by Jim Beegle
He made the familiar drive from the airport east to his house. He put the car in the garage and commanded the door to close with the remote that for the most part lived on the passenger seat in the car. He became aware that Amy had arrived home while he was gone when he passed from the garage through the kitchen to the living room and saw her luggage. The lights were off in the room. The whole house was dark. He made his way up the stairs and into their bedroom and looked at the bed. Amy was in it, sheet twisted around her body and deep in sleep. Mark quietly went into the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the lights so as not to wake his wife. When he did get the door closed and the lights on, items on the vanity informed him that his efforts at being quiet were more than likely wasted. Amy’s sleeping pill bottle sat on the counter by the sink where she had left it after fishing the pills from her toiletry kit that she kept in her luggage.
It was not uncommon for her to have trouble sleeping when she traveled or when she finally managed to make it back to the central time zone of the United States. Multiple time zones, different foods, stress, and hours sitting on a plane could really mess up your sleeping cycle. Amy had once mentioned her troubles readjusting to sleeping cycles after returning from overseas a few years earlier to her doctor. The doctor had prescribed a very powerful sleeping pill to help her get over the first few nights back. Mark knew it must be good. Two years ago he had hurt his back when he slipped on a patch of ice in their driveway. She had given him one of the pills to help him get to sleep that night. It had worked very well. He knew it must be powerful if it could have that kind of effect on him. He was at least seventy-five pounds heavier than his wife was. One of these pills and Amy would be asleep in five minutes and she would sleep for ten to twelve hours without waking. She had taken one tonight when she had arrived home. Mark would not be able to talk to her until the next day. Not that he really had that much to say to her, but it would be nice to see how the trip had gone. Instead of joining Amy in bed, Mark quietly slipped out of the room and downstairs to his office.
He powered up the computer on his desk so he could check the mail that had been collecting there since Friday. When he logged in he discovered, just as he had suspected, a handful of messages from people within the company including several from Sandy. But there were two in the inbox that he did not recognize right away. Upon closer study, he realized that they were from Marin, and that one of the messages had a document attached to it. He opened this one first and found a short message from her.
Dear Mark,
I found this article this morning when I was going through some of the files I had pulled to get you the information that I brought to you Friday. I don’t know how I missed it but thought it might be of interest to you. If you need to ask me about this or anything else, give me a call at home. The number is 817-555-3489.
Thanks too for a nice dinner and for being concerned about my safety. It was very nice of you and you were a perfect gentleman.
Marin
Attached to the email was a document that Marin had scanned for him. It was a report from the FBI to Alan Ketchem, currently the president and CEO of IBC, and at that time president of the Southwest Bank of Houston. The report outlined the FBI’s belief that David Cameron had gotten plastic surgery while in Switzerland to change his appearance. Mark’s mind went back to the driver’s licenses and passport that he had looked at in Nassau. Even compensating for the additional twenty years he did not think that they favored Cecil very much. Now he knew why. It seemed Cecil had gone to a lot of trouble to cover not only the movement of the money, but his own movements as well. He sat in his chair and reread the short article, thinking about the planning that must have gone into Cecil’s robbery and escape.
He then went to her second email.
Mark,
I wanted you to know that I got the flowers. They are lovely and you shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble. It was my pleasure to help, but the flowers are nice and I appreciate you thinking of me.
Marin
P.S.—I took the card off of them just in case you were wondering. I don’t want to cause you a problem at home. After all, maybe I would like to come back to your place sometime.
Mark congratulated himself on knowing that Marin would not leave the card on the flowers. It was good to know that she was being careful. But what was the last sentence of the letter all about? Was she making a pass at him? Was Marin responding to a pass he made and couldn’t remember? He replayed over in his mind the time she had been in Runaway Bay. There was nothing in those recollections that could be misconstrued as a pass. Maybe she was just teasing him to see how he would react. Maybe she wasn’t?
He quickly wrote an email back to Marin, thanking her for the FBI documents and to letting her know that it was his pleasure to send her the flowers and she had earned them. He asked her again to let him know how much time she had put into getting the information so she could be paid. He thought about her postscript and wondered if he should make any comment. What comment could he make? In the end, he decided to say nothing. As he had done with other issues over the last seventy-two hours Mark set this one aside as well in order to tackle the rest of his email.
The next morning Amy was still sleeping when Mark left at six o’clock and headed downtown to his office. He had spent the night on the couch where he fell asleep reading. Waking at five with a stiff neck, Mark decided to give up sleeping and get a head start on the traffic for once. He made coffee and went through the rest of his morning routine before easing his car out into the light traffic headed south of the Dallas Tollway.
He was working on the second pot of coffee from the office kitchen when Sandy arrived just a little before eight. She wandered into Mark’s office to check his out basket and ask him how the meeting had gone.
