A Billion Ways to Die (24 page)

“That’s my attitude,” said Chuck. “My wife struggles a bit with her good fortune, but most of her friends and family live in the worst kind of poverty in Haiti. It eats at her.”

I couldn’t tell him I already knew that about Okayo, having read her personal e-mails over the last few weeks. While not necessarily driven by guilt, she clearly felt a strong responsibility toward those she left behind for her life as an affluent doctor in Westchester County, New York.

Andalusky sketched out my new responsibilities, which looked uncannily like my old responsibilities, with the added requirement of helping to present the department’s quarterly status reports, bolstered, he assumed, by some of the same foundational research that lifted my Jordanian desalinization study.

I thought he’d covered everything when he mentioned one other thing.

“Now that you’re attached to my office, it’d be very much in your interest to help me build a counterweight to Gyawali’s data and policy recommendations,” he said.

I told him I didn’t quite understand. He handed me a piece of paper that listed the half-dozen areas of interest being researched by Gyawali’s group, and the estimated dates of completion, along with check-in dates along the way.

“You probably worked on a lot of this,” he said. “I want you to keep going, but go deeper, wider, use some of that data magic of yours. Find out where he’s gone off the beam, or missed something important. Keep it close to the vest until we need it. If it all works out I’ll introduce you to my discretionary bonus pool.”

Then I understood.

“You want me to find ways to undermine his research, to gain us some leverage with the CEO.”

He studied my face.

“It’s sort of a crude way of putting it, but that’s the gist. We break the cord between Gyawali and the CEO, or at least weaken it, allowing me to step in with a fresh alternative. Then maybe we get a better grip on Gyawali’s operation, make him accountable to our divisional budget for a change. Can you kill three birds with one stone?”

He smirked as if charmed by the idea.

“And it could mean added compensation for me,” I said, “if I deliver the goods.”

“We all deserve a chance to get ahead.”

I didn’t know if I could duplicate his look of rapacious zeal, but I tried.

“Sounds like fun,” I said.

I gave him my opinion on the Gyawali projects that offered the greatest opportunity, based on my assessment of certain shortcomings in Gyawali’s methodology. I was able to paint a vivid picture of how we could encourage Gyawali to go down a certain path, and then just as he commits to a given conclusion, spring the trap. It sounded a bit ambitious, I admitted, but if we were going to do it, better do it in a big way.

The more I talked, the more excited he became.

“That’s the way to be transformative in this company,” he said, tapping the table top with a tight fist. “You gotta go big.”

Before we broke to go back to our offices, he put his hand on my shoulder. He brought his face close enough for me to smell the lunch on his breath.

“You know, Marty, if you happen to stumble on anything of a personal nature regarding Dr. Gyawali, or any of his top people, anything that they wouldn’t want the world to know about, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Could really ice the cake. You read me?”

His voice still danced with that good-natured, Midwestern bonhomie, but the set of his face had changed, to one I recognized, having last seen it on a beat-up fishing scow in the Caribbean.

“Read you loud and clear, Chuck,” I said.

“I think it’s going to be interesting having you around,” he said, giving my shoulder a slight squeeze.

“I certainly intend it to be,” I said.

I
USED
about a week to familiarize myself with my new surroundings, the general rhythms of the building, the social climate and prevailing mood states. With a greater proportion of private offices, deep carpeting and sound insulation, a monastic quiet prevailed, with communications managed almost entirely through e-mail. Chuck’s office was physically, and thus tellingly, directly outside the standard concentration of top management known as the C suite. The CEO, CIO, COO, etc., clustered defensively behind a locked glass wall, and sustained by a small cadre of administrative assistants. You rarely saw any of these people, despite the steady flow of upbeat, or instructive interoffice memos that drifted down into the rank and file.

Surveillance cameras were coyly concealed throughout the building, along hallways and within common areas and conference rooms. Having worked for a security equipment company, I knew what to look for, which meant never acting as if I did. Official staff in grey slacks and blue blazers moved regularly through the building, somehow being unobtrusive and obvious at the same time. Fit, composed and square-jawed, I didn’t need the IT guy to tell me they were all ex-military.

Though I had virtually no contact with my fellow employees, I saw a fair amount of Chuck, the result of some of his pent-up demand for data analytics. The assignments came at me in a steady stream, though he was respectful of my time, allowing me to set my own reporting schedule. It wasn’t difficult work if you had the right software, which Brian in IT was happy to provide.

Seeing a lot of Chuck also meant seeing a lot of Patricia Cheerborg. It was apparent she was his closest protégé and that they represented a duality through which ran the whole of the department’s operations. He copied her on every e-mail he sent to me, so I made sure to consistently hit the “reply all” button. And on a few occasions, as I waited for an audience, I saw them move between each other’s offices as if it were a common work space. This is what inspired a plan that would surely necessitate Natsumi’s participation.

“You’ll never fit in any of my things,” she said, looking me up and down with a critical eye.

“I know. We need to go shopping.”

“What’s her size?” she asked.

“I don’t know what that means. Sort of tall, on the slim side, though big boned. A little stooped.”

“That’s a start.”

I Googled her and found a few photographs from company events and her LinkedIn page. Even better, there was a video interview of her when acting as spokesperson for a Fontaine development project.

“You’re lucky about the hair,” she said. “We can buy it prepermed and ready to go.”

