Winds of Change Book Two

by Melissa Good

  “Wow.” Dar wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “And, they booted out the big cheese.”

  “Alastair?”

  “Yep. Told him to take a hike and he said he was more than happy to. That’s why, I guess, he hasn’t called ya.”

  “Holy shit,” Dar repeated. “What the hell are they going to do?”

  “Beats me. Beats Pete. He’s the only one who stuck it out and he only did it because he’s got this hard on to prove that jackass wrong and make the thing right.”

  “Uh huh.” Dar thought a moment. “Does he want me to help?”

  Mark muffled the call. “Yeah, I’m here. Hang on I’ll be right back in there.” He uncovered the mouthpiece. “Sure he does, but he’s scared.”

  “Understandable.”

  “He’s got a wife who’s nine months preggers and about to pop. They’re living on his salary. He said that was the only reason he agreed to do my gig, it gave him a bump.”

  “Mark. If something happens to this guy because of something we did together, I’ll take care of him,” Dar said.

  “I know. I told him that,” Mark said. “But he’s scared they’re going to see that online forum thing. He wants to talk to you in person, see if there’s something you can tell him to do.”

  “Sure,” Dar said. “You want to bring him by the office tomorrow morning, early? I don’t seriously think there’s surveillance watching us.”

  “Can I bring him by your place tonight?”

  Dar glanced at Kerry, who was plastered to her chest listening, watching the blonde head nod. “Sure. I’ll leave your name at the ferry.”

  “Great. See ya soon,” Mark said. “All right! I hear ya! I’m coming back!” He closed the line and Dar hit the release button on her end.

  “Holy crap,” Kerry said. “This is nuts.”

  “Total nuts.” Dar shook her head. “Let’s just hope I can give him some useful advice.”

  “Ugh.”

  DAR WAS BACK in her office with Kerry perched on one end of the desk, and Mark and Pete sitting on the couch. She leaned on her elbows, mostly just listening as the young, tow-haired man in jeans and a hoodie talked.

  “So.” Peter took a sip from the glass he held in both hands. “That’s how it happened. Nobody really...I mean, we looked at what he wanted us to do but no one realized what it would...I mean, do.”

  “Uh,” Dar grunted softly.

  “So then,” Peter continued. “He made us reload all the routers from scratch. So we didn’t have anything left to roll back to. He said he wanted to make this work, so he dumped the repository so we couldn’t reload from backup.”

  Kerry leaned forward a little. “That is criminally idiotic.”

  Peter nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I tried to argue with him.”

  “What you shoulda done is copy the repository off to an offline storage before you dumped it,” Mark said. “What a fucking moron this guy is.”

  Dar spoke up for the first time in a while. “If what he thought was that the configs were so proprietary he couldn’t wrap his head around them, it would make sense to do it from scratch so he knew everything.”

  The other three in the room stared at her.

  Dar folded her hands. “I’m guessing he thought he could put his own configuration in and it would work.”

  “Uh...I suppose, ma’am,” Peter said, meekly.

  “I might have done the same thing.”

  “Yeah, but the difference is your stuff would work,” Mark said. “Because you actually know how to do this.”

  “That’s true. But I’m guessing he thought he did, too. Even though I think he’s an idiot in terms of management, no one is stupid enough to take down their whole company and put all their clients at risk a couple weeks into a new job.”

  Peter nodded. “What pissed everyone off is he tried to blame us first, then you. He refused to man up and say it was him that caused the problem.”

  Dar pondered that. “What does he want to do now? He want this fixed, or he want to sit there and have his ass on fire until he ends up having to redo everything, which is going to take probably a month?”

  “Up ‘til today I’d have said he wanted to rig it,” Peter said, promptly. “But after everybody walked out I saw him in ops and he was really freaked out. He told me I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone but he needed to get this stuff working because some big customer was yelling.”

  “Okay, that’s good,” Dar said. “Because if he was going to stick to his original plan it would never have worked. The layout’s not designed for anything but the metrics we had.”

