August 2001
Bellows and his team weren’t happy about putting Daisy in the back of the car alone with him, but Harold was certain the girl was no threat. She was exhausted; her body had no energy reserves, and without her drugs she was simply drained. She huddled in the far corner, with her back to the door and her knees to her chest again.
He’d known she was an abused child the first time he saw her. Making herself as small as possible seemed to be an instinct now.
She smelled awful. He wondered if there was any way to get that smell out of the leather seats. Too late to worry about that.
“Please,” she said, very quietly. “Please just let me go.”
“No,” Harold answered, just as softly.
“Why?”
“Because you hacked my system.”
“I won’t do it again. I promise.” She took a deep breath, as if she were trying to draw energy from the air. “If you want to turn me over to the cops, I don’t care. Just don’t make me go to rehab. I can’t.”
“They’ll take very good care of you. I promise.”
She thought about it for a moment, tried again. “If I could just fix before we get there, I could get through. It’s not even a whole hit. Just enough to take the edge off. Please.”
“No.”
“I need it.”
“No.”
She ran her hand over her face. “Look, I’ll do whatever you want. Anything. Just let me have my bag, just look away for a minute, and then anything you want.”
Harold glanced at her. He knew exactly what she was offering. As if any sexual favor from a woman in her condition held the slightest enticement. The idea made him nauseous.
She read his answer in his expression and buried her face against her knees again. “Please,” she begged. “Please.”
“No.”
“Why do you hate me so much?”
He looked at her, surprised. “I don’t hate you. I’m perplexed by you. You clearly have an amazing mind. You could do anything you wanted to do. And instead you’ve decided to waste your life with drugs.”
“That’s my choice,” she said, with all the full-throated conviction only a teenage could muster.
“Of course it is. But instead of actually making a choice, you’re simply following in your father’s footsteps.”
“You leave him out of this. You don’t know him.”
He wondered if she knew she’d used the present tense; her father had been dead for three years. He’d tracked her history while he waited for his people to pick her up; he knew much of what had happened to her since her summer as an IFT intern. “I know how he died, Miss Buchanan. And I can see you dying very much the same way, very soon.”
“So what?”
“The world is full of stupid people. People who make terrible decisions because they simply don’t know any better, or because they can’t foresee the consequences of their actions. But you’re not one of them. You’re a very smart person doing very stupid things.”
“Whatever.”
Harold gestured out the car window. “There are people out there right now who would give anything, who would sell their souls for the kind of intelligence you have. And you’re throwing it away.”
“Like I said, my choice.”
“Have you taken even one minute to think about what you’re doing? Or are you just blindly mimicking your parents, running headlong into self-destruction?” She didn’t answer, so he continued. “Were they good parents, Miss Buchanan? Were they the kind of people you’d deliberately choose to pattern your life after? Did they ever put their child’s need ahead of their own? Or were they selfish and uncaring and neglectful? And stupid?” She coiled even tighter, put one arm over her head as if he’d struck her. “And if you were honest about what they were for even that one minute, why would you choose to be like them?”
She made a small sound of protest, somewhere between a hiccup and a sob.
“You have something they didn’t have. You have a good mind, a first-rate intellect. And if you’d stop abusing it, that mind could take you anywhere. You can be anything you want. You can have anything you want, go anywhere … your life could be anything you want it to be. Nothing is beyond your reach. Absolutely nothing.”
“Stop it,” she sobbed into her knees.
“You don’t have to die in the gutter just because your parents did. You already have everything you need to get out.”
She went absolutely still except for the occasional involuntary hiccup-sob. Harold wondered she’d heard a word he’d said. He wondered why he’d even bothered.
Because there had been one moment in the pizza shop when her eyes had showed him how very special she might have been -- but it was probably already too late.
And then she said, very softly, “It hurts.”
It was the simplest, most honest thing she’d said all evening. She wasn’t talking about her heroin withdrawal, Harold knew, though that was swiftly becoming painful, too. She was talking about her whole life. The abuse, the neglect. The schools that could not challenge her agile mind. The loneliness. The boredom. The fear. The alienation from a world that had no place for someone like her. Her parents’ deaths, her addiction, her utter denial of her own potential. He knew very well what she meant. Too well. Remembering hurt, too. It would always hurt.
