Clare didn't even look away from the screen. It was like a cartoon where the character's eyeballs remained glued to an object and stretched like elastic bands as they walked away.
"Uhh... sorry, Mom. Yeah. Okay."
Enough. Clare hadn't managed to slide fully off the stool before Dru snatched the phone. Their hands collided. It was a harder grab than Dru intended.
"Hey!"
"Don't you dare hey me." Dru shoved the cell in her pocket and filled the dish pan. The hot skillet hissed steam as she plunged it into the water. "All you had to do was watch the pancakes. Find your bag and get in the car. I've got to go to work. And make sure you've got your inhaler – you know what happened last time."
"Mom, I need my cell."
"Clare, the only people who need cells have jobs that require instant responses. Doctors. CEOs. The Secretary General of the UN. Everyone else just likes having one."
"I can't go to class without it."
"Try. I managed it at your age."
"What if I have an asthma attack in class?"
"Then your tutor can call me. That's why I want you to check you've got your inhaler. Remember how much it cost the last time you ended up in ER."
"Mom — "
"Clare, no."
"Why are you taking it out on me? If your job sucks so much, why don't you just quit? It's not my fault that everyone hates you because you're the office kapo."
Dru tried to leave KWA at the front door, but it was getting harder these days. "I do wish you wouldn't trivialize that word. What are they teaching you?"
"Dad said it was apt. He says that HR's only there to protect management from the staff. Not to help employees."
Dru chose not to hear that as Larry's latest retort by proxy, a row conducted one line at a time via Clare like some game of postal chess. "Well, when Dad gets a job," Dru said, "Dad can comment on how I do mine, can't he?"
Clare was fourteen, metamorphosing into an alien species that Dru didn't recognise or remember ever being part of. Why do I put up with the job? Because I've got a mortgage and an asthmatic kid and a useless ex-husband who pays when he feels like it. Larry was still pleading poverty and promising he had a new business in the pipeline.
Kapo. Maybe.
Dru had no illusions about the role of human resources at a time like this. KWA was in merger talks with Halbauer, and that meant doing what-if studies into who had to be culled to guarantee the survival of the herd. If Dru became the downsizing angel of death to look after her own family, she could live with that. Halbauer had its own HR department, a costly duplicate in a merger. She wasn't stupid. There'd be casualties close to home, too, and she didn't plan to be one of them.
"Car," Dru barked. "Now."
Clare stormed out ahead of her and wrenched the passenger door open with a drama queen flourish. Dru had moments of actually hating her, then hating herself for hating her, because there'd been a time when all she'd wanted in life after a string of miscarriages was a baby. Clare hadn't come cheaply, either in terms of the cost or the toll the process had taken. Dru found it hard to cut herself any slack. She didn't want to be the mom that her own mother had been.
I'll sort this out. It's what I do.
Dropping Clare off at summer school meant a five-mile detour, plenty of sulking time in rush-hour traffic. "Mom, I'm sorry," Clare said at last. "Can I have my cell back, please?"
"Try going a day without sharing your every move and thought online. You know how dangerous that is." Sanctions didn't mean anything unless they hurt. Dru had another where-did-I-go-wrong moment. "When you're my age and the dumb things you posted are still there, you'll regret it."
"Only if I don't get murdered before then because I didn't have my cell to call for help."
"Clare, the answer's still no."
"You're so selfish."
Dru braked late and almost rammed the car in front. "You want to see selfish? Who pays your phone bills?"
"Mom – "
"I don't have the energy for this, Clare."
"I wish I'd gone to live with Dad."
"Good plan, except his girlfriend didn't want you living with them. Did she?"
"Mom, why do you hate me so much? Because you're ruining my life."
Teenagers had their script, and moms had theirs. Dru decided not to stick to hers. She pulled up outside the school and parked, silent and unyielding. If she stopped escalating this, Clare would lose interest. It was a variant on handling toddlers. She recalled those days all too well.
Clare tried again. "So do I get my cell back? I said I was sorry."
