Paranoia (7 page)

“Doing anything about it in the next generation?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, I can’t say. That’s proprietary to Wyatt Telecom. This isn’t just a legal nicety, it’s a moral thing with me—when you give your word, it’s got to mean something. If that’s a problem . . .”

He gave what looked like a genuine, appreciative smile. Slam dunk. “Not a problem at all. I respect that. Anyone who leaks proprietary information from their last employer would do the same to me.”

I noted the words “last employer”: Lundgren had already signed on, he’d just given it away.

He pulled out his pager and quickly checked it. He’d gotten several pages while we were talking, on the silent vibrate mode. “I don’t need to take any more of your time, Adam. I want you to meet Nora.”

10

Nora Sommers was blond, around fifty, with wide-set staring eyes. She had the carnivore look of a wild pack animal. Maybe I was biased by her dossier, which described her as ruthless, tyrannical. She was a director, the team leader of the Maestro project, a sort of scaled-down Blackberry knockoff that was circling the drain. She was notorious for calling seven
A.M.
staff meetings. No one wanted to be on her team, which was why they were having a hard time filling the job internally.

“So Nick Wyatt must be no fun to work for, huh?” she began.

I didn’t need Judith Bolton to tell me you’re never supposed to complain about your previous employer. “Actually,” I said, “he’s demanding, but he brought out the best in me. He’s a perfectionist. I have nothing but admiration for him.”

She nodded wisely, smiled as if I’d selected the right multiple-choice answer. “Keeps the drive alive, hmm?”

What did she expect me to say, the truth about Nick Wyatt? That he’s a boor and an asshole? I don’t think so. I riffed a bit longer: “Working at Wyatt is like getting ten years of experience in one year—instead of one year of experience ten times.”

“Nice answer,” she said. “I like my marketing people to try to snow me. It’s a key component of the skill-set. If you can snow me, you can snow the
Journal.
”

Danger, Will Robinson. I wasn’t going there. I could see the teeth of that jaw trap. So I just looked at her blankly.

“Well,” she went on, “the word has certainly spread about you. What was the hardest battle you had to wage on the Lucid project?”

I rehashed the story I’d just given Tom Lundgren, but she sounded underwhelmed. “Doesn’t sound like much of a battle to me,” she countered. “I’d call that a trade-off.”

“Maybe you had to be there,” I said. Lame. I scrolled through my mental CD-ROM of anecdotes about the development of the Lucid. “Also, there was a pretty big tussle over the design of the joy pad. That’s a five-way directional pad with the speaker built into it.”

“I’m familiar with it. What was the controversy?”

“Well, our ID people really keyed in on that as a focal point of the product—it really drew your eye to it. But I was getting major pushback on that from the engineers, who said it was near impossible, way too tricky; they wanted to separate the speaker from the directional pad. The ID guys were convinced that if you separated them, the design would get cluttered, asymmetric. That was tense. So I had to put my foot down. I said this was cornerstone. The design not only made a visual statement, but it also made a major technology statement—told the market we could do something our competitors couldn’t.”

She was lasering in on me with her wide-set eyes like I was a crippled chicken. “Engineers,” she said with a shudder. “They can really be impossible. No business sense at all.”

The metal teeth of the jaw trap were glistening with blood. “Actually, I never have problems with engineers,” I said. “I think they’re really the heart of the enterprise. I never confront them; I
inspire
them, or try, anyway. Thought leadership and mindshare, those are the keys. That’s one of the things that most appeals to me about Trion—engineers reign supreme here, which is as it should be. It’s a real culture of innovation.”

All right, so I was pretty much parroting an interview Jock Goddard once gave to
Fast Company
, but I thought it worked. Trion’s engineers were famous for loving Goddard, because he was one of them. They considered it a cool place to work, since so much of Trion’s funding went into R&D.

She was speechless for a second. Then she said, “At the end of the day, innovation is mission-critical.” Jesus, I thought I was bad, but this woman spoke business cliché as a second language. It was as if she’d learned it from a Berlitz book.

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

“So tell me, Adam—what’s your greatest weakness?”

