The Depository

by E Y Mak

  “I’m not going to take a retainer, at least for now. I will follow up and review the police file pro bono. Just to check that it was done properly. The most reasonable story at this point is that he was a broken man who took the easy way out. But the emails and this expressionless man could be followed up on.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Lukas. “At least let me pick up breakfast.”

  After leaving Bons, Russell walked the half block back to Phineas Tower at a semi-brisk pace. The sunny skies from the last couple of days had disappeared behind the threatening rain clouds now forming. In rushing out the door this morning, he had left his umbrella at home. He had had enough on his mind. If it rained, he decided that he was just going to get wet.

  He also decided that he was going to leave Daniel in the dark about his meeting with Lukas for the time being.

  Chapter Six

  Candice arrived at Phineas Tower a half hour later than she had hoped. Still relatively new to the city, she had not yet fully learned the ins and outs of the New York public transportation system. There had been several delays on the subway, and the two trains she had to take from her apartment in Brooklyn had each halted midway. She ultimately got off at WTC station and walked the rest of the way to Phineas Tower. The delay pushed her to skip her usual detour to Starbucks for a fruit cup and she arrived at her desk hungry. Water from the office kitchen would have to do for now.

  Candice booted her computer up and sipped water as it loaded. After entering her password, she opened up her inbox. There were three emails.

  Jonathan Sakai, 6:55 a.m.

  Subject: Phineas phone ready

  Avril Lennox, 7:13 a.m.

  Subject: Girl Guides cookies for sale

  Russell Woo, 7:42 a.m.

  Subject: Welcome—New file

  After skimming and quickly contemplating eating cookies for breakfast, she deleted the email from Avril and clicked on Russell’s email.

  To: Candice Pirelli

  From: Russell Woo

  Subject:Welcome—New File

  Hey Candice,

  I heard you just finished the last day of training yesterday! Welcome to the show. HR has assigned me to act as your mentor for your first year.

  First of all, I get comped for firm development expenses, so please make sure to bug me at least once a month for lunch.

  Second, I have a new file and need some help.

  Please come by in the morning—I’m available between 10 to 10:45.

  Best,

  Russell

  Candice contemplated the mentoring assignment. Everyone knew Russell as a rising star in the investigations department. However, he also had the reputation of being abrupt and slightly hard to work with. She had been warned that his dry humor took getting used to. At least I am stuck with someone interesting. She checked the time. 8:12 a.m. Candice replied:

  Sounds good. I’ll drop by at 10 this morning.

  She then opened the email from Jonathan.

  To: Candice Pirelli

  From: Jonathan Sakai

  Subject:Phineas phone ready

  Hi Candice,

  I’m Jonathan, IT support from R&D.

  Your phone is available and you’re scheduled for training at 9:00 at the Training Room 5 on 64.

  Thank you,

  Jon

  Candice quickly typed a response to Jonathan that the time worked.

  After spending the next half hour filling out some post-training feedback forms, she picked up a yellow legal pad and took the elevator to 64.

  Training Room 5 was a tiny internal meeting room with no windows and a meeting table dead center. A computer terminal was set on the side near a projector display. A balding Japanese man, presumably Jonathan Sakai, was already seated and was organizing a stack of six brown boxes laid on the far end of the table. An identical but opened box was on the table, next to a smartphone already set out on the table.

  “Candice?” Jon asked.

  Candice nodded and extended her hand. “Hi, Jon. Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m sure you’ve already heard of the Phineas smartphone. Here’s yours—the latest and greatest out of R&D,” he said. He spoke quite casually, like someone from the West Coast.

  Candice picked up and inspected the unit. It didn’t look very special—a molded box of plastic that felt heavy for a phone with a five-inch display. Nonetheless, she was relieved that she wasn’t tethered to her desk to attend to her work email.

  “We have a contract with Chinese suppliers to purchase cosmetically flawed external casings. We basically junk the internals and start from scratch. The product inside, except for the screen, is pure Phineas R&D.” He paused long enough to take a deep breath and then continued with renewed excitement. “Phineas built the operating system from the ground up. The basics are all there—text messaging, phone, calendar, email functionality. Every single bit of data leaving this device is encrypted. But here’s the fun part. You dicks in intelligence get the one with special features.” Jon was mortified for a second when he realized the word that he had used. “Sorry. I mean detectives.”

  “It’s okay. I spent some time in the field at the FBI. I’ve heard much worse.”

  Jon took the phone back from Candice and flipped it over. He pointed to a large glass circle at the top of the unit. “First of all, the camera has a one-inch sensor and a twenty-to-seventy-millimeter lens. This makes it relatively good for low-light situations and moderate zooming. Still, grab the DSLR if you need to do any long-range surveillance. We have a locker full of those.” He pushed a button on the side of the unit and the aperture blades protecting the sensor snapped open. Another push shut the blades. Candice was impressed—she had never seen the mechanical opening and closing of a lens shutter on a cellphone camera before.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to describe this tech to a millennial like you. But there’s a couple of features beyond your typical smartphone from the big telcos. There’s a voice recorder app, natch. The flash on the camera also emits a laser. If you point it at the window of a room where your target is located, the laser can detect the vibrations on the glass and you can hear the conversation from the earpiece of this phone.”

