Friday. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
I'm not looking forward to all the schoolwork I have to catch up on this weekend, even if finishing it means that I'm that much closer to completing the Deckerman Method. I'm really not looking forward to the inevitable yard work, either, because Steven will want to go double or nothing and I might've been lucky last week but there's no way I can pull it off two weeks in a row.
As soon as I walk into Weston Enterprises and Logistics—with time to spare, for once—things are...weird. The sound of shoes clicking against the atrium floor is missing the usual accompanying hum of conversation. Nobody makes eye contact with me, either; not that they usually do, but the people in the atrium are actively avoiding making eye contact with anybody else. A nervous tension suffocatingly fills the air, and the urge to tiptoe to the quicklifts in order to not disturb the eery peace is strong. I'm a professional, however, or at least I have been for over a week. I'm an adult, almost. There's nothing to be afraid of.
Except for the fact that there so obviously is.
The heavy atmosphere is even more stifling in the Tech Department, everybody hunched over their desks as the keep their heads down and pretend the world doesn't exist. My greeting for Oliver today—What the hell is going on?—is on the tip of my tongue, but when I turn the corner to our desks he's not there.
Oliver Penn, who probably wouldn't be dating Finley if there was even the slightest chance he could marry his job, is not at his desk.
His computer isn't on and there's no trace of his line on the ground. There's not a jacket hanging from the hanger, even though it's definitely a jacket-y type of spring day. There is not a hint of him even being here today.
I force myself to take deep breaths. It's okay.
I peel my jacket off, settle in my chair, and turn on my computer. I fiddle with my stapler as I wait for my computer to start, swallowing the impulse to get the hell out of here. That wouldn't help anything. It really wouldn't.
When my To Do list pops up on screen, the urge to get the hell out becomes a lot hard to ignore. There is only one item on my To Do list today: recover the files on Mr. Weston's wiped computer hard drive.
"Kirk."
By a miraculous feat of will I don't jump or otherwise give away my surprise. Polovsky is looking down at me like I'm an experiment that he doesn't know the outcome of yet.
I relax. Or, at least, I try to relax. "Where's Mr. Weston?"
Polovsky quirks an eyebrow. "Why do you think he's gone?"
"Apparently he wiped his hard drive. He'd only do that if he wasn't planning on coming back."
"Touché."
We stare at each other for a second. Everything in Polovsky's expression and posture is pressing me to back down, but I sit up straight and look him in the eye because oh hell no. I might be terrified, but I'm not just going to roll over.
I can't see over the walls of my cubicle, or around where Polovsky is blocking my only exit, but the air surrounding us is growing more and more tense with each passing second. My coworkers, for all that they'd had their attention single-mindedly on their own computer screens mere moments ago, serve as a captive audience that's riveted by what's going on.
I'm ignorant as to why they're paying such close attention to me, but maybe that's why Polovsky wants me to do this job. Because I'm new. Because I don't know something that everybody else does.
One of Polovsky's hands is resting on the back of Oliver's empty chair.
"Sir," I say, "I'm afraid I don't understand."
Polovsky nods once. "Shut down your computer and follow me, please, Kirk."
I obey, but when I get up to follow him doesn't lead me to his office—he leads me to the quicklifts. My coworkers aren't even bothering to pretend that they're working now, but they're carefully avoiding eye contact with me. When we step into the quicklift Polovsky presses the button for Weston's floor, then leans against the wall and rubs a hand over his face as we wait for the doors close. "Rumors," he says, sounding like he's lived two lifetimes so far today.
I tap my fingers against my thighs lightly. "What—what about them?"
"I hate the damn things." His eyes are trained on the quicklift doors as we lurch and travel up. "They tend to mix things up, make everything a hell of a lot worse. But people can't keep their damn mouths shut, and—"
The quicklift dings and the doors slide open to a peculiar scene in the waiting area of Weston's floor. All the doors are open, and the police have set up shop in the boardroom. There are a few officers scuttling around inside Weston's office, following their lines like cars on a race track. Two of them are talking to Weston's unimpressed secretary, who notices our arrival.
