Paranoia (11 page)

By this point, recalling Elliot Krause putting his shit-splashed glasses back on his shit-covered face as he stumbled out of the Handy House, I was laughing so hard I lost my balance and sprawled onto the floor. For a couple of seconds I lay there, unable to get up. People crowded around me, giant heads leaning in, asking if I was okay. I was definitely looped. Everything had gotten smeary. For some reason I flashed on an image of my father and Antwoine Leonard, and the thought struck me as screamingly hilarious, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I felt someone grab me by the shoulder, someone else grab me by the elbow. Seth and another guy were helping me out of the bar. Everyone seemed to be watching me.

“Sorry, man,” I said, feeling a wave of embarrassment wash over me. “Thanks. My car’s right here.”

“You’re not driving, bud.”

“It’s right
here
,” I insisted feebly.

“That’s not your car. That’s an Audi or something.”

“It’s mine,” I said firmly, punctuating the statement with a vigorous nod. “Audi—A6, I think.”

“What happened to Bondo?”

I shook my head. “New car.”

“Man, this new job, they paying you a lot more?”

“Yeah,” I said, then I added, my words slurred, “not that much more.”

He whistled for a cab, and he and the other guy hustled me into it. “You remember where you live?” Seth said.

“Come on,” I said. “Of course I remember.”

“You want a coffee for the ride home, sober you up a little?”

“Nah,” I said. “I got to get to sleep. Work tomorrow.”

Seth laughed. “I don’t envy you, man,” he said.

17

In the middle of the night my cell phone rang, ear-splittingly loud, only it wasn’t the middle of the night. I could see a shaft of light behind the shades. The clock said five-thirty—
A.M
.?
P.M
.? I was so disoriented I had no idea. I grabbed the phone, wished I hadn’t left it on.

“Yeah?”

“You’re still asleep?” a voice said, incredulous.

“Who is this?”

“You left the Audi in a tow zone.” Arnold Meacham, I realized at once: Wyatt’s security Nazi. “It’s not
your
car, it’s leased by Wyatt Telecommunications, and the least you can do is take decent care of it—not leave it lying around like a discarded
condom
.”

It came back to me: last night, getting wasted at Alley Cat, somehow getting home, forgetting to set the alarm . . . Trion!

“Oh, shit,” I said, jolting upright, my stomach doing a flip. My head throbbed, felt enormous, like one of those aliens on
Star Trek
.

“We set out the rules quite clearly,” Meacham said. “No more carousing. No partying. You’re expected to function at peak capacity.” Was he talking faster and louder than normal? He sure seemed to be. I could barely keep up.

“I know,” I croaked lamely.

“This is not an auspicious start.”

“It was real—real busy yesterday. My first day, and my father—”

“I really don’t give a shit. We have an explicit agreement, which you’re expected to abide by. And what have you turned up on the skunkworks?”

“Skunkworks?” I flung my legs around to the floor, sat on the edge of the bed, massaged my temples with my free hand.

“Classified, codeword projects. What the hell do you think you’re there for?”

“No, it’s too early,” I said. “Too soon, I mean.” Slowly my brain was starting to function. “I was escorted everywhere yesterday. There wasn’t a minute when I was left alone. It would have been far too risky for me to do anything sneaky. You don’t want me blowing this assignment on the first day.”

Meacham was silent for a few seconds. “Fair enough,” he said. “But you should have an opportunity quite soon, and I expect you to take advantage of it. I want a report by close of business
today
, are we clear?”

18

By lunchtime I began to feel less like the walking wounded, and I decided to go up to the gym—the “fitness center,” excuse me—to get in a quick workout. The fitness center was on the roof of E Wing, in a sort of bubble, with tennis courts, all sorts of cardio equipment, treadmills and StairMasters and elliptical trainers all outfitted with individual TV/video screens. The locker room had a steam room and sauna and was as spacious as any high-end sports club I’d ever seen.

I’d changed and was about to hit the machines and the weights when Chad Pierson sauntered into the locker room.

“There he is,” Chad said. “How’s it going, big guy?” He opened a locker near mine. “You here for B-ball?”

“Actually, I was going to—”

“There’s probably a game on, you wanna play?”

I hesitated a second. “Sure.”

There was no one else on the basketball court, so we waited around for a couple of minutes, dribbling and taking shots. Finally, Chad said, “How about a little one-on-one?”

