August 2001
Her hacker name was DaisyB, short for Daisy Buchanan. She did not look much like a literary figure to Harold. Certainly more of a Dickens waif than a Fitzgerald heroine, in any case.
Heroine, he thought, watching the girl. Heroin. A funny word, a homonym with two very different meanings. Daisy Buchanan fancied herself the first, especially while she was shooting the second.
She’d come to the pizza shop expecting to meet her dealer. She’d needed a fix then. That had been three hours ago. She was crashing now. Edging toward frantic. It was more psychological than physical, Harold knew. He didn’t see any need to share that knowledge with the girl. She huddled in the corner of the booth, her knees tight against her chest. She’d been twitching when they first caught her; now she practically vibrated. She shivered, yet sweat beaded on her forehead.
She would not look at him. She held her hand over her eyes most of the time; the florescent lights bothered her. She was wearing some kind of vanity contacts, electric green and oversized, that made her eyes look cat-like, alien. Harold guessed that in addition to her withdrawal symptoms, she had a significant eye infection. Occasionally she looked out the window or glared balefully at the men on the security team. There were three of them, one at every exit, and each of them outweighed her at least three to one. She wasn’t getting past them; they’d established that from the beginning. But it was Harold she most feared. She wouldn’t look at him at all.
He could see the outline of the bones in her wrists and arms; her hands were all but skeletal. Her skin was dead-white, brittle-looking. There were bright spots of color on her cheeks; she was probably feverish. Her hair was bright green, to match her contacts, but it hung in a tangled mess around her shoulders. Her lips were pale, except where the cracks in them showed red with blood. Her eyes were dull, hazy. She wore a torn black hooded sweatshirt, equally torn jeans and sneakers held together with duct tape. She smelled like old cigarettes and bright desperation. Like the street.
This pitiful creature, this shivering addict, had hacked into IFT’s system. Into his system.
He wondered if he would have recognized Nathan’s former intern without the laptop.
When Ingram had started up his internship program, he’s insisted on giving every participant a state-of-the-art laptop. Harold had counter- insisted on encrypting every one of them with a digital identity tag. He’d wanted to be able to easily identify any intern who strayed into forbidden areas of the IFT servers. He’d been surprised when one of the tags popped up on the hacker he was chasing. But it led him to the girl’s file, and then in almost a straight line to the girl.
He’d hoped the laptop had been stolen from her. He hadn’t wanted to believe that one of Nathan’s chosen few was attacking his systems. And this one “ Nathan’s promising little rock star “ he’d wanted to believe that least of all. But they’d found the laptop in her bag, and she hadn’t made any attempt to deny it was hers.
At fourteen she’d been reading The Gulag Archipelago on her lunch break. At seventeen she was dying by her own hand, one filthy injection at a time.
Harold shook his head and turned his attention back to the laptop.
It told him everything about the pizza shop’s operation. Drug inventories were kept on the same spreadsheets with counts of mozzarella and pepperoni. Names, dates, amounts, credit card numbers. Everything the police would need to convict the enterprising Mr. Mancini and his delivery staff, his customers and his suppliers. All of that held very little interest for Harold. What he wanted was information about what she’d been doing on the side. He knew she’d hacked into IFT, he knew when, and he knew largely how. But the details had been deleted, and nothing he tried on the battered little computer brought them back.
Yet.
His glanced at his watch. Twenty until twelve. By midnight, he predicted, she’d tell him what he wanted to know. If not, he’d take the laptop back to his office and tear it apart. But one way or another, he would know what she’d done and how she’d done it.
He watched her and he waited.
She glanced toward him, dropped her eyes to her bag that sat on the chair beside him. He’d already been through it. A fake drivers’ license and an apparently real library card. Two paperbacks, Lord of the Flies and Ender’s Game, both with library stickers on the spine. Thirty-one dollars and seventy-four cents. A badly-bent pair of glasses. Her fix kit and a small envelope with a tiny amount of powder in it. It wasn’t, Harold gathered, even a whole dose for her. But she wanted it, fiercely.
She saw him watching and hid her eyes.
Fifteen minutes, he decided, and he’d ask her again.
