth floor is pretty restricted. Anyway, I think it's better if people at work don't know, don't you agree?"

"Yeah, you're right."

I was surprised when she curled up next to me and drifted off to sleep: I thought she was going to take right off, go home, wake up in her own bed, but she seemed to want to spend the night.

The bedside clock said three thirty-five when I got up. She remained asleep, buzzing softly. I walked across the carpet and noiselessly closed the bedroom door behind me.

I signed on to my e-mail and saw the usual assortment of spam and junk, some work stuff that didn't look urgent, and one on Hushmail from "Arthur" whose subject line said, "re: consumer devices." Meacham sounded royally pissed off:

Boss extremely disappointed by your failure to reply. Wants additional presentation materials by 6 pm tomorrow or deal is endangered.

I hit "reply" and typed, "unable to locate additional materials, sorry" and signed it "Donnie." Then I read through it and deleted my message. Nope. I wasn't going to reply at all. That was simpler. I'd done enough for them.

I noticed that Alana's little square black handbag was still on the granite bar where she'd left it. She hadn't brought her computer or her workbag, since she'd stopped at home to change.

In her handbag were her badge, a lipstick, some breath mints, a key ring, and her Trion Maestro. The keys were probably for her apartment and car and maybe her home mailbox and such. The Maestro likely held phone numbers and addresses, but also specific datebook appointments. That could be very useful to Wyatt and Meacham.

But was I still working for them?

Maybe not.

What would happen if I just quit? I'd upheld my side of the bargain, got them just about everything they wanted on AURORA – well, most of it, anyway. Odds were they'd calculate that it wasn't worth hassling me further. It wasn't in their interests to blow my cover, not so long as I could potentially be useful to them. And they weren't going to feed the FBI an anonymous tip, because that would just lead the authorities back to them.

What could they do to me?

Then I realized: I'd already quit working for them. I'd made the decision that afternoon in the study at Jock Goddard's lake house. I wasn't going to keep betraying the guy. Meacham and Wyatt could go screw themselves.

It would have been really easy at that moment for me to slip Alana's handheld into the recharging cradle attached to my desktop computer and hot-link it. Sure, there was a risk of her getting up, since she was in a strange bed, finding me gone, and wandering around the apartment to see where I'd gone. In which case she might see me downloading the contents of her Maestro to my computer. Maybe she wouldn't notice. But she was smart and quick, and she was likely to figure out the truth.

And no matter how fast I thought, no matter how cleverly I handled it, she'd know what I was up to. And I'd be caught, and the relationship would be over, and all of a sudden that mattered to me. I was smitten with Alana, and after only a couple of dates and one night together. I was just beginning to discover her earthy, expansive, sort of wild side. I loved her loopy, unrestrained laugh, her boldness, her dry sense of humor. I didn't want to lose her because of something the loathsome Nick Wyatt was forcing me to do.

Already I'd handed over to Wyatt all kinds of valuable information on the AURORA project. I'd done my job. I was finished with those assholes.

And I couldn't stop seeing Jock Goddard hunched over in that dark corner of his study, his shoulders shaking. That moment of revelation. The trust he'd put in me. And I was going to violate that trust for Nick Fucking Wyatt?

No, I didn't think so. Not anymore.

So I put Alana's Maestro back into her pocketbook. I poured myself a glass of cold water from the drinking-water dispenser on the Sub Zero door, gulped it down, and climbed back into my warm bed with Alana. She muttered something in her sleep, and I snuggled right up next to her and, for the first time in weeks, actually felt good about myself.

69

Goddard was scurrying down the hall to the Executive Briefing Center, and I struggled to keep up with him without breaking into a run. Man, the old guy moved fast, like a tortoise on methamphetamine. "This darned meeting is going to be a circus," he muttered. "I called the Guru team here for a status update as soon as I heard they're going to slip their Christmas ship date. They know I'm royally pissed off, and they're going to be pirouetting like a troupe of Russian ballerinas doing the 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.' You're going to see a side of me here that's not so attractive."

I didn't say anything – what could I say? I'd seen his flashes of anger, and they didn't even compare to what I'd seen in the only other CEO I'd ever met. Next to Nick Wyatt he was Mister Rogers. And in fact I was still shaken, moved by that intimate little scene in his lake house study – I'd never really seen another human being lay himself so bare. Until that moment there'd been a part of me that was sort of baffled as to why Goddard had singled me out, why he'd been drawn to me. Now I got it, and it rocked my world. I didn't just want to impress the old man anymore, I wanted his approval, maybe something deeper.

Why, I agonized, did Goddard have to fuck it all up by being such a decent guy? It was unpleasant enough working for Nick Wyatt without this complication. Now I was working against the dad I never had, and it was messing with my head.

"Guru's prime is a very smart young woman named Audrey Bethune, a real comer," Goddard muttered. "But this disaster may derail her career. I really have no patience for screwups on this scale." As we approached the room, he slowed. "Now, if you have any thoughts, don't hesitate to speak. But be warned – this is a high-powered and very opinionated group, and they're not going to show you any deference just because I brung you to the dance."

The Guru team was assembled around the big conference table, waiting nervously. They looked up as we entered. Some of them smiled, said, "Hi, Jock," or "Hello, Mr. Goddard." They looked like scared rabbits. I remembered sitting around that table not so long ago. There were a few puzzled glances at me, some whispers. Goddard sat down at the head of the table. Next to him was a black woman in her late thirties, the same woman I'd seen talking to Tom Lundgren and his wife at the barbecue. He patted the table next to him to tell me to sit by his side. My cell phone had been vibrating in my pocket for the last ten minutes, so I furtively fished it out and glanced at the caller ID screen. A bunch of calls from a number I didn't recognize. I switched the phone off.

"Afternoon," Goddard said. "This is my assistant, Adam Cassidy." A number of polite smiles, and then I saw that one of the faces belonged to my old friend Nora Sommers. Shit, she was on Guru, too? She wore a black-and-white striped suit and she had her power makeup on. She caught my eye, beamed like I was some long-lost childhood playmate. I smiled back politely, savoring the moment.

Audrey Bethune, the program manager, was beautifully dressed in a navy suit with a white blouse and small gold stud earrings. She had dark skin and wore her hair in a perfectly coifed and shellacked bubble. I'd done some quick background research on her and knew that she came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a doctor, as was her grandfather, and she'd spent every summer at the family compound in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. She smiled at me, revealing a gap between her front teeth. She reached behind Jock's back to shake my hand. Her palm was dry and cool. I was impressed. Her career was on the line.

