Paranoia (17 page)

“It’s my money, Dad.” Then I added, feebly, “It’s an investment.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, you think I’m an
idiot?
An
investment?
”

“Dad, look, I just got a huge promotion. I’m working at Trion Systems for, like, twice the salary I was getting at Wyatt, okay?”

He looked at me shrewdly. “What kinda money they paying you, you can throw away five
thousand
—Jesus, I can’t even say it.”

“They’re paying me a lot, Dad. And if I want to throw my money away, I’ll throw it away. I’ve earned it.”

“You’ve earned it,” he repeated with thick sarcasm. “Any time you want to pay me back for”—he took a breath—“I don’t know
how
many tens of thousands of dollars I dumped on you, be my guest.”

I came this close to telling him then how much money I threw his way, but I pulled back just in time. The momentary victory wouldn’t be worth it. Instead I told myself over and over, this is not your dad. It’s an evil cartoon version of Dad, animated by Hanna-Barbera, distorted out of recognition by prednisone and a dozen other mind-altering substances. But of course I knew that wasn’t quite true, that this really was the same old asshole, just with the dial turned up a couple of notches.

“You’re living in a fantasy world,” Dad went on, then took a loud breath. “You think just ’cause you buy the two-thousand-dollar suits and the five-hundred-dollar shoes and the five-thousand-dollar watches you’re going to become one of
them
, don’t you?” He took a breath. “Well, let me tell you something. You’re wearing a fucking Halloween costume, that’s all. You’re dressing up. I tell you this ’cause you’re my son and no one else is going to give it to you straight. You’re nothing more than an ape in a fucking tuxedo.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I mumbled. I noticed Antwoine tactfully walking out of the room. My face went all red.

He’s a sick man, I told myself. He has end-stage emphysema. He’s dying. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“You think you’re ever gonna be one of them? Boy, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You think they’re gonna take you in and let you join their private clubs and screw their daughters and play fucking
polo
with them.” He sucked in a tiny lungful of air. “But
they
know who you are, son, and where you come from. Maybe they’ll let you play in their sandbox for a while, but as soon as you start to forget who you really are, someone’s going to fucking remind you.”

I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. He was driving me crazy. “It doesn’t work that way in the business world, Dad,” I said patiently. “It’s not like a club. It’s about making money. If you help them make money, you fulfill a need. I’m where I am because they need me.”

“Oh, they
need
you,” Dad repeated, drawing out the word, nodding. “That’s a good one. They need you like a guy taking a shit needs a piece of toilet paper, you unnerstand me? Then when they’re done wiping away their shit, they flush. Lemme tell you, all they care about is winners, and they know you’re a loser and they’re not going to let you forget it.”

I rolled my eyes, shook my head, didn’t say anything. A vein throbbed at my temple.

A breath. “And you’re too stupid and full of yourself to know it. You’re living in a goddamned fantasy world, just like your mother. She always thought she was too good for me, but she wasn’t shit. She was dreaming. And you ain’t shit. You went to a fancy prep school for a couple of years, and you got a high-priced do-nothing college degree, but you still ain’t shit.”

He took a deep breath, and his voice seemed to soften a little. “I tell you this because I don’t want you to be fucked over the way they fucked me over, son. Like that fucking candy-ass prep school, the way all the rich parents looked down on me, like I wasn’t one of them. Well, guess what. Took me a while to figure it out, but they were right. I wasn’t one of them. Neither are you, and the sooner you figure it out, the better off you’ll be.”

“Better off, like you,” I said. It just slipped out.

He stared at me, his eyes beady. “At least I know who I am,” he said. “You don’t fucking know who you are.”

28

The next morning was Sunday, my only chance to sleep late, so of course Arnold Meacham insisted on meeting me early. I’d replied to his daily e-mail using the name “Donnie,” which told him I had something to deliver. He e-mailed right back, told me to be at the parking lot of a particular Home Depot at nine
A.M
. sharp.

There were a lot of people here already—not everyone slept late on Sunday—buying lumber and tile and power tools and bags of grass seed and fertilizer. I waited in the Audi for a good half hour.

