54

ALLIE PULLED INTO THE EMPLOYEE PARKING LOT AT DEEP SEVEN AND FOUND a space. She parked her car and looked up at the building. It crouched in front of her, looking like a malevolent giant lizard made of black glass and steel. The outsized lobby was its head, the double doors its mouth, and the curving limestone path its pale and poisonous tongue.

She suddenly wanted to run again, to flee back to the Bahamas or to some unfindable place in South America or Asia. Anything to avoid going back into that place. How had she ever thought that she could do this? It was one thing to look around in the billing files of unsuspecting companies while doing their accounting work. She knew exactly what to look for, and she had a near perfect cover: how many people would raise an eyebrow at an accounting temp looking at accounting files?

But even that hadn’t been easy enough for her. She’d blown it at Blue Sea. And Blue Sea had been child’s play compared to what she was about to try now. If she couldn’t look at some invoices on unsecured servers without getting caught, what made her think she could penetrate the strongest defenses of a company like Deep Seven? Even if she did, she had no idea what to look for, and she doubted that they had a file labeled “Secret Evil Plan.”

Even if she somehow managed to get past their security, find whatever they were hiding, and get back out, what then? Her likely prize would be the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time in a Kansas prison. And if she didn’t win that, her consolation prize would be sitting in court and testifying against Erik. She remembered his voice on her answering machine as she played his last message over and over to torture herself. He had said he loved her, needed her. She imagined the look on his face as he watched her betray him on the witness stand.

She vaguely remembered reading a poem in college about a poet who discovered the road to truth. It appeared to be overgrown with grass, but as the poet took his first step on it, he discovered that each blade of grass was actually an exquisitely sharp knife. So he turned back and took another path.

But there was no other path for her. She knew that. Her last weeks in the Bahamas were still fresh in her mind. She vividly remembered the scent of hell surrounding her wherever she went, the perpetually judging eyes watching her. If she ran again, she knew it would be worse. Ten times worse. She couldn’t bear that.

Staying in her car forever wasn’t really an option, unfortunately. She looked at her watch. 8:28. She took a deep breath, opened her car door, and stepped out onto the knife-filled path in front of her.

Deep Seven buzzed with activity. Hurrying workers filled the halls, and temps (several of whom Allie recognized from prior jobs) hammered at the keyboards of hastily installed computer terminals in every conference room she passed. Even the break areas were busy, having been converted into impromptu conference rooms.

As Franklin Roh guided her through the office, her despair grew. She was sure he’d stick her in a room with twenty other people, which would pretty much eliminate any chance to do some quiet espionage. But he took her right past all the hubbub and deposited her in an isolated cubicle in a quiet corner of the IT department’s area. A fake ficus tree loomed over her, further shielding her from the rest of the office.

Mr. Roh (he had never invited her to call him Franklin) told her about her assignment, speaking quickly. “The government seized Deep Seven’s servers and held them for nearly a month. We were forced to rent replacement equipment and operate off of back-up tapes for that whole time.”

Allie made careful expressions of shock and sympathy.

He nodded impassively and continued. “When the government finally returned our equipment, we had to migrate all our data back onto the original servers. Not everything made it, however. A number of files were corrupted in the transition or disappeared entirely.”

Allie shook her head and clicked her tongue.

“You don’t need to figure out what went wrong—Deep Seven’s IT staff is handling that—but I will need you to find how many problem files we have.

“Unfortunately, I won’t be able to give you the supervision this project deserves because I’ll be busy on the Golden Gate turbine project. We won the bid, and the project is sucking up every minute of my time. Sorting out the problems with their servers will have to be left to temps, but TempForce said a lot of good things about you, so I assume you’ll be able to work very independently.”

She assured him that she could handle the job on her own.

He glanced at his watch and asked whether she had any questions, clearly indicating that it would be best if she didn’t.

She gave the right answer, and he turned and hurried away like a parochial school nun who fears that somewhere children are having fun.

She watched his retreating back, marveling at her good fortune. She would be working on her own and out of the way. And her job was to poke around in the servers looking for anything problematic—what better cover for a little fishing expedition?

She’d have to be careful about what she did electronically, of course. She wouldn’t copy, print, or even open a single suspicious file. Instead, she’d simply note where a hard copy of it was physically filed and then she’d go look at it.

Deep Seven kept pretty much everything in a central file room. It had security cameras at the doors, but not inside. If she had an excuse to go in and out carrying files, she’d be golden. And getting that excuse should be easy. She would mention to Mr. Roh that she needed to check a random sample of electronic documents against hard copies to make sure the files hadn’t become corrupted during the server transfers. He wouldn’t have any reason to object, and no one would think twice about seeing her take piles of files back to her cube. Once she was safely behind the dingy gray fabric walls of her workspace, she could read at her leisure and use her cell phone to take pictures of anything interesting.

