**
Hugo stood outside of Mr. Hansen’s office, hand on the door handle, suddenly nervous about his upcoming conversation with him. The man must have known about the missing reference files, so would he look too suspicious if he asked for them? Nancy was trying not to stare at his hesitation, but her expression was curious. Mr. Hansen had a crush on her. It was obvious from the psych profile he’d put in her file; just little things, like the way he described her with slightly more reverence than was necessary. She had a strong psychic shield so Mr. Hansen’s abilities didn’t work on her. He wondered if he should mention the attraction to either one of them, but it was really none of his business.
Hugo gave the receptionist a little smile and then walked inside.
“You wanted to see me?” Mr. Hansen asked as Hugo entered, motioning towards a chair.
Hugo sat down on the edge of the seat, very carefully placing his palms on his knees, “Yeah, I uh, just had a quick question actually. I finished going through the database this morning.”
“That was fast.”
Hugo’s face went a little red, “It uh, it got really easy after I realized I didn’t have to read the files right away, just look at them…” He was dragging his nails across his pants, so he stopped. “A-any way…while I didn’t find a lot of holes, there were several reference files missing. 14 of them. They seem to all have to do with the original company employees, but I can’t find them anywhere. Do you know where they are?”
There was a brief pause. Mr. Hansen’s expression didn’t change, but he was obviously very carefully choosing his words. Hugo’s stomach lurched. Mr. Hansen was using his ability with him, probably every time he walked into the office. The man never looked surprised or put out, his shirts impeccable. What expressions was he hiding behind the illusionary exterior?
“I know Mr. Gideon has several of them in his office, but I don’t know if he has copies of all fourteen or not.”
“Can I ask him? I want to update the database with the reference files.”
Mr. Hansen nodded (probably), “It certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, that was it. Thanks.”
They parted ways, and Hugo immediately headed for Mr. Gideon’s office. He hesitated at the end of the long hallway outside of the office however. What if Mr. Gideon got mad that he asked for the files and tried to poison him too? But it was really too late to turn back, Sandra had heard him and was smiling at him, so he continued down the hallway and asked to speak to Mr. Gideon. She had the ability to see through anything, had two older sisters, both married, and parents who lived in Arizona where she was originally from, and where Mr. Gideon had found her. Hugo knew her social security number, her address, and that she was in love with Mr. Gideon, just like Eva, but would never admit it to anyone, including herself (if Mr. Hansen’s assessment was to be believed.) Sandra glanced at the double doors, and Hugo supposed, when she didn’t see him in there, called him on her intercom that probably just rang Mr. Gideon’s cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Alex, sorry to bother you, but Hugo Meyers is here to see you. Do you have a moment?”
There was a brief pause, “I would be delighted, send him in.” A moment later Sandra was motioning him inside.
Mr. Gideon was standing in the center of the room. “Why hello, Hugo! How are you finding everything here at the company? Please, have a seat.”
Hugo cautiously sat down, watching Mr. Gideon move back to the edge of his desk, “I’m doing alright. Uh…Mr. Hansen asked me to update the employee database, and reviewing it, I found that there were fourteen reference files missing. Do you know where they are?”
Mr. Gideon placed a finger to his lips, his gaze briefly floating up to the ceiling, “Fourteen files, you say? Do you know what they were about?”
“All of the original members of the company and some separate projects some of them were involved in.”
“Oh yes! Of course. I have the first nine files, but I no longer have files 10 through 14 as part of an agreement with one of the original members of the company when she decided to leave; my dear friend, Maggie.”
Hugo remembered seeing her file. It was as sparse as the other files for the original members of the company, but she had terminated employment two years ago, soon after William Hansen’s death. She was a 37 year old woman who could see remotely anyone or anything she knew the name of. She was very pretty, for an older woman, with long, auburn hair that fell in curls, and had dark brown eyes; she wasn’t smiling in her picture. The reason she left the company was not stated, but she’d worked closely with Mr. Hansen in HR as a talent scout. She was an only child and had never been married. Mr. Hansen painted her as a quiet and private woman, more interested in observing than acting.
“Can I speak to Maggie about those files?”
Mr. Gideon looked amused, and for a moment he glanced out the window behind him to gather himself. “Of course you can, although I don’t know exactly what good it will do. She’s still a little upset with me and might not want someone from my company looking at the files she left with. But you are certainly welcome to give it a try. Her current address is in the database.”
“Thank you. Is there any part of the agreement that I should know about? I don’t want to unintentionally violate it when I go talk to her.”
Mr. Gideon considered the question carefully, “No, not really. She just wanted those files.”
“Thanks. So can I review the files that you have?”
