Paranoia (20 page)

34

The official word came down by e-mail before lunch: Goddard had ordered a stay of execution for Maestro. The Maestro team was ordered to crash a proposal for minor retooling and repackaging to meet the military’s requirements. Meanwhile, Trion’s Government Affairs staff would start negotiating a contract with the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency Department of Acquisition and Logistics.

Translation: slam dunk. Not only had the old product been taken off life support, but it had gotten a heart transplant and a massive blood transfusion.

And the shit had hit the fan.

I was in the men’s room, standing in front of the urinal and unzipping my fly, when Chad came sauntering in. Chad, I’d noticed, seemed to have a sixth sense that I was pee-shy. He was always following me into the men’s room to talk work or sports and effectively shut off my spigot. This time he came right up to the next urinal, his face all lit up like he was thrilled to see me. I could hear him unzip. My bladder clamped down. I went back to staring at the tile grout above the urinal.

“Hey,” he said. “Nice job, big guy.
That’s
the way to ‘manage up’!” He shook his head slowly, made a sort of spitting sound. His urine splashed noisily against the little lozenge at the bottom of the urinal. “Christ.” He oozed sarcasm. He’d crossed some invisible line—he wasn’t even pretending anymore.

I thought, Could you please go now so I can relieve myself? “I saved the product,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, and you burned Nora in the process. Was it worth it, just so you could score some points with the CEO, get yourself a little face time? That’s not how it works around here, bud. You just made a huge fucking mistake.” He shook dry, zipped up, and walked out of the rest room without washing his hands.

A voice mail from Nora was waiting for me when I returned to my cubicle.

“Nora,” I said as I entered her office.

“Adam,” she said softly. “Sit down, please.” She was smiling, a sad, gentle smile. This was ominous.

“Nora, can I say—”

“Adam, as you know, one of the things we pride ourselves on at Trion is always striving to fit the employee to the job—to make sure our most high-potential people are given responsibilities that best suit them.” She smiled again, and her eyes glittered. “That’s why I’ve just put through an employee transfer request form and asked Tom to expedite it.”

“Transfer?”

“We’re all awfully impressed with your talents, your resourcefulness, the depth of your knowledge. This morning’s meeting illustrated that just so well. We feel that someone of your caliber could do a world of good at our RTP facility. The supply-chain management unit down there could really use a strong team player like you.”

“RTP?”

“Our Research Triangle Park satellite office. In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.”

“North
Carolina?
” Was I hearing her right? “You’re talking about transferring me down to North Carolina?”

“Adam, you make it sound like it’s Siberia. Have you ever been to Raleigh-Durham? It’s really such a lovely area.”

“I—but I can’t move, I’ve got responsibilities here, I’ve got—”

“Employee Relocation will coordinate the whole thing for you. They cover all your moving expenses—everything within reason, of course. I’ve already started the ball rolling with HR. Any move can be a little disruptive, obviously, but they make it surprisingly painless.” Her smile broadened. “You’re going to love it there, and they’re going to love
you!
”

“Nora,” I said, “Goddard asked me for my honest thoughts, and I’m a big fan of everything you’ve done with the Maestro line, I wasn’t going to deny it. The last thing I intended to do was to piss you off.”

“Piss me off?” she said. “Adam, on the contrary—I was grateful for your input. I only wish you’d shared your thoughts with me
before
the meeting. But that’s water under the bridge. We’re on to bigger and better things. And so are
you!
”

The transfer was to take place within the next three weeks. I was completely freaked out. The North Carolina site was for strictly back-office stuff. A million miles away from R&D. I’d be useless to Wyatt there. And he’d blame me for screwing up. I could practically hear the guillotine blade rushing down on its tracks.

It’s funny: not until I walked out of her office did I think about my dad, and then it really hit me. I
couldn’t
move. I couldn’t leave the old man here. Yet how could I refuse to go where Nora was sending me? Short of escalating—going over her head, or at least trying to, which would surely backfire on me—what choice did I have? If I refused to go to North Carolina, I’d have to resign from Trion, and then all hell would break loose.

