The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  Thank goodness there was only one more day in the workweek or I would have been arrested. Monday morning in the Denver airport, the scales had fallen off my eyes, and I caught a glimmer of the forest instead of just the trees. I was working for a company that brought information together like never before. Now I knew that wasn’t always a good thing.

  I no longer liked my work.

  I slogged away, though, using half as many brain cells as usual, but in the distracted world of Baja Breeze, who could tell? I took honest-to-goodness lunches away from my desk and left at five, the normal leaving hour for most Americans except for the Zaan consultants, who left around seven or eight most nights, and the Baja Breeze crowd, who left at four unless they had to leave at three or three-thirty to pick up babies or go watch soccer games or just get out of there because they were going crazy.

  I pretty much had the front door to myself when I left.

  No one noticed except Michael de Leon, who wanted to go to lunch on Thursday. We walked the couple of blocks to a little shopping strip and indulged in Thai food. The Tiger Lily wasn’t the best place to have a conversation because the tables overflowed with people, but Michael had an anonymous crush on a waitress there.

  “How’s the data conversion going?” I asked him even though I knew the answer. Clean data consumed most of my thinking that week.

  He looked at the ceiling and shook his head. “Oh my God, you won’t believe this. I had to sit Keri down this morning and explain to her once again what they had to do to clean up their data and why it was so important not to bring over bad data.”

  “You’re talking about Carry, that ditz on the HR team, not Keri, the project manager, right?”

  He rubbed his neck and shook his head again. For an odd second, he looked like Eddy—dark hair, soft smile, and tired gaze. “Keri the project manager.”

  “So apparently, she hasn’t been reading any of those emails I’ve written for her to send out under her name.”

  “Oh, I think she’s reading them. There just aren’t any brain cells between her left ear and right ear to trap any of the information.”

  Kai, the unknowing object of Michael’s unrequited love, came and took our order. Before she even left the table, Michael, who apparently had no flirting skills, started in again. “My ten-year-old niece can explain what data conversion is better than Keri.”

  Kai rolled her eyes. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  We both looked at her and laughed.

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s Silicon Valley.” She jerked her head toward the kitchen. “Even the dishwasher can tell you how important it is to have clean data.” She left the table but muttered back to us, “Of course, he’s a computer science major at Stanford.”

  “Trolling for tips,” I said.

  “It works. It works,” Michael said. “Course, she has great legs, too.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “About Kai?” He sounded slightly eager. When you put in twelve-hour days, you don’t have much of a social life. A waitress with great legs had to fuel him for weeks.

  I laughed. “Yeah, about Kai, but also about Baja Breeze. If they don’t clean up their data, they simply can’t go live. What are you going to do?”

  “Work twice as hard. Cover my backside with a pile of documentation.” He fiddled with his glass of ice tea. “Or do what you’re doing.”

  I’m sure I flushed. “What’s that?”

  “Check out?” He looked at me. “I’m not sure. Is that what you’re doing?”

  I should have had some kind of denial, but for all my thinking that week, I’d forgotten to think up an excuse. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you show up at eight, you leave for lunch, you leave at five. While you’re there, you get the work done, but there’s something missing.”

  “I have to put in ten hours of overtime to prove my worth? My work’s not good enough this week?”

  “Maggie, your work is fabulous. On your worst day, your work is better than any ten people at Baja Breeze. But this week, it’s all just been more mechanical somehow. No chicken shit, but no chicken salad.” We’d talked about the chicken byproducts of my job lots of times.

  “Has someone else noticed? Has anyone complained?” I was uncomfortable. I measured myself by what others thought. Michael mattered.

  “No, no, no. Nothing like that. You can do this job in your sleep. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.” He fiddled with his straw and looked at me sideways. “Are you and Eddy on the outs?”

  I shook my head. This was the third project Michael and I had been on together, but how well did I know him? He was smart, skilled, hardworking, generous, kind, and sometimes funny. But could I trust him?

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. The understatement of the week.

  Kai showed up then with steaming plates of curry. I savored the delicate blend of coriander, cumin, ginger, and lemon grass. Michael savored his view of Kai’s legs.

  “I confirmed with the dishwasher,” she said. “Garbage in. Garbage out.” I think she winked at Michael. He must have thought so, too, because he blushed and giggled a little uncomfortably.

  When she left, I said, “Ask her out.” I was glad to have a distraction.

  “I was that obvious?”

  “Ohhhh yeah.”

  “I don’t have time for a relationship.”

  “Then make time.”

  “You’re taking us off the subject.”

  “We had a subject?” I ladled several spoonfuls of curry over my rice. “This is why I prefer California projects. You know what I eat in Nebraska?”

  “Beef.”

  “It’s what’s for dinner. That and iceberg lettuce and canned green beans.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  I couldn’t believe his persistence. I guess that tenaciousness was what made him such a great project manager. Maybe it was a mistake—or maybe it was the curry—but I finally asked, “Did you get your smallpox vaccine yet?” Sometimes you just have to trust your instincts.

