Shimmer (29 page)

The shadows in my office left walls gray, glass black, the table a dim silhouette, the chairs a puzzle of vague angles and turns.

I turned back to Trevor. Always, with Trevor, there was that sense of wanting to yell at him. To blame him. To attack him for everything that had gone wrong. But tonight I couldn't.

“I don't think I can take any bad news, Trevor,” I said.

“You don't look like you can take any news, Robbie,” he said.

Above us, the ventilation system quietly started, the near silent hum just touching the sound between our voices.

He nodded, crossing his arms over his chest, one hand on an elbow, the other on a shoulder, and it was as if he were holding himself.

“Cliff is vomiting four or five times a day,” I said. “Leonard has given up the act of sleep. Julie often works from the mailroom for two or three hours a day. Whitley is smoking three packs of imaginary cigarettes. This is not a healthy time.”

He nodded. Turning toward the window.

“Sometimes I think the only thing holding them together is grace,” I said.

He nodded. Leaning forward and, for a second, pressing his forehead against the glass. I heard him say quietly, “I am really sorry.”

That ventilation system, so quiet, below sound, the non-sound.

Still his head was pressed lightly against the glass.

“Leonard pointed Shimmer at the whole company,” I said. “A new version of Shimmer. It's self-teaching. Learning. Right now, learning.”

He stepped back from the window. Still looking out at the night. He nodded.

“Do you understand what that means?” I asked.

“I understand enough.”

“We need a solution.”

“Can you cut Leonard off?” Trevor asked. “Just flip a switch on him?”

I shook my head. I tapped my teeth. “No,” I said. And all I wanted was to sleep.

“Every few days I hear rumors of lost journals,” Trevor said.

I nodded slowly. “I hear them too.”

“I always want to believe it's true,” Trevor said. “Want to believe I can simply find a journal, pay for it, and solve every problem we have.”

“I do too.”

“But it's Shimmer,” Trevor said, turning his head, “Shimmer that could destroy this faster than anything.”

In a moment, I nodded.

“Shimmer is our enemy,” he said.

He was pushing his thin hair from his eyes. His hand moving along the sharp angle of his jaw.

“It's not just grace holding this place together,” he said.

He stood up, leaning close to the window, again slowly scanning the New Jersey horizon. “Go to sleep,” he said.

“When do you leave town?” I asked him.

He nodded absently. “Now,” he said. “I leave now.” And he turned and touched me on the arm, and left.

It was twenty minutes later, as I began to think I should stand and move to my couch, that I realized I was sitting in my chair wrapped in a blanket from my bed upstairs.

It was another ten minutes when I remembered the firing in Omaha.

And it was yet another ten when I remembered that I don't like to be touched.

Leonard did not look well. His body seemed even bigger, heavier, the mouth and arms and shoulders pulled downward. His eyes not just
wide, not just heavy, but red and wet and turned now toward the surface of his desk.

“One of the waves,” Leonard said slowly. “From the Regence attack. One of them made its way out of the country.”

“We were wrong about the attack?” I asked. “It was bigger than we thought?”

“I think this is something else.”

I nodded, glancing around the room, waiting for him to speak again. All I wanted was to run my hands along every angle in the room, every desk and book and stack of papers and files, all of it placed so carefully around us.

“I think this was a mistake,” he said. He was pushing his lips together between words. Eyes still so red and wet, but now staring at me. Wanting something, I realized. Some word maybe. An answer. “The wave triggered a mistake.”

“Where did the wave go?” I heard myself ask.

He pushed a thick hand across one ear. “To Budapest,” he said.

I stared.

“Why did it go to Budapest?” he asked, light from the windows now casting sharp angles across his face.

“I was going to ask you,” I heard myself say.

“I'm out of ideas, Robbie,” he said, and it was like he'd touched me, this biggest of employees squeezing me on the knee. Because Leonard never used my name. Leonard never called me Robbie.

