“Hold on a minute.” Easton’s voice had become crisp. It was replaced with hold music, which Dar suffered through, having an innate dislike for the song
Sleigh Ride.
It cut off thankfully on the third go-round, replaced by a rustle and a clearing of Gerry’s throat. “Ah, Dar?”
“Mm...still here.” Dar sketched a squirrel on her pad.
“I just checked, and no, we’ve got nothing dark there.” Gerry paused. “Nothing even remotely gray, as a matter of fact.”
Dar scowled, and put fangs on the squirrel. “Damn.” She exhaled.
“Okay, thanks, Gerry. I’ve got to hunt somewhere else for answers.”
“Problems?” The cautious question came back.
“Things that aren’t making sense,” Dar replied. “I hate that.”
A chuckle came through the line. “As well I remember. If you need any more information, Dar, get in touch, eh?”
“I will.” Dar hung up the cell phone and reviewed the data she had on her screen. “Okay.” She called up a new e-mail, clipped and pasted from the analyzer program into it, added notes, and sent it on its way.
“Let’s see what Mark can dig up about who bought that nice big hub that mysteriously connects to someone else’s network from inside a supposedly secure building.”
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Then she set up her transfer program and tapped into the base’s network, parsing all of its traffic and sending a running dump to her ops center in Miami. The big boxes there would digest the information and run her custom-designed systems analysis programs on it. That code would tell her if her gut instinct was right and there was something weird going on, or if she was just seeing spiders in the shadows.
Dar leaned back in her wooden chair and folded her arms as the data transfer kicked in. She looked up as a light knock sounded at the door. “Yes?”
Chuckie stuck his head inside the room. “Hey there, old buddy.
Can I interest you in some lunch?”
Dar smiled easily. “Sure.” She set her passwords and locked the laptop down, then stood up and joined Chuckie at the door. “You want to go downstairs or off base?” she asked. “I kind of have an itch for conch fritters.”
“You’re on,” Chuckie agreed happily. “I’ve been buried up to my butt in status reports all day. I’ve got ten new recruits coming from this class, and boy howdy, I hope those little suckers don’t sink the boat before we clear international waters.” He put a hand on Dar’s back and guided her down the hall. “Dad says you plan on doing a checkout on the training process here, that right?”
“Right,” Dar answered. “That’s what Gerry was griping about from here mostly—results on the folks they kick out of here being substandard.” She dropped down the stairs with Chuckie at her side.
“He wants to know why, and frankly, so do I.”
“For real?” Chuckie held the door at the bottom of the hall open for her, then followed her out and into the cool, somewhat damp air.
“Yeah.” Dar pulled her keys out of her pocket and headed for the Lexus. “From a management perspective, bad performance usually only has one of a couple sources.” She opened the doors and they got in, then she continued her lecture, to which Chuckie listened with interest.
“Either your talent pool is empty, your processes are defective, or there’s a motivation structure in place that doesn’t match what your performance objectives are.”
Chuckie folded his arms over his chest and eyed her. “Can we talk about football or something? I didn’t get three words out of five in that last paragraph.”
Dar chuckled as she pulled out of the base parking lot and sent the Lexus in search of a scrungy crab shack. “Sorry.” She recomposed her thoughts. “Your recruits suck, the instructors don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or someone’s being paid to just churn out bodies regardless of whether they know what end of a broom to grab hold of.”
“Ah.” Chuckie considered this thoughtfully. “How are you going to figure out which one it is?”
How indeed?
Dar pulled into an unpaved parking lot and stopped
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the Lexus. “I’m not sure yet,” she admitted. “I’ve got a program sucking everything down into one of our big processors, and it’s going to sort the data out for me. I’ll review it and make a plan based on what I find.”
“Okay.” Chuckie opened the door to the crab shack and they entered, going from the bright light outside into a somewhat dim, weathered wooden interior graced with trestle tables, benches, and several neon bar signs on the wall. “Howdy, Red.”
The burly, bearded man with more tattoos than seemed safe waved at him. “Hey, Chuck. Whoa, you moved up in the world, didn’cha?” His eyes flicked over Dar with genial approval. “C’mon in, sweet thing.”
Chuckie, to give him credit, winced.
