Chapter Thirty-One
Follow the tape? Sure enough, a line of duct tape had been stuck to the floor on the landing, leading down the stairs. Overhead Diana spotted a small surveillance camera, tucked into a heavy beam and aimed at the doorway in which she was standing.
She pulled on the boots and stood, imagining herself in a video window on Daniel’s computer screen. She tucked her trembling hands into her jacket pockets, feeling for her pills. She wasn’t about to take more—she’d need every one of them, and besides, for what she had to do today, she needed to be extra sharp.
Running her hand along the wall to anchor herself, she followed the line of tape that ran down the stairs and through a doorway. It continued on across a floor of the mill and out into another stairwell. Up the stairway, through a corridor, and on she followed its circuitous path. Finally she came to the narrow, upward-slanted passageway that ended at the metal door to the silo. The surveillance camera over the doorway was pointed down at her.
Hesitantly, Diana tried the door. It wasn’t locked, but it took all her strength to push it open. When she peered inside, she saw Daniel at one of the tables. He turned her way as a breeze swept through the doorway, and it felt as if a pair of hands were trying to pull the door shut.
“Hey, close it, would you?” he said.
Diana stepped into the silo. When she let the door go, it banged shut behind her. The air went still. She realized what had created the draft—the hatch far up the silo wall had been open too.
“So you finally woke up,” he said.
He got up and walked past her to the door. He punched some numbers into the keypad on the wall, his back sheltering it from view, and the door lock clicked.
“Hungry?” he asked. Flint sparked in his dark eyes. “Got you a bacon-and-egg sandwich.”
Diana closed her eyes and swallowed. Just what she needed to chase last night’s greasy pizza.
“There’s coffee too,” he said. When he turned and pointed toward the counter, she saw he had a Bluetooth headset hooked over his ear.
“Thanks,” Diana said.
The carafe in the coffeemaker was nearly empty. She poured herself the last cup and added some milk from the little refrigerator. She turned off the pot. Beside it sat a grease-stained bag. She touched it. Cold. She shuddered, imagining the congealed bacon on fat-saturated toast.
The first sip of coffee with a hint of chicory was bracing but bitter.
Daniel returned to the table and focused on the computer screen.
“You didn’t come back last night,” she said.
“You weren’t exactly encouraging. Besides, there was a lot to do.”
Diana wondered what he’d been working on, and whether he’d been working on it for the last ten hours straight. She assumed that Jake had left to catch his flight to Baltimore.
She leaned against the wall and sipped her coffee. “You know, months ago, when we first started working together, I was amazed at how easily Jake was able to find and close Neponset Hospital’s security hole. It was almost like he was channeling you.”
Daniel stopped typing but he didn’t look over at her.
“How long have you been our silent partner?”
“Neponset Hospital.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, that was pretty slick, wasn’t it?” He spread both arms, arched his back, and stretched.
“But Vault—they’re a much bigger deal,” she said. “I mean, they manage insurance coverage for virtually anyone who works for the federal government, past and present.”
“Plus anyone incarcerated in a federal prison.”
She whistled. “That’s a lot of people. A lot of private information.”
He swiveled to face her. “Information that the government has no business knowing, if you ask me.”
“They must have paid a lot for that fancy new security system.”
“Supposedly impossible to crack.” Daniel grinned. “And then one of their employees goes and leaves his computer on a commuter train, a computer with a flash drive that never should have gotten out of the building. Got just what they deserved if you ask me.” He winked at her. “Arrogance will be rewarded.”
Those final words and the smirk that accompanied them were eerily familiar. Daniel had often used the phrase to underscore his contempt for his so-called enemies and the nobility behind the mayhem that he unleashed on them. He seemed oblivious to the irony, since his own arrogance easily matched that of the federal government and of corporations like Vault Security.
“So”—he yawned again—“welcome aboard. Have a seat.” He indicated her white tulip chair, which was pulled up to one of the systems on a worktable beside his.
She sat and rolled closer to the screen. The log-in box for OtherWorld was already up. She typed in NADIA VARATA and her password and waited for home office to come into focus.
