When The Devil Whistles (32 page)

Allie licked her lips nervously and her heartbeat quickened. “Yeah, as a matter of fact I am. I really liked the last place I was—Deep Seven. I was, um, wondering whether you knew if they were hiring.”

Trudi’s clear laugh rang through the phone. “What a coincidence! They’re hiring, and they’re looking for people exactly like you. Apparently some big government investigation totally messed up their files and computer system, and they need it fixed like yesterday. It was all over the news a while back. Did you hear about it?”

Allie stood and began pacing in the five feet of free space by the chair. “I, um, might have seen something about it on TV.”

“Well, they’ll be pumped to hear that you’re available. I’ll call them right now. See you at Tang Dynasty at five?”

“At five.”

Tang Dynasty was an Asian fusion restaurant with great food and an off-beat menu that Allie enjoyed. How many places offered deep-fried tripe? Or “exploding turkey” sandwiches (so named because a cook once failed to thaw a turkey before deep-frying it, leading to a spectacular fireball in the kitchen)?

Trudi arrived thirty seconds after Allie, and they were seated at a little table in an alcove upholstered with red leather. Trudi looked just the same as she had the last time Allie saw her— the perfect picture of a stylish professional woman who also happened to be a mom. Allie used to think that was sad, proof that Trudi had become boring. Now she felt a little twinge of envy.

“So, what happened with Erik? Where have you been? Tell me about it!”

Allie split her chopsticks apart and rubbed them against each other as she spoke, giving her something to do with her hands and eyes. “There’s not that much to tell really.” Or at least not much that could be told. “The whole meth thing finally got to be too much for me, so I told him to hit the road. Then I did the same thing—hit the road, I mean. I just had to escape from everything for a while.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Bahamas. I just rented a little place on the beach and hung out. Did some diving, did some biking, tried to give myself skin cancer. That kind of thing.”

Trudi grimaced in mock agony. “Ah, stop! I’m already too jealous! I wish Dave and I could get away for just one or two days like that. It sounds wonderful.”

That stung. Trudi hadn’t meant to hurt her, of course. But Allie couldn’t help picturing her happily married friend laughing on the beach or snorkeling in the coves of San Salvador— and contrasting that image to the lonely agony of her time there.

The waitress came up and took their orders. Allie ordered quickly. She had several minutes to collect her thoughts while Trudi first repeatedly tried to pronounce chawanmushi and then asked detailed and slightly suspicious questions about what it contained. She ultimately went with a chicken won ton salad.

“You know, I’m a little jealous of you too, Trude. You’ve got your own kind of wonderful going on right here.”

Trudi gave Allie an appraising look. “Wow, you are a changed woman, Al. Well, good for you. I can tell you firsthand that there’s life after the party ends. I’m still having fun, and I can’t remember the last time I had a hangover.”

“I feel a sudden urge to buy some sensible shoes and a minivan.”

Trudi laughed. “And pick up some Spanx while you’re at it. I can’t tell you how fast my fat jeans became my skinny jeans after I started having kids.”

Allie held up her hand. “Not so fast! That’s still a looong way in the future for me. But speaking of the future, what can I expect tomorrow morning at Deep Seven?”

“I’m not really sure. All they said was that you should show up at 8:30 tomorrow and ask for Franklin Roh. They probably just want you to do whatever you did last time.”

Which, of course, was exactly what she intended to do. But without the fake invoices this time.

54

A
LLIE PULLED INTO THE EMPLOYEE PARKING LOT AT
D
EEP
S
EVEN AND FOUND
a space. She parked her car and looked up at the building. It crouched in front of her, looking like a malevolent giant lizard made of black glass and steel. The outsized lobby was its head, the double doors its mouth, and the curving limestone path its pale and poisonous tongue.

She suddenly wanted to run again, to flee back to the Bahamas or to some unfindable place in South America or Asia. Anything to avoid going back into that place. How had she ever thought that she could do this? It was one thing to look around in the billing files of unsuspecting companies while doing their accounting work. She knew exactly what to look for, and she had a near perfect cover: how many people would raise an eyebrow at an accounting temp looking at accounting files?

But even that hadn’t been easy enough for her. She’d blown it at Blue Sea. And Blue Sea had been child’s play compared to what she was about to try now. If she couldn’t look at some invoices on unsecured servers without getting caught, what made her think she could penetrate the strongest defenses of a company like Deep Seven? Even if she did, she had no idea what to look for, and she doubted that they had a file labeled “Secret Evil Plan.”

Even if she somehow managed to get past their security, find whatever they were hiding, and get back out, what then? Her likely prize would be the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time in a Kansas prison. And if she didn’t win that, her consolation prize would be sitting in court and testifying against Erik. She remembered his voice on her answering machine as she played his last message over and over to torture herself. He had said he loved her, needed her. She imagined the look on his face as he watched her betray him on the witness stand.

