Paranoia (25 page)

“What’s the mask?” I said. “Oxygen?”

“It’s a nebulizer. Albuteral and Atrovent, which are bronchodilators.” He leaned over my father and put the mask back in place. “You’re a real fighter, Mr. Cassidy.”

Dad just blinked.

“
That’s
an understatement,” Antwoine said, laughing huskily.

“Excuse us.” Dr. Patel pulled back the curtain and took a few steps. I followed him, while Antwoine hung back with Dad.

“Does he still smoke?” Dr. Patel asked sharply.

I shrugged.

“There are nicotine stains on his fingers. That’s completely insane, you know.”

“I know.”

“He’s killing himself.”

“He’s dying one way or the other.”

“Well, he’s hastening the process.”

“Maybe he wants to,” I said.

42

I started my first official day of working for Jock Goddard having been up all night.

I’d gone from the hospital to my new apartment around four in the morning, considered trying to grab an hour of sleep, then rejected the idea because I knew I’d oversleep. That might not be the best way to start off with Goddard. So I took a shower, shaved, and spent some time on the Internet reading about Trion’s competitors, poring over
News.com
and Slashdot for the latest tech news. I dressed, in a lightweight black pullover (the closest thing I had to one of Jock Goddard’s trademark black mock turtlenecks), a pair of dress khakis, and a brown houndstooth jacket, one of the few “casual” items of clothing Wyatt’s exotic admin had picked out for me. Now I looked like a full-fledged member of Goddard’s inner posse. Then I called down to the valet and asked them to have my Porsche brought around.

The doorman who seemed to be on in the early morning and evening, when I most often came and went, was a Hispanic guy in his mid-forties named Carlos Avila. He had a strange, strangled voice as if he’d swallowed a sharp object and couldn’t get it all the way down. He liked me—mostly, I think, because I didn’t ignore him like everybody else who lived there.

“Workin’ hard, Carlos?” I said as I passed by. Normally this was the line he used on me, when I came home ridiculously late, looking wiped out.

“Hardly workin’, Mr. Cassidy,” he said with a grin and turned back to the TV news.

I drove it a couple of blocks away to the Starbucks, which was just opening, and bought a triple grande latte, and while I was waiting for the Seattle-grunge-wannabe multiple-piercing-victim kid to steam a quart of two-percent milk, I picked up a
Wall Street Journal
, and my stomach seized up.

There, right on the front page, was an article about Trion. Or, as they put it, “Trion’s woes.” There was an engraved-looking, stippled drawing of Goddard, looking inappropriately chipper, as if he were totally out of it, didn’t get it. One of the smaller headlines said, “Are Founder Augustine Goddard’s Days Numbered?” I had to read that twice. My brain wasn’t functioning at peak capacity, and I needed my triple grande latte, which the grunge kid seemed to be struggling over. The article was a hard-hitting and smart piece of reporting by a
Journal
regular named William Bulkeley, who obviously had good contacts at Trion. The gist of it seemed to be that Trion’s stock price was slipping, its products were long in the tooth, the company (“generally deemed the leader in telecommunications-based consumer electronics”) was in trouble, and Jock Goddard, Trion’s founder, seemed to be out of touch. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. There was a whole riff about the “long tradition” of founders of high-technology companies who got replaced when their company reached a certain size. It asked whether he was the wrong person to preside over the period of stability that followed a period of explosive growth. There was a lot of stuff in there about Goddard’s philanthropy, his charitable efforts, his hobby of collecting and repairing vintage American cars, how he’d completely rebuilt his prize 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible. Goddard, the article said, seemed to be headed for a fall.

Great, I thought. If Goddard falls, guess who falls with him.

Then I remembered: Wait a second, Goddard’s not my real employer. He’s the
target
. My real employer is Nick Wyatt. It was easy to forget where my true loyalties were supposed to lie, with the excitement of the first day and all.

Finally my latte was ready, and I stirred in a couple of Turbinado sugar packets, took a big gulp, which scalded the back of my throat, and pressed on the plastic top. I sat down at a table to finish the rest of the article. The journalist seemed to have the goods on Goddard. Trion people were talking to him. The knives were out for the old guy.