Instead, pixel by pixel, a replica of the interior of the silo materialized. Nadia, dressed in her signature black leather jacket and red cap, was sitting in the same tulip chair that Diana sat in at that moment, facing a table covered with computer equipment arranged only slightly differently from the machines in the real-world silo.
“We gave you a new home base. I hope you don’t mind,” Daniel said.
She didn’t. They’d already demonstrated how they could control Nadia whenever they felt like it. But it was a timely and potent reminder of all the variables she’d need to take into account.
Diana maneuvered the mouse to angle the viewfinder. The interior of the silo had been replicated right down to the shading of the curved walls, from brown to white as they neared the roof, and the bent rebar ends sticking out of them. A little inset map of the space showed just one yellow dot—her avatar was alone in its virtual tower.
She quickly checked her inventories. Her libraries of “gestures,” “sounds,” and “clothing” seemed intact, but all of her “places” and “contact cards” had disappeared. Erased. Again, what she’d expected. Neither Daniel nor Jake would be so easily seduced by her promise to cooperate.
With a series of beeps, message after message popped onto her queue. She was surprised that Daniel and Jake hadn’t disabled her communications. Uh-oh. A message from PWNED caught her eye. The subject line: “Re: Phew.” Pam had sent it yesterday, after Diana had called her.
Pam’s message began, Got your message. So relieved to hear from you . . .
Had Pam missed the point of her phone call? Diana gripped the mouse and shot a look over to Daniel. He seemed engrossed in his own work.
She quickly scanned the message, realizing that it wasn’t a response to her call at all, but a reply to an electronic message appended at the bottom—a message supposedly from Diana, one that Jake or Daniel must have sent, reassuring Pam that Diana’s trip to New Hampshire had gone well and she’d be there for a while longer. Diana could only hope that Pam wasn’t fooled, and this response was her way of playing along.
She clicked reply. Her computer buzzed, like she’d entered a wrong answer, and up popped a box with the message, Unable to complete. She entered a query to see whether Pam was in-world at that moment. Another buzz. Unable to complete.
“Shit.” She said it under her breath.
Daniel snorted. Diana choked, sure that he’d heard and realized what she was trying to do. But he was slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed and his mouth slack. His chin drifted down, down, and a moment later he jerked back alert. He snorted again and straightened, ran his hand back and forth over his mouth, and stared at the screen. A minute later, his head tipped to the side again.
Diana pushed away from the table. Her chair made a nasty sound as it scraped across the floor. Daniel jumped, and the little headset fell out of his ear. She walked over to him, picked it up, and handed it to him. Gently she put her hands on his shoulders.
He gave her a wary look that softened into a smile as she started to massage his shoulders, working her thumbs at the knots of tension in his trapezius muscles. He closed his eyes and rolled his head around.
“Mmmm. That feels good.” He slipped the headset into his shirt pocket, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply.
She worked her way up and down in his neck and upper spine. Daniel’s face went calm, the lines of tension disappearing from his forehead and jaw as her thumbs circled up into what would have been his hairline if he hadn’t shaved his head. If he’d just let down his guard, he’d be dead asleep in seconds.
He grabbed her wrist. “What are you up to?”
“Idiot. You can see what I’m up to.” She wrenched her arm free and rubbed her wrist. “I killed the coffee,” she said. “You look like you could use another cup. I know I could.”
Daniel started to get up but Diana put her hand firmly on his shoulder. “Let me,” she said. He collapsed back into his chair.
She picked up his empty coffee cup and her own, still nearly full. “I think I remember how you like it. Good and strong.”
Diana prayed that Daniel wouldn’t follow her to the sink. When she got there, she turned on the water, and while it was running, she rinsed out Daniel’s cup and pretended to rinse out her own. Meanwhile, she felt around in her pocket for her pills. With her thumb, she flipped open the lid of the container and emptied the remaining pills into the pocket.
She dumped out the last bit of coffee in the pot and rinsed it. Threw away the used coffee filter and replaced it with a new one. In the refrigerator’s freezer compartment she found coffee beans. She ladled ten scoops into the coffee grinder. Her back shielding the grinder from Daniel’s view, she slipped the pills from her pocket. There were five and a half left. She dropped all but one into the grinder.