“There's a test center in Budapest, right?” I was asking.

“There is an anomaly,” he said, glancing down, slowly, his head seeming to fall forward, as if soon it would slide off his neck. “In Budapest. Across all of Eastern Europe.”

I could only nod.

“It comes and goes,” he said.

“The wave?” I asked quietly.

He shook his head, staring down. Still with that look of wanting on his face. “The anomaly,” he said.

“Maybe,” I started, then stopped. “I don't know,” I said emptily.

He shook his head. “It looks like something else.” And carefully he was raising his head again. “I thought maybe it was something you might have left in the system. From the beginning. When I saw it, I thought, maybe Robbie knows what this is.”

I heard myself saying, “And what is it, Leonard?”

“I think you know,” he said, looking at me again.

I couldn't speak. Leonard still staring, still wanting something. Something from me.

“I'll call it a tunnel. A hidden tunnel. A second data highway,” he said. Had Leonard's hair always been black? “A shadow thread,” he said.

“A shadow thread.”

“Do you know what happens in Budapest, Robbie?”

I shook my head.

“Robbie, tell me why there's a hidden link between Shimmer and Budapest.”

I shook my head.

He looked away. Nodding toward the wall, then toward his lap.

“Shimmer,” I said.

He nodded. “I saw it with Shimmer.”

“I don't know,” I heard myself say. “It is not a thing I know.”

“Then I hate to say this, Robbie. But I think I know what this is, if you don't. We need to call in SWAT.”

I shook my head.

“It's the worst yet,” Leonard said. “This is another one from my group. Has to be. Because this is the worst rogue section I've ever seen.”

In all the times I'd imagined the beginning of the end—the end of my lie, the end of the shadow network, the end of the company itself—never once had I pictured it being launched by seven adults sitting quite comfortably in a set of children's chairs.

But that was exactly how the end was now seeming to begin.

“And where did you buy these?” Julie quietly asked Whitley, clearly planning a purchase of her own.

We were in Whitley's office on the sixteenth floor, the SWAT team sitting around her low child's conference table, our legs stretched out straight or knees pulled up high, all of us discussing the ramifications of the rogue section Leonard had just discovered.

Leonard's assumption—that this was the work of a rogue section—bought me some time. But how much I didn't know. Because what Leonard had found—what he'd called a shadow thread—was really just one tiny thread of the hidden system around us. The thread had been active only intermittently when Shimmer had found it. I'd even had time to begin to shut it down, phasing out that thread's use over the next twenty-four hours—fast enough that Leonard would not have much of a trail to follow, but not so fast that the thread itself seemed to shut down immediately following his meeting with me. Still, it was enough for Leonard and key members of his team to follow.

And with Shimmer, all this could be enough for Leonard to catch me.

“I could get a set of these chairs for you too,” Julie said, looking at me.

“Just two of them,” I said, leaning toward her, “for the mailroom.”

She smiled. I felt like I couldn't breathe.

“The shadowing this rogue section is doing,” Leonard said now, “is extraordinarily sophisticated. It hints at a very deep understanding of the company's network.”

“Meaning?” Cliff asked.

“Meaning,” Perry answered, speaking for the first time, “that this rogue section could possibly be doing much more than generating this one thread of activity.”

“I'll be leading the investigation myself,” Leonard said, in confirmation of Perry's assessment.

“And continuing to rebuild the network?” I asked quietly. “Watching Regence? Aren't you putting yourself in the lead there too?”

“Yes,” he said, looking down at the table, then out the window, then at the table again. “And that's how it should be.”

I realized Leonard hadn't looked at me since we'd entered the room, that pained expression from our earlier meeting still so clear on his face, in his motions, his body. It was more tempered now, less severe. But still there. And only now did I understand it. Understood why Leonard had barely looked at me back in his office. Understood why I'd felt like he seemed to want something from me.

