CHAPTER TWENTY
DeeDee put her coffee cup down on the table so hard that the rich black fluid splashed over the rim. She did not make eye contact.
Samson winced. This was the junior assistant’s version of screaming at hospital orderlies and throwing non-fitting wheelchair repair parts at the wall. The young woman needed her caffeine to function and here she was so mad that she was spilling it. It was not a good sign.
“So, how was your visit to Shen Kong headquarters, Samson?” he said in a soft voice he’d learned from his own senior assistant back when he’d been the junior one. “Did you get us the rock back and smooth things over, so Rodney couldn’t sabotage the elevator again? Like he did by telling Mr. Jeffy about the hacking attempt on your comm? Oh, you did? That’s nice. Good job, Samson. What about saving the boss’s job so it doesn’t come out that he sabotaged the elevator too with that side contract to give his extended family money, did you manage that? Oh, yeah, you did? Okay then, let’s have a fight about something else then so we don’t have to talk about any of that or how tired you are because you haven’t had four hours of sleep in a row for three days.”
DeeDee made eye contact now. She locked gazes with him like they were about to engage in magic mind meld straight out of an animated feature film. “You know,” she said. “You should have told me.”
Samson lifted his shoulders in an apologetic shrug. “I didn’t really believe my own intuition until I made a side trip to visit the West African Launcher.” He paused as another coffee shop customer passed by their outdoor table with a giant-sized to-go coffee and left the parking lot. “I haven’t picked up my comm yet. You left yours behind too?”
“Yes, Agent Young.” DeeDee glared at him. She was getting really good at doing face-to-face nonverbal communication. And that was even a sarcastic but workplace-appropriate dig to add in that fictitious agent title. Chummy would be so proud.
“Good. I know I usually suck at security stuff.”
DeeDee laughed.
Samson tried not to take offense. “But at least I know that about myself, so I can take precautions when it really matters.”
DeeDee allowed him a provisional nod. “Yes. Fine. You can do my job and your job both. But I’m still in the dark. How did visiting the West African Launcher site fix the fact that the boss has fallen for a social engineering scam, and been communicating with and sending company internal files to an outside contact named Pascaline?” She held up a hand. “And you don’t get credit for fixing the rock. I helped Jax McAllister get Mr. Ethan Schmidt-Li a direct line to Mr. Aanderson, and the two of them got Mr. Jeffy to talk with Ms. Zhu of Shen Kong. By my timeline they already had things mostly smoothed over before you even boarded your rescheduled flight to Hainan.”
“A social engineering… That’s not what it… Wait, what did you do?” Samson lost all the color in his already pale face. “Did you report it?”
“Not exactly,” DeeDee said, staring into her coffee.
“Thank God,” he said. “It’s not social engineering, it’s worse. Pascaline is his niece or first cousin once removed or something.” He waved an arm dismissing the details. “Whatever the exact family tree, she is actually a valid business contact. Ethan Schmidt-Li was made Chief of Sciences, Worldwide, following extensive lobbying on his behalf by our boss, Chummy, the head of HR. Then within an hour of his accepting the position, I checked, and after a closed-door meeting with our Chummy, Mr. Schmidt-Li assigned the support launcher contract to a family-owned company with zero space business who happened to be the vice president of human resources’ family.”
DeeDee had her mug lifted to her face for another sip and her jaw dropped. She jerked her attention back to the coffee in enough time to spill it on the patio grass instead of her lap.
“Oh, it gets better,” Samson said. “Better put the coffee on the table for this part. I was ready to put together a thin argument that the company had rights to the geographic location best suited for constructing the support launcher. But they didn’t. That was owned by another party who his family subcontracted with afterwards.”
“How the fuck is that fixable?” DeeDee said. So much for business-appropriate communication. Samson realized he’d never tell Chummy about this conversation anyway, so he could stop his automatic assessments of DeeDee’s progress. She’d never be senior assistant to the vice president for human resources if the two of them couldn’t fix Chummy’s extremely flagrant misstep.
“It’s not really,” Samson admitted, “but it is forgivable.”
She blinked.
“Results. If it all works, the way that it all got there doesn’t get critiqued. At worst there will be rosy retrospectives in twenty or fifty years with a lot of ‘oh gosh and golly gee’ and many reasonable choices will be spun to look edgy and unlikely to have worked, so even in that detailed analysis, this part will be hidden in the noise. And I think our boss knows that.”
DeeDee nodded slowly. He could see her working through the chain of logic by the way her blinks slowed from a shocked flutter to normal. “So he’s got it covered?” Her voice didn’t lift at the end of the sentence, but Samson knew her better than to take it as a statement.
“He might think he does, but that family business could use some help. The contract is actually pretty well written for the situation and puts all the design and research on us with their company only on the hook for acquiring the site and getting it built. Their technical lead, that’d be Pascaline, is self-taught and doubts herself too much. I’m sending them an academic savant in space systems to be her deputy.”
