Before Katie could consider the wisdom of diving into the car and dragging her brother out, the door began sliding shut. Archie stuck a baby finger in each corner of his mouth, pulled wide, and wiggled his tongue at her.
“You are in such deep shit!” Katie shouted at him through the glass.
Archie, who was now in the process of dropping his pants and mooning his sister, did not appear overly concerned.
Five
Standing at the tail end of the ferry, on a lower, less populated deck area of the ship — too far from the food and drink to attract any real members of the media — Brandon Kyle looked down at the frothy wake and the mainland receding into the distance, resting his elbows on the railing.
He thought about what Rebecca Geary had said. About him — well, she didn’t know it was him standing there right next to her — needing proof that the Arrival corporation was guilty of sabotage. How knowing something, and proving it, were two very different things.
And yet, he knew what had happened. At least the broad strokes.
It had begun with one of his top programmers, Emeril Francisco. Emeril was nothing short of a genius, who, at twenty-nine, was one of the most valuable members of the Gandalf team. He’d been with them six years, and what made him invaluable was that he wasn’t like everyone else. Emeril didn’t think in words. Emeril thought in numbers. He thought in code. Kyle guessed that when Emeril was having sex, he was counting thrusts and calculating arousal time. He was worth every one of those five hundred thousand dollars a year Kyle was paying him.
Genius often came hand in hand with eccentricity, and Kyle had spent enough time in the high-tech world to understand, and tolerate, that kind of thing. There was that one guy in research and development who swore he came up with his best ideas while wearing a pirate hat, and there he’d be, in the office, the damn thing perched on his head. You half expected to see a fucking parrot sitting on his shoulder. And there was that punker — Kristy, her name was — with the rings in the nose, the spiky hair, the jeans that were more ripped openings than actual material. You figured, when she was sitting at her workstation, earbuds firmly in place, that she had to be listening to a band with a name like Suicidal Gerbil or Open Runny Sore but in fact was grooving to Lawrence Welk. She wasn’t even being ironic about it. She liked Lawrence Welk.
These were, let’s face it, not people who could have gotten a job at Lehman Brothers. But in the tech world, eccentricities were part of the deal. At Gandalf, when you summoned someone to your office, you weren’t surprised if they came scooting down the hall on a skateboard or walked in on their hands.
But with Emeril Francisco, eccentricity had slid into perversity.
You couldn’t find a nicer guy around the Gandalf headquarters. No big ego, always offered a shoulder to cry on when you were down in the dumps, had maybe three sick days over four years. Never reheated fish in the microwave. And most critical of all, he was a design wizard. Say you wanted a car’s sensors to be able to tell the difference between a ball bouncing into its path, or a small dog, and Emeril would find a way to do it, usually before the end of the day. With his help, Gandalf was at least sixteen months ahead of Arrival in their self-driving technology.
So when Rhonda Templeton said she needed to speak with Kyle privately about a personnel matter, he could not have imagined it would have had anything to do with Emeril Francisco. Rhonda, mid-thirties, a Seattle native, was the resident expert on viruses, and she had been spending her time developing ways to ensure they did not infect the Gandalf driving systems. There had been stories in the news about how, if your car was loaded with software, it could be hacked, even commandeered, by someone else. It was Rhonda’s job to make sure that could not happen, and she led the team charged with that assignment. She was also working on defensive strategies about the latest looming threat: ransomware. The last thing Gandalf needed was a bunch of Russian hackers locking up their system and demanding millions to unlock it.
Rhonda, who had phoned in sick for the previous three days, closed the door and sat down across from Kyle and said, “I hardly know where to begin.”
“How about the beginning?” Kyle said cheerfully.
She was wearing a sweater with a high neck that came right up to her chin. She pulled it down to expose her neck, which was seriously bruised. A bluish mark went around her throat from one side to the other.
“Jesus,” Kyle said. “What happened? Did you have an accident or something?”
“Emeril Francisco is what happened,” she said, pulling the sweater back up to cover the bruising.
“I don’t understand.”
“This,” she said, her voice starting to break, “is what he’s into. He’s sick. He’s a sick, sick man, and I can’t work alongside someone like that anymore.”
Kyle’s star employee, it turned out, was a sexual sadist. Rhonda knew of at least one other woman in the office who’d had a similar experience with the man. Rhonda’s run-in with Emeril had been four days earlier, which explained why she had not been into the office for the last three days.
“He’s a psychopath,” Rhonda said. “If he’s done it to me, and — well, I promised not to say who the other person is — then he’s probably done it to more than just us. One of these days, he’s going to go too far. He’s going to choke someone to death.”
Kyle said he completely sympathized. It was a terrible thing that she’d been through. How could she be expected to work alongside such a man?
So Brandon Kyle took action.
Years ago, a person in his position might have been able to get away with transferring Rhonda to another department, maybe to another city. But the days of making the victim pay for the offender’s misdeeds were long since over.
He brought Emeril into his office and spoke plainly: “Regardless of how valuable you may be to this company, there are some behaviors that simply cannot be tolerated. The people in this workplace have every right to feel safe, and I’m afraid your presence makes that exceedingly difficult.”
Kyle even recorded the firing and played it for Rhonda. Her eyes brimmed with tears when she heard what Kyle had to say.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
Kyle had smiled and said, “I’m the one who should thank you, for bringing this to my attention.”
Except Kyle never fired Emeril at all. Did Rhonda really believe he was going to let one of his top people go? Run the risk that he’d go to the competition and take all of Gandalf’s corporate secrets with him? Not on your life.
“We’re going to have to do a little improv,” he’d told Emeril, and the firing was staged and recorded. The first two times, Kyle hadn’t been satisfied with Emeril’s performance. “You need to deny it, say Rhonda was lying, get a little more outraged.” The third take went perfectly.
Kyle put things in place to allow Emeril to work off-site, even found ways to disguise his contributions so that they appeared to have been done by a new, outside tech firm.
The ruse even worked for a while.
But over time, Rhonda became suspicious. She had expected there to be some fallout from the firing. That Emeril might have sued, or at the very least mounted some sort of campaign to get his job back. Why hadn’t another tech company scooped him up? Rhonda had agreed, with great reluctance, to sign a nondisclosure agreement with Gandalf when she’d joined, so she hadn’t been able to spread the word about Emeril’s behavior. So there was every reason to believe another firm might have hired him without knowing about the allegations that had been made against him.
So she started doing some checking. If there was anyone who could follow a digital trail, it was Rhonda. She looked into the background of the firm that was now doing Emeril’s work, and eventually tracked bitcoin payments to an account that was linked to her attacker.