She vaguely remembered reading a poem in college about a poet who discovered the road to truth. It appeared to be overgrown with grass, but as the poet took his first step on it, he discovered that each blade of grass was actually an exquisitely sharp knife. So he turned back and took another path.

But there was no other path for her. She knew that. Her last weeks in the Bahamas were still fresh in her mind. She vividly remembered the scent of hell surrounding her wherever she went, the perpetually judging eyes watching her. If she ran again, she knew it would be worse. Ten times worse. She couldn’t bear that.

Staying in her car forever wasn’t really an option, unfortunately. She looked at her watch. 8:28. She took a deep breath, opened her car door, and stepped out onto the knife-filled path in front of her.

Deep Seven buzzed with activity. Hurrying workers filled the halls, and temps (several of whom Allie recognized from prior jobs) hammered at the keyboards of hastily installed computer terminals in every conference room she passed. Even the break areas were busy, having been converted into impromptu conference rooms.

As Franklin Roh guided her through the office, her despair grew. She was sure he’d stick her in a room with twenty other people, which would pretty much eliminate any chance to do some quiet espionage. But he took her right past all the hubbub and deposited her in an isolated cubicle in a quiet corner of the IT department’s area. A fake ficus tree loomed over her, further shielding her from the rest of the office.

Mr. Roh (he had never invited her to call him Franklin) told her about her assignment, speaking quickly. “The government seized Deep Seven’s servers and held them for nearly a month. We were forced to rent replacement equipment and operate off of back-up tapes for that whole time.”

Allie made careful expressions of shock and sympathy.

He nodded impassively and continued. “When the government finally returned our equipment, we had to migrate all our data back onto the original servers. Not everything made it, however. A number of files were corrupted in the transition or disappeared entirely.”

Allie shook her head and clicked her tongue.

“You don’t need to figure out what went wrong—Deep Seven’s IT staff is handling that—but I will need you to find how many problem files we have.

“Unfortunately, I won’t be able to give you the supervision this project deserves because I’ll be busy on the Golden Gate turbine project. We won the bid, and the project is sucking up every minute of my time. Sorting out the problems with their servers will have to be left to temps, but TempForce said a lot of good things about you, so I assume you’ll be able to work very independently.”

She assured him that she could handle the job on her own.

He glanced at his watch and asked whether she had any questions, clearly indicating that it would be best if she didn’t.

She gave the right answer, and he turned and hurried away like a parochial school nun who fears that somewhere children are having fun.

She watched his retreating back, marveling at her good fortune. She would be working on her own and out of the way. And her job was to poke around in the servers looking for anything problematic—what better cover for a little fishing expedition?

She’d have to be careful about what she did electronically, of course. She wouldn’t copy, print, or even open a single suspicious file. Instead, she’d simply note where a hard copy of it was physically filed and then she’d go look at it.

Deep Seven kept pretty much everything in a central file room. It had security cameras at the doors, but not inside. If she had an excuse to go in and out carrying files, she’d be golden. And getting that excuse should be easy. She would mention to Mr. Roh that she needed to check a random sample of electronic documents against hard copies to make sure the files hadn’t become corrupted during the server transfers. He wouldn’t have any reason to object, and no one would think twice about seeing her take piles of files back to her cube. Once she was safely behind the dingy gray fabric walls of her workspace, she could read at her leisure and use her cell phone to take pictures of anything interesting.

Perfect. She couldn’t imagine a better setup. The icy gray hopelessness that gripped her half an hour ago melted away as she made her plans. She could do this! It really was possible. A wave of elation swept over her and she discovered that she was smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.

She got to work on her sampling protocol and made quick progress. After an hour, she had a set of rules that should take her into likely areas for prospecting—and which she could easily explain to Mr. Roh if he asked what she was doing. She was just selecting her first set of documents when she heard footsteps behind her.

She instinctively popped up the company’s internal e-mail program to hide what she had been doing and turned. She saw a balding South Asian man of about her age walking toward her. A chunky gold watch adorned his wrist, and he wore a red polo shirt that was a little tight across his stomach. “Hello, my name is Rajiv,” he said with a musical accent. “Welcome to Deep Seven.”

“Thanks. I’m Allie Whitman. And it’s actually welcome back. I’m a temp, and I worked here a couple of months ago.”

He shook his head and smiled. “No, you didn’t. I would have remembered you.”

She glanced at his left hand and saw that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Rajiv was hardly her type, but… well, she needed information. She braced herself and giggled demurely. “Why, thanks. I was down in accounting the last time I was here.”