Generation of Liars (18 page)

Rabbit reached into his pocket and
pulled out a small earpiece. “This.”

“What’s that? Some kind of bug?”

“This is a listening device. It’s
how I will communicate to you. You will pop it in your ear and listen for my
directions, since I will have blueprints to the building while I do
surveillance from the car. The codename for it is June bug.”

“So far my hair is blue and this
mission stinks, so I’m renaming it the Stink bug.” I popped the newly named Stink
bug into my ear. “How does it work?”

“I will be able to communicate
directions to you, and if you need to talk to me, it can pick up sounds on your
end too.”

“Now only one thing remains for me
to know, and that is how the heck I am supposed to destroy the servers once I’m
inside.”

“Ah,” Rabbit said brightly. He
dropped down to his knees beside the bed and carefully slid out a black
briefcase from underneath. “I was hoping you would ask.”

“What’s in the briefcase?”

He drummed his fingers over the
briefcase and announced, “A very sophisticated acid solution that will destroy
anything it comes into contact with.” He popped open the briefcase and showed
me a set of silver flasks that contained the highly dangerous acid that I would
be using to evaporate the information on the servers. “Don’t mess around with
these, Alice. Don’t breathe it in and don’t get it on your skin. This has to be
a clean mission or you will be hurting.”

“I don’t need a safety lecture. I’m
not a freaking two-year-old. Plus, I am the girl who mastered climbing down the
Eiffel Tower. I think I can handle myself.”

“You only climbed down part of the
way. And I realize you’re not a two-year-old, but this is serious stuff, and
you had trouble handling a ballpoint ink pen without incident.”

“You really get a kick out of
making me look bad, don’t you?”

“Listen, we need to get a move on
this. Employees usually start piling into Cibix by eight A.M. and it’s getting
close.”

“One more question.”

“What?”

“Walking down to the server room to
check it out might not attract attention since the badge makes me official, but
I’m pretty sure Cibix has security cameras positioned on something as valuable
as the Project Nine servers. How am I going to splash the servers with acid
without security seeing and rushing to detain me?”

“I managed to find a route to hack
the security camera circuits in the building. I am going to freeze the picture
on the cameras inside the server room so that your activity doesn’t get
captured.”

I cuffed my fingers around the
briefcase handle and we made our way down to the lobby and outside to the
parking garage attached to the Hilton. We hopped into our rental car and Rabbit
glided us into the congested morning traffic. It was raining, and large aqua
raindrops settled on the windshield like glassine jewels. 

I flipped the sun visor down in
front of my face and looked into the vanity mirror so that I was gazing into my
own fluttering green eyes. The skin around them appeared gossamer, purple and
white, like the surface of a thin seashell. “I look exhausted,” I muttered. “It
must be all the travelling. I can’t believe my hair is freaking blue.”

Rabbit ignored me, his eyes were
pinching together to define the blurry, rain-obscured traffic through the
windshield. He turned onto Avenue of the Americas and stopped the car about a
quarter-block’s distance from the Cibix main entrance.

My eyes studied the dripping
windshield. “Rabbit, can’t you drop me off any closer? It’s pouring out.”

“It’s only a drizzle. You will be
fine.”

“I am not stepping out of this car
and walking into my first day at a new job looking like a wet rat, dragged in
from the gutter. It’s unprofessional. Pull up closer!”

“Someone is really getting into her
role as a corporate drone.”

“Well, I’ve never worked in an
office before and I want to make a good impression.”

“You do realize you don’t actually
work at Cibix, don’t you?”

“I realize that. Will you please
pull up closer?”

“Fine, fine,” he said, checking his
mirrors and pulling back into traffic.

The car crawled the length of the
Cibix building, turning into a gated parking lot with a sign that read: CIBIX
EMPLOYEE PARKING. Rabbit let the car idle as I climbed out. He rolled down the
window and poked his head out to tell me one more time, “Serious, Alice.
Remember that this is serious.”

