Paranoia (4 page)

“And what if I’m caught?”

“You won’t be,” Wyatt said.

“But if I am . . . ?”

“If you do the job right,” Meacham said, “you won’t be caught. And if somehow you screw up and you
are
caught—well, we’ll be here to protect you.”

Somehow I doubted that. “They’ll be totally suspicious.”

“Of what?” Wyatt said. “In this business people jump from company to company all the time. The top talent gets poached. Low-hanging fruit. You’re fresh off a big win at Wyatt, you maybe don’t have the juice you think you should, you’re looking for more responsibility, a better opportunity, more money—the usual bullshit.”

“They’ll see right through me.”

“Not if you do your job right,” said Wyatt. “You’re going to have to learn product marketing, you’re going to have to be fucking brilliant, you’re going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your whole sorry life. Really bust your ass. Only a major player’s going to get what I want. Try your phone-it-in shit at Trion, you’ll either get shot or shoved aside, and then our little experiment is over. And you get door number one.”

“I thought new product guys all have to have MBAs.”

“Nah, Goddard thinks MBAs are bullshit—one of the few things we agree on. He doesn’t have one. Thinks it’s limiting. Speaking of limiting.” He snapped his fingers, and Meacham handed him something, a small metal box, familiar looking. An Altoids box. He popped it open. Inside were a few white pills that looked like aspirin but weren’t. Definitely familiar. “You’re going to have to cut out this shit, this Ecstasy or whatever you call it.” I kept the Altoids box on my coffee table at home; I wondered when and how they got it, but I was too dazed to be pissed off. He dropped the box into a little black leather trash can next to the couch. It made a
thunk
sound. “Same with pot, booze, all that shit. You’re going to have to straighten up and fly right, guy.”

That seemed like the least of my problems. “And what if I don’t get hired?”

“Door number one.” He gave an ugly smile. “And don’t pack your golf shoes. Pack your K-Y.”

“Even if I give it my best shot?”

“Your job is not to blow it. With the quals we’re giving you, and with a coach like me, you won’t have any excuse.”

“What kind of money are we talking about?”

“What kind of
money?
The fuck do I know? Believe me, it’ll be a hell of a lot more than you get here. Six figures anyway.” I tried not to gulp visibly.

“Plus my salary here.”

He turned his tight face over to me and gave me a dead stare. He didn’t have any expression in his eyes.
Botox?
I wondered. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m taking an enormous risk.”

“Excuse me?
I’m
the one taking the risk. You’re a total fucking black box, a big fat question mark.”

“If you really thought so, you wouldn’t ask me to do it.”

He turned to Meacham. “I don’t believe this shit.”

Meacham looked like he’d swallowed a turd. “You little prick,” he said. “I ought to pick up the phone right now—”

Wyatt held up an imperial hand. “That’s okay. He’s ballsy. I like ballsy. You get hired, you do your job right, you get to double-dip. But if you fuck up—”

“I know,” I said. “Door number one. Let me think it over, get back to you tomorrow.”

Wyatt’s jaw dropped, his eyes blank. He paused, then said, all icy: “I’ll give you till nine
A.M.
When the U.S. Attorney gets into his office.”

“I advise you not to say a word about this to any of your buddies, your father, anybody,” Meacham put in. “Or you won’t know what hit you.”

“I understand,” I replied. “No need to threaten me.”

“Oh, that’s not a threat,” said Nicholas Wyatt. “That’s a promise.”

5

There didn’t seem to be any reason to go back to work, so I went home. It felt strange to be on the subway at one in the afternoon, with the old people and the students, the moms and kids. My head was still spinning, and I felt queasy.

My apartment was a good ten-minute walk from the subway stop. It was a bright day, ridiculously cheerful.

My shirt was still damp and gave off a funky sweat smell. A couple of young girls in overalls and multiple piercings were tugging a bunch of little kids around on a long rope. The kids squealed. Some black guys were playing basketball with their shirts off, on an asphalt playground behind a chain-link fence. The bricks on the sidewalk were uneven, and I almost tripped, then I felt that sickening slickness underfoot as I stepped in dog shit. Perfect symbolism.