The girl twisted around until she slipped to the floor of the car, then folded her arms on the seat and put her head on them. He could see tears shining on her cheeks, but she wept silently. “It hurts,” she said again, broken. She closed her eyes.
“I know,” he answered, just as softly. He put his hand out slowly, hesitated, then let it rest on her head. Her hair felt like straw. Beneath, her skin was fever-hot. He touched her very lightly; she seemed too fragile to bear even the full weight of his hand. But she sighed softly, as if the contact gave her some small measure of comfort.
I left my capacity for hope on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium. F. Scott Fitzgerald had written those words decades before. We’re not there yet, Harold thought. I have a little hope for her. But it was dim and fading. She was very wounded and very lost.
Perhaps five minutes passed before she opened her eyes again. Her bright green contacts were weirdly luminescent under the street lights. Harold thought she was looking at him, but when he tilted his head a little he could see that she was gazing past him, out the side window of the car, watching as they passed the tall buildings at the heart of Manhattan. She said, quietly and perhaps not to him, “Sometimes I think a big hand will appear in the sky and knock all the buildings down on top of me.”
Harold felt a shiver of premonition run up his spine. But it was nothing, he told himself. Nothing. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
She was silent for the rest of the drive.
When they stopped at the front entrance of the rehab facility, there were two large men in white waiting for her. The girl climbed out of the car without protest. She was pale, weak “ defeated. Harold felt like a beast. But every alternative he could think of ended badly for her. No mercy he offered her now would be any true mercy all. It would only hasten her death.
He walked around the back of the car, set her bag on the trunk and opened it. “I’m keeping the laptop. If you finish rehab you can come and get it.”
She stared at him dully. She was dwarfed between the two orderlies, and yet somehow managed to act like they were invisible. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Perhaps.”
“Can you get someone to take my library books back?”
Harold was completely unprepared for the tears that suddenly appeared in his eyes. He blinked quickly, grateful for his glasses. That was it, the source of that last ounce of hope he held out for her. That she still checked books out of the library instead of stealing them. That she still cared about something, however small. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised. He retrieved the books, gave the rest of the bag to the nearest orderly. “What she’s been using, there’s a little left in there.”
Daisy Buchanan gazed at him for one more long moment. She was calm now. Nothing left to fight for, no hope of winning. And yet he felt like she hadn’t given up, either. Otherwise she wouldn’t have cared about library fines.
She turned without a word and let the beefy men in white follow her into the building.
***
Two weeks later, late on a Sunday night, the director of the facility called Harold. He was apologetic about the late hour, and more apologetic to have to report that Miss Buchanan had disabled her supposedly tamper-proof tracker anklet, climbed a 15-foot fence, and walked away.
Harold assured the man that he’d expected something of the sort. In truth, he was surprised that she’d stayed even that long. He spent the night reinforcing every firewall and security aspect of the company’s vast networks.
On Monday DaisyB did not attempt to hack IFT.
On Tuesday morning, the giant hand she had predicted took the form of two commercial airliners and knocked down the World Trade Center buildings.
Though he had no reason to think that the young woman had been anywhere near Ground Zero, Harold was irrationally certain that he would never hear from Daisy Buchanan again.
***
2012
Reese moved to the window and watched her. Christine flopped down on the top step of the fire escape, with her back half to the window. She shook out a cigarette, lit it with a silver Zippo, took a long drag and then coughed harshly. He was relieved there weren’t any needles or vials; he would have had to stop her. Cigarettes “ and from the smell of the smoke, regular tobacco cigarettes “ could kill her eventually, but not right in front of him.
She cleared her lungs and tried again. The second time she didn’t cough.
“John,” Finch said softly.
Reese looked over his shoulder. Finch was frozen at his keyboard, looking toward the window with great concern. “She’s not going anywhere, Harold. She hasn’t got any shoes on.”
“I should have realized, I did realize, I just …” It would have killed Finch, John knew, to have surrendered control of his entire system the way he’d just asked Christine to do.
But the girl was not Finch. “She’s alright. Give her a minute.”