Guru – the project was code-named TSUNAMI – was a supercharged handheld digital assistant, really killer technology and Trion's only convergence device. It was a PDA, a communicator, a mobile phone. It had the power of a laptop in an eight-ounce package. It did e-mail, instant messages, spreadsheets, had a full HTML Internet browser and a great TFT active-matrix color screen.

Goddard cleared his throat. "So I understand we have a little challenge," he said.

"That's one way of putting it, Jock," Audrey said smoothly. "Yesterday we got the results of the in-house audit, which indicated that we've got a faulty component. The LCD is totally dead."

"Ah hah," Goddard said with what I knew was forced calm. "Bad LCD, is it?"

Audrey shook her head. "Apparently the LCD driver is defective."

"In every single one?" asked Goddard.

"That's right."

"A quarter of a million units have a bad LCD driver," Goddard said. "I see. The ship date is in – what is it, now? – three weeks. Hmm. Now, as I recall – and correct me if I'm wrong – your plan was to ship these before the end of the quarter, thus bolstering earnings for the third quarter and giving us all thirteen weeks of the Christmas quarter to rake in some badly needed revenue."

She nodded.

"Audrey, I believe we agreed that Guru is the division's big kahuna. And as we all know, Trion is experiencing some difficulties in the market. Which means that it's all the more crucial that Guru ship on schedule." I noticed that Goddard was speaking in an overly deliberate manner, and I knew he was trying to hold back his great annoyance.

The chief marketing officer, the slick-looking Rick Durant, put in mournfully, "This is a huge embarrassment. We've already launched a huge teaser campaign, placed ads all over the place. 'The digital assistant for the next generation.' " He rolled his eyes.

"Yeah," muttered Goddard. "And it sounds like it won't ship until the next generation." He turned to the lead engineer, Eddie Cabral, a round-faced, swarthy guy with a dated flattop. "Is it a problem with the mask?"

"I wish," Cabral replied. "No, the whole damned chip is going to have to be respun, sir."

"The contract manufacturer's in Malaysia?" said Goddard.

"We've always had good luck with them," said Cabral. "The tolerances and quality have always been pretty good. But this is a complicated ASIC. It's got to drive our own, proprietary Trion LCD screen, and the cookies just aren't coming out of the oven right -"

"What about replacing the LCD?" Goddard interrupted.

"No, sir," said Cabral. "Not without retooling the whole casing, which is another six months easy."

I suddenly sat up. The buzzwords jumped out at me. ASIC…proprietary Trion LCD…

"That's the nature of ASICs," Goddard said. "There are always some cookies that get burnt. What's the yield like, forty, fifty percent?"

Cabral looked miserable. "Zero. Some kind of assembly-line flaw."

Goddard tightened his mouth. He looked like he was about to lose it. "How long will it take to respin the ASIC?"

Cabral hesitated. "Three months. If we're lucky."

"If we're lucky," Goddard repeated. "Yep, if we're lucky." His voice was getting steadily louder. "Three months puts the ship date into December. That won't work at all, will it?"

"No, sir," said Cabral.

I tapped Goddard on the arm, but he ignored me. "Mexico can't manufacture this for us quicker?"

The head of manufacturing, a woman named Kathy Gornick, said, "Maybe a week or two faster, which won't help us at all. And then the quality will be substandard at best."

"This is a goddamned mess," Goddard said. I'd never really heard him curse before.

I picked up a product spec sheet, then tapped Goddard's arm again. "Will you please excuse me for a moment?" I said.

I rushed out of the room, stepped into the lounge area, flipped open my phone.

Noah Mordden wasn't at his desk, so I tried his cell phone, and he answered on the first ring: "What?"

"It's me, Adam."

"I answered the phone, didn't I?"

"You know that ugly doll you've got in your office? The one that says 'Eat my shorts, Goddard'?"

"Love Me Lucille. You can't have her. Buy your own."

"Doesn't it have an LCD screen on its stomach?"

"What are you up to, Cassidy?"

"Listen, I need to ask you about the LCD driver. The ASIC."

When I returned to the conference room a few minutes later, the head of engineering and the head of manufacturing were engaged in a heated debate about whether another LCD screen could be squeezed into the tiny Guru case. I sat down quietly and waited for a break in the argument. Finally I got my chance.

"Excuse me," I said, but no one paid any attention.

"You see," Eddie Cabral was saying, "this is exactly why we have to postpone the launch."

"Well, we can't afford to slip the launch of Guru," Goddard shot back.

I cleared my throat. "Excuse me for a second."

"Adam," said Goddard.

"I know this is going to sound crazy," I said, "but remember that robotic doll Love Me Lucille?"

"What are we doing," grumbled Rick Durant, "taking a swim in Lake Fuckup? Don't remind me. We shipped half a million of those hideous dolls and got 'em all back."

"Right," I said. "That's why we have three hundred thousand ASICs, custom-fabricated for the proprietary Trion LCD, sitting in a warehouse in Van Nuys."

A few chuckles, some outright guffaws. One of the engineers said to another, loud enough for everyone to hear, "Does he know about connectors?"

Someone else said, "That's hilarious."

Nora looked at me, wincing with fake sympathy, and shrugged.

Eddie Cabral said, "I wish it were that easy, uh, Adam. But ASICs aren't interchangeable. They've got to be pin-compatible."

I nodded. "Lucille's ASIC is an SOLC-68 pin array. Isn't that the same pin layout that's in the Guru?"

Goddard stared at me.

There was another beat of silence, and the rustling of papers.

"SOLC-68 pin," said one of the engineers. "Yeah, that should work."

Goddard looked around the room, then slapped the table. "All right, then," he said. "What are we waiting for?"

Nora beamed moistly at me and gave me the thumbs-up.

On the way back to my office I pulled out my cell phone again. Five messages, all from the same number, and one marked "Private." I dialed my voice mail and heard Meacham's unmistakable smarmy voice. "This is Arthur. I have not heard from you in over three days. This is not acceptable. E-mail me by noon today or face the consequences."

I felt a jolt. The fact that he'd actually called me, which was a security risk no matter how the call was routed, showed how serious he was.

He was right: I had been out of touch. But I had no plans to get back in touch. Sorry, buddy.

The next one was Antwoine, his voice high and strained. "Adam, you need to get over to the hospital," he said in his first message. The second, the third, the fourth, the fifth – they were all Antwoine. His tone was increasingly desperate. "Adam, where the hell are you? Come on, man. Get over here now."

I stopped by Goddard's office – he was still schmoozing with some of the Guru team – and said to Flo, "Can you tell Jock I've got an emergency? It's my dad."