Somehow she'd picked up the idea that apologizing was a special achievement that deserved medals, not the minimum expected in polite society. Dru blamed the school again.
"No," Dru said. No was an excellent word. She didn't use it anywhere near enough. "I'll pick you up from Rebecca's tonight. We'll talk over dinner."
Clare opened the passenger door and sat waiting, brows raised a little in that verging-on-tears kind of way. Dru waited too. Clare's face morphed from wounded to sour in an instant.
"No wonder Dad left you," she said. "You're the kapo all day at work and you forget to stop being a bitch when you get home."
Clare scrambled out and slammed the door behind her before Dru could react. Chasing after her and demanding an apology would be handing her the power, though. Dru would deal with her tonight when the heat had gone out of this. As she drove off, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror and felt a pang of dismay as her brain clicked into recognition mode. Yes, that greying, fading creature with shadows under its eyes really was her. And she recognised the description of bitch, too. It was true. She wore her work persona home.
KWA's automatic gate let her car in to the parking garage. This was her unthinking daily routine: park in her allocated space, then detour via the maintenance area to check the recycling bins. Someone had dumped a cardboard box without removing the originating company's address and the consignment number. On its own it was innocuous, but there was no point in broadcasting the minutiae of KWA's business, and no way of knowing what jigsaw puzzle of information it might complete. Dru hauled it out and sorted through the rest of the flattened packages, looking for offenders.
"Anything wrong, Mrs Lloyd?" Alex, one of the regular security guards, ambled towards her. "Here, let me take those."
"People aren't removing labels before they dump packaging, Alex," she said, sorting through the cartons like giant index cards. "I'll circulate a memo, but if you catch anyone doing this, let me know, okay?"
"Sure, ma'am. But you make a lot of work for yourself. Who's going to bother collecting all that little detail just in case it comes in handy?"
"People like me, I'm afraid."
Alex laughed to himself and walked to the staff entrance with her. As he reached the small glass-fronted security booth, he held up a finger as a signal to wait and reached under the counter.
"There," he said, handing her a couple of magazines. "Bet you can't do these."
They were puzzle books. Alex had a lot of solitary downtime on his hands in this job, and he'd told her he wasn't planning to get dementia when he retired. The puzzles were fearsome; Dru was addicted. She slipped the magazines into her bag.
"I owe you a bottle of bourbon," she said. "Thank you."
It was a harmless little friendship between an old guy nobody noticed and a woman who didn't have many allies in this place, based on a common love of puzzles. They looked after one another.
As Dru walked out of the elevator on the third floor, heads turned in the cubicle farm. A few office staff stood chatting in a huddle behind the glass wall, but they stopped and gave her a look that made her wonder if she was decked out in a black hood and scythe. Dru didn't need Clare's history teacher to remind her what happened to kapos. You could collaborate with the camp commandant as much as you liked, and send your fellow inmates to their doom for a few extra crumbs, but you knew you'd probably end up
sharing their fate sooner or later.
That, or one of the other prisoners stabs you in the back for betraying your own kind.
She'd just have to make herself indispensable. The alternative was to get out, but benefits like KWA's didn't grow on trees. What were her KWA shares worth? Maybe it was time to sell them, just in case.
Bobbie was already at her desk, fingers moving over her keyboard in a blur. The admin assistant seemed to have formed the idea that only the visibly workaholic would survive restructuring.
"Good morning, Dru."
"Hi, Bobbie. No boss yet?"
"Sheelagh's not coming in today, remember? She's taking a family day. Son. Dental appointment. I've forwarded some of her mail to you."
Dru keyed in the code to her door. "Fine."
"Halbauer sent over some encrypted files, too." Maybe Bobbie was fishing. "I think it's the IT staffing details."
"Probably. Thanks."
