by Paul Duffau
Mitch tried to get back to work, but his ears were attuned to every distraction in the room. Normal banter that he usually ignored snuck past his filters, as did every muffled curse as someone discovered that their current project had just gone off the rails.
Finally, in desperation, Mitch plugged headphones into his phone, selected his rock playlist, and cranked the volume. He still heard voices, so he pressed the volume button twice more until he was left with pounding rhythms and some hope of concentration. He bent over his desk and focused on the schematic in front of him. Purposefully, he traced the white lines on the black background to direct his attention to the work at hand. He made a note, then another, and finally broke through the resistance to immerse himself in the job again, breathing easier as the stress of spying faded. Working in a state of steady concentration, he completed the first page of edits. Those created new issues on the next page. Once I complete the first run-through, I’m going to need to go back over the whole dang thing—
The bubble of focused air around him vanished as a round hand seized his shoulder and commenced violently shaking him. Mitch jerked away, his heart stopping for a medium-sized eternity. The hand belonged to Warnicke, who bore a resemblance to Vesuvius before it buried Pompeii. Warnicke’s mouth moved but Mitch couldn’t hear a word. Wincing, he removed the earphones. Deny everything. Deny, deny, deny.
“Yo?” Mitch amazed himself at the nonchalance in the single word. The skin around his eyes hurt from keeping them open so wide. The rest of his face set itself into a concrete mask.
Warnicke tore into him before Mitch could say another word. “Meriwether! When you have something you want to correct, the proper channel is to go through your boss.” He puffed himself to his full height, growing rounder. He shoved a finger in Mitch’s face and wagged it. “That’s me, in case you forgot. You don’t go behind my back and report directly to the engineers.”
Mitch stared at him, jaw falling open like he was the town idiot. At the edge of his peripheral vision, foreheads and eyes rose from various cubicles. Those in Warnicke’s line of sight prairie-dogged, diving back into their holes to escape a predator. The rest watched the unfolding soap opera scene with sick anticipation. Like a tractor beam, the crumpled tissue on his desk dragged his eyes sideways and down.
“Do you understand me?”
Snapping his attention back to his boss, Mitch felt his palpitations fade to a dead calm. Fricking Warnicke was torqued off by the design fault. Inside, Mitch laughed. He doesn’t know did a happy dance in his head, followed by an indignant, If he’d bothered to listen to me in the first place . . .
What he said was a simple, “Yes, sir.”
Warnicke crossed his arms. “They want you on the eighth floor. Hightail it up there and don’t dally on the way back. You still have work to complete, and it’s due.”
“I have two more days,” Mitch pointed out.
“Had,” sniped Warnicke. “The schedule got moved up.”
I’m sure.
“Who am I supposed to see up there?”
With a lip curled up into a snarl, Warnicke said. “Ask for Mr. Paczynski.”
“Whoa,” said Garrett from behind him.
“Right.” Mitch palmed the dirty Kleenex from his desk and stood. “I’ll be right back.”
Leo stomped away, landing a glare on Garrett as he passed.
Mitch went to Garrett. “Who’s Paczynski?”
“He, oh lowly high school intern, is the head of R and D.” His coworker gave him an appraising up-and-down look. “You either f’d up bad, or you hit a home run with him. Either way, our charming supervisor is going to hate you.” A broad laugh accompanied the banter. “Almost as much as he hates me, maybe.”
A boulder dropped onto Mitch’s shoulders. “Yay, me,” he offered, with the enthusiasm of a man headed for the guillotine.
Mitch reached the elevators. He tossed the tissue with Hunter’s SD card in the trash receptacle at the doors and hit the button to go up. Once in the elevator, he hit the button for the eighth floor. Acceleration pressed his soles to the carpet and, with a whir, the numbers over the door lit up in sequence. With each floor, the weight increased, until he was sure that he exceeded the safe capacity of the elevator. The deceleration lightened the load on his feet without doing a thing for the emotional reaction he was experiencing.
I’m not cut out to be a spy.