I smiled, nodded, and mentally uttered a prayer of gratitude to Judith Bolton.

Score.

Man, it all seemed almost too easy.

11

I got the news from Nick Wyatt himself. When I was shown into his office by Yvette, I found him on his Precor elliptical trainer in a corner of his office. He was wearing a sweat-soaked tank top and red gym shorts and looked buff. I wondered if he did steroids. He had a wireless phone headset on and was barking orders.

More than a week had gone by since the Trion interviews, and nothing but radio silence. I knew they’d gone well, and I had no doubt that my references were spectacular, but who knows, anything could happen.

I figured, wrongly, that once I’d done my interviews I’d be given time off from KGB school, but no such luck. The training went on, including what they called “tradecraft”—how to steal stuff without getting caught, copy documents and computer files, how to search the Trion databases, how to contact them if something came up that couldn’t wait for a scheduled rendezvous. Meacham and another veteran of Wyatt’s corporate security staff, who’d spent two decades in the FBI, taught me how to contact them by e-mail, using an “anonymizer,” a remailer based in Finland that buries your real name and address; how to encrypt my e-mail with this super-strong 1,024-bit software developed, against U.S. law, somewhere offshore. They taught me about traditional spy stuff like dead drops and signals, how to let them know I had documents to pass to them. They taught me how to make copies of the ID badges most corporations use these days, the ones that unlock a door when you wave them at a sensor. Some of this stuff was pretty cool. I was beginning to feel like a real spy. At the time, anyway, I was into it. I didn’t know any better.

But after a few days of waiting and waiting for some word from Trion, I was scared shitless. Meacham and Wyatt had been pretty clear about what would happen if I didn’t land the job.

Nick Wyatt didn’t even look at me.

“Congratulations,” he said. “I got the word from the headhunter. You just got parole.”

“I got an offer?”

“A hundred seventy-five thousand to start, stock options, the whole deal. You’re being hired in as an individual contributor at the manager level but without any direct reports, grade ten.”

I was relieved, and amazed by the amount. That was about three times what I was making now. Adding in my Wyatt salary took me to two hundred and thirty-five thousand. Jesus.

“Sweet,” I said. “Now what do we do, negotiate?”

“The fuck you talking about? They interviewed eight other guys for the job. Who knows who’s got a favorite candidate, a crony, whatever. Don’t risk it, not yet. Get in the door, show ’em your stuff.”

“My stuff—”

“Show ’em how amazing you are. You’ve already whetted their appetites with a few hors d’oeuvres. Now you blow ’em away. If you can’t blow ’em away after graduating our little charm school here, and with me and Judith whispering in your ear, then you’re an even bigger fucking loser than I thought.”

“Right.” I realized I was mentally rehearsing this sick fantasy of telling Wyatt off as I walked out the door to go work for Trion, until I remembered that not only was Wyatt still my boss, he pretty much had me by the balls.

Wyatt stepped off the machine, drenched with sweat, grabbed a white towel off the handlebars, and blotted his face, his arms, his armpits. He stood so close to me I could smell the musk of his perspiration, his sour breath. “Now, listen carefully,” he said with an unmistakable note of menace. “About sixteen months ago Trion’s board of directors approved an extraordinary expenditure of almost five hundred million dollars to fund some kind of skunkworks.”

“A what?”

He snorted. “A top-secret in-house project. Anyway, it’s highly unusual for a board to approve an expenditure that large without a lot of information. In this case they approved it blind, based solely on assurances from the CEO. Goddard’s the founder, so they trust him. Also, he assured them the technology they were developing, whatever the hell it is, was a monumental breakthrough. I mean huge, paradigm-shifting, a quantum leap. Disruptive beyond disruptive. He assured them that it’s the biggest thing since the transistor, and anyone who’s not a part of this gets left behind.”

“What is it?”

“If I knew, you wouldn’t be here, idiot. My sources assure me that it’s going to transform the telecommunications industry, turn everything upside down. And I don’t intend to get left behind, you follow me?”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“I’ve invested far too much in this firm to let it go the way of the mastodon and the dodo. So your assignment, my friend, is to find out everything you can about this skunkworks, what it’s up to, what they’re developing. I don’t care whether they’re developing some fucking electronic pogo stick, point is, I’m not taking any chances. Clear?”

