Blake Leathersby wore workout clothes, spandex shorts and a ribbed Union Jack tank. Colliding with his chest was like having an airbag deploy in my face—a stiff, sweaty one.
"Oh!" I said, barely keeping my feet. "Sorry, I didn't see you."
As he stepped back to consider me, one of his trunk-like legs struck Yves Pomeroy—and Yves wasn't able to keep his feet.
"Excusez-vous," the older man snapped, a jumble on the floor. "One should watch where one steps."
Leathersby didn't offer a hand up. "One should be sturdier than a blade of grass. I'm coming from the gym. Might check the place out yourself—add some muscle mass, Colonel Blimp."
I didn't get the reference, but Yves puffed up as though he'd taken a slur broadside. I was happy to hang back as a spectator. Leathersby hadn't seemed to recognize me, the wig and prosthetic doing their job, but why push it?
Yves said, "We French place less value on brawn for brawn's sake."
Leathersby sniffed. "Could be that explains why we English paste you every time it comes to war."
Fabienne Rivard, hearing the commotion, walked to her door and jerked it closed with evident irritation.
Yves fixed the lay of his linen shirt. "You should know: I was kidnapped again. In America this time."
"No kidding? Get fed any corn this time? I'm told they like their fatties over there, yeah?"
The Frenchman refused to dignify the questions with a response. "As vice president of executive security, have you no pride? No desire to fulfill your duty?"
Leathersby chuckled—a gruff, cruel bark. "What can I say? I do my best, but it's a lot of nutjobs wanna see your old bones gone..."
He resumed up the hall, emitting a gust of odor from his armpit. I followed Yves the other direction, forcibly loosening my gait, trying to look natural.
I couldn't believe such naked aggression in the halls of a multinational conglomerate. If I had have seen a thing like that working for Rainey Personnel and reported it? The company would've been off the client list by the time I turned in my week's timesheet.
"He's awful," I said.
"Quite," Yves agreed.
"The guys said was a mercenary—he only did certain jobs for Rivard. What was that talk about vice president?"
Yves steered us around a corner. "Fabienne has recently installed him in a full-time role. The man is a bully in meetings. He makes crass gestures when a decision goes against him. He is the very worst of his country—and each day this Anarchy continues, his stature grows. He thrives like..." Yves's face curdled. "...like mold—some poison mold which feeds off darkness and ignorance."
We reached the elevator bank. Yves faltered at the button panel, still flushed from the confrontation, taking several seconds to master his palsy. Finally he managed to push Down.
Inside the car, he said, "This is why we must go! Go, and find the truth!"
Enterprise Software occupied the sixty-first floor. I expected some Space Age facility, sleek machines with transparent or neon-colored innards, but the accommodations were unspectacular. The computers looked liked any PC I might've been assigned working reception, and their kitchenette featured a chips-and-candy-bar vending machine and drip coffee maker with brown-stained pot.
The engineers, likewise, seemed run-of-the-mill. Yves introduced me to his principal software architect, Gaspard, a spindly man who kept honking into a tissue.
"This is it, this is where we make the software—achew!" He waved an arm about the floor. "Every day we receive eight hundred new virus reports. We're lucky to get half in the patch—achew!"
I was listening with an artificial grin, feigning deep interest.
Yves said, "Yes, well, Gaspard does not typically lead this part of the tour. Where is Marie? I would like Mademoiselle Jansen to meet Marie—is she here?"
Gaspard and his colleagues examined their shoes.
"Please, let her not be sick," Yves said, shooting me a look. "As the primary engineer in the CyberParle revamp, Marie can best speak to recent changes in our security suite."
Again I turned up my grin, channeling an executive eager to hear some nitty-gritty details.
Again the engineers examined their shoes.
Finally Gaspard spoke. "You have not been present much, sir."
Yves stuttered defensively. "I—er—I am required to travel, to defend our department in public. This can not be helped."
Another worker said, "Something has happened to Marie—some harm. We all know this. She has not been here in months."
"Months?" Yves repeated. "Then who is running CyberParle?"
"Thérèse," Gaspard said. "Thérèse Laurent has taken direct command."
The workers' body language clamped shut at the name—as classic a case of hostile nonverbal cues as I'd seen. Yves' face turned ashen.
He asked a few further questions to keep up the ruse—Fine work, bon, c'est ça!—then thanked his team effusively and hustled us away to his office.
"No, this is not good," he said as the door closed. "Thérèse is a businesswoman—in truth, a lackey of Fabienne's. She can not direct a software product—much less one under siege, as CyberParle is."