"What the hell, Polovsky."
Weston's unimpressed secretary sounds exhausted, his words weighted down with futility. His suit, usually impeccably neat, is rumpled and wrinkled, button up shirt not even done up all the way. He's slouched against the wall where the cops have more or less cornered him, and I can see the shadows under his eyes all the way across the waiting area. Polovsky can't completely suppress his wince. "I know, Cahill. I'm sorry. We're going to get this figured out."
Weston's unimpressed secretary's eyes cut to me. "Is that why wunderkind's here?"
"Yes."
I bristle and I'm freaking out and the words fall out of my mouth. "My name is Kirk Hawthorne, and I know that you know that, so—"
"Kirk."
Polovsky isn't mad, but the sound of my name is enough for me to nearly swallow my tongue. Weston's unimpressed secretary redirects his attention back to Polovsky, as well. "They don't believe me, Henrik," he says, and in the time that it takes me to remember that Henrik is Polovsky's first name Polovsky comes to a decision.
"Let me get Kirk settled," he says, "and then I'll be back to sort this mess out."
Polovsky waits for Weston's unimpressed secretary to nod in confirmation before he leads me into Weston's office. I carefully glance at the floor once, long enough to see my dull pink line travel to behind Weston's desk, before I give the two officers in the room a longer look. Finley had said that my ability to see the lines was because they needed people to monitor the lines. Make sure everything is running smoothly.
I wonder if the two cops that are keeping a careful eye on my every move know that there's colored lines sprouting from their feet. One's canary yellow, the other is a really dark brown. I refuse to make eye contact with them, even as Polovsky and I murmur a greeting. We circle around to the back of Weston's desk, where his computer screen is announcing the blank hard drive. I sit in Weston's chair only at Polovsky's insistence. Weston's chair is even more comfortable than the chairs that his visitors sit in; I could probably take a nap in this chair if I applied myself.
"Is it completely gone?"
I raise an eyebrow and look up at Polovsky. I haven't even put my hands on the keyboard yet, busy as I am trying to figure out how to settle in this chair so that its comfiness doesn't distract me. But, even then— "No hard drive is ever completely wiped."
Polovsky, as head of the Tech Department in one of the most technologically advanced companies on the planet, should really know that, but surprise flies across his face. "Really?"
Perhaps he's just had a really long night. "Yes, really. I don't know how much I'll be able to recover, but I should be able to recover something. What's my deadline?"
"End of the day."
"And then?"
"The cops will take it."
"Will?"
Polovsky's lips thin dangerously. "We're assuming, Kirk, that you have the skills to find what they're looking for. Mr. Weston has had a few pretty serious allegations levelled against him, and him having wiped his computer hard drive certainly hasn't helped his case. I don't want you to find anything incriminating, but—"
Canary yellow line cop clears his throat. Polovsky sighs.
"Just crack the hard drive, Kirk. Recover what you can. I have to go rescue Cahill and do damage control. And you two," Polovsky says, turning to the cops and pointing at them with sharp jabs of his finger, "stay out of his way."
Polovsky really isn't in a position to be making demands but the cops nod. The one that belongs to the dark brown line says, "You're sure he's the one?"
"Deckerman Method," Polovsky replies simply, and the cops look at me with a new appreciation in their eyes. I shift in Weston's chair uneasily, even though I think I might sink through the cushions right to the floor. Polovsky lays a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it once before letting it fall away. "You got this, Kirk."
Damn right I do.
It's not easy by any means, though. Very touch and go. Blue screens taunt me as I search for a backdoor, for a rip, for any little give that will take me to where the files got dumped. I fail more than I'm successful, the cops are unnervingly present, and I'm dying of caffeine withdrawal.
I can't stop, though.