  Peter nodded. “I sorta thought maybe that was it. Willerson thinks you did something.”

  “I did,” Dar said with a brief smile. “But everything I did is written down in the design documents. He didn’t erase those, too, did he?”

  Peter shook his head. “No. He said he read those and that’s why he wanted to make that change, said it would make things better.”

  Dar studied his face then she sighed. “All right. Ker’s on the money. He’s a moron.”

  Kerry gave her a puzzled look. “Were you really trying to give him the benefit of the doubt?”

  “Yes.” Dar leaned back in her chair. “If he had half a brain then I could call him up and we could maybe get this taken care of. But that kind of idiot doesn’t back down. At this point, he can’t. He has to go all the way with it or he’s done.”

  “Yeah,” Peter agreed. “But at this point he’s freaking. I think he’ll let me get in there and try to fix stuff if you can tell me how.”

  “Should you?” Kerry asked, half turning to face Dar. “I know there’s the issue with the military contracts, Dar, but honestly, should you go in there and make this right? Considering that they already are trying to blame you?”

  Dar hitched her knee up and circled it with both hands, pondering in silence as the rest of them waited. “It’s a valid question,” she finally said. “I don’t feel like I owe them anything at this point.” She took a breath and released it. “But I’ll be damned if my legacy at that place is going to be a colossal fuck up they’re trying to paint my name on.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement, even Kerry. “I get it, hon. Let’s figure out how to get it done.”

  “That’s the hard part. I don’t have any copies of the configs,” Dar said. “I left everything in the repository so we’ll have to depend on my memory to rebuild them.”

  “Sorry about that, ma’am.” Peter looked glum. “Mark’s right. I should have copied everything off before I deleted it.”

  “You guys made those changes without copying the config on a notepad at least?” Mark sounded incredulous. “What the hell, man?”

  “Notepad,” Dar muttered, her eyes shifting off to one side. “What did that remind me of?”

  “Let me go make some coffee,” Kerry said. “I’m guessing we’re gonna need it.” She got up off the desk and headed for the kitchen with Chino trotting behind her.

  “You know, all of us probably did,” Peter said mournfully. “But with all the crazy making, stuff was moving and systems got rebooted, and you know.”

  Mark got up. “Let me get my lappie. Maybe I did something illegal and crazy like left some copies on my personal external.”

  Dar made a clucking noise with her tongue.

  “Hey, boss, I know where that code repository came from.” He gave Dar a wry look. “Even if it was all yours.” He ducked out and that

  left Dar and Peter alone in the office.

  Peter looked profoundly uncomfortable.

  Dar leaned forward again and rested her chin on her hand. “Weird, huh?”

  He made a face. “Yes, ma’am. Too much strange for me.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine,” she responded, though she really couldn’t. “Listen, let’s start off by you calling me by my name, okay? I never was much for the ma’am stuff.”

  Peter smiled uncertainly. “I sort of feel like I’m stuck betw
een that rock and a hard place. I don’t want to be a troublemaker, you know? I just want to go in and work and go home and enjoy my family.”

  Dar nodded. “I get that. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  He nodded.

  “You could get nailed here, doing this,” Dar went on. “But you don’t have much of a choice. At least not until things start working again.”

  Peter relaxed visibly. “You get it.”

  Dar smiled at him. “Sorry, Peter,” she said. “One way or another I’ll make this right for you. Promise.” She watched his expression become more open. “I made things there the way I did so it would give the company an advantage. Not to be a jackass.”

  Now he smiled. “Yes, ma...I mean, yes. We all knew that. Even Mr. Jose said that in the big meeting we had yesterday. He said no matter what David Willerson’s said, or what he thought, you did the right things.”

  Ah, Jose. Dar felt a little tickled. “He should know, because no matter how much he and I disagreed he did the right things, too, for the company.”

  Peter nodded. “The guy said Mr. Jose was stupid, then everyone started yelling and we all just left.”

