Paranoia (12 page)

“Nora, this is Ken in Singapore.”

“Yes, Ken?”

“Uh, we’re feeling some pressure here, I have to say, from Palm and Sony and Blackberry, especially in the Enterprise space. Advance orders for Maestro Gold in Asia Pacific are looking a little soft.”

“Thank you, Ken,” she said hastily, cutting him off. “Kimberly, what’s your sense of the channel community?”

Kimberly Ziegler, wan and nervous-looking with a head of wild curls and horn-rimmed glasses, looked up. “My take is quite different from Ken’s, I have to say.”

“Really? In what way?”

“I’m seeing product differentiation that’s benefiting us, actually. We’ve got a better price point than either Blackberry or Sony’s advanced text-paging devices. It’s true there’s a little wear-and-tear on the brand, but the upgrade in the processor and the flash memory are really going to add value. So I think we’re hanging in there, especially in the vertical markets.”

Suckup, I thought.

“Excellent,” Nora beamed. “Good to hear. I’d also be quite interested to hear whatever feedback that’s come in on GoldDust—” She saw Chad holding his index finger in the air. “Yes, Chad?”

“I thought maybe Adam might have a thought or two about GoldDust.”

She turned to me. “Terrific, let’s hear it,” she said as if I’d just volunteered to sit down and play the piano.

“GoldDust?” I said with a knowing smirk. “Like, how 1999 is that? The Betamax of wireless. It’s up there with New Coke, cold fusion, XFL football, and the Yugo.”

There were some appreciative titters. Nora was watching me closely.

I went on, “The compatibility problems are so massive, we don’t even want to go there—I mean, the way GoldDust-enabled devices work only with devices from the same manufacturer, the lack of any standardized code. Philips keeps saying they’re going to come out with a new, standardized version of GoldDust—yeah, right, maybe when we’re all speaking Esperanto.”

Some more laughter, though I noticed in passing that maybe half the people in the room were stone-faced. Tom Lundgren was looking at me with a funny crooked smile, his right leg jackhammering.

I was really grooving now, getting into it. “I mean, the transfer rate is, what, less than one megabit per second? Really pathetic. Less than a tenth of WiFi. This is horse-and-buggy stuff. And let’s not even talk about how easy it is to intercept—no security whatsoever.”

“Right on,” someone said in a low voice, though I didn’t catch who it was. Mordden was downright beaming. Phil Bohjalian was watching me through narrowed eyes, his expression cryptic, unreadable. Then I looked over and saw Nora. Her face was flushing. I mean, you could see a wave of red rising from her neck to her wide-set eyes.

“Are you finished?” she snapped.

I felt queasy all of a sudden. This was not the reaction I expected. What, had I gone on too long? “Sure,” I said warily.

An Indian-looking guy sitting across from me said, “Why are we revisiting this? I thought you made a final decision on this last week, Nora. You seemed to feel very strongly that the added functionality was worth the cost. So why are you marketing people going back to this old debate? Isn’t the matter settled?”

Chad, who’d been studying the table, said, “Hey, come on, guys, give the newbie a break, huh? You can’t expect him to know everything—the guy doesn’t even know where the cappuccino machine is yet, come on.”

“I think we don’t need to waste any more time here,” said Nora. “The matter’s decided. We’re adding GoldDust.” She gave me a look of the darkest fury.

When the meeting ended, a stomach-churning twenty minutes later, and people began filing out of the room, Mordden gave my shoulder a quick, furtive pat, which should have told me everything. I’d fucked up, big time. People were giving me all sorts of curious looks.

“Uh, Nora,” said Paul Camilletti, holding up a finger, “you mind staying behind a sec? I want to go over a few things.”

As I walked out, Chad came up to me and spoke in a low voice. “Sounds like she didn’t take it well,” he said, “but that was really valuable input, guy.”

Yeah right, motherfucker.

20

Maybe fifteen minutes after the meeting broke up, Mordden stopped by my cubicle.

“Well, I’m impressed,” he said.

“Really,” I said without much enthusiasm.