My brain wants to stop and focus on more important things like figuring out where the hell Oliver is, never mind where Mr. Weston is. The difficulty with that is that I have little information to go on in regards to either of them, and while Oliver would probably be the easiest person to find I'm not going to email Finley from Weston's computer, not right now.
Oliver could just be sick. He could've gotten sick on the day that everything went to shit and called in. Coincidentally.
Steven's never liked coincidences. I don't like them much, either.
The screen of Weston's computer—filled with code as I try to coax it into giving me whatever secrets remain—goes suddenly blank. I groan, fisting a hand into my hair and pulling before I settle it back at the keyboard.
Back to square one.
-
Eventually, thankfully, I recover something.
It's nothing substantial, definitely not perfect, and there'll probably be a lot of holes to fill in, but it's a start. I try not to pay attention to the file names that flash across the screen as I dredge them up. Mr. Weston gave me a chance, employing the indy kid when nobody else would, and I don't know what he's been accused of but I don't think he's a bad man. If it turns out that he is then the less I know, the better.
With half an hour left to go in the day, I stumble upon something that almost makes me fall out of the chair.
The cops, who've been hovering nervously in a weird circuit in front of Weston's desk for the past hour, notice my chair move. They both step forward, ready for action, in the same moment, but I wave them away. I'm not dying, and I don't even know what this is but they don't need to know.
They really, really, really don't need to know there's a file folder that simply says Kirk on the screen.
Nobody does.
Not even me, to be honest, but it's too late for that.
Something is very, very wrong.
I wish I would've had enough foresight to slip a flash chip into my pocket, but Polovsky had been acting weird and Oliver hadn't been there and it had thrown me right off. I'm going to have to figure a different way to read that file, but it can't stay on this hard drive. The police are apprehending it in less than half an hour. I can't email it back to myself because they'll likely be able to follow it. I could copy it onto a flash chip if I had one, though, then wipe the folder from the hard drive thoroughly. I start to shift things around on Weston's desk quietly whenever the cops aren't looking at me, opening the drawers without making a sound. Surely there's got to be something, anything—
There. A small blue thing, four gigabytes of storage. It snicks quietly into one of the ports on the computer and, amazingly, there's nothing on it. Like Weston had known Polovsky would see if I could recover his hard drive. Like he knew I'd find the folder. Like he knew I'd need the flash chip.
Twenty minutes left before the end of my shift. I cut and paste the folder to the flash chip and pull up the email browser in the wait. I log in and fire off a quick message to Finley before I can overthink about what to say to her.
Hey. How about you, me, and Oliver meet for coffee tomorrow?
I check to see how much longer before the file transfer is complete—eighty-two percent complete, thirty seconds remaining—and when I check back to my email inbox Finley has replied.
Sounds good. Meet you at the regular place at two?
I send back an affirmation and log out. They'll know I accessed my email, but that's okay. There's nothing incriminating that was sent or received—just Kirk Hawthorne, Deckerman Method educated Tech Department prodigy, making personal plans on company time. Everybody else does it, so why should I be the exception?
I disconnect the flash chip once the transfer is complete and slip it into my pocket, then ensure that all traces of it on Weston's hard drive are completely gone.
There's nothing to see here.
Polovsky comes back at the end of the day, and we stand aside and watch as the cops take Weston's computer away. "What did you recover?" he asks, trying for nonchalant and failing.
The slim flash chip is heavy in my pocket. "I don't know," I say. "I didn't really pay attention. I was more focussed on trying to get as much as I could."
Polovsky isn't happy with that answer, and I don't have to be looking at him or need his next words to know it. "Alright. Thank you for your work, Kirk. Have a good weekend."
"See you on Monday, sir."
I don't make eye contact with anybody on my way out. It's not a big deal, because nobody else seems too keen on making eye contact, either.
It helps me feel safe, even with my hyperawareness ofthe flash chip plaguing me all the way home.