  That, unfortunately, Dar could easily imagine. She’d been in enough of those meetings. With a sigh she leaned back and her knee bumped the desk drawer, nudging it open. She reached over to shut it then paused when she saw the edge of something inside and pulled it all the way open.

  “Huh.” She took out the old Palm and examined it, then fished around in the drawer for the charger. “I wonder?” She plugged it in and waited for it to start up. “Wonder if I left any notes in there from last year.”

  Kerry came back in with a thermos and some cups, setting them down on Dar’s desk. “Whatcha got there, hon?”

  “My old PDA,” Dar said. “I might have saved some of my notes from when I was doing the rig at the Rock.”

  Mark came back in with his laptop and a small case hung around his neck. “I think I’ve got the mesh diagram.” He sat down and opened the laptop. “I was gonna have it printed out and laminated.”

  Dar looked up at him and frowned. “What?”

  Kerry nudged her. “Keep surfing.”

  Peter got up and timidly fixed himself a cup of coffee. “Been a long day,” he said, by way of explanation. “It’s nice of you all to let us come over here. It’s a pretty place.”

  “No problem. Dar would tell you that she prefers our cabin down south,” Kerry said, handing over a small ceramic jug of creamer. “And, actually, so do I.”

  Dar focused past the conversation and started to root through the PDA as it finished booting. She took out the stylus and tapped around, calling up a note program she remembered using. There were several folders randomly named and she clicked on one.

  After a moment she closed it. She shook her head and opened a second, tilting the screen so she could read the text. She closed that and clicked on the next. “I keep the weirdest crap,” she muttered. “Ah.” She sat back and regarded the PDA. “I think this might be...yeah. The config for the two big routers in Miami.”

  “Cool.” Mark came over and looked over her shoulder. “Yeah, that’s them.”

  “Mm. I saved a copy before I did the changes to make the reroute at the Rock work.” Dar gave him a droll look. “So at least I can’t feel hypocritical about it.”

  “Those were a lot of changes.”

  “They were.” Dar sent the note to her private email from the PDA and waited for her desktop to pick it up. Then she regarded it and sent it to the printer. “Okay, let’s see what this gets us.”

  KERRY WAS LYING on the couch, her head resting on the arm and her legs extended out and crossed at the ankles. Mocha was sleeping on her chest and Chino was curled up just past her feet. She listened idly to Dar give Mark and Peter some last instructions at the door.

  Then the door closed. She turned her head and opened one eye to see Dar heading her way. “Think it’ll work?”

  “Probably not.” Kerry sat up and Dar slid into the empty place on the couch then pulled her back down on top of her. “If they let him make the changes, there’s probably even more changes in there that I haven’t seen that’ll screw things up.”

  “Ugh.”

  “I need to just go in there and do it,” Dar acknowledged mournfully.

  “You need to concentrate on making that demo for Congress,” Kerry said. “Dar, I know you want to make this right, but there’s only so much you can do.”

  Dar sighed. She put her arms around Kerry and hugged her. “We’ll

  see what happens. Maybe he’ll work it out, He’s a bright kid.”

  Kerry patted her leg. “Then let’s go to bed. It’s two a.m. Tomorrow’s going to suck.”

  Dar remained in place. “You pissed off that I’m doing this?” she asked. “You seem like it.”

  “I’m not. I mean I’m not pissed off at you,” Kerry clarified. “I’m just pissed that ILS can’t seem to let go of us. I want out of it. I don’t want to worry about them sending lawyers after us and blaming us for stuff and...you know.”

  “Mm. Sorry.”

  “It frustrates me,” Kerry said. “I just want that part of our life to be over and it seems like all they want to do is suck us back into it.” She looked up at Dar’s profile. “But I get it, Dar. I know you spent a good part of your life there and you can’t let it go so easily.”

  Dar smiled at her with open and sweet affection. “I love you,” she said. “I’m glad you get that because I don’t want us to fight over it.”