“Absolutely. You’ve got more spine than I’d have given you credit for. Taking on your manager, the dread Nora, on her pet project. . . .” He shook his head. “Talk about creative tension. But you should be made aware of the consequences of your actions. Nora does not forget slights. Bear in mind that the most ruthless of the guards in the Nazi concentration camps were women.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said.

“You should be on the alert for subtle signs of Nora’s displeasure. For instance, empty boxes stacked up next to your cubicle. Or suddenly being unable to log on to your computer. Or HR demanding your badge back. But fear not, they’ll give you a strong recommendation, and Trion outplacement services are provided
gratis
.”

“I see. Thanks.”

I noticed that I had a voice mail. When Mordden left, I picked up the phone.

It was a message from Nora Sommers, asking me—no,
ordering
me—to come to her office at once.

She was tapping away at her keyboard when I got there. She gave a quick, sidelong, lizardlike glance and went back to her computer. She ignored me like that for a good two minutes. I stood there awkwardly. Her face had started flushing again—I felt sort of bad that her own skin gave her away so easily.

Finally she looked up again, wheeled around in her chair to face me. Her eyes glistened, but not with sadness. Something different, something almost feral.

“Listen, Nora,” I said gently. “I want to apologize for my—”

She spoke so quietly I could barely hear her. “I suggest
you
listen, Adam. You’ve done quite enough talking today.”

“I was an idiot—” I began.

“And to make such a remark in the presence of Camilletti, Mister Bottom Line, Mister Profit Margin. . . . I’ve got some serious damage control to do with him, thanks to you.”

“I should have kept my mouth—”

“You try to undermine me,” she said, “you don’t know what you’ve taken on.”

“If I’d known—” I tried to get in.

“Don’t even go there. Phil Bohjalian told me he passed by your cube and saw you feverishly doing research on GoldDust before the meeting, before your ‘casual,’ ‘offhand’ dismissal of this vital technology. Let me assure you of this, Mr. Cassidy. You may think you’re some hot shit because of your track record at Wyatt, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable here at Trion. If you don’t get on the bus, you’re going to get run over. And mark my words: I’m going to be behind the wheel.”

I stood there for a few seconds while she bore down on me with those wide-set predator eyes. I looked down at the floor, then back up again. “I blew it big-time,” I said, “and I really owe you a huge apology. Obviously I misjudged the situation, and I probably brought with me my old Wyatt Telecom biases, but that’s no excuse. It won’t happen again.”

“There won’t be an opportunity for it to happen again,” she said quietly. She was tougher than any jackbooted state trooper who’d ever flagged me over to the side of the road.

“I understand,” I said. “And if anyone had told me the decision had been made, I certainly would have kept my big mouth shut. I guess I was going on the assumption that folks here at Trion had heard about Sony, that’s all. My bad.”

“Sony?” she said. “What do you mean, ‘heard about Sony?’”

Wyatt’s competitive-intelligence people had sold him this tidbit, which he’d given me to use at a strategic moment. I figured that saving my ass counted as a strategic moment. “You know, just that they’re scrapping their plans to incorporate GoldDust in all their new handhelds.”

“Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“The latest release of Microsoft Office isn’t going to support it. Sony figures if they incorporate GoldDust, they lose out on millions of dollars of enterprise sales, so they’re going with BlackHawk, the local-wireless protocol that Office
will
support.”

“It will?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re sure about this? Your sources are completely reliable?”

“Completely, one hundred percent. I’d stake my life on it.”

“You’d stake your career on it as well?” Her eyes drilled into me.

“I think I just did.”

“Very interesting,” she said. “
Extremely
interesting, Adam. Thank you.”

21

I stayed late that evening.

By seven-thirty, eight, the place was empty. Even the diehard workaholics worked from home at night, logging back on to the Trion network, so there was no need to stay late at the office anymore. By nine o’clock, there was no one in sight. The overhead fluorescent lights stayed on, faintly flickering. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked black from some angles; from other angles you could see the city spread out before you, lights twinkling, headlights streaking by noiselessly.

I sat at my cubicle and started poking around the Trion internal Web site.