The bell over the front door rang as the door opened and closed. There was movement, a shadow, and then Nathan Ingram’s booming voice. “Harold, what the hell are you doing?”
He swore inwardly. The one person in the world who could screw this up. He slammed the laptop, swept it onto the bench seat beside him, and stood up quickly. “Nathan, you …”
The girl took one look at Ingram and exploded into sound and motion, screeching as she tried to work around the edge of the table. “He kidnapped me! You can’t keep me here like this! I want to go home!”
Harold glared at her and she froze at the very end of the bench. But her voice continued. “I’m a minor. I’m gonna call the cops. You can’t keep me here like this, you pervert. I want to go home!”
“And where would home be, exactly?” he asked her coldly.
She met his eyes now. Her eyes flicked to Ingram, back to him. The other man’s presence emboldened her, but there was something else, too. Not fear, exactly. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Evidently I can.”
“Harold,” Nathan said earnestly, “you can’t …”
He didn’t recognize her, Harold thought with relief. At least not yet. He grabbed Ingram by the arm and pushed him toward the swinging door to the kitchen. The girl moved, but he froze her again with a look. He grabbed her bag on his way past and heard her actually moan with disappointment. She wouldn’t even have run, he thought.
She just wants the drugs.
“Are you out of your mind?” Nathan demanded before the door swung shut behind them. “You can’t just hold somebody like this. This is huge trouble, Harold. If her parents find out about this …”
“Her parents are dead,” Harold answered sharply. “No one’s coming for her.”
“Which doesn’t make this any better. What in God’s name are you thinking? You can’t just …”
“She hacked our network, Nathan.”
“She …” He paused in mid-outrage. “She did? That strung-out little junkie… are you serious?”
“Nathan.”
“You’re sure it was her?”
“Yes.”
“How?” Ingram at least looked alarmed now. “Harold, how?”
“That’s what I was about to find out.”
“You don’t know?”
“I know the basics. I want the specifics. And she will tell me, very soon, if you don’t screw this up.”
Nathan ran his hand over his face. “Jesus, Harold. How long have you been holding her?”
“Just under three hours.”
“Just … why didn’t you call the cops?”
“And tell them what, Nathan? That that strung-out little junkie, as you so aptly put it, hacked into the most secure computer system in the city?”
“Is that what this about, Harold? Your ego? You’re holding a teenage girl prisoner to protect your ego?”
“It’s not my ego.” Half a lie, and he knew his partner knew it, but no matter. “It’s the reputation of our company. If she can hack us, then anyone in the city will think they can get away with it.”
From the front room the girl began shouting. “When this gets out you are in such big trouble! I’m going to the papers, I’m going to tell everybody!”
Harold straightened up. The smart play, from the girl’s point of view, would have been to tell Ingram who she was, to remind him that she’d been an intern. To throw herself on his mercy and enlist him as an ally against Harold. Ingram would be crushed, to see one of his bright stars fallen so far, but he’d probably take her side.
But she hadn’t done it. Either she simply didn’t remember him, which was a possibility given her level of drug usage, or else …
… or else behind her fake green eyes she still had some sense of shame, and she didn’t want him to know, either.
Nathan looked at him. “Harold …”
“I will handle this, Nathan. I am handling this. She can’t hurt us. But I need you to play along.”
The girl shrieked, “You can’t treat me like this. I don’t care how big your company is, the Times can’t wait for stories like this. I’m going to tell them everything. You are in so much trouble!”
“Trust me,” Harold said firmly. He walked back into the dining room. Ingram followed.
The girl was still at the edge of the booth. She retreated just a little when Harold sat back down. Then she focused on Ingram. “You have to let me go. Right now.”
Nathan dragged a chair over from the next table, turned it around backward, and straddled it. He folded his arms on the back and leaned forward, all charm and reason.
“What’s your name?”
She glanced at Harold swiftly, then back at Ingram. “Daisy.”
Harold sat back. She wasn’t going to tell him, bless her opiate-soaked heart. And Nathan was likely too thrown off by those alien contacts to figure it out.