As every male on his first attempt at going drag knows, even modestly high heels are very difficult to walk in. I tried them with a pair of panty hose, over shaved legs, and a knee-length light wool skirt in order to capture the whole experience.

“I wonder when I’ll be able to look at you without at least a little smirk,” said Natsumi.

“It’d be heartless to deny you that joy,” I said, as I wobbled around the house.

“I bet your legs are better looking than Patricia’s,” she said.

“The kind of thing a guy waits his whole life to hear.”

After we bought the wig, blouse, plastic-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweater, the greater challenge became more apparent. My shoulders.

“Maybe if I lost weight,” I said.

“That won’t make your skeleton any smaller.”

“She stoops,” I said, demonstrating as well as I could while still unsteady on my feet.

“How long can you sustain that?” she asked.

“Let’s find out.”

So I practiced for a few hours every night for over a week, until I mastered her long-legged loping walk and slope-shouldered posture, though after taping my performance with a camera similar to what security would install at Fontaine, it wasn’t assuring.

“You’re still too manly on top,” said Natsumi. “You’re not a good enough schlump.”

After some thought, I resorted to one of the most versatile tools of the pragmatic and deceptive. Duct tape.

I assumed as slouched a posture as I could and Natsumi taped me into position, working around the stuffed bra. It was just shy of excruciating, but I had movement of my hands and could free myself of thinking about that unnatural shape.

“Too bad about the nose,” said Natsumi, searching out the final flaw in the disguise.

“My mother used to say the same thing. She blamed it on my father’s side of the family.”

“Just keep your head down.”

I used this preparation time to do a little low-key network probing using Brian’s admin password. I stayed in the outer rings of the file structure, mostly recording what was accessible without actually cracking into the folders. Though it was within this relatively safe realm I came across a valuable find—an appointment schedule one of the administrative assistants kept for Chuck, Patricia and a few other high-ranking people in the department. At that point in the process, there was no more precious asset.

Thus the opportunity arose about a week later when both Chuck and Patricia were scheduled to be at an evening presentation in the city. This was posted a few days before the event, giving me time to smuggle the women’s clothes into the office along with a flash drive containing what I hoped was the key to the rest of Andalusky’s electronic realm.

In the morning I asked Chuck for a brief chat at the end of the day. He said he could do it a few minutes before five. So I showed up when the two of them were getting ready to leave the building. As we chatted in the hallway, I sneaked another look at the camouflaged security cameras, assessing their likely angles and coverage.

Back in my office, I logged on to one of my approved servers, typing in the first section of a report I’d already composed at home. Installed on my computer was a program that picked up the report halfway through and continued with a recording of the keystrokes, creating the appearance I was diligently working away at my desk while I adopted my Patricia Cheerborg identity.

Around seven o’clock I left my office and headed down a nearby stairwell connected with the parking garage. I was wearing a long raincoat, underneath which I wore the Patricia outfit down to my calves, which were covered in cut-off pant legs taped to my knees. I got in my car, and after climbing into the passenger seat, completed the conversion. One of the greatest points of exposure came next, when I left the car and followed a different route back to the stairwell. My hope was that unless my movements were being directly monitored, which in the garage would have to be from some distance, it was unlikely anyone would notice Marty Goldman get in his car and Patricia Cheerborg emerge from the passenger side moments later.

I climbed back up the stairwell, passing my floor on the way to the next, the top floor where they housed company top management.

When I reached the hallway, I adopted my best Patricia Cheerborg walk and headed for her office. I’d made another guess, that security would be unaware of her meeting in the city, assuming that keeping tabs on executive meetings would be too burdensome. Seeing her appear at her office after hours, on the other hand, would be commonplace, and unworthy of extra attention.

Head down, I walked with Patricia’s purposeful stride directly into her office, which was unlocked, answering yet another worrisome possibility. I sat at her desk, swiveled around to face the credenza and took a deep breath. Though presumably hidden from view by people or cameras, I pretended to go through some papers on the credenza while I waited for the storm troopers to appear. Or not.

When it felt like I was in the clear, with my heart rate down to a steady trip hammer, I took a bunch of Kleenex tissues out of my skirt pocket, gathered up a few file folders and left the office, making a show of sneezing and snuffling into the Kleenex. Again, with clear purpose, I made the quick turn into Andalusky’s office, also blessedly unlocked, and shut the door.

This time, I didn’t hesitate, but went right for his desktop computer. I put the flash drive into the USB port and switched it on. When the user name and password request popped up, I used Brian’s admin credentials, and hit enter. As the machine booted up, an invisible little app slithered out of the flash drive and attached itself to Chuck’s computer at the operating system level, expressing itself as a legitimate slice of communications code and thus undetectable by known security software.

“Known” being the operative word. In the arms race between spyware hackers and the people committed to their defeat, the balance of power shifted nearly by the minute. Though I’d acquired the latest version of my app from a reliable source, no one could know if it weren’t already tagged and targeted by the righteous opposition. There was no way to know.

The advantage I had, warranting the mighty risk I was taking, was being able to inject the agent directly into the computer at the start-up phase, bypassing any network presence where automated sentries guarded the gates.

It was tempting to cruise around Andalusky’s e-mail and file folders, but as soon as the app was safely tucked away, I logged off and shut down the computer. This part of the mission presumably accomplished, my entire nervous system decided it was time to jump up and run like hell.

Luckily, running of any kind in Patricia’s modest heels was out of the question. Instead I went back into her office to let another reasonable length of time pass before making the last run through the building.