Shimmer (3 page)

It's a tax issue.

He's got it wrong.

Great news.

Yes.

If you think so, then yes.

Unreal.

No.

No.

Thanks, but no.

Nine-thirty, and I was passing through meetings between teams from R&D, Strategic Planning, Technical Development, Production, Operations, Customer Service and Tech Support. Most Mondays I made brief, unannounced appearances at a handful of staff meetings. I nodded and smiled at group VPs, section managers, entry-level employees still learning to use their voice mail. I shook hands. I dispensed
Hello
s. I asked for the names of the many people I had never met. I told them to go about their business as usual, leaning against a high window or a green glass wall, sometimes sitting down in a corner next to a group of latecomers to the meeting, knowing I needed to sit silent, motionless, fading from the minds of the attendees around me, and hopefully they'd begin to sit back in their chairs or stand up to talk as if I weren't there, some of them flicking bits of paper at their neighbors, others doodling in their planners or swearing at the person writing too small on the whiteboard, and I watched as the group followed a sometimes well-designed, sometimes undefined path toward decision, compromise, acquiescence and assent.

“If the Germans can come through, then yes,” said a financial analyst in one meeting.

“Not that I'm skeptical, but can we see it on a Pert chart?” said a programmer in another.

“Ergo, I give to you six months of research,” said a marketing assistant.

“Beneath my clothing, I, like you, am naked,” said a trainer from Tech Support.

This was not a normal company.

By eleven
A.M
., two business reporters were following me across the sixteenth floor. It was a puff-piece interview arranged by our Public Relations department, which had spent the last three years pitting the business papers against TV, cable against the networks and the networks against the newsmagazines in order to keep the name of Core Communications and Robbie Case, its poster-boy CEO, in every possible media outlet.

“This kind of growth is what we always said we wanted,” I told one of the reporters as we walked down a hall toward Strategic Planning, where I would pass them back to our PR group. “Still, anyone who tells you they're ready for this is, I think, lying.”

It was one of my standard lines.

“By your saying that,” one reporter asked, “couldn't you drive your stock price down three, four, even five dollars?”

I shrugged. I smiled slightly at him. “But I've got other things to tell you that will drive it up by ten.”

Who is this person I have become?

Passing through the home of one of the main marketing groups, the reporters scribbling eagerly as they heard hip-hop music rolling across the tops of workstation walls. These were the product development people, ad-agency refugees now creating taglines and branding campaigns not just for our famed Blue Boxes but also for a wide range of new products and services unrelated to Blue Boxes. Whitley in black in the center of a group of eight, for a moment dancing with her hands toward the ceiling, silver bracelet on each wrist caught for a second in the light, her black suit coat unbuttoned, her still face now smiling as her sharp hair fell to the sides, the group around her laughing in sudden surprise, clapping for the boss who in that motion had revealed herself as a onetime club kid turned Chief Operating Officer.

“Stop that dancing,” I said loudly, standing back from the group, the appropriately benign comments of the passing CEO, a scene tailored on the fly to the trailing business press.

“No rock and roll,” Whitley yelled back. “No swear words. No long hair. No smoking. No laughing. No thinking. No fun.”

Leaving the reporters with one of Whitley's press people.

Walking again, usually with a group, rarely alone—informal meetings made faster if we did not sit down. Walking and discussing any range of issues as we passed through the divisions of the company, the meeting participants sometimes scheduling their walks with me ahead of time, sometimes intercepting me in stairways or elevators or tracking me down on my cell phone, and all of it was okay if we did not stop, if we kept walking, talking fast, never bogging down in one issue, all of this time—my time of walking and meeting—all of it scheduled, in advance and down to the minute, by my assistant on twenty.

Always in my life as CEO of Core Communications, there was merely the appearance of spontaneity.

Picking up Julie for a discussion of production issues at two European facilities.

Passing people in suits, people in jeans, people in shirts that crossed the line from earth-tone casual to weekend camouflage.

Seeing bright computer monitors reflecting off glass walls and young faces.

Glancing into a makeshift bunkhouse in the middle of fifteen, a onetime conference room now lined with small beds and padded cots, all used for late-day naps or overnight stays.

Reading a list of the animal names we gave to our computers, the tree names we used for our servers, the former republics, capitals and other landmarks of the Soviet empire that we gave to our many conference rooms.

There was an overriding if obscure logic to our company, one formed so chaotically out of the disparate rhythms of so many different people.

One hundred new e-mails by noon.

Four women entering a conference room named Turkmenistan, and all of them wearing green.

Walking again, now talking with Cliff as we passed through a new, still uninhabited area, one of the building's recently built-out sections that were collectively known as the Unoccupied Territories. Turning a corner and expecting to find people but only seeing more empty desks, empty chairs, the clean delineation of steel and glass partitions. All of it untouched, all of it quiet, all of it ready for the next wave of workers. Most Unoccupied Territories sat unused for just a few weeks. But sometimes, if we misjudged the scope or type of the next big staffing need, the areas remained unassigned for as much as two or three months, months when the spaces would be used as wrestling death pits for high-strung programmers, as sleeping quarters for accountants trying to close the quarterly financials, as extra workspace for squatters from all areas of the company, all of them needing more room.

Into a scheduled lunch meeting where I reviewed reports on the roll-out of a wide range of new products and services, each meant to broaden our product lines, expand our revenue base and diminish our dependence on sales of Blue Boxes. Already we sold over a hundred products and services in addition to the Blue Boxes. Together they accounted for less than two percent of company sales. Certainly not enough revenue to support the current operations and growth of Core Communications. Barely enough to cover the R&D money we continued to put into other new ideas.