On the drive in, I tried to listen to an Ani DiFranco CD I’d picked up at Tower as part of my Alana research project, but after a few cuts I ejected the thing. I couldn’t stand it. A couple of songs weren’t songs at all but just spoken pieces. If I wanted that, I’d listen to Jay-Z or Eminem. No thanks.

I thought about the
Journal
piece and tried to come up with a spin in case anyone asked me about it. Should I say it was a piece of crap planted by one of our competitors to undermine us? Should I say the reporter had missed the real story (whatever that was)? Or that he’d raised some good questions that had to be dealt with? I decided to go with a modified version of this last one—that whatever the truth of the allegations, what counted was what our shareholders thought, and they almost all read the
Wall Street Journal
, so we’d have to take the piece seriously, truth or not.

And privately I wondered who Goddard’s enemies were who might be stirring up trouble—whether Jock Goddard really was in trouble, and I was boarding a sinking ship. Or, to be accurate about it, whether Nick Wyatt had
put
me on a sinking ship. I thought: The guy
must
be in bad shape—he hired me, didn’t he?

I took a sip of coffee, and the lid wasn’t quite on tight, and the warm milky brown liquid doused my lap. It looked like I’d had an “accident.” What a way to start the new job. I should have taken it as a warning.

43

On my way out of the lobby men’s room, where I did my best to blot up the coffee spill, leaving my khakis damp and wrinkled, I passed the small newsstand in the lobby of A Wing, the main building, which sold the local papers plus
USA Today
, the
New York Times
, the salmon-colored
Financial Times
, and the
Journal.
The normally towering pile of
Wall Street Journal
s was already half gone and it was barely seven in the morning. Obviously everyone at Trion was reading it. I figured copies of the piece from the
Journal’
s Web site were in everyone’s e-mail by now. I said hi to the lobby ambassador and took the elevator to the seventh floor.

Goddard’s chief admin, Flo, had already e-mailed me the details of my new office. That’s right, not cubicle, but a real office, the same size as Jock Goddard’s (and, for that matter, the same size as Nora’s and Tom Lundgren’s). It was down the hall from Goddard’s office, which was dark like all the other offices on the executive corridor. Mine, however, was lit up.

Sitting at her desk outside my office was my new administrative assistant, Jocelyn Chang, a fortyish, imperious-looking Chinese-American woman in an immaculate blue suit. She had perfectly arched eyebrows, short black hair, and a tiny bow-shaped mouth decorated with wet-looking peach-colored lipstick. She was labeling a sorter for correspondence. As I approached, she looked up with pursed lips and stuck out her hand. “You must be Mr. Cassidy.”

“Adam,” I said. I didn’t know, was that my first mistake? Was I supposed to maintain a distance, be formal? It seemed ridiculous and unnecessary. After all, almost everyone here seemed to call the CEO “Jock.” And I was about half her age.

“I’m Jocelyn,” she said. She had some kind of a flat, nasal Boston-area accent, which I hadn’t expected. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Flo said you’ve been here forever, which I’m glad to hear.” Oops. Women don’t like being told that.

“Fifteen years,” she said warily. “The last three for Michael Gilmore, your immediate predecessor. He was reassigned a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve been floating.”

“Fifteen years. Excellent. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

She nodded, no smile, nothing. Then she seemed to notice the
Journal
under my arm. “You’re not going to mention that to Mr. Goddard, are you?”

“Actually, I was going to ask you to have it mounted and framed as a gift to him. For his office.”

She gave me a long, terrified stare. Then a slow smile. “That’s a joke,” she said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“Sorry. Mr. Gilmore wasn’t really known for his sense of humor.”

“That’s okay. I’m not either.”

She nodded, not sure how to react. “Right.” She glanced at her watch. “You’ve got a seven-thirty with Mr. Goddard.”

“He’s not in yet.”

She looked at her watch again. “He will be. In fact, I’ll bet he just got in. He keeps a very regular schedule. Oh, hold on.” She handed me a very fancylooking document, easily a hundred pages long, bound in some kind of blue leatherette, that said
BAIN & COMPANY
on the front. “Flo said Mr. Goddard wanted you to read this before the meeting.”

“The meeting . . . in two and a half minutes.”

She shrugged.