“Daisy. Really?” He gave her a half-smile, the one meant to be sincere and reassuring. “Unusual name. Pretty.” He was in full diplomat mode, smoothing the situation over as he always did. “All right, Daisy. This doesn’t have to be this complicated. Tell us how you got into our system, and we can all get out of here. “
Her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t, Harold thought with grim satisfaction, convinced by the reassuring smile. “I tell you and I can go home?”
“Just tell me how you got in.”
“And I get my bag back?”
“Daisy. Tell me how you hacked us.”
He was completely soothing, reasonable. It was a voice and a manner that had worked on some of wealthiest and most powerful men and women in the world. But it wasn’t working on Chrissy Buchanan. Daisy, he reminded himself.
“Promise me,” she insisted.
“Tell us what we want to know, and we all walk out of here.”
She recognized the weasel words and remained silent.
Ingram sighed extravagantly and looked at him. “I don’t know. Are you sure she’s the hacker? She doesn’t seem that bright.”
The girl glanced at Harold again, raised one eyebrow. She was plenty bright enough to not take the bait. And then, unexpectedly, she sat back, unfolded her arms. “I’m bored,” she announced. “I used the cat door.”
“The what?”
“The cat door. You probably call it something else. Your shortcut, so you don’t have to go through full security protocols on a project in process ... so, what? Access field?”
“Port hole,” Harold supplied quietly. “And it’s secured.”
“Yeah. It’s half-protected. Bump it and it kicks to full security.”
“Yes.”
“So how did you get in?” Ingram asked.
She nodded toward her bag. “Let me fix and I’ll tell you.”
“No,” Harold said firmly.
“I’m sick,” she insisted. “I can’t tell you until I get right.”
“No.”
“Tell me about the cat door,” Ingram urged.
She folded her arms over her chest again. A shudder ran through her body, hard, and then another one. She was sweating visibly. She looked around, studied the security men again. Shook her head. “You ever play Ding Dong Ditch when you were a kid?”
“What?”
“Were you ever a kid?” she asked wearily. “Never mind. I bump the cat door. It locks down. You come in tomorrow and have to go through full security to log in. You look for a threat, there’s nothing there. You reset the door. Then I bump it again. Same thing. Every day.” She studied Ingram for a long moment. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
She looked at Harold, then back and forth between the two of them. For the first time her eyes revealed the deep intelligence he’d known she must possess. “Oooooooh,” she finally said. “I get it.”
She was one of very, very few who understood that Nathan Ingram was not brain behind IFT “ at least not all of it. Her sudden realization jarred Harold, and he could tell it alarmed his partner, too. “You bumped the cat door,” he answered evenly. “And I reset it.”
She studied him, assessing him in a new light. “Every day. For weeks. Finally you lower the threshold. Same thing, every day. Sometimes even while you’re logged in. Bump the door, lock it down, and you have to log in from the start again. And every time you check, there’s no threat there. Just random traffic. A glitch in the system.”
Harold nodded grimly. He’d figured out this much. But his systems didn’t have glitches, not for long.
“Anybody else would have taken down the threshold entirely. But not you. You’re too careful for that. You tell it to notify you before it activates. And it keeps right on happening. And there’s never a threat, no matter how fast you look.”
Harold nodded. “How did you get in?”
Daisy sighed. She looked around the empty pizza shop again. Looked at Ingram. Dismissed him with her eyes and looked back at Harold. “NSA got a tip. They tried to power-hack you. Knock down the front door with a battering ram. And while you were busy with them, the cat door alerted. For the eighty-seventh time in twenty-nine days. And you told it …”
“Disregard,” Harold pronounced tightly. “I told it to disregard.”
She smiled. “By the time you were done with NSA, I was in.”
He looked out the front window for a moment. The street was still busy, even at this hour. Of course, of course. Clever little thing. He was angry, at her and at himself. But he was also grudgingly impressed.
Ingram cleared his throat. “The NSA thing. That was four days ago.”
“Uh-huh,” Daisy answered smugly. Then she shivered so hard that her elbow banged against the tabletop.
“And what have you been doing all that time?”
“Partying. Tagging stuff. Stealing programs.”
