Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (21 page)

“It’s Sara Williston. You talk to her and I’ll go get Dr. Francis on the line.”

I smiled my thanks at her, took the phone and hit the button on the phone taking the line off hold. “Sara, it’s Kate Monahan. I want to return some things to the safety deposit box and wanted to drop by. Is that convenient for you?”

Sara told me that I could drop by any time before 7:00 p.m. After that, she was leaving for a rock climbing class. Apparently, they have rock climbing walls inside old warehouses where people can practice the sport. I did
not
ask for further details. Rock climbing, indoors or outdoors, would rate right up there with watching golf on television. Yawn, bore.

As soon as I hung up, Carrie was back in my office looking a little disturbed.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“Dr. Francis,” she said. “He’s no longer working at Global Devices and they didn’t have a forwarding address. I find that strange.”

“Who did you talk to over there?” I asked.

“I called his old number and got someone else’s voice mail. I tried the number a second time, thinking I might have dialed wrong, which I didn’t. So then I called the main switchboard, which was closed for the night. Then I remembered that one of my friends who I went to secretarial school with worked there. I tracked her down through the automated directory.”

“Oh. My. God. How long were you out there on the phone?”

“Just a few minutes,” Carrie continued. “Lucky for me Naomi works for the head of the human resources group. Which means she has access to their internal systems. She logged on to their HR system and found out that Dr. Francis left the company about four weeks ago, and they have no forwarding address.”

“You’re amazing,” I told her. “Go home now. We’ll worry about Dr. Francis tomorrow.”

“I’m off then,” she said. “Just remember to page Lou when you’re ready to leave.”

Lou had a heck of a time navigating the streets in SoHo after my bank appointment. Cars were double-parked and two lane streets narrowed to one lane. When he finally pulled up in front of Frank Sanchez’s place, I was about ten minutes late for my appointment. Jay was pacing on the sidewalk, running his hand through his hair. He almost made a move towards the car to open my door, but knew better. Lou was very possessive about his duties.

I told Lou that I didn’t need him for the rest of the evening and he took the news stoically. The man had such pride in his job, and he was so over-protective of me.

“You shure, ma’am?” he asked in his thick New York accent. “Nuttin’ I can do for you tonight?”

“No, Lou. Really. I have an appointment here, and then Jay and I’ll go for something to eat, and then we’ll catch a cab back.”

When I said “cab”, I swear Lou almost gasped. Like I had insulted his mother or something. “It’s okay Lou,” I told him as I placed a hand on his arm. “You deserve some time off. Really. Come and get me tomorrow morning at our usual time. Enjoy your evening.”

“Ma’am,” he said and tipped his hat at me. “Sir,” he said directly to Jay. “Night.” With that he got back behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town Car and left us.

“Wow,” Jay piped up. “Who would have thought it would be so hard keeping the hired help happy?”

My lesson with Frank that night was all about being personally aware of my surroundings, and the effects on the body of violent or aggressive surprise. But we only got to that part of the class after Frank had put Jay and I through our paces. We spent time on our footwork drills and our punches, practicing our jab, cross and hook, and then Frank introduced us to the
qua choi
or ‘back fist’. This was a punch where you used your forearm like a piston and met your target with the back of your hand. I
loved
this punch and got great satisfaction from the sound of my hand hitting the practice glove with a satisfying
thwap
. After thirty minutes I was dripping with sweat, and although Frank’s dojo was air conditioned I could hardly feel the effects of it.

While I sat on the bench sipping from a bottle of water, Frank talked to me about some of the basics of self-defense.

“I don’t really like to call it self-defense,” he explained. “It’s more self-protection. It’s about being aware, sometimes hyper-aware, of your surroundings. Kate, you’re responsible for your own personal security and safety.” When our peripheral vision is active, he explained, our ability to detect danger increases. He talked about how to approach your car at night, why you should lock the doors as soon as you get in your car, and other different types of situations to avoid.

Frank then asked me to describe how I felt physically the first time I was attacked.

