Paranoia (19 page)

One of the men was looking at the scorched metal waste can and saying something to the other guy. Like, what the hell happened here?

“
Cançado,
” I said to the lady: I’m tired, that’s how I am. “
Bom, até logo
.” See you later.

“
Até logo, senhor
,” the woman said as I walked out the door.

I thought for a second about driving home, changing clothes, turning right back around. But that was more than I could handle, so instead I left E Wing—by now people were starting to come in—and re-entered B Wing and went up to my cubicle. Okay, so if anyone checked the entrance records, they’d see that I’d come in to the building Sunday night around seven, then came back around five-thirty in the morning on Monday. Eager beaver. I just hoped I didn’t run into anyone I knew, looking the way I did, like I’d slept in my clothes, which of course I had. Fortunately I didn’t see anyone. I grabbed a Diet Vanilla Coke from the break room and took a deep swig. It tasted nasty this early in the morning, so I made a pot of coffee in the Bunn-O-Matic, and went to the men’s room to wash up. My shirt was a little wrinkled, but overall I looked presentable, even if I felt like shit. Today was a big day, and I had to be at my best.

An hour before the big meeting with Augustine Goddard, we gathered in Packard, one of the bigger conference rooms, for a dress rehearsal. Nora was wearing a beautiful blue suit and she looked like she’d had her hair done specially for the occasion. She was totally on edge; she crackled with nervous energy. She was smiling, her eyes wide.

She and Chad were rehearsing in the room while the rest of us gathered. Chad was playing Jock. They were doing this back-and-forth like an old married couple going through the paces of a long-familiar argument, when suddenly Chad’s cell phone rang. He had one of those Motorola flip phones, which I was convinced he favored so he could end a call by snapping it shut.

“This is Chad,” he said. His tone abruptly warmed. “Hey, Tony.” He held an index finger in the air to tell Nora to wait, and he went off into a corner of the room.

“Chad,” Nora called after him with annoyance. He turned back, nodded at her, held up his finger again. A minute or so later I heard him snap the phone closed, and then he came up to Nora, speaking fast in a low voice. We were all watching, listening in; they were in the center ring.

“That’s a buddy of mine in the controller’s office,” he said quietly, grimfaced. “The decision on Maestro has already been made.”

“How do you know?” Nora said.

“The controller just put through the order to do a one-time write-off of fifty million bucks for Maestro. The decision’s been made at the top. This meeting with Goddard is just a formality.”

Nora flushed deep crimson and turned away. She walked over to the window and looked out, and for a full minute she didn’t say anything.

33

The Executive Briefing Center was on the seventh floor of A Wing, just down the hall from Goddard’s office. We trooped over there in a group, the mood pretty low. Nora said she’d join us in a few minutes.

“Dead men walking!” Chad sang out to me as we walked. “Dead men walking!”

I nodded. Mordden glanced at Chad walking beside me, and he kept his distance, no doubt thinking all kinds of evil thoughts about me, trying to figure out why I wasn’t giving Chad the cold shoulder, what I was up to. He hadn’t been stopping by my cubicle as often since the night I’d sneaked into Nora’s office. It was hard to tell if he was acting strangely, since strange was his default mode. Also, I didn’t want to succumb to the situational paranoia—was he looking at me funny, that sort of thing. But I couldn’t help wondering whether I had blown the whole mission with one single act of carelessness, whether Mordden was going to cause me serious trouble.

“Now, seating’s crucial, big guy,” Chad muttered to me. “Goddard always takes the center seat on the side of the table near the door. If you want to be invisible, you sit on his right. If you want him to pay attention to you, either sit to his left or directly across the table from him.”

“Do I
want
him to pay attention to me?”

“I can’t answer that. He
is
the boss.”

“Have you been in a lot of meetings with him?”

“Not that many,” he shrugged. “A couple.”

I made a mental note to sit anywhere Chad recommended against, like to Goddard’s right. Fool me once, shame on you, and all that.