  He shook his head. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Everything.” I laid out my vaccine day. He slowed his eating a little but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s a lot of information to ask for, don’t you think?”

  He didn’t really pause before he nodded.

  “What do you think they need all that information for?” I asked.

  Michael shrugged his shoulders slightly and shook his head.

  “Put your project manager hat on,” I said. “If you could get Baja Breeze’s customers and vendors to eagerly enter their own information and, oh by the way, give you even more information than what they’ve given Baja Breeze to date, would that solve your data-conversion problems?”

  He set his chopsticks down.

  “Would that be a project manager’s dream?”

  He tilted his head in agreement.

  “Now here’s the kicker. Maybe the two are unrelated, but the mood I was in on Monday told me they’re one and the same.” I ticked off the mini billboards at the Denver airport: “What do you need to know? Who else needs to know it? What will you be able to do when you know it? Zaan: Now you can know it.”

  “Our new ad campaign.” He sighed.

  “You know we delivered the database technology and built the software for the CDC to track the spread of diseases.”

  “Not only do I know it, I know the Zaan project manager for that one. We were on a complicated project together a couple years ago. He’s smart. Really smart.”

  “So what do you think his take on all this would be?”

  “It’ll be easy enough to find out. He’s local.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  SANJEEV SRIVASTAVA, THE ZAAN CDC PROJECT MANAGER, actually happened to be in town and agreed to meet us for dinner at an Indian restaurant. Sanjeev ordered for us. He could have been a cousin to th
e waiter. They both had the same rounded noses and deep-set black eyes, the same lean, wiry bodies. They conversed in a lilting, rolling speech. It was English, but I didn’t understand them.

  Now that we were here, it was too awkward. I was glad that Michael and Sanjeev were at least good friends. They talked about this and that, and we all complained about how wearing it was to work for Zaan. Sanjeev and I compared point status on airlines and hotels. I couldn’t believe it, but he had even more than I did, so we had a bonding of sorts. The waiter began bringing course after course, all vegetarian. Michael and I split a bottle of wine. Sanjeev had hot tea.

  Eventually, Michael edged toward the subject. “So you finally rolled off the CDC project?”

  Sanjeev’s eyes narrowed very, very slightly. “We finished it in August.”

  “What a grind,” I said. “San Francisco to Atlanta. No wonder you have more miles. The time zone differences are a beast. West Coast to East Coast—that’s the full stretch.”

  “It’s grueling,” he said. “I ended up spending some of my weekends there.”

  “So what did the CDC implement?” Michael asked.

  Sanjeev didn’t even pause. “Most of it was database stuff. We built some one-off software to enter the data.”

  “No kidding? New apps? Must have been a huge project.”

  “The Zaan portion was less than a hundred and twenty million. The entire project, though, was well over a billion.”

  “Whoa! What did they spend the other nine hundred million on?” Michael asked. We were all prima donnas. To think of the Zaan portion being only a fraction of the whole was humbling for all three of us.

  Still, Sanjeev swaggered a little as he talked. “A lot of it was hardware. They had a whole staffing plan, too, and some training.”

  “But a billion? For the CDC? What in the world were they doing? Building a new atomic bomb?” I asked.

  Sanjeev momentarily stopped eating and leaned back into his chair. “Like I said, we were a drop in the bucket. The reason we were even there was the power of our database. They needed information. We gave them a way to store it and organize it.”

  “That’s a lot of money to spend on a database. I don’t care how sophisticated it is,” Michael said.

  Sanjeev didn’t bite. The three of us ate in awkward silence.

  Finally, I asked, “What kind of an application did they build?”

  Sanjeev tore off a piece of poori and sopped up some vegetables. He seemed intent on what he was doing. I couldn’t tell if the silence was deliberate or accidental.

  Michael asked again, “What kind of an app would the CDC need that we didn’t already have?”

  Sanjeev was an artist in silence. He just kept on eating.

  I would have stopped asking, but Michael was on a mission. “Sanjeev.” He waited until Sanjeev looked at him. “What kind of application did they build? What was worth a hundred and twenty million to the CDC?”

  I could have sworn he looked at my upper left arm, the one that had a slowly healing small, crusty red bump. “It was a simple one. They only needed to be able to store, organize, and retrieve information. Tracking the information was important, too,” he said. He shifted his eyes around the room.

  “But about what?” Michael asked.

  “The epidemic du jour.”

  “You mean smallpox?” I asked.

  He lowered his voice. “That would seem to be the one.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  “HE NEVER ACTUALLY GOT RUDE,” I TOLD EDDY on the way home from the airport. “He just clammed up. Said he signed a nondisclosure agreement with the CDC.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  I thought for a minute back through my projects. “On one level, it’s not unusual at all. Every time a company issues me a temporary contractor badge, I have to sign a statement like that. But it never kept anyone from talking about their projects or using those projects as examples to inject a come-to-Jesus moment into the next project.”