70

I knew what it was even before I got there, of course, but I still drove like a lunatic. Every red light, every left-turning vehicle, every twenty-miles-an-hour-while-school-is-in-session sign – everything was conspiring to delay me, keep me from getting to the hospital to see Dad before he died.

I parked illegally because I couldn't take the time to cruise the hospital parking garage for a space, and I ran into the emergency room entrance, banging the doors open the way the EMTs did when they were pushing a gurney, and rushed up to the triage desk. The sullen attendant was on the phone, talking and laughing, obviously a personal call.

"Frank Cassidy?" I said.

She gave me a look and kept chattering.

"Francis Cassidy!" I shouted. "Where is he?"

Resentfully she put down the phone and glanced at her computer screen. "Room three."

I raced through the waiting area, pulled open the heavy double doors into the ward, and saw Antwoine sitting on a chair next to a green curtain. When he saw me he just looked blank, didn't say anything, and I could see that his eyes were bloodshot. Then he shook his head slowly as I approached and said, "I'm sorry, Adam."

I yanked the curtain open and there was my dad sitting up in the bed, his eyes open, and I thought, You see, you're wrong, Antwoine, he's still with us, the bastard, until it sank in that the skin of his face was the wrong color, with sort of a yellow waxy tinge to it, and his mouth was open, that was the horrible thing. For some reason that was what I fixated on; his mouth was open in a way it never is when you're alive, frozen in an agonized gasp, a last desperate breath, furious, almost a snarl.

"Oh, no," I moaned.

Antwoine was standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder. "They pronounced him ten minutes ago."

I touched Dad's face, his waxy cheek, and it was cool. Not cold, not warm. A few degrees cooler than it should be, a temperature you never feel in the living. The skin felt like modeling clay, inanimate.

My breath left me. I couldn't breathe; I felt like I was in a vacuum. The lights seemed to flicker. Suddenly I cried out, "Dad. No."

I stared at Dad through blurry tear-filled eyes, touched his forehead, his cheek, the coarse red skin of his nose with little black hairs coming out of the pores, and I leaned over and kissed his angry face. For years I'd kissed Dad's forehead, or the side of his face, and he'd barely respond, but I was always sure I could see a tiny glint of secret pleasure in his eyes. Now he really wasn't responding, of course, and it turned me numb.

"I wanted you to have a chance to say good-bye to him," Antwoine said. I could hear his voice, feel the rumble, but I couldn't turn around and look. "He went into that respirtary distress again and this time I didn't even waste time arguing with him, I just called the ambulance. He was really gasping bad. They said he had pneumonia, probably had it for a while. They kept arguing about whether to put the tube in him but they never had the chance. I kept calling and calling."

"I know," I said.

"There was some time…I wanted you to say good-bye to him."

"I know. It's okay." I swallowed. I didn't want to look at Antwoine, didn't want to see his face, because it sounded like he was crying, and I couldn't deal with that. And I didn't want him to see me crying, which I knew was stupid. I mean, if you don't cry when your father dies, something's wrong with you. "Did he…say anything?"

"He was mostly cursing."

"I mean, did he -"

"No," Antwoine said, really slowly. "He didn't ask after you. But you know, he wasn't really saying anything, he -"

"I know." I wanted him to stop now.

"He was mostly cursing the doctors, and me…"

"Yeah," I said, staring at Dad's face. "Not surprised." His forehead was all wrinkled, furrowed angrily, frozen that way. I reached up and touched the wrinkles, tried to smooth them out but I couldn't. "Dad," I said. "I'm sorry."

I don't know what I meant by that. What was I sorry for? It was long past time for him to die, and he was better off dead than living in a state of constant agony.

The curtain on the other side of the bed pulled back. A dark-skinned guy in scrubs with a stethoscope. I recognized him as Dr. Patel, from the last time.

"Adam," he said. "I'm so sorry." He looked genuinely sad.

I nodded.

"He developed full-blown pneumonia," Dr. Patel said. "It must have been underlying for a while, although in his last hospitalization his white count didn't show anything abnormal."

"Sure," I said.

"It was too much for him, in his condition. Finally, he had an MI, before we could even decide whether to intubate him. His body couldn't tolerate the assault."

I nodded again. I didn't want the details; what was the point?

"It's really for the best. He could have been on a vent for months. You wouldn't have wanted that."

"I know. Thanks. I know you did everything you could."

"There's just – just him, is that right? He was your only surviving parent? You have no brothers or sisters?"

"Right."

"You two must have been very close."

Really? I thought. And you know this…how? Is that your professional medical opinion? But I just nodded.

"Adam, do you have any particular funeral home you'd like us to call?"

I tried to remember the name of the funeral home from when Mom died. After a few seconds it came to me.

"Let us know if there's anything we can do for you," Dr. Patel said.

I looked at Dad's body, at his curled fists, his furious expression, his staring beady eyes, his gaping mouth. Then I looked up at Dr. Patel and said, "Do you think you could close his eyes?"

71

The guys from the funeral home came within an hour and zipped his body up in a body bag and took it away on a stretcher. They were a couple of pleasant, thickset guys with short haircuts, and both of them said, "I'm sorry for your loss." I called the funeral-home director from my cell and numbly talked through what would happen next. He too said, "I'm sorry for your loss." He wanted to know if there would be any elderly relatives coming from out of town, when I wanted to schedule the funeral, whether my father worshipped at a particular church where I'd like to have the service. He asked if there was a family burial plot. I told him where my mom was buried, that I was pretty sure Dad had bought two plots, one for Mom and one for him. He said he'd check with the cemetery. He asked when I wanted to come in and make the final arrangements.

I sat down in the ER waiting area and called my office. Jocelyn had already heard there was some emergency with my father, and she said, "How's your dad?"

"He just passed," I said. That was the way my dad talked: people "passed," they didn't die.

"Oh," Jocelyn gasped. "Adam, I'm sorry."

I asked her to cancel my appointments for the next couple of days, then asked her to connect me with Goddard. Flo picked up and said, "Hey there. The boss is out of the office – he's about to fly to Tokyo tonight." In a hushed voice, she asked, "How's your father?"

"He just passed." I went on quickly, "Obviously I'm going to be out of it for a couple of days and I wanted you to give Jock my apologies in advance -"

"Of course," she said. "Of course. My condolences. I'm sure he'll check in before he gets on the plane, but I know he'll understand, don't worry about it."

Antwoine came into the waiting area, looking out of place, lost. "What do you want me to do now?" he asked gently.

"Nothing, Antwoine," I said.

He hesitated. "You want me to clear my stuff out?"

"No, come on. You take your time."