Mr. Gideon contemplated the ceiling again for a moment, and then smiled at Hugo, “Sure, why not?” His expression turned serious, “However, these files are not to leave my office.”
Hugo nodded, “Won’t be a problem.”
“Well then,” the CEO went behind his desk, shuffled and rattled a few things, “So, how are you enjoying working with Mr. Hansen? He informed me that he’d already promoted you to a full time administrative assistant.”
“It’s great so far.” Hugo shut his mouth; he didn’t want to explain why it was so great, how he’d missed a band practice because right now these files seemed more important than anything else in the world. He hadn’t even had a single vision since last Thursday when he’d started reading them; almost a full week.
“Wonderful.” Mr. Gideon returned to the front of the desk with an armful of colorful folders that he placed in front of Hugo, “There you go. Shall I leave you to it? There are some other matters I have to attend to, but you are more than welcome to the run of the office while I’m gone.”
“Thanks again. I’ll be fine.”
“Alright. If you finish with them before I get back just leave them on my desk. Now if you’ll excuse me,” Mr. Gideon stepped through a portal into what looked like a conference room and was gone.
Hugo was alone in Mr. Gideon’s office. He stood and then realized he wasn’t alone; Sandra was outside and could easily see him. He picked up the top file and fell back into the chair, frustrated and disappointed. The top file was reference file #1, Mr. Gideon’s. It started out pretty much the same as the database, until Hugo got to the medical records, which included a description of his abilities. Mr. Gideon had left a few of them out. The obvious was the unnatural level of charisma. As long as he was within audio/visual range of the person, he could put anyone at ease. On some level this worried Mr. Hansen; his language when describing the charisma was cautious and a little wary. He was also tougher than a normal human and hadn’t visibly aged much in the five years since he’d started the company. He could also disorient people just by looking at them and was abnormally good at telling when people were lying. Well shit. There was also a curious side note from Mr. Hansen pointing out that his ability didn’t work on Mr. Gideon. Hugo paused there. Mr. Hansen wasn’t interpreting it as psychic shielding, like Nancy’s ability, even though it had the same end result. Did that mean there were other psychic powers that did affect Mr. Gideon? Could Patrick read
his mind? It was worth looking into.
Hugo set Mr. Gideon aside to pick up the next file. Mr. Hansen. Many of the files in the stack were pretty close to the ones in the database, but with a more thorough list of abilities and names for reference files 10 through 14. Those files weren’t on people, but projects. Mr. Hansen’s brother had been part of a project that Mr. Hansen didn’t have the file for or any record of. Was that part of the agreement with file nine, Maggie? And on top of that, files three and seven were missing from Mr. Gideon’s stack. When Hugo had paged through the last one, he shuffled through the stack again, hoping he had somehow just passed them up, but they weren’t there. They weren’t in the drawer Mr. Gideon had pulled the files from either. In fact, there was no one in the database that corresponded to those files either. If the number scheme stuck, there were two more founders of Gideon Enterprises that had been completely wiped from the record. Were they dead like William Hansen, and founders six and eight, Martin Kimble and Jack Nelson?
Resisting the urge to sift through the office to find the missing files, Hugo left. He headed back towards Mr. Hansen’s office, hoping he would be willing to tell him about the missing founders.
“Hugo! Hugo! Hugo!” CJ was bouncing down the hall towards him, waving her arms a little as she went, “Guess what I just did?!”
There was a universe of options available to CJ, “Blow something up?”
“Kinda! Mr. Gideon took me to Alaska a little while ago cause he wanted to see if I put out enough power to overload a generator and-”
“Haven’t you been testing your power output in the labs?”
“Yeah, but this was better. And I totally did it! It looked really neat, you should have been there. Like this entire little town went completely black! It looked soooo cool!”
Hugo’s eyes widened. “CJ! That’s dangerous, you shouldn’t have done that!”
“What? No, I didn’t get hurt. I’m totally fine.”
“No CJ, for the city you blacked out. They’re in Alaska, they probably lost all heat and power. The traffic lights went out, so there were probably some accidents, and the hospitals probably...”
CJ looked down at the ground; she picked at the seam in her pants, “But Mr. Gideon said it was ok.”
“Well he’s wrong. Don’t do that again, please.”
The girl nodded very slowly, but didn’t make eye contact, “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
Hugo’s jaw clenched, and he had to put effort into relaxing his hands, “I know. And I’m mostly mad at Mr. Gideon for even suggesting it. He should know better. What was he thinking?”
“I dunno.”
“It’s ok.” Hugo shifted uncomfortably, unsure of how to end the conversation, “Hey, I need to talk to Mr. Hansen and then I think I’ll need to go on a road trip to visit someone who used to work here. Interested?”