Perfect. She couldn’t imagine a better setup. The icy gray hopelessness that gripped her half an hour ago melted away as she made her plans. She could do this! It really was possible. A wave of elation swept over her and she discovered that she was smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.

She got to work on her sampling protocol and made quick progress. After an hour, she had a set of rules that should take her into likely areas for prospecting—and which she could easily explain to Mr. Roh if he asked what she was doing. She was just selecting her first set of documents when she heard footsteps behind her.

She instinctively popped up the company’s internal e-mail program to hide what she had been doing and turned. She saw a balding South Asian man of about her age walking toward her. A chunky gold watch adorned his wrist, and he wore a red polo shirt that was a little tight across his stomach. “Hello, my name is Rajiv,” he said with a musical accent. “Welcome to Deep Seven.”

“Thanks. I’m Allie Whitman. And it’s actually welcome back. I’m a temp, and I worked here a couple of months ago.”

He shook his head and smiled. “No, you didn’t. I would have remembered you.”

She glanced at his left hand and saw that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Rajiv was hardly her type, but… well, she needed information. She braced herself and giggled demurely. “Why, thanks. I was down in accounting the last time I was here.”

“Ah, that explains it. I hardly ever get out of IT. I have many important projects to manage here.”

“I’ll bet you do, especially now.” She nodded toward the steady bustle of workers hurrying along an arterial hall a few yards away. “It’s gotten a lot busier since the last time I was here.”

“Yes, Deep Seven has definitely become very active. Just today I had to set up twelve new workstations. I also have my regular work, of course.” His eyes darted toward the plastic tree by her desk. “Franklin keeps me busy. He gives me lots of, ah, fascinating projects.”

“Wow, what does he have you working on now? I know about the Golden Gate turbine project and I’m working on the remigration project, but I was thinking there must be some other stuff going on with all these people.”

He rubbed the bushy mustache that graced his upper lip. “Oh, I’m working on lots of things, but I don’t want to take up your time during the work day. Shall we have lunch? There is an excellent Chinese place just down the street. It is called Asian Express.”

She had been to Asian Express three times during her last stint at Deep Seven, and it was no Tang Dynasty. In fact, she had eaten better frozen Chinese food. “That would be great. When do you want to go?”

“Shall we say 12:15? I would not want to keep you away from your desk for too long on your first day.”

How thoughtful of him. “Sure. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

Rajiv left, and Allie went back to work. She picked her first sample and started pulling documents in groups of ten. The first five groups held nothing interesting, but the sixth time was the charm: her net caught a juicy-looking memo titled “Resolution of Grasp II Problem.”

She went to the file room and pulled the hard copy of the memo, which bore the legend “CONFIDENTIAL: LIMITED DISTRIBUTION.” She stuck it into a stack of random documents and hurried back to her desk, trying hard not to look like she was hurrying.

Five minutes later, she was hunched below the protective walls of her cubicle, her shaking fingers paging through the memo. It was about one of Deep Seven’s ships, the Grasp II. About a year ago, the company discovered that it had been writing off the value of a bunch of equipment on the ship at too high a rate. That meant they had been claiming too much in deductions. And that meant they owed a bunch of back taxes and penalties to the IRS.

Her heart slowed down as she read. This wasn’t exactly a good document for Deep Seven, but it didn’t look like the sort of thing that would get anyone killed. Not even an annoying IT geek. She’d seen this sort of thing at plenty of companies— some bookkeeper messes up, the firm spots the problem later, and they’ve got to figure out how to tell the feds. They might have to pay some penalties and someone might get fired, but it shouldn’t be a big deal. But, on the other hand, maybe there was more to this than a single bad tax return. Maybe this was the tip of some iceberg that she didn’t see yet.

Allie flipped through the memo again and decided it was a keeper.

She poked her head up and scanned the surrounding area. No one around except the never-ending foot traffic in the hall.

She pulled her cell phone out of her purse and was about to take a picture of the first page when she noticed the time on her phone’s display: 12:20.

Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!

She stood up quickly and hit her head on the branches of the fake tree. It shook violently—and something fell out of it. She looked down at the off-white Berber carpet. There it was: a small black object no larger than a pen cap. She bent over and looked at it. It was a tiny video camera.

The floor suddenly felt uneven beneath her feet and she almost staggered. It all made perfect, sickening sense. The isolated cubicle, him telling her to work independently, the project she had been given. Everything. It was all a trap. They would bait her into doing something to confirm that she was a spy. Then snap!—the jaws would spring shut. She’d disappear just like Samuel Stimson, erased from the face of the Earth.