Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DeeDee Nelson knew she wasn’t a people person. That was one of the more obvious results of the self-knowledge assessments her boss, Mr. Chummy, had had her take right after she’d first started working for him. In the literature—and she always read the accompanying literature for such things—a person was supposed to retake such tests every few years to see how things had changed. She had reminders on her comm for the retakes. But she’d let her comm get hacked, and now she felt like a limb was missing.

Mr. Rodney Johnson allowed her to borrow his spare comm for the flight home to Germany. She supposed he thought she’d be checking her messages or playing games. Or maybe he thought she needed an electronic teddy bear. She didn’t know. He laid his seat flat, pulled one of Mr. Aanderson’s extra blankets over his head, and went to sleep.

Her boss had passed out in his own chair. Not a surprise to DeeDee, since he’d stayed awake through the entire flight over. She pressed the release on his chair back and eased it down flat as well. He half woke enough to slide back and accept the pillow and blanket she provided.

The aircraft was larger than they needed, so she went far forward where the glow from her screen wouldn’t bother anyone.

The drawer above the one with the thin airline blankets had easy-heat meal packets. The labels declared them gourmet, but most things tasted a little funny at altitude. She checked the next drawer higher still and found the drink powders Rodney had used to make cocoa and a selection of packaged snack foods. She helped herself to the cheese puffs and grabbed a handful of moist towelettes to wipe her fingers on. It wouldn’t be polite to return Rodney’s comm with orange imitation cheese dust caught in all the device’s crevices.

The familiar crunch soothed her and the aftertaste hinted of white cheddar and possibly a tiny bit of asiago. DeeDee would’ve preferred a faintly stale chemical imitation cheese flavor, but one couldn’t have everything.

Her check of the equipment turned up no unwanted tracking software. She wormed out a few common bits of malicious code of the type any device acquired when occasionally used by the unwary for shopping or entertainment, but she left them alone. A totally clean device ought to raise concerns when next TCG’s in-house techs made a service check. She didn’t care to alarm anyone until she knew for absolute certain.

A check of her corporate messaging inbox would be expected, so she did that, and found the sales deputy’s messages instead of her own. The senior salesman had turned off the device’s faceprint security before handing it over to her, she noticed with a hiss of consternation. A message had slipped through his spam filter from an IP address in either Nigeria or Cameroon with a vaguely threatening tone and some ranting about hijacking a public bus. DeeDee deleted that for him.

She logged Rodney Johnson out and herself in. She’d have liked to shake him awake and force him to click through a security training module on insider threats.

Her boss’s steady efforts to get her to accept corporate social norms deterred her from actually doing it, but she added a note to Rodney’s file so future HR assistants would know TCG’s deputy VP of Sales had flawed cyber security instincts. Her fingers hit the combination of hot keys to flag the note for her boss’s eyes as well. Rodney’s device didn’t have her settings, so it didn’t do it.

Her fingers trembled and DeeDee didn’t do it the long way either. She ran her searches and did inquiry after inquiry, making only a half-hearted effort to reply to the backlog in her inbox. She’d look like she were working past exhaustion and half asleep if anyone checked. But her boss had an overabundance of trust too. She wasn’t sure he’d ever look.

DeeDee composed the message to Mr. Jeffy four times before giving up on herself in disgust. They’d land soon. She deleted all four drafts and logged herself out. She slipped the device back into the pocket of Rodney’s satchel and walked back forward to start the coffee.

A little terminal next to the coffee machine had a chat app installed. She pinged Samson. He flashed her a sleepy emoji.

“If you see a robbery and don’t call the police,” she typed, “are you a thief too? Does it make a difference if the robber takes only small things? Or does it just mean the robber is experienced and has been doing it for a long, long time?”

DeeDee could only find evidence of the one, but it was so smoothly done that she wasn’t quite sure it really counted as stealing exactly. And yet something that smooth had to have taken quite a lot of planning, and he’d have passed by many other easier options.

Samson’s cursor blinked and a text response rolled across the screen interrupting her thoughts.

“Ug. No brainteasers, please. Attempting to get up to speed on conversational Bantu Swahili is making my head hurt more than enough,” Samson replied.

The coffee gurgled and splattered into the carafe. Should she tell him it wasn’t a rhetorical? DeeDee prepped a mug sweetened with a half spoonful of Chummy’s favorite raw cane sugar.

“Okay, okay, what about this?” Samson typed more. “Check with the boss, but I say it means: (1) hire the robber for a position where local business culture prevents the company from putting a good anti-graft system in place and adjust the annual bonus to top off whatever is due after the missing petty cash is tallied up & (2) hire a silent watcher to do the tallying.”

DeeDee marveled at the screen.

“Did I get it right?” Samson asked.

“Is that coffee I smell?” Mr. Aanderson called out from the back of the aircraft, sounding much improved after his rest. “And if so, is there a kind soul who might bring a poor old man a cup? With two nonfat creams and a half packet of the pink non-sugar sweetener stuff?”

“In a moment, Mr. Aanderson,” DeeDee said. She filled Chummy’s mug first, then the top salesman’s coffee with the additions as requested, and made a guess about what Rodney might want.

To Samson, she typed back, “IDKGTO.” Autocorrect sent, “I don’t know. Got to go.”

“Later,” he acknowledged.


Chummy woke to Cory Aanderson singing his second assistant’s praises and half seriously threatening to steal her from him.

“She doesn’t have medical training, and I refuse to authorize tuition reimbursement for her to get any,” Chummy said. He pushed the armrest buttons to turn his bed back into a chair and stood to shake some of the wrinkles out of the suit pants and shirt.

DeeDee closed his hands around a warm mug of coffee. Chummy lifted it in salute to her and drank down the hot bliss.

“I let my assistant get some sleep.” Aanderson pointed at Rodney Johnson, still flat with his blanket pulled up over his head.

They could tell the deputy was awake from the harrumph he made in response, but the blanket didn’t twitch. A mug with a firmly attached lid waited for him in the built-in cupholder near his seat.

“A deputy vice president is not an assistant,” DeeDee said. She looked frazzled with her lank hair sticking out in side fluffs like it did when she pulled on it under stress. None of it had the matted flatness from even a short nap on the long flight. DeeDee had worked through the night again.

Chummy sipped more coffee, thinking about the things that might have kept a driven rules-focused assistant up all night but not resulted in a cold shoulder from his fellow vice president on the flight. Cory Aanderson had his corporate comm at his elbow already, and he’d been awake long enough to go through his priority messages if he had the attention to needle Chummy about getting his coffee made for him.

DeeDee tried to smile, but she wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The two salesmen didn’t know her well enough to recognize her distress.

He stared into his coffee looking for insights that weren’t there. His assistant came around with the carafe and poured a refill.

“It’ll be alright, boss,” she said.

If only it were that easy.


Back | Next
Framed