Robaire averted his eyes, shook his head. “Jesus, Jack. What do I say if anyone finds out? Christ, I’ve got two young guys working under me.” He raised his eyes to the adjoining offices. “They’ve heard these rumors, too. They’re just sitting there, rubbing their hands together, each one hoping he’ll be the one who takes my place. I even caught one of them going through the papers on my desk the other day.”
“Stuart, I’ve got a guy across the hall who’s doing the same thing. He’s even going through my trash. We’re all in the same boat. And the only chance we have is to stick together and find out what the hell is going on.”
“But you said this might have nothing to do with anything.” He was almost pleading, searching out any escape.
“That’s right. But if it does we need to know.”
Robaire shook his head again. “If one of those bastards ever saw me and reported me for it, I’d be dead. Management would just think I was a party to this M.I.T. test. I got that memorandum from Mr. Waters a few days ago. I sent copies to my staff. If they see me, what excuse do I have?”
Fallon had already seen the memorandum. Robaire had shown it to him. It had put Robaire’s entire department on notice. Put them in a box.
“You think that memo is unusual?” Fallon asked.
Robaire stared at him, incredulous. “Unusual? Christ, I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve worked here for fifteen years. We’ve never cut back on testing. Not even in the most austere of times. It’s just bad engineering.”
“What do you think of the tolerances?”
Robaire stared at the table. “I agree with you. Something has to be wrong. I don’t know if it’s something minor that can be corrected with a quick fix, or if it’s something more systemic.”
He looked up. “Jack, I raised some questions when Mr. Waters was here laying out the specs. I told you about that. He almost took my head off. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not sure I want to understand any of it. I’ve got my résumé out now, and I’m just praying somebody out there will want me.”
Annie leaned forward and smiled at him. “Stuart, Stuart, Stuart. You’re worried about those schmucks next door?” She inclined her head toward the adjoining offices. “You leave them to me, while you get Jack what he needs.” She winked at him. “As long as they’re not gay, they’ll be captivated by my charms.”
Robaire pressed his thumb and index finger into his eyes. “All right.” He shook his head. “But Jack, what you’re asking scares the living hell out of me.”
“We’re all scared,” Fallon said. “We’re all there together. We’d have to be fools not to be scared.”
An hour later, after Fallon and Annie had left the plant, one of the assistants Annie had “captivated” entered Robaire’s now empty office and took a seat at the small conference table. He was a twenty-eight-year-old electrical engineer named Victor Nagy, and two weeks earlier Carter Bennett had telephoned and suggested he keep an eye out for any unauthorized testing. It was something the young engineer had viewed as a chance to send his personal corporate star into ascension.
Nagy spread some computer printouts on the table, as though waiting to review them with Robaire, then reached beneath and surreptitiously removed a microcassette from a small voice-activated tape recorder he had secreted there more than a week ago. He then gathered the printouts and left.
Back in his own office, a small smile played across the engineer’s lips as he listened to the tape on a second recorder. His star was not only ascending, it was about to go off like a rocket. Nervously—triumphantly—he picked up the phone and called New York. The smile faded when Bennett’s assistant explained he was not available.
“Please have him call me,” he said. “It’s very important that I speak to him. Please tell him, Victor Nagy from Plattsburgh.”
They moved across Killian Court, the only open stretch of greenery on M.I.T.’s urban campus. The rectangle of grass was crowded with students; each intent on soaking up the August sun in brief respites from the summer research projects that kept them locked away in cramped laboratories. Fallon and Annie zigzagged through the sprawl of slender, half-naked bodies. Behind them lay Memorial Drive and the Charles River, and perhaps the best view of the Boston skyline to be had anywhere in the city. Ahead was the Great Dome, a white marble edifice that bore a striking resemblance to the Jefferson Memorial, and beneath which lay what denizens of the ‘Tute called the Infinite Corridor—an expanse of hallway said to be the second longest in the United States, and to which the majority of the school’s buildings were connected. It was there that Fallon and Annie would hopefully find Material Sciences, known simply as Building 8, where Paul Palango had his office and lab.