Christine held the lit end of the cigarette inward, concealed in the curve of her palm. It was the way soldiers smoked, to keep the glow from giving their position away in the dark. She’d learned to smoke from her father.
“Why does she get to you, Finch?” Harold looked at him mutely. “She makes you react before you think. You don’t have to tell me why, but you’d better figure it out for yourself.”
“I don’t have to figure it out,” Finch said bitterly. “I know why.” He paused. “I gave up on her.”
Reese waited.
“When they admitted her to rehab, she weighted seventy-one pounds. She was days, maybe a week, from dying. And when they told me she’d broken out, the first thing I did was reinforce my firewalls. I knew she was on the street, I knew she couldn’t survive there, and my first thought was to protect my computers.”
“Finch …”
“That wasn’t atypical behavior for me at the time. Even after the Towers came down I didn’t look for her, not for weeks. As long as she wasn’t a threat, she wasn’t … relevant.” He shrugged. “That was the kind of man I was. The kind that could give up on someone like her.”
“That’s not the kind of man you are now, though.”
“Isn’t it? She offered me hospitality and genuine gratitude, and I used them to emotionally blackmail her into letting us up here. I just bullied her into giving me full access to her systems.”
Reese shook his head. “She let you talk to Zelda because she wants to save the boy and she knows you’re her best chance. The girl’s not as fragile as you think she is, Finch. You want to feel bad because you didn’t try to save her a second time, go ahead. But look out the window first. She’s still here. The truth is, she didn’t need you to save her twice. Not until now, anyhow.”
Finch thought about it, nodded, not happily. “Do you believe her?”
“I think she’s telling us all she knows. I’m not sure it’s the whole story. This black web. Is it really worth killing someone over?”
“Absolutely. There’s pornography everywhere, free or cheap. To support a pay site, they’ve got to be supplying something very rare. And presumably very illegal. The files they think she has are valuable, but they’re replaceable. I’d guess that the real issue is avoiding prosecution. They want to be very sure that the data never reaches the police.” Finch stood up, touched the screen and brought up the picture of the boy again. “She’s right, you know. Our odds of finding this boy …” He shook his head.
“I know. But we can shut them down. Stop them from hurting any other children. And we will.”
“Yes.”
Reese glanced out the window again. “She doesn’t believe her life is in danger. It may be best to let her keep believing that.”
“For now, anyhow,” Finch agreed.
“Keep her inside, keep the doors locked. You’ll be safe enough.”
“Where are you going?”
“I think I’ll start with Larry Dover. Got an address for me?”
“Of course.” Finch sat back down at the keyboard. Then he paused, looked up, and spoke instead. “Zelda. Display an address for Larry Dover, please.”
“Of course, Mr. Finch,” the computer replied. The address came up on the screen.
“Aww, Finch, you’re evolving,” Reese teased gently. He glanced out the window. The girl was tapping out a second cigarette. He climbed out the window and sat down beside her.
Christine glanced over at him. “Want one?” She offered him the pack.
Reese took the pack, turned it in his hand. Camels, no filter. He squeezed it gently. Nothing solid concealed inside.
She knew exactly what he’d been checking for. “Told you. Not using, not holding.”
The cellophane outer wrapper was yellowed and crumbly. “They’re old.”
“They’re awful.” She took another long drag of smoke and held it.
“They sell these in stores now, you know. You could buy new ones.”
She shook her head, blew out the smoke in a cloud. “If they tasted good I’d go back to smoking two packs a day.” She lit the second cigarette from the butt of the first one, then crushed out the first but kept it in her hand.
“We will get these guys, Christine. We will track this network and we will shut them down. Whatever it takes.”
The woman studied him for a moment. Believed him. “Thank you.” And then, “Why?”
“Because someone needs to do it.”
That hadn’t been the ‘why’ she was asking, he knew, but after a moment she simply shook her head. “I could have made it so much easier.”
“You screwed up,” Reese agreed. “But you’ll be more help if you stop beating yourself up and get your head back in the game.”
“Easier said than done.”
“I know.” He looked down the alley below them, wondered if she could see the spot where her father had died from here. “Why do you live here?”