KWA had already offshored its payroll and accounting to its offices in India. There wasn't a lot left of HR, either. Dru couldn't blame Bobbie for getting jumpy. She logged in and found her inbox full of the usual overnight mail, pitches from training companies, and the feed of industry digests that she shared with PR and Marketing. External hearts and minds were PR's problem, but Dru needed to know if staff were saying anything ill-advised online. Keyword monitoring reports picked up every mention of Kinnery Weaver Associates and permutations of the company name on the Internet, as well as references to its areas of interest in social media and forums. Text and sentiment analytics reported back on the public perception of the company and the biotech industry. There was nothing said or thought about the company that didn't eventually find its way back to head office.
One paragraph jumped out from a sea of text in the media monitoring digest. Dru tapped the screen and isolated it.
KEYWORDS: KINNERY (CHARLES KINNERY) OCCURRENCES: 1. LOCATION: THE SLIDE
Slide? She hadn't even heard of it. When she hit the link, it was just an online activist magazine like hundreds of others, just better designed, full of routine conspiracy theory stuff with the usual paranormal nonsense thrown in. She almost missed the reference to Charles Kinnery. All she knew was that he was one of the original partners who'd set up KWA.
DYNAMIC MIMICRY IN HUMANS: DID GENETICISTS BUILD A SHAPE-SHIFTER FOR THE DoD?
It was a bizarre story about creating a human with the ability to alter his appearance for undercover intelligence missions. It was clearly garbage. But Charles Kinnery's name was in there, along with KWA's, so there was the potential for fallout. Dru set the page to alert her on updates and called the PR manager.
"Hi, Dean. Have you picked up the mention of Charles Kinnery on the digest? It's on a site called The Slide."
Dean laughed. "Yeah, seen it. They're the high IQ end of Elvis Ate My Hamster stories. They left out Jimmy Hoffa and Shergar this time, though."
"No crisis, then."
"They could publish today's date and nobody would believe it."
"Kinnery left years ago. What sparked this?"
"No idea. Maybe they forgot their meds. This is routine dingbattery for The Slide, though. The shape-shifter bit should clue you in."
"Okay. But I'll keep an eye on it."
"You don't need to make extra work for yourself."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing. I'm on it. Relax."
Dru realised she was letting uncertainty get to her. Everyone was looking over their shoulder these days, but mostly at her.
"Sorry. Rough start to the day. Talk to you later."
So Dean wasn't worried, even though it was an oddly specific reference to a man who hadn't worked here for years. Dru relegated it to a watching brief and forgot about shape-shifting agents to concentrate on how many duplicated IT jobs there'd be if KWA and Halbauer merged. It was looking so depressing that she was relieved when Julianne, Shaun Weaver's secretary, called her to a meeting.
Julianne had mastered the art of corporate mime. When Dru reached Weaver's office, the secretary did her usual elaborate hand signals like a bookie at a race track. On the phone, she gestured, left hand miming a handset against her ear before extending and lowering. Wait.
Dru took a seat. Weaver was a god, and Dru was a minion. She had to wait for an audience. Eventually the door handle clicked and Weaver stood in the doorway with a bloom of light around him that only added to the sense of being allowed some face time with God.
"How are you, Dru?" He remembered her name. That was something. "Sorry to dump this on you, but Sheelagh's out today. I've had an odd phone call."
She almost called him Shaun in return, but familiarity only worked one way. "How odd?"
"Come in and I'll tell you."
The vertical blinds were drawn even though the office wasn't overlooked. Dru decided this already had the signs of turning into something above her pay grade. She sat down in one of the oversized green leather chairs and almost held her breath. Weaver was a hard man to rattle. A volcano could erupt in his backyard and he'd simply raise his eyebrows. But as he read through the notepad on his desk, he kept rubbing his top lip.
"A paranormal news site's running a line on my old colleague, Charles Kinnery," he said. "Dynamic mimicry for the DoD."
"The Slide." Dru nodded. Time to look indispensable. Especially with Sheelagh away. "I saw it on the digest. Crazy stuff."
Weaver frowned as if he'd expected her to do something about it sooner. "One of their people rang me for a comment. Zoe Murray."
Dru waited for him to go on, but he didn't. "She bypassed Dean?"