“You may want to start sucking up to someone else around here.” Sandy looked at him with a questioning look. He grinned at her and said, “I’m afraid I am in trouble.”
“What did you do this time?” she asked.
“Told the truth.” Sandy just looked at him and shook her head.
“I should never let you go anywhere by yourself,” she said with a weak attempt at humor.
Mark returned her weak smile with one of his own just as his phone began ringing. He answered it as Sandy walked out of his office and into hers, outgoing mail in hand. The rest of the day was spent in a series of phone calls, meetings, and time at his desk either working on the code to the software or reviewing the work of others. Sandy fetched lunch from vending machines in the kitchen and he consumed it while digging through the piles of paperwork that came and went through the room as if it were a comet on a short orbit trail.
It was Sandy who informed him that yet another day had come and gone when she stuck her head through the office door to say good night. Mark followed an hour later and headed to the parking lot in the basement to make the drive home. As he drove with the city fading behind him in the setting sun of the mild November day, Mark’s mind once more drifted to Marin’s email from the night before and what she could have meant by her closing line to the second letter: I might like to come back sometime. He would like to say that he considered the vows that he had made to Amy when they married the glue that kept him on the path of monogamy. But the truth of the matter was the only thing that was not contributing to the unraveling of his marriage was the thing that kept him faithful to Amy. After work, there was little time left in most days to do much more than eat and sleep.
Because of his position within Micronix, it was an unwritten rule that he was for all intents and purposes “out of bounds” to the people inside the company. Sandy flirted with him in a good-natured way, but even that was restrained and done more for her entertainment and not anything serious. As he drove through his neighborhood he tried to name even one woman he knew that was neither a friend of Amy’s nor a co-worker’s at Micronix. The list was exceedingly short and really included only Marin’s nam
e and Mrs. Willies when he came right down to it. Well, Mrs. Willies was definitely out of bounds, and even though Marin worked with Amy, he considered her neutral in his classification system. Marin was not on Amy’s “A” list of people needed in her assault on the corporate towers. No, there was no mistaking it. One of the things that had from the beginning united Mark and Marin was a distrust of Amy and her motives. He could not help but smile to himself as he drove his car into the garage.
He didn’t know when she had finally gotten up that day, but Amy was up and in the kitchen when Mark came in through from the garage. She was dressed in designer jeans and a white sweatshirt that likely cost more than all the pairs of jeans Mark had in his closet. He kissed Amy as he moved through the room to the refrigerator.
“How was Moscow?” he asked as he fished a beer out from the back of the fridge. He pointed at the bottle in his hand to see if Amy wanted one. She shook her head no to a beer before answering the question he’d asked.
“It was nice. Cold, but we got a lot done.”
“Great,” Mark said as he opened the beer bottle and hoped his voice communicated more excitement than he felt. “Did you close the deal?”
“I’m not sure. It’s kind of funny. You work and work and work on something and one day you realize that somewhere in the process you accomplished what you set out to do but don’t really remember when the change-over took place.” Without really thinking about it, Amy pulled a beer glass from the cupboard and set it on the counter. Mark ignored it and continued to take direct pulls from the brown, long-necked bottle.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Mark said throwing the empty into the wastebasket under the sink. “I work on software for years and then wonder what happened to it before I realize it’s loaded on my computer and I am using it every day. Your mind just gets focused and you lose track of what’s happening around you sometimes.” He looked at his wife when he finished speaking and guessed that she had taken in their discussion about business and was in the process of applying it to their marriage, just as he was doing. “Are you working any this week?”
“I may go in for a little while tomorrow, but I am not sure yet. I will need to go in Friday for sure,” she replied to his question. One of the many laws that the United States Congress passed in the wake of the bank failures in the 1930s was legislation that prevented any bank from being closed for more than three days in a row. The law was on the books, in part, to help people get to their money. It was also there to make sure that no one working in the bank could steal the deposits and have any more than a three-day head start on the sheriff.
“How about you?” his wife asked.
“We’re closed Thursday and Friday. Everyone else in your department working?” he asked in the same conversational tone.
“Oh, I don’t know, but I am sure most of the crew will be there. Hamilton called a meeting to review this last trip during lunch on Friday, so I imagine most of them will be in.” Hamilton was Amy’s direct boss and currently her patron for greater glory in the world of IBC. Mark made a note of the fact that she and her boss would be working Friday and filed it away in the back of his head. Neither one of them was in much of a mood to cook so they headed out in Mark’s car to the El Fenix. The El Fenix was a Dallas landmark, an old family restaurant that had been in the same location close to the old Coca-Cola bottling plant on Lemon Avenue ever since it had opened. It was one of Mark’s favorite haunts, not only for the food but also for the colorful mix of customers. People from all walks of life waited for a table at El Fenix on a busy night. A few days before Thanksgiving most people were thinking of food other than Mexican so the wait for a table was brief.