The entrance to my apartment smelled strongly of urine, either from a cat or a bum. The mail hadn’t come yet. My keys jingled as I unlocked the three locks on my apartment door. The old lady in the unit across the hall opened her door a crack, the length of her security chain, then slammed it; she was too short to reach the peephole. I gave her a friendly wave.

The room was dark even though the blinds were wide open. The air was stifling, smelled of stale cigarettes. Since the apartment was street level, I couldn’t leave the windows open during the day to air it out.

My furnishings were pretty pathetic: the one room was dominated by a greenish tartan-plaid sleeper sofa, high-backed, beer-encrusted, gold threads woven throughout. It faced a Sanyo nineteen-inch TV that was missing the remote. A tall narrow unfinished-pine bookcase stood lonely in one corner. I sat down on the sofa, and a cloud of dust rose in the air. The steel bar underneath the cushion hurt my ass. I thought of Nicholas Wyatt’s black leather sofa and wondered if he’d ever lived in such a dump. The story was that he came up from nothing, but I didn’t believe it; I couldn’t see him ever living in such a rat hole. I found the Bic lighter under the glass coffee table, lighted a cigarette, looked over at the pile of bills on the table. I didn’t even open the envelopes anymore. I had two MasterCards and three Visas, and they all had whopping balances, and I could barely even make the minimum payments.

I had already made up my mind, of course.

6

“You get busted?”

Seth Marcus, my best buddy since junior high school, bartended three nights a week at a sort of yuppie dive called Alley Cat. During the days he was a paralegal at a downtown law firm. He said he needed the money, but I was convinced that secretly he was bartending in order to maintain some vestige of coolness, to keep from turning into the sort of corporate dweeb we both liked to make fun of.

“Busted for what?” How much had I told him? Did I tell him about the call from Meacham, the security director? I hoped not. Now I couldn’t tell him a goddamned thing about the vise they’d got me in.

“Your big party.” It was loud, I couldn’t hear him well, and someone down at the other end of the bar was whistling, two fingers in his mouth, loud and shrill. “That guy whistling at
me?
Like I’m a fucking
dog?
” He ignored the whistler.

I shook my head.

“You got away with it, huh? You actually pulled it off, amazing. What can I get you to celebrate?”

“Brooklyn Brown?”

He shook his head. “Nah.”

“Newcastle? Guinness?”

“How about a draft? They don’t keep track of those.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

He pulled me a draft, yellow and soapy: he was clearly new at this. It sloshed on the scarred wooden bar top. He was a tall, dark-haired, good-looking guy—a veritable chick magnet—with a ridiculous goatee and an earring. He was half-Jewish but wanted to be black. He played and sang in a band called Slither, which I’d heard a couple of times; they weren’t very good, but he talked a lot about “signing a deal.” He had a dozen scams going at once just so he wouldn’t have to admit he was a working stiff.

Seth was the only guy I knew who was more cynical than me. That was probably why we were friends. That plus the fact that he didn’t give me shit about my father, even though he used to play on the high school football team coached (and tyrannized) by Frank Cassidy. In seventh grade we were in the same homeroom, liked each other instantly because we were both singled out for ridicule by the math teacher, Mr. Pasquale. In ninth grade I left the public school and went to Bartholomew Browning & Knightley, the fancy prep school where my dad had just been hired as the football and hockey coach and I now got free tuition. For two years I rarely saw Seth, until Dad got fired for breaking two bones in a kid’s right forearm and one bone in his left forearm. The kid’s mother was head of the board of overseers of Bartholomew Browning. So the free tuition tap got shut off, and I went back to the public school. Dad got hired there too, after Bartholomew Browning.

We both worked at the same Gulf station in high school, until Seth got tired of the holdups and went to Dunkin’ Donuts to make donuts on the overnight. For a couple of summers he and I worked cleaning windows for a company that did a lot of downtown skyscrapers, until we decided that dangling from ropes on the twenty-seventh floor sounded cooler than it actually was. Not only was it boring, but it was scary as hell, a lousy combination. Maybe some people consider hanging off the side of a building hundreds of feet up some kind of extreme sport, but to me it seemed more like a slow-motion suicide attempt.

The whistling grew louder. People were looking at the whistler, a chubby balding guy in a suit, and some people were giggling.