"Yes. But I don't want this discussed outside this office." Routine jitters about the merger wouldn't normally have ruffled Weaver's calm, let alone an obviously crackpot story. "Not even with Dean."
"It's on the Internet, Mr Weaver," Dru said. "Even a take-down order can't erase it completely. It's not true, surely."
"Well, we did do some transgenic research funded by the DoD. But this Murray woman has the actual name. Project Ringer. That means there's been some kind of leak, because it was classified. The name was never made public."
"But no actual shape-shifter."
"Dru, if we'd pulled that off, we'd have asked the DoD for a lot more money."
"But they thought it might be feasible."
"You know how these agencies are – win big or fail big, but at least give it a shot. We introduced engineered animal genes into human embryos. It wasn't illegal back then – nobody had done it yet, officially. But they were all destroyed by fourteen days anyway." Weaver sounded as if he was making a defence case to her. She noticed his blink rate for the first time. "The value to us was the techniques we developed during the project, the spin-offs for therapeutic applications. Which paid off."
"My subject's psychology," Dru said. "I just need to know enough to understand the risk."
"You've seen squid and octopus change colour and texture. They do it with structures in their skin. Chameleons use cell signalling. Lots of animals have evolved different methods for fast disguise. Now imagine if a human could change colour and even the shape of his features when he needed to, and then change back again. Life would be a lot easier for covert operators."
"And bank robbers. And hijackers."
"I didn't say it was without a downside."
"Okay, I can see how making some red-haired spy look Middle Eastern would be useful, but what about the other giveaways, like gait? Size? Gender? Voice?"
Weaver nodded as if he was relieved that she'd grasped it without his needing to draw pictures. "We only got funding for the initial stages before they decided it was too crazy even for them. But that was all we needed."
Dru could have told DARPA that it was crazy for five bucks. But she still wasn't sure what the immediate problem was – that KWA had a leaky employee somewhere, or that Weaver didn't want KWA tarred with the goat-staring wacko research brush, let alone conducting illegal experiments. But sloppy commercial c
onfidentiality was a killer. Nobody would want to team with a technology company that couldn't keep sensitive information secure.
"So what do you want me to focus on?" she asked.
Weaver clasped his hands on the desk top, stroking one thumb across the other. "Did you ever meet Charles?"
Dru bristled. How old do you think I am? How old do I look, for goodness' sake? "No, I was still looking for my first job when he was around."
"I'm wondering if this journalist's misunderstood something that might have actually happened."
"I can't guess," Dru said. "You need to spell it out."
"Okay, perhaps Charles walked out of here with material or data, and he's been working on it elsewhere. Maybe he parked some engineered genes in a human volunteer, even himself. There's a lot we need to find out."
Dru was instantly out her technical depth. "Why would he need to use a host?"
"He wouldn't. DNA's easy to move around. You can even put a drop of fluid on paper and mail it. Using a live carrier's a good way to hide and transport it, though. It's invisible unless you know it's there and what to look for. Who's going to screen people?"
It was fascinating, but the more Weaver explained, the more bizarre and incomprehensible Dru found it. Motive. She was still a psychologist at heart. When people leaked information, there was a reason for the when and the how. It might simply have been a case of very old, inadequately shredded documents that had suddenly been unearthed on a dump, but Weaver seemed to be taking it seriously, and Dru never assumed she was being told the full story.
"If this project started twenty-odd years ago, why raise it now?" she asked.
Weaver shrugged. "Sabotaging the merger?"
"Wouldn't somebody float a smear story that was more credible?"
"I would have thought so."
"And who would do it? Kinnery?"
"Only if he was working for a rival. But he's been in academia for years."
"You said he might have walked off with KWA's property. I thought he was the friend you built the company with."
"Charles had his moments. He just quit out of the blue and sold his stake to me. It was some personal crisis. Maybe drink or gambling, because God knows he had his weaknesses, but he refused to tell me the details. So I'm not ruling anything out."
Going Grey Page 12
