Terminated

by Ray Daniel

  Quick, light footsteps halted him. Dana was coming back. Roland hid his gun behind the door as Dana said, “I forgot my bag.” She turned into her cube, bent, reached under the desk, and looked straight into my face. We made eye contact. I handed her her bag. She straightened, holding her bag, and said to Roland, “Don’t ever push me again.”

  Roland said, “I apologize. I’m very upset. Now please go.”

  Dana went out the front doors. Roland watched her leave. I heard the front doors close, and Roland emerged with his gun. He called out, “Whoever you are! You can’t escape! I’m going to search all these cubes!” He stopped and listened.

  Roland skipped over Dana’s cube. Apparently he considered it searched. He started working his way down the row. I crawled out of my hiding space and got ready to sprint. I risked a peek and saw Roland turn the corner in the cube farm. I bolted down the hall and out the front door where Dana had left. I heard Roland shout, “Hey!” but by then I was gone. I ran down the hallways and then down the staircase. I didn’t stop running until my shaking hands were turning the key in my Zipcar.

  monday

  twenty

  “A gun,” said Bobby as he examined his scone.

  “Yes, a gun. A big fucking gun,” I said. I was trying to make a point.

  It was nine in the morning, and Bobby and I were sitting on black metal chairs at a sidewalk table in front of Wired Puppy, a local coffee shop that was holding its own against Starbucks. Miller was wearing an oatmeal-colored summer suit, white shirt, and bright yellow tie. He looked like he was playing the sun in a kindergarten play. I was wearing bags under my eyes from a sleep-destroying cocktail of alcohol and adrenaline. A two-foot black, wrought-iron fence separated us from the commuters who hustled down the street as we breakfasted on exotic coffees and blueberry scones. Bobby was sipping his coffee through a tiny plastic hole in the lid. I, classier than that, had asked for my coffee in a mug.

  “He had a gun. So?” said Bobby.

  “So arrest him.”

  “You want me to arrest Roland Baker because you say that he pulled a gun when you broke into his office.”

  “It was actually my office.”

  “No, it was actually his office.”

  “Whatever. I want you to arrest him for carrying a gun.”

  “It seems to me that I should be arresting you for trespassing.”

  “You’re missing the whole fucking point!” I gestured with my mug, sloshed some hot coffee on my hand, swore, put it down, and crossed my arms.

  “Jesus, will you relax?”

  I had wolfed my scone. Bobby’s lay unmolested on his plate.

  “I need another scone.”

  “Get it later. Drink your coffee and relax.”

  “You gonna eat that one?”

  “Yes,” Bobby said. He picked it up and took a bite out of it.

  I splayed myself across my black wire chair and rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. I said, “Fine. I’m relaxed.”

  Bobby kept talking. “Good. Now shut up and listen. I’m not going to do anything about Roland and his fucking gun.” Bobby started ticking points off on his meaty fingers. “First, I told you so. These guys aren’t fucking around. Second, it’s your word against his. And third, I don’t give a shit because Kevin wasn’t killed by a gun that could fit under a Manchester United sweatshirt.”

  “But Roland probably has something to do with Kevin getting killed.”

  “Yeah, he probably does. So why the fuck would I arrest him on a gun charge that he could beat without breaking a sweat?”

  I straightened and put up my hands. “Fine. Fine. You’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right.”

  “So you’re the expert. What should I do now?”

  “I told you what to do. Find a safe hole and crawl into it.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “One of these bastards killed my wife. I want to know who it was.”

  “Let the local police handle it.”

  “They’re done handling it. They decided it was me, realized they couldn’t prove it, and gave up. Stupid donut munchers.”

  “Hey! Cut that shit out.”

  I had hit a nerve, but I didn’t care. I was pissed off, and the image of Kevin on the Harvard Bridge kept crashing into the image of Carol on the kitchen floor. Something ugly was writhing in the back of my mind, and I was getting tired of controlling it.