"It's just that this came on suddenlike, and I don't have any other place -"

"Stay in the apartment as long as you want," I said.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "You know, he did talk about you," he said.

"Oh, sure," I said. He was obviously feeling guilty about telling me that Dad hadn't asked for me at the end. "I know that."

A low, mellow chuckle. "Not always the most positive shit, but I think that's how he showed his love, you know?"

"I know."

"He was a tough old bastard, your father."

"Yeah."

"It took us some time to kind of work things out, you know."

"He was pretty nasty to you."

"That was just his way, you know. I didn't let it get to me."

"You took care of him," I said. "That meant a lot to him even though he wasn't able to say it."

"I know, I know. Toward the end we kind of had a relationship."

"He liked you."

"I don't know about that, but we had a relationship."

"No, I think he liked you. I know he did."

He paused. "He was a good man, you know."

I didn't know what to say in response to that. "You were really great with him, Antwoine," I finally said. "I know that meant a lot to him."

It's funny: after that first time I broke out crying at my dad's hospital bed, something in me shut down. I didn't cry again, not for a long while. I felt like an arm that's gone to sleep, gone all limp and prickly after having been lain on all night.

On the drive out to the funeral home I called Alana at work and got her voice mail, a message saying she was "out of the office" but would be checking her messages frequently. I remembered she was in Palo Alto. I called her cell, and she answered on the first ring.

"This is Alana." I loved her voice: it was velvety smooth with a hint of huskiness.

"It's Adam."

"Hey, jerk."

"What'd I do?"

"Aren't you supposed to call a girl up the morning after you sleep with her, to make her feel less guilty about putting out?"

"God, Alana, I -"

"Some guys even send flowers," she went on, businesslike. "Not that this has ever happened to me personally, but I've read about it in Cosmo."

She was right, of course: I hadn't called her, which was truly rude. But what was I supposed to tell her, the truth? That I hadn't called her because I was frozen like some insect in amber and I didn't know what to do? That I couldn't believe how lucky I was to find a woman like her – she was an itch I couldn't stop scratching – and yet I felt like a complete and total evil fraud? Yeah, I thought, you've read in Cosmo about how men are users, baby, but you have no idea.

"How's Palo Alto?"

"Pretty, but you're not changing the subject so easily."

"Alana," I said, "listen. I wanted to tell you – I got some bad news. My dad just died."

"Oh, Adam. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh God. I wish I were there."

"Me, too."

"What can I do?"

"Don't worry about it, nothing."

"Do you know…when the funeral's going to be?"

"Couple of days."

"I'll be out here till Thursday. Adam, I'm so sorry."

I called Seth next, who said pretty much the same thing: "Oh, man, buddy, I'm so sorry. What can I do?" People always say that, and it's nice, but you do begin to wonder, what is there to do, right? It wasn't like I wanted a casserole. I didn't know what I wanted.

"Nothing, really."

"Come on, I can get out of work at the law firm. No worries."

"No, it's okay, thanks, man."

"There going to be a funeral and everything?"

"Yeah, probably. I'll let you know."

"Take care, buddy, huh?"

Then the cell phone rang in my hand. Meacham didn't say hello or anything. His first words were, "Where the fuck have you been?"

"My father just died. About an hour ago."

A long silence. "Jesus," he said. Then he added stiffly, as if it were an afterthought: "Sorry to hear it."

"Yep," I said.

"Timing really sucks."

"Yep," I said, my anger flaring up. "I told him to wait." Then I pressed END.

72

The funeral-home director was the same guy who'd handled Mom's arrangements. He was a warm, amiable guy with hair a few shades too black and a large bristling mustache. His name was Frank – "just like your dad," he pointed out. He showed me into the funeral parlor, which looked like an underfurnished suburban house with oriental rugs and dark furniture, a couple of rooms off a central hallway. His office was small and dark, with a few old-fashioned steel file cabinets and some framed copies of paintings of boats and landscapes. There was nothing phony about the guy; he really seemed to connect with me. Frank talked a little about when his father died, six years ago, and how hard it was. He offered me a box of Kleenex, but I didn't need it. He took notes for the newspaper announcement – I wondered silently who would read it, who would really care – and we came up with the wording. I struggled to remember the name of Dad's older sister, who was dead, even the names of his parents, who I think I'd seen less than ten times in my life and just called "Grandma" and "Grandpa." Dad had had a strained relationship with his parents, so we barely saw them at all. I was a little fuzzy on Dad's long and complicated employment history, and I may have left out a school where he'd worked, but I got the important ones.

Frank asked about Dad's military record, and I only remembered that he'd done basic training in some army base and never went off anywhere to fight and he hated the army with a passion. He asked whether I wanted to have a flag on his coffin, which Dad was entitled to, as a veteran, but I said no, Dad wouldn't have wanted a flag on top of his coffin. He would have railed against it, would have said something like, "The fuck you think I am, John F. Kennedy lying in fucking state?" He asked whether I wanted to have the army play "Taps," which Dad was also entitled to, and he explained that these days there wasn't actually a bugler, they usually played a tape recording at the graveside. I said no, Dad wouldn't have wanted "Taps" either. I told him I wanted the funeral and everything as soon as he could possibly arrange it. I wanted to get it all over with.

Frank called the Catholic church where we had Mom's funeral and scheduled a funeral mass for two days off. There were no out-of-town relatives, as far as I knew; the only survivors were a couple of cousins and an aunt he never saw. There were a couple of guys who I guess could be considered friends of his, even though they hadn't talked for years; they all lived locally. He asked whether Dad had a suit I wanted him to be buried in. I said I thought he might, I'd check.

Then Frank took me downstairs to a suite of rooms where they had caskets on display. They all looked big and garish, just the sort of thing Dad would have made fun of. I remember him ranting once, around the time of Mom's death, about the funeral industry and how it was all a monumental rip-off, how they charged you ridiculously inflated prices for coffins that just got buried anyway, so what was the point, and how he'd heard they usually replaced the expensive coffins with cheap pine ones when you weren't looking. I knew that wasn't true – I'd seen Mom's coffin lowered into the ground with the dirt shoveled over it, and I didn't think any kind of scam was possible unless they came in the middle of the night and dug it up, which I doubted.

Because of this suspicion – that was his excuse, anyway – Dad had picked out one of the cheapest caskets for Mom, cheap pine stained to look like mahogany. "Believe me," he'd said to me in the funeral home when Mom died, when I was a slobbering mess, "your mother didn't believe in wasting money."