Dar dropped her jacket onto the nearest trestle table and sauntered over to the man, leaning on the counter across from him and tipping her sunglasses down to give him a better look. After a moment, she sighed.
“You are still as butt ugly as you were in high school, you know that, August?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Whothefuckareyou?”
“Someone you ain’t seen in fifteen years,” Dar drawled back. “You want to put us up two baskets of fritters and burgers, so at least we’ll get something out of this conversation?”
The man scratched his jaw and tilted his head, then reached over and pulled Dar’s sunglasses all the way off. He leaned closer. “Oh shit.”
He started laughing. “It’s Dar.” He let the glasses drop to the counter.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
Dar scooped up her shades. “You’re damn lucky I’m not nearly as much of a hardass as I used to be, Augie. That crack would have gotten you a broken nose once upon a time.” She relaxed into a smile as Chuckie decided it was safe to approach and came up next to her.
“Yeah, you’re so mellow now,” Chuckie commented. “Remind me of that again when I bitch about how sore I am from that little stunt we pulled the other night.”
“Irene!” August hollered behind him. “Two burgers, two fritters, okay?” He faced forward again. “Dar, man, it’s such a trip to see you. It has been forever and gone, ain’t it?” He pointed to the table. “Siddown.
I was just gonna have some lunch myself. We were busier than all get-out before, but it slowed down some.”
Dar took a seat on the worn wooden bench as her two friends did the same. She rested her elbows on the surface and exhaled, allowing a bittersweet sense of familiarity to wash over her. August’s father had owned the shack during her younger years, and she’d spent many hours hunched over the uneven tables, talking crap and swallowing enough fried fish and greasy burgers to have easily killed off anyone with a more sensitive digestive system.
Her nose twitched as she detected the scent of the spicy fritter batter cooking, and she smiled, glad—for the moment—to know that not everything had changed.
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“Still workin’ with that computer shit, huh, Dar?” Augie asked.
Oh yeah
. “Yep,” Dar admitted. “Same shit.”
“MS. KERRY?” MAYTE’S voice crackled through the intercom.
“
Señor
Mark is here.”
Kerry finished typing her last sentence and flexed her hands, making the joints crack slightly. “Great. Send him this way, Mayte.” She sat back and waited as her door opened and Mark entered. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Mark closed the door and crossed the carpeted floor, taking a seat in one of Kerry’s visitor’s chairs. “Listen, I...um—”
“Mark, it’s okay,” Kerry interrupted him gently. “I’m over it.”
The MIS chief blinked. “Oh.” He sat back and let his hands rest on his thighs. “You know the whole staff’s been walking around in a blue funk since the meeting, right?”
“I heard.” Kerry ran her fingers through her hair and riffled it, stifling a yawn as she did so. “Jesus, it’s not like I was that wacko, was I? I’ve heard Dar go off. I know I’m not in her league.”
“Nah,” Mark agreed. “It’s worse with you, though, because you’re always so nice. When you get postal, it makes everyone’s hair stand on end.” He gave Kerry an apologetic look. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Kerry smiled. “I talked to Mariana.” She shifted the topic neatly. “She’s agreed to let me handle whatever we decide to do with Brent.”
“Urm.” Mark rubbed his jaw, darkened with stubble now that the day was almost ended. “I talked to him a little. He’s way out there, Kerry.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure out if it’s just that he had a...uh, I mean, if...”
Kerry leaned forward. “I didn’t think he was serious until after I met you both in the ops center that time and Dar told me that he’d just finished asking her if I was seeing anyone.” She propped her head up on one fist. “I thought that was pretty darn oblivious of him, you know?”
Mark waggled his hand. “He’s pretty focused.”
“So is his problem that I’m not interested, or is his problem why I’m not interested?”
“Why,” Mark said bluntly. “His dad’s a Southern Baptist minister who was tossed out of the local group for advocating the castration of gay guys and the incarceration of anyone who didn’t think we should swap the Bill of Rights for the Bible.”
Kerry sighed.
“It sucks, you know? He’s a good tech, and not a half-bad guy if you don’t mind the freaking nerdiness.” Mark shook his head. “I talked to him just before I came in here, and he just can’t see why everyone doesn’t feel the same way he does.”
