Terminated

by Ray Daniel

  “Hello,” said an older male voice. Charlene’s father, maybe?

  “Hi,” I said, “I’m calling for Charlene.”

  “Yeah. She’s busy right now.”

  “It’s Kevin’s friend, Tucker. I was calling to … ”

  I heard the phone get muffled against a chest, then indecipherable human voices, a low-pitched one and then a higher one. A woman’s voice. Finally the mouthpiece came away from the chest and I heard Charlene say, “Let me talk to him.”

  The older guy said, “Are you sure?” and then Charlene was on the phone.

  “What did you do?” she said.

  “Charlene, I—” I started.

  “What did you do, Tucker? What did you do to get my husband killed?”

  My heart got tangled in my guts as my insides twisted.

  “I didn’t do—I don’t know—I wasn’t.”

  “Goddamn it, Tucker, he was in cybercrime! He was supposed to sit behind his computer and read emails. What did you do? How did you get him out on that bridge?”

  “He wanted to meet me there.”

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I shouted. I shook my head. I had just yelled at a widow.

  I suck.

  “Oh, you did something. He never got into trouble unless it was with you. You with your goddamn drinking and stupid hacks. How did you get him killed?”

  “I don’t know! OK? OK? I don’t know how I got him killed.”

  “You admit it? You bastard! You got poor Kevin killed and you admit it. He was helping you, wasn’t he? He was helping you with that whole thing about Carol.”

  What could I say? I said nothing. She was right.

  “Say something!” I heard the phone move away from her mouth. “No! No! I want this bastard to know what he did.”

  I shouted into the phone, “I’ll fix it! Charlene, I’ll fix it!”

  “How will you fix it? How can you fix anything?”

  “I’ll find out who did this. I swear it! I’ll find out or I’ll die trying!”

  There was sobbing on the other end that diminished as the phone was taken away. There was a pause and then the male voice was back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s not herself. She doesn’t really blame you.”

  I said, “When’s the wake?”

  “Don’t know yet. Charlene’s making the plans.”

  “When she feels better, tell her that I’ll see her then, and that I’ll deliver.”

  “Deliver what?”

  I said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and broke the connection.

  My face was wet. I hadn’t noticed when the tears had started. I lay on the couch as a flood of sorrow threatened to break through my defenses. I needed to get outside my head. I looked around my apartment to find a focal point.

  There was a sock on the floor. It was left over from last night with Margaret. Was it only last night? I started thinking back to before I had met her, to the sudden craving for a coffee that had driven me into the Thinking Cup. I got it in a mug. I hate drinking out of paper. It was so pedestrian. The forces of Scotch and exhaustion combined with thoughts of coffee shops to drag me into a fitful sleep.

  But there was no relief. Kevin’s chest exploded in my dreams, Carol thrashed on the kitchen floor, and I ran from room to room in our old house looking for the shadowy figure who had killed them both. Abruptly, I found myself standing in a silent office.

  It was my old office at MantaSoft, but it had changed. The walls were covered in moss, and vines dripped down from the ceiling tiles. There was someone sitting at my desk typing on my computer. He looked up at me. It was Roland Baker. He laughed and I startled myself awake.

  It was dark. I looked at my watch. It was past 10:00 p.m. I’d slept for three hours. Perfect. I rose, washed my face, drank some water, and headed out into the night. I was going to keep my promise to Charlene, and I knew what I had to do. It was time to find out what was so goddamn special about Roland Baker.

  nineteen

  The nap had left me sober enough to drive but drunk enough to take reckless action. I needed to figure out what the hell Roland had been doing as team leader and how this could have gotten Kevin killed, and I figured the best way to do that was to visit my old office in Waltham.

  Waltham is northwest of Boston, about ten miles out on a beltway road that we call Route 128, but that the rest of the country calls I-95. At one time, twenty years ago, Route 128 would be uttered in the same sentence as Silicon Valley, as in, “High-tech hotspots such as Route 128 and Silicon Valley.”

  That was a long time ago. The Massachusetts high-tech industry collapsed in the late ’80s, and now most of our engineers work in remote offices of Silicon Valley companies. My office in Waltham had been one of these satellites. MantaSoft’s headquarters was in Palo Alto, down the street from Stanford.

  The Rosetta design team, my team, worked in an enormous silver office building with a clock above its front door. They shared the building with an assortment of dot-coms, insurance companies, and PR firms.

  I drove a Mini Cooper Zipcar to Waltham. The clock on the front of the building said 11:30 as I pulled into the empty visitor’s lot. I had worked enough late nights alone to know that the office would be empty. I used the key card Shelly had given me to enter the building and took the elevator to the third floor. MantaSoft sat at one end of the hallway. It was time to break into my old office.

  I paused at the MantaSoft front door. The door was oak and guarded by a card key reader. The reader blinked at me with its red eye. I didn’t want my name recorded in the MantaSoft security system as a late-night entry, so I ignored the front door and took a left, walking down the hallway toward the back door.