The EBC was a truly impressive sight. There was a huge wooden conference table made of some kind of tropical-looking wood that took up most of the room. One entire end of the room was a screen for presentations. There were heavy acoustic blinds that you could tell were supposed to slide down electrically from the ceiling, probably not only to block out light but to keep anyone outside from hearing what went on inside the room. Built into the table were speakerphones and little screens in front of each chair that slid up when a button was pushed somewhere.

There was a lot of whispering, nervous laughter, muttered wisecracks. I was sort of looking forward to seeing the famous Jock Goddard up close and personal, even if I never got to shake his hand. I didn’t have to speak or make any part of the presentation, but I was a little nervous anyway.

By five minutes before ten, Nora still hadn’t shown up. Had she jumped out of a window? Was she calling around, trying to lobby, making a last-ditch effort to save her precious product, pulling whatever strings she had?

“Think she got lost?” Phil joked.

Two minutes before ten, Nora entered the room, looking calm, radiant, somehow more attractive. She looked like she’d put on fresh makeup, lipliner and all that stuff. Maybe she’d even been meditating or something, because she looked transformed.

Then, at exactly ten o’clock, Jock Goddard and Paul Camilletti entered the room, and everyone went quiet. “Cutthroat” Camilletti, in a black blazer and an olive silk T-shirt, had slicked his hair back and looked like Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
. He took a seat way off at a corner of the immense table. Goddard, in his customary black mock turtleneck under a tweedy brown sport coat, walked up to Nora and whispered something that made her laugh. He put his hand on her shoulder; she put her hand on top of his hand for a few seconds. She was acting girlish, sort of flirtatious; it was a side of Nora I’d never seen before.

Goddard then sat down right at the head of the table, facing the screen. Thanks, Chad. I was across the table and to his right. I could see him just fine and I sure didn’t
feel
invisible. He had round shoulders, a little stooped. His white hair, parted on one side, was unruly. His eyebrows were bushy, white, each one looked like a snow-capped mountaintop. His forehead was deeply creased, and he had an impish look in his eyes.

There were an awkward few seconds of silence, and he looked around the big table. “You all look so nervous,” he said. “Relax! I don’t bite.” His voice was pleasant and sort of crackly, a mellow baritone. He glanced at Nora, winked. “Not often, anyway.” She laughed; a couple of other people chuckled politely. I smiled, mostly to say, I appreciate that you’re trying to put us all at ease.

“Only when you’re threatened,” she said. He smiled, his lips forming a V. “Jock, do you mind if I start off here?”

“Please.”

“Jock, we’ve all been working so incredibly hard on the refresh of Maestro that I think sometimes it’s just hard to get outside ourselves, get any real perspective. I’ve spent the last thirty-six hours thinking about pretty much nothing else. And it’s clear to me that there are several important ways in which we can update, improve Maestro, make it more appealing, increase market share, maybe even significantly.”

Goddard nodded, made a steeple with his fingers, looked down at his notes.

She tapped the laminated bound presentation notebook. “We’ve come up with a strategy, quite a good one, adding twelve new functionalities, bringing Maestro up to date. But I have to tell you quite honestly that if I were sitting where you’re sitting, I’d pull the plug.”

Goddard turned suddenly to look at her, his great white eyebrows aloft. We all stared at her, shocked. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. She was burning her entire team.

“Jock,” she went on, “if there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s that sometimes a true leader has to sacrifice the thing he loves most. It kills me to say it. But I simply can’t ignore the facts. Maestro was great for its time. But its time has come—and gone. It’s Goddard’s Rule—if your product doesn’t have the potential to be number one or number two in the market, you get out.”

Goddard was silent for a few moments. He looked surprised, impressed, and after a few seconds he nodded with a shrewd I-like-what-I-see smile. “Are we—is everyone in agreement on this?” he drawled.

Gradually people started nodding their heads, jumping on the moving train as it pulled out of the station. Chad was nodding, biting his lip the way Bill Clinton used to; Mordden was nodding vigorously, like he was finally able to express his true opinion. The other engineers grunted, “Yes” and “I agree.”

“I must say, I’m surprised to hear this,” Goddard said. “This is certainly not what I expected to hear this morning. I was expecting the Battle of Gettysburg. I’m impressed.”

