2 Executive Retention

by Maria E. Schneider

  "You're so funny."

  "Watch this." Radar started a program. The human resources database came up, the payroll database and a mess of Word files. "So far these are the only accounts that met the weird hours. A lot of that stuff is probably okay to be accessed, but we have to start the chase somewhere."

  I peered over his shoulder at the list. "What are the Word documents?"

  "I dunno. Look through them and see if they contain anything interesting."

  He had already set up the extra computer, so I sat down in front of it. The information didn't look particularly interesting, but I opened about five of the files and started reading. Two of them were related to hiring; there was a list of grade levels and salaries. One of them appeared to be a ranking of every single employee in the company, a file most likely related to the layoff.

  Inspiration hit. "How can I tell where these employees live?" Okay, it was none of my business, and Huntington was probably right; knowing which employees he was watching near my neighborhood might not be of great benefit to me. But since I had stumbled across the employee list and Huntington had been shot in my neighborhood, using the opportunity to find out who lived in Piney Oaks seemed like an excellent plan.

  Radar glanced at my screen. "We'd have to look them up. I've seen that list you're looking at. It's just a list of all the employees pulled from the employee database. The red names are the guys that got the ax."

  "Oh." I scanned the list. "I see the two names of the contractors are red-lined. The job titles for those that got laid off are all over the place, aren't they? I wonder where they live." If Radar wouldn't show me how to look up addresses, I was out of luck because I wasn't going to be able to hack into the proper records on my own.

  Radar wheeled his chair over. "Why do you care where they live? Here, I can show you how to look up addresses."

  He must have gone into the human resource database using a back door because no password was required. I was pretty sure there was supposed to be one. Otherwise, people like me could willy-nilly change their salaries and titles and maybe even give themselves a retention bonus.

  Since he was watching over my shoulder, I started with the contractor that Becky had told me about. Stella didn't live anywhere near me. Of course, as I was looking up names, it occurred to me that more than one person at Acetel could live within walking distance of my house and be a resident of Piney Oaks. Then again, Piney Oaks was at least a notch or two above my neighborhood. The houses were new and had been designed by a custom builder. I was looking for…someone with a legal or illegal income who could afford such digs.

  Radar was still watching, so I gave him a tight smile. I knew the name I really wanted to look up, but I wasn't sure I wanted Radar to know that I was looking for Jacques' home address, so I checked the next two people on the layoff list instead. They had post office boxes, one in San Jose and one in Denton. The next person also had a post office box listed in Denton.

  Radar looked down at his cell phone and flipped open the handset. Since it had buzzed and he didn't talk, I assumed it was a page, not a call. He ignored me and sat down at his console quickly.

  Good. Now that he wasn't looking, I looked up Jacques' address, not only because I was suspicious of him, but because the guy had annoyed my last nerve today. Sadly, he didn't live in Piney Oaks. Arnold wasn't above suspicion either, but he lived over in Alpine Hills near Huntington. A very nice neighborhood and easy for Huntington to keep an eye on if need be.

  Hmph. Maybe Huntington was watching every person in the company and figuring out who lived in Piney Oaks wouldn't be all that informative.

  Still...I went down the list, hitting three more people who had been laid off. Two of them had post office boxes in Denton and one had a street address in San Jose.

  I started to look up Becky's address because she was next on the list, but seeing Becky's name reminded me of the contractors. Why were there so many laid off people with Denton addresses? Hadn't Becky told me that only the contractors had been laid off in Denton?

  I scanned down the list and checked another laid off person. Another post office box in Denton. Maybe I had misunderstood Becky about where the laid off people lived, but it seemed strange that most of them had post office boxes instead of street addresses or apartment numbers.

  I checked another one. Alvin Nygen had a post office box in Denton as well.

  I spotted the other contractor's name: Ben Martinez. Maybe he lived in Piney Oaks. Maybe he had started this entire investigation because he was a disgruntled, laid-off employee. Then, he had caught Huntington snooping near his home and shot him.