  The back door is a great example of how too much security results in no security. MantaSoft’s hyper-paranoid security guards had decided that we had to have a lock on the door to the hallway. This meant that if you went to the rest room, you needed your card key to reenter. Of course, people forgot their card keys and needed to bang on the door after making potty. This was embarrassing to the person with the small bladder and annoying to the guy who sat nearest the door, an engineer named Ducky Gillis.

  Ducky solved the problem by replacing the backdoor’s generic knob with a combination-lock knob. Now people could reenter without disturbing him. Ducky had never asked permission to implement this change. In his words, “Questions you know the answer to, you don’t need to ask.” Soon after his victory over corporate security, Ducky quit MantaSoft to become a chair maker in Vermont. He took the knowledge of how to change the combination with him.

  The knob was large and silver and had five mechanical buttons the size of pencil erasers. I keyed in the combination: 406—Ted Williams’s batting average in 1941. I turned the knob and entered. Once inside, I eased the door closed and listened. The office was dark and silent. The air conditioning was off for the night, and the building was stuffy. I was comforted by the familiar space even though I felt like an intruder.

  Thirty engineers worked in Waltham. Two rows of cubes ran down the middle of the office, which curved away to my right. To my left was a kitchen with the coffee makers essential to technological advancement. The cubes didn’t have access to the windows. These were reserved for the offices along the wall—symbols of power. I had lived in one of those offices, though Roland squatted there today.

  I walked through the eerie space and glanced into the cubes. People’s family photos looked skeletal as my night vision removed the details and colors. The unused computers whirred. I lingered by Carol’s old cube, right outside my office. The nameplate on the cube read “Dana Parker.” Dana’s computer whirred with reams of computer code sitting on her screen. She hadn’t locked the screen. Sloppy. I considered sending a sexy email to Jack Kennings in her name, the usual punishment for an
unlocked screen. Instead, I got to work.

  It was time to get into Roland’s office. His door was closed, but I knew how to break in. There’s always a lazy person who’ll get you through a security system. In my case, his name was Frank. Frank had locked himself out of his office once and missed an important meeting. Now he never locked his door and so became the weak link into Roland’s office.

  Frank’s office shared a wall with Roland’s. Frank had a credenza full of family pictures next to that wall. I carefully removed these and stacked them in order. That way I could put them back in the right spots.

  I stood on the credenza and looked at the ceiling tiles. People are naive. They think that because the walls in their house go all the way to the ceiling, the same must be true in the office. They think locking their doors makes their offices into secure little boxes. They’re wrong. Years of security hacking had taught me to look beyond the intended behavior of objects and study their design instead. Yes. A wall is supposed to separate two offices, but when you look at its design, you’ll see why it fails.

  The visible ceiling in an office building is suspended from the floor above to make room for air conditioning ducts, Ethernet cables, power cords, and the other hidden entrails of office life. Once you push up a ceiling tile, a new world is available. I stood on Frank’s credenza, held up one of his ceiling tiles, and looked over the wall. I slid the tile out of the way, reached over the wall, and got a finger under Roland’s tile. I lifted it and slid it aside, tunneling into Roland’s office from above. I jumped and pulled myself to the top of the wall. Swung my feet up and looked down into the room.

  It was a mess. In just six months, Roland had converted my immaculate workspace into a shitstorm of discarded magazines and sheets of paper. He had the same type of credenza as Frank, except that his was covered in piles of manila folders, discarded newspapers, and other trash.

  I thought about quitting right there. Instead, I said, “Screw it” and kept moving. I hung from the ceiling, kicked some paper out of the way, and dropped. Hitting the credenza in a sprawl, I crashed across it and spread Roland’s papers across the floor in an even layer, landing on top of them. So much for stealth.

  I lay on my back assessing the damage. I wiggled my fingers and toes, stretched and craned my neck, and looked up at the office door. It was ajar.

  “Idiot,” I said to myself. I had assumed the door was locked and hadn’t even tried it. I stood up in the slippery pile of spilled paper, turned on the office light, and opened the door all the way. I looked around, listening for any sign that I wasn’t alone. There was none. I got behind the desk and sat down in front of Roland’s computer.

  The keyboard was horrifying. In only six months Roland had managed to deposit a thin film of oily gunk on the home row of keys. The mouse also wore a light patch of oil over the left mouse button. I shuddered and went to work. It was time to hack into Roland’s account. Fortunately, he was running Windows.

  Pity the poor bastards at Microsoft. Every time they try to make their machine easier to use, they open another hacker doorway. Take the sticky-keys feature. You press the shift key five times at login, and voilà you get a handicapped-accessible software keyboard. Or consider the fact that if you crash a Windows machine, it generates a crash report to be sent to Microsoft. This report comes with a handy link that opens the Microsoft privacy statement in Notepad, and Notepad gives you access to a File Explorer that can rename your files. Software guys like me can put these features together to … well … hack your computers.