Christine sighed. “You know, on any other day the amount that you two know about me would totally freak me out.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.” She took another deep drag, then crushed out the second cigarette, though it was only half gone. “There are tunnels from the basement to an old speak-easy. They’re a great place to hide the meth lab.”
Reese stared at her, and after a moment she relented.
“Because it’s safe here.”
“The doors and the windows. And the big guy downstairs.”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant. It’s emotionally safe.” She began to field-strip the butts: peeled back the papers, shook loose the unburned tobacco, rolled the wrappers into a tiny balls before she tossed them away. She never looked at them while she worked; he was quite sure she was unaware of what she was doing. “Nothing worse is ever going to happen to me here.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at it.” John considered for a moment. There was a certain logic in it. He thought for an instant about buying Jessica’s empty house in New Rochelle. About trying to live there, in her rooms, in her place, knowing that no greater grief could ever visit him there.
His mind recoiled so sharply that he felt nauseous.
Christine said, gently, “Are you okay?”
Reese took a deep breath, got his own emotions firmly under control. “It can’t be good for you. Not in the long term.”
“We are not,” she said firmly, “going to discuss my housing choices right now.”
“Maybe later then.” He put his feet out, prepared to stand up. “Come on, back to work. I’ve got places to go.”
“To quote ,u>Chess, so I am not dangerous then? What a shame.”
“Hmmm?” he answered, with as much innocence as he could muster, which wasn’t much.
“That’s what this conversation’s been about, isn’t it? And why you came into the café in the first place?”
Reese sat back. He shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d fallen into the same trap as the men on Wall Street: She was pretty and sweet and straight-forward, and he’d been lulled into dismissing her intelligence. “Well … yes.” In a way, he liked being caught out by her.
“I’m not a threat to Random. He’s the last person on Earth that I’d hurt.”
“Random?”
“Finch.”
“I believe you.” He looked toward the street again. “That doesn’t mean you’re not dangerous. I’m starting to think you’re dangerous in a way I’ve never seen before. But not physically, not to him. And beyond that, he’s on his own.” He thought about it. “I think you’re probably more dangerous to yourself. You need to learn to let go of your past.”
“Mmmm.” She took out her lighter again, toyed with it. “How long you been out of the Army?”
“Long time.”
“And your hair just never got any longer, huh?”
He saw what she was getting at, of course. Ruefully, he ran his hand through his just-barely-longer-than-regulation hair. “I grew it out once. Grew a beard, too. It was itchy.”
“Uh-huh.” But she smiled, just a little.
“You might have a point. And if I’d smoked, I’d probably still be field-stripping my butts, too.”
“I didn’t … “She looked at her hands, startled. “I didn’t even know I did that.”
Reese rolled to his feet, put his hand out to help her up. “Let’s go. You don’t want to leave Finch alone with Zelda any longer than this anyhow.”
***
Larry Dover lived in a tiny house on a quiet street. The yard was a little overgrown, the paint faded, the windows dirty. Reese walked to the garage and peered through the tiny window. There was a black sedan parked inside. He moved to the back door and listened. Only silence inside. He forced the door open and stepped inside.
The smell hit him like a fist.
John stopped and pushed the door all the way open to let a little fresh air move through. There was nothing quite like the smell of a rotting human body. It was unmistakable, distinct even from any other large dead animal. The odor started very soon after death and grew stronger every hour. This body had been dead a long time.
He covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief and went inside.
The kitchen was messy and cluttered. There were dirty dishes on the counter and the table, and stacked in the sink. The trash can was overflowing. All of the cupboard doors were partially open; there were two sets of drawers, and the bottom drawer on each was open.
The top drawer nearest the phone, the one with the papers and pens and rubber bands, was sitting on the counter top. All the contents were pushed to one side.
Reese moved through the doorway. The man’s body was sprawled on his back in the archway between the living room and the dining room. He’d been wearing sweat pants and a white t-shirt when he died; the body was so bloated that the shirt was stretched tight and part of his belly was exposed. He had one arm at his side, the other extended out. John couldn’t see any evidence of violence to the body. There was no blood pool under him; he considered turning the corpse over to check for wounds and decided against it.
