staff, the implementer of each phase of our expansion. But she was also someone who found an only poorly suppressed pleasure in tracking the activities of our rogue sections. Whitley oversaw the task force investigating the rogue sections and—more importantly—other far more serious security threats from industry spies and outside hackers. It was a task force comprised of fifteen security officers, twelve system administrators, two reformed hackers, three industrial psychologists, four financial auditors, three lawyers, four members of the R&D department, a former FBI investigator and Leonard, the head of the company’s Technical Development Group. They shadowed suspect e-mails, tapped problem phone calls, reviewed inexplicable documents and project plans and—when necessary—attempted to infiltrate a rogue section.
The group was officially named the Subversives & Intrusions Task Force. However, they were known to most everyone as the Core SWAT team.
“SWAT was a compromise name,” Whitley always liked to recall. “Some members wanted to be known as Army Rangers, others wanted the Coast Guard. Personally, I lobbied hard for calling us the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
Responsibility for something like the SWAT team—and the rogue sections—was something I would have given only to Whitley. I’d hired Whitley when the company had hit sixty employees, all of whom were madly chasing the plan I’d laid out—domination of the high-speed mainframe networking industry through a fanatical commitment to drawing blood from mainframes around the country and the world. However, as devoted and well-intentioned as we tried to be, as revolutionary as our Blue Boxes were, none of us had a clue how to work together effectively. Departments didn’t communicate, managers didn’t coordinate, and so despite the best efforts of the best people, we were making only very slow progress.
Whitley made us communicate.
Whitley made us coordinate.
Whitley made us make progress.
She was one of those people who, in everyone she touched, instilled a sense of benevolent fear. She smiled, she was kind, she understood. And she made people fear any possibility of not doing their best.
“You’ll get it done,” she would say, nodding, hard shoulders dropping just slightly as she spoke. “I don’t know how, but you will.”
And so, throughout the company, in any department, any division, Whitley was the only person who ever really told me no. Julie, Cliff and Leonard sometimes laughed off my suggestions, vice presidents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as I relayed an idea, the board of directors periodically moved to put one of my initiatives under “extended review.”
But only Whitley told me no.
In the past three years Whitley and her SWAT team had, without realizing it, come closer and closer to various parts of my lie. Rogue sections, outside hackers, industry spies—all had caused security problems for the company. Each incident had led to an even deeper investigation of Core’s operations, a greater expansion of Whitley’s SWAT team, new security measures for Leonard and his technical staff. And all of that made my lie more difficult to sustain. SWAT pressing closer to the hidden satellites, the secret servers, the increasing flow of un-tracked money.
My own secret police, unintentionally hunting me down.
On bad days I pictured myself walking into my office to find Whit-ley and her SWAT team at my computer, studying the secrets of my spreadsheet model.
And what they could find was almost unimaginable. My lie, grown terribly large and impossibly complex in the three years since it had begun. A high-tech fraud made up of a thousand interdependent deceptions. The people who worked here, the companies we acquired, the stock we sold—all of it was an unseen disease. A cancer, really, spread silently through this company and still, every day, infecting and reinfecting each department, each system, each person who was here.
When it did finally kill us, it would do so suddenly. Completely. The computers would stop working. The mainframes would shut down. The satellites might as well fall from the sky. And no one—not SWAT, not Whitley—would be able to decipher what exactly had happened.
Paper sorted, paper printed, paper copied, paper piled, paper flowing toward destinations unseen and unknown, paper sitting untouched in tall piles on bright tables, sitting dusty and still on high shelves along the wall. Paper bound, paper clipped, paper stapled and stacked and filed and sent and all of it reflecting white as it shot quietly from copiers and printers, or landing heavily as it was moved from desk to file, from file to binder, from binder to conference room. Paper was the breath, it seemed, the air we inhaled, then released.
“Core Communications,” I heard someone behind me say, “owns approximately two thousand six hundred and twenty-eight white-boards.”
Walking with the head of Human Resources, finding myself in the middle of an afternoon basketball game in the wide walkways on fourteen, the Lady Gunslingers of PR favored by ten over the Warlords of Admin. It was one of multiple events in an endless and informal buildingwide Olympics—Nerf basketball, laser tag, yo-yo face-offs, darts, pool, air hockey, marbles, video games of all sorts and kinds, poker, chess, D&D, cubicle badminton, Wiffle-bat baseball, chair races, Yahtzee!, Scrabble, checkers, elevator bingo, untold betting pools devoted to elections, births, sports and office romances, periodic foot races around the auditorium on two, broom-and-tape-roll shuffle-board, Frisbee, full-contact rollerball, Magic: The Gathering, tag-team wrestling, Sumo wrestling, paper-airplane competitions based on an arcane Italian formula gauging distance, speed and altitude, and six separate putt-putt courses, each with a rating of novice, pro or addict, that were spread through offices, workspaces, hallways and conference rooms to form a total of one hundred and eight holes of golf.
“Foul!” someone yelled, throwing their hands in the air.
As with every other group in Core Communications, the people playing basketball were not only some of the most productive people in the company, they were also the most productive workers in their professions. Outsiders never believed it. Even the board found it hard to understand. But despite the games and jokes and constant digressions, Core was one of the most productive and efficient companies in the world.
I played five minutes of basketball with the Warlords of Admin. I managed to contribute two assists and a foul shot but had three jump shots blocked by a fanatical Bulgarian intern—a lightning-quick woman with a twelve-inch vertical leap and no idea I was the owner of the company, the building and the court she so freely dominated.
It was, for me, an unlikely but welcome moment of anonymity and untainted employee contact, even as other people stood around us, watching their CEO run the court.
Walking with two financial analysts, each updating me on fluctuations in various European stock markets, the meeting soon carrying us from the eighteenth to the eleventh floor, Worldwide Network Operations, where sci-fi marathons met the complete works of Nietzsche, where junior programmers in tuxedo T-shirts worked alongside engineering PhDs and tired dropouts from Cal Tech.
Picking up Julie, the two of us walking across thirteen, a floor with a particularly large number of windows, the rooms cast in shadows from the windows around us, rooms sometimes angular, sometimes round, sometimes softened into shapelessness as the light reflected off the steel and the glass and the ducts in the ceiling.
“I’ve got a meeting with the blind,” Julie was saying, “then a review of new day care policies on the Korean peninsula.”
Julie was our goodness. Our corporate soul. It