The doors whooshed open and the air left Mitch’s lungs. Exercising all his willpower, he stepped from the elevator and into the lobby. Frosted-glass partitions and miniature ficus trees in straw pots greeted him. In front of him, braced by the vegetation, was a set of burnished aluminum double doors. The 3rdGen logo, painted red and inlaid in the metal, dared him to enter. His hand shook as he pulled on the handle. The door moved effortlessly on well-oiled pivots.
Inside, an attractive woman sat at a modernistic desk. She delivered a perfunctory smile. “May I help you?”
His fingers fidgeted of their own accord. “Mr. Paczynski asked me to meet him?”
Her lips hardly moved. “Your name?”
Mitch gave it to her.
“Please take a seat.” She pointed to a bank of chairs to the right of the double doors, in the same style as the desk. “I will let him know you are here.”
Mitch spent the time observing. The space was arranged into variously sized conference rooms around the outer wall, with the interior space broken up into offices instead of cubicles. The exterior spaces were a third occupied, with diverse teams of engineers—Mitch assumed they were, they had that kind of look—debating and drawing on pads of paper. He pictured himself working in this kind of environment, building the future, and momentarily forgot about Hunter and the disk.
The conference room walls were glass on the exterior and to the center of the office floor. The two ends were solid. The effect was to let the natural light of the Seattle summer flood the entire space with light. The interior offices facing him had a single standard office door and a window. The one nearest bore a hand-drawn placard with “Deep Work—Do Not Disturb” on it. The door was shut, and the blinds on the window were drawn.
“Mr. Paczynski is free now,” said the woman, snatching Mitch back to his grim reality. “Follow the right gallery to the end. His office is the corner overlooking the Sound.” She pointed, as though he couldn’t figure out the directions on his own.
Mitch thanked her and followed her directions, wiping his palms on the front of his pants. In a moment of panic, he worried about meeting the R&D director in jeans. The weight that had pressed him flat in the elevator escaped into a flock of fluttering butterflies. He paused at the open door of the corner office. The edge of a neatly arranged desk was visible. He raised a closed fist and knocked on the jamb twice.
“That you, Mitch? Come on in.”
He entered. Paczynski, a cheerfully rotund man with a graying beard, stood to greet him and pointed to a chair. “Have a seat.” As Mitch did so, the director spoke. “One of my guys said you made a pretty good catch on the design you’re working on. He noticed that you’re a high school kid, so he referred it up to me.”
“Um, thank you,” Mitch hemmed, “but why?”
Paczynski’s gaze sharpened to laser-like precision. “Beej, my guy, is pretty sharp. You didn’t just spot something missing, you processed the implications and then took an appropriate action. He checked the time stamps and saw you found our oops in a little under ten minutes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So, you like working here, Mitch?”
The rapid change of topic blindsided Mitch. “Um, yeah, a lot. The work is pretty cool, but . . .” His voice tapered off before he was too honest and got himself into more trouble.
Paczynski pinned him with that gaze again. “But it’s a little boring, right?” He waved a hand before Mitch could protest. “We start all the interns with projects that we expect to push their abilities but not too much.” Another change in direction. “Let me ask you a few questions. Where do
you go to school?”
What followed was fifteen of the most challenging minutes in Mitch’s life. The R&D director probed Mitch, starting with easy questions in physics and electronics and mechanical systems. Soon the questions ramped up in difficulty until Mitch was admitting that he didn’t know something on nearly every question and feeling stupid for the first time in his life.
To Mitch’s relief, Paczynski finally halted the inquisition. Glumly, he thought he’d be lucky to hang onto any job with 3rdGen after that display of ignorance. He took solace in the fact that high school students weren’t supposed to know statics yet. He’d at least answered one of those right.
Maybe.
Paczynski jotted a few words on a sticky and placed it on a stack of other notes. “Okay, Mitch, thanks for coming up.” He stood, and Mitch stood, too.
What now? Shake hands? The weights, the butterflies were gone. Left behind was a sucking hole of nothingness.
He stuck out his right hand. “Thank you, Mr. Paczynski.”
