Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (34 page)

As things turned out, it would be a long time before I felt this relaxed again.

chapter forty-eight

It was a good thing that I fell asleep so early the night before. We had a seven a.m. appointment with Frank Sanchez so I didn’t whine too much when Jay had me up and at ‘em at six. Jay had woken me the night before from a deliciously cozy couch in the living room where I had fallen asleep reading restated financial statements. Before I dozed off I remember thinking that I had found the cure for insomnia - financial statements - and for especially bad cases I would recommend reading the notes to the financial statements. Honest to God, did people actually read that babble?

Manhattan was beautifully quiet early on a Saturday morning and Lou was on hand to drive us to Frank’s place.

I settled into the back seat of the car and thought about how quickly I was getting used to being driven around. “Lou, there is no way you are working seven days a week,” I told him. “I don’t care if you’re driving the President of the United States.”

“It’s okay, ma’am,” he assured me as we pulled away from our building, heading south on Fifth Avenue. “I’m off at noon today and Mr. Northland has arranged for one of our other drivers to be available.”

Traffic was light this early in the morning and we made good time driving to Soho. Lou got lucky with the lights and I counted twenty consecutive blocks before we hit a red. As we drove, Jay and I discussed our weekend plans. Although I had absolutely zero desire to go to the office, I knew I had to. One of the reasons that presidents and chief executive officers were in the office seven days a week was because of the endless stream of paper, documents to be reviewed, requests to be turned down, opinions to be given, advice to be doled out, phone calls to be returned, emails to be answered, studies to be studied, research to verify, and proposals to be vetted. I wasn’t complaining - well maybe a little bit - but my problem wasn’t just the amount of work, it was the continual learning curve. Some of the research papers that crossed my desk were absolutely mind boggling. The fact that Tommy had degrees in biology, engineering, and software design probably made it a little easier for him to understand the mounds of paper. Yours truly had a solid high school education and two years of community college where I’d trained as a paralegal. None of my education had prepared me for the highly technical, financial, and scientific issues that crossed my desk on a daily basis. I was learning though how to fake it well.

Frank’s lesson was pretty much a repeat of the day before. “We need you to practice what we went over yesterday,” he told us. “Repetition and more repetition will make it second nature, so we need to train not just your body but your brain too.”

Knife and gun disarms, how to get out of choke holds, what to do when someone grabs you from behind. We practiced, and then practiced some more. And then just to be sure, we practiced one more time. Jay would attack me and then I would reciprocate. How to handle the situations was almost becoming second nature to me and as Jay and I went through the motions I allowed my mind to zone out and my body to take over. The hour flew by and when Frank suggested we take a few minutes to practice our jabs and low line kicks, I was all for it. I do believe I actually got a second wind and wasn’t half as exhausted as I was the day before. Could I actually be getting in shape?

The three of us stood around chugging from bottles of water when we finally finished up about an hour and a half later.

“So Kate, what do you think about all this training?” Frank asked me. “Do you feel like you’re getting the hang of it?”

I mopped the sweat from my face before answering. “I think I’m getting it. I’m starting to understand it better. Today was good though because I was able to react to Jay’s attacks without too much thinking. I’m actually liking it and enjoying the physical side of it. Especially the punching and kicking.”

“Good to hear. But remember, there’s no substitute for awareness. Keep your mind sharp and always be aware of your situation. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t get into stupid situations.” Jay nodded his head in agreement with Frank.

“Understood Frank,” I assured him.

I was at my desk by ten o’clock. I had a quick shower at home after our workout with Frank where I changed into presentable jeans, T-shirt and running shoes. If I had to work, I was going to be comfortable.

The office was expectedly quiet - it was after all a Saturday morning in the summer. When I had signed in with the security guard in the lobby of the office tower, I noticed that there were only a few signatures of Phoenix staff on the list. Not that I recognized any of them. I was only a couple of weeks into the job and most of the employees were still strangers to me.

The mound of papers in my in-basket made me groan and I decided to make some coffee before tackling the pile. The hallways were dark, with the only light coming through glass panels built into the walls next to the doors of offices that had windows to the outside. There was an eerie greenish glow coming from one open doorway and I smiled when I realized it was coming from the photocopier. The coffee room was pitch black but I found the light switch right where it should have been. The door to the coffee room closed behind me quietly.

There were two large coffee machines on the long counter. One which made a whole pot of coffee at a time and the other which dispensed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee by the cup. I fetched a large china mug from the cupboard and placed it under the spout on the one-cup machine, pushed the button for caffeinated, and watched in fascination through the clear glass front of the machine as it measured up a goodly amount of coffee beans, ground them, placed the coffee grounds in a funny looking gizmo, shot a large amount of boiling water through it which drained into my cup, and then disposed of the used coffee grounds into another container. Very cool.

Back at my desk I worked through my in-basket, dealing with each item as best I could. The things I couldn’t manage without some advice were put into a separate pile. Mundane crap was put into another pile for Carrie to deal with.

Sandra Melnick had left three technical proposals, each in its own file folder, and all three held together with a large rubber band. A large, yellow Post-it note was stuck on the top with a handwritten note from Sandra. She thought I might want to be in the loop on what was going on in the R and D group, and these three proposals were the largest projects for which we were preparing bids. Each file had a template form stapled on the inside cover of the file folder with some basic information. At the bottom of each form there was a section for financial information. Each of these proposals was worth over $10 million, if we were to be the successful bidder. Successful would be nice, I thought, and a couple of these projects could help with the dent in our financials that the loss of the Global Devices work had caused.