  I didn't get a chance to find out where Ben Martinez lived. Radar looked up from his computer. "What are you doing!?!" His chair rolled close to mine so he could stare at my monitor.

  "Huh? I just finished looking at the name Alvin Nygen. To see if he worked in Denton or not. And he did."

  "Troll dung," he muttered. He pushed himself back to his computer and typed furiously. "Get out of there."

  I obeyed, and then sat and waited. He kept typing. "That page I got--someone tagged us looking. An email got sent after you opened one or more of those files. It looks like the email is going through one of the IT mail accounts to somewhere else." He typed some more. "Yup, several emails."

  "What?"

  He didn't stop typing. "When I have a file tagged--when I'm watching the file--I get an email if that file gets accessed. It looks like someone else had a tag on one or more of the files you opened…and bam, we've been caught. There was a program executed to send an email to whoever was watching. What were you doing?"

  I blinked. "I was looking at employee addresses. Mostly the ones that got laid off. Do they have all the laid off employees tagged?"

  "Don't try that yet!" He started to type, stopped, then started again. "Troll crap in a dungeon."

  I sat quietly, letting him think.

  "I should be able to figure out the name on the mailbox that is being notified, but it's going to take more time. The guy was clever and used a forwarding mechanism rather than going straight to a single name. Meanwhile, someone knows we've been in here. Crap. They probably knew the first time I was looking around."

  "Why would anyone care if we accessed someone's file that isn't even working here anymore?"

  "Who knows? You're the genius that is looking for something."

  "How do you know someone tagged you before?"

  He scrunched back in his chair. "Not sure if they did. I've been in and out and all over the place. I didn't have it set up as carefully as I do now. I wouldn't have figured it out now if I hadn't started getting paranoid and tracking certain other activities."

  "Can I open another one? Can you stop the email notification from going out?"

  He thought about it. Without answering, he wiggled his fingers over the keyboard and then did some typing. "Okay, what is the next name?"

  I found the name of the next person on the list who had been laid off. "Sandra Garcia."

  "Why couldn't I have a normal job? No, I have to get involved with genius wander around." After several minutes of frenzied typing, he ordered, "Okay, try it."

  I opened it. Bingo. Denton, Colorado, post office box. That made at least six people that had supposedly gotten laid off in Denton, and they all had post office boxes. I was pretty sure Becky had told me only contractors got let go. I hadn't been keeping track of the San Jose addresses, but there had been a lot of post office box listings there too.

  I was able to glimpse Sandra's over fifty-thousand-dollar salary before Radar shouted, "Close it!" Then he slumped over. "Too late."

  "It sent another one?"

  He shook his head. "Not exactly." His cell phone buzzed again indicating an incoming page. He didn't look at it.

  "What?" I whispered.

  "The mail server went down because my little setup wasn't quite sophisticated enough." He chewed on his nails. "I bet that email notification got stuck…I wonder if I can tra
ck the forwarding when I bring the server back up. Of course, all that it is likely to tell us is his fake account name. He could go in and delete that before I get a chance to trace it too."

  Network accounts were very complex, but in general, it sounded like the hacker was tracking the hacker who was tracking him. If someone was watching activities that closely, something was very wrong. "If the mail server is down, can I access these other accounts?" I still didn't know what I was looking for, but if someone was interested in us looking, I figured I should look some more.

  He didn't look happy. "You could, but that's not going to stop the program that sends emails. They will queue up somewhere. This guy is going to know we were looking at these files. This was not a good idea."

  "How are they going to know it was us?"

  He glared at me. "They won't know because I'm not using my real name. The only way anyone would know is if you told someone. And you are not going to tell anyone."

  In the dark, with the blue light from the monitor illuminating only one side of his scraggly hair, he looked very unsavory. His tone of voice wasn't exactly sweetness and light either.

  I felt a need to remind him that cameras were watching. "I guess the only person that will know is the guy with the cameras."