“How?”

“That’s your job.” He turned, walked across the vast expanse of office toward an exit I hadn’t noticed before. He opened the door, revealing a gleaming marble bathroom with a shower. I stood there awkwardly, not sure whether I was supposed to wait for him, or leave, or what.

“You’ll get the call later on this morning,” Wyatt said without turning around. “Act surprised.”

PART TWO
B
ACKSTOPPING

Backstopping:
An array of bogus cover identifications issued to an operative that will stand up to fairly rigorous investigation.

—The Dictionary of Espionage

12

I’d placed an ad in three local papers looking for a home healthcare aide for my dad. The ad made it clear anyone was welcome, the requirements weren’t exactly strict. I doubted there was anyone left out there—I’d already been to the well too many times.

Exactly seven responses came in. Three of them were from people who somehow misunderstood the ad, were themselves looking to hire someone. Another two phone messages were in foreign accents so thick I couldn’t even be sure they were trying to speak English. One was from a perfectly reasonable-sounding, pleasant-voiced man who said his name was Antwoine Leonard.

Not that I had much free time, but I arranged to meet this guy Antwoine for coffee. I wasn’t going to have him meet my father until he had to—I wanted to hire him first, before he could see what he was going to have to deal with, so he couldn’t back out so easily.

Antwoine turned out to be a huge, scary-looking black dude with prison tats and dreadlocks. My guess was right: just as soon as he could, he told me he’d just got out of prison for auto theft, and it wasn’t his first stint in the slammer. He gave me the name of his parole officer as a reference. I liked the fact that he was so open about it, didn’t try to hide it. In fact, I just liked the guy. He had a gentle voice, a surprisingly sweet smile, a low-key manner. Granted, I was desperate, but I also figured that if anyone could handle my dad, he could, and I hired him on the spot.

“Listen, Antwoine,” I said as I got up to leave. “About the prison thing?”

“It’s a problem for you, isn’t it?” He looked at me directly.

“No, it’s not that. I like you being so straight with me about it.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, well—”

“I just think you don’t need to be so totally honest with my dad.”

The night before I started at Trion, I got to bed early. Seth had left a phone message inviting me to go out with him and some friends of ours, since he wasn’t working that night, but I said no.

The alarm clock went off at five-thirty, and it was like something was wrong with the clock: it was still nighttime. When I remembered, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, a weird combination of terror and excitement. I was going into the big game, this was it, practice time was over. I showered and shaved with a brand-new blade, went slow so I didn’t cut myself. I’d actually laid out my clothes before I went to sleep, picked out my suit and tie, gave my shoes a glossy shine. I figured I’d better show up on the first day in a suit no matter how out-of-it I looked; I could always take off the jacket and tie.

It was bizarre—for the first time in my life I was making a six-figure salary, even though I hadn’t actually gotten any of the paychecks yet, and I was still living in the rat hole. Well, that would change soon enough.

When I got into the silver Audi A6, which still had that new-car smell, I felt more high-end, and to celebrate my new station in life I stopped at a Starbucks and got a triple grande latte. Almost four dollars for a goddamned cup of coffee, but hey, I was making the big bucks now. I cranked up the volume on Rage Against the Machine all the way to the Trion campus so that by the time I got there Zack de la Rocha was screaming “Bullet in the Head” and I was screaming, “No escape from the mass mind rape!” along with him, wearing my perfect corporate Zegna suit and tie and Cole-Haan shoes. I was pumped.

Amazingly, there were a fair number of cars in the underground garage, even at seven-thirty. I parked two levels down.

The lobby ambassador in B Wing couldn’t find my name on any list of visitors or new employees. I was a nobody. I asked her to call Stephanie, Tom Lundgren’s admin, but Stephanie wasn’t in yet. Finally she reached someone in HR, who told her to send me up to the third floor of E Wing, a long walk.