“Sure.”

“To eleven. Winners out?”

“Okay.”

“Listen, how ’bout we put a little wager on the game, huh? I’m not really a competitive guy—maybe that’ll juice it up a little.”

Yeah, right, I thought.
You’re
not competitive. “Like a six-pack or something?”

“Come on, man. A C-note. Hundred bucks.”

A
C-note?
What, were we in Vegas with the Rat Pack? Reluctantly, I said, “Okay, sure, Whatever.”

A mistake. Chad was good, played aggressively, and I was hungover. He went to the top of the three-point line, shot, and sank it. Then, looking pleased with himself, he made a pistol with his finger and thumb, blew the smoke off the barrel, and said, “Smokin’!”

Backing me in, he hit a few fadeaway jumpers and immediately took the lead. From time to time he’d do this little Alonzo Mourning move where he waggled both hands back and forth like a sharpshooter slinging his guns around at a shootout. It was supremely annoying. “Looks like you didn’t bring your A game, huh?” he said. His expression seemed benevolent, even concerned, but his eyes gleamed with condescension.

“Guess not,” I said. I was trying to be a nice guy, enjoy the game, not go after him like a dick, but he was beginning to piss me off. When I drove, I wasn’t in sync, didn’t have a feel yet. I missed a few shots, and he blocked a couple. But then I scored a few points off him, and before long it was six to three. I began to notice he kept driving right.

He pumped his fist, did his stupid finger-pistol thing. He drove right, hit another jumper. “Money!” he crowed.

It was at that point that I sort of hit a mental toggle switch and let the competitive juices flow. Chad kept driving to the right and shooting right, I noticed. It was obvious he couldn’t go left, didn’t have a decent left hand. So I started taking away his right, forcing him left, then I hit a layup.

I’d guessed right. He had no left hand. He missed shots going left, and a couple of times I easily picked off the ball as his dribble crossed over. I got in front of him, then suddenly jumped back and to the right, forcing him to switch directions quickly. Mostly, as I got into the rhythm of the game, I’d been driving, so Chad must have figured I didn’t have a jump shot. He looked stunned when my jump shot started dropping.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” he said through gritted teeth. “You
do
have a jump shot—but I’m going to shut it down.”

I started playing with his mind a little. I faked going for a jump shot, forcing him up in the air, then blew right by him. This worked so well that I tried it again; Chad was so unnerved that it worked even better the second time. Pretty soon the score was even.

I was getting under his skin. I’d do a little stutter step, just a little movement, fake to the left, and he’d jump left, giving me space to drive right. With each score you could see he was getting more and more rattled.

I drove in and shot a layup, then hit my fadeaway. I was ahead now, and Chad was getting red-faced, short of breath. No more cocky repartee.

I was ahead, ten to nine, when I drove hard and then suddenly stopped short. Chad reeled back and fell on his ass. I took my time, got my feet set, and put up my shot—all net. I made a little pistol with my thumb and forefinger, blew off the smoke, and, with a nice big smile, said, “Smokin’.”

Half backing up, half collapsing against the padded gym wall, Chad gasped, “Well, you surprised me, big guy. You’ve got more game than I thought.” He took a deep gulp of air. “This was good. Lot of fun. But I’m going to kick your ass next time, buddy—I know your game now.” He grinned, like he was only kidding, reached out and put a clammy, sweaty hand on my shoulder. “I owe you a Benjamin.”

“Forget about it. I don’t like playing for money anyway.”

“No, really. I insist. Buy yourself a new tie or something.”

“No way, Chad. Won’t take it.”

“I owe you—”

“You don’t owe me anything, man.” I thought for a moment. There’s nothing people love to part with more than advice. “Except maybe a Nora tip or two.”

His eyes lit up; I was playing on his field now. “Aw, she does that to all the newbies. It’s her own form of hazing, doesn’t mean anything more than that. It’s nothing personal, believe me—I got the same treatment when I started here.”

I noticed the unstated,
And now look at me
. He was careful not to criticize Nora; he knew to be wary of me, not to open up. “I’m a big boy,” I said. “I can take it.”

“I’m saying you won’t have to, bud. She made her point—just stay on your toes—and now she’ll move on. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t consider you a high-po.” High-potential, he meant. “She likes you. She wouldn’t have fought to get you on her team if she didn’t.”