  I said, “All I get from all you people is that you can’t do anything.”

  “We can do lots.”

  “Yeah? What have you done about Kevin?”

  Miller stared at me, his jaw clenching and relaxing. He took a deep breath and blew it out. He leaned back in his chair and looked into his coffee. I waited, eyeing the uneaten portion of his scone. Finally Bobby looked up at me.

  “All right, fuck it,” he finally said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re obviously going to keep poking around doing stupid shit trying to figure this thing out. I might as well use you to get some information.”

  “Clearly I live to be used.”

  “Shut up and listen.”

  I shut up.

  Bobby said, “You told me that Kevin was pissed that you got involved with this Bronte company.”

  “Yeah. He said I fucked things up by talking to Margaret Bronte.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you could find out,” said Miller. He popped the rest of the scone into his mouth, scraped his chair back, and joined the commuters on the sidewalk. I went into the coffee shop with my mug, got a refill and another scone, and grabbed a seat in the subterranean back room that was Wired Puppy’s seating area.

  Bobby was right and I was stupid. I had spent the night crashing around Roland’s office when I could have been doing research on the Internet. I hadn’t even checked out Bronte’s website. It was time to get smart.

  I finished my breakfast and climbed out onto the hot, sunny sidewalk. The humidity had already started to rise, and it was going to be another scorcher. My choices for Internet research were to either walk all the way back home in the humidity, or risk assimilation. I decided to risk assimilation. Tweeted:

  To the Apple Store!

  twenty-one

  The Apple Store on Boylston Street loomed over the sidewalk like a crystalline Borg cube. Fortunately, Apple hadn’t recently released some minor modification to one of their products, so I didn’t have to negotiate a rope line of groupies to get into the place. I love Apple products. They’re solidly built, run a secure operating system, and look great. But I could never understand the hysteria, the long lines, or the desperate need to be the first person in the office to own the latest iPad. My silver BlackBerry was still doing the job.

  The store had just opened and was still empty. Blue-shirted Apple geniuses loitered about the edges of the rectangular room, checking machines, poking at iPads, and chatting. I walked to the center of the cube and mounted the glass spiral staircase, climbing the wide white stairs on the outer edge of the spiral and executing a 180-degree turn. The staircase deposited me on the second floor.

  I approached the floor-to-ceiling glass wall at the front of the store and watched commuters and tourists navigate Boylston Street. A girl in a yellow sundress walked across the street carrying a coffee with a confident swaying stride. She deftly sidestepped a guy in a striped shirt who had come to a dead stop on the sidewalk and was looking up at the store. He caught me looking at the girl, dropped his eyes, and entered the store. I followed her down the street with my eyes and tweeted:

  Enjoying the view from the Apple Cube.

  It was time to get to work. Large iMacs lined the edge of the store floor. I positioned myself in front of one away from the w
indow and opened the web browser. Navigated to evernote.com, logged in, and was ready to do my research.

  A blue-shirted genius popped up next to me. “Trying out the new iMac?”

  I said, “Yeah. Love this thing.” I Googled “Jack Kennings Manta-

  Soft.”

  The kid said, “Do you have any questions I could answer?”

  Google produced reams of data. Jack Kennings had quite an Internet footprint. The top of the screen showed an interview on YouTube. I copied its URL to Evernote. Next was a series of interviews. These were uninteresting.

  I Googled “Jack Kennings resume.” Got a lot of six-year-old articles about how Jack was taking over as CEO at MantaSoft. Our old CEO, the founder, had been kicked out in a dispute with the board. Jack was the replacement CEO. He was going to bring “professional management” to the company.

  The kid in the blue shirt had been watching me. He said, “You know you can use Bento for storing those notes.”

  The kid was just doing his job, so I was patient. “Yeah,” I said, “I know, but this way I can access my stuff at home.”

  The kid said, “You’re looking for his résumé? Is this guy on LinkedIn?”