The dining room table was as cluttered as everything else. One of the chairs was pulled out, set with its back to the table. He bent to look at the arms. There were clear, fresh marks at both ends, straight horizontal lines. Someone had been bound to the chair, probably with zip ties, and had tried to get loose. John looked more closely at the dead man’s outstretched arm. His wrist was too swollen to tell if there were any ligature marks.
He looked around the room. There was the standard furniture, but it was buried under piles of papers. There were file folders, magazines, catalogues, old newspapers. Most of it, Reese thought, looked like junk. All of it looked like it had been gone through. The doors of the side cupboard were open, and so was the drawer of the coffee table.
He kept going to the bedroom. The bed wasn’t made; there were dirty clothes on the floor. The closet was open and all the hanging clothes had been shoved to one side. The dresser drawers had been dumped.
Across the hall was another small room. It contained a big easy chair and a super-sized flatscreen TV, in an entertainment center that covered an entire wall. It also had a desk with a laptop on it, and a separate flatscreen monitor. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was largely uncluttered. Reese shook his head. You could tell what people cared about by what they took care of.
The doors of the entertainment center were all open. Within were dozens of DVD cases. They all seemed to have hand-made labels. Across the top shelf was a row of plastic VHS cases. Reese looked down at the TV. It had a DVD slot, but no VHS. It was possible, of course, that Dover had never gotten around to getting rid of his old media. He wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Beside the unit was a trash can; John could see dozens of plain white envelopes, all torn open by hand. He looked closer at the plastic cases. There were tracks in the dust in front of them. Gingerly, he used the handkerchief to take down the case with the lightest coating of dust and opened it.
It was full of hundred dollar bills.
Reese touched his phone. “Finch?”
“I’m here.”
“Are we alone?”
“Mostly.”
“Dover’s dead. He was tied to a chair, but he may have died of natural causes. He’s been dead a while. Several days to a week.”
“I see.” Finch’s tone was completely neutral; Reese knew the girl was right beside him. But he was also calm, so apparently there’d been no new drama at Chaos. He hadn’t expected any.
“The place has been tossed, but not by professionals. Probably they were looking for a web address.”
“Almost certainly.”
“And I found Dover’s retirement fund. He was getting paid in cash, I would guess for letting them run the black web.”
“I see.”
“I don’t suppose the box has shown up.”
Finch sighed. “No.”
“Send me the laptop’s location, then. I’ll see if they’re still together.”
“Sending it now. Should I notify our friends about the situation?”
“About Dover? There’s no rush. He’s not going anywhere.” Reese checked the message on his screen. “How’s our girl?”
“Quiet,” Finch answered. “But very observant.”
“Good luck with that, Finch.”
“Thank you.”
Reese tucked his phone away and gladly left the house.
***
“Was that Reese?”
“Yes.” Finch continued to study the code they’d separated out of the second sample file. He hadn’t liked the big touch-screens when he first saw them, but he had to admit that being able to stand up and move data around with his fingertips was helpful in this instance.
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh.” Christine leaned her hip on the stool she’d dragged over from the breakfast bar. “That’s how we’re going to be, huh?”
“If it’s something you need to know, I promise I’ll tell you.” She didn’t answer. “It’s strange,” Finch said, without looking at her. “I can almost hear the gears turning in your head.”
“Can you?”
“You’re trying to calculate the best approach to persuade me.”
“Nope.” She folded her hands in front of her in a distinctly child-like manner. “Obviously you think that I’m too emotionally fragile to hear it. And as I’ve submitted myself to your clearly superior judgment for the day, I will abide that decision. I’ll just … sit here quietly … and continue to wallow in self-doubt.”
He did look at her then. A trace of mischief pulled at the corners of her mouth and danced undeniably in her eyes. “That was good,” Finch conceded. “An excellent attempt.”
“Best I could do on short notice.” She shrugged, gave up for the moment. “What are you seeing?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that you didn’t see. I wonder, though … you said you had Zelda sifting for content?”
“Yeah. But since the top layer is video, she’s not able to pull many useful images. From her point of view it’s all images.”
“Then we need to refine her point of view.” He sat down in front of the keyboard. “Show me the program you’re using.”