But I wasn't going to do that to him, even though he was dead and wouldn't know any different. I drove a Porsche, I lived in a huge apartment in Harbor Suites, and I could afford to buy a nice coffin for my father. With the money I was making from the job he kept ranting about. I picked out an elegant-looking mahogany one that had something called a "memory safe" in it, a drawer where you were supposed to put stuff that belonged to the deceased.

A couple of hours later I drove home and crawled into my never-made bed and fell asleep. Later in the day I drove over to Dad's apartment and went through his closet, which I could tell hadn't been opened in a long time, and found a cheap-looking blue suit, which I'd never seen him wear. There was a stripe of dust on each shoulder. I found a dress shirt, but couldn't find a tie – I don't think he ever wore a tie – so I decided to use one of my mine. I looked around the apartment for things I thought he'd want to be buried with. A pack of cigarettes, maybe.

I'd been afraid that going to the apartment would be hard, that I'd start crying again. But it just made me deeply sad to see what little the old guy had left behind – the faint cigarette stink, the wheelchair, the breathing tube, the Barcalounger. After an excruciating half hour of looking through his belongings I gave up and decided that I wouldn't put anything in the "memory safe." Leave it symbolically empty, why not.

When I got back home I picked out one of my least favorite ties, a blue-and-white rep tie that looked somber enough and I didn't mind losing. I didn't feel like driving back to the funeral home, so I brought it down to the concierge desk and asked to have it delivered.

The next day was the wake. I arrived at the funeral home about twenty minutes before it was to begin. The place was air-conditioned to almost frigid, and it smelled like air freshener. Frank asked if I wanted to "pay my respects" to Dad in private, and I said sure. He gestured toward one of the rooms off the central hall. When I entered the room and saw the open coffin I felt an electric jolt. Dad was lying there in the cheap blue suit and my striped blue tie, his hands crossed on his chest. I felt a swelling in my throat, but it subsided quickly, and I wasn't moved to cry, which was strange. I just felt hollow.

He didn't look at all real, but they never, ever do. Frank, or whoever had done the work, hadn't done a bad job – hadn't put on too much rouge or whatever – but he still looked like one of Madame Tussaud's wax museum displays, if one of the better ones. The spirit leaves the body and there's nothing a mortician can do to bring it back. His face was a fake-looking "flesh tone." There seemed to be subtle brown lipstick on his lips. He looked a little less enraged than he had at the hospital, but they still hadn't been able to make him look peaceful. I guess there was only so much they could do to smooth the furrow from his brow. His skin was cold now, and a lot waxier than it had felt in the hospital. I hesitated a moment before kissing his cheek; it felt strange, unnatural, unclean.

I stood there looking at this fleshy shell, this discarded husk, this pod that had once contained the mysterious and fearsome soul of my father. And I started talking to him, as I figure almost every son talks to his dead father. "Well, Dad," I said, "you're finally out of here. If there really is an afterlife, I hope you're happier there than you were here."

I felt sorry for him then, which was something I guess I was never quite able to feel when he was alive. I remembered a couple of times when he actually seemed to be happy, when I was a lot younger and he'd carry me around on his shoulders. A time when one of his teams had won a championship. The time he was hired by Bartholomew Browning. A few moments like that. But he rarely smiled, unless he was laughing his bitter laugh. Maybe he'd needed antidepressants, maybe that was his problem, but I doubted it. "I didn't understand you so well, Dad," I said. "But I really did try."

Hardly anyone showed up in the three-hour span of time. There were some buddies of mine from high school, a couple with their wives, and two college friends. Dad's elderly Aunt Irene came for a while and said, "Your father was very lucky to have you." She had a faint Irish brogue and wore overpowering old-lady perfume. Seth came early and stayed late, kept me company. He told Dad stories in an attempt to make me laugh, famous anecdotes about Dad's coaching days, tales that had become legend among my friends and at Bartholomew Browning. There was the time he took a marking pen and drew a line down the middle of a kid's face mask, a big lunk named Pelly, then all the way down his uniform to the kid's shoes, and along the grass in a straight line across the field, even though the pen didn't make a mark on the grass, and he said, "You run this way, Pelly, you get it? This is the way you run."

There was the time when he called time out and he went up to a football player named Steve and grabbed his face mask and said, "Are you stupid, Steve?" Then, without waiting for Steve to reply, he yanked the mask up and down, making Steve's head nod like a doll's. "Yes, I am, Coach," he said in a squeaky imitation of Steve's voice. The rest of the team thought it was funny, and most of them laughed. "Yes, I am stupid."

There was the day when he called time out during a hockey game and started yelling at a kid named Resnick for playing too rough. He grabbed Resnick's hockey stick and said, "Mr. Resnick, if I ever see you spear" – and he jabbed the stick into Resnick's stomach, which instantly made Resnick throw up – "or butt-end" – and he slammed him again in the stomach with the stick – "I will destroy you." And Resnick vomited blood, and then had the dry heaves. Nobody laughed.

"Yeah," I said. "He was a funny guy, wasn't he?" By now I wanted him to stop the stories, and fortunately he did.

At the funeral the next morning, Seth sat on one side of me in the pew, Antwoine on the other. The priest, a distinguished, silver-haired fellow who looked like a TV minister, was named Father Joseph Iannucci. Before the mass he took me aside and asked me a few questions about Dad – his "faith," what he was like, what he did for a living, did he have any hobbies, that sort of thing. I was pretty much stumped.

There were maybe twenty people in the church, some of them regular parishioners who'd come for the mass and didn't know Dad. The others were friends of mine from high school and college, a couple of friends from the neighborhood, an old lady who lived next door. There was one of Dad's "friends," some guy who'd been in Kiwanis with Dad years ago before Dad quit in a rage over something minor. He didn't even know Dad had been sick. There were a couple of elderly cousins I vaguely recognized.

Seth and I were pallbearers along with some other guys from the church and the funeral home. There were a bunch of flowers at the front of the church – I had no idea how they got there, whether someone sent them or they were provided by the funeral home.

The mass was one of those incredibly long services that involve a lot of getting up and sitting down and kneeling, probably so you don't fall asleep. I felt depleted, fogged in, still sort of shell-shocked. Father Iannucci called Dad "Francis" and several times said his full name, "Francis Xavier," as if that indicated that Dad was a devout Catholic instead of a faithless guy whose only connection to the Lord was in taking His name in vain. He said, "We are sad at Francis's parting, we grieve his passing, but we believe that he has gone to God, that he is in a better place, that he is sharing now in Jesus' resurrection by living a new life." He said, "Francis's death is not the end. We can still be united with him." He asked, "Why did Francis have to suffer so much in his last months?" and answered something about Jesus' suffering and said that "Jesus was not conquered or defeated by his suffering." I didn't quite follow what he was trying to say, but I wasn't really listening. I was zoning out.

