I ordered an expensive red Bordeaux, and I could hear Jock Goddard’s words echoing in my head:
You used to drink Budweiser, now you’re sipping some first-growth Pauillac.
The service was slow—there seemed to be one waiter for the whole dining room, a Middle Eastern guy who barely spoke English—but it didn’t bother me. We were both sort of blissed-out, floating on a postcoital high.
“I noticed you brought your computer,” I said. “In the trunk of your car.”
She grinned sheepishly. “I don’t go anywhere without it.”
“Are you sort of tethered to the office?” I asked. “Pager, cell phone, e-mail, all that?”
“Aren’t you?”
“The good thing about having only one boss,” I said, “is that it cuts down on some of that.”
“Well, you’re lucky. I’ve got six direct reports and a bunch of really arrogant engineers I have to deal with. Plus a huge deadline.”
“What kind of deadline?”
She paused, but for just a moment. “The rollout’s next week.”
“You’re shipping a product?”
She shook her head. “It’s a demo—a big public announcement, demonstration of a working prototype of the thing we’re developing. I mean, it’s a really big deal. Goddard hasn’t told you about it?”
“He might have, I don’t know. He tells me about all kinds of stuff.”
“Not the kind of thing you’d forget. Anyway, it’s taking up all my time. A real time suck. Night and day.”
“Not totally,” I said. “You’ve had time for two dates with me, and you’re taking tonight off.”
“And I’ll pay for it tomorrow and Sunday.”
The overworked waiter finally showed up with a bottle of white wine. I pointed out his error, and he apologized profusely and went off to get the right one.
“Why
didn’t
you want to talk to me at Goddard’s barbecue?” I asked.
She looked at me incredulously, her sapphire-blue eyes wide. “I was serious about the HR manual, you know. I mean, workplace romances really are discouraged, so we’ve got to be discreet. People talk. People especially love gossiping about who’s screwing who. And then if something happens . . .”
“Like a breakup or something.”
“Whatever. Then it becomes awkward for everyone.”
The conversation was starting to spin in the wrong direction. I tried to bring it back on course. “So I guess I can’t just pop in on you one day at work. Show up on the fifth floor unannounced with a bouquet of lilies.”
“I told you, they’d never let you in.”
“I thought my badge lets me in anywhere in the building.”
“Maybe most places, but not the fifth floor.”
“Meaning
you
can get onto the executive floor, but I can’t get onto yours?”
She shrugged.
“You have your badge with you?”
“They’ve trained me not to go to the bathroom without it.” She pulled it out of her little black purse and flashed it at me. It was attached to a key ring with a bunch of other keys.
I grabbed it playfully. “Not as bad as a passport picture, but I wouldn’t submit this head shot to a modeling agency,” I said.
I inspected her badge. Hers had the same stuff on it as mine, the 3-D holograph Trion seal that changed color as light passed over it, the same pale blue background color with trion systems printed over and over on it in tiny white letters. The chief difference seemed to be that hers had a red-and-white stripe across the front.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she said.
I took my badge out of my pocket and handed it to her. The basic difference was in the little transponder chip inside. The chip inside the badge was encoded with information that either opened a door lock or didn’t. Her card got her into the fifth floor in addition to all the main entrances, the garage, and so on.
“You look like a scared rabbit here.” She giggled.
“I think I felt that way on my first day.”
“I didn’t know employee numbers went this high.”
The red-and-white stripe on her card had to be for quick visual identification. Meaning that there must be at least one additional checkpoint beyond waving the badge at the badge reader. Someone had to check you out as you entered. That made things a lot more difficult.
“When you leave to go down to lunch or up to the gym—must be a huge hassle.”
She shrugged, uninterested. “It’s not too bad. They get to know you.”
Right, I thought. That’s the problem. You can’t get in the door unless the chip inside your proximity access badge has been coded right, and even once you’re on the floor, you have to pass by a guard for facial confirmation. “At least they don’t make you go through that biometric crap,” I said. “We had to do that at Wyatt. You know—the fingerprint scan. A friend of mine at Intel even had to go through a retinal scan every day, and all of a sudden he started needing glasses.” This was a total lie, but it got her attention. She looked at me with a curious grin, unsure whether I was joking.