The director had a firm grip. “Mitch, we do that to experienced engineers to gauge their knowledge. They don’t like it, either. You did fine.” He released Mitch’s hand.
“Oh,” was all Mitch could respond.
Paczynski leaned back on the edge of his desk. “Apply for another internship next year.” He tapped the yellow sticky note. “We’ll have something more interesting for you, I think.”
High as a kite, Mitch put the headphones back on. With a mixture of pleasure and a double dose of apprehension, he resumed working under the baleful eye of Leo. Too damn bad, he thought. At the same time, fear at the time bomb in the sole of his shoe and the one in Garrett’s computer tempered his hopes.
Could he get away with it?
The answer, he thought in despair, was that he’d never know if he got away with it, only if he got caught. And he had to live with that forever, never knowing.
Chapter 25
The summer sun on her bare shoulders baked a deeper bronze into her skin. Kenzie sat cross-legged on the lawn, oblivious. Frustrated, she watched a pebble the size of a large pea, set on a saucer. It should have moved. She reviewed the lessons that Harold had given on levitation. She repeated it, step for step. Closing her eyes so she could “see” better, she applied an appropriate amount of energy.
The pebble stared at her, immune to her attentions.
“Dang it,” Kenzie muttered to herself. It worked in the Glade.
A rumble behind her told her that one of her parents had come home. A fast check of the sun’s height caused her to raise an eyebrow. It was early. She rocked and rose in one long, sinuous movement, without using her hands. She stooped and picked up the dish. She tipped it so the pebble rolled in a circle on the depression where a teacup would sit. It made a sound like a high-pitched bell tolling.
Jackson, sitting guard just inside the house, lifted his head and tracked her to the door. She opened it and entered.
“You might try relaxing,” he offered. “Hard to meditate when you’re tight as a drum.”
Her response to him was a frown and a shrug. She redirected the conversation to safer ground. “Someone’s home.” Meditation was the excuse she’d use to distract his attention from her actual purpose—to re-create the amulet she had made at the Glade while practicing Harold’s levitation spell. She had positioned herself so that her back was to Jackson, obscuring the rounded rock, not that it made any difference.
“I heard.”
Of course he had.
As if timed, the door from the kitchen to the garage swung open and Sasha entered, briefcase in hand. Kenzie scowled. Sasha saw it and a fleeting expression of anger, quickly suppressed, touched her eyes. Sasha faced Jackson.
“Mr. Jackson, thank you for your time today. Mr. Graham and I will be home for the rest of the afternoon and evening.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jackson, wearing a smile. In a few words, he recapped the day, part of the briefing that he delivered every day to whichever parent arrived home first. His ability to observe the most minor of details, including times down to the minute, was impressive. After her experiences in the spring, Kenzie didn’t try to flimflam Jackson. He finished with the report, then, with a nod in Kenzie’s direction, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Miss Graham.”
“I want to go to church tomorrow,” Kenzie stated, staring at Sasha, and using “church” as a pseudonym for the Glade of Silver Night. “Can Jackson take me and wait outside?”
“I can wait inside,” Jackson suggested with a shrug. “Just in case.” His discomfort at not being in close proximity to her if his skills were needed clearly weighed on him.
“No.” Sasha’s voice was cold. “Our faith is private.” A glare with an edge as sharp as a dagger slashed at Kenzie for introducing the subject in front of the bodyguard. “And no to you, too. I or your father can take you if you need.” She softened. “Good evening, Mr. Jackson. We’ll see you in the morning.”
Dismissed, Jackson left, leaving Kenzie alone with her stepmother. Sasha looked her up and down with a sniff. “You need to change into proper clothes.”
Kenzie looked down. She wore a yellow running bra, her hot pink shorts, and a pair of sweaty low-cut socks that matched her shorts. She put a hand on her hip. “I’m comfortable.”
Distaste curled Sasha’s mouth. “You’re sweaty and those are not appropriate clothes for going out.”
Kenzie tipped her head down but maintained eye contact. “I’m sweaty from running. Which I would do outside except you and Father are so paranoid that I’m stuck with a full-time babysitter who won’t let me cross the street, much less go for a run. So, instead, I get to spend time on the dread-mill.”