I asked, "Do you think she's hiding the kernel?"
"I have told you—I do not know this term."
"The kernel is the thing destroying the data. Piper Jackson said all you need to do is—"
"Jackson." Yves's lips puckered in a way I didn't like. "She may be lying to save her own skin."
Another pucker on "skin."
"What's your explanation, then?" I said. "Why is a person with no technical expertise leading the most vital data protection project in history?"
Yves's wispy chest rose and fell. "I do not know. I hold out hope for another explanation, but I concede it looks bad."
As he brooded on the true nature of his own company, I scanned Yves Pomeroy's office. Like the rest of Enterprise Software, his space was modest—even dingy. His desk was particleboard, and four folding chairs were his only furniture. The space received no natural light, though there was a dim glass pane behind him—like a window in front of a brick wall, only not brick.
"Your office is not...great," I said.
Yves got a forlorn expression. He tried kicking his alligator-skin loafers up onto his desktop, but his inflexible chair didn't allow it.
"Under Henri, nothing but the best." He kissed the tips of his fingers. "Under his daughter, I am punished. The dismal office is my penance from the Gender Council. They have dug into my actions decades ago—when France was quite a different place—and decided I need 'rehabilitation.'"
The pouting and air quotes didn't wear well to me. I thought about him singling out the most attractive receptionist, rushing to pin my badge for me. I was no Fabienne Rivard fan but felt like her initiative might just have found its mark in Yves's case.
"What does your window overlook?" I said, indicating the glass pane. "Is that a window?"
Yves squinted a moment in confusion, then twisted abruptly. "The shaft! Oui, oui—a window of sorts."
"Shaft?"
"The inner shaft." He stood and approached the pane, raising its sill, craning his head through.
He explained that the rock Roche Rivard was built into had been tectonically active—remained so to this day. When geologists had discovered this during construction, they had advised Henri Rivard to seek another site.
Henri refused. He demanded they find a way to build anyway. Most of the scientists and project leaders refused, but he found one young turk who believed drilling deeply through the Earth's crust in the precise center of the building—a kind of release valve—would mitigate the risk. Henri decreed it be done, and it was done. Now a handful of offices on each floor overlooked the inner shaft.
I knew we needed to get moving on CyberParle, but couldn't help being fascinated.
Inner shaft?
Drilling deeply through the Earth's crust?
"Do you ever see lava? Or hear it, I guess?"
Yves shook his head. "There are some who claim they can smell sulfur. I am a recognized sommelier by the region of Bordeaux, and I never have."
"There's never been any kind of...explosion?"
Yves chuckled and told the story of the Algerian nationalists who seized two floors of Roche Rivard in 1983, stole Rivard's experimental sonic agitator, and threatened to discharge it straight down the inner shaft—directly into the fault line—unless Henri Rivard agreed to pay reparations.
Yves smiled admiringly at the memory. "Henri told them, 'Do your worst!' I was there at his side—it was beautiful. 'I am done apologizing for le colonialisme!' They killed hostage after hostage. Henri backed down not a centimetre. 'Did Rivard profit from past abuse? Indeed we did—handsomely. Accept this and abandon your terror now, or die like dogs."
Once again, I didn't love Yves's accompanying mannerisms—the awe, the mirth.
"And?"
Yves shrugged. "Die they did, at the hand of sharp-shooters who rappelled down the shaft."
In the run-up to today, Durwood had made clear his distrust of Yves Pomeroy. "Man who doesn't value the marriage bond, values nothing." I was starting to wonder if he was onto something.
Yves was just diving into an account of Henri's dressing down of the dying Algerian leader when my badge plinged. I looked down and found it orange.
"Fifteen minutes!" Yves said. "Time is short—we must get to the records. To the bowels! I had hoped to avoid them, but one cannot always choose."
"The bowels?" I said.
"All software commits, CyberParle and otherwise, are logged in a separate floor deep in the rock of Roche Rivard."
I pointed to his computer. "You can't just look them up?"
Yves stood and plucked a cashmere coat off a rack. "In this regard, Rivard suffers from the same problems as the rest of the world."
I didn't understand. How could the Grand Planifier and Rivard's other whizzbang systems do all their magic, but the Enterprise Software division couldn't access basic records from their computers?
I wished Piper were here to ask the right specifics—to call bull.
Yves asked if I'd brought a coat.
"No," I said. "It's summer, I didn't think I would need one."
Yves gallantly handed me his own coat, then retrieved a V-neck sweater from a desk drawer for himself.
"Outside, oui, it is summer," he said. "It is not summer in the bowels."