by Melissa Good
“Help us? She caused this!” The main pointed at Dar.
“Is that...” Kerry muttered.
“Yes.”
“Let me start texting.”
Bridges turned to look at Dar. “You cause this, Roberts?”
“No,” Dar responded in a flatly calm voice. “Moronic male ego caused this. I had nothing to do with it. Assuming what you’re talking about is the fact that a company I used to work for maliciously and deliberately disrupted your systems.”
“Now, Dar.” Jacques stepped out from behind a block of angry bodies. “That’s not true.”
“Fuck you, it is,” Dar said. “I told you what to do and you didn’t do it. All of you put pride in front of your customer. From my perspective, that makes you all useless sacks of shit who frankly deserve to be taken into some green painted cell somewhere in the basement of this place and beaten to death.”
She stopped talking and sat down, resting her elbows on the big conference table. “Please get this over with. I have a demonstration to do in a half hour.”
There were very few times that Kerry was prouder of Dar than she was at this moment. She quietly sat down next to Dar and folded her hands on her lap.
“Dar,” Jacques regrouped. “I was just—”
“Shut up. You’re a goat bag. I have no respect for you,” Dar said in a clipped tone. “I have no respect for any of you. Be men. You fucked up. Own it.”
Bridges sat down with a grunt.
A tall, dark haired man, dressed in a green linen suit, put his hands on the back of the chair directly across from where Dar was sitting. “Can I ask who you are?”
“My name is Dar Roberts. Can I ask who you are?”
The man sat down. “You’re Dar Roberts? Funny. From what I was hearing I expected you to have a horn and a long red tail,” he said. “I’m Steve Booker.”
“Ah. We’ve spoken,” Kerry said. “He’s the governmental systems technical coordinator, Dar.”
He peered at her. “I know that voice. Kerry Stuart?”
Kerry drew a breath, then just merely nodded.
“You going to sit down?” Bridges stared pointedly at Jacques and
the man with the crew cut. “Or do you want me to call the goons to have you dragged down to the not nearly as fictitious little green room downstairs?”
Reluctantly they sat.
“All right.” Bridges leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “I don’t have time to screw around with you people anymore,” he said. “Shut up and don’t speak until I tell you to,” he said, as Jacques drew breath.
Bridges looked at Dar. “What is the actual fucking problem, Roberts, since I know deep in my complete lack of a heart that you know.”
Kerry put her hand on Dar’s arm, applying gentle pressure. Then she cleared her throat. “We don’t know specifically what happened,” she said, “because only the people who actually did it know what they did.”
Bridges rolled his eyes.
“But what I believe happened is that the people ILS hired to replace Dar, and I, decided to put their imprint on the systems that were in place there. They made changes to them that caused a pretty serious degradation in performance.”
Higgs took an angry breath. “That’s a—”
“Don’t,” Kerry said sharply. “Stop playing games. This is the government of the United States you’re messing up. The consequences of that are a lot more important than you understand.”
“You are liable for this,” Dar said, in the small silence that followed. “What you did will take ILS down. You’ll lose the company.” She looked directly at Jacques. “And you will deserve to lose it. I am so disgusted by you and what you allowed to happen here that I’m about to throw up on this table.”
Jacques’s face twisted into a grimace. “Dar—”
“We risked our lives for this customer.” Dar cut him off, but in a very quiet, gentle voice. “And you allowed this moron to knowingly and deliberately put them in jeopardy.”
Higgs stood up. “You made that system so impenetrable you caused this! Don’t blame this on anybody but you, you fucking immoral piece of shit!”
“So you did make some changes?” Bridges asked.
“To make things better. Sure,” Higgs said.
Bridges sniffed reflectively. “John, get the MPs up here,” he said. “I want this guy put in lock up.” He turned to Dar, leaning on his chair arm. “Can you fix this, Roberts?”
“She’s not touching anything!” Higgs said. “I’ve got our lawyer coming over here and he’s going to serve the damn papers we’ve been trying to serve to this bitch for two weeks. Then we’ll see who’s going to jail.”
“Brook, sit down,” Jacques said, quietly.
“The hell! I’m not going to sit down, and I’m not going to stand by while my reputation and yours gets tossed in the garbage!” Higgs started around the table toward Dar. “Wait ‘til I get my hands on you.”
The door opened in front of him and he stopped abruptly, taking a step back as a man walked in with rolled up sleeves and a casual pair of slacks on. “What’s all going on in here?” he asked, looking around. “Oh, there you are.”
“Hello, Mr. President,” Bridges said. “Just having a meeting.”
“With all that yelling?” Bush seemed surprised. “Hello there, ladies.” He gave Dar and Kerry a smile. “Hey, is this your lady friend?” he asked Dar.
“It is,” Dar said. “My partner, Kerry.”
“Hi, there. Call me George.” The president extended a hand, which Kerry took. “I just heard from someone down the hall that your new thing’s really something.”
“Looking forward to demonstrating it to you shortly,” Dar said. “So far, so good.”
“Well now that’s great. So what’s all the yelling about?” Bush asked, a touch more sharply. “Something wrong?”