Sasha refused to be diverted. “As may be. Get changed. Choose something flattering.”
That didn’t sound good. Suspicious, Kenzie retreated to her next line of defense. “I don’t want to go.”
“That’s nice. Get dressed.”
“You can’t make me.” The words erupted from Kenzie before she had a chance to think about them. When she did, it was all she could do not to wince. Acting like a two-year-old was embarrassing.
Sasha approached Kenzie and stopped a foot away. In a glacially cold voice, she said, “Actually, I can.” She ran the back of her pointer finger down Kenzie’s cheek, leaving icicles clinging to her skin. “There’s more to the Art than power. I would be delighted to prove that to you sometime.” She smiled like a shark, daring Kenzie to accept the challenge.
Kenzie stumbled back. Goose bumps appeared on her arms at the pregnant deadliness in the air. Wordlessly, she fled, Sasha’s eyes boring holes in her back. She reached her room and slammed the door behind her. Leaning against it, she panted while her thoughts fell around her in a jumbled heap. One idea stood above the others and added to the chill in her bones. Sasha hadn’t risen to the top of the family and stayed there by playing nice.
The atmosphere in the car was cooled by more than the air-conditioning that her father had blasting. If he noticed the tension between the two women, he kept it hidden. He focused on navigating the rush-hour traffic that brought the Seattle highways to daily standstills. They crept over the Montlake Boulevard bridge, headed north. To the right, Husky Stadium waited for the start of football season. To the left was the sun, dropping to the horizon and extending shadows.
“Where are we going?”
Just as they had the previous six times, both adults ignored her. If they didn’t want to tell her, it couldn’t be good. One particular kind of not-good stood out. She had dressed accordingly.
Sasha had stressed “flattering.” Kenzie had selected the dumpiest clothes she owned: a formless sweater top that left her looking flat-chested, and her baggiest jeans. She left her hair in the ponytail from her run on the treadmill and used no makeup. It had the desired effect of aggravating Sasha, though not to the point of more open warfare. Her father seemed indifferent.
They turned in past a gate framed by two l
antern-capped columns and glided downhill toward the water. The homes grew progressively larger and more opulent the closer to the lakeshore they went. On the last row of miniature mansions, her father directed the car into a driveway leading down to a home with pleasing classical lines. It easily surpassed the size of her parents’ home four or five times over. A security man dressed in a suit stepped from a space near the garage and pointed. Her father parked in the space indicated and they exited the vehicle.
“Mr. and Mrs. Graham, my name is Walter. I’ll be watching your car while you are visiting. Mr. Rubiera asked me to direct you to the veranda. He said he will meet you there.” The way he used his hand to suggest the direction, fingers tight together and thumb folded inside the palm, made him look like a tour guide.
Golden lamps shaped like teardrops hung on wrought metal posts and lit the winding path formed by stone inset with an intricate pattern that made it closer to a work of art than a walkway. On either side, viny Japanese wisteria grew, casting a sweet scent onto the air. At the high arch separating the home from the grounds, the flowers of the plant hung in a waterfall of purple profusion. Moving through the arch left them with a view of the graceful home, draped in the colors of the soon-to-set sun.
Purple and gold. The significance offended her. She already knew that the Rubiera Family, represented by Hunter, thought highly of themselves. Decorating in the hues of royalty proclaimed their arrogance. Kenzie opened her mouth to comment on it, and then snapped it shut at the realization that it offended her. Why? The answer brought a wrinkle of self-awareness to her forehead. She sniffed, earning a warning glance from Sasha and an appraising nod from her father.
The walkway straightened and fed them onto a broad terrace with a waist-high white stucco wall demarcating the edge of the short cliff face down to the lakeside. Steep steps led to a small floating dock and a nimble-looking twenty-foot sailboat. Seagulls thronged just off shore, caw-cawing as they fought for scraps.
At the corner where the house met the terrace, a tall man stood with imperious ease in the shadows cast by the overhang of the veranda’s cover.