“Okay.” Kerry scrubbed her face. “I’d like to talk to him,” she said.
“Can you set up a time tomorrow morning? Make it early, preferably
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before I have to sit in on the marketing projection session.”
“Sure you want to do that?” Mark queried.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Mark stood up. “Did you hear from the boss? Her data dump finally finished. The processors are chewing on it.”
Kerry leaned back. “Yep. She’s home, actually.” She propped a knee up against the desk and folded her hands around it. Hearing from Dar had been a surprise, especially when her lover had told her she was comfortably seated on their leather couch watching a special on China.
“She’s...um...cooking dinner.”
Mark stopped in mid-motion and stared at her, his jaw dropping in mild shock. “Uh?”
“Yeah.” Kerry scratched her nose. “My curiosity is starting to give me wedgies,” she admitted with a grin. “I mean, it could be that we’ll end up eating ice cream sundaes for dinner—those are well inside Dar’s ability; or maybe she’ll do eggs, which I know are safe.”
“Now you’ve got me curious.” Mark chuckled. “She once told me flipping the power switch on the coffee machine was the limit of her cooking skills.” He folded his arms. “You gotta let me know what happens.”
Kerry stood up and stretched, wincing as her back popped from the long hours she’d been seated at her desk trying to clear her inbox. She’d even had Mayte bring her up lunch so she could spend the extra time catching up. “Okay.” She viewed the outbox with a sense of satisfaction.
“I think I’m going to pack it in.”
“Walk you downstairs?” Mark offered. “I was just on my way out myself.”
They joined a group of fellow employees who were also leaving, including Jose and Eleanor, and the elevator was fairly crowded. Kerry pressed back against the mirrored wall, not really uncomfortable, but conscious of the air’s stuffiness and the clashing scents of Eleanor’s aggressive rose perfume and Jose’s vaguely coconutty-smelling after-shave.
Ick
. Kerry eyed the ceiling; it was also unfortunate that some people seemed to have a curious absentmindedness when it came to things like deodorant and reasonably frequent showering. She considered holding her breath, wondering if the elevator was being perversely slow just to piss her off.
Oh
. Kerry almost hopped up and down to force the car to move faster.
What if it gets stuck?
Her eyes widened a little. How would it look for the VP Ops to upchuck all over half the executive staff in an elevator?
“Kerry!”
She jerked and sucked in a breath, then glanced at Mark. “What?”
Mark leaned closer. “You looked like you were freaking out.”
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reached the bottom and bounced a little, then, finally, blissfully, the doors slid open and allowed the people to exit and the cold air to enter.
“Jesus.” She pushed off from the mirrored wall and left the elevator, glancing up into the vast vault of the atrium lobby.
A faint smile crossed her face as she remembered the first time she’d seen this place—a very late, rainy night that had started in despair and ended up being a crossroads in her life she wasn’t even aware of until long after she’d passed through it.
She followed Mark out the front doors into the daylight and headed for her car, her mind making the mental jog when it first tried to find her Mustang, then shifted and searched for the new profile.
“Hey, did you get a new set of wheels?” Mark asked as he ambled alongside her. “Ain’t that cute...a baby Darcar.”
“A wh? Oh,” Kerry laughed. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that.”
She patted her new blue Lexus on the side. “I like it. I can actually see things now. See you tomorrow, Mark.”
“Yeah.” Mark put his briefcase in the saddlebag of the big Harley and unstrapped his motorcycle helmet. “Drop me a mail when you figure out what Big D is feeding you, huh? I’m dying to know.”
“Hmm.” Kerry got into the SUV and rolled the window down.
“Dying...not a good word there, Mark.” She gave him a wave and started the car, then pulled out of the parking lot and headed home.
IT WAS RELATIVELY quiet outside the condo when she pulled into her spot and got out, cautiously examining the front door before she approached it. “Well.” She leaned back against the car and crossed her arms. “No smoke, no fire engines outside the place, and it looks like the electricity is still on, so she didn’t blow a circuit.”
She nodded. “Looking good so far. Now, Kerrison,” she addressed herself seriously, “whatever this turns out to be, Dar will have spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on it, so no matter what, you’re going to like it. Got me?” She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath.