Paranoia (22 page)

“I’m lucky,” I said. “Or maybe I just have a big mouth, and for some reason Goddard likes that.”

“No, I don’t think so. You’ve got some kind of Vulcan mind-meld going with the old guy. You, like, know all the right buttons to push. I’ll bet you two don’t even need to talk. That’s how good you are. I’m impressed, big guy. I don’t know how you did it, but I’m seriously impressed.”

He zipped up, clapped me on the shoulder.

“Let me in on the secret, will ya?” he said, but he didn’t wait for a reply.

When I got back to my cubicle, Noah Mordden was standing at my cubicle inspecting the books on top of the file cabinet. He was holding a gift-wrapped package, which looked like a book.

“Cassidy,” he said. “Our too-cool-for-school Widmerpool.”

“Excuse me?” Man, was the guy into cryptic references.

“I want you to have this,” he said.

I thanked him and unwrapped the package. It was a book, an old one that smelled of mildew.
Sun Tzu on The Art of War
was stamped on the cloth front cover.

“It’s the 1910 Lionel Giles translation,” he said. “The best, I think. Not a first edition, which is impossible to come by, but an early printing at least.”

I was touched. “When did you have time to buy this?”

“Last week, online, actually. I didn’t intend it to be a departure gift, but there you are. At least now you’ll have no excuse.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll read it.”

“Please do. I suspect you’ll need it all the more. Recall the Japanese
kotowaza,
‘the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.’ You’re fortunate that you’re being moved out of Nora’s orbit, but there are great perils in rising too quickly in any organization. Hawks may soar, but chipmunks don’t get sucked into jet engines.”

I nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Ambition is a useful quality, but you must always cover your tracks,” he said.

He was definitely hinting at something—he
had
to have seen me coming out of Nora’s office—and it scared the shit out of me. He was toying with me, sadistically, like a cat with a mouse.

Nora summoned me to her office by e-mail, and I braced myself for a shitstorm. “Adam,” she called out as I approached. “I just heard the news.”

She was smiling. “Sit down, sit down. I am
so
happy for you. And maybe I shouldn’t reveal this, but I’m
delighted
that they took my enthusiasm about you seriously. Because, you know, they don’t always listen.”

“I know.”

“But I assured them, if you do this, you won’t be sorry. Adam’s got the right stuff, I told them, he’s going to go the extra mile. You’ve got my word on it. I
know
him.”

Yeah, I thought, you think you know me. You have no idea.

“I could see you were concerned about relocating, so I made a few calls,” she said. “I’m so happy things are turning out right for you.”

I didn’t reply. I was too busy thinking about what Wyatt would say when he heard.

37

“Holy shit,” Nicholas Wyatt said.

For a split second his polished, self-contained, deep-tanned shell of arrogance had cracked open. He gave me a look that almost seemed to border on respect. Almost. Anyway, this was a whole new Wyatt, and I enjoyed seeing it.

“You are fucking kidding me.” He continued staring. “This better not be a joke.” Finally he looked away, and it was a relief. “This is un-fucking-believable.”

We were sitting on his private plane, but it wasn’t moving anywhere. We were waiting for his latest bimbo girlfriend to show up so the two of them could take off for the Big Island of Hawaii, where he had a house in the Hualalai resort. It was me, Wyatt, and Arnold Meacham. I’d never been in a private jet before, and this one was sweet, a Gulfstream G-IV, interior cabin twelve feet wide, sixty-something feet long. I’d never seen all this empty space in an airplane. You could practically play football in here. No more than ten seats, a separate conference room, two huge bathrooms with showers.

Believe me, I wasn’t flying to the Big Island. This was just a tease. Meacham and I would get off before the plane went anywhere. Wyatt was wearing some kind of black silk shirt. I hoped he got skin cancer.

Meacham smiled at Wyatt and said quietly, “Brilliant idea, Nick.”

“I gotta give credit to Judith,” Wyatt said. “She came up with the idea in the first place.” He shook his head slowly. “But I doubt even she could have seen this coming.” He picked up his cell, hit two keys.