Fallon had never been to M.I.T., and once inside the Infinite Corridor, he was stunned by both its dimensions and its shabbiness. Curls of peeling paint dotted the vast expanse of bland-colored walls, and the doors of offices and the walls beside them were cluttered with notices and memos and taped-up newspaper clippings, many so old they had begun to brown at the edges.
Outside the entry to Building 8 the wall held a seemingly endless supply of Dilbert cartoons. Fallon stopped to read one, as Annie looked over his shoulder.
“That’s just what I’d expect in this joint,” she said. “A whole wall dedicated to the patron saint of nerds.” She tugged on his sleeve. “Please, let’s get this over with. Being around all this brainpower is gonna give me a migraine. P.P.’s office is on the second floor. But be prepared. The place is gonna smell of stale farts.”
Paul Palango opened the glass-fronted door to his office and stared out at them with what Fallon thought was the most sickly, insincere smile he had ever seen. Palango was short, in his early thirties, Fallon guessed, with a soft, slightly swollen body that hinted at the Pillsbury Doughboy he would become in another ten years. He squinted at Annie, then Fallon, as he scratched at wavy brown hair and sent a cascade of dandruff to his shoulders.
“Oh, you’re here today,” he said. “For some reason I thought you were coming tomorrow.”
Annie rolled her eyes, then reached out and pinched his cheek. “Paulie, bubala. I called yesterday, and said we were coming tomorrow. Since yesterday was yesterday, tomorrow is today. Do you have any coffee?”
Annie brushed past, leaving Palango slightly stunned in her wake, and entered the cramped office, which barely had room for an institutional metal desk, two metal chairs, and two overflowing bookcases. She wrinkled her nose at the smell that indeed permeated the room. “This is Jack Fallon,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s vice president of sales, which means he’s my boss, which means you should be nice to him or I could lose my job, which means I’d be unemployed and poor.” She said the last as though warning that money she’d lent him in the past might have to be repaid if that unfortunate event occurred.
Palango turned to Fallon, his dull brown eyes suddenly bright. “You know, I’ve often thought of leaving academe for the private sector.” His face became instantly offended. Then he puffed himself up and stretched his arms to take in some larger entity. “For all the brilliance that goes on behind these walls, they pay us a pittance.”
Fallon grinned as he stepped past, Palango’s ploy too blatantly obvious. “Don’t rush off,” he said. “Especially if you have tenure. Five years from now the people working here may be the only engineers in America who haven’t been downsized to jobs at McDonald’s.”
Palango’s face screwed up again. “That would be the ultimate offense,” he said. “I could end up serving my all too unappreciative students their lunch.”
Annie reached out and pinched his cheek again. “Well, until then, Paulie, help us appreciate your genius by doing the little job I told you about.”
Quickly Annie restated the problem and handed over the wire they had brought from the Plattsburgh plant.
“I’d like to have your findings double-checked by someone else in your department,” Fallon added. “It’s not that
we don’t trust your expertise. It’s just that I expect resistance to those findings, and I need the results to be as irrefutable as possible.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Palango assured them. “I’ll get the chairman of my department to do it. He’s one of the top materials men in the world.”
Palango led them into a surprisingly small lab. Despite the cutting-edge research for which M.I.T. was noted, the room had a World War II feeling about it, the black laboratory bench chipped along its edges and permeated with a coating of ancient dust that seemed lacquered to its top. Even the windows were coated with years of grime, and it made everything seem even smaller and darker.
Palango worked for an hour and a half without comment, checking the sample wire against the printout of manufacturing specs that Fallon had provided. When he finished he squinted up and shook his head with open incredulity.
“It’s just as you suspected. Sprint received a batch of the new cable, which, I’m afraid, falls far short of any workable spec.” He hesitated. “Let me ask you something. You do, I suppose, sell fiber-optic cable to aircraft manufacturers as well as communications companies?”