“I’m kidding about the glasses part, but he was convinced all that scanning was going to ruin his eyesight.”
“Well, there’s this one inner area with biometrics, but only the engineers go in there. It’s where they do work on the prototype. But I just have to deal with Barney or Chet, the poor security guards who have to sit in that little booth.”
“It can’t be as ridiculous as it was at Wyatt in the early stages of the Lucid,” I said. “They made us go through this badge-exchange ritual where you had to hand your ID card to the guard, and then the guy gave you a
second
badge to wear on the floor.” I was totally bullshitting, parroting back something Meacham had told me about. “So let’s say you realize you left your car headlights on, or you forgot something in the trunk of your car, or you want to run down to the cafeteria to grab a bagel or something . . .”
She shook her head absently, snorted softly. She’d run out of what little interest she had in the intricacies of the badge-access system at work. I wanted to pump her for more information—like, do you have to hand your ID card to the guard, or do you just show it to them? If you had to hand the guard your card, the risk was a lot higher of the guard discovering a fake badge. Does the scrutiny get any more lax at night? Early in the morning?
“Hey,” she said, “you haven’t touched your wine. Don’t you like it?”
I dipped a couple of fingertips into my glass of wine. “Delicious,” I said.
This little act of stupid juvenile male goofiness made her laugh, loud and whooping, her eyes crinkling into slits. Some women—okay, most women—might have asked for the check at that point. Not Alana.
I was into her.
81
Both of us were stuffed from dinner, a little unsteady from too much wine. Actually, Alana seemed a little more toasted than me. She fell back on the creaky bed, her arms outstretched as if to embrace the whole room, the inn, the night, whatever. That was the moment for me to follow her onto the bed. But I couldn’t, not yet.
“Hey, you want me to get your laptop from the car?”
She groaned. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t mentioned it. You’ve been talking about work way too much.”
“Why don’t you just admit you’re a workaholic, too, and be done with it?” I did my AA meeting riff: “Hi, my name is Alana, and I’m a workaholic. ‘Hi, Alana!’”
She shook her head, rolled her eyes.
“The first step is always to admit you’re powerless over your workaholism. Anyway, I left something in your car, so I’m going down there anyway.” I held out my hand. “Keys?”
She was leaning back on the bed, looking too comfortable to move. “Mmph. Okay, sure,” she said reluctantly. “Thanks.” She rolled over to the edge of the bed, fished her car keys out of her purse, handed the key ring to me with a swanning, dramatic gesture. “Come back soon, huh?”
The parking area was dark and deserted by now. I looked back at the inn, about a hundred feet away, made sure our room didn’t look over the parking lot. She couldn’t see me.
I popped the trunk of her Miata and found her computer bag, a gray flannel-mohair-textured nylon satchel. I wasn’t kidding: I had left something in here, a small knapsack. There was nothing else of particular interest in her trunk. I swung the satchel and knapsack onto my shoulder and got into her car.
I looked back toward the inn again. Nobody was coming.
Still, I kept the interior dome light off and let my eyes get used to the dark. I’d attract less attention this way.
I felt like a creep, but I had to be realistic about my situation. I really didn’t have a choice. She was my best way into AURORA, and now I
had
to get inside. It was the only way I could save myself.
Quickly I unzipped the satchel, pulled out her laptop, and powered it on. The car’s interior went blue from the computer screen. While I waited for it to boot up, I opened my knapsack and pulled out a blue plastic first aid kit.
Inside, instead of Band-Aids and such, were a few small plastic cases. Each contained a soft wax.
By the blue light I looked at the keys on her key ring. A few looked promising. Maybe one of them would open file cabinets on the AURORA project floor.
One by one, I pressed each key onto a rectangle of wax. I’d practiced this a few times with one of Meacham’s guys, and I was glad I did; it took a while to get the hang of it. Now the password prompt on her screen was blinking at me.