  I stopped reading and turned to him, “Hey, good call, dude. I’ll check it.” I pointed over his shoulder. “You have another customer.”

  The guy who had disrupted the girl in the yellow sundress was standing across the room looking at iPads. The kid took off to help him.

  LinkedIn told me that Jack had been CEO of two previous software security companies. Before that he had been a VP of Engineering at a startup, and before that a director. Jack’s climb had been swift and uninterrupted. He lived in the Bay Area and had gone to Stanford for both his undergraduate engineering degree and his MBA. Stanford. There are those from MIT who would have held that against him, but I was much too open-minded for that. I settled for pitying him.

  I Googled “Jack Kennings +children +wife” to look into Jack’s personal life. The only hits were from the local newspaper. Jack had run a campaign to raise money for a playground, a school, a battered women’s shelter, and a dog adoption center. He had served as president of the PTO and had won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year award from the Stanford Alumni. I found a picture of Jack and his wife at a charity dinner. He wore a tux and she sported a red dress. She came up to his armpit and had the hot, blond, busty look of a second wife. Jack had a silly grin on his face. He knew he was a lucky guy. I added all this to my notes.

  Margaret was next. The Bronte website mirrored the shark theme in Margaret’s booth. The website showed that Bronte had two security products, some sort of network sniffer that would look through your network and report suspicious employee activity. This was nothing new. MantaSoft had had this technology for a year. The site offered a few white papers that would provide useful information to a security ignoramus, but nothing that a pro wouldn’t already know.

  High-tech companies have a constant struggle between marketing and product development. In most startups, product development wins and you get interesting products with lousy marketing: a misspelling-laden website that rips off the tag line from some unrelated product. Securesoft: When it absolutely, positively needs to be secure.

  Bronte was different. Here the marketing was strong, but the products were weak. The site was crisp and sharp, the Move or Die theme was woven throughout the text, and the graphics were original and arresting. Margaret clearly knew how to position her product, even if that product was boring and delivered outdated functionality.

  The Management page had a single picture of Margaret. She wore a black suit that complemented her salt and pepper hair. She stood at an angle to the camera, arms crossed, blue eyes boring into me. Her bio said that she was the founder of Bronte Software. I knew that. It said that she had previously worked for IBM, Cisco, and 3M. There was nothing more.

  I went to LinkedIn and found Margaret’s obligatory CEO page. It said that she was CEO of Bronte Design, and that she had previously worked for IBM, Cisco, and 3M. Nothing new. While Jack had over 500 connections on LinkedIn and was only one link removed from me, Margaret had ten links, and no connections to me.

  I looked over my shoulder. Striped Shirt was standing behind me. He had been looking over my shoulder. Some instinct made my stomach twitch, and I decided to leave. I closed the browser and looked around. The kid in the blue shirt was helping a heavy woman wearing red shorts and a blue T-shirt choose an iPhone. Her midriff was bare, but it was less a fashion statement than a consequence of physics. Striped Shirt had moved away from me and was poking at an iPad on a table, but he didn’t seem to be using it. Just poking it. It was time to go.

  I took long strides toward the frosted-glass spiral staircase at the center of the store. Striped Shirt also slid toward the staircase. I sped up and took a step on the narrow inner stairs of the spiral when he made his move. He ran toward me and hit me with his shoulder, knocking my hand away from the banister. The steps in the inner edge were narrow. I crashed headlong down the sharp, glass stairs.

  One thing about falling down a glass spiral staircase: it hurts like hell. I raised my hands to block the stairs and my palms were creased with pain as they hit the glass edges. I flipped and my elbow hit another edge, and in another spin my forehead cracked into the glass. I stopped falling when I was halfway down the stairs and Striped Shirt was standing over me. He reached down as if to help me up, and I instinctively reached for his hand.

