Paranoia (15 page)

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m saying that if you plan to do something foolish like try to tape-record our meetings or any phone calls you get from me or anyone else associated with me, things will not go well for you. You don’t need insurance, Adam.
I’m
your insurance.”

A beautiful Japanese woman in a kimono appeared with a tray and handed him a rolled hot towel with silver tongs. He wiped his hands and handed it back to her. Up close you could tell that he’d had a facelift. The skin was too tight, gave his eyes an almost Eskimo cast.

“Your home phone isn’t secure,” he continued. “Neither is your home voice mail or computer or your cell phone. You’re to initiate contact with us only in case of emergency, except in response to a request from us. All other times you’ll be contacted by secure, encrypted e-mail. Now, may I see what you have?”

I gave him the CD of all recent Trion hires I’d downloaded from the Web site, and a couple of sheets of paper, covered with typed notes. While he was reading through my notes, the Japanese woman came back with another tray and began to set before Wyatt an array of tiny, perfect, sculptural pieces of sushi and sashimi on lacquered mahogany boxes, with little mounds of white rice and pale-green wasabi and pink slices of pickled ginger. Wyatt didn’t look up; he was too absorbed in the notes I’d brought him. After a few minutes he picked up a small black phone on the table, which I hadn’t noticed before, and said something in a low voice. I thought I heard the word “fax.”

Finally he looked at me. “Good job,” he said. “Very interesting.”

Another woman appeared, a prim middle-aged woman, lined face, gray hair, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She smiled, took the sheaf of papers from him, left without saying a word. Did he keep a secretary on call all night?

Wyatt picked up a pair of chopsticks and lifted a morsel of raw fish to his mouth, chewed thoughtfully while he stared at me. “Do you understand the superiority of the Japanese diet?” he said.

I shrugged. “I like tempura and stuff.”

He scoffed, shook his head. “I’m not talking about tempura. Why do you think Japan leads the world in life expectancy? A low-fat, high-protein diet, rich in plant foods, high in antioxidants. They eat forty times more soy than we do. For centuries they refused to eat four-legged creatures.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking: And your point
is
 . . . ?

He took another mouthful of fish. “You really ought to get serious about enhancing the quality of your life. You’re, what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You’ve got decades ahead of you. Take care of your body. The smoking, the drinking, the Big Macs and all that crap—that shit’s got to stop. I sleep three hours a night. Don’t need more than that. Are you having fun, Adam?”

“No.”

“Good. You’re not there to have fun. Are you comfortable at Trion in your new role?”

“I’m learning the ins and outs. My boss is a serious bitch—”

“I’m not talking about your cover. I’m talking about your
real
job—the penetration.”

“Comfortable? No, not yet.”

“It’s pretty high-stakes. I feel your pain. You still see your old friends?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t expect you to dump them. That might raise suspicions. But you better make goddamned sure you keep your mouth shut, or you’ll be in a world of shit.”

“Understood.”

“I assume I don’t need to remind you of the consequences of failure.”

“I don’t need to be reminded.”

“Good. Your job’s difficult, but failure is far worse.”

“Actually, I sort of like being at Trion.” I was being truthful, but I also knew he’d take it as a jab.

He looked up, smirked as he chewed. “I’m delighted to hear that.”

“My team is making a presentation before Augustine Goddard pretty soon.”

“Good old Jock Goddard, huh. Well, you’ll see quickly he’s a pretentious, sententious old gasbag. I think he actually believes all the ass-kissing profiles, that ‘conscience of high-tech’ bullshit you always see in
Fortune
. Really believes his shit doesn’t stink.”

I nodded; what was I supposed to say? I didn’t know Goddard, so I couldn’t agree or disagree, but Wyatt’s envy was pretty transparent.

“When are you presenting to the old fart?”

“Couple weeks.”

“Maybe I can be of some assistance.”

“I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

The phone rang, and he picked it right up. “Yes?” He listened for a minute. “All right,” he said, then hung up. “You hit something. In a week or two you’ll be receiving a complete backgrounder on this Alana Jennings.”