Then a black BMW 745i pulled into the space next to mine, looking a little out of place among the pickup trucks and SUVs. Arnold Meacham was wearing a baby-blue cardigan sweater and looked like he was on his way to play golf somewhere. He signaled for me to get into his car, which I did, and I handed him a CD and a file folder.

“And what do we have here?” he asked.

“List of AURORA Project employees,” I said.

“All of them?”

“I don’t know. At least some.”

“Why not all?”

“It’s forty-seven names there,” I said. “It’s a decent start.”

“We need the complete list.”

I sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.” I paused for a second, torn between not wanting to tell the guy anything I didn’t have to—the more I told him, the more he’d push me—and wanting to brag about how much progress I’d been making. “I have my boss’s passwords,” I finally said.

“Which boss? Lundgren?”

“Nora Sommers.”

He nodded. “You use the software?”

“No, the Keyghost.”

“What’ll you do with them?”

“Search her archived e-mail. Maybe go into her MeetingMaker and find out who she meets with.”

“That’s penny-ante shit,” Meacham said. “I think it’s time to penetrate AURORA.”

“Too risky right now,” I said, shaking my head.

“Why?”

A guy rolled a shopping cart stacked with green bags of Scott’s starter fertilizer by Meacham’s window. Four or five little kids ran around behind him. Meacham looked over, electrically rolled up his window, turned back to me. “Why?” he repeated.

“The badge access is separate.”

“For Christ’s sake, follow someone in, steal a badge, whatever. Do I need to put you back in basic training?”

“They log all entries, and every entrance has a turnstile, so you can’t just sneak in.”

“What about the cleaning crew?”

“There’s also closed-circuit TV cameras trained on every entry point. It’s not so easy. You don’t want me to get caught, not now.”

He seemed to back down. “Jesus, the place is well defended.”

“You could probably learn a trick or two.”

“Fuck you,” he snapped. “What about HR files?”

“HR’s pretty well protected too,” I said.

“Not like AURORA. That ought to be relatively easy. Get us the personnel files on everyone you can who’s associated in any way with AURORA. At least the people on this list.” He held up the CD.

“I can try for it next week.”

“Do it tonight. Sunday night’s a good time to do it.”

“I’ve got a big day tomorrow. We’re making a presentation to Goddard.”

He looked disgusted. “What, you’re too busy with your cover job? I hope you haven’t forgotten who you really work for.”

“I’ve got to be up to speed. It’s important.”

“All the more reason why you’d be in the office working tonight,” he said, and he turned the key in the ignition.

29

Early that evening I drove to Trion headquarters. The parking garage was almost entirely empty, the only people there probably security, the people who manned the twenty-four-hour ops centers, and the random work-crazed employee, like I was pretending to be. I didn’t recognize the lobby ambassador, a Hispanic woman who didn’t look happy to be there. She barely looked at me as I let myself in, but I made a point of saying hi, looking harried or sheepish or something. I went up to my cubicle and did a little real work, some spreadsheets on Maestro sales in the region of the world they call EMEA, for Europe/Middle East/Asia. The trend lines weren’t good, but Nora wanted me to massage the numbers to bring out whatever encouraging data points I could.

Most of the floor was dark. I even had to switch on the lights in my area. It was unnerving.

Meacham and Wyatt wanted the personnel files on everyone in AURORA. They wanted to find out each person’s employment history, which would tell them what companies they were all hired from and what they did at their last jobs. It was a good way to suss out what AURORA was all about.

But it wasn’t as if I could just saunter into Human Resources, pull open some file cabinets, and pluck out whatever files I wanted. The HR department at Trion, unlike most other parts of the company, actually took security precautions. For one thing, their computers weren’t accessible through the main corporate database; it was a whole separate network. I guess that made sense—personnel records contained all sorts of private information like people’s performance appraisals, the value of their 401(k)s and stock options, all that. Maybe HR was afraid that the rank-and-file would find out how much more the top Trion execs got paid than everyone else and there’d be riots down in the cube farms.

HR was located on the third floor of E Wing, a long hike from New Product Marketing. There were a lot of locked doors along the way, but my badge would probably open each one of them.