“Okay.” I couldn’t tell if he was holding out on me or not.

“I mean, if you wanna . . . like, this afternoon’s meeting—Tom Lundgren’s going to be there, reviewing the product specs, right? And we’ve been spinning our wheels for weeks already, stuck in some dumbass debate over whether to add GoldDust functionality.” He rolled his eyes. “Like, give me a break. Don’t even get Nora started on that crap. Anyway, it’s probably a good idea if you have
some
opinion on GoldDust—you don’t have to agree with Nora that it’s complete and total bullshit and a huge waste of money. The important thing is to just have an opinion on it. She likes informed debate.”

GoldDust, I knew, was the latest big thing in electronic consumer products. It was some engineering industry committee’s fancy marketing name for low-power, short-range wireless transmission technology that’s supposed to let you connect your Palm or Blackberry or Lucid to a phone or a laptop or a printer, Whatever. Anything within twenty feet or so. Your computer can talk to your printer, everything talks to everything else, and no unsightly cables to trip over. It was going to free us all from our chains, from wires and cables and tethers. Of course, what the industry geeks who invented GoldDust didn’t figure on was the explosion in WiFi, 802.11 wireless. Hey, even before Wyatt put me through the Bataan Death March, I had to know about WiFi. GoldDust I learned about from Wyatt’s engineers, who ridiculed it up and down.

“Yeah, there was always someone at Wyatt trying to push that on us, but we held the line.”

He shook his head. “Engineers want to pack everything into everything, no matter what it costs. What do they care if it pushes our price point up over five hundred bucks? Anyway, that’ll come up for sure—I’ll bet you can really whale on it.”

“All I know is what I read, you know?”

“I’ll tee it up for you at the meeting, you can whomp it. Earn a couple of strategic brownie points with the boss, can’t hurt, right?”

Chad was like tracing paper: he was translucent; you could see his motives. He was a snake and I knew I could never trust him, but he was obviously trying to establish an alliance with me, probably on the theory that it was better for him to be aligned with the hot new talent, be my buddy, than to appear to be threatened by me, which of course he was.

“All right, man, thanks,” I said.

“Least I can do.”

By the time I got back to my cube there was half an hour before the meeting, so I got on the Internet and did some quick-and-dirty research on GoldDust so at least I could sound like I knew what I was talking about. I was whipping through dozens of Web sites of varying quality, some industry-promo types, and some (like
GoldDustGeek.com
) run by geeks obsessed with this shit, when I noticed someone standing over my shoulder, watching me. It was Phil Bohjalian.

“Eager beaver, huh?” he said. He introduced himself. “Only your second day, and look at you.” He shook his head in wonderment. “Don’t work too hard, you’ll burn out. Plus you’ll make us all look bad.” He made a sort of chortle, like this was a line out of
The Producers
or something, and he exited stage left.

19

The Maestro marketing group met once again in Corvette, everyone sitting pretty much in the same place, as if we had assigned seats.

But this time Tom Lundgren was in the room, sitting in a chair against the wall in the back, not at the conference table. Then, just before Nora called the meeting to order, in walked Paul Camilletti, Trion’s CFO, looking spiffy, like a matinee idol out of
Love Italian Style
, wearing a nubby dark-gray houndstooth jacket over a black mock turtleneck. He took a seat next to Tom Lundgren, and you could feel the entire room go still, electrically charged, as if someone had flipped a power switch.

Even Nora looked a little rattled. “Well,” she said, “why don’t we get started? I’m pleased to welcome Paul Camilletti, our chief financial officer—welcome, Paul.”

He ducked his head, the kind of acknowledgment that said,
Don’t pay any attention to me—I’m just going to sit here incognito, anonymous, like an elephant in the room
.

“Who else is with us today? Who’s teleconning in?”

A voice came over the intercom speaker: “Ken Hsiao, Singapore.”

Then: “Mike Matera, Brussels.”

“All right,” she said, “so the gang’s all here.” She looked excited, jazzed, but it was hard to tell how much of that was a show of enthusiasm she was putting on for Tom Lundgren and Paul Camilletti. “This seems as good a time as any to take a look at forecasts, drill down, get a sense of where we stand. None of us wants to hear that old cliché, ‘dying brand,’ am I right? Maestro is no dying brand. We are not going to torpedo the brand equity that Trion has built up in this product line just for the sake of novelty. I think we’re all on board on that.”