  Roland’s computer was under his desk. Its fan whined as it struggled to suck air through the pile of paper that had been stacked on and around it. I crawled under the desk to find the power button. Oreo wrappers and yellow bits of Twinkie covered the floor. My hand brushed a dead bug that had apparently starved to death trying to digest the yellow cake. The rug smelled like feet. I lay on my back like a mechanic and snaked my arm into the space behind the PC to power it down and then up. I climbed out from under the desk and brushed myself clean as best I could.

  I waited for the computer to complain that it had crashed, offer to email a crash report, and let me open the privacy statement in Notepad. Once I was in Notepad, I replaced the sticky-key program with the cmd program … that black screen the IT guy uses to type commands into your computer. Then I rebooted the computer, pressed the shift key five times, and had a black command window come up, ready for my command.

  I typed the command that erased Roland’s password, logged in, and waited for the interminable Windows login sequence to complete.

  I thrummed my fingers on the desk and looked out the window. It was late and Route 128 was quiet. I looked across the highway at the dark trees beyond. How many times had I seen this view? The trees were full of green leaves, but I’d seen them turn red and orange and go bare. I’d sat at this desk, working late, and watched silent snow layer the trees and fill the highway. I remembered the warm feeling of virtue in these moments—the alpha dog status of being the hardest working guy in the office.

  I looked back from the window. Carol stood among Roland’s wreckage, looking out the window over my shoulder.

  “Reminiscing, baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you remembering how I used to leave here at six every night?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Did you remember how I used to cook dinner? Do you remember the Moo Shu hamburger recipe I got from Rachael Ray?”

  “The one with the scallions and hoisin sauce?”

  “They were good hamburgers,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too bad you never ate them.”

  “That’s not true. I had them for breakfast sometimes,” I said, typing into Roland’s computer. It started its slow login process. Roland’s computer was a pig.

  “I gave up cooking after six months of eating alone.”

  I turned to her. “Why do you always dwell on the bad times?”

  Carol blinked at me. I had caught her off guard. She had nothing to say.

  I continued. “We were having fun when I got this job. You even volunteered to sit in that cube near me.”

  Carol said, “I did it so we could leave together.”

  “I know. It was fun.”

  “What are you talking about? You never left. You got this office and this job and you were the boss and then you never left.”

  “It was just until the project was done.”

  “Was it my fault?”

  “What?”

  “Wasn’t I a good wife?”

  “Of course you were.”

  “Then why didn’t you love me?”

  I tried to formulate a response, but my throat was filling with a choking ball of regret. I opened my mouth to speak but closed it when the ball began to burn. I turned to look at Carol, but the lights in the main office turned on and I heard a voice.

  “Turn that light off !” Roland barked. The light snapped off, leaving my office as the only lit place. I bolted from the chair, slipping and stumbling on the stacks of printer paper strewn across the floor. I stayed low and scrambled into the cube across from the office door. Dana’s cube. It was pitch dark under her desk. I curled myself into the spot.

  Roland ran into his office and surveyed the mess.

  He called out, “It’s good that you rang me.”

  Dana stepped into view as she spoke. “I didn’t know what to do. I almost called the police.”

  Roland said, “That would have been a bad idea. You did well. Now go home.”

  “But I thought I’d—”

  “No. Go home.”

  I was screwed. I had hidden under Dana’s desk. Right next to her handbag. She’d practically have to ask me to hand it to her. With her cube five feet from Roland’s office, I couldn’t move without getting caught.

  Dana s
tepped into the office, looked around at the mess and then up. She said, “It looks like he came through the ceiling.”

  Roland looked up and said, “Bloody hell!” and then, “I thought I told you to leave.”

  Dana ignored him. She asked, “Did he take anything?”

  Roland said, “I don’t think so.” He looked at his computer screen.

  Roland rattled the mouse, clicked, and said, “He was logged into my computer as me!”

  Dana came around and looked at the screen. She asked, “How did he get the password?”

  I gauged the distances needed to make a run for it. Dana and Roland were looking at the computer screen, but I could see their faces, which meant I was in their peripheral vision.

  I might have escaped if I could start at a dead run, but I’d gotten myself wedged under the desk and would have to crawl before I could stand. I’d be in their full view. I decided that there was nothing I could do. My only hope was that Dana would forget her handbag.

  Roland forced the issue. He was standing in front of the computer. His face had gone blank and he was completely still except for his breathing, which had gotten deeper. He leaned on the desk and had moved the mouse when Dana pointed at the screen and said, “Did he get into your email?”

  At the sound of her voice, Roland erupted, “I said go home!” He shoved Dana toward the office door. She was a foot smaller than him, no more than five two, and the shove knocked her off balance. She shrieked as she slipped on the strewn paper, caught herself, and stumbled out of the office.

  Dana regained her composure and hustled toward the front door. I sighed. Her bag was safe with me. With her gone, Roland reached under his Manchester United warm-up jacket and produced a small, boxy gun. Oh fuck! I pulled myself farther under the desk, as Roland walked around his desk.