Chapter Forty
(Friday Afternoon—Johnny)
Johnny returned to work at one o’clock, hoping nobody noticed his nervous twitching. Maybe he could blame it on drugs he’d taken for his neck.
Bentley’s Lincoln and the black Explorer the cops had been in were gone from the parking lot. Serno’s office door was closed, but that didn’t mean anything. He liked to hole up in there during the day. Johnny’s theory was that he took long naps, because he couldn’t see what there was about Serno’s job that would take much time to do.
Should he go back into Danny’s office right away? But no, people were moving around too much, settling in after lunch. He’d give it a try around three, maybe. Or sneak the jump drive in while talking to Danny. If he showed up.
Meanwhile, he had some time, didn’t he? The programmers were quietly stampeding away from wherever he went, because he’d been handing out documentation assignments to any of them who’d looked bored. They knew the work had to be done, but they didn’t enjoy it. None would bother him this afternoon.
So maybe he could take a look at the contents of the jump drive. CyberLook had bought them by the gross, or nearly, and Danny’s looked just like everyone else’s. Nobody would know what he was doing.
He took it out of his pocket and plugged it into his computer. Some quality of the office’s silence—or what passed for silence, though it included distant rumbles of conversation and occasional high-pitched laughs from the programmers’ bullpen—aroused a sense of caution.
He stopped and checked out the area. Nothing unusual. Lyle, on his way back from the bathroom, saw him looking around and grinned at him—probably because Lyle was actually getting to do some programming while everyone else had to write in English.
Johnny grinned back. What was he worried about, anyway? He was just going to look at some files.
He did a fast scan of the drive. A few text files, some folders labeled with the names and dates of presentations—not much to go through.
After an anticlimactic pause he looked up, grinning. He knew what he’d been listening for earlier: background music. Plugging in the jump drive had felt like one of those momentous, irrevocable decisions that would have the audience on the edges of their seats, silently screaming “No, don’t do it!”—if his life were a horror movie, anyway. It wasn’t the first time he’d had that feeling, either. Maybe he’d been watching too much late-night TV.
Well, nothing jumped out at him, either literally (ha!) or in the sense of seeming to be interesting. He copied the files onto his hard drive for a more thorough perusal and shoved the jump drive back into his pocket.
He checked the positioning of the convex mirror he’d stuck on the corner of his monitor to ensure he’d have warning if someone stepped into his cubicle behind him, and settled down to go over the files in detail.
The presentations definitely tended to focus on some of the far-out possibilities of the software, not having much to do with its current uses. There was a lot of emphasis on security and control of information shared between what Danny called “entities.” It all exploited some features that were a sort-of-accidental outgrowth of what they’d needed to do to make their stuff work in so many different environments.
But his respect for Danny went up a couple of notches. It was extrapolation, but surprisingly good extrapolation. Some of this stuff wouldn’t be hard to do at all. It was pretty much in line with what Johnny had told Owen about, but somehow it seemed more real when written down like this. Of course, it would be easier to get the work done if Danny just came out and said what he wanted, but never mind. Johnny had already learned enough to make his job easier.
If he kept his job. It was alarmingly easy to drift off into speculation and fantasy about this stuff. But there were moral issues here.
Sure, Danny should have come clean with him about what he wanted. But that didn’t make what Johnny was doing right. Nor did the undeniable glamour of some of the future possibilities for CyberLook’s software mitigate the obvious fact that it would be developed for government use above all others—an easy inference from the features Danny had stressed in his presentations. Besides, who else would fund all this?
Johnny found himself in sudden unwilling sympathy with scientists who worked to develop weapons at government expense. The ultimate goals might not be worth pursuing, but the problems were so damned interesting it was hard to let go.
He sat back and frowned, the pain in his neck forgotten. Maybe he should just erase the files and forget the whole thing. Maybe he should just get up and go home, or even farther. He had a couple of standing job offers, and enough money in the bank to take off and enjoy a few months’ vacation if he wanted to.
Yeah. Maybe. But something was going on, and whether the cause was noble or ignoble (he liked that better than “sleazy”), at his core Johnny was a problem-solver. Playing with logical structures, making the pieces of puzzles fit together, was better than eating. Sometimes, better than sex.
So how did it all break down, logically? CyberLook was tied somehow to deaths, disappearances, and efforts to frame a friend of his. Danny had benefited, was running CyberLook, and could be presumed to be involved. At the very least, he should be checked out. This was a serious problem, and Johnny was probably the best-placed person to find whatever evidence existed at CyberLook. He might even have some evidence in front of him now. So he’d find out whatever he could, and worry about consequences later.
He put his doubts aside and focused on studying the files, glancing occasionally at his mirror to be sure nobody had come up behind him. Best not to be seen going through this stuff, just in case somebody came by and recognized it.
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Shiver on the Sky Page 63