“I’m not spying on you, Sam. Relax.” She squeezed his arm. “I do, though, fully intend to find out everything there is to know about you.”
“Curious creature, aren’t you?”
“I am,” she said, and quickly drifted off to sleep.
He didn’t really doubt her. It seemed that he was seriously losing his grip with this woman.
He used the plane’s satellite phone to call the office.
Typhony answered.
“How’s it going?” Sam asked.
“Really good but I can’t talk now, so I’m giving you Paul.”
That’s weird, Sam thought.
“Yo,” Paul said.
“Are we making progress?”
“You bet. I called Hal Godwynn. Apologized for the middle-of-the-night wake-up. Said you’d be talking to him, that you really needed his help. He’s cranking up as we speak. He knows it’s big and says there’ll be a lot of mouths to feed. Fifty thousand dollars to try, with a fifty-thousand success fee and fifty thousand more as a home-run bonus. Success is that he finds a plane leaving Canada with Jason on it and tells us where it landed. Another fifty-thousand home run if we actually find him and we get him back.”
“Okay.” Sam heard something in Paul’s voice.
“We’re thinking Jason was smart enough to circumvent file-folder security but never cracked the code to open the document. So he gave us a folder that he locked with a document inside that was encrypted by Grace Technologies. We’re working on breaking it. Grogg is going to run about two hundred big computers in series for about an hour and see what he can do.”
“We need to break it open. Jason had to have a reason for thinking it would be interesting.”
“So when you gonna be here?”
“Soon. Tell me what’s wrong, Paul.”
“Oh, it’s nothing critical; it can wait until you get here. Some people want to talk with you.”
“Which people?”
“Trust me on this one, Sam. It’s one of those things you should get into when you get here and it will definitely keep.”
“It’s why Typhony wanted off the line.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay. I’ll be right there. I can hardly wait.”
Someone had screwed up. Sam knew that. And the miscreant wanted to tell his or her story.
“What’s wrong?” Anna asked.
“You faker.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“If you could hear, you know they wouldn’t tell me.”
“What do you think?”
“Don’t know.”
“Who’s Hal?”
“A retired FAA administrator. He has a knack for tracing aircraft flying in controlled airspace.”
“I hope he figures it out.”
“I do too.”
“Sam, I want to go to the office with you.”
“That’s out of the question.”
“If you let me come, I’ll… well… I’ll pay closer attention to what you say.”
“Oh, that’s a real concession.”
“You’re looking for my brother. That’s where everything is happening. You’ve got what… bunches of people in there all working phones and computers and God knows how many people out in the field feeding you information.”
“You can’t come.”
“What if I promise to follow orders? How about that?”
“For the entire job you promise to do what I say?”
“Nearly.”
“What kind of lie is ‘nearly’?” Sam laughed. “At least be convincing. You get the anemic lie award.”
They drove through the streets of LA, she watching his face in the flickering of the night-lights, Sam talking easier now. She sensed he had decided to take a chance. He pulled through the gate, past the guard shack, and into what was obviously a very private parking area. She saw a lot of cars for what she considered the late hour.
“Looks like your crew is hard at it,” she said.
“That’s one I don’t understand, though.” He indicated a sporty-looking Porsche. “Four hundred and twenty horsepower, 413 foot-pounds of torque, zero to sixty in ten-point-oh seconds, and all-wheel-drive. It belongs to Jill, and she’s supposed to be in the mountains with Grady.” Then he leaned forward and peered down to the end of the row. “What the hell?” he said. “That’s my mother’s car down there.”
Sam had a look on his face that she hadn’t seen-a cross between anger and worry.
Inside they were met by Typhony and Paul. Jill stood just behind the pair. Everybody in the office was looking out of their cubicles, most standing.
Sam saw his mother in the doorway to the lounge. Beside her was Grady with a yellow pad. There was a hush about the place, none of the soft clicking from the keyboards. Everybody was watching as though he were a cop breaking down the door of a bookie salon. For a second nobody spoke or even moved.
“What’s happening with Grady?”
“I brought her here and put her to work,” Jill said.
“Paul?”
Paul looked at Jill.
“Paul said no way. Said we would have to follow procedure and that she wouldn’t work here for months, if then. I argued and he said take it up with you. But I brought her in anyway, when he wasn’t looking.”
“You broke a company policy?”
“I’ll be happy to fire her ass,” Paul said.
“She was just trying to help…” Grady called out.
“Go back to your desk, Grady,” Jill said. “This is my business.”
“I’m speechless but I’m sure it won’t last,” Sam said. He craved a cigarette.
“I want to explain,” Jill said.
“In there.” Sam nodded at the conference room. He felt like the King of Siam when the Englishwoman challenged him about Tup Tim. Security had to mean something.
“I’d like to speak with you privately,” Spring said.
It gave him the excuse that he wanted not to react immediately.
“Okay,” Sam said.
They went into the conference room first and closed the door. “Jill only told me after we arrived and were inside that you would not approve. Shortly before you arrived here she explained the significance of what she had done-that it was a major breach of your security rules.”
“It certainly was that. And she ignored Paul.”
“And so you need to fire her.”
“That’s right.”
“And yet you know she would bust her butt for you in a tight spot.”
“I know that.”
“So you don’t want to fire her. So maybe there is a better way.”
“I’m listening.”
“Let her come up with a means of making recompense that satisfies everyone she put at risk. If it satisfies you and everyone else, then she can stay.”
“But she’s not a child, and this is a job. We don’t do detention.”
“Sam, I’ve watched these people. It’s a little community.”
“It’s a community with rules and principles that we all follow. Myself included.”
“I’m not going to waste your time. But everybody here was threatened by the breach and they have worked out something, subject to your approval.”
“Well, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. This isn’t a halfway house. But I’ll listen.”
“You know I’m right.”
“Just please don’t make a treaty with Anna Wade and declare war on my psyche.”
They opened the door.
“Can I talk to you now?” Jill came in.
“Talk,” Sam said.
“You can’t run your kind of business and have people doing their own thing. I know there is never a good reason to breach security.”
“But?”
“No but. You should fire me.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“At the time I thought you’d understand, because of the danger to Grady. Then when I mulled it over, and after Paul started literally shaking me, I realized maybe you wouldn’t. Originally, I thought, maybe you’d get mad but somehow… overlook it.”
“But why did you think I’d understand?”
“Because our research shows that Samir Aziz is probably dangerous and that Chellis is perhaps deadly, but so clever that we can’t prove it Chellis will kill Grady because she’s the key to getting Jason free of Grace’s control. Aziz will abduct her for the same reason. There isn’t a safer place than here. Finally, I have a feeling about this girl. We can trust her. She should work here. That’s why I did it.”