It felt as if the whole building were revolving slowly; I had to sit down, had to think. As I passed by Noah Mordden’s office he waggled his finger at me to summon me in.

“Ah, Cassidy,” he said. “Trion’s very own Julien Sorel. Do be nice to the Madame de Renal.”

“Excuse me?” I said. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

In his signature Aloha shirt and his big round black glasses he was looking more and more like a caricature of himself. His IP phone rang, but naturally it wasn’t any ordinary ring tone. It was a sound file clipped from David Bowie’s “Suffragette City”: “Oh
wham
bam thank you
ma’am!
”

“I suspect you impressed Goddard,” he said. “But at the same time, you must also take care not to unduly antagonize your immediate superior. Forget Stendahl. You might want to read Sun Tzu.” He scowled. “The ass you save could be your own.”

Mordden’s office was decorated with all sorts of strange things. There was a chessboard painstakingly laid out in midgame, an H.P. Lovecraft poster, a large doll with curly blond hair. I pointed to the chessboard questioningly.

“Tal-Botvinnik, 1960,” he said, as if that meant anything to me. “One of the great chess moves of all time. In any case, my point is, one does not besiege walled cities if it can be avoided. Moreover, and this is wisdom not from Sun Tzu but from the Roman emperor Domitian, if you strike at a king, you must kill him. Instead, you waged an attack on Nora without arranging air support in advance.”

“I didn’t intend to wage an attack.”

“Whatever you intended to accomplish, it was a serious miscalculation, my friend. She will surely destroy you. Remember, Adam. Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

“She’s transferring me to Research Triangle.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Could have been much worse, you know. Have you ever been to Jackson, Mississippi?”

I had, and I liked the place, but I was bummed and didn’t feel like engaging in a long conversation with this strange dude. He made me nervous. I pointed to the ugly doll on the shelf and said, “That yours?”

“Love Me Lucille,” he said. “A huge flop and one that, I’m proud to say, was my initiative.”

“You engineered . . .
dolls?
”

He reached over and squeezed the doll’s hand, and it came to life, its scary-realistic eyes opening and then actually squinting with the animation of a human being. Its cupid’s bow mouth opened and turned down into a frightening scowl.

“You’ve never seen a doll do that.”

“And I don’t think I ever want to again,” I said.

Mordden allowed a glint of a smile. “Lucille has a full range of human facial expressions. She’s fully robotic, and actually quite impressive. She whines, she gets fussy and annoying, just like a real baby. She requires burping. She gurgles, coos, even tinkles in her diaper. She exhibits alarming signs of colic. She does everything but get diaper rash. She has speech-localization, which means she looks at whoever’s talking to her. You teach her to speak.”

“I didn’t know you did dolls.”

“Hey, I can do anything I want here. I’m a Trion Distinguished Engineer. I invented it for my little niece, who refused to play with it. She thought it was creepy.”

“It
is
kind of homely,” I said.

“The sculpt was bad.” He turned to the doll and spoke slowly. “Lucille? Say hello to our CEO.”

Lucille turned her head slowly to Mordden. I could hear a faint mechanical whir. She blinked, scowled again, and began speaking in the deep voice of James Earl Jones, her lips forming the words: “Eat my shorts, Goddard.”

“
Jesus
,” I blurted out.

Lucille turned slowly to me, blinked again, and smiled sweetly.

“The technological guts inside this butt-ugly troll were way ahead of its time,” Mordden said. “I developed a full multithreaded operating system that runs on an eight-bit processor. State-of-the-art artificial intelligence on some really tightly compiled code. The architecture’s quite clever. Three separate ASICs in her fat tummy, which I designed.”

An ASIC, I knew, was geek-speak for a fancy custom-designed computer chip that does a bunch of different things.

“Lucille?” Mordden said, and the doll turned to look at him, blinking. “Fuck you, Lucille.” Lucille’s eyes slowly squinted, her mouth turned down, and she emitted an anguished-sounding
wa-a-h
. A single tear rolled down her cheek. He pulled up her frilly pink pajama top, exposing a small rectangular LCD screen. “Mommy and Daddy can program her and see the settings on this little proprietary Trion LCD here. One of the ASICs drives this LCD, another drives the motors, another drives the speech.”