  Candice pointed it at a wall. “I have an ex that this would have been useful on. Pathological liar.”

  Jon laughed. “It’s a useful tool. On another note, if you don’t want anyone eavesdropping in on your conversation, the phone also has an audio jammer that protects conversations by generating white noise that can desensitize any microphone nearby.”

  “Interesting.” Candice took the phone back and cycled through the various sounds that it could generate. It varied from static, to the sound of a bustling coffee shop, to a high-pitched whine. She noticed she could activate more than one of the sounds at once. “What happens if I lose this phone?”

  “Glad you asked.” Jon handed her a business card printed with the words “Canadian Packaging Services Ltd.—Edwin Borianta” and a phone number. “If you somehow lose the phone, call this number immediately. This will remotely deactivate the phone. And when I say deactivate, I mean self-destruct. Don’t lose the phone, though. We couldn’t get any loss insurance. I guess that makes sense since it technically doesn’t exist.”

  “Thanks,” Candice said. Since she had left her purse at her cubicle, she stuffed the business card into the pocket of her dress pants.

  “Some more tips. HR has asked us to give you a spiel on proper internet usage. I think it goes without saying that the phone is for business use only. I mean you can make the occasional phone call or text, but no online shopping or Facebook or anything. We monitor and keep a database of all the websites that are visited on our computers and phones. We use that to see if our agents and staff hit their performance indicators. Our system detects patterns and scores each user on how focused they are on their work. Bad things happen if you score too low, so get a personal phone for that kind of usage. We got some kind of a deal with T-Mobile. Al
so, we also don’t want Facebook tracking this phone.”

  Jon pulled himself up straight, like a professor about to deliver the most essential part of his lecture.

  “Finally, here’s an important function,” Jon said, pointing to a green icon with the overhead silhouette of what seemed to be a helicopter. “It summons a drone that will drop down from the mesh network and provide you with surveillance support. Use it wisely—misuse of the company property is insubordination and cause for termination.”

  “So that’s how you do it,” she said. “Call in a swarm.”

  “You should see what we can do with the smart speaker technology that we acquired a couple of years ago, advanced, and then licensed out,” he said. “With a flip of a switch, we can listen in on, and collect data from, any smart speaker conversation in the country. We could then send a swarm to the location of the speaker. But no one has tried that yet. Something about privacy laws.”

  Suddenly, Jon’s face contorted in a look of anxiety, and he turned around, scrambling through the stack of papers next to the unopened boxes behind him. He found what he was looking for, and turned back towards Candice, papers in hand.

  “Sorry, I should have done this first,” Jon said as he read from a checklist. “We have to cover the legal details. The terms of your employment agreement specifically preclude you from admitting the existence of this unit to any third parties. But here’s the NDA for this specific phone.”

  Candice laughed at the additional paperwork. Since the beginning of Phineas Academy, she had signed more waivers than she ever had in her life, including her time at the FBI. The legal department at Phineas did not let anything go without some paperwork. Makes sense since their legal department was larger than the size of a medium-sized law firm.

  Candice took some further instruction from Jon, and then she practiced using each of the features in turn. She considered herself technologically proficient and mastered all of the features quickly. The device was quite intuitive.

  “Thanks, Jon. I don’t think there’s anything further for now. But if I have any questions, I know where to meet you.”

  Jon nodded with a grin. “Good luck and welcome again to Phineas!”

  As Candice walked out the door, she looked down at the phone’s display one more time.

  9:47 a.m.

  She debated going downstairs and taking her usual back-alley shortcut to the Panera Bread on Park. In a world where every move was watched, monitored, and possibly recorded, she enjoyed every opportunity to fade from the official record.

  But not today.

  Candice let out a sigh. Though she was excited to finally start doing actual work, her stomach complained as she rushed upstairs to meet with Russell.

  Chapter Seven

  The large mocha-stained oak door to Russell’s office was ajar when Candice arrived shortly before ten. She had hoped that her first file would be an interesting one. Corporate diligence on a Fortune 500 company. VIP protection detail for someone famous. Something sexy and exciting. She peered in and saw Russell. He didn’t seem to notice her as he focused on a copy of the US Securities Act of 1934.

  Before walking in, Candice took a quick scan of his office. It was the example of organized chaos. There were piles of papers a foot high sloppily stacked upon one another—a stray post-it note on each stack seemingly sufficing for coordination. An old brown bookshelf covered one side of the wall, primarily filled with law texts. A six-inch plastic hockey player wearing a black-and-orange uniform and an orange “16” was displayed at eye level on the shelf, still sealed in its original packaging. Two bottles of scotch were set down on a countertop in the corner of his office. Next to the scotch counter, his blazer and trench coat neatly hung from a hat and coat stand.