“Other than scared out of my mind?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Tell me about other things you remember.”

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on that night, just a few months ago. Just remembering the weight of him sitting on my stomach, one of his large hands covering my mouth and the other trapping both my hands over my head, caused a metallic taste in my mouth. My stomach and bowels tightened.

I looked up at Frank standing in front me. “I remember feeling helpless,” I started. “I wanted to scream but nothing would come out of my mouth. It felt like I was falling down a tunnel. It sounded like thunder in my ears.” My breathing started to get short so I concentrated on taking some deep breaths. I suddenly felt like shit.

“See, even after several months, the incident still has the ability to cause physiological effects on you. You’re breathing is hard.” Frank sat down beside me on the bench. “Kate, look at me,” he directed. “Your face is flushed and it’s not from our workout. This is what I want to talk to you about.”

I took a couple of deep breaths and looked at Frank. He seemed like a nice guy and even though it was only the second time I had met him, I decided I had to trust him. Jay was standing on the other side of the room, leaning on the wall, sipping from his water bottle. He was the smart one, he knew to give me my space.

“Frank, I want to forget about those incidents. I hate the way remembering them makes me feel.” I stood up and starting pacing, getting myself worked up. “I can’t stand not feeling in control. That son-of-a-bitch attacked me three times and then he shot me. He’s fucking lucky he’s in the Kingston Penitentiary because I don’t know what I’d do to that sorry bastard if I ran into him. Just thinking about what he put me through makes me so angry I could spit.”

“Kate. All of these feelings are totally natural. I think you’re handling it well. Some women who aren’t as strong as you don’t cope well at all after they’ve been attacked. Some of them become suicidal. Let’s consider your anger as some positive energy. You can picture him in your mind when you’re working on your punches. Right now I want to talk to you about the effects on your body when you’re under attack. Everything you described to me before is caused by a whole bunch of chemicals in your body that go haywire when you’re attacked or surprised. Your muscles tense up. Right?”

I nodded in agreement.

“You suddenly can’t hear certain noises and others are magnified. Right?”

I nodded again.

“You feel like you’re in a tunnel. Sometimes you feel like you’re falling. You have no sense of time. Everything seems totally out of your control. Right?”

Again, I nodded.

“That’s the effect of the chemical cocktail. Your body goes into self-preservation mode. Your attacker counts on you being surprised and unable to help yourself. Let’s learn how to keep our awareness levels high and how to defend ourselves if we’re the subject of a surprise attack. Okay?”

Jay and I spent the next hour learning how to deal with unexpected surprises. Frank taught me how to take a knife away from someone who was attacking me and even though I was highly doubtful that I could do something like that, within ten minutes I was able to take the knife away from Frank and lay him out, flat on his back on the floor. Frank told me to be submissive and passive with my attacker and to never look them in the eye. That way, the attacker could feel superior and in control. I didn’t need to be stronger than my attacker and I didn’t need to be bigger than my attacker.

Suddenly I felt totally empowered and realized that I had found the magic I had been looking for. I had vowed to learn how to defend myself and even though I was a short little person, I was learning that size didn’t mean anything in these situations, if you knew what you were doing. We practiced on Jay, the poor guy. While he pretended to attack me with a knife, I practiced taking it away from him, and dropping him to the mats that Frank had supplied. Frank ended the lesson by showing me what to do and how to escape if someone grabbed me from behind. By the end of the two hours, I was exhausted but feeling more and more in control. My thanks to Frank were heartfelt.

“Just doing my job, Kate, just doing my job,” he told me. “See you in a couple of days.”

chapter thirty

Jay woke me from a deep sleep that night. I was so physically exhausted after our class with Frank that I could barely make it through dinner. When we arrived back at the apartment I dumped my stuffed briefcase on the large dining room table.

“I have no strength to go through this shit tonight,” I said to no one in particular.

Jay on the other hand, was fired up. Apparently, he gets ‘juiced’ after a work out and has too much energy to sleep. I highly doubt that I will
ever
feel like that.

I showed him the files I had brought home from Phoenix. He asked if he could go through them.