“Judith,” he said. “Our boy is now working directly for Mister Big himself. The Big Kahuna. Special executive assistant to the CEO.” He paused, smiled at Meacham. “I kid you not.” Another pause. “Judith, sweetheart, I want you to do a crash course with our young man here.” Pause. “Right, well, obviously this is top priority. I want Adam to know that guy inside and out. I want him to be the best fucking special assistant the guy’s ever hired. Right.” And he ended the call with a beep. Looking back at me, he said, “You just saved your own ass, my friend. Arnie?”

Meacham looked like he’d been waiting for this cue. “We ran all the AURORA names you gave us,” he said darkly. “Not a single fucking one of them popped up with anything.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. God, did I hate the guy.

“No Social Security numbers, no nothing. Don’t fuck with us, buddy.”

“What are you talking about? I downloaded them directly from the Trion directory on the Web site.”

“Yeah, well, they’re not real names, asshole. The admin names are real, but the research-division names are obviously cover names. That’s how deep they’re buried—they don’t even list their real names on the Web site. Never heard of such a thing.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” I said, shaking my head.

“Are you being straight with us?” Meacham said. “Because if you aren’t, so help me, we will fucking crush you.” He looked at Wyatt. “He totally fucked up the personnel records—got diddly-squat.”

“The records were
gone
, Arnold,” I shot back. “Removed. They’re being super-careful.”

“What do you have on the broad?” Wyatt broke in.

I smiled. “I’m seeing ‘the broad’ next week.”

“Like boyfriend-girlfriend stuff?”

I shrugged. “The woman’s interested in me. She’s on AURORA. She’s a direct link into the skunkworks.”

To my surprise, Wyatt just nodded. “Nice.”

Meacham seemed to sense which way the wind was blowing now. He’d been stuck on how I’d blown the HR operation, and how the AURORA names on the Trion Web site were for some reason fake, but his boss was focusing on what was going
right,
on the amazing turn of events, and Meacham didn’t want to be out of lockstep. “You’re going to have access to Goddard’s office now,” he said. “There’s any number of devices you can plant.”

“This is so fucking incredible,” Wyatt said.

“I don’t think we need to be paying him his old Wyatt salary,” Meacham said. “Not with what he’s making at Trion now. Christ, this goddamned kite’s making more than
me
.”

Wyatt seemed amused. “Nah, we made a deal.”

“What’d you call me?” I asked Meacham.

“There’s a security risk in having us transfer corporate funds into an account for this kid, no matter how many shells it goes through,” Meacham said to Wyatt.

“You called me a ‘kite,’” I persisted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I thought it’s untraceable,” Wyatt said to Meacham.

“What’s a ‘kite’?” I said. I was a dog with a bone; I wasn’t letting this drop, no matter how much I annoyed Meacham.

Meacham wasn’t even listening, but Wyatt looked at me and muttered, “It’s corporate-spy talk. A kite’s a ‘special consultant’ who goes out there and gathers the intel by whatever means necessary, does the work.”

“Kite?” I said.

“You fly a kite, and if it gets caught in a tree, you just cut the string,” Wyatt said. “Plausible deniability, you ever hear of that?”

“Cut the string,” I repeated dully. On one level I wouldn’t mind that at all, because that string was really a leash. But I knew when they talked about cutting the string, they meant leaving me high and dry.

“If things go bad,” Wyatt said. “Just don’t let things go bad, and no one has to cut the string. Now, where the hell is this bitch? If she’s not here in two minutes, I’m taking off without her.”

38

So I did something then that was totally insane but felt great. I went out and got myself a ninety-thousand-dollar Porsche.

There was a time when I would have celebrated some great piece of news by getting hammered, maybe splurging on champagne or a couple of CDs. But this was a whole new league. I liked the idea of cutting my Wyatt apron strings by exchanging the Audi for a Porsche, lease courtesy of Trion.

Ever been in a Porsche dealership? It’s not like buying a Honda Accord, okay? You don’t just walk in off the street and ask for a test drive. You have to go through a lot of foreplay. You’ve got to fill out a form, they want to talk about why you’re here, what do you do, what’s your sign.

Also, there’s so many options you could go out of your mind. You want bi-xenon headlights? Arctic Silver instrument panel? You want leather or
supple
leather? You want Sport Design wheels or Sport Classic II wheels or Turbo-Look I wheels?