“Just getting some issues ironed out,” Bridges said. “Nothing too tough.”
“Uh huh.” Bush nodded. “Well, you all try not to keep Ms. Roberts too long. We’ve got an appointment.” He eyed them, then slipped out the door and closed it behind him.
Higgs went back to his seat and sat down, looking like he was trying to pass a gallstone. Jacques leaned back and half hid his eyes with one hand.
Bridges ignored both of them. “Okay, now where were we. Roberts? Can you fix this thing or not?”
“In point of fact, she’s been trying to,” Kerry said. “Except these bimbos keep firing the people she was trying to help.”
Bridges tapped his lips. “Roberts?”
“I won’t do it to help them,” Dar finally said. “But I will do it for you. Pull their contracts. After that you get me access and I’ll fix it.”
“What?” Higgs yelped.
“Dar, please don’t be so hasty.”
“Done,” Bridges said with a brief smile. “Steve, call the GAO and make it happen. Cut the new contracts to Roberts’s company and mandate the gizmos, gears and whatnot that makes it all up goes to them, too.”
Kerry grimaced. “Oh lord. That honestly won’t work.”
“Then go with him and figure out how to make it work,” Bridges told her. “You’ve got a shitload of your father in you. Go prove it.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Go on.”
Dar leaned closer to him. “You keep insulting Kerry and I’ll tell you to fuck off, too.”
“No, it’s okay.” Kerry was surprised to find that it actually was.
“He meant it in a good way.” She stood up and patted Dar’s back, then circled the table and pointed at Steve. “C’mon.”
“Let’s clear the room,” Bridges said. “Except you, and you, and me.” He pointed at Jacques and Dar. “John, keep that bozo entertained.” He indicated Higgs. “Move, people.”
Five minutes later they were alone in the room.
“So,” Bridges said. “Explain to me why you turned into such an idiot?” he asked Jacques.
Jacques
merely shook his head. “There comes a point,” he said after a pause, “when all the bad decisions are made of so much weight, you cannot push them off.”
“You could have,” Dar said. “I told you what you needed to do.”
“You did,” he said. “But I am only one man and there were so many on the board who refused to go along with that, because it meant to the world a total failure.”
Bridges brows hiked. “And this is?”
“Now? It is in fact a total failure,” Jacques said. “We will all be cast out.”
“You should be,” Dar said. “You butchered that company.”
“Dar.”
“Jacques, that’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Dar said. “The buck stops with you. Just like when I was there, the buck stopped with Alastair.”
“We were very sure we knew what to do,” Jacques said. “We were absolutely sure we had picked well to replace you.”
Dar regarded him. “You are a moron,” she said. “Higgs could no more replace me than I could flap my arms and fly to Mars.”
“That is the problem isn’t it? You made yourself un-replaceable,” Jacques said. “I think you knew that. You arranged things so that anyone who followed you would be lost.”
Dar regarded him thoughtfully. “I did,” she said, surprising everyone. “Not on purpose,” she added. “It’s just who I am. I’m a leader. An Alpha if you want. I did things my way. But you all knew that and you let me. If that wasn’t what you wanted, then you should have stopped me a long time ago.”
Bridges nodded in turn.
“So yes, I knew I was impossible to replace. I just wasn’t going to sacrifice my life because of that. I was hoping you’d find someone who would study what I did and then make a plan to make it their own. Not do something as mind-bendingly stupid as make some random change then make it impossible to recover from it.”
“So now you will wreck us,” Jacques said.
“Yes. I can’t let you wreck both the company’s reputation and mine,” Dar said. “So I will take you down and force a replacement of the board. If the company’s very lucky, Alastair will agree to take over again until things can be made right.”
Jacques shook his head “They will not stand still for that.”
“They won’t have a choice,” Bridges said. “Considering how much of the operations of the government you goat heads are disrupting, I could have all of you held as suspected terrorists. You do realize that, right?”
Jacques looked at him, startled.
“You do realize where you are, right?” He pointed at the desk. “You do realize the guy who walked in here a while back in the chinos and button down was George Bush, right? Leader of the free world and all that crap?”
Dar sighed.
“She gets it.” Bridges pointed at Dar. “If I were you, I’d start catching up before the best thing that will happen to you and all your Wall Street buddies is they’ll end up in Guantanamo.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “And I don’t even need a warrant. Your families will never see you again. You’ll never get a lawyer. You get me?”
Jacques was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said then. “I understand you.”
“Good.” Bridges looked satisfied. “Today might end up all right after all.” He leaned back and twiddled his thumbs, humming softly under his breath.
Dar waited a moment to see if anything else was going to happen, then she pulled out her Handspring and started to type.
Chapter Fourteen
KERRY FOUND HERSELF in a rectangular office, with desks against the walls and old fashioned drapes over the windows above them. There were two men behind one of the desks, with big ledgers open in front of them, and her new friend Steve on the phone next to her.
“We can’t,” she answered Steve’s question. “We don’t have anything close to the space, people, systems, all that, to be able to actually manage the contracts.”