“Harold …”
“It’s all right, Nathan. She hasn’t hurt us.” He’d checked everywhere she’d been. She had stolen a lot of programs, but she hadn’t done any damage. She hadn’t meant to.
“I could have,” Christine reminded him.
“But you haven’t. So what was the point of hacking us?”
She tilted her head, squinting curiously. “To prove I could. But it took too long. I lost the bet.” She stood up rather unsteadily. “I’m going home. Gimme my bag.”
“No.”
She swayed a minute, rocked heel to toe. Glared at Ingram. “You said I could go.”
He stood up, too. He towered over the girl and put on his Full Authority Figure voice. “I said we’d all leave here. Good night.”
He strode toward the door. The girl screamed, “You said I could go!” and launched herself at him. The nearest security man plucked her out of the air from behind, wrapped his arms over hers. She screamed again. “I will burn you down, Ingram! I will hack every computer you own and I will slag them all!”
Nathan looked back, first at the raging girl, then at Harold. “You’re sure about this?”
“I’ll handle it,” Harold repeated calmly.
“We’ll talk later?”
“Of course.”
Harold watched his partner out, then turned to the girl. She was still screaming, but her voice was already getting weaker. She tried kicking, to no effect. She snarled like a feral cat. The security man, Bellows, simply held her. She could not escape and she could not hurt him.
“Get the car,” Harold said. “Miss Buchanan, stop it.”
Her tantrum stopped as suddenly as it had started. There was, he supposed, no point in her display of temper now that Nathan was gone. “Please,” she said reasonably. “Just let me go. Please. I promise I’ll never touch another one of your systems. I promise.”
He studied her a moment. The waxy skin, the broken lips, the bloodshot eyes. The trembling. Bellows had loosened his grip but he hadn’t released her; it looked now like he was holding her up. She would have promised anything to get to her drugs.
She had hacked his network patiently, carefully, brilliantly, while her brain was awash in heroin. He could only imagine what she might do when she was clean. Nathan had been right about her. And terribly, tragically wrong.
Why hadn’t she told Nathan who she was?
And why hadn’t he?
“Are you gonna call the cops?” She sounded almost hopeful.
“No,” Harold answered. “I’m taking you to a rehabilitation facility.”
She straightened; Bellows tightened his grip. “I am not going to rehab. You can’t make me. You have no right …”
“I have no right,” he agreed, “but I have enough money to make that inapplicable.”
“You son of a bitch …” Her words faded into raging screams again. She struggled harder to escape from Bellows. She didn’t manage it.
“Car’s ready,” one of the other men announced from the door.
Harold nodded. He picked up the girl’s bag, stuffed the laptop inside, and waited. The girl flailed, completely out of control, fearful and angry and trapped. But she also very quickly become exhausted. She didn’t have the reserves to maintain this kind of rage. Like a cheetah, her attempted attack was fast, fully committed and brief.
In another minute, exactly as he’d expected, she slumped in Bellow’s arms.
Wearily, Finch nodded toward the door.
***
2012
“Mr. Reese,” Finch said in his earpiece, “can you see Miss Fitzgerald?”
Reese frowned. “You said she was upstairs.”
“She should be in the café now.”
“How do you know that?” Reese raised his camera and scanned the interior of the shop again. Their target was on a stool at the end of the bar. She’d changed out of the skirt, was back in her customary jeans. She had her tablet in her hands. “She’s here.”
“Good. I’m on my way.”
“What?”
“She called me, John. She asked for my help.”
“She knows we were watching her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it doesn’t matter.”
Reese took a deep breath. “This is not a good idea,
Finch.”
“You’re probably right.” The phone went dead.
Reese heard the car stop in the alley behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Fusco got out and walked toward him. “You could have just called me with the case number, Lionel.” He wasn’t in the mood for chatter; he needed to figure out what to do about Finch.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Fusco’s voice was tight, angry. “I gotta know something right now. What are you doing here? What’s going on with the girl?”
“You know Christine Fitzgerald?” Reese tried not to sound surprised.
“I used to. Kinda. Only that wasn’t her name then. She in trouble?”
“Probably.”
“What kind?”