The next couple of hours were spent reading and devouring the contents of these three files. I made copious notes to myself and stuck dozens of little, yellow Post-it notes in the margins of the documents highlighting areas where I had questions. Each file contained a bundle of spreadsheets, which were created by our internal financial staff, setting out what we estimated it would cost the company to carry out the work. Some of the spreadsheets had so many columns and rows I could barely read them.

During the time I’d been at the office, Jay had called me twice and Kelly Northland had called me once. Jay was not happy that I was going to the office and I had refused to let him come with me. He tried, unsuccessfully, to talk me out of it. The two phone calls from him were his way of checking up on me.

“I don’t understand why you couldn’t just bring the work home with you,” he’d said the first time he’d called.

Kelly pretty much echoed what Jay had said and told me that he was on his way to the office, he’d see me shortly. Jay must have called him and told on me. I wondered if he was going to call my mom too.

“Kelly, I’m fine. The place is quiet. I’m getting some work done.” I was talking to a dead phone.

I felt comfortable at the office, and Jay and Kelly were probably over-reacting. To what I wasn’t sure. They both were being over-protective, which I reluctantly acknowledged and appreciated, but, in my typical, hard headed fashion, I ignored.

When I finished with the three proposals, I swiveled in my chair to the computer and fired it up. I would finish up by going through my emails and seeing if there was anything urgent. Then, home, and a leisurely afternoon with Jay. Maybe I could convince him to go with me to one of the art museums or for a walk in Central Park. Maybe we could visit the zoo which was right across the street from the apartment and which I was dying to visit.

Microsoft Outlook took a while to boot up and by the time it was running I knew why it had taken so long. My in-basket had over two hundred unread messages. For gawd’s sake, I thought, I was out of the office for one day. I either had to get a Blackberry so I could stay on top of the emails or give Carrie access so she could deal with them.

The message on the top of the list was the most recently received one so I scrolled down several screens to get to the first unread message, so I could go through them in order. The first eighteen messages were spam and by the time I had opened and deleted the eighteenth I was disgusted. Disgusted with the content of the spam messages and disgusted that there were people out there who spent their days sending shit like this. The next dozen messages were legitimate business emails, which I read. They could be dealt with on Monday so I left them where they were in the in-basket. Anxious to finish up, I started scanning the sender’s name and subject line to see if there was anything that needed my attention that couldn’t wait until Monday. I scanned and scrolled, scanned and scrolled. Dozens of the emails were internal, from the Vice Presidents, or bulletins to the employees, some of them automatically generated, like the financial update which was issued every forty-eight hours to the executive team. I scrolled over those and dozens more spam.

My finger froze on the mouse when I caught the subject line of an email I thought at first glance was spam. It read
You Don’t Control It All Bitch
. This was the first spam message I had seen with a word like
bitch
in it. I clicked on the message, purely out of curiosity, and quickly wished I had ignored it.

chapter forty-nine

It turns out that the subject line was only mildly offensive. The text of the message turned my stomach.

“
You do not control the life of others, you do not control the universe. You do not control who lives and dies. The one who sat where you do today thought they were in control. You are a tiny microcosm who has no worth, no meaning, no value to this world. Like the one before you, you will cease to exist in the macrocosm. Snuffed out, extinct and no longer believing that you are in control. Bitch. Goodbye.
”

My breathing was shallow and my face felt flushed. I quickly pushed my chair back, separating myself from the computer. The message remained on the screen and I stared at it from a distance.
The one who sat where you do today…
Did the message mean Tommy? I quickly lit a cigarette and paced in front of the windows. Who had sent that email? The sender’s email address was gobbledy-gook: [email protected] and the message had been sent in the middle of the night.

The email was threatening and admittedly scared the crap out of me. I closed the offending message and scrolled carefully through the rest of my emails to see if there were any similar messages. Seeing none, I clicked on the large X in the top, right-hand corner of my screen, shutting down Outlook. Out of sight, out of mind, I thought.

The stalker smiled and admired the reflection in the computer screen. The calm visage reflecting back made the stalker feel powerful. The calm was not faked but as a result of biofeedback, which was a learned technique, easy for someone of the stalker’s power to master. The stalker was finally in control of breathing and blood pressure. The bitch had just read the email. Untraceable email. Time to turn up the heat.

The scream caught in my throat and I couldn’t get it out because I swear to God that was where my heart was. With my heart pounding at about three hundred beats a minute, I closed my eyes and took a couple of quick breaths.

“Jesus,” I breathed out slowly. “You scared me.”

Kelly was less than eighteen inches in front of me and he stood stock still in the exact position he was in when I had opened my office door. As soon as I closed down my computer I had phoned the driver and gathered up my things. I was spooked by the email and wanted to get out of the office.

“I was just about to knock,” he explained. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I was just leaving.”

“You look upset,” he said. “What happened?”

“Besides you scaring the bejeezus out of me?” I shot back.

“Yeah, besides that.”

“Just an email I got. It kind of spooked me.”

Kelly pushed past me into my office and headed over towards my computer. “Show me.”

While I booted up the computer, Kelly gave me another gentle lecture about not venturing out on my own. I was spooked enough by the eerie email that I paid attention.

“Until this case is settled, you can’t afford to be alone outside of your apartment.”

“But I can’t ask you to spend your time following me around.”

“I don’t plan on it. That’s why we’ve arranged for a bodyguard. Lou is officially on holidays for a few days. We’ll have a professional driver and guard with you at all times.”

“Isn’t that a bit much?” I ventured. Kelly didn’t respond so I imagine my question was rhetorical in his mind.

The computer screen asked for my log-in and password so I typed them in and waited while the computer continued. At long last the computer stopped its grinding and calmly waited for me to tell it what to do so I clicked on the email icon and my in-box popped right up. I scrolled down until I got to the email, where it sat amongst the hundreds of others.