“You remember the formula?” Daniel asked. He’d crossed the room silently and was standing right behind her.
Diana’s heart stuttered. The little white pills seemed to glow among the nearly black beans.
“Of course I do,” she said, quickly putting on the grinder’s lid and pressing down to turn it on. Daniel put his hand over hers. One, two, three . . . She counted to herself, listening as the pitch of the grinding shifted higher and higher.
Daniel released his hand, but Diana kept hers pressed down and continued counting until she reached twenty. She couldn’t afford any telltale white chunks to still be visible. When she removed the lid, the pills had disappeared into the fine, uniformly dark powder.
Daniel leaned close to the grinder and sniffed. “Ambrosia of the gods,” he said.
He returned to his computer. While the coffee dripped through the filter, Diana stood behind him. He shifted to one side so she could see. It was a memo addressed to Andrew. Andrew Moore was Vault’s head of IT. The subject line was “Recommendations.” Daniel was building a numbered list, and he was up to number seven.
“You’re giving them recommendations at a kickoff meeting?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“Because all we’ve done so far is gather background information, propose an approach, and cash their advance. Coming in day one with answers? Not a good idea.”
“But it’s obvious to anyone what they need to do.”
“Not to anyone. Certainly not to them. They need to feel like you’re listening. Your response has to seem agile, not off the shelf. It should grow out of their ‘unique’ ”—Diana drew quote marks in the air—“‘situation.’ There’s a reason we call what we do solutions. No one wants to pay a lot for the quick fix. Besides, it’s about ownership. Give them a prescription up front? They’ll feel like they could have gone to a wiki and gotten the same answers for free.” She bent down, reaching for his keyboard. “May I?”
Daniel pushed away from the table, his arms folded across his chest.
“And—” At the top of the memo she highlighted TO: ANDREW. “This early in your relationship, don’t assume you can use the COO’s first name.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. But that’s a minor point.” She scrolled through the document, stopped, and highlighted another line. “Never call what they do engineering.” In another she highlighted data storage. “This is even worse. They like to think of themselves as software developers.’ ”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sweat the small stuff. Show that you know their marketing niche, what image they’re trying to project. Believe me, it matters.”
The coffeepot made slurping sounds as the last bit of water dripped through. Diana went over to it and filled Daniel’s cup. She made sure he saw her add some fresh coffee to the top of her own unfinished cup. She turned to face him and took a sip, smiling as she did so.
“The main thing,” she said, walking back to him and handing him his cup, “is this. We shouldn’t be handing them answers at a first meeting. We should be listening.” She bent over and read some more, shaking her head.
He got up, offering her his seat. “Go to it.”
Diana took her time, revising what Daniel had written, watching out of the corner of her eye as he drank some coffee, then drank more.
“There.” Finally, unable to stretch the task out any longer, she pushed away from the table. The page she’d been working on rolled off the printer. She handed it to Daniel.
“Discussion points?” he said, reading the heading. “That’s slick.”
“Short and sweet. Asking, not telling. Now take the main points and make them into a slide presentation and we’re good to go.”
“We need slides?” Daniel groaned.
“You want to control the meeting, don’t you? Besides, that’s what they expect. Oh, and you should use the Gamelan corporate style.”
“We have a corporate style?”
“It’s amazing what impresses people.”
Daniel yawned and stretched. His eyes seemed to have gone flat, the spark of intensity dimmed.
“Why don’t you take a break? I can do this stuff in my sleep, and you need to sleep.” Diana carried the printout to her computer. As she walked, the paper seemed to flutter like a sail on a little boat floating across the room, and she felt detached and floaty. She’d had just enough of the Xanax-laced coffee to give her some buoyancy and a thin layer of separation between herself and her surroundings.
“Help yourself to more coffee.” She tossed the words over her shoulder. “Our meeting’s not for hours.” She opened the Gamelan presentation template and began to reshape the memo.
A while later she glanced over at Daniel. She recognized the cow-skull logo on the Web site that he was looking at—Cult of the Dead Cow—the online meeting place for hackers worldwide. Daniel had been one of the founders of their Ninja Strike Force, the elitest of the elite.
Soon he was yawning again. More coffee. She tried to telegraph the thought.