  He glanced up at the ceiling. "Yeah, whatever." He looked back at me. "Look, I'll have to work on this some more to be able to tell you whether or not we can keep netting around. But you were right about one thing."

  "Oh?" I was ridiculously pleased to have any good news.

  "Someone is up to something. People don't set traps unless they are running some sort of game."

  I thought long and hard about that, but it still bothered me, no matter how I looked at it. I finally asked, "So, uh, why exactly do you set traps?"

  He looked back over at me. Out came the grin. "Heh, heh, heh," was all he said.

  Chapter 21

  I tried to call Huntington both when I got home and then again the next morning. For an injured man, he sure was out and about. I didn't want to leave a message since what Radar and I found seemed awfully important.

  At work the next morning, I called Becky. I fully planned to pump her about the layoffs again. "Are you free for lunch today?" I asked.

  "Absolutely. We can leave now. I'm starved!"

  "Except that it's eight in the morning. That would be breakfast."

  "Okay, okay. We can wait until noon."

  Since she didn't seem to be in a hurry to get off the phone, I asked the first of my questions. "Are you sure that no one from Arnold or Jacques' group got laid off? Some guy in the lab said something about a bunch of layoffs here in Denton. I hope no one thinks I took a job out from under someone."

  "No way! We were really lucky here. We only lost Ben and Stella, but Stella doesn't count because they hired her back. I'm sure no one is looking at you like you took someone else's job! Maybe if they knew about you in San Jose, but not here."

  "Thanks, you're probably right. Twelve for lunch?"

  "Excellent. I'll come grab you from the lab."

  What were the chances that six other people had been laid off and that Becky knew none of them? Not...likely.

  I headed for the lab to get some work done. Before I made it to the stairwell, a voice hailed me. "Sedona!"

  Arnold was standing in the hallway with Pete Saget, the CFO. "You have a minute? I wanted to introduce you to Pete while he's in town."

  That seemed quite unnecessary, but I marched over and stuck out my hand. "Hi."

  Arnold pushed his glasses high on his nose and smiled wide. "Sedona has been working on a Kronology case, if you can believe it. She's making some headway. I've been so impressed I've been thinking she'd make a great addition to my A-team."

  Well, that was news to me. My eyes narrowed.

  Pete gave me a football coach evaluation look. I did my best to remove the distrust from my face. I didn't like being a pawn in other people's power games, especially when those people didn't bother to talk to me first.

  "How are you liking Acetel?" Pete asked. "Finding it challenging?"

  "Yes," I responded to his second question rather than his first.

  Arnold punched my shoulder playfully, "What do you think, are you ready to move to the A-team?"

  Oh, a trick question. If I said no, it made me look like I didn't want to excel. If I said yes, Arnold would assume he had my blessing. Now see, this was not good. Being cornered made me ugly. My hair stood on end, and I was positive my fingernails grew an inch. It was possible a little forked tail whipped around behind me. "I'm confused," I said, looking first at one man and then the other. "I thought I was hired onto the A-team working for Jacques. I mean, I was told you needed a specialist-- a top person in this spot."

  CFOs don't get to be CFO's without political acumen. "Absolutely. All of our positions are top-notch. We want keen investigative minds, ones that grow, become team players, but still think outside the box."

  What? Garble-gook. I put on my very, very sweet face, the one that made Sean worry. "Jacques has quite a reputation. I noticed that he takes on cases that no one else will touch. I heard he is up for a promotion to head up the whole Denton office because he is so good at coaching individuals on their career goals." And wasting my time, but I left that part out.

  Arnold pushed on his glasses again and glanced sideways at Pete.

  See, that was the problem with politics. You think you're maneuvering and making headway only to find out that last left turn was a u-turn.

  Arnold's neck got red as we waited for a response from Pete.

  Pete's dark eyes bored into me, making me feel like a scummy beetle rather than a potential member of the football team. Perhaps he didn't care for my brand of self-defense.