“I should be responsible for all of it,” Leonard said.

Leonard wanted me to forgive him. Forgive him for yet another rogue section, another security breach, another mistake, another failure. All these things that he'd put himself in charge of in the last few weeks, all of them were related to his group. They weren't his fault. He couldn't have controlled any of it. But he thought he was responsible. Felt it completely.

Over the next thirty minutes, I watched as SWAT agreed to a full investigation of Budapest, agreed to a deep historical analysis of the Budapest systems and, of course, agreed to have Shimmer not only analyze the shadow thread created by this rogue section but also search our entire network for any sign of similar activity.

Shimmer, gaining access, building strength, readying itself to speak back to us all.

I sat in my child's chair. I agreed to the SWAT response. I suggested an investigation of the Warsaw office that fed data to Budapest and all of Eastern Europe. I smiled as Julie offered to parade naked in front of the Regence cameras.

And I noticed as Leonard leaned back from the group. Staring forward. Separating himself. Immersed in the problems he had to make right.

I was watching the shadow network when she came into the room. Alone in my near dark office at ten-thirty at night, Shimmer painting circles on a wall at the end of the room. This was the same Shimmer
that Leonard and SWAT could now see. Projected ten by ten feet on my wall, the dense circles now larger, deeper, made up of even denser cylinders, Shimmer already deciphering the meaning of the shapes it found, seeing where the company spun in on itself, seeing the motion of the shadow network beneath Core Communications.

She came into my office now, in a dark suit, a white blouse, the mouth barely holding her unknowable smile. The reflection of the shadow network flickering across her eyes.

“You should be asleep,” Whitley said.

“Yes,” I said.

She sat down on the windowsill near me, watching Shimmer on the wall, the lights of New York and New Jersey behind her.

Whitley was a late person. One of those people who could accomplish more in the hours after six than she'd otherwise finish in a full week's work. She'd been this way since joining Core.

It was Monday night.

“Do you think there will be a time,” I said, “when there's no more of this? No more living in the building? No more late nights wandering the halls of this office?”

She was nodding slowly as I spoke, hair across her eyes, still staring toward the end of the room.

“Can you imagine?” I asked quietly.

She didn't answer, and we sat in silence for a minute, my mind working through a hundred problems for tonight and tomorrow, racing as it always did, listing as it always did. I didn't even realize that Whitley had stood, turning to stare out the window.

“If you say it,” she said carefully, her voice so slow and distant and I didn't know why, “maybe then you might still be right.”

I stood up, standing next to her now, thinking she would say more.

But she didn't. Only stared out the window. The light from outside, from the computer and Shimmer in my office, all of it touching then disappearing from her half-hidden face.

“What are you working on tonight?” I asked.

She shook her head, turning to me now, hand on my arm.

“You don't like to be touched,” she said, smiling some.

“It's a painful thing,” I said, half smiling as I looked down at her hand, seeing it like some threat beside me, a weapon touching another person's arm.

“Like heat?” she asked, and I think she was holding it just a bit harder.

I shook my head. “Invisible waves.”

“Radiation?” she asked, smiling slightly.

“It's all I can do not to pull away.”

“Right now?” she asked, hand moving again, holding my arm, seeing her fingers, feeling that pressure.

“Inside,” I said, seeing my hands, both of them for a moment, and both looked like someone else's hands. “Inside it destroys me.”

“You're not very good at this,” she said, half smiling, half turned away.

I started to shake my head, not sure what she meant, glancing away, toward Shimmer, and realizing then. Turning back. Realizing.

“You're not very good at this,” she said again.

Of course.

“This,” she said, “is the first favor.”

I was closer to her now, not sure if I'd moved or she had, her hand on my arm still, and I felt myself touching her then, hand on her side, touching just barely the smoothest white of her blouse, touching her, touching Whitley, touching someone I'd known three years and only now crossing into some other place, this place where she was, there, here, against me.