Paranoia (28 page)

Kev

I didn’t reply—I had to figure out how to handle it. The guy had obviously looked me up, saw my new title, couldn’t figure it out. Whether he wanted to get together out of curiosity, or to brownnose, this was big trouble. Meacham and Wyatt had said they’d “nuke” him, whatever that meant, but until they did whatever they were going to do, I’d have to be extra careful. Kevin Griffin was a loaded gun lying around, waiting to go off. I didn’t want to go near it.

Then I signed off, and signed back on using Nora’s user ID and password. It was two in the morning, and I figured she had to be offline. It would be a good time to try to get into her archived e-mail, go through it all, download anything that had to do with AURORA, if there was anything.

All I got was
INVALID PASSWORD, PLEASE RE-ENTER
.

I re-entered her password, this time more carefully, and got
INVALID PASSWORD
again. This time I was certain I hadn’t made a mistake.

Her password had been changed.

Why?

When I finally crashed for the night, my mind was racing, running through all the possibilities as to why Nora had changed her password. Maybe the security guard, Luther, had come by one night when Nora happened to be staying a little later than usual, and he was expecting to see me, engage in a conversation about Mustangs or whatever, but he saw Nora instead. He might wonder what she was doing there in that office, might even—it wasn’t totally unlikely—confront her. And then he’d give her a description and she’d figure it out; it wouldn’t take her long at all.

But if that’s what had happened, she wouldn’t just change her password, would she? She’d do more than that. She’d want to know why I was in her office, when she hadn’t given me permission to be there. Where that could lead, I didn’t want to think about. . . .

Or maybe it was all innocent. Maybe she’d just changed her password routinely, the way every Trion employee was supposed to do every sixty days.

Probably that’s all it was.

I didn’t sleep well at all, and after a couple of hours of tossing and turning I decided to just get up, take a shower and get dressed, and head into work. My Goddard work was done; it was my
Wyatt
work, my espionage, that was way behind. If I got into work early enough, maybe I could try to find out something about AURORA.

I glanced in the mirror as I walked out. I looked—like shit.

“You up already?” Carlos the concierge said as my Porsche pulled up to the front curb. “Man, you can’t keep hours like this, Mr. Cassidy. You get sick.”

“Nah,” I said. “Keeps me honest.”

49

At a little after five in the morning the Trion garage was just about empty. It felt strange being there when it was all but deserted. The fluorescent lights buzzed and washed everything in a kind of greenish haze, and the place smelled of gasoline and motor oil and whatever else dripped from cars: brake fluid and coolant and probably spilled Mountain Dew. My footsteps echoed.

I took the back elevator to the seventh floor, which was also deserted, and walked down the dark executive corridor to my office, past Colvin’s office, Camilletti’s office, other offices of people I hadn’t met yet, until I came to mine. All the offices were dark and closed; no one was in yet.

My office was all potential—not much more than a bare desk and chairs and a computer, a Trion-logo mousepad, a filing cabinet with nothing in it, a credenza with a couple of books. It looked like the office of an itinerant, a drifter, someone who could up and leave in the middle of the night. It was badly in need of some personality—framed photographs, some sporting-goods collectibles, something jokey and funny, something serious and inspirational. It needed an imprint. Maybe, once I caught up on my sleep, I’d do something about it.

I entered my password, logged in, checked my e-mail again. Sometime in the last few post-midnight hours a companywide e-mail had gone out to all Trion employees worldwide asking them to watch the company Web site later on today, at five o’clock Eastern Standard Time, for “an important announcement from CEO Augustine Goddard.” That should set off the rumor mills. The e-mails would be flying. I wondered how many people at the top—a group that now included me, bizarrely enough—knew the truth. Not many, I bet.

Goddard had mentioned that AURORA, the mind-blowing project he wouldn’t talk about, was Paul Camilletti’s turf. I wondered if there was anything in Camilletti’s official bio that might shed some light on AURORA, so I entered his name in the company directory.