“You’re giving them a Mr. Rodney Johnson? Don’t you think we could try a new mistake?” DeeDee covered her face with her hands.
“I wasn’t one of the assistants yet when that happened,” Samson said. “Besides, Mr. Johnson has given us Cory Aanderson for a lot more years than we’d have had him without. And who knows? The thrill of still being able to work might be part of why Mr. Aanderson is still alive.”
“Good repetition of the party line,” DeeDee said. “And yes, I know we all pretend that it was Chummy’s pick and when Mr. Jeffy gets invited to give talks at the business schools, he likes to trot it out as evidence of Chummy’s genius. But Chummy was out with a really nasty flu the week Jeffy finalized the Aanderson-Rodney pairing out of a panel with five other more standard choices. Chummy’s assistants back then put it together without Chummy’s involvement, and the boss covered for them afterwards and you know it.”
“And now I’m covering for Chummy,” Samson said.
“We,” DeeDee corrected. “Tell me about this savant you’ve found. If he’s that good why doesn’t he work for us yet?”
Samson told her.
“Got it,” DeeDee said. “I’ll make sure our résumé-screening systems keep him unemployed long enough for the launcher folks to pick him up.”
“Okay.” Samson started to disengage his wheel locks.
“Another thing,” DeeDee said. “You need to get better at comm security.”
Samson rolled his eyes.
“You have to,” DeeDee insisted. “Our favorite deputy vice president has figured out somehow that he wasn’t Chummy’s top pick.”
“Rodney knows?” Samson clamped the locks back down.
“I think Cory Aanderson told him a long time ago,” DeeDee said. “The data breadcrumbs only make sense if he’s known for ages. Most people would’ve let it go by now. But Rodney sticks to things.”
“He does,” Samson agreed. The man stuck to his boss Cory Aanderson and was instrumental in keeping him alive and relatively healthy for somebody with a terminal cancer. But in other areas that unwavering commitment could be less helpful.
“So he always follows up on any little comment. He’s got an extensive file on Chummy on his personal comm.”
“Networking 101,” Samson suggested. “Personality details to review before meetings and such so a busy guy can correctly remember thousands of business contacts’ names and their kids’ names and birthdays.”
“With a subheading titled ‘Vulnerabilities,’” DeeDee said. “And a much more neutrally worded ‘Efforts’ which has the weirdest details recorded in the tagged documents. Some of it is obvious fantasyland conspiracy nonsense. His comm security is even worse than yours,” she added.
“Does he know?” Samson asked. “No, he can’t have known,” he answered himself.
“Just let me talk,” DeeDee said. “This is hard when I can’t type it to you. Rodney seems convinced that he won’t actually get to be Vice President of Sales if Chummy is still with the company when Cory Aanderson eventually leaves us.”
Samson opened his mouth to respond and shut it at DeeDee’s glare. Chummy would never go back on a promise like that, and Mr. Jeffy wouldn’t stand for it even if Chummy had an alien body-snatch experience and suddenly became a person who’d do something like that. DeeDee knew that. He didn’t have to say it. He focused again on what she was saying.
“There’s a bizarre number of efforts that mostly didn’t seem to do anything. He knows Chummy’s got a bunch of relatives who could call on him for favors, and he’s identified them as Chummy’s primary weakness. He’s done some minor talent poaching to try to get Chummy to voluntarily leave TCG and go back to help out the family business in a headhunter role. Turns out nobody in the family has even reached out, so Rodney gave up on that angle before doing some of the more elaborate stuff in there. Can you believe he had a scheme to pay a drug addict trust fund kid who’d been cut off from family funds to perform some sort of hijacking to abduct a Chummy relative? Obviously that one never happened. His stuff in West Africa seems to have been mostly notional because he lacked local contacts. But he did have private investigators based in Europe do some pretty thorough checks on people and used an anonymous tip to get a younger family member accused of securities fraud.”
“What?”
“A young accountant named Reuben Sadou,” DeeDee said. “He’s been in jail with only a public defender. The lawyer wants him to turn state’s witness but the guy doesn’t actually know anything because he’s not involved, so he can’t.”
“And Rodney expects Chummy to quit his job to go be a lawyer?” Samson was definitely not following the logic here and no amount of blinking was helping.
“No. I think he just got frustrated that nothing he did was getting back to Chummy, and it was an easy way to hurt him. If Chummy knew about it, he’d probably at least take out a loan to cover bail and fund a private defense attorney.”
“You haven’t told Chummy yet?”
“No,” DeeDee said. “That would make Rodney happy. I don’t want to do that. But I do want to stage a jailbreak.”
“That won’t play right into Rodney’s hands at all,” Samson said.
DeeDee grinned. “Trust me. I have an idea.”
Samson winced. “Please promise you won’t make it worse.”