Rabbit gunned it out of the parking
lot and I scampered across the pavement towards the entrance. Towering over the
VIP parking area was an American flag, intertwined with a yellow flag
displaying the Cibix logo, which was a small squiggly tornado. Both flags were
currently being battered by the wind that accompanied the dreary rain drizzle.

The men and women treading inside
the doors were dressed mostly in black, as though already morning the loss of
their day, and they gripped briefcases and paper coffee cups with the Starbucks
label. I imagined that they were off to plan big mergers, roll our new
products, and win new customers. Actually, I had no idea what people in
corporate America really did. I was a professional liar, so my cubicle was
whatever millionaire’s yacht I was causing a dust up in at the moment.

As I made my way towards the
entrance, an empty soda can rolled to my feet and bounced off the tip of my
shoe. I sidestepped it just in time to avoid it barreling underneath my feet
and tripping me. I looked down, puzzled, at the wayward can. It appeared to
have rolled from a tank-like dumpster located on the perimeter of the parking
lot. It seemed specifically destined to hit my feet.

I noticed a man hauling a load of
trash from the dumpster, and when he turned his face upwards, the sparse sun
caught against the waxy surface of his bald head.

I adjusted the Stink bug in my ear.
“What’s with the backup?” I asked Rabbit.

“What do you mean?”

“I just spotted Moonboots
McCafferty dressed in janitor’s garb, unloading Cibix’s trash into the dumpster
in the parking lot. He nearly killed me with a rogue soda can.”

“Motley must have thought we needed
backup in case things get hairy.”

There was a strange commotion from
the other end of the parking lot.

“Oh, and you’re not going to
believe this,” I said with a tired grunt, “but I just spotted a six-foot tall
security guard with a nasty Irish accent yelling at some guy for dumping his
Starbucks cup in the trash instead of the recycle bin.”

“Xerxes O’Brien? Motley called in
Xerxes too? Are you sure?”

“Positive. I mean how many enormous
Irish guys with a beard as red as a barn are there in this city?”

“It’s probably for the best that
they are here.”

Chapter Twelve: The Corporate Grind

I
CROSSED INTO the Cibix lobby with the black briefcase leveled at my hip just as
Rabbit’s voice kicked in on the Stink bug again. “Good morning, all Cibix
employees. The weather report for today, as always, is stale recycled air. The
employee cafeteria will be serving limp fish sticks. For consistency sake, your
boss will still be a blowhard. And remember, stale coffee will be available all
day long, so we encourage you to stay for some unpaid over time.”

I smiled, even though I was fully
committed to still hating Rabbit. “What direction?” I hushed for Rabbit to hear
through the Stink bug.

“Go straight through the lobby and
then round a left at the receptionist’s desk.”

The receptionist was filing her
nails and speaking into one of those bulbous headsets that made her look like
she either was manning the Starfleet Enterprise or taking orders at a fast food
drive thru window. “Then what?”

“You’re going to see an arrow with
a plaque underneath it that points to Finance on the fourteenth floor. Take the
elevator up.”

I did as Rabbit instructed and
climbed into the elevator. There was a man standing inside already. He was the
personification of a midlife crisis. As I stepped onboard, he looked up me up
and down with his dull, beady eyes. He had thin greasy hair that he had
obnoxiously combed over to one side in a failed attempt to conceal his balding,
and he wore an ill-fitting shirt that didn’t make an accommodation for the
twenty pounds or so of fat that had accumulated onto his gut since he started
his career three decades ago. Every office had one, I figured. When the
elevator let me off on the fourteenth floor, I could feel his eyes burning into
my backside as I stepped into the hallway.

“Take a right,” Rabbit instructed.
I did, and then I followed the sign for the Finance quadrant. “Debra Light’s
cubicle is all the way in the back on the left.”

Upon arrival, I noticed that the
path to step inside my cube was partially blockaded by a pile of expired printer
toner and that spider webs hung from its corners like laced curtains. “You
couldn’t spring for a lofty corner office with a window?”

“It was the only vacant one in the
department. They’ve had a recent hiring spree. I guess with the new government
contract they needed to
up
the workflow.”

“It’s not like I’m going to be here
long.”