If Wyatt wanted to know who’d been hired in to some kind of “skunkworks” that had been started some time in the last two years, I figured I should try to find out who Trion had
hired
in the last two years or so. That was as good a start as any. There were all sorts of ways to search the employee database, but the problem was, I didn’t really know exactly who or what I was looking for.

After a while, I figured it out: the employee number. Every Trion employee gets a number. A lower number means you were hired earlier on. So after looking at a bunch of different, random employee bios, I began to see the range of numbers of people who’d started working here two years ago. Luckily (for my purposes anyway), Trion had been in a real slow period, so there weren’t that many. I came up with a list of a few hundred new hires—new being within the last two years—and downloaded all the names and their bios to a CD. So that was a start at least.

Trion had its own, proprietary instant-messaging service called InstaMail. It worked just like Yahoo Messenger or America Online’s Instant Messenger—you could keep a “buddy list” that told you when colleagues were online and when they weren’t. I noticed that Nora Sommers was logged in. She wasn’t here, but she was online, which meant she was working from home.

Which was good, because that meant I could now attempt to break into her office without the risk of her showing up unannounced.

The thought of doing it made my guts clench like a fist, but I knew I had no choice. Arnold Meacham wanted tangible results, like yesterday. Nora Sommers, I knew, was on several Trion new product–marketing committees. Maybe she’d have information on any new products or new technology Trion was secretly developing. At the very least it was worth a close look.

The most likely place where she’d keep this information would be on her computer, in her office.

The plaque on the door said
N. SOMMERS
. I summoned up the nerve to try the doorknob. It was locked. That didn’t entirely surprise me, since she kept sensitive HR records there. I could see right through the plate glass into her darkened office, all of ten feet by ten feet. There was not much in it, and it was, of course, fanatically neat.

I knew there had to be a key somewhere in her admin’s desk. Strictly speaking, her administrative assistant—a large, broad-beamed, tough woman of around thirty named Lisa McAuliffe—wasn’t only
hers
. Nominally, Lisa worked for all of Nora’s unit, including me. Only VPs got their own admins; that was Trion policy. But that was just a formality. I’d already figured out that Lisa McAuliffe worked for Nora and resented anybody who got in the way.

Lisa wore her hair really short, almost in a crew cut, and wore overalls or painters’ pants. You wouldn’t think Nora, who always dressed fashionably and femme, would have an admin like Lisa McAuliffe. But Lisa was fiercely loyal to Nora; she reserved her few smiles for Nora and scared the bejesus out of everyone else.

Lisa was a cat person. Her cubicle was cluttered with dozens of cat things: Garfield dolls, Catbert figurines, that sort of thing. I looked around, saw no one, and began to pull open her desk drawers. After a few minutes I found the key ring hidden on the soil of her fluorescent light–compatible plant, inside a plastic paper clip holder. I took a deep breath, took the key ring—it must have had twenty keys on it—and began trying the keys, one by one. The sixth key opened Nora’s door.

I flipped on the lights, sat down at Nora’s desk, and powered up her computer.

In case anyone happened to come by unexpectedly, I was prepared. Arnold Meacham had pumped me full of strategies—go on the offensive, ask
them
questions—but what were the odds that a cleaning person, who spoke Portuguese or Spanish and no English, was going to figure out that I was in somebody else’s office? So I focused on the task at hand.

The task at hand, unfortunately, wasn’t so easy.
USER NAME
/
PASSWORD
blinked on the screen. Shit. Password-protected: I should have expected it. I typed in
NSOMMERS
; that was standard. Then I typed
NSOMMERS
in the password space. Seventy percent of people, I’d been taught, make their password the same as their user name.

But not Nora.

I had a feeling that Nora wasn’t the sort of person who wrote down her passwords on a Post-it note in a desk drawer or something, but I had to make sure. I checked the usual places—under the mouse pad, under the keyboard, in back of the computer, in the desk drawers, but nothing. So I’d have to wing it.

I tried just
SOMMERS
; I tried her birth date, tried the first and last seven digits of her Social Security number, her employee number. A whole range of combinations.
DENIED
. After the tenth try, I stopped. Each attempt was logged, I had to assume. Ten attempts was already too many. People generally didn’t fumble more than two or three times.