“Sure, like I got on Lundgren and Sommers.”

“No, this is of another magnitude of detail.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll want to follow up. She’s your way in. And now that you have a code name, I want the names of everyone connected in any way with AURORA. Everyone, from project director all the way down to janitor.”

“How?” As soon as I said it, I regretted it.

“Figure it out. That’s your job, man. And I want it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“That’s right.”

“All right,” I said, with just a little defiance creeping into my voice. “But then you’ll have what you need, right? And we’ll be done.”

“Oh, no,” he said. He smiled, flashing his big white chompers. “This is only the beginning, guy. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

25

By now I was working insane hours, and I was constantly zonked. In addition to my normal work hours at Trion, I was spending long hours, late into the night, every night, doing Internet research or going over the competitive-intelligence files that Meacham and Wyatt sent over, the ones that made me sound so smart. A couple of times, on the long, traffic-constipated drive home, I almost fell asleep at the wheel. I’d suddenly open my eyes, jolt awake, stop myself at the last second from veering into the lane of oncoming traffic or slamming into the car in front of me. After lunch I’d usually start to fade, and it took massive infusions of caffeine to keep me from folding my arms and passing out in my cubicle. I would fantasize about going home early and getting under the covers in my dark hovel and falling deep asleep in the middle of the afternoon. I was living on coffee and Diet Pepsi and Red Bull. You could see dark circles under my eyes. At least workaholics get some kind of sick buzz out of it; I was just whipped, like a flogged horse in some Russian novel.

But running on fumes wasn’t even my biggest problem. The thing was, I was losing track of what my “real” job was and what my “cover” job was. I was so busy just getting by from meeting to meeting, trying to stay on top of things enough that Nora wouldn’t smell blood in the water and go after me, that I barely had time to skulk around and gather information on AURORA.

Every once in a while I’d see Mordden, at Maestro meetings or in the employee dining room, and he’d stop to chat. But he never mentioned that night when he either did or didn’t see me coming out of Nora’s office. Maybe he hadn’t seen me in her office. Or maybe he had and he was for some reason not saying anything about it.

And then every couple of nights I’d get an e-mail from “Arthur” asking me where I was with the investigation, how things were going, what the hell was taking me so long.

I stayed late almost every night, and I was hardly ever at home. Seth left a bunch of phone messages for me and after a week or so gave up. Most of my other friends had given up on me, too. I’d try to squeeze in half an hour here or there to drop by Dad’s apartment and check in on him, but whenever I’d show up, he was so pissed off at me for avoiding him that he barely looked at me. A sort of truce had settled in between Dad and Antwoine, some kind of a Cold War. At least Atwoine wasn’t threatening to quit. Yet.

One night I got back into Nora’s office and removed the little key logger thing, quickly and uneventfully. My Mustang-loving-guard friend usually came by on his rounds at between ten o’clock and ten-twenty, so I did it before he showed up. It took less than a minute, and Noah Mordden was nowhere in sight.

That tiny cable now stored hundreds of thousands of Nora’s keystrokes, including all her passwords. It was just a matter of plugging the device into my computer and downloading the text. But I didn’t dare do it right there at my cubicle. Who knew what kind of detection programs they had running on the Trion network? Not a risk worth taking.

Instead, I logged on to the corporate Web site. In the search box I typed in AURORA, but nothing came up. Surprise, surprise. But I had another thought, and I typed in Alana Jennings’s name and pulled up her page. There was no photo there—most people had their pictures up, though some didn’t—but there was some basic information like her telephone extension, her job title (Marketing Director, Disruptive Technologies Research Unit), her department number, which was the same as her mailstop.

This little number, I knew, was extremely useful information. At Trion, just like at Wyatt, you were given the same department number as everyone else who worked in your part of the company. All I had to do was to punch that number into the corporate database and I had a list of everyone who worked directly with Alana Jennings—which meant that they all worked in the AURORA Project.

That didn’t mean I had the
complete
list of AURORA employees, who might be in separate departments on the same floor, but at least I had a good chunk of them: forty-seven names. I printed out each person’s Web page and slipped the sheets into a folder in my workbag. That, I figured, should keep Wyatt’s people happy for a while.