When it was over, Seth gave me a hug, and then Antwoine gave me a crushing handshake and hug, and I was surprised to see a single tear rolling down the giant's face. I hadn't cried during the whole service; I hadn't cried at all the whole day. I felt anesthetized. Maybe I was past it.

Aunt Irene tottered up to me and held my hand in both of her soft age-spotted hands. Her bright red lipstick had been applied with a shaky hand. Her perfume was so strong I had to hold my breath. "Your father was a good man," she said. She seemed to read something in my face, some skepticism I hadn't meant to show, and she said, "He wasn't a comfortable man with his feelings, I know. He wasn't at ease expressing them. But I know he loved you."

Okay, if you insist, I thought, and I smiled and thanked her. Dad's Kiwanis friend, a hulking guy who was around Dad's age but looked twenty years younger, took my hand and said, "Sorry for your loss." Even Jonesie, the loading dock guy from Wyatt Telecom, showed up with his wife, Esther. They both said they were sorry for my loss.

I was leaving the church, about to get in the limousine to follow the hearse to the graveyard, when I saw a man sitting in the back row of the church. He'd come in some time after the mass had started, but I couldn't make out his face at such a distance, in the dark light of the church's interior.

The man turned around and caught my eye.

It was Goddard.

I couldn't believe it. Astonished, and moved, I walked up to him slowly. I smiled, thanked him for coming. He shook his head, waved away my thanks.

"I thought you were in Tokyo," I said.

"Oh, hell, it's not as if the Asia Pacific division hasn't kept me waiting time and time again."

"I don't…" I fumbled, incredulous. "You rescheduled your trip?"

"One of the very few things I've learned in life is the importance of getting your priorities straight."

For a moment I was speechless. "I'll be back in tomorrow," I said. "It might be on the later side, because I'll probably have some business to take care of -"

"No," he said. "Take your time. Go slow."

"I'll be fine, really."

"Be good to yourself, Adam. Somehow we'll manage without you for a little while."

"It's not like – not at all like your son, Jock. I mean, my dad was pretty sick with emphysema for a long time, and…it's really better this way. He wanted to go."

"I know the feeling," he said quietly.

"I mean, we weren't all that close, really." I looked around the dim church interior, the rows of wooden pews, the gold and crimson paint on the walls. A couple of my friends were standing near the door waiting to talk to me. "I probably shouldn't say it, especially in here, you know?" I smiled sadly. "But he was kind of a difficult guy, a tough old bird, which makes it easier, his passing. It's not like I'm totally devastated or anything."

"Oh, no, that makes it even harder, Adam. You'll see. When your feelings are that complicated."

I sighed. "I don't think my feelings for him are – were – all that complicated."

"It hits you later. The wasted opportunities. The things that could have been. But I want you to keep something in mind: Your dad was fortunate to have you."

"I don't think he considered himself -"

"Really. He was a lucky man, your father."

"I don't know about that," I said, and all of a sudden, without warning, the shut-off valve in me gave way, the dam broke, and the tears welled up. I flushed with shame as the tears started streaming down my face, and I blurted out, "I'm sorry, Jock."

He reached both of his hands up and placed them on my shoulders. "If you can't cry, you're not alive," Goddard said. His eyes were moist.

Now I was weeping like a baby, and I was mortified and somehow relieved at the same time. Goddard put his arms around me, clasped me in a big hug as I blubbered like an idiot.

"I want you to know something, son," he said, very quietly. "You're not alone."

73

The day after the funeral I returned to work. What was I going to do, mope around the apartment? I wasn't really depressed, though I felt raw, like a layer of skin had been peeled off. I needed to be around people. And maybe, now that Dad was dead, there'd be some comfort in being around Goddard, who was beginning to look like the closest thing I ever had to a father. Not to put myself on a shrink's couch or anything, but something changed, for me, after he showed up at the funeral. I wasn't conflicted or ambivalent anymore about my so-called real mission at Trion, the 'real reason' I was there – because that was no longer the real reason I was there.

At least by my reckoning, I'd done my service, paid my debt, and I deserved a clean slate. I wasn't working for Nick Wyatt any longer. I'd stopped returning Meacham's phone calls or e-mails. Once I even got a message, on my cell phone voice mail, from Judith Bolton. She didn't leave her name, but her voice was instantly recognizable. "Adam," she said, "I know you're going through such a difficult time. We all feel terrible about the death of your father, and please know you have our deepest condolences."

I could just imagine the strategy session with Judith and Meacham and Wyatt, all desperate and angry about their kite who'd slipped his string. Judith would say something about how they should go easy on the guy, he's just lost a parent, and Wyatt would say something foulmouthed and say he didn't give a shit, the clock was ticking, and Meacham would be trying to out-tough-guy his boss about how they were going to hold my feet to the fire and they were going to fuck me over; and then Judith would say no, we have to take a more sensitive approach, let me try to reach out to him…

Her message went on, "But it's extremely important, even in this time of turmoil, for you to remain in constant contact. I want us all to keep everything positive and cordial, Adam, but I need you to make contact today."

I deleted her message as well as Meacham's. They would get the point. In time I'd send Meacham an e-mail officially severing the relationship, but for the time being I thought I'd just keep them dangling while the reality of the situation sank in. I wasn't Nick Wyatt's kite anymore.

I'd given them what they needed. They'd realize that it wasn't worth their while to hang tough.

They might threaten, but they couldn't force me to go on working for them. As long as I kept in mind that there really was nothing they could do, I could just walk away.

I just had to keep that in mind. I could just walk away.

74

My cell phone was ringing even before I pulled into the Trion garage the next morning. It was Flo.

"Jock wants to see you," she said, sounding urgent. "Right now."

Goddard was in his back room with Camilletti, Colvin, and Stuart Lurie, the senior VP for Corporate Development I'd met at Jock's barbecue.

Camilletti was talking as I entered.

"…No, from what I hear the S.O.B. just flew into Palo Alto yesterday with a term sheet already drawn up. He had lunch with Hillman, the CEO, and by dinner they'd inked the deal. He matched our offer dollar for dollar – I mean, to the penny – but in cash!"

"How the hell could this happen!" Goddard exploded. I'd never seen him so angry. "Delphos signed a no-shop provision, for Christ's sake!"

"The no-shop's dated tomorrow – it hasn't been signed yet. That's why he flew out there so fast, so he could do the deal before we locked it in."

"Who are we talking about?" I asked softly, as I sat down.