Christine leaned over his shoulder and brought up a program. He scanned through the lines of code, understood immediately how it worked. “Did you write this?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good. May I?”
“Of course.”
He moved the cursor up near the top of the program and began to insert his own lines of code. “This should allow her to tag where each image is found. In essence to separate by layers.” He was intensely aware that Christine continued to hover over his shoulder, that she was watching every keystroke. And worse, understanding it. The part of him that demanded secrecy shuddered at her proximity. But there was another side, too, that reveled in it. She would understand how good it was.
It had its appeal, and the appeal set off his internal alarms. He shifted just a little, raised one shoulder.
Christine inexplicably, perhaps instinctively, read the gesture and responded perfectly. She moved away, settled back on her stool, and watched the re-coding on the big screen rather than over his shoulder.
She was still watching, Finch thought. Nothing had changed. But having her physically away from him calmed his alarm. She was watching now because he chose to let her watch. That was easier.
What he couldn’t figure out was how she’d known exactly what to do.
And, too, why she’d done it. It was, after all, her system he was working with.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to concentrate on the coding. A line here, a tweak there. Half a line. Coding was second nature to him, practically instinct, and meshing his new code into hers was effortless; her coding was clean, near-elegant in its simplicity. Six lines at the end. He looked over the revised program. Added one more line. Less than a minute elapsed in real time.
He glanced at the woman. “Nice,” she said warmly.
Stop trying to impress the girl, Finch told himself firmly. Stop being pleased when it works. “Zelda,” he said, “run the revised program.”
The thumbnail pictures on the screen began to flash as the computer processed them.
Christine stood up and walked toward the door. “Do you want some tea? I’ve only got the one-cup junk up here, but I can have Igor …”
“No!” Finch barked.
She froze with her hand on the door lever, turned to look at him.
“I don’t …”He worked to make his voice calmer. “We don’t want you to leave the apartment right now.”
She didn’t move, and for an instant Finch could see her tensing. Getting ready to run. The situation had shifted in the space of one sharp word. She remembered, of course, that once he’d held her against her will “ how could she not remember? But this time he couldn’t stop her. A few steps was all she needed. She could get away.
“Please,” he said.
She took her hand away from the lever. Her body relaxed. She walked to the little kitchen. “Crap tea it is, then,” she said, as if nothing had happened.
Finch stood and walked to the breakfast bar. “Christine,” he said quietly. “I’m not keeping you captive here.”
“I know.” She kept her hands busy with the little brewer. She met his eyes briefly, then looked away. “I’m doing better, huh? With the impulse control? Trying to actually think before I act.”
“You are,” Finch agreed.
She pushed a mug of tea towards him, turned back to the cupboard for a sugar bowl and a spoon. Then she got another mug and brewed herself a cup of coffee. “I would do even better,” she said evenly, “if I had all the information that should factor into my thinking.”
Finch stirred his tea, took a sip. It was, as she’d promised, a miserable imitation of real tea. If she’d stomped her feet, if she’d raged and screamed and demanded to know what was going on, it would have been easy to resist her. But her calm and polite behavior was very persuasive. And, too, he knew she was like him: The more information she had, the better she’d be able to deal with whatever happened. After a moment, he conceded. “Larry Dover is dead. He’s been dead for at least several days. It may have been natural causes. But his house was searched, possibly robbed.”
Christine thought about it for a moment. As he’d anticipated, she remained calm. “And … that didn’t rise to the level of things you thought I needed to know?”
“You’re safe here, at least for now.”
She put her mug on the counter. “Downstairs, you tried to tell me that my life was in danger.”
“Yes.”
“But that was before you knew Dover was dead. So how did you know?”
“That’s … complicated.”
“And Reese was watching me in the restaurant before the robbery here even happened.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. He could see that she was picking over the details in her mind, making the connections. “Random’s higher calling,” she finally said. “You said it was me right now. Which implies that it’s … other people, at other times.”
There was no point in lying to her now. “Yes.”
“You’re not Random,” Christine pronounced solemnly. “You’re the freaking Batman.”
It was such an unexpected response that Finch had to chuckle. “Not exactly.”
“Pretty damn close.”
“There may be similarities.”
