“Eh.” Kerry’s voice was noncommittal. “Let’s not talk about that. Does the term sewer backup mean anything to you?”
“Ouch.” Dar winced, as she turned left onto Brickell.
“Yeah, it’s almost as bad as it is in here,” Kerry told her. “Well, I’m going to go call Netops. I’ll try to have a status for you by the time you get here.”
Maria’s voice came back on the line and the muffled sound of a door closing could be heard in the background. “She is such a nice girl, Dar,” the secretary told her approvingly. “That was so sweet of her to take you home on Friday.”
“Yes, it was.” Dar swung into the parking lot, noting a wildly careening truck just behind her. The truck pulled right up to the service entrance, and four men got out, pulling out carpet-cleaning equipment. She grinned mercilessly. “Be right up.” She hung up the line and got out of the car, grabbing her briefcase before heading for the doors.
KERRY CARRIED A handful of papers with her as she slipped down the back hallway and tapped on the door to Dar’s office, hearing the older woman’s voice raised in a growling yell. “Oh boy.” She pushed the door open and slipped inside.
Pacing back and forth behind her desk, Dar looked for all the world like a well-dressed panther. She was yelling at some hapless person in the network operations center, her staccato barks tossing aside his attempts to explain.
“Don’t give me that crap, I don’t want to know about how Sprint had a fiber cut under Newark Airport. I want that circuit rerouted.”
Kerry stopped before she reached the desk and held the top sheet out, then handed it over as Dar held her hand up. “It’s a big problem, Dar. They had an airport transport vehicle go off the ramp and crash down through the communications center. It took out their entire fiber center, including all the internal com at the airport.”
“Jesus.” Dar’s eyes widened. “Are they shut down?”
“Yeah, they’re rerouting traffic through La Guardia, but it’s a mess.”
Fingers drumming on her desk, eyes shifting rapidly, Dar sat down and
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requested information from their database, and drummed her fingers again.
“All right, all right. Listen up, Netops…”
“We’re here,” the tired-sounding voice came back. “We’ve been on this since two AM.”
“You’ve got thirty-seven T1 lines that come down into Newark for T-and-T’s rescom that you handle for the Hub site agreement.” Dar traced a spiderwork of connections on her screen, motioning Kerry over. The blonde woman put a hand on the back of her chair and peered at the screen.
“Yeah, but that’s carrying terminal res traffic.” The phone crackled.
“If you shift the endpoint routers at backbone six and seven to one and two, you can send airport com down those, and get the airport back up. Shunt the res functions to dial backup,” Dar said rapidly. “That’ll bring the net back up there, and pass traffic through for the banking centers in New York, who are down right now and breathing fire on my ass.” There was dead silence from the phone. “Did you hear me?” Dar barked, glancing back as Kerry patted her shoulder comfortingly. “Hello?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, okay. We heard you. Hang on, this is going to… Damn it, John, get that Tiger frad configured so we can shift res to backup. Someone call the MTC and tell them we’re doing this so they don’t freak out when the lines go down.”
“I’m waiting,” Dar called out impatiently.
“We’re working on it,” the voice responded hurriedly.
“Work faster,” Dar warned. “It’s 8:52. If those banks aren’t up for transactions by 9:00 AM, the shit is going to hit the fan in so many directions you won’t know where to duck.”
“Okay! Okay!”
Dar pulled up a Netview screen and displayed the down sites. She repeated the command, then again, nervously refreshing the screen.
“I was going to suggest I get you some coffee,” Kerry murmured, “but maybe not.”
The dark head turned, and blue eyes regarded her as Dar’s lips twitchingly held back a grin. Then she turned her attention back to the screen.
“Three minutes left. Where are my circuits!”
“Hang on, hang on. Switch that. No. No!”
“Two minutes!” Dar yelled. “I need that circuit!”
“Okay, we need the secondary tables loaded in that backbone. Serial 1…
Okay, okay. Try it now!”
Dar refreshed the screen and smiled. “Thank you,” she purred. “Nice doing business with you guys.” She hit the release button. “Not!” She barked at the phone, then punched a button and shook her head.
“Elaine Aberman, Service recovery,” a nervous, anxious voice answered.
“Good morning, Elaine,” Dar said, soothingly.
“No! It’s not!” the woman wailed. “It’s horrible! It’s tragic! We’re dying!”