Was this my first test? There was no way I could read even a page of this incomprehensible gibberish before the meeting, and I sure wasn’t going to be late. Bain & Company is a high-priced global management-consulting firm that takes guys around my age, guys that know even less than I do, and works them until they’re drooling idiots, making them visit companies and write reports and bill hundreds of thousands of dollars for their bogus wisdom. This one was stamped
TRION SECRET
. I skimmed it quickly, and all the clichés and buzzwords jumped right out at me—“streamlined knowledge management,” “competitive advantage,” “operations excellence,” “cost inefficiencies,” “diseconomies of scale,” “minimizing non–value-adding work,” blah blah blah—and I knew I didn’t even have to read the thing to know what was up.

Layoffs. Head-harvesting on the cubicle farm.

Groovy, I thought. Welcome to life at the top.

44

Goddard was already sitting at a round table in his back office with Paul Camilletti and another guy when Flo escorted me in. The third guy was in his mid- to late fifties, bald with a gray fringe, wearing an unfashionable gray plaid suit, shirt, and tie right out of a shopping mall men’s store, a big bulky class ring on his right hand. I recognized him: Jim Colvin, Trion’s chief operations officer.

The room was the same size as Goddard’s front office, ten by ten, and with only four guys here and the big round table it felt crowded. I wondered why we weren’t meeting in some conference room, someplace a little bigger, more fitting for such high-powered executives. I said hi, smiled nervously, sat in a chair near Goddard, and put down my Bain document and the Trion mug of coffee Flo had given me. I took out a yellow pad and pen and got ready to take notes. Goddard and Camilletti were in shirtsleeves, no jackets—and no black turtlenecks. Goddard looked even older and more tired than last time I’d seen him. He had on a pair of black half-glasses on a string around his neck. Spread out on the table were several copies of the
Wall Street Journal
article, one of them marked up with yellow and green highlighter.

Camilletti scowled at me as I sat down. “Who’s this?” he said. Not exactly ‘Nice to have you aboard.’

“You remember Mr. Cassidy, don’t you?”

“No.”

“From the Maestro meeting? The military thing?”

“Your new assistant,” he said without enthusiasm. “Right. Welcome to damage control central, Cassidy.”

“Jim, this is Adam Cassidy,” Goddard said. “Adam, Jim Colvin, our COO.”

Colvin nodded. “Adam.”

“We were just talking about this darned
Journal
piece,” Goddard said, “and how to handle it.”

“Well,” I said sagely, “it’s just one article. It’ll blow over in a couple of days, no doubt.”

“Bullshit,” Camilletti snapped, glaring at me with an expression so scary I thought I was going to turn to stone. “It’s the
Journal
. It’s front-page. Everyone reads it. Board members, institutional investors, analysts, everyone. This is a friggin’ train wreck.”

“It’s not good,” I agreed. I told myself to keep my mouth shut from now on.

Goddard exhaled noisily.

“The worst thing to do is to over-rotate,” Colvin said. “We don’t want to send up panic smoke signals to the industry.” I liked “over-rotate.” Jim Colvin was obviously a golfer.

“I want to get Investor Relations in here now, Corporate Communications, and draft a response, a letter to the editor,” Camilletti said.

“Forget the
Journal
,” Goddard said. “I think I’d like to offer a face-to-face exclusive to the
New York Times
. An opportunity to address issues of broad concern to the whole industry, I’ll say. They’ll get it.”

“Whatever,” said Camilletti. “In any case, let’s not protest too loudly. We don’t want to force the
Journal
to do a follow-up, stir up the mud even more.”

“Sounds to me like the
Journal
reporter must have talked to insiders here,” I said, forgetting the part about keeping my mouth shut. “Do we have any idea who might have leaked?”

“I did get a voice mail from the reporter a couple of days ago, but I was out of the country,” Goddard said. “So I’m ‘unavailable for comment.’”

“The guy may have called me—I don’t know, I can check my voice mail—but I surely didn’t return his call,” said Camilletti.

“I can’t imagine anyone at Trion would knowingly have any part in this,” Goddard said.

“One of our competitors,” Camilletti said. “Wyatt, maybe.”

No one looked at me. I wondered if the other two knew I came from Wyatt.