Echo Chamber Page 7

8

  Steph and I sit in my office, waiting for Benjamin.

  In our three-way meetings, I usually sit behind my desk, with Steph across from me and Benjamin leaning on the wall or on Steph's chair. Today, Steph and I both sit behind the desk. We brought in a third chair for Benjamin. The orange light of sunset pours through the windows, an odd contrast to Steph's icy gaze fixed on the door.

  For three reasons, we put off firing Benjamin all afternoon. First, he was in the middle of a systems upgrade and I didn't want him out of the building before I was certain our servers would make it through the night. Second, I was only ninety percent sure of his guilt, and I figured exculpatory information might arise during the afternoon.

  It didn't.

  The third reason we waited was to give Alex time to get back to me. As urgent as firing Benjamin is, doing so without a replacement in place is risky.

  An hour ago, Alex texted a single line: She's on her way.

  Now, here we are.

  I glance at Steph, whose anger has turned into firm resolution. I'm about to remind her to let me do most of the talking when Benjamin appears in the doorway.

  "New servers are online," he says with a smile. "Doubled our capacity so we're ready for the home stretch. Between the app and the main site, we can handle a hundred million votes in twenty-four hours."

  "Have a seat," I say.

  He looks at me, confused, then at Steph. He swipes his messy brown hair out of his eyes. "What's up?"

  "Ben," Steph says firmly. "Sit."

  As he sits, my chest tightens a little. I place both hands on the desk to steady myself. I don't enjoy firing people, and a tiny piece of me is still unsure about firing Benjamin.

  But I stick to the plan. "We know you gave information about Justine Hall's events to Peter. We know you've been helping him all along. You're fired."

  His smile disappears.

  I gauge his reaction. Panic crosses his face, but the expression quickly flattens. "Hey, look, Peter could be getting information from anywhere. Hacking her emails, bugging her office. He could have done a million things to get that information."

  Until this moment, I was only ninety percent sure of his guilt. But his moment of fear, combined with the rapidity of his excuses, kills any remaining doubt.

  Steph glares. "Don't treat us like idiots."

  "Steph, I…"

  She slaps the table so hard a pen rolls onto the floor. "Don't!"

  Steph had concealed her anger well, but the look she gives Benjamin makes me wonder whether her threat to launch him out the window was an idle one. The windows in here don't actually open, but she looks very mad.

  Benjamin leans away. "I can't believe you think…"

  "We know," I say.

  "The whole system will fall apart without me. You two have no idea how any of it works, you have…"

  "We already have your replacement." I speak with a finality meant to indicate that the conversation is over.

  I glance at the door and Benjamin takes the hint. Shaking his head slowly, he stands and walks to his desk.

  We follow, waiting in silence as he takes his jacket off the back of the chair and gathers his wrist support mouse pad from the desk. I'm about to tell him to hurry up when he addresses Steph. "I assume this means you're breaking up with me?"

  I reach an arm across Steph's chest to keep her from lunging forward and strangling him.

  She's calm, though. "Yes, Ben. I'm breaking up with you."

  He nods slowly, then walks away. This time for good.

  An hour later, I'm ready to head upstairs for the night when I hear a noise from the street below.

  Someone shouting?

  Glancing out the window, I see a couple walking arm in arm across the street, but they don't appear to be talking. They're certainly not shouting. Three Priuses and a Tesla pass as the couple disappears around a corner.

  I must have imagined it. I grab my phone and head for the door.

  The noise comes again. It's definitely someone shouting. A woman's voice, I think. And it sounds as though she's saying, "Seeeeeeeeeeeee."

  Back at the window I look left, then right. I don't see the source of the sound.

  "Ra-seeeeeeee." It comes again and someone emerges from Baker's Dozen, looking up and down the block. It's Walter, our regular waiter. He looks confused. Apparently he hears it, too.

  For the second time today, I wish the windows in here opened.

  I wave, but Walter doesn't see me.

  "Oc-ra-seeeeeeeeee."

  I still can't tell what she's saying, but it's a woman yelling. My mind hits on something Alex said earlier. "How important is it to you that the person be, well, sane?"

  I jog across the office and down the flight of stairs to the street below. As I swing open the door, I see Walter, squinting into the shadow of an awning across the street.

  "What's going on?" I ask.

  "Hey Mia. Is she one of yours?"

  "What? I don't think so."

  "Am-errrr-i-toc-raaaaa-seeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Outside, her call is much louder. For the first time, I know what she's saying.

  "Am-errrr-i-toc-raaaaa-seeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

  I grimace in Walter's direction. "Okay, I guess she is one of ours. Sorry about that."

  He gives me a scolding smile. "Well, keep her quiet. We've got paying customers in here." He steps back into the restaurant.

  "Hey, when do you close for the night?" I ask.

  "Soon. What do you need?"

  "Can you send up whatever you have left over? A few meals' worth." I glance at the woman in the shadows. "She might be hungry."

  As Walter heads inside, I call across the street. "Hey! Are you looking for the Ameritocracy office?"

  Her head moves in my direction. She doesn't say anything.

  I wait for a car to pass, then cross the street and stop a yard away from her under the awning. The first thing I notice is her height. I measure everyone's height in relation to Steph, who's nearly half a foot taller than me. This woman has at least a couple inches on Steph. She must be close to six feet tall.

  I extend a hand as she steps out of the shadows. "Mia Rhodes. Are you by any chance…well, Alex didn't have a name. Are you Alex's friend?"

  "Leslie Carrington." She shakes my hand tentatively, then backs away, this time off to the side of the awning under the light of a streetlamp. She studies me cautiously, and I study her right back.

  Her outfit looks like it was stolen from the dressing room of an eighties movie. She wears a beige jumpsuit with thick shoulder pads. Her wide elastic belt sports a built-in plastic buckle in odd shades of pastel red, white and blue. Her black hair is tied in a messy ponytail and her thick bangs are hairsprayed half up in a frizz, the other half down in a neat curl to the level of her eyebrows.

  "Did Alex Vane ask you to come?"

  "He did."

  "And you want a job working on our computer system?"

  "Want is a tricky word. I'm here."

  "How did you get here so fast? I assume you were up in Seattle if Alex knew you."

  "I live in California now."

  Her answers are clipped. Not rude, exactly, but she gives the impression of someone who doesn't want to say more than she needs to.

  "Why were you standing across the street, yelling 'Ameritocracy'?"

  "When Alex messaged me, he didn't have an exact address. He said you were on the main street in Santa Clarissa. There's no sign on your door."

  "You could have called, or googled us from your phone."

  "Phone?" she asks mockingly. "Are you serious?"

  I don't know what she means, and I'm a little afraid to ask. I smile cautiously, hoping she'll elaborate.

  She walks a little square in and out of the shadows, one large stride in each direction with slow, 90-degree turns after each. Then she does it again, like she's forgotten I'm here.

  It's a perfect California evening. High