Amy had bottled water and Mark drank beer over the chips and salsa that was placed on the table just as soon as they were seated. Amy talked most of the time they spent waiting for dinner and the talk was mostly of Hamilton’s and her successes in Europe over the last few weeks. Mark listened with something that would be best described as a notch above polite. It wasn’t because he had little interest in what she was saying, but most of what she talked about were details of international banking and its associated laws that sailed over Mark’s head. She was still wound up after dinner, talking all the way home of the grand schemes that they had for IBC in Russia. Either the conversation with Mark or the El Fenix Mexican food must have given her great insight into her schemes because, as soon as they got back to their home, she made camp on the phone and began talking in animated sentences to her boss. Two hours later he headed upstairs to bed and waved goodnight to Amy who was still talking with the same level of intensity as when she began the call.
The drive into his office the next morning was better than usual. Lots of people were taking the day off to get a jump on what the newspaper annually described as “the busiest travel day of the year.” Some of the schools were out and the combination made for an easy drive into Dallas. A large number of DECCO employees were either off or did not want to bother with anything that remotely resembled business. Mark knew this because his phone sat unused for most of the morning. Sandy had only been in once to ask if he needed more coffee before she went to the kitchen. Just after lunch when he was seriously thinking about calling it a day and going home his phone rang. Mark answered it and heard a howling coming through the receiver and into his ear.
“Hey, Slugger. How the hell are ya?” asked a voice over the phone that Mark instantly recognized as that of his long-time college buddy and more recent business partner, Patrick McDowell.
“Hiya, Pat, how are you?” Mark replied, a smile spreading across his face.
Pat McDowell was one of the five original owners of Micronix. He had been the one who had recruited Mark onto the team at the beginning of the planning for the new company. He had also been the one who lobbied the other three to let Mark buy into the startup with his ten thousand dollars instead of the twenty-five thousand the other four had put up. They had finally agreed, but in return, Mark got fewer of the shares of the company. Mark had more than made up for his friend’s faith in him by helping not only launch their software a few years earlier, but also by working on the complex undertaking of the IPO that had made them all a lot of money. When asked by his other three partners why he thought they needed Mark, Pat had told them it was because Mark was one of those rarest of people in the high-tech world: a hybrid.
Most people who make their living with or from computers can, for the most part, be very easily divided into two groups: Geeks or Marketing. Two such different and interdependent people founded Apple Computer: Steve Wozniak, the geek, and Steve Jobs, the marketing guy. Woz, as the people around him knew, was the technical genius who created the first Apple computer. He did it as a way to impress his buddies at the infamous Home Brew Club—a collection of computer hobbyists living in the San Francisco area that met once a week to show off their latest creations. Steve Jobs saw what Woz had created and envisioned not only a product to sell in his friends’ collections of hardware, but an industry that would change the lives of just about everyone in the world. Apart from each other, they were just a couple more guys with some pretty good ideas about how to make computers. Together, they founded one of the most exciting and interesting computer companies in the world.
Geeks are the guys who stay up all night long hacking out tedious line after tedious line of software code or work eighteen-hour days on end wiring chips and circuit boards together. They survive on high caffeine soft drinks, loud driving rock music, and the chance to impress fellow geeks with their work. They are the twenty-first century equivalent of coal miners, digging information from circuits and software code instead of loading rail cars with black gold from the earth. Both tasks are done with very little appreciation by the end user of their true value: how the coal keeps the water hot in the boiler or how the software code and hardware allows them to send email to their kids when they are on the road. But, like coal miners, geeks are the backbone of their industry.
It was in light of this that Pat had made his “hybrid” pronouncements about Mark. He claimed that Mark had a unique ability to understand the technical aspects of any product. Maybe not as quickly as some and maybe his software code lacked the flair of others, but it was always sound and it always worked. It was enough for Pat to know that when Mark talked to the engineers they listened to him and took notes. The “hybrid” part came from the “money” side of the business. It was here that Pat had come not only to respect but, to depend on his friend.
When Micronix was trying to explain their company to the investment firms they wanted to persuade to underwrite their initial public offering of stock, it was Mark who turned the trick for them. He could sit down with a group of fifty-year-old business bankers, serious white guys with serious money and a serious lack of understanding of anything Micronix was creating, and explain the most complex parts of their business in terms that were clear and simple. He painted word pictures for them with basic colors that he knew everyone could recognize. It was, Pat claimed, true artistry to watch. But most people outside the company and a substantial number of the people inside the company wondered what exactly Mark did. His name was somewhere on most of the patents and copyrights held by Micronix, but he didn’t spend all his time in the lab like the other engineers. He could be seen most days coming to work, not in the standard uniform of the geeks, tee shirts, and jeans but in a suit.