  “But isn’t that kind of thing usually about disclosing financial information or trade secrets? ”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s about. Sanjeev wouldn’t talk about the project itself, but he went into some detail about why he couldn’t talk about it. He said the CDC had lawyers sit with each consultant individually and explain what they could talk about and what they couldn’t.”

  “Maybe that was his message.”

  “Maybe so.” I thought about that for a while. “Michael says Sanjeev is a good guy, which is why he thought it would be worth our while to talk to him. Sanjeev also said they did this intense background check on everyone. It sounded pretty much like what I went through to get vaccinated.”

  “You mean they did the fingerprinting and the saliva sample?” Eddy raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Just to work on some software and a database? That’s a little intense, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Here’s the funny thing, though. I asked him if he’d gotten his vaccination yet.”

  “And?”

  We’d pulled into our drive, but neither of us made a move to get out of the car.

  “He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. So I asked him again.”

  “Did he answer you?”

  I gently rubbed the tender red spot on my arm. “He said it was the last thing they did before they wrapped up the project.”

  Eddy carried my suitcase into the house. That was our division of labor: I dragged my bags through every airport in the world, but when it reached our property line, he took over. I took a quick shower and found something that didn’t smell like a suitcase to change into while Eddy heated up some chicken tortilla soup and threw together a green salad.

  “So when did they finish the project?” Eddy asked when we sat down to eat.

  “August.”

  “August?” Eddy tilted his head.

  “August.”

  “But the first—“

  “Yes. I know. The first smallpox death was reported in September. He refused to say anything else at that point and made it clear that Michael and I should just drop the subject. Not just for the evening, but drop it period. That we really didn’t want to go there.”

  “He threatened you?” Eddy had hardly touched his soup.

  “No, no, no. Not personally.” What had he done? Had he said something specifically or was it just the cumulative effect of the evening? It was hard to put my finger on anything tangible. “He seemed really agitated. He kept fiddling with his silverware and napkin. Even after we stopped talking about the CDC project, he kept looking around the restaurant. He wouldn’t talk at all when the waiter came around.”

  “So why did all that make you feel threatened?”

  “When we left the restaurant that night, the three of us stood outside the restaurant and chatted a couple of minutes. Just before he walked off, he said something to the effect that what you know can hurt you, that this was one of those things to stay below the radar on. And then he left.”

  Eddy scratched his head. He still hadn’t touched his soup. “So what do you think he meant?”

  I finally told Eddy what I’d been thinking about non-stop for the last twenty-four hours. “I think building a website about smallpox isn’t under the radar. What do you think?”

  He just shook his head and finally started eating his soup.

  CHAPTER

  16

  I SHOULD HAVE CALLED IN SICK, but in all the years I’d worked for Zaan, I’d never missed a day of travel or work and, frankly, wasn’t all that sure what excuse I would need to stay home. If my manager told me to rest up and fly out on Tuesday, then it wasn’t worth the effort of ditching on Monday.

  The only positive thing about traveling was that with everyone’s high anxiety about smallpox, far fewer people were flying, so the lines were shorter and the planes only half full. Of course, I don’t think any of the airlines thought that was a positive thing. And their resp
onse was only logical: they started cutting flights, which meant that instead of a door-to-door trip to Nebraska Beef Products of seven and half hours, my new schedule stretched out to nine hours. Already the airlines—those that had survived the 9/11 economic catastrophe and the 2008 economic collapse—were making noises about needing government subsidies if the US was going to keep the big players (and the big employers) around.

  In fact, this smallpox epidemic was taking its toll on just about everyone except NBP, which had seen a bump in numbers, particularly the higher end cuts, just as Scott Leinbach, the NBP project manager, had predicted. As he pointed out, if people can’t afford to go on vacation because they’re worried about losing their jobs, they indulge in a pricier steak to comfort themselves.

  National crisis or not, NBP was in a celebratory mood. The project was going very well, revenue was up, and Nebraska had only twelve newly reported cases of smallpox in a corner not close to Timber. As a thank-you to the project team for successfully completing the third out of four rounds of software testing, the CEO invited the entire team to his house for a late afternoon barbecue. Ordinarily, a cookout in November in Nebraska doesn’t fit my definition of a good time, but the NBP people promised the CEO had a house big enough for all of us, and Bob Litten wasn’t CEO of a beef packing plant for nothing.

  By Colorado standards, Bob Litten’s house was dated but palatial. The sprawling fifties brick rancher set on five acres of lawn and landscaped gardens put me in a short photo-snapping frenzy. Never mind that the guest bathroom was pink ceramic, circa 1956 (I couldn’t help myself and checked the stamped date on the inside of the toilet lid), and the kitchen hadn’t been updated since the almond years of the eighties—when I stepped out onto the deck, I realized why they hadn’t remembered to remodel: the view of green, rolling hills that swept into a fireball sunset made up for anything manmade on the other side of the sliding glass doors. People rave about Colorado’s beauty. And it’s true, our mountains are amazing. But who in Nebraska can feel shortchanged when they can see five miles into a dusk like that?