Fallon nodded. “We sell to most of the majors.”
Palango shook his head. “Well—and I assure you I’ll have my preliminary findings checked—if I were you, I’d make damned sure none of this faulty stuff gets shipped to any of those companies by mistake. I don’t know who set these specs, but this cable doesn’t even have the tolerances needed to meet cable TV standards. If it ever ended up in an aircraft, a good electrical storm could have those birds falling out of the sky.”
Les Gavin and Willis Chambers were out in the hall when Fallon arrived at his office the next morning. Gavin had a smirk on his face, and he was speaking to Chambers in hushed tones. When he saw Fallon coming toward him, the smirk disappeared. Then he whispered a final word to Chambers, and the pair moved away.
Fallon watched his assistant retreat and decided there was one thing he’d do before he left the company. He would call Gavin into his office and summarily fire the smarmy little sonofabitch. He would do it just for kicks, even if Carter Bennett rehired the man an hour later.
Fallon entered his outer office and immediately caught the look on Carol’s face. Her eyes darted to the closed door of his private sanctum. “Jim Malloy’s waiting for you,” she said. “And he’s not in good shape.”
“What’s wrong?”
Carol shook her head. Her eyes were both sympathetic and frightened. “I better let Jim explain. Everything went crazy here yesterday, and I didn’t know where to reach you.”
Fallon entered his office and closed the door behind him. Malloy was seated on the sofa, and even from across the room Fallon could tell he’d been drinking. His face was pale and haggard, eyes streaked with burst capillaries, and his attempt at shaving that morning had left a patchwork of nicks and untouched beard. Fallon took a chair next to him and could smell the stale booze that wafted off the man. Malloy hadn’t touched a drop in years, not since Fallon had called him on it, warned him that his job was at stake. He chose to ignore that now, at least for the moment.
“What’s going on, Jim?” he asked.
Malloy stared at him. “You don’t know?”
“I’ve been in Plattsburgh and Boston. You know that. Talk to me.”
Malloy chewed on his upper lip. There was a cup of coffee in his hand, and Fallon could see it was shaking. “I thought they would have told you,” he said. He took a gulp of coffee.
“Who? Tell me what?”
“Chambers. Bennett. All of them. I thought they would have cleared it with you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Fallon leaned in closer. “Come on, Jim, start at the beginning.”
Malloy gulped coffee again. He used both hands to keep it from spilling. “I came to work yesterday, and I found my office locked and my desk in the hall.”
“What?”
Malloy glared at him. “That’s right. Out in the hall. Right where my assistant used to sit.”
Fallon envisioned it. Unlike upper management, who were provided office suites, mid-level executives had smaller private offices with assistants stationed at desks outside their doors. The assistants sat literally in a wide, well-traveled hall.
“So who’s in your office?” Fallon asked.
“No one. It’s empty. Locked and empty.” His hands gripped the cup so tightly Fallon thought it might break. Malloy’s face contorted; his eyes looked as though he might break down, but he fought it off. “I went to see Willis Chambers,” Malloy continued. “I figured he’s head of human resources, right? He’ll know what the hell is going on.” His jaw tightened in anger; his face flushed. “Well, he knows all right. My office is being redecorated, he says. It’s part of an overall refurbishing, he says. They had to start somewhere, he says.”
“Did anyone notify you?”
“Hell, no.” He stared at Fallon. “Did they tell you?” His features filled with suspicion.
Fallon’s temper flared. But not at Malloy. What else could the man think? “No, Jim. Nobody said a word to me.” He sat back. His hands had closed into fists. “What else did Chambers say?”