“You’re up,” the executive stated calmly.
“You can’t believe what kind of a mess it is in here. We’ve got service reps on standby ready to get up to New York, and… Excuse me?”
“You’re up. We rerouted traffic a bit. Might be a touch slow, but it’s all there,” Dar informed her.
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Melissa Good
“Oh!” The woman squealed. “Guys, guys, we’re up! We’re up! Glory be to god, we’re up!”
Kerry put her hand over her mouth and choked back a laugh.
“G’bye, Elaine.” Dar hung up and let herself relax back into her chair with a sigh. “Nice way to start a Monday.” She rolled her head and looked up at the still-snickering blonde. “Sewer backup, huh?”
Kerry let a hand drop to Dar’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Oh my god, yes. It was awful. I finally just had to leave, take a ride down to the little park near my place and wait for them to finish pumping the sewers out.”
“Mmm. Sounds great.” Dar pushed herself to her feet. “I’m supposed to be at an exec meeting. Keep an eye on this for me, will you? Call my cell if it gets ugly again.” She patted Kerry on the back as she pushed her chair in. “See you later.”
Kerry watched her leave, then she collected her papers and made her way back to her own office.
DAR COULD HEAR the loud arguments before she even pushed open the door, and she quite deliberately let it slam behind her as she moved across to the large executive conference table. Everyone jumped, then turned and started yelling at her. She blocked out the sound, pulling her chair forward and seating herself in it, then meticulously arranging her papers in front of her and folding long hands together across them. The din continued, and she swept the room, pinning each yelling manager with her pale blue eyes until he or she shut up, then moving on to the next one. Finally, only José Montarosa was left, the head of Sales, whose face was beet red, veins sticking out on a neck a size too big for his white long-sleeved shirt.
“Goddamn it, Dar, I have three contracts in jeopardy in New Jersey.
We’re supposed to be demoing this morning. If you can’t get this shit working, I’m going to take it out of your goddamn paycheck!”
Dar glanced down at her hands, then back up at him, and cocked an eyebrow. “Try it,” she purred, with a smile. An uneasy silence fell, and she continued, “Besides, if your admin was worth two percent of the salary you pay her for those…
assets
…you hired her for, she’d have paged you ten minutes ago and told you we were up.” Dar poured herself a glass of water and sipped it. “Now sit down and shut up, and let’s get on with this. I have things I have to take care of.”
Montarosa glared at her, his lips twitching, then he lifted the conference room phone and dialed a number. “Maria, what’s the status?” A pause. “Why the hell didn’t you let me know?” Another pause. “Don’t give me that crap, my pager’s…” He paused and glanced at his belt. “
Puta
.” He flung the phone down and just assumed his seat with a glower.
Duks leaned back, biting a pencil to keep from laughing. “Dar, I heard it was a fiber cut. What happened?”
The tall woman also leaned back, crossing her legs at the ankles under the table. “Truck cut the cable. We rerouted through the regular airport T1s and shunted that traffic to a backup.”
“Oh.” Duks nodded as though he had any clue as to what she was talking
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about. “Can I have an egg roll with that?”
A nervous laugh went around the table, breaking the tension. “All right, all right, I’m the chair this week. Let’s see what’s on the agenda.” Mariana chuckled from her place next to Duks as she pulled out the previous meeting’s minutes. “Now that we have the morning crisis out of the way, thanks to Dar, we can go over more insignificant things.” She cleared her throat. “Global Volunteer day—it’s next Saturday, up in North Miami at the proposed Alternative School there. We need people to go down and clean the place up, do some painting, that kind of thing.”
“How many volunteers do we have from the field?” Evan Maitsen asked.
His department was in charge of most of the data entry, and traditionally provided a lot of volunteers for charity work.
“Um, as of today, two hundred and six,” Mariana reported. “Quite a group from Associated is coming over. Guess they want to impress the corporate types.” A laugh went around the table.
“Whose turn is it from us this year?” José asked, propping his chin up on a big fist. “I did it last year, remember?”
Dar considered a moment. “Mine, I think.” She was recalling having heard Kerry talk about her recruitment efforts earlier for the clean-up. They all looked at her in mild disbelief. She shrugged. “I haven’t done it, so it must be my turn.”