What I wanted was a Porsche, and I didn’t want to wait four to six months for it to be custom built in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. I wanted to drive it off the lot. I wanted it
now
. They had only two 911 Carrera coupes on the lot, one in Guards Red and one in metallic Basalt Black. It came down to the stitching on the leather. The red car had black leather that felt like leatherette and, worst of all, had red stitching on it, which looked cowboy-western and gross. Whereas the Basalt Black model had a terrific Natural Brown supple leather interior, with a leather gearshift and steering wheel. I came right back from the test drive and said let’s do it. Maybe he’d sized me up as the kind of guy who was just looking, or wouldn’t in the end be able to pull the trigger, but I did it, and he assured me I was making a smart move. He even offered to have someone return the leased Audi to the Audi dealership—totally zipless.

It was like flying a jet; when you floored it, it even
sounded
like a 767. Three hundred twenty horsepower, zero to sixty in five-point-zero seconds, unbelievably powerful. It throbbed and roared. I popped in my latest favorite burned CD and blasted the Clash, Pearl Jam, and Guns N’ Roses while redlining it to work. It made me feel like everything was happening right.

Even before I moved into my new office, Goddard wanted me to find a new place to live, more convenient to the Trion building. I wasn’t exactly going to argue; it was long past time.

His people made it easy for me to abandon the dump I’d lived in for so long and move into a new apartment on the twenty-ninth floor of the south tower of the Harbor Suites. Each of the two towers had like a hundred and fifty condos, on thirty-eight floors, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms. The towers were built on top of the swankiest hotel in the area, whose restaurant was top-rated in Zagat’s.

The apartment looked like something out of an
In Style
photo shoot. It was around two thousand square feet, with twelve-foot ceilings, hardwood parquet and stone floors. There was a “master suite” and a “library” that could also be used as a spare bedroom, a formal dining room, and a giant living room.

There were floor-to-ceiling windows with the most staggering views I’d ever seen. The living room itself looked over the city, spread out below, in one direction, and over the water in another.

The eat-in kitchen looked like a showroom display at a high-end kitchen-design firm, with all the right names: Sub-Zero refrigerator, Miele dishwasher, Viking duel-fuel oven/range, cabinets by Poggenpohl, granite countertops, even a built-in wine “grotto.”

Not that I’d ever need the kitchen. If you wanted “in-room dining,” all you had to do was pick up the wall phone in the kitchen and press a button, and you could get a room service meal from the hotel, even have a cook from the hotel restaurant come up on short notice and make dinner for you and your guests.

There was an immense, state-of-the-art health club, a hundred thousand square feet, where a lot of rich people who didn’t live here worked out or played squash or did Taoist yoga, followed by saunas and protein smoothies at the café.

You didn’t even park your own car. You drove it up to the front of the building, and the valet would whisk it away somewhere and park it for you, and you called down to get it back.

The elevators zoomed at such supersonic speed that your ears popped. They had mahogany walls and marble floors and were about the same size as my old apartment.

The security here was a whole hell of a lot better too. Wyatt’s goons wouldn’t be able to break in here so easily and search my stuff. I liked that.

None of the Harbor Suites apartments cost less than a million, and this baby was over two million, but it was all free—furnishings included—courtesy of Trion Systems, as a perk.

Moving in was painless, since I kept almost nothing from my old apartment. Goodwill and the Salvation Army came and took away the big ugly plaid couch, the Formica kitchen table, the box spring and mattress, all the assorted junk, even the cruddy old desk. Crap fell out of the couch as they dragged it away—Zig-Zag papers, roaches, assorted druggie paraphernalia. I kept my computer, my clothes, and my mother’s black cast-iron frying pan (for sentimental reasons—not that I ever used it). I packed all my stuff into the Porsche, which tells you how little there was, because there’s almost zero luggage space in a Porsche. All the furniture I ordered from that fancy furniture store Domicile (the agent’s suggestion)—big, puffy, overstuffed couches you could get swallowed up in, matching chairs, a dining table and chairs that looked like they came out of Versailles, a huge bed with iron railing, Persian area rugs. Super-expensive Dux mattress. Everything. A shitload of money, but hey—I wasn’t paying for any of it.