The Enemy Inside

EIGHT

If there was any debriefing to be done with Serna’s secretary, Proffit would do it himself. Serna’s original secretary had been lured away by another firm at an obscenely high salary more than a year earlier. Proffit had secretly guaranteed the woman’s increase in pay with the other firm for two years in order to get her to move on.

Vicki Preebles, her replacement, was hired by Serna, but from a short list of applicants, all of whom had been carefully selected and screened by Proffit beforehand. They were paid for their time and sworn to secrecy. They signed nondisclosure agreements in blood and were told that they would be legally drawn and quartered if they revealed anything told to them during the selection process.

Olinda Serna had been making a move on Proffit to replace him as managing partner for about eighteen months. She had been meeting privately with other partners in the firm, flying from office to office, lining up support for a palace coup. Proffit knew this from travel records and pieces of information he had gleaned from others in the firm, people who were loyal to him. He was taking no chances and no prisoners.

It was how he confirmed the details of the budding rebellion: pillow talk with Vicki Preebles. After she was hired by Serna, Proffit wasted no time setting Preebles up in an apartment, a place the secretary could never have afforded on her own salary, where, from time to time, he would visit her whenever he came to town, which was almost every week. He ordered in catered dinners, intimate evenings spent discussing office gossip, sometimes over champagne and, on more frisky occasions, shots of tequila.

Proffit was married. He had three grown children and two grandchildren. But he was not averse to mixing a little business with pleasure. Besides, it was a necessary arrangement. He could have just paid Vicki for the information, but that might not have purchased her loyalty. Emotional connections, though sometimes volatile, were invariably more trustworthy.

This afternoon the grieving secretary was still off work as he visited her.

“What will happen to me now that she’s gone?” asked Preebles. “I don’t want to seem cold or uncaring. .”

“No one could accuse you of that,” said Proffit. “And there’s no need to explain. I understand. Don’t worry. You have a solid future with the firm. A job as long as you want it.” He smiled warmly as he lay bare chested in his boxers atop the thick feather comforter on her bed.

Preebles was under the covers, naked, lying on her side, one breast partially exposed, her nipple hard as a nail head and twice as large.

Proffit picked at the carefully arranged pieces of fresh fruit from a large platter that lay on the bed between them. It looked like a scene from one of DeMille’s Roman orgies. The only things missing were the slaves with their feathered fans and the jingling belly dancers.

“Yes, but who will I work for?” she asked.

He knew she was going to be trouble. But there was time for that later. “We will find a job for you that you will love. I promise.”

“Why couldn’t I just work for you?”

He shot her a quick glance. When he found her studying his face he rapidly turned his eyes back to the fruit.

“You’re almost always here in town. It’s almost as if you live here. I know your office is in Los Angeles, but you could use someone in Washington. I mean, it would be very convenient for you, wouldn’t it?”

He nibbled at a piece of pineapple and said nothing. “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”

When he finally looked up at her, she smiled. A sexual ether seemed to float across the hills and valleys of her body under the blankets like mustard gas on a battlefield. Her hand drifted toward him but the plate was in the way.

Proffit felt the urge. But thankfully at his age it took a while to recharge the batteries. Time for new tactics. “I meant to ask you, one of the lawyers handling Olinda’s estate at the firm asked me if she kept a spare key to her house anywhere at the office.”

“You mean her place in Georgetown?” said Vicki.

“Yeah. She didn’t own any other property, did she?”

“No. She stayed in town almost every weekend, unless she was traveling on business. A key, let me think. . ” Preebles put a finger to her lips, the long shapely nail against the red gloss of her lips a little smeared from their recent antics.

“We’ve looked but haven’t found one,” said Proffit. “They need to gain access in order to inventory the property at the house.”

“Of course. I understand. If she had one, it would be in the big partner’s desk. The oak antique against the wall in her office.”

“We’ve looked there. We didn’t find anything.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Preebles. “There are hidden compartments all over that thing. It’s like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. You know, the kind with sliding wooden compartments and hidden drawers.”

“Yeah,” said Proffit. “I had one of those when I was a kid.”

“Anything she didn’t want you to find she put in that desk.”

“Really?”

“Emm. You know you need a secretary,” she said. “Why can’t you just assign me to do that? After all, you are the boss,” she said.

“You’ve seen these compartments?”

“I have.”

“How many are there?”

“I didn’t count them.”

“How big are they?”

“Big enough for a key,” she said.

“But not papers?”

“I thought you were looking for a key?”

He gave her a look as if to say, “Stop with the bullshit.”

“I suppose it would depend,” she said.

“On what?”

“On the form these papers were in.”

He looked at her, a big question mark.

She chose not to read it. “Tell me you don’t need your own personal secretary and I’ll stop bugging you.” She stirred under the blankets and rolled away from him as if she were about to get up.

“OK, I could probably use a secretary,” said Proffit. “I admit it.”

She stopped with one naked thigh already out from under the covers, settled back down, looked over and gave him the smile of victory. “If the papers were on a thumb drive they’d easily fit in one of the little hidey-holes in that desk.”

“Did she use a thumb drive?”

Preebles nodded. “She wore it on a lanyard around her neck, hanging down her top where you couldn’t see it. I saw her hide it in the desk on a few occasions when she was dressed in something where she couldn’t conceal it in her clothing. But never overnight and never when she left the office.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I checked,” said Preebles. “That’s why you hired me, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

“I noticed that she used it mostly after certain phone calls and never on the office line. Only her cell phone. She’d talk and then take it off from around her neck, plug it into her computer, save whatever it was she was typing to the thumb drive. Then she’d take the drive out of the machine and put it back around her neck. Mostly it was like columns of numbers. She never let the little drive out of her sight. I assume it probably went up in the flames with her out in California,” said Preebles.

Proffit couldn’t afford to make that assumption. “How is it that she allowed you to see all this?”

“She didn’t know I was looking.”

“What were you doing, hiding under her desk?”

“On the bookshelf behind her,” said Preebles. “What they call a pinhole camera. It’s wireless. They sell them at the spy shop here in Washington. It showed up in a little box in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor to my computer outside her office. It had pretty good resolution. If you expanded to the full screen you could read the monitor on her computer. But I didn’t want anybody to catch me doing it.”

“Good thought,” said Proffit. She’d gone way beyond the call of duty.

“The camera toggled on and off with one key on my keyboard. Anybody came by I just turned it off and the little box on my screen disappeared. I removed the camera the minute I found out she was dead.”

“Did this camera have a tape?”

“I couldn’t afford it,” said Preebles. “Those get really expensive.”

“I can imagine. Let me ask you a question. Do you know how to get into all the little hidden places in that desk?”

She propped herself up on one arm. “I think I could remember. I know I could if I was your personal assistant in the Washington office. You need my eyes and ears. You know you do.” She plucked one of the large strawberries from the platter and dragged it lasciviously across her nipple, breaking into a smile and then giggling a little as she did it.

He could have the desk dragged out to a medical office somewhere and have it x-rayed if he had to. And then take a chainsaw to it. He made a mental note to get a safe with double locks installed in his D.C. office and have it swept for bugs hourly before he allowed Preebles anywhere near the place.