“I thought we’d settled this part of our relationship, Lionel,” John said calmly. “I ask the questions and you provide the answers.”
Fusco looked away. His face was red. He worked his jaw for a long minute, grinding his teeth. Finally he handed him a yellow note. “There’s the report numbers. Two of ‘em. She got mugged this week, you know.”
“I heard.”
The detective ran his hand over his face to wipe the sweat away. “This burglary report, it says that’s her residence. She’s not really living up there, is she?”
“It’s the only address we have for her.”
“I mean, maybe she’s just using it for an office or something, right?”
“You know her, Lionel. You tell me.”
“I don’t know her. I just …” Fusco threw one hand up, turned and walked back down the alley.
Reese watched him, but didn’t follow. The detective obviously wasn’t leaving. He was thinking about something. Thinking hard. But John knew what Fusco didn’t: The man had already made up his mind. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been there in person. He raised his camera and checked on the girl again. She hadn’t moved.
After a long moment, Fusco reached behind his back, under his jacket, and pulled out a fat manila file. He walked back to where Reese waited. “If she’s really living up there, then you need to read this.”
John took the folder gingerly; it was slightly damp with Fusco’s sweat. He turned it to look at the tab. “Fitzgerald, Thomas. Her father?” The file was stamped CLOSED in big red letters. “What’s his story?”
“He’s dead.” Fusco took a deep breath. “I shot him.”
Reese looked at him steadily, waited.
“It was a clean shoot,” Fusco continued quickly. “He had
hostages, came out with a gun. He had a history. There were a bunch of witnesses. There was nothing else to do. He was gonna kill somebody. We had to shoot him.”
“But?”
Fusco looked toward the café. Worked his jaw again. “The girl, Chrissy, she was just a kid. High school. Her mom was drunk, so we, uh … I went and picked her up from school. To talk him out. She got him to let the hostages go, she was … she just …”
“She saw everything,” Reese guessed grimly.
“She saw everything,” Fusco confirmed.
“She blames you?”
“No. No. She knew he was crazy. She said it wasn’t my fault.” He shook his head. “I’m tellin’ you, John, if you could have seen her … this little girl with this … she was so …” He stopped, seemed to struggle for the right words. Finally he gave up. “Doesn’t matter. The thing is, the shooting went down right in front of the bar.” He gestured. “Right there in the street.”
“In front of Chaos?” Reese asked, surprised.
“Used to be called Happy Hours. But it’s the same building. So you see what I’m sayin’, right? If Chrissy’s living up there, then she’s definitely in trouble. But I don’t think it’s the kind of trouble you can get her out of.”
Reese took a deep breath. Fusco was right; it was very troubling. But the Machine didn’t kick out numbers of people who going insane. Unless that insanity would lead them to hurt or kill others. He didn’t even want to consider how Finch’s creation might figure something like that out. And put that together with Finch’s sudden insistence on meeting with her …
But it didn’t track right. She’d owed the café, and probably been living above it, for several years. It was an unhealthy choice, but it wasn’t a new one. “She’s all right, Lionel,” he said. “I watched her all morning. She owns her own company, makes plenty of money. Travels, takes college classes. She’s a little paranoid, maybe, but she’s not crazy. She’s not falling apart.”
The detective looked at him. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Fusco exhaled. Relaxed a notch. “She still shouldn’t be living there.”
“Maybe you should tell her that.”
“Not sure she’d listen to me. It’s been a long time.”
“Worth a try,” Reese answered. “But it’ll have to wait until we get the current situation sorted out.”
“Sure. The mugging, the break-in. What’d she get into, anyhow?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Fusco stood very still for a moment, staring at the cafe.
Reese could see the tension in him still. “What else should we know?” he finally prompted.
It took a minute. “After the shooting, she got kinda … sideways.”
“That’s not surprising,” John allowed. He already knew the answer, but he let Fusco tell him. “How’d it take her?”
“Drugs.” Fusco pronounced it as a curse. “And not any kind of, you know, experimenting to take the edge off. She went pretty much straight hard-core. Grass, coke, acid, speed. Anything she could lay her hands on. Finally ended up on heroin. A lot of heroin.”