Mariana stared hard at her for a long moment, then shook her head and scribbled Dar’s name down on her sheet. “All right.” She cleared her throat, and went on to the next subject. “Remember this Friday is Boss’s Day.” She glanced around the table. “I know most you know the drill, but once again, please be careful—some people do take this opportunity to offer inappropriate gifts.”
A chuckle lifted into the air. “Yeah, I remember when someone sent Dar a set of freeze-dried bull’s
cojones
.” José snickered, giving Dar a sweet smile.
“What did you do with them, eh?”
Dar, who had been doodling, looked up. “Co-mailed them to Alastair,”
she replied in a deadpan voice.
Duks almost fell off his chair laughing, and the others joined in, save José and a few of his cronies. “
“Well, not all of us have to worry about our employees sending pipe bombs,” he insinuated. “Some of ours actually like us.”
Mariana glanced at him. “Fortunately for us, Dar pays people to do a job, not be her buddy,” she responded mildly. “Or we’d all be in big trouble.” She shuffled a page. “Speaking of which, let’s get onto performance reviews, shall we?”
Dar went back to her sketching, listening with half an ear to the Personnel executive’s carefully drawn-out plans. She’d spent the previous day catching up on e-mail and relaxing, sprawled out across the couch in the blessedly restored air conditioning, surprised at how unwound she’d gotten after just one day on the water. She glanced up as Duks leaned close.
“You’re in a good mood today,” he murmured in a low voice.
“Am I?” Dar inquired. “I guess I am. I had a fairly laid-back weekend.”
Duks eyed her pad, which had small pictures of fish all over it. “Did you 152
Melissa Good
go fishing?”
She chuckled. “Not really. Did a little diving, though, after the storm cleared.”
He clucked at her. “Dar, you should know better than to go diving solo. I don’t want to be processing your life insurance claim, thanks.”
Blue eyes lifted mildly to his. “I wasn’t alone.”
He blinked at her in surprise, then laughed softly and shook a finger at her. “I should have guessed. No wonder you look so relaxed.”
Dar’s brow lifted. “It’s not…” She hesitated. “Not what you’re thinking.”
He just smiled at her and tapped her arm with his pencil. “Say no more.”
Silly Duks. He thinks everything has to do with people sleeping together, doesn’t
he?
Dar smiled to herself. It would never occur to him that two virtual strangers could get stuck together by circumstance and end up becoming friends.
That was a very satisfying thought, and Dar reflected on it a moment as a faint smile touched her face. It had been a very long time since she’d added one of those to her life. Beyond Duks, of course, and Mariana, with whom she would sometimes do occasional things—dinner, lunches, and whatnot. She’d known them for years, and they’d been out to the island a few times, but…
She sighed.
An ill wind blew nobody good.
“Dar?”
By the tone, it was not the first time her name was being called, and she glanced up with a start. “Sorry, what?” All eyes were on her, curious and doubtful. “Sorry, I was going over something in my head.” She folded her arms across her chest. “What?”
“Right, well…” Mariana glanced back down at her agenda. “Now that we’ve closed the third quarter and are starting into fourth, we’ve got a couple of weeks to decide what to do with Christmas.”
“I think we should give it up and become Hindus,” Duks stated with a sniff. “Much easier. We can give everyone white rice for presents.” He waggled his pencil. “Seventeen cents a pound, remember.”
José threw a wadded-up piece of paper at him. “Godless heathen.” He snorted. Duks was well-known for his atheist leanings. “Remind me not to ever vote to put you in charge of holiday arrangements.”
“Do we have a budget this year or are we going to have to go out and sell embroidered toilet paper for funds again?” Dar drawled, sketching a lobster.
“It’s fourth quarter, what do you think?” Duks laughed. “Ah, I suppose I can squeeze some cash out of somewhere. What is it—a tree, some stuffed pigs or something, and yucca? Is that it?”
Mariana sighed. “Never mind, I’ll take care of planning it. Maybe we’ll get something other than
picadillo
and
ropa vieja
this time.” She shot a glance at José, who shrugged and lifted his hands. “Don’t worry, I’ll get at least one stuffed pig for you.”
They finished the meeting and Duks walked Dar to the door. “You open for lunch, DR?”
Dar took a breath. “Probably not, Dukky, I’ve got meetings. I don’t know when they’ll be done.” She gave him a smile. “Raincheck.” She folded her pad under her arm and headed for the stairwell, a faster way down to the tenth
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