“Fill your boots,” I told him and dragged my ass to bed. I was totally disoriented when he woke me.

“Kate,” he was saying softly as he shook my shoulder. “Kate. Wake up.”

“What?” I tried to push myself up with my arms into a sitting position but my forearms and shoulders ached so much they were useless. I flopped back down on the pillow. “What? This better be good Jay, or I’m telling your mom.”

He threw the covers off and tugged on one of my useless arms. “Come on. I need to show you what I found in those files.”

I followed him into the dark living room. A bit of light from the street below was coming through the windows and from the cubby hole in the wall behind the aquarium. The computer screen gave off a glow and a small lamp beside it was lit.

“What time is it?” I asked Jay.

“Around two,” he told me. He pulled a chair up beside him and patted the seat. “Here. Sit down.”

“Two?” I yawned. “Aren’t you tired?”

“No. Now pay attention.” He lifted up one of the files that I had brought from the office. “See here?” Jay pointed to the label on the side of the file folder.

“Yeah. I see.”

“What does it say?”

I read off the name on the file folder. Global Devices. Technical Specifications. PISTON.

“Right. But look carefully. What else is on the label?”

“Oh for God’s sake Jay. What? I’m barely awake.” I squinted and looked at the label. “T-7,” I read out loud.

“Right,” Jay said. He took the file back and swiveled around on his chair to the file cabinets behind us. He pulled out the top drawer of the second cabinet and rifled through the files until he found the one he wanted. Jay pulled the file folder out with a flourish and handed it to me. “Ta da,” he proudly said.

“Ta da, what?”

“These two files should be mirror images of each other. Obviously the filing system at Phoenix assigns a number to each file. I only noticed it after I had been reading the contents of the files. I remembered that the files in the cabinets were only labeled with a letter-number combination system. If this file here,” he lifted up the one I had brought from the office, “is the official T-7 file, then this file,” he pointed at the file I was holding, “should be a copy of the T-7 file.” He took the file from me.

“But,” he continued, “it’s not a completely true copy.” He flipped several pages to where it was marked with a small yellow Post-It note and handed it back to me. Jay then opened the file from the office to the same spot. “Remember that game we used to play when we were kids? You know, the one that came with the Saturday comics? They’d have two pictures which looked identical and you had to find the differences? Well, let’s pretend we’re playing that game. Do you see the differences between the two?”

The sheets of paper he was pointing to were part of a report to Global Devices detailing tests on the PISTON system. There were columns of figures, headed with symbols and letters I had never seen before. My brain was still foggy with sleep and I was having just a teensy bit of trouble with my enthusiasm level.

“Sorry, Jay. I can’t see any differences.”

“It’s okay. Look. Here.” His finger came to rest on a number on a sheet of paper in the file from the cabinet, and with his other hand he pointed out a different number, but in the same place on the page on the other file. “See? Same reports. Different numbers. And this isn’t the only place where there are differences.”

He turned around and faced the computer and started fiddling with the mouse. “None of this was obvious when you look at these things in isolation. If you look at Tom’s computer files, nothing seems wrong. Same thing for the files in the cabinet or the files you brought from the office. It was when I had this file from your office and I saw the number on the top of the label, that I thought to look at the file in the drawer. I didn’t put the Post-It notes in the file you know. They were already there, so Tom had already done his homework.”

“What do you think this means?” I wondered out loud.

“That’s pretty obvious to me,” Jay said. “Your Mr. Connaught found some discrepancies in the reports. I think that’s why he has all these files in the drawers. They seem to be a duplicate of the files from your office.”

“Let me see,” I said. I stood up and bent over the file cabinet and pulled a few files out randomly. When we found these files the other day, I hadn’t bothered to go through them because the labels meant nothing to me. The contents of the files that I pulled out now looked familiar to me, and I said to Jay, “I think you’re right. These look like the files I spent all day going through.” I opened the second cabinet and pulled out the file labeled R-1. The contents were the same as the RFP file I had reviewed that afternoon.