She gazed across the room, past the computer screens and out the window. Finch waited. Gave her time to process. And prepared to head her off if she pursued the whole issue any further. If that was possible.
Finally she nodded, mostly to herself. “I don’t suppose I can go have another smoke, can I?”
“I would really prefer that you didn’t.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Now what?”
Finch took a deep breath of his own. Anyone could ask questions. Knowing what questions not to ask was a special talent, and thankfully one that she was blessed with. “Now we do what we do.”
“We dig in the data.”
“We dig in the data.”
***
The seminar ended with group discussion. Kevin Frey kept his mouth tightly closed. If he opened it, he knew he was going to scream in frustration. No, it wasn’t harassment to ask a co-worker on a date. Yes, it was harassment to tell her she’d be fired if she didn’t say yes. No, it wasn’t harassment to post pictures of you and a co-worker at a party. Yes, it was harassment if the co-worker was drunk and semi-dressed. It was all common sense, or should have been. Frey had no intention of socializing with anyone at the company, anyhow, so he just didn’t care.
All the chatter was keeping him from the box. From doing his real job.
He watched Campanella across the room. The man was intelligent, successful, wealthy. He was also, in Frey’s mind, one of the most naïve men he’d ever met. He was listening to every word the presenter said. Carefully considering the comments of his employees. Paying attention to the culture of his company. Nurturing an atmosphere … Frey wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him. Stop being such an idiot, he wanted to scream. Not one of these people would be here if you didn’t pay them.
He glanced at his watch. It was after four; this thing had to wrap up soon. Campanella didn’t like to keep his people late. He wanted them to be home with their families. In a town where people routinely worked eighty hours a week, Campanella actively discouraged overtime. He stressed balance over ambition.
The weird thing was, people seemed to get just as much work done.
Frey shrugged. The man’s management philosophy didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was a sucker, and it had been easy for Dover to run his operation under his radar, until he got careless. And it was easy for Frey to run his under Dover’s. Until the damn girl showed up.
He had to get back to that box. Get Garuccio his files, get his boss his photos. It should be simple. He just needed to get out of this room.
Finally, finally the speaker wrapped up her program. Frey stood up and eased toward the door ahead of the crowd. He’d skip the elevator, he decided, and take the stairs to his office. It was only two floors. It would be faster …
“Matthew!” Campanella said heartily. His hand settled on his shoulder. “How are you settling in?”
“Fine,” Frey said. “Just fine. There are still a few issues to work out, but it’s going well.”
“Good. Good. We’re going out for cocktails. You should come with us.”
Frey tried to laugh. “I’d love to, Mr. Campanella, but I …”
“Sam.”
“Sam. I’d love to, but I really have to get a little work done. I’ve got a couple processes running that I need to …”
The man pulled him closer, a little away from the throng. “Matthew, I know you’re very dedicated, and you’re trying to make a good impression. But if you want to move up in the world “ not just here, but everywhere “ you’re going to have to get out of that office and socialize a little.”
“I know that, Mr. … Sam. But right now I’m a little over my head.”
“And the problems will still be there tomorrow. Tonight you need to come out and be with the other managers. Let them get used to seeing you in your new role. It’s important, Matthew.” He hesitated. “Maybe if I’d kept Larry a little closer, hadn’t let him be such a loner …” He shook his head. “This is important to me, Matthew. As important as the computers are.”
Frey took a deep breath. “Then of course I’ll come with you. Just give me a few minutes to shut some things down.”
“Good. Good.” Campanella patted his shoulder and finally released him. “Ten minutes, in the lobby. Don’t make me send Karen after you again. She’s not nearly as pleasant the second time she has to do something.”
“I’ll remember that,” Frey promised. He slipped out the door and hurried to the stairway.
Once behind the steel door, he put his forehead against the cool concrete wall. All I wanted, he thought, was a cushy office and a network to run our stuff through. What the hell did I do to deserve a mentor?
He ground his teeth and let a small scream of frustration slip between them. Then he sprinted up the stairs to his office.
***
Click here to visit the official POI website 'CBS:POI'.
Click here to register and post POI fics 'Register'.
Click here to read the latest POI fics 'Recently Added'.
|