Malloy grunted, shook his head. “I asked him how long this refurbishing was gonna take. Just how long I’d be sitting out in the goddamned hall. And he says he has no idea. He says he’s sure it won’t be too long. So I ask him what other offices are being refurbished, and he tells me he’s not sure. He says he can’t understand why I’m so upset. He says I should be pleased I’m first on the list.” Malloy’s face contorted again, but he pushed on. “So I ask him when the workmen are supposed to start, and he tells me he’s not sure exactly. But he insists they had to move everything out of the office now, just so there wouldn’t be any delays doing it when they got here. He just grinned at me, told me how those guys got paid by the hour, and the company didn’t want them standing around, waiting for me to move out.”
Fallon looked away toward the window, simmering. “You have a key to the office, right?” he asked at length.
Malloy let out a bark of a laugh. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Except they changed the locks. Chambers said it was for security. He said the workmen would be leaving tools there, and the company would be liable if they disappeared. The fuckl” He stared at Fallon. His eyes were filled with a mix of fear and rage. “This is it, right, Jack? This is all part of their game. I’m the first target, the first guy they’re gonna force out the door. That’s the goddamned list Chambers is really talking about.”
Fallon leaned in close, forearms on his knees. He kept his voice low and even. “I’m not going to lie to you, Jim. I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Right now, I want you to take the rest of the day off,” he said. “Just go home and call me later this afternoon.” He hesitated. “And, Jim, lay off the sauce. You’ve been away from it for years. Go to an AA meeting. Do whatever works for you. But don’t let them beat you this way.”
Malloy’s jaw trembled, and Fallon thought he might burst into tears. Again, he fought it back. “Jack, I’m scared. I don’t know if I can take this kind of humiliation.” Malloy’s eyes searched Fallon’s face for some kind of answer. “Jack, what the hell did I ever do to deserve this? What kind of people are they? Why don’t they just fire me? Why do it this way?”
“They don’t want to fire you, Jim. They want you to quit. If they fire you, you’re still part of the problem. You’re another example of age discrimination that’ll be added to the list when they force everyone else to take their buyout. If you quit, then it’s something that was out of their control. Your choice, not theirs.” Fallon reached out and grabbed his forearm, squeezed it lightly. “Don’t let them win this way, Jim. Tell them to go to hell and hang tough.”
Malloy’s head drooped; his eyes fixed on a blur of carpet. “I don’t know if I can, Jack. I just don’t know.”
Fallon walked into Chambers’s office without waiting to be announced. He
could still hear Chambers’s assistant telling him he had to wait. But she wasn’t doing it too vehemently. She had even given him an approving nod as he marched past. He closed the door, shutting her out. He didn’t want one of Carol’s covert dinosaurs pressured to be a witness against him.
Chambers was seated in his high-backed chair, and Fallon walked straight around the desk and stepped in close, not leaving the man room enough to stand.
“Tell me about this goddamned redecorating plan, Willis,” he snapped. “And tell me quick.”
Chambers began to sputter. Fallon leaned down, his face only a foot from Chambers’s nose.
“Jack, calm down. Please.” Chambers was pressed back in his chair, fighting for any distance he could put between them. His eyes were wide and terrified, and his hands had gone up to fend off an anticipated blow.
“You listen to me, you little shit,” Fallon hissed. “This is the last time you’re going around me and pulling crap in my division. You’re going to tell me what this is all about. You’re going to tell me how long Jim Malloy is going to be sitting in a goddamned hall. And if I don’t like the answers, you’re going to give me a key so his desk can be moved back in now.”
Chambers started to sputter again, and Fallon stood, giving him some small breathing space.
“I don’t have a key,” Chambers pleaded. “Building maintenance has the key. And I have no idea how long it will take.” He raised his hands to his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “You know what workmen are like, Jack. Who can tell?”
Fallon reached down and jabbed a finger into his chest. “Then find out!” he snapped. “Because I want to know.” He straightened again, but still did not move. “Now tell me how Jim Malloy happened to be the first person on your list, and why the hell nobody told him, or me.”
Chambers’s hands were up defensively again. If Fallon moved, just a few steps, he fully intended to bolt for the door. “Jack, I thought you knew. I thought Jim knew. I assure you, it was just some kind of snafu, that’s all.”
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