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To all the true American
Patriots who fight for their country each day.
You know who you are.
Chapter One
The radio announcer suggested that listeners enjoy lots of beautiful
North Carolina sunshine and have themselves a good one. Dave Griffin
maneuvered into an opening in the morning traffic and slotted his car
into the right hand lane. He figured he might be exposed to a bit of
sun when he left the Markham-Hook Conglomerate’s Pyramid Building at
lunchtime, but he wasn’t sure he’d be having himself a good one or even
an okay one. A ton of work lay stacked on his desk in piles that only
he could make sense of.
He swung his blood-colored SUV around a corner and joined the line
inching into the company’s lot for oversized vehicles. While he waited
his turn to rumble down the ramp to the underground garage, he fiddled
with the radio dials, trying to find a station that wasn’t broadcasting
air quality reports, as if people had any choice over which air to
breathe. He’d just driven fifteen miles from his new home in the
suburbs. He didn’t need a voice coming out of his dashboard to tell him
there was so much haze hanging over the city that the Pyramid on top of
Markham-Hook’s tallest building couldn’t be seen from five miles away.
When he emerged from the garage, he squinted up toward the sky. No
trouble seeing the building from across the street. The Markham-Hook
Pyramid Building had won awards for everything except in-your-face
audacity, and that one was probably in the works. The structure was
fifty stories tall, besting by some thirty stories the next highest
building in Avalon. The first five floors--main lobby, banquet hall,
service floor, new accounts, and human resources--were all
Markham-Hook. Floors six through twenty-four were leased to the most
prosperous businessmen, lawyers, and doctors in the city. They--and
their clients--rode up from the lobby in glass elevators that looked
like futuristic space capsules. All the elevators in the building had
been feng shueid, and people from Avalon Bonnie Blooms arrived daily to
arrange freshly cut flowers in vases attached to the interior elevator
walls.
Starting with floor twenty-five and ending with forty-five,
Markham-Hook housed its own people--computer programmers, investment
counselors, insurance and mortgage brokers, travel planners,
administrative staff--all the thousands of workers required to keep the
Markham-Hook economy humming. Floors forty-six through fifty were
reserved for the top management. CEO John Victor Harris’s office held
the place of honor in the point of the pyramid where, it was rumored,
he could see for thirty miles in every direction on days when the skies
were clear.
Dave worked on twenty-five. He was a programmer with a
workstation in the maze of cubicles that stretched across half of the
floor space, from the front to the back of the building. He’d been here
four years, hired straight out of NC State before he’d even stepped off
the stage clutching his computer science degree. But he didn’t rate one
of the double-sized cubicles in a window row. In fact, his closet-sized
cube opened onto the carpeted hallway leading from the elevator, so
there was constant traffic scuffing back and forth. Someday, though,
he’d move over a few aisles. He expected someday to arrive pretty
quickly. He’d gotten his yearly review last week and scored above
average in everything and superior in a few categories--problem-solving
ability, speed and accuracy of his work, and willingness to work
overtime when needed.
He wasn’t working over today, though. Out of the question. He rode up
to his floor on one of the employee elevators, a half-sized duplicate
of the luxury cars provided to clients. The doors slid open to reveal
the desk of his team’s admin, Myra Hilton.
“Morning, Dave.” She waved him to a stop, red-painted talons flashing,
and looked at him over the top of her half glasses. “Ken wants to see
you when you get a chance.”
“Sure. Tell our esteemed supervisor I live to keep him happy.”
“Just run by his office at some point in the next fifteen minutes,
okay? Otherwise he’ll think I forgot to tell you.”
Dave rolled his eyes. Half the time Ken acted like he was too important
to relay his own messages and the rest of the time he micromanaged the
team. Dave thumped the top of Myra’s desk as he moved past to peek
around the corner. No sign of Ken. He turned and made a dash for his
cubicle, bobbing and weaving between co-workers like a courier on his
way to the CEO with the latest stock figures.
Mentally patting himself on the back after the narrow escape, Dave
pulled out his desk chair. His triumph didn’t last long. Thumping
footsteps sounded behind him as if a troll had escaped from under a
bridge and was loose in the building. Dave hunched his shoulders and
tried to blend in with the gray walls.
“Dave, got a minute?”
With a sigh of resignation, he turned and pasted on a look of polite
inquiry. Ken, the picture of a man with nothing but lard in his
arteries, had clomped into Dave’s cube breathing like a porn star in
the middle of a hot scene. He stopped in front of Dave and pushed a
piece of paper into his hand.
“You were supposed to come by my office.” So this was one of the
micromanage days. “Knew you’d forget to check your email yesterday, so
I printed this off for you.”
Dave hadn’t forgotten, he just hadn’t bothered with his email because
anything Ken had to say wasn’t all that important. Knowing it would
annoy Ken, he read out loud in a voice he copied from his favorite doom
and gloom newscaster. “Departmental meeting Friday morning in
Conference Room 25. Nine AM. Mandatory. Major company announcement for
all personnel. Cheers. Ken G. Archer, Team B Supervisor.”
He crumpled the paper and pushed it into the breast pocket of
Ken’s wrinkled sport coat and patted the pocket. He wished his boss
would let the coat die. It had long ago lost any ability to recover its
shape after cleaning and hung from his shoulders like an old towel.
“Rumors were flying yesterday. I’d have to be brain dead not to
know about the meeting.”
“Dave, this isn’t a regular announcement.”
“Is it a surprise party for your birthday or something?” Dave
held his watch close to his eyes and pretended to be startled at the
lateness of the hour.
Ken edged toward the hallway. “Just enjoy the day. You’ll find
out the bad news tomorrow.”
Sure. Now that Ken had promised dire tidings, Dave was supposed
to cheerfully knock out a pile of work and go home at the end of the
day so he could curl up with a good book. Ken would probably recommend
a nice success story, such as a biography of Bill Gates, that Dave
could read while he munched on leftover pizza amid all the trappings of
comfortable middle class life he’d managed to acquire in the last year.
Mandatory meeting. Bad news. Normally such meetings occurred so
the CEO could announce another merger. Rah-rah. More profits for
Markham-Hook Conglomerate. But this was different. Even if Ken hadn’t
come out and told him, Dave would have known by his lost dog
expression. Probably a dip in the company stock prices. The party,
after all, couldn’t last forever, even though Markham-Hook had marched
along making record profits while the rest of the economy staggered.
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