“Incredible,” I said. “All this for a doll.”

“Correct. And then the toy company we partnered with fucked up the launch. Let this be a lesson to you. The packaging was terrible. They didn’t ship until the last week in November, which is about eight weeks too late—Mommy and Daddy have already made up their Christmas lists by then. Moreover, the price point sucked—in this economy, Mommy and Daddy don’t like spending over a hundred bucks for a fucking toy. Of course, the marketing geniuses in Trion Consumer and Educational thought I’d invented the next Beanie Baby, so we stockpiled several hundred thousand of these custom chips, manufactured for us in China at enormous expense and good for nothing else. Which means Trion got stuck with almost half a million ugly dolls that no one wanted, along with three hundred thousand extra doll parts waiting to be assembled, sitting to this day in a warehouse in Van Nuys.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s okay. Nobody can touch me. I’ve got kryptonite.”

He didn’t explain what he meant, but this was Mordden, borderline crazy, so I didn’t pursue it. I returned to my cubicle, where I found that I had several voice messages. When I played the second one, I recognized the voice with a jolt even before he identified himself.

“Mr. Cassidy,” the scratchy voice said, “I really. . . . Oh, this is Jock Goddard. I was very much taken by your remarks at the meeting today, and I wonder if you might be able to stop by my office. Do you think you could call my assistant Flo and set something up?”

PART FOUR
C
OMPROMISE

Compromise
: The detection of an agent, a safe house, or an intelligence technique by someone from the other side.

—The Dictionary of Espionage

35

Jock Goddard’s office was no bigger than Tom Lundgren’s or Nora Sommers’s. This realization blew me away. The goddamned CEO’s office was maybe a few feet bigger than my own pathetic cubicle. I walked right by it once, sure I was in the wrong place. But the name was there—
AUGUSTINE GODDARD
—on a brass plaque on his door, and he was in fact standing right outside his office, talking to his admin. He had on one of his black mock turtlenecks, no jacket, and wore a pair of black reading glasses. The woman he was talking to, who I assumed was Florence, was a large black woman in a magnificent silver-gray suit. She had skunk stripes of gray running through her hair on either side of her head and looked formidable.

They both looked up as I approached. She had no idea who I was, and it took Goddard a minute, but then he recognized me—it was the day after the big meeting—and said, “Oh, Mr. Cassidy, great, thanks for coming. Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’m all set, thanks,” I said. I remembered Dr. Bolton’s advice, then said, “Well, maybe some water.” Up close he seemed even smaller, more stoopshouldered. His famous pixie face, the thin lips, the twinkling eyes—it looked exactly like the Halloween masks of Jock Goddard that one of the business units had had made for last year’s companywide Halloween party. I’d seen one hanging from a pushpin on someone’s cubicle wall. Everyone in the unit wore one and did some kind of skit or something.

Flo handed him a manila file—I could see it was my HR file—and he told her to hold all calls and showed me into his office. I had no idea what he wanted, so my guilty conscience went into full swing. I mean, here I’d been skulking around the guy’s corporation, doing spy-versus-spy stuff. I’d been careful, sure, but there’d been a couple of goofs.

Still, could it really be anything bad? The CEO never swings the axe himself, he always has his henchmen do it. But I couldn’t help but wonder. I was ridiculously nervous, and I wasn’t doing much of a job of hiding it.

He opened a small refrigerator concealed in a cabinet and handed me a bottle of Aquafina. Then he sat down behind his desk and immediately leaned back in his high leather chair. I took one of two chairs on the other side of the desk. I looked around, saw a photograph of an unglamorous-looking woman who I assumed was his wife, since she was around the same age. She was white-haired, plain, and amazingly wrinkled (Mordden had called her the shar-pei) and she wore a Barbara Bush–style three-strand pearl necklace, probably to conceal the wattles under her chin. I wondered if Nick Wyatt, so consumed with bilious envy toward Jock Goddard, had any idea who Augustine Goddard came home to every night. Wyatt’s bimbos were changed, or rotated, every couple of nights and they all had tits like a centerfold; that was a job requirement.