Fusco’s phone rang. He took it out, glanced at the number, silenced the ringer.
“How’d she support her habit?” Reese asked.
“How do you think?” Fusco answered. “The usual, at first. Petty theft, shoplifting, purse snatching. We never caught her hooking, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t do it.”
“And yet she doesn’t have a juvie record.”
“No,” the detective agreed. “She doesn’t.” He shrugged. Covering for the minor crimes of a young girl were the least of his sins and they both knew it. “Anyhow, there was this dealer, Mancini. Street-level guy, but connected. Had a pizza place in the Village. If you knew how to order right, you could get you fix delivered with your pie.”
“Enterprising.”
“Yeah. But then Chrissy partnered up with him and she went one better. Set him up on the internet. Web site, menu, on-line ordering. Enter a coupon code to order your drugs, get it delivered, and run the whole thing through on your credit card.”
Reese raised an eyebrow. “Tech support for a drug dealer.”
“Yeah. He kept her high, she kept his business running. And it ran smooth for a while. Made some serious bank. Word was that the operation got some attention up the food chain, that even the Don noticed. Our late friend Zambrano. But by then she was too fried to be any use to him.”
He didn’t doubt that Fusco was telling him the truth, but it was hard to hear. “So what happened?”
“9/11 happened,” Fusco answered. His phone rang again; he silenced it without even looking.
“And?”
“I don’t know how it went down, but she got straightened out. I saw her a couple weeks after and she was clean. She cut her ties “ Mancini got busted around then anyhow “ changed her name, went legit.” Fusco almost smiled. “Hasn’t been in trouble since, as far as I can tell. And I, you know, keep an ear out for her.”
“So maybe someone’s trying to drag her back into the business,” John mused, mostly to himself.
“After all this time?”
“People have long memories.” He thought specifically about Carl Elias. He was certainly running the mob from his prison cell; he might have noticed Fitzgerald’s potential benefit to his business interests. But Fusco was right. After so much time, it was a very long shot.
“Thank you for bringing me this,” he said. “It may help.”
“Yeah.” The detective looked embarrassed. “Look. This kid, she’s been through a lot. A hell of a lot. And like I said, she had some sketchy years. But she got herself turned around. She’s a good kid.”
His phone rang a third time. “You should answer that,” John said.
“Yeah. This damn day job.” He stepped away and answered the call.
Reese waited, gazing across the street at the windows of the top floor apartment. The police report was heavy and damp in his hand. He’d read it when Fusco left, but he’d learned pretty much everything he needed to know about Christine Fitzgerald. She’d made bad choices, and then she’d made better choices. Like everyone.
And maybe those bad choices were coming back to hurt her.
Or maybe she was making new bad choices. That remained to
be seen.
Fusco put away his phone and came back. “Witness wants to change his story. He can wait, if you need me here.”
Reese shook his head. “She’s all tucked in. I’ll look after her.”
“If you want my help, anything at all, you let me know.”
He watched Fusco leave. Then he checked on the girl. She still hadn’t moved. She seemed to be ignoring everyone around her. As at the diner, she was folded up, making herself small.
The girl with a very visible life, and an equally invisible one. He remembered how cleanly she had played the rich men from Wall Street. He thought about her security windows, her steel doors with the heavy-duty locks. There was a way to put all those pieces together, and Reese didn’t like the picture it made.
But there were pieces that didn’t fit into that picture, either.
Finch was on his way. She’d crooked her little finger at him and he’d come running. A pretty woman with a book in her hand could trump Harold’s common sense every time; being drugged by the woman who was not Jordan Hester hadn’t taught him a thing. And he had a particular soft spot for this one.
Reese shook his head. He was going to have to be paranoid enough for both of them.
***
Kevin Frey’s phone rang as he was walking through the lobby. He grabbed it, checked the number. Swore under his breath. Answered it. “What?” he snapped.
“Where are my pictures?” the woman snarled.
“They’re safe.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Frey looked around the lobby. He didn’t see any unfamiliar faces. Yet. “I told you, the drive got corrupted. I’m recovering the files as fast as I can.”
“We need them now.”