Then I remembered that somewhere it was recorded who entered which checkpoints and at what time. The information was stored, which didn’t necessarily mean that anybody looked at it or did anything about it. But if there were ever trouble later, it wouldn’t look good that on a Sunday night for some reason I walked from New Products to Personnel, leaving digital bread crumbs along the way.

So I left the building, just took the elevator down and took one of the back entrances. The thing about these security systems was that they only kept track of entrances, not exits. When you walked out, you didn’t use your badge. This might have been some fire-department code thing, I didn’t know. But that meant that I could leave the building without anyone knowing I’d left.

It was dark outside by now. The Trion building was lit up, its brushed-chrome skin gleaming, the glass windows a midnight blue. It was relatively quiet out here at night, just the
shush
of the occasional car passing by on the highway.

I walked around to E Wing, where a lot of the administrative functions seemed to be housed—Central Purchasing, Systems Management, that sort of thing—and saw someone coming out of a service entrance.

“Hey, can you hold the door?” I shouted. I waved my Trion badge at the guy, who looked like he was on the cleaning crew or something. “Damned badge isn’t working right.”

The man held the door open for me, didn’t give me a glance, and I walked right in. Nothing recorded. As far as the central system was concerned, I was still upstairs at my cubicle.

I took the stairs to the third floor. The door to the third floor was unlocked. This, too, was a fire department law of some kind: in buildings above a certain height you had to be able to go from floor to floor by the stairs, in case of emergency. Probably some floors had a badge-reader station just inside the stair exit. But the third floor didn’t. I walked right into the reception area outside Human Resources.

The waiting area had just the right kind of HR look—a lot of dignified mahogany, to say we’re serious and this is about your career, and colorful, welcoming, cushy-looking chairs. Which told you that whenever you came to HR you were going to sit there on your butt for an ungodly long time.

I looked around for closed-circuit TV cameras and didn’t see any. Not that I was expecting any; this wasn’t a bank—or the skunkworks—but I just wanted to make sure. Or as sure as I could be, anyway.

The lights were on low, which made the place look even more stately. Or spooky, I couldn’t decide.

For a few seconds I stood there, thinking. There weren’t any cleaning people around to let me in; they probably came late at night or early in the morning. That would have been the best way in. Instead, I’d have to try the same old my-badge-won’t-work trick, which had gotten me this far. I went back downstairs and headed into the lobby through the back way, where a female lobby ambassador with big brassy red hair was watching a rerun of
The Bachelor
on one of the security monitors.

“And I thought I was the only one who had to work on Sunday,” I said to her. She looked up, laughed politely, turned back to her show. I looked like I belonged, I had a badge clipped to my belt, and I was coming from the inside, so I was supposed to be there, right? She wasn’t the talkative type, but that was a good thing—she just wanted to be left alone to watch
The Bachelor
. She’d do anything to get rid of me.

“Hey, listen,” I said, “sorry to bother you, but do you have that machine to fix badges? It’s not like I
want
to get into my office or anything, but I have to or I’m out of a job, and the damned badge-reader won’t let me in. It’s like it
knows
I should be home watching football, you know?”

She smiled. She probably wasn’t used to Trion employees even noticing her. “I know what you mean,” she said. “But sorry, the lady who does that won’t be in till tomorrow.”

“Oh, man. How am I supposed to get in? I can’t wait till tomorrow. I’m totally screwed.”

She nodded, picked up her phone. “Stan,” she said, “can you help us out here?”

Stan, the security guard, showed up a couple minutes later. He was a small, wiry, swarthy guy in his fifties with an obvious toupee that was jet black while the fringe of real hair all around it was going gray. I could never understand why you would bother to wear a hairpiece if you weren’t going to update it once in a while to make it look halfway convincing. We took the elevator up to the third floor. I gave him some complicated blather about how HR was on a hierarchically separate badging system, but he wasn’t too interested. He wanted to talk sports, and that I could do, no problem. He was bummed out about the Denver Broncos, and I pretended I was too. When we got to HR, he took out his badge, which probably let him in anywhere he worked in this part of the building. He waved it at the card reader. “Don’t work too hard,” he said.