"Nicholas Wyatt," Stuart Lurie said. "He just bought Delphos right out from under us for five hundred million in cash."

My stomach sank. I recognized the name Delphos but remembered I wasn't supposed to. Wyatt bought Delphos? I thought, astonished.

I turned to Goddard with a questioning look.

"That's the company we were in the process of acquiring – I told you about them," he said impatiently. "Our lawyers were just about finished drawing up the definitive purchase agreement…" His voice trailed off, then grew louder. "I didn't even think Wyatt had that kind of cash on their balance sheet!"

"They had just under a billion in cash," said Jim Colvin. "Eight hundred million, actually. So five hundred million pretty much empties out the piggy bank, because they've got three billion dollars of debt, and the service on that debt's gotta be two hundred million a year easy."

Goddard smacked his hand down on the round table. "God damn it to hell!" he thundered. "What the hell use does Wyatt have for a company like Delphos? He doesn't have AURORA… For Wyatt to put his own companyon the line like that makes no goddamned sense at all unless he's just trying to screw us over."

"Which he just succeeded in doing," Camilletti said.

"For heaven's sake, without AURORA, Delphos is worthless!" Goddard said.

"Without Delphos, AURORA is fucked," said Camilletti.

"Maybe he knows about AURORA," said Colvin.

"Impossible!" said Goddard. "And even if he knows about it, he doesn't have it!"

"What if he does?" suggested Stuart Lurie.

There was a long silence.

Camilletti spoke slowly, intensely. "We're protecting AURORA with the exact same federal security regulations the Defense Department mandates for government contractors dealing in sensitive compartmented information." He stared fiercely at Goddard. "I'm talking firewalls, security clearances, network protection, multilevel secure access – every goddamned safeguard known to man. It's in the goddamned cone of silence. There's just no fucking way."

"Well," Goddard said, "Wyatt somehow found out the details of our negotiations -"

"Unless," Camilletti interrupted, "he had someone inside." An idea seemed to occur to him, and he looked at me. "You used to work for Wyatt, didn't you?"

I could feel the blood rushing to my head, and to mask it, I faked outrage "I used to work at Wyatt," I snapped at him.

"Are you in touch with him?" he asked, his eyes drilling into me.

"What are you trying to suggest?" I stood up.

"I'm asking you a simple yes-or-no question – are you in touch with Wyatt?" Camilletti shot back. "You had dinner with him at the Auberge not so long ago, correct?"

"Paul, that's enough," said Goddard. "Adam, you sit down this goddamned instant. Adam had no access whatsoever to AURORA. Or to the details of the Delphos negotiation. I believe today's the first time he's even heard the name of the company."

I nodded.

"Let's move on," Goddard said. He seemed to have cooled off a little. "Paul, I want you to talk to our lawyers, see what recourse we have. See if we can stop Wyatt. Now, AURORA's scheduled launch is in four days. As soon as the world knows what we've just done, there'll be a mad scramble to buy up materials and manufacturers up and down the whole damned supply chain. Either we delay the launch, or…I do not want to be part of that scramble. We're going to have to put our heads together and look around for some other comparable acquisition -"

"- No one has that technology but Delphos!" Camilletti said.

"We're all smart people," Goddard said. "There are always other possibilities." He put his hands on the arms of his chair and got to his feet. "You know, there's a story Ronald Reagan used to tell about the kid who found a huge pile of manure and said, 'There must be a pony around here somewhere.' " He laughed, and the others laughed as well, politely. They seemed to appreciate his feeble attempt to defuse the tension. "Let's all get to work. Find the pony."

75

I knew what had happened.

I thought things through as I drove home that night, and the more I did the angrier I got, and the angrier I got the faster and more erratically I drove.

If it weren't for the term sheet I'd gotten from Camilletti's files, Wyatt wouldn't have known about Delphos, the company Trion was about to buy. The more I reminded myself of this, the worse I felt.

Damn it, it was time to let Wyatt know it was over. I wasn't working for them anymore.

I unlocked my apartment door, switched on the lights, and headed right for the computer to send an e-mail.

But no.

Arnold Meacham was sitting at my computer, while a couple of tough-looking crew-cut guys were tearing the place apart. My stuff was everywhere. All my books had been taken off the shelves, my CD and DVD players had been taken apart, even the TV set. It looked like someone had gone on a rampage, throwing everything around, wrecking as much as possible, trying to cause maximum damage.

"What the fuck -?" I said.

Meacham looked up calmly from my computer screen. "Don't you ever fucking ignore me," he said.

I had to get the hell out of there. I spun around, bounded toward the door just as another of the crew-cut thugs slammed the door shut and stood in front of it, watching me warily.

There was no other exit, unless you counted the windows, a twenty-seven-story drop that didn't seem like a very good idea.

"What do you want?" I said to Meacham, looking from him to the door.

"You think you can hide shit from me?" Meacham said. "I don't think so. You don't have a safe-deposit box or a cubbyhole that's safe from us. I see you've been saving all my e-mails. I didn't know you cared."

"Of course I have," I said, indignant. "I keep backups of everything."

"That encryption program you're using for your notes of meetings with Wyatt and Judith and me – you know, that was cracked over a year ago. There's far stronger ones out there."

"Good to know, thanks," I said, heavy on the sarcasm. I tried to sound unfazed. "Now, why don't you and your boys get the hell out of here before I call the police."

Meacham snorted and made a hand signal that looked as if he was summoning me over.

"No." I shook my head. "I said, you and your buddies -"

There was a sudden movement I could see out of the corner of my eye, lightning-fast, and something slammed into the back of my head. I sagged to my knees, tasting blood. Everything was tinged dark red. I flung my hand out to grab my attacker, but while my hand was flailing in back of me, a foot slammed into my right kidney. A jagged bolt of pain shot up and down my torso, knocking me flat on the Persian rug.

"No," I gasped.

Another kick, this one to the back of my head, incredibly painful. Pinpoints of light sparkled before my eyes.

"Get 'em off me," I moaned. "Make your – buddy – stop. If I get too woozy, I might get talkative."

It was all I could think of. Meacham's accomplices probably didn't know much if anything of what Meacham and I were involved in. They were just muscle. Meacham wouldn't have told them, wouldn't have wanted them to know. Maybe they knew a little, just enough to know what to look for. But Meacham would want to keep them as much out of the loop as possible.

I cringed, braced myself for another kick to the back of my head, everything all white and sparkly, a metallic taste in my mouth. For a moment there was silence; it seemed that Meacham had signaled them to stop.

"What the hell do you want from me?" I asked.

"We're going for a drive," Meacham said.