  "Jacques is a good manager, isn't he?" Pete said. "I'm very lucky to have good managers in Denton. They keep the ship steering in the right direction." He slapped Arnold's shoulder and moved away, down the hall. "It was nice to meet you, Sedona. Keep up the good work."

  "Nice to have met you too." Arnold would likely bomb my office later. At worst he was probably hoping to tout his stupid A-team and at best plotting to get an additional employee out of it. Maybe I should have told him I was working undercover for Huntington, and I didn't care about any of his petty little games.

  Riiight.

  I really needed to find Huntington and give him an update. My mind was still chewing over the post office boxes in Denton. Why didn't any of them have street addresses? Anyone could open a post office box. And that same anyone could pick up a paycheck. But…who were the employees? And why didn't anyone here seem to know about them?

  I thought of the size of the write-off for the quarter. Was Acetel paying an entire team that worked on a different campus? A secret workshop that solved customer cases, but instead of that payment going to Acetel, it went straight into an embezzler's pocket?

  I closed my eyes, but could only vaguely remember Bill saying he was happy he hadn't gotten laid off. He might have said something about San Jose, but I couldn't swear to it.

  Before lunchtime, even with half my brain on something else, I managed to record the performance numbers and start another test. I finished up the report for the Kronology customer and sent it to Jacques for approval. Instead of answering my email with glowing praise, he sent me a meeting request for three o'clock to go over my employee improvement survey questions. What a pain in the posterior.

  Becky came down early for lunch, but I was ready.

  We headed to the parking lot, walking single file down the stairs that graced the dormant grassy slope outside the building. We were halfway down when the black Lincoln screeched up and Beefy got out. His New York accent hadn't improved. "Youz needs to come with us."

  Of course, I should have expected my buddies to try again. It was terrible luck they picked lunchtime when I was on my way out with Becky.

  "Run," I screamed at Becky and shoved her back up the stairs. Mr. Beefy had a gun under
his jacket. He showed it to me, but kept it relatively hidden from the world at large.

  Becky did not run. What she did was let out a scream that nearly shattered the windows on the Lincoln.

  I faced the enemy and grabbed the railing on either side of the stairs as Beefy came my way. I jumped and let loose a kick. He leaned away. I would have missed completely except that with my hands on the rails, I had extra reach. My flailing leg caught his nose on the way down rather than on the way up.

  His nose popped, a quiet but distinct crunch. I guessed that his nasal accent was about to get worse.

  Panicked by the continued screaming from behind me, and the fact that the driver was getting out of the car to help, I followed the kick by launching myself away from Becky towards Beefy. The palm of my hand smacked his already bleeding nose. He went over backwards like the side of beef he resembled.

  Sadly, the driver didn't hesitate. He took the stairs toward me three at a time.

  I jumped the rail and ran, sliding across the frozen grass slope. Thank God I never wore heels to work.

  Contrary to my thinking that Becky was no help at all, her unabated screaming brought people to the door. Before the Bun-dozer could run me down, three and then four guys poured out of the building. The Bun-dozer reversed. He started to jump back over the railing and grab his buddy, but there wasn't time. He changed directions again. With a flying leap, he sprawled inside the passenger side of the Lincoln. For a moment, he looked like a beached whale trying to swim his way to the steering wheel, but he managed to slam the passenger door shut and step on the gas.

  My rescuers ran to Beefy just as the guy started to get up. I recognized Bill as he shuffled in a funny lope down the steps. With a loud plop and a dull cracking noise, he sat himself proudly atop Beefy.

  Still, Becky did not stop screaming. "My God, my God, Sedona!" This was followed by another banshee wail, and an operatic screech of, "Are you okay?" She got a leg up over the rail and then ran my way, flailing her arms like a windmill.

  Dazed, I sat down hard and hoped she didn't run right over me. The cold ground went straight through my jeans, but was real and somehow comforting. Becky took a couple more woozy steps in my direction, her hand to her heart. "I don't feel so good. Spots. Black spots." Her head searched around like a drunk looking for car keys. "Help!"