“There is a small pocket on the
outside of your briefcase. I need you to reach inside, there’s a surprise for
you.”

I slid my hand into the mesh pocket
and pulled out a name plate that said: Debra Light, Accounting, along with a
framed picture of Debra Light’s husband - if Debra’s husband were Rabbit. I did
my best to suppress my laughter as I stared at the dorky picture of Rabbit
posed beside a fireplace, wearing a tacky argyle sweater.

“Cute touch,” I remarked as I
wiggled into my chair.

“Who are you talking to?” asked a
female voice from behind me.

I spun my chair around to see a
vision of a middle-aged woman. Her hair was stiffened by Aqua Net and her pudgy
body was swathed in an outdated blazer. Her figure was squared off by a set of
unnecessary shoulder pads, which gave her the appearance of a linebacker. She
was sipping coffee from a mug which had an image of a fuzzy kitten wearing
sunglasses.

I straightened my posture and
smoothed my hair around my face. “Hello. Do you need some accounting done?” I
asked the woman. I supposed it was a realistic question for an accountant to
ask.

“Is today your first day?” she
asked.

“Not technically.”

“But I’ve never seen you before and
I sit right over there.” She pointed to the cubicle with three feet of drab
braided brown carpet between it and my own. I noted the presence of a cat
calendar pinned to the outside wall and framed pictures of cats showcasing
around the computer monitor.   

I nervously smoothed the hair
around my face, battling imaginary flyaway strands. “My first day here,
here
.
I’ve just been transferred from the Paris office to work on Project Nine.” What
I wanted to tell her was that I wasn’t in the mood for questions from Shoulder
Pads, the one-woman welcoming committee.

“I didn’t know we had offices in
Paris.” I saw her brow furrow, but then her expression lightened as she
remarked, “but we’re such a big company, the right hand never knows what the
left earlobe is doing.” The laugh she followed up with was violent enough to
for her to exert a snort. “But I don’t have to tell you how sucky management
is. Probably the Paris bosses are just as bad as here.”

I nodded in fervent agreement. “The
worst. Last year at my review, my manager made a big fuss just because I have
blue hair. It cost me my Christmas bonus.”

“A Christmas bonus is a sacred
thing.” I gave a wounded nod and she continued. “And for having blue hair?
That’s some kind of discrimination right there. What if you had some sort of
illness that turned your hair blue? What if you were taking some of that,
what’s it called, colloidal silver, to keep healthy? I saw a man on the
Oprah
show once, turned his skin blue with that stuff, but probably he will live
to be a hundred years old. Tell ya what, I would march to Human Resources and
threaten a lawsuit if I was you.”

“I might just do that,” I said.

“Why did they transfer you over
here anyway? They’re pretty hush-lipped on Project Nine to those of us not in
on the operation. The rumor is that it’s something about a top secret
government project.”

“They needed some of my financial
expertise, which is extensive, by the way, for allocating funds for research
and development.”

“Gosh, it must be a real
high
priority project, because they are just bringing you in by the truckload,
aren’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the second new one that
showed up just today. Blondie-locks over there reported in this morning for the
same project.” She pointed to a cubicle on the other side of the room, where a
buxom blonde was sitting; her ample figure was shoved into a conservative
pinstriped blazer. The overstressed buttons on her ensemble looked ready to
give out under the cleaving pressure of her chest. As if on cue, the devilish
woman turned her attention from tapping her keyboard and did an antagonistic
wave in my direction.

“
Her
again,” I whined.

“You know her?”

I leaned into Shoulder Pads, my
nostrils accessing the faint smell of cat urine that was embedded into her
clothing. “I heard they hired her in from the competition, so don’t trust her.”

“I would never trust a woman
wearing anything that tight.”

Rabbit came back on in my ear.
“Okay, Alice, enough hanging around the water cooler. Time to work.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Shoulder
Pads, “I need to go make some copies.” I grabbed my briefcase and shot up from
my chair and crossed the barracks of cubicles that extended to the hallway
where the elevators were located. “The blonde is here,” I murmured into the
microphone.