  “I don’t want us to fight over anything,” Kerry responded.

  “Yeah, that’s no fun.”

  They untangled themselves and got up, Kerry carefully letting the sleepy eyed Mocha down on the ground. “There you go, little man. You want a piddle stop before we go to bed?”

  Chino jumped down and yawned, stretching her paws out. Then she trotted over to the dog door and through it, with Mocha galloping behind her.

  Kerry wandered into the kitchen and leaned on the counter, watching the dogs in the garden as the motion sensitive lights came on. She turned her head as Dar entered, coming over to stand next to her, gazing outside with her arms folded over her chest.

  Kerry edged over and let her head rest against Dar’s shoulder, pausing to give the skin there a kiss. “Can I come with you to Washington?”

  “Want to come with me to DC?” Dar asked at the same time. They looked at each other then started chuckling.

  “We’re sappy, useless poster children for bad romance novels, you know that?” Kerry sighed. “I sometimes feel like our lives are set to Disney princess music.”

  “Aw.”

  “Though, I’ll keep you company right up to the door to the senate chambers. I don’t think my presence will win you any points in there.” Kerry leaned on the counter with her elbows. “I’d like to talk to Bridges’s team about implementation.”

  “Sure,” Dar agreed. “Let’s get the pooches and sack out. Maria can make the arrangements tomorrow.”

  Back in the bedroom Kerry wiped Mocha’s dew drenched feet and watched him march over into Chino’s bed and curl up.

  It was late and Kerry was tired. She got under the covers and smiled as she listened to Dar humming in the bathroom. Dar came back in and joined her, making the water bed rock a little. Kerry waited for her to settle then eased over and curled up against Dar’s right side. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Dar replied, her resonant tones making Kerry’s ears tickle just a trifle.

  “Can we be late to work tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “We own the company.”

  “We do,” Dar said. “Once you teach Mayte how to handle your stuff, you can spend the day with your feet up on your desk writing poetry and no one’s gonna say word one to you.”

  Kerry had to stop and think about that for a minute. “Except that someone I know taught me one of the golden rules is to lead by example.” She felt Dar
chuckle silently. “So I can’t do that unless you’re going to use those poems as the basis of a new client offering.”

  “True, but we can still go to work late tomorrow,” Dar said. “It’s not always a bad thing to let the staff work things out on their own, y’know.”

  Kerry lifted her head and gave her a wry look.

  “Yeah, okay, let’s wait to see how we feel when the sun rises.”

  AS IT TURNED out, the morning wasn’t nearly as painful as Kerry had feared. They woke only a half hour later than the alarm would have normally sounded. With mutual shrugs, they got up and got about their usual routine.

  “C’mon, kids.” Kerry zipped up her light jacket, waiting for Mocha and Chino to come trotting over. “Let’s go for a ride to the office. You ready?”

  Chino twirled around in a circle and barked, while Mocha eyed her warily.

  Dar got her backpack on her shoulder and joined them, her head bent as she texted a message on her Handspring. “Asking Mark if he heard anything.” She picked up Mocha and followed Kerry out the door.

  They were taking Kerry’s car and she hopped up into the driver’s seat after letting Chino into the back seat where she curled up on the fuzzy dog blanket attached to the leather that conveniently kept her from sliding around.

  “It’s fun taking these guys with us,” Dar commented as Mocha stood up on her knee and looked out the window. “You know what I was thinking? For the demo I think I’d like to tie in to a simulated Internet node back here.”

  “Like fake traffic?” Kerry asked.

  “Yeah. We don’t have any way of tying in for real yet.”

  “I have a call in to A&T and Level Three,” Kerry said. “They aren’t happy, but they knew this was coming. Do we know yet where they’re going to want the private circuits dropped and who’s paying for them?” T

  Dar let her head rest against the seat. “They’re paying for them, but that’s a good question. I have to find out who’s supposed to order them and make sure they’re the right size.” She glanced at Kerry. “Good thing you’re going with me.”