“I’m going to fucking lose it,” Seth said.

“Don’t,” I said, but it was too late, he was already headed to the other end of the bar. I took out a cigarette and lighted it as I watched him lean over the bar, glowering at the whistler, looking like he was going to grab the guy’s lapel but stopping short. He said something. There was some laughter from the whistler’s general vicinity. Looking cool and relaxed, Seth headed back this way. He stopped to talk to a pair of beautiful women, a blonde and a brunette, and flashed them a smile.

“There. I don’t believe you’re still smoking,” he said to me. “Fucking stupid, with your dad.” He took a cigarette from my pack, lighted it, took a drag and set it down in the ashtray.

“Thank you for not thanking me for not smoking,” I said. “So what’s
your
excuse?”

He exhaled through his nostrils. “Dude, I like to multitask. Also, cancer doesn’t run in my family. Just insanity.”

“He doesn’t have cancer.”

“Emphysema. whatever the fuck. How is the old man?”

“Fine.” I shrugged. I didn’t want to go there, and neither did Seth.

“Man, one of those babes wants a Cosmopolitan, the other wants a
frozen drink.
I hate that.”

“Why?”

“Too labor-intensive, then they’ll tip me a quarter. Women never tip, I’ve learned this. Jesus, you crack two Buds, you make a couple of bucks. Frozen drinks!” He shook his head. “Man.”

He went off for a couple of minutes, banging things around, the blender screaming. Served the girls their drinks with one of his killer smiles. They weren’t going to tip him a quarter. They both turned to look at me and smiled.

When he came back, he said, “What are you doing later?”

“Later?” It was already close to ten, and I had to meet with a Wyatt engineer at seven-thirty in the morning. A couple days training with him, some big shot on the Lucid project, then a couple more days with a new-products marketing manager, and regular sessions with an “executive coach.” They’d lined up a vicious schedule. Boot camp for bootlickers, was how I thought of it. No more fucking off, getting in at nine or ten. But I couldn’t tell Seth; I couldn’t tell anyone.

“I’m done at one,” he said. “Those two chicks asked if I wanted to go to Nightcrawler with them after. I told them I had a friend. They just checked you out, they’re into it.”

“Can’t,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Got to get to work early. On time, really.”

Seth looked alarmed, disbelieving. “What? What’s going on?”

“Work’s getting serious. Early day tomorrow. Big project.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“Unfortunately no. Don’t you have to work in the morning too?”

“You becoming one of Them? One of the pod people?”

I grinned. “Time to grow up. No more kid stuff.”

Seth looked disgusted. “Dude, it’s
never
too late to have a happy childhood.”

7

After ten grueling days of tutoring and indoctrination by engineers and product marketing types who’d been involved with the Lucid handheld, my head was stuffed with all kinds of useless information. I was given a tiny “office” in the executive suite that used to be a supply room, though I was almost never there. I showed up dutifully, didn’t give anyone any trouble. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep this up without flipping out, but the image of the prison bunk bed at Marion kept me motivated.

Then one morning I was summoned to an office two doors down the executive corridor from Nicholas Wyatt’s. The name on the brass plate on the door said
JUDITH BOLTON
. The office was all white—white rug, white-upholstered furniture, white marble slab for a desk, even white flowers.

On a white leather sofa, Nicholas Wyatt sat next to an attractive, fortyish woman who was chatting away familiarly with him, touching his arm, laughing. Coppery red hair, long legs crossed at the knee, a slender body she obviously worked hard at, dressed in a navy suit. She had blue eyes, glossy heart-shaped lips, brows arched provocatively. She’d obviously once been a knockout, but she’d gotten a little hard.

I realized I’d seen her before, over the last week or so, at Wyatt’s side, when he paid his quick visits to my training sessions with marketing guys and engineers. She always seemed to be whispering in his ear, watching me, but we were never introduced, and I’d always wondered who she was.

Without getting up from the couch, she extended a hand as I approached—long fingers, red nail polish—and gave me a firm, no-nonsense shake.

“Judith Bolton.”

“Adam Cassidy.”

“You’re late,” she said.

“I got lost,” I said, trying to lighten things up.