His photo was there, stern and forbidding and yet more handsome than in person. A thumbnail biography: born in Geneseo, New York, educated in public schools in upstate New York—translation, probably didn’t grow up with money—Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, meteoric rise in some consumer-electronics company that was once a big rival to Trion but was later acquired by Trion. Senior VP at Trion for less than a year before being named CFO. A man on the move. I clicked on the hyperlinks for his reporting chain, and a little tree chart popped up, showing all the divisions and units that were under him.

One of the units was the Disruptive Technologies Research Unit, which reported directly to him. Alana Jennings was marketing director.

Paul Camilletti
directly oversaw
the AURORA project. Suddenly, he was very, very important.

I walked by his office, my heart hammering away, and saw, of course, no sign of him. Not at quarter after five in the morning. I also noticed that the cleaning crew had already been by: there was a fresh liner in his admin’s trash can, you could see the undisturbed vacuuming lines on the carpet, and the place still smelled like cleaning fluid.

And there was no one in the corridor, likely no one on the entire floor.

I was about to cross a line, do something risky at a whole new level.

I wasn’t worried so much about a security guard coming by. I’d say I was Camilletti’s new assistant—what the hell did they know?

But what if Camilletti’s admin came in really early, to get a jump on the day? Or, more likely, what if Camilletti
himself
wanted to get an early start? Given the big announcement, he might well have to start placing calls, writing e-mails, making faxes to Trion’s European offices, which were six or seven hours ahead. At five-thirty in the morning, it was noon in Europe. Sure, he could e-mail from home, but I couldn’t put it past him to get in to his office unusually early today.

So to break into his office today, I realized, was insanely risky.

But for some reason I decided to do it anyway.

50

Yet the key to Camilletti’s office was nowhere to be found.

I checked all the usual places—every drawer in his admin’s desk, inside the plants and paper-clip holder, even the filing cabinets. Her desk was open to the hallway, totally exposed, and I began to feel nervous poking around there, where I so clearly didn’t belong. I looked behind the phone. Under the keyboard, under her computer. Was it hidden on the underside of the desk drawers? No. Underneath the desk? Also no. There was a small waiting-room area next to her desk—really just a couch, coffee table, and a couple of chairs. I looked around there, but nothing. There was no key.

So maybe it wasn’t exactly unreasonable that the company’s chief financial officer might actually take a security precaution or two, make it hard for someone to break into his office. You had to admire that, right?

After a nerve-wracking ten minutes of looking everywhere, I decided it wasn’t meant to be, when suddenly I remembered an odd little detail about my own new office. Like all the offices on the executive floor, it was equipped with a motion detector, which is not as high-security as it sounds. It’s actually a common safety feature in the higher-end offices—a way to make sure that no one ever gets locked inside his own office. As long as there’s motion inside an office, the doors won’t lock. (More proof that the offices on the seventh floor really were a little more equal.)

If I moved quickly I could take advantage of this. . . .

The door to Camilletti’s office was solid mahogany, highly polished, heavy. There was no gap between the door and the deep pile carpet; I couldn’t even slide a piece of paper under it. That would make things a bit more complicated—but not impossible.

I needed a chair to stand on, not his admin’s chair, which rolled on casters and wouldn’t be steady. I found a ladderback chair in the sitting area and brought it next to the glass wall of Camilletti’s office. Then I went back to the sitting area. Fanned out on the coffee table were all of the usual magazines and newspapers—the
Financial Times, Institutional Investor, CFO, Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0, Barron’s
. . . .

Barron’s
. Yes. That would do. It was the size and shape and heft of a tabloid newspaper. I grabbed it, then—looking around once again to make sure I wasn’t caught doing something I couldn’t even
begin
to explain—I climbed up on the chair and pushed up one of the square acoustic ceiling panels.

I reached up into the empty space above the suspended ceiling, into that dark dusty place choked with wires and cables and stuff, felt for the next ceiling panel, the one directly over Camilletti’s office, and lifted that one too, propped it up on the metal grid thing.