CJ instantly sparked back to life, “Of course I am! I’m your bodyguard!”
Hugo smiled weakly at that, “Ok, I’ll be back in a bit.” He waved to CJ and made his way to Mr. Hansen’s office. Once there he hesitated at Nancy’s desk, once again wondering if this was a good idea.
“Go ahead,” Nancy coaxed, a note of amusement in her voice, her smile slightly quirked. Hugo blushed, knocked lightly on the door to Mr. Hansen’s office, and then entered.
“Have a seat. Did you speak with Mr. Gideon?”
Hugo nodded, taking the offered chair, “I did. He gave me files one through nine to look at. The medical records were more thorough, but otherwise they were the same. Why weren’t they in the database?”
Mr. Hansen remained still, “Some of the founding members of the company didn’t want everything they could do to be public knowledge, even amongst the members of the company, so it was just policy to keep all of those files separate.”
Some of the founding members…most likely it was Mr. Gideon, since his file diverged the most from his file in the database. Hugo took a deep breath, running his palms along his jeans. “There were two files missing. Three and seven.”
Mr. Hansen frowned slightly at that, “Missing? Did you ask Mr. Gideon about them?”
“No, he’s in a meeting right now. I thought at the very least you could tell me who was missing. They aren’t in the database either.”
There was a long pause where Mr. Hansen remained perfectly still, Hugo couldn’t even be sure if he was breathing. “Who do you have files for?”
“Mr. Gideon, you, Christian, Dr. Arliss, Dr. Kimble, and Jack Nelson.”
“Ah.” Another long pause. Hugo desperately wondered what Mr. Hansen was thinking, as there was nothing to read in his body language. It must have all been an illusion, no one could reveal so little about what they were thinking through their body language. Hugo chewed on his thumb. “Diane Spencer and Trent Miller. They were the other two founding members.”
“And where are they now?”
“I don’t know. They both disappeared along with their files, I guess.”
Hugo’s eyes widened. They lost track of two of their founding members and all the data on them? How was that possible? “What were they like? What could they do?”
Mr. Hansen leaned back in his chair, hands leaving the desk, “Trent could manipulate plants. He left the company two years ago for…he was not pleased with the direction of the company, and shortly after that I lost contact with him. He was a driven man, looking to make the world a better place, much like Mr. Gideon.
“Diane was…a lot like Patrick. She couldn’t shape-shift, but she could read and control minds, and had a similar…temperament.” She was a sociopath. “She disappeared one day.” There was a flat note in Mr. Hansen’s voice that left Hugo’s mouth dry. Diane had disappeared. Had she been the woman he’d seen through Mr. Hansen’s rifle scope? Had Mr. Hansen killed her? Why? Hugo could feel his breathing starting to stutter and his palms sweat. “Hugo, what’s wrong?”
Hugo nearly jumped in his chair. “Mr. Gideon!” The words fell out of his mouth before he could register where he was going, “He had CJ black out an entire city in Alaska, just to test her power.” Hugo let out a breath, thankful he hadn’t blurted out anything incriminating.
There was that long pause again. Finally, voice completely flat, “He what?”
“CJ told me Mr. Gideon had her overload a generator, which blacked out a small city.”
“I’m going to have to talk to him about that.” There was almost a hint of irritation in the man’s voice, or perhaps Hugo had just imagined it. “Back to the matter at hand. You said there were 14 reference files, but Mr. Gideon only had most of the first nine?”
Hugo nodded. “Yeah, he said Maggie Sampson had the rest. I was hoping I could go see her.
“It seems unlikely she’ll want to…”
Hugo waited a few seconds, but Mr. Hansen never finished his statement. “You want the database to be complete right? It’s worth a shot.”
Mr. Hansen nodded, “Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Let me give her a call.”
Mr. Hansen dialed a number and then waited several seconds before opening his mouth, “Yes, it’s me Maggie. No please, hear me out-” Mr. Hansen sighed, placing a hand on the desk. “Hugo Meyers and CJ, yes, just CJ, would like to meet with you. He is interested in the files,” Mr. Hansen glanced at Hugo, and he in turn started chewing on his thumbnail. “No, that’s not it. I just think you two need to talk.” Mr. Hansen sighed again, “No, he asked of his own accord.” After a long pause, the smile that flitted across Mr. Hansen’s face was triumphant. “Thank you, Maggie. Goodbye.
“That went better than anticipated,” Mr. Hansen said thoughtfully when he’d put down the receiver, “For what it’s worth, it looks like you’ll get your chance to talk to her.”
The Sound of Wind Page 22