When I got home that night, around ten, intending to sit down at my computer and download all the keystrokes from Nora’s computer, something else grabbed my attention. Sitting in the middle of my “kitchen” table—a Formica-topped thing I’d bought at a used furniture place for forty-five bucks—was a crisp-looking, thick, sealed manila envelope.

It hadn’t been there in the morning. Once again, someone from Wyatt had slipped into my apartment, almost as if they were trying to make the point that they could get in anywhere. Okay, point made. Maybe they figured this was the safest way to get something to me without being observed. But to me it seemed almost like a threat.

The envelope contained a fat dossier on Alana Jennings, just as Nick Wyatt had promised. I opened it, saw a whole bunch of photos of the woman, and suddenly lost interest in Nora Sommers’s keystrokes. This Alana Jennings was, not to put too fine a point on it, a real hottie.

I sat down in my reading chair and pored over the file.

It was obvious that a lot of time and effort and money had gone into it. P.I.s had followed her around, taken close note of her comings and goings, her habits, the errands she ran. There were photos of her entering the Trion building, at a restaurant with a couple of female friends, at some kind of tennis club, working out at one of those all-women health clubs, getting out of her blue Mazda Miata. She had glossy black hair and blue eyes, a slim body (that was fairly evident from the Lycra workout togs). Sometimes she wore heavy-framed black glasses, the kind that beautiful women wear to signal that they’re smart and serious and yet so beautiful that they can wear ugly glasses. They actually made her look sexier. Maybe that was the point.

After an hour of reading the file, I knew more about her than I ever knew about any girlfriend. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was rich—a double threat. She’d grown up in Darien, Connecticut, went to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, and then went to Yale, where she’d majored in English, specializing in American literature. She also took some classes in computer science and electrical engineering. According to her college transcript she got mostly As and A minuses and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. Okay, so she was smart, too; make that a triple threat.

Meacham’s staff had pulled up all kinds of financial background on her and her family. She had a trust fund of several million dollars, but her father, a CEO of a small manufacturing company in Stamford, had a portfolio worth a whole lot more than that. She had two younger sisters, one still in college, at Wesleyan, the other working at Sotheby’s in Manhattan.

Since she called her parents almost every day, it was a fair guess that she was close with them. (A year’s worth of phone bills were included, but fortunately someone had predigested them for me, summarized who she called most often.) She was single, didn’t seem to be seeing anyone regularly, and owned her own condo in a very upper-crust town not far from Trion headquarters.

She shopped for groceries every Sunday at a whole-foods supermarket and seemed to be a vegetarian, because she never bought meat or even chicken or fish. She ate like a bird, a bird from the tropical rainforest—lots of fruits, berries, nuts. She didn’t do bars or happy hours, but she did get the occasional delivery from a liquor store in her neighborhood, so she had at least one vice. Her house vodka seemed to be Grey Goose; her house gin was Tanqueray Malacca. She went out to restaurants once or twice a week, and not Denny’s or Applebee’s or Hooters; she seemed to like high-end, “chef-y” places with names like Chakra and Alto and Buzz and Om. Also she went to Thai restaurants a lot.

She went out to movies at least once a week, and usually bought her tickets ahead of time on Fandango; she occasionally saw your typical chick flick but mostly foreign films. Apparently this was a woman who’d rather watch
The Tree of Wooden Clogs
than
Porky’s
. Oh, well. She bought a lot of books online, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, mostly trendy serious fiction, some Latin American stuff, and a fair number of books about movies. Also, recently, some books on Buddhism and Eastern wisdom and crap like that. She’d also bought some movies on DVD, including the whole
Godfather
boxed set as well as some forties noir classics like
Double Indemnity
. In fact, she’d bought
Double Indemnity
twice, once in video a few years earlier, and once, more recently, on DVD. Obviously she’d only gotten a DVD player within the last two years; and obviously that old Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck flick was a favorite of hers. She seemed to have bought every record ever made by Ani DiFranco and Alanis Morissette.