“I know it is necessary. Now. Is there anything in your past conduct with this company which might be said to be out of order?” She was peering at him over her glasses.
He shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“Anything at all? Did you overstate your qualifications on your original job application? Did you abruptly terminate any employee? Have you had any kind of inquiry about your behavior or decisions? Were you ever the subject of an internal company investigation? And even if you weren’t, did you ever, to your knowledge, do anything improper, however small or apparently minor?”
“Jesus,” he said. “It’s been twelve years.”
“While you are cleaning out, think about it. I need to know anything that the company might drag up about you. Because if they can, they will.”
“Okay.”
“And one other point. I gather from what you’ve told me that nobody at your company is entirely clear why Johnson has enjoyed such a rapid rise among the executives.”
“That’s right.”
“Find out.”
“It won’t be easy,” Sanders said. “Everybody’s talking about it, and nobody seems to know.”
“But for everybody else,” Fernandez said, “it’s just gossip. For you, it’s vital. We need to know where her connections are and why they exist. If we know that, we have a chance of pulling this thing off. But if we don’t, Mr. Sanders, they’re probably going to tear us apart.”
He was back at DigiCom at six. Cindy was cleaning up her desk and was about to leave.
“Any calls?” he said, as he went into his office.
`Just one,” she said. Her voice was tight.
“Who was that?”
“John Levin. He said it was important.” Levin was an executive with a hard drive supplier. Whatever Levin wanted, it could wait.
Sanders looked at Cindy. She seemed tense, almost on the verge of tears.
“Something wrong?”
“No. Just a long day.” A shrug: elaborate indifference.
“Anything I should know about?”
“No. It’s been quiet. You didn’t have any other calls.” She hesitated. “Tom, I just want you to know, I don’t believe what they are saying.”
“What are they saying?” he asked.
“About Meredith Johnson.”
“What about her?”
“That you sexually harassed her.”
She blurted it out, and then waited. Watching him, her eyes moving across his face. He could see her uncertainty. Sanders felt uneasy in turn that this woman he had worked alongside for so many years would now be so openly unsure of him.
He said firmly, “It’s not true, Cindy.”
“Okay. I didn’t think it was. It’s just that everybody is-”
“There’s no truth to it at all.”
“Okay. Good.” She nodded, put the call book in the desk drawer. She seemed eager to leave. “Did you need me to stay?”
“No.”
“Good night, Tom.”
“Good night, Cindy.”
He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He sat behind his desk and looked at it a moment. Nothing seemed to have been touched. He flicked on his monitor, and began going through the drawers, rummaging through, trying to decide what to take out. He glanced up at the monitor, and saw that his e-mail icon was blinking. Idly, he clicked it on.
NUMBER OF PERSONAL MESSAGES: 3. DO YOU WANT TO READ THEM NOW?
He pressed the key. A moment later, the first message came up.
SEALED TWINKLE DRIVES ARE ON THEIR WAY TO YOU TODAY DHL. YOU SHOULD HAVE THEM TOMORROW. HOPE YOU FIND SOMETHING . . . JAFAR IS STILL SEVERELY ILL. THEY SAY HE MAY DIE.
ARTHUR KAHN
He pressed the key, and another message came up.
THE WEENIES ARE STILL SWARMING DOWN HERE. ANY NEWS YET?
EDDIE
Sanders couldn’t worry about Eddie now. He pushed the key, and the third message came up.
I GUESS YOU HAVEN’T BEEN READING BACK ISSUES OF COMLINE. STARTING FOUR YEARS AGO.
AFRIEND
Sanders stared at the screen. ComLine was DigiCom’s in-house newsletter-an eight page monthly, filled with chatty accounts of hirings and promotions and babies born. The summer schedule for the softball team, things like that. Sanders never paid any attention to it and couldn’t imagine why he should now.
And who was “Afriend”? He clicked the REPLY button on the screen.