76

Meacham and his goons hustled me out of my apartment, down the elevator to the garage, then out a service entrance to the street. I was scared out of my mind. A black Suburban with tinted windows was parked by the entrance. Meacham led the way, the three guys staying close to me, surrounding me, probably to make sure I didn't run, or try to jump Meacham, or anything. One of the guys was carrying my laptop; another had my desktop computer.

My head throbbed, and my lower back and chest were in agony. I must have looked like a mess, all bruised and beaten up.

"We're going for a drive" usually means, at least in Mafia movies, cement boots and a dunk in the East River. But if they'd wanted to kill me, why didn't they do it back in my apartment?

The thugs were ex-cops, I figured out after a while, employed by Wyatt Corporate Security. They seem to have been hired purely for their brute strength. They were blunt instruments.

One of the guys drove, and Meacham sat in the front seat, separated from me by a bulletproof glass enclosure, talking on a phone the whole way.

He'd done his job, apparently. He'd scared the shit out of me, and he and his guys had found the evidence I was keeping on Wyatt.

Forty-five minutes later, the Suburban pulled into Nick Wyatt's long stone driveway.

Two of the guys searched me for weapons or whatever, as if somehow between my apartment and here I could have picked up a Glock. They took my cell phone and shoved me into the house. I passed through the metal detector, which went off. They took my watch, belt, and keys.

Wyatt was sitting in front of a huge flat-panel TV in a spacious, sparely furnished room, watching CNBC with the sound muted, and talking on a cell phone. I glanced at myself in a mirror as I entered with my crew-cut escorts. I looked pretty bad.

We all stood there.

After a few minutes Wyatt ended his call, put the phone down, looked over at me. "Long time no see," he said.

"Yeah, well," I said.

"Look at you. Walk into a door? Fall down a flight of stairs?"

"Something like that."

"Sorry to hear about your dad. But Christ, breathing through a tube, oxygen tanks, all that shit – I mean, shoot me if I ever get like that."

"Be my pleasure," I murmured, but I don't think he heard me.

"Just as well he's dead, huh? Put him out of his fucking misery?"

I wanted to lunge at him, throttle him. "Thanks for your concern," I said.

"I want to thank you," he said, "for the information on Delphos."

"Sounds like you had to empty your piggy bank to buy it."

"Always gotta think three moves ahead. How do you think I got to where I am now? When we announce we've got the optical chip, our stock's gonna go into orbit."

"Nice," I said. "You've got it all figured out. You don't need me anymore."

"Oh, you're far from done, friend. Not until you get me the specs on the chip itself. And the prototype."

"No," I said, very quietly. "I'm done now."

"You think you're done? Man, are you hallucinating." He laughed.

I took a deep breath. I could feel my pulse throbbing at the base of my throat. My head ached. "The law's clear on this," I said, clearing my throat. I'd looked at a bunch of legal Web sites. "You're actually in a lot deeper than me, because you oversaw this whole scheme. I was just the pawn. You ran it."

"The law," Wyatt said with an incredulous smile. "You're talking to me about the fucking law? That's why you've been saving up e-mails and memos and shit, trying to build a legal case against me? Oh, man, I almost feel sorry for you. I think you truly don't get it, do you? You think I'm going to let you walk away before you're finished?"

"You got all sorts of valuable intelligence from me," I said. "Your plan worked. It's over. From now on, you don't contact me anymore. End of transaction. As far as anyone's concerned, this never happened."

Sheer terror gave way to a kind of delirious confidence: I'd finally crossed the line. I'd jumped off the cliff and I was soaring in the air, and I was going to enjoy the ride until I hit ground.

"Think about it," I went on. "You've got a whole lot more to lose than I do. Your company. And your fortune. Me, I'm diddlyshit. I'm a small fish. No, I'm plankton."

His smile broadened. "What are you going to do, go to 'Jock' Goddard and tell him you're nothing but a shitty little snoop whose brilliant 'ideas' were spoon-fed him by his chief competitor? And then what do you think he's going to do? Thank you, take you to lunch at his little diner and toast you with a glass of Ovaltine? I don't think so."

I shook my head, my heart racing. "You really don't want Goddard to know how you learned all the details of their negotiations with Delphos."

"Or maybe you think you can go to the FBI, is that it? Tell them you were a spy-for-hire for Wyatt? Oh, they'll love that. You know how understanding the FBI can be, right? They will squeeze you like a fucking cockroach, and I will deny fucking everything and they'll have no choice but to believe me, and do you know why? Because you are a fucking little con man. You're on record as a hustler, my friend. I fired you from my company when you embezzled from me, and everything's documented."

"Then you're going to have a hard time explaining why everyone at Wyatt recommended me so enthusiastically."

"But no one did, get it? We'd never give a recommendation to a hustler like you. You, compulsive liar that you are, you counterfeited our letterhead to forge your own recommendations when you applied to Trion. Those letters didn't come from us. Paper analysis and forensic document examination will establish that without a doubt. You used a different computer printer, different ink cartridges. You forged signatures, you sick fuck." A pause. "You really think we weren't going to cover our asses?"

I tried to smile back, but I couldn't get the trembling muscles of my mouth to cooperate. "Sorry, that doesn't explain the phone calls from Wyatt executives to Trion," I said. "Anyway, Goddard'll see through it. He knows me."

Wyatt's laugh was more like a bark. "He knows you! That's a scream. Man, you really don't know who you're dealing with, do you? You are in so far over your fucking head. You think anyone's going to believe that our HR department called Trion with glowing recommendations, after we bounced you out on your ass? Well, do a little investigative work, dickwad, and you'll see that every single phone call from our HR department was rerouted. Phone records show they all came from your own apartment. You made all the HR calls yourself, asshole, impersonating your supervisors at Wyatt, making up all those enthusiastic recommendations. You're a sick fuck, man. You're pathological. You made up a whole fucking story about being some big honcho on the Lucid project, which is provably false. You see, asshole, my security people and theirs will get together and compare notes."

My head was spinning slowly, and I felt nauseated.

"And maybe you should check out that secret bank account you're so proud of – the one where you're so sure we've been depositing funds from some offshore account? Why don't you track down the real source of those funds?"

I stared at him.

"That money," Wyatt explained, "was routed directly from several discretionary accounts at Trion. With your goddamned digital fingerprints on it. You stole money from them, same way you stole from us." His eyes bulged. "Your fucking head is in a goddamned jaw trap, you pathetic sack of shit. Next time I see you, you'd better have all the technical specs for Jock Goddard's optical chip, or your life is fucking over. Now get the fuck out of my house."