Taking the
Barron’s
, I reached over, lowered it slowly, waving it around. I lowered it as far as I could reach, waved it around some more—but nothing happened. Maybe the motion detectors didn’t reach high enough. Finally I stood up on tiptoe, crooked my elbow as sharply as I could, and managed to lower the newspaper another foot or so, waving it around wildly until I really began to strain some muscles.

And I heard a click.

A faint, unmistakable click.

Pulling the
Barron’s
back through, I put the acoustic ceiling panel back, sat it snugly in place. Then I got down from the chair, moved it back where it belonged.

And tried Camilletti’s doorknob.

The door came open.

In my workbag I’d brought a couple of tools, including a Mag-Lite flashlight. I immediately drew the Venetian blinds, closed the door, then switched on the powerful beam.

Camilletti’s office was as devoid of personality as everyone else’s—the generic collection of framed family photos, the plaques and awards, the same old lineup of business books they all pretended to read. Actually, this office was pretty disappointing. This wasn’t a corner office, didn’t have floor-to-ceiling windows like at Wyatt Telecomm. There was no view at all. I wondered whether Camilletti disliked having important guests visit such a humble office. This might be Goddard’s style, but it sure didn’t seem to be Camilletti’s. Cheapskate or no, he seemed grandiose. I’d heard that there was a fancy visitors’ reception suite on the penthouse of the executive building, A Wing, but no one I knew had ever seen it. Maybe that’s where Camilletti received bigwigs.

His computer had been left on, but when I clicked the space bar on the modernistic black keyboard, and the monitor lit up, I could see the
ENTER PASSWORD
screen, the cursor blinking. Without his password, of course, I couldn’t get into his computer files.

If he’d written down his password somewhere, I sure as hell couldn’t find it—in drawers, under the keyboard, taped to the back of the big flat-panel monitor. Nowhere. Just for kicks I entered his user name ([email protected]) and then the same password, PCamilletti.

Nope. He was more cautious than that, and after a few attempts I gave up.

I’d have to get his password the old-fashioned way: by stealth. I figured he probably wouldn’t notice if I swapped out the cable between his keyboard and CPU with a Keyghost. So I did.

I admit I was even more nervous being inside Camilletti’s office than I’d been inside Nora’s. You’d think by now I’d be an old pro about breaking into offices, but I wasn’t, and there was a vibe in Camilletti’s office that scared the shit out of me. The guy himself was terrifying, and the consequences of being caught didn’t bear thinking about. Plus I had to assume that the security precautions in the executive-level offices were more elaborate than in the rest of Trion. They
had
to be. Sure, I’d been trained to defeat most standard security measures. But there were always invisible detection systems that didn’t set off any alarm bells or lights. That possibility scared me most of all.

I looked around, groping for inspiration. For some reason the office seemed somehow neater, more spacious than others I’d been in at Trion. Then I realized why: there were no filing cabinets in here.
That’s
why it seemed so uncluttered. Well, so where
were
all his files?

When I finally figured out where they had to be, I felt like an idiot. Of course. They weren’t in here, because there wasn’t any room, and they weren’t in his admin’s area, because that was too open to the public, not secure enough.

They had to be in the back room. Like Goddard, every top-level Trion executive had a double office, a back conference room the same size as the front. That was the way Trion got around the equality-of-office-space problem. Hey, everyone’s office is the same size; the top guys just get
two
of them.

The door to the conference room was unlocked. I shined the Mag-Lite around the room, saw a small copying machine, noticed that each wall was lined with mahogany file cabinets. In the middle was a round table, like Goddard’s but smaller. Each drawer was meticulously labeled in what looked like an architect’s hand. Most of them seemed to contain financial and accounting records, which probably had good stuff in them if only I knew where to look.

But when I saw the drawers labeled
TRION CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT
, I lost all interest in anything else. Corporate development is just a biz buzzword for mergers and acquisitions. Trion was known for gobbling up startups or small and midsize companies. More in the go-go years of the late nineteen-nineties than now, but they still acquired several companies a year. I guessed that the files were here because Camilletti oversaw acquisitions, focusing mainly on cost issues, how good an investment, all that.