“What’s good for any of us as individuals in the short term,” Nora added, “isn’t necessarily what’s best for Trion.”

I couldn’t believe the way Nora was leading this immolation, but I had to admire her cunning, her Machiavellian skill.

“Well,” Goddard said, “before we pull the trigger, hang on for a minute. You—I didn’t see you nodding.”

He seemed to be looking directly at me.

I glanced around, then back at him. He was definitely looking at me.

“You,” he said. “Young man, I didn’t see you nodding your head with the rest.”

“He’s new,” Nora put in hastily. “Just started.”

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Adam,” I said. “Adam Cassidy.” My heart started hammering. Oh, shit. It was like being called on in school. I felt like a second-grader.

“You got some kind of problem with the decision we’re making here, uh, Adam?” said Goddard.

“Huh? No.”

“So you’re in agreement on pulling the plug.”

I shrugged.

“You are, you’re not—what?”

“I certainly see where Nora’s coming from,” I said.

“And if you were sitting where I’m sitting?” Goddard prompted.

I took a deep breath. “If I were sitting where you’re sitting, I wouldn’t pull the plug.”

“No?”

“And I wouldn’t add those twelve new features, either.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No. Just one.”

“And what might that be?”

I caught a quick glimpse of Nora’s face, and it was beet red. She was staring at me as if an alien were bursting out of my chest. I turned back toward Goddard. “A secure-data protocol.”

Goddard’s brows sunk all the way down. “Secure data? Why the hell would that attract consumers?”

Chad cleared his throat and said, “Come on, Adam, look at the market research. Secure data’s like what? Number seventy-five on the list of features consumers are looking for.” He smirked. “Unless you think the average consumer is Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.”

There was some snickering from the far reaches of the table.

I smiled good-naturedly. “No, Chad, you’re right—the average consumer has no interest in secure data. But I’m not talking about the average consumer. I’m talking about the military.”

“The military.” Goddard cocked one eyebrow.

“Adam—” Nora interrupted in a flat, warning sort of voice.

Goddard fluttered a hand toward Nora. “No, I want to hear this. The military, you say?”

I took a deep breath, tried not to look as panicked as I felt. “Look, the army, the air force, the Canadians, the British—the whole defense establishment in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada—recently overhauled their global communications system, right?” I pulled out some clippings from
Defense News, Federal Computer Week
—magazines I always happen to have hanging around the apartment, of course—and held them up. I could feel my hand shaking a little and hoped no one else noticed. Wyatt had prepared me for this, and I hoped I had the details right. “It’s called the Defense Message System, the DMS—the secure messaging system for millions of defense personnel around the world. It’s all done via desktop PCs, and the Pentagon is desperate to go wireless. Imagine what a difference that could make—secure wireless remote access to classified data and communications, with authentication of senders and receivers, end-to-end secure encryption, data protection, message integrity. Nobody owns this market!”

Goddard tilted his head, listening intently.

“And Maestro’s the perfect product for this space. It’s small, sturdy—practically indestructible—and totally reliable. This way, we turn a negative into a positive: the fact that Maestro is dated, legacy technology, is a
plus
for the military, since it’s totally compatible with their five-year-old wireless transfer protocols. All we need to add is secure data. The cost is minimal, and the potential market is huge—I mean,
huge!
”

Goddard was staring at me, though I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or he thought I’d lost my mind.

I went on: “So instead of trying to tart up this old, frankly inferior product, we remarket it. Throw on a hardened plastic shell, pop in secure encryption, and we’re golden. We’ll
own
this niche market, if we move fast. Forget about writing off fifty mil—now we’re talking about hundreds of millions in added revenue per year.”

“Jesus,” Camilletti said from his end of the table. He was scrawling notes on a pad.

Goddard started nodding, slowly at first, then more vigorously. “Most intriguing,” he said. He turned toward Nora. “What’s his name again—Elijah?”

“Adam,” Nora said crisply.

“Thank you, Adam,” he said. “That’s not bad at all.”

Don’t thank me, I thought; thank Nick Wyatt.

And then I caught Nora looking at me with an expression of pure and undisguised hatred.