  Russell raised his head and a look of recognition crossed his face. “Please, come in.” Candice obliged and sat down in a black chair next to the door.

  “Candice, right?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Woo? I’ve heard quite a bit about you.”

  “All good, I hope. And please—Russell. I hope you are settling in well at Phineas.” Even from the brief exchange, she could tell that Russell was a friendly guy. He already smiled more than any other person she had met at Phineas, even though it was mostly just a smirk. Maybe it was his kind eyes. His gregarious tone also seemed unbefitting of a senior investigator at Phineas.

  “Mostly. So far, so good,” she said.

  “I’ve read your file—a master’s in forensic psychology and top of the class at FBI academy.” He whistled. “Spent only . . . one year? in the field in Boston before coming here. They have a great program there and we are certainly happy to benefit from your training here. Your history suggests that you’re a do-gooder. I was like that once. Why leave the FBI? We’re a bit more . . . grey here.”

  Candice noticed Russell shrugging his shoulders and very slightly rolling his eyes, as if to undermine the legitimacy of their employer. His body language and mannerisms were cheeky and personal; they made him comfortable to talk to. She mentally recapped her own decisive moment before opening up.

  “The Phineas recruiter made a compelling case. She said that I would have the option to move my career forward in ways not possible at the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, the ATF, or any other government body. I could get the chance to lead files sooner and avoid the bureaucracy. Plus, there’s a business aspect to Phineas that you would never get in a government agency. There is a real possibility to work directly with clients here, of your choosing, and that’s attractive to me, long term.”

  Russell ran both of his hands through his hair as he leaned back in his chair.

  “Okay. I won’t lie—the money is pretty good in this division of Phineas, especially if you can, like you said, bring in your own clients—particularly big security contracts. Like the Olympics or something. What lead you down this path anyway? It is a dangerous profession, and most people don’t grow up wanting to do what we do. The hours are bad, and the work is nowhere as glamorous as the television shows make it look.”

  “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a detective. I’ve read every Sherlock book out there growing up.” Candice paused. “Plus, I followed the history of Phineas as a child. The regulatory battles of the 1950s to get set up in the air above NYC. The events leading up to and including the Battle of Nantucket. The uncovering of the attempted Clinton assassination in 97.”

  Russell stared at her blankly for a few awkward seconds.

  “Nerd,” he said, before breaking out into a broad smile. “But that is good. We could always use as many smart and capable agents as possible at Phineas. There’s room for someone with a knowledge base like yours.”

  Candice redirected, parrying Russell’s attempt at flattery. “Why’d you leave your law practice behind?”

  Russell paused as if he was making up a justification on the spot. “I liked what I did. But I needed something different in life. I felt like I needed to be outside more. A lot of people still wonder about my decision. One of the partners I worked for even said that leaving was going to be the worst decision of my life. I guess I wanted to do more than just help rich people get richer.”

  “Ah, so I guess you’re a closet do-gooder too?” Candice said.

  “I guess you could say that. Hasn’t really panned out that way, though,” he said. Russell averted his gaze a bit. “Have you finished all of the training?”

  “Pretty much—just one more makeup session scheduled for next week,” said Candice.

  “Okay, that’s, whatever. You can start working now. I need you to help me with a new file that landed on my desk today. Phineas doesn’t do a lot of suicides. I certainly haven’t done one myself, but I promised someone I would do what I can. I’m stretched a bit thin though, so I’ll need some support.”

  “What do you need?” Candice asked.

  “Someone has reason to suspect that there could have been more to the suicide. I’m going to talk to the investigative officer
at the NYPD, Harry Lions, to see if I can take a look at their file. But I need you to gather some independent intelligence on the victim.”

  “No problem. Tell me what we know so far.” For the short time that she had been at the FBI, Candice had often been asked to draft victimology reports. Victimology is the study of the victims in a number of crimes perpetrated by the same criminal. The idea was that by identifying similarities between each of the victims of a particular crime, an investigator could identify a pattern in the criminal’s approach to his or her crimes. By looking at age, lifestyle, physical characteristics, and other commonalities, the information obtained could be used to help the investigator put together an accurate profile of the perpetrator. She had hoped she would be able to use some of her training soon.

  Russell continued, “His name is Timotheus Butler. He was the CEO involved in Ndian, that big securities fraud scandal this summer. He hung himself two weeks ago.”

  Candice knew the securities fraud case well. “Yes, I heard of the Ndian case. Why would we look into this any further? I mean, disgraced CEO couldn’t bear to face the people he defrauded. His reputation is in shambles. If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck. . . . That’s what I thought right away when I saw his death on CNN.”

  Russell nodded. “That’s exactly what I thought as well. But there may be some stones still unturned. I don’t have any reason to believe the NYPD didn’t competently investigate, but I’ve been asked to help out.”