CAN’T REPLY – SENDER ADDRESS NOT AVAILABLE
He clicked the SENDER INFO button. It should give him the name and address of the person sending the e-mail message. But instead he saw dense rows of type:
FROM UU5.PSI.COM!UWA.PCM.COM.EDU!CHARON TUE JUN
16 04:43:31 REMOTE FROM DCCSYS
RECEIVED: FROM UUPS15 BY DCCSYS.DCC.COM ID AA02599;
TUE, 16 JUN 4:42:19 PST
RECEIVED: FROM UWA.PCM.COM.EDU BY UU5.PSI.COM
(5.65B/4.0.071791-PSI/PSINET)
ID AA28153; TUE, 16 JUN 04:24:58 -0500
RECEIVED: FROM RIVERSTYX.PCM.COM.EDU BY UWA.PCM.COM.EDU (4.1/SMI-4.1)
ID AA15969; TUE, 16 JUN 04:24:56 PST
RECEIVED: BY RIVERSTYX.PCM.COM.EDU (920330.SGI/5.6)
ID AA00448; TUE, 16 JUN 04:24:56 -0500
DATE: TUE, 16 JUN 04:24:56 -0500
FROM: CHARON @UWA.PCM.COM.EDU (AFRIEND)
MESSAGE-ID: <9212220924.AA90448@RIVERSTYX.PCM. COM.EDU >
TO: TSANDERS@DCC.COM
Sanders stared. The message hadn’t come to him from inside the company at all. He was looking at an Internet routing. Internet was the vast worldwide computer network connecting universities, corporations, government agencies, and private users. Sanders wasn’t knowledgeable about the Internet, but it appeared that the message from “Afriend,” network name CHARON, had originated from UWA.PCM.COM.EDU, wherever that was. Apparently some kind of educational institution. He pushed the PRINT SCREEN button, and made a mental note to turn this one over to Bosak. He needed to talk to Bosak anyway.
He went down the hall and got the sheet as it came out of the printer. Then he went back to his office and stared at the screen. He decided to try a reply to this person.
FROM: TSANDERS@DCC.COM
TO: CHARON@UWA.PCM.COM.EDU
ANY HELP GREATLY APPRECIATED.
SANDERS
He pushed the SEND button. Then he deleted both the original message and his own reply.
SORRY, YOU CANNOT DELETE THIS MAIL.
Sometimes e-mail was protected with a flag that prevented it from being deleted. He typed: UNPROTECT MAIL.
THE MAIL IS UNPROTECTED.
He typed: DELETE MAIL.
SORRY, YOU CANNOT DELETE THIS MAIL.
What the hell is this? he thought. The system must be hanging up. Maybe it had been stymied by the Internet address. He decided to delete the message from the system at the control level. He typed: SYSTEM.
WHAT LEVEL?
He typed: SYSOP
SORRY, YOUR PRIVILEGES DO NOT INCLUDE SYSOP CONTROL.
“Christ,” he said. They’d gone in and taken away his privileges. He couldn’t believe it.
He typed: SHOW PRIVILEGES.
SANDERS, THOMAS L.
PRIOR USER LEVEL: 5 (SYSOP)
USER LEVEL CHANGE: TUE JUNE 16 4:50 PM PST
CURRENT USER LEVEL: 0 (ENTRY)
NO FURTHER MODIFICATIONS
There it was: they had locked him out of the system. User level zero was the level that assistants in the company were given.
Sanders slumped back in the chair. He felt as if he had been fired. For the first time, he began to realize what this was going to be like.
Clearly, there was no time to waste. He opened his desk drawer, and saw at once that the pens and pencils were neatly arranged. Someone had already been there. He pulled open the file drawer below. Only a half-dozen files were there; the others were all missing.
They had already gone through his desk.
Quickly, he got up and went out to the big filing cabinets behind Cindy’s desk. These cabinets were locked, but he knew Cindy kept the key in her desk. He found the key, and unlocked the current year’s files.
The cabinet was empty. There were no files there at all. They had taken everything.
He opened the cabinet for the previous year: empty.
The year before: empty.
All the others: empty.
Jesus, he thought. No wonder Cindy had been so cool. They must have had a gang of workmen up there with trolleys, cleaning everything out during the afternoon.
Sanders locked the cabinets again, replaced the key in Cindy’s desk, and headed downstairs.
The press office was on the third floor. It was deserted now except for a single assistant, who was closing up. “Oh. Mr. Sanders. I was just getting ready to leave.”
“You don’t have to stay. I just wanted to check some things. Where do you keep the back issues of ComLine?”