Shit. Not everyone password-protected their laptops. Oh, well: at least this wasn’t going to be a wasted errand. From the knapsack I pulled out the miniature pcProx reader that Meacham had given me and connected it to my handheld. I pressed the start button, then waved Alana’s badge at it.
The little device had just captured the data on Alana’s card and stored it on my handheld.
Maybe it was just as well that her laptop was password-protected. There was a limit to how much time I could spend out in the parking lot without her wondering where the hell I’d gone. Just before I shut down her computer, just for kicks, I decided to type in some of the usual-suspect passwords—her birth date, which I’d memorized; the first six digits of her employee number. Nothing happened. I typed in
ALANA
, and the password prompt disappeared, and a plain screen came up.
Oh, man, that was easy. I was in.
Jesus. Now what? How much time could I risk spending on this? But how could I pass the opportunity up? It might never come again.
Alana was an extremely well-organized person. Her computer was set up in a clear, logical hierarchy. One directory was labeled
AURORA
.
It was all here. Well, maybe not all, but it was a gold mine of technical specs on the optical chip, marketing memos, copies of e-mails she’d sent and received, meeting schedules, staff rosters with access codes, even floor plans. . . .
There was so much that I didn’t have time even to read through the file names. Her laptop had a CD drive; I had a little spindle of blank CDs in the knapsack. I grabbed one, popped it into her CD drive.
Even on a super-fast computer like Alana’s, it took a good five minutes to copy all the AURORA files to a disk. That’s how much there was.
“What took you so long?” she said poutily when I returned.
She was under the covers, her naked breasts visible, and she looked sleepy. A Stevie Wonder ballad—“Love’s in Need of Love Today”—was playing softly on a little CD player she must have brought.
“I couldn’t figure out which was your trunk key.”
“A car guy like you? I thought you drove off and left me here.”
“Do I
look
stupid?”
“Appearances can be deceiving,” she said. “Come to bed.”
“I’d never have figured you for a Stevie Wonder fan,” I said. Truly, I would never have guessed, given her collection of angry women folk singers.
“You don’t really know me yet,” she replied.
“No, but give me a little time,” I said. I know everything about you, I thought, yet I don’t know anything. I’m not the only one keeping secrets. I put her laptop on the oak desk next to the bathroom. “There,” I said, returning to the bedroom, taking off my clothes. “In case you’re seized with some brilliant inspiration, some amazing brainstorm in the middle of the night.”
Naked, I approached the bed. This beautiful naked woman was in bed, playing the role of seductress, when really I was the seducer. She had no idea what sort of game I was playing, and I felt a flush of shame mixed, oddly, with a tug of arousal. “Get up here,” she said in a dramatic whisper, staring at me. “I just had a
brainstorm
.”
We both got up after eight, unusually late for us hyper-driven type A workaholics—and fooled around in bed for a while before showering and going down to a country breakfast. I doubt people in the country actually eat this way, or they’d all weigh four hundred pounds: rashers of bacon (only at country bed-and-breakfasts does bacon come in “rashers”), mounds of grits, freshly baked hot blueberry muffins, eggs, French toast, coffee with real cream. . . . Alana really chowed down, which surprised me, for such a pencil-thin girl. I enjoyed watching her eat so ravenously. She was a woman of appetites, which I liked.
We went back up the room and fooled around some more, and hung out and talked. I made a point of not talking about security procedures or proximity badges. She wanted to talk about my dad’s death and funeral, and even though the subject depressed me, I talked about it a little. Around eleven we reluctantly left, and the date was over.
I think we both wanted it to keep going, but we also needed to get home to our own nests for a while, get some work done, go back to the salt mines, make up for this delicious night away from work.
As we drove, I found myself grooving on the country road, the trees dappled with sunlight, the fact that I’d just spent the night with the coolest and most gorgeous and funniest and sexiest woman I’d ever met.
Man, what the hell was I doing?
82
By noon I was back in my apartment, and I immediately called Seth.
“I’m going to need some more cash, man,” he said.
I’d already given him several thousand dollars, from my Wyatt-funded account, or wherever the money really came from. I was surprised he’d run through it already.