“But Ms. Roberts said—”
“Yes, I know what Dar said.” Kerry sighed. “I’m totally with her on getting that board out of there and getting people into position not to mess everything up again, but there is just no way for us to take over the service like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“So what do we do?”
That was a good question. Kerry leaned against the desk behind her. “What are the...wait, why am I asking you that? I wrote the damn contract.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It’s a three year and it was renewed about eighteen months ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Got a penalty clause,” one of the accountants said.
“Yes, it would. But it also has SLAs in it. Can you pull them?” Kerry said. “And the monitors that prove they were broken?”
Steve scratched his head. “Do we do that?”
“You should.”
“I think they depended on ILS to tell us,” he responded with a grimace. “But all that doesn’t matter. Bridges said to just make it happen, so that’s what we need to do, you know?”
“I know but it’s not that easy. The stuff that’s running your stuff is on pieces of gear that other people’s stuff is running on.”
“That’s not right,” Steve said. “You can’t mix top secret stuff like that.”
“I can if the other stuff is just as top secret,” Kerry said. “There’s an awful lot of government stuff on the...” She paused and pondered the options. “Okay wait. The government nodes in the area are segregated...”
“We should take over everything. It wasn’t right to have some company doing it,” Steve said. “I told everyone that.”
“That’s it.” Kerry straightened up. “We can’t do it because we don’t have the people.”
“Well, we sure don’t have the people. That’s why we hired ILS,” the accountant said in a practical tone.
“But you could,” Kerry said. “You could put your own people into all the places where the connections are and you monitor them.”
Steve’s eyes literally lit up. “Yeah!”
“We don’t have those people,” the accountant repeated. “Where do we get them?”
“You hire the people who are already there.” Kerry’s pale green eyes twinkled, just a little. “The ones that work for ILS. They would be out of a job if you took away the contracts.”
The accountant smiled, thinly. “I see.”
“That way they’re not cutting the contracts to another company, you’re in sourcing,” Kerry said. “You just terminate the contracts for non-performance and conscript the equipment due to national security reasons.”
“You bet...” He paused. “Can we do that?”
“Sure why not?” Kerry smiled. “They all have government security clearances,” she said. “And they know what to do with your stuff.”
One of the other accountants looked up at the words. “Wait, we’re hiring people?”
“That’s a super idea,” Steve said. “Kerry, you are the bomb.”
“Don’t say that.” The other accountant said. “You know they don’t like it.”
The first accountant started shuffling through papers. “We better get someone to rubber stamp a budget then...let me get the forms.” He shook his head a little and went over to a filing cabinet. “Bridges will sign this, right?”
“Right,” Steve said. “He said whatever it takes.”
The accountant rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what they all say when it involves taxpayer dollars.”
“So now what?” Steve turned to Kerry. “Should we go over to the place where all our stuff is?”
Kerry drew in a breath then released it. “Let’s get all the paperwork in line, then yeah. I’ll go over there with you. I know the people there.” She was hard pressed to know whether to be relieved or apprehensive about it. She knew there were a lot of long timers in the Herndon office.
Loyal people. Competent people who had welcomed her leadership with open arms in very tense times. How would they feel about this?
Would it be a betrayal?
A rescue?
“Should we tell them we’re coming, or just go over there?” Steve asked. “They could screw things up worse if they get pissed off, right?”
Kerry was briefly silent. “We’ll just go,” she said. “I don’t think they’d do anything but there’s no saying ILS won’t.”
Steve clapped her on the shoulder. “Right on,” he said. “Let’s get some coffee. I’m thinking it’s gonna be a long day.”
DAR OPENED THE message on her Handspring, ignoring Jacques’s staring eyes. “Well, crap,” she said. “There’s not one single solitary person left in IT in the Miami office.” She looked up and across the table. “Mark is there. He said there’s not one person he can give a new set of configs to, to maybe, maybe solve this.”
Bridges spun around in his chair. “Tell him to go fix it himself,” he said. “Can he?”
Dar dialed Mark’s number. “Let me talk to him.”
“You’ll get him inside whatever that is, right?” Bridges looked pointedly at Jacques.
“Yes, of course,” Jacques answered instantly. “Dar, is that Mark Polenti?”
Dar nodded. “I spent last night revising your fucking router configs because your brainless idiot called him and begged him for help.”
Bridges chuckled under his breath. “You should have gone into the service, Roberts. You’ve got the mindset for it.”
“I would have ended up court-martialed for insubordination before I left basic,” Dar responded crisply. “Mark?”
“Yea, boss,” Mark said, somewhat indistinctly. “They just brought me a tray of pastelitos. Hang on.” He swallowed. “Okay, so, here’s the deal—ain’t no one for me to give this stuff to. Like, no one.”
“I know. They want you to go in and put them in yourself. You up for that?”
Long silence. “Are you shitting me?”
Dar sighed. “I’m sitting in the briefing room at The White House with White Fang here crouched over me and Jacques with a gun to his head. No. I’m not shitting you.”
Bridges chuckled dryly. “That was my favorite book as a kid,” he said. “That and some Zane Gray Indian stories.”