  Striped Shirt pulled me close. He smelled of cigarettes, coffee, and cologne. His face was soft, but his eyes bore into mine. He said, “Mind your own business, Mr. Tucker.” He had an accent. Eastern European? He dropped my hand, and my head bounced back onto the glass stair. I didn’t see him leave. I had blood in my eyes.

  twenty-two

  The long Red Line train rumbled through the station, tickling the stitches on my forehead with its rushing wake of air. The breeze felt good. The sky was hot and blue above me. I had started to sweat on the Charles/MGH train station platform, elevated above the cars passing below on Storrow Drive.

  The train had just left the Longfellow Bridge. It had emerged from its tunnel in Cambridge, crossed the river, and would now plunge under the city of Boston on its way south to Braintree. I had just walked to the station from the emergency room at Mass General Hospital, where an Indian doctor had put a shot of Novocain and four stitches into my face above my right eyebrow.

  A police officer had visited me in the emergency room, asking whether I had seen the guy who pushed me and whether I could give a description. I had given him a broad sketch of a guy with dark hair and a striped shirt, but said that it had all happened too fast for me to remember anything else. I’m not sure why I lied.

  In my memory, the fall happened in slow motion. I could still feel the rough skin of his hand knocking my fingers away from the guardrail, and the hard knot of bone in his shoulder hitting me on the spine. I had stumbled forward onto the narrow inner steps of the spiral staircase. I missed the first step and had slipped off the second, pitched too far forward to stop myself from falling. I remembered every blow on the steps: hand … elbow … head … shoulder … back … other hand. Each one of them created its own knot of pain.

  I could also remember the guy who pushed me. He had a wide face and a soft mouth. Black hair, black eyes, a small scar on his right cheek. He was a little walleyed, with his left eye drifting away while his right locked onto my gaze. That same rough hand grabbed mine, as if to help, and pulled me up. I could remember his message: “Mind your own business, Mr. Tucker.” I remember him dropping my hand and running out of the store.

  I told the cop none of this. I couldn’t see how he could help me. At best, I imagined that he would ask me to come to the station, sign papers, fill out a report, or do whatever it was they did with people who had been attacked. I’d given the cop just enough information to get him to leave, a
nd then I’d walked to the train station.

  The train stopped moving and the doors whooshed open. I stepped inside and habitually put my Bluetooth headset into my ear. Carol liked trains. She arrived just as the train pulled out of the station.

  She peered at the stitches over my eye and said, “Oh, baby, that looks so painful.”

  I said, “Looks do not deceive.”

  Carol reached out and came within an inch of touching the wound, but I knew she wouldn’t. She said, “Those people are animals.”

  “Which people?” I asked.

  “The ones who killed me. The ones who did this.”

  “So I’m getting closer. Good.”

  Carol’s eyes started to glisten. She said, “No, baby. It’s not good. You need to stop now.”

  Carol disappeared as the train slowed and entered Park Street station. I stood. The doors whooshed open, and I emerged into the bottom tunnel in Park Street. The Green Line light-rail trolleys were on the floor above.

  Normally I liked walking in the train stations. The station’s subterranean climate was cool and dry, and the flow of people walking in the same direction filled me with energy. But today was different. As I climbed the stairs, a Hispanic kid in a Celtics T-shirt came bounding down the stairs. He raised his hand to strike me, to push me back down the staircase. I tightened my grip on the handrail and shrunk inward, anticipating the blow. Then he was running on down the stairs, probably trying to catch the train I had just left.

  I stood on the stairs for a moment, and then ran up them to get to the platform. I emerged breathless, and people stared at me. I could feel them looking at my cut like I was the weak one in the herd, the one that could be culled out and taken down. I averted my gaze from them and leaned on a support column to wait for the train. My stitches hurt.

  The pain was mild but unstoppable. I had never been in a fight before. Growing up in Wellesley, going to MIT, and working in high tech had never exposed me, not once, to a situation where someone could or would inflict pain upon me. Now that it had happened, I realized how little control I had over my life.