And nowhere near enough money to head off the bankruptcy I had forecast on the spreadsheet model hidden on my computer.

But I kept putting money into new products. New services. Anything that helped keep the company afloat.

Because always it was there, the need to find a way.

Somehow, Robbie. Somehow. Keep the company alive.

Whitley called me on my cell phone as I crossed fifteen with two VPs from Japan. “Come up to seventeen,” she said rapidly, her voice bursting with the poorly restrained exuberance of an overachieving child. “Security's about to bust a rogue section in Marketing.”

I made my way to seventeen just in time, finding Whitley standing at the edge of a workgroup of almost twenty desks, workstations and shared meeting spaces. The two of us were semihidden from the group, standing behind a steel partition with a manager from Corporate Security. Everything in the group seemed normal—the noise of keyboards, phones and talking coworkers rising and falling beneath the lights all around us. There did not appear to be a security problem, let alone a security action in progress. But then I noticed the odd number of white-shirted messengers and office services assistants who were wandering along various walkways near and within the group.

Plainclothes security officers, each moving into position, preparing to break up what we called a rogue section.

What made a group a rogue section was a careful if unexpected mix of creativity, subversion and pointlessness. They were discovered from time to time. The group in front of us, Whitley whispered to me, had spent four months generating elaborate—albeit fake—project plans detailing the creation and marketing of a new translation of the Old Testament. Complete with detailed biblical justifications, historical timelines, annotated budgets, slide shows and legal documentation, the entire group had been working late into the night, week after week.

It was not at all clear why.

I'd never seen a rogue section get broken up before. It was a little like watching a shoplifter being arrested. An increasing number of plainclothes store personnel nonchalantly moved into aisle nine of the supermarket, working their way down the stacks of canned soup, seeming to study the relative merit of one brand over another, all the while closing in on a young man with two beers shoved into his pants.

Except, in this case, the computers of four marketing coordinators near the west side of the group suddenly went dark as the ten or more messengers and office services assistants hovering nearby all pulled security badges from their pockets, quickly moving in on the four workers, asking them to stand, asking them to please cooperate with this investigation.

“There's definitely a very Gestapo-like quality to this,” I said to Whitley, watching as security officers escorted the employees away while a specially trained team of tech support reps began to go through desks, file cabinets and the now reactivated computers of the rogue section.

“Which,” Whitley said, “secretly increases the thrill for me.”

Whitley was the day-to-day manager of the entire company, the trusted adviser to me and all the senior staff, the implementer of each phase of our expansion. But she was also someone who found an only poorly suppressed pleasure in tracking the activities of our rogue sections. Whitley oversaw the task force investigating the rogue sections
and—more importantly—other far more serious security threats from industry spies and outside hackers. It was a task force comprised of fifteen security officers, twelve system administrators, two reformed hackers, three industrial psychologists, four financial auditors, three lawyers, four members of the R&D department, a former FBI investigator and Leonard, the head of the company's Technical Development Group. They shadowed suspect e-mails, tapped problem phone calls, reviewed inexplicable documents and project plans and—when necessary—attempted to infiltrate a rogue section.

The group was officially named the Subversives & Intrusions Task Force. However, they were known to most everyone as the Core SWAT team.

“SWAT was a compromise name,” Whitley always liked to recall. “Some members wanted to be known as Army Rangers, others wanted the Coast Guard. Personally, I lobbied hard for calling us the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

Responsibility for something like the SWAT team—and the rogue sections—was something I would have given only to Whitley. I'd hired Whitley when the company had hit sixty employees, all of whom were madly chasing the plan I'd laid out—domination of the high-speed mainframe networking industry through a fanatical commitment to drawing blood from mainframes around the country and the world. However, as devoted and well-intentioned as we tried to be, as revolutionary as our Blue Boxes were, none of us had a clue how to work together effectively. Departments didn't communicate, managers didn't coordinate, and so despite the best efforts of the best people, we were making only very slow progress.

Whitley made us communicate.

Whitley made us coordinate.

Whitley made us make progress.

She was one of those people who, in everyone she touched, instilled a sense of benevolent fear. She smiled, she was kind, she understood. And she made people fear any possibility of not doing their best.

“You'll get it done,” she would say, nodding, hard shoulders dropping just slightly as she spoke. “I don't know how, but you will.”

And so, throughout the company, in any department, any division, Whitley was the only person who ever really told me
no.
Julie, Cliff and Leonard sometimes laughed off my suggestions, vice presidents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as I relayed an idea, the board of directors periodically moved to put one of my initiatives under “extended review.”

But only Whitley told me
no.

In the past three years Whitley and her SWAT team had, without realizing it, come closer and closer to various parts of my lie. Rogue sections, outside hackers, industry spies—all had caused security problems for the company. Each incident had led to an even deeper investigation of Core's operations, a greater expansion of Whitley's SWAT team, new security measures for Leonard and his technical staff. And all of that made my lie more difficult to sustain. SWAT pressing closer to the hidden satellites, the secret servers, the increasing flow of un-tracked money.

My own secret police, unintentionally hunting me down.

On bad days I pictured myself walking into my office to find Whit-ley and her SWAT team at my computer, studying the secrets of my spreadsheet model.

And what they could find was almost unimaginable. My lie, grown terribly large and impossibly complex in the three years since it had begun. A high-tech fraud made up of a thousand interdependent deceptions. The people who worked here, the companies we acquired, the stock we sold—all of it was an unseen disease. A cancer, really, spread silently through this company and still, every day, infecting and reinfecting each department, each system, each person who was here.