“Working on it,” Frey said through clenched teeth. “I’ll send them as soon as they’re clean.”
There was a pause; Frey could almost hear his boss considering. “Bring it in. We’ll get a tech team on it.”
“I can’t do that,” he snapped. “If I take it out of here, someone will notice.”
“Send the files over.”
“I just told you they’re corrupted.”
There was another pause. “Tonight. I want the files tonight, corrupted or not.”
Frey blew out a relieved breath. “I’ll do what I can.”
“You’ll do what you’re told.” The phone went dead.
Outside on the sidewalk, Frey looked around again. Such a simple damn thing. And that idiot Dover had let it become so complicated. He’d left him alone for two damn weeks and he’d screwed up everything.
His side ached. Having your appendix out was no big deal any more, they said, but it still hurt.
But he could still fix this. She never needed to know that he’d lost the files. He could put everything back the way it was. He could keep his nice office and his shiny desk. It would all be okay.
He walked around the corner of the building and down the block. There was a pimped-out silver Cadillac parked in the back alley, under the ‘No Parking’ sign. Frey shook his head; could the man be any more of a cliché? Or any more obvious? He glanced around again. No one was watching him.
Garuccio was leaning against the car, his arms folded over his chest. “Hey.”
“Where’s the drive?”
“I got it,” Garuccio answered. He didn’t unfold his arm.
Frey hated the man’s eyes. They were too close together, too close to his nose. They made him look like a pig. “Can I have it, please?” he asked with exaggerated courtesy.
“I give you this drive,” the man said, “how do I know you give me what I need?”
“I told you I’d …”
“Yeah, I know what you told me. You told me a lot of things. You told me the business would run smooth. And I been off-line for a lot of time now.”
“If you want me to fix that,” Frey growled, “you’re going
to have to give me the drive.”
Garuccio finally unfolded his arms. He opened the back door of the car and brought out a duffle bag. Frey reached for it, but the man pulled it back. He unzipped the bag and brought out just the external hard drive.
“You get this,” he said. “I’m keeping the laptop until I see some results.”
“And what if what I need is on the laptop?”
“Then you call me and we meet somewhere that I can watch you work.”
Frey sighed. “You’re wasting time.”
“Maybe so.”
“You said time was money, right? Just give me everything. I’ll tell you when you’re back on-line.”
“Uh-uh. Get me results, then you get the rest.”
Frey looked up at the sky for a moment. It was cloudy, but it wouldn’t rain. He was surrounded by idiots. First Dover and now this gangster wanna-be. He was used to being the smartest person in the room, but lately the
weight of the stupid was killing him.
Maybe literally, he realized. If the files he needed weren’t on the hard drive, if he couldn’t get the pictures back to his superiors …
He shook his head. He was imagining things. It was the right drive, and it was all he needed. “Fine. I’ll let you know if I need the laptop.” He took the hard drive. “Now get out of here before someone starts asking why I’m meeting with a pimp.”
Garuccio smirked at him. His pig-like eyes disappeared when he smiled. “See you around, smart guy.”
Frey tucked the drive under his arm and hurried back inside.
Before he even got to his office, Karen Deiter hurried toward him. She was a woman of middle years and conservative dress, and despite her title of administrative assistant, she seemed to have a lot of authority. “Mr. Getty, you’re late for the seminar.”
Frey flinched. He’d forgotten all about the idiotic seminar. “Don’t have time.”
“It’s mandatory,” she reminded him. “Mr. Campanella’s looking for you. He sent me to find you.”
Frey swore under his breath. He was missing critical files, and that moron was going to make him attend a diversity seminar? “This is critical. I don’t have time.”
She stared at him. “I’m not going back there without you.” She dropped her chin. “You haven’t been in this job long enough to blow him off.”
The woman had been with the company a long time. She knew what she was talking about. It would suck up his whole afternoon, but if he was going to keep this cushy job he’d have to play the game. Besides, everything he needed should be right on the drive. It should be okay now. Better not to draw attention to himself. “You’re right,” he said apologetically. He went into his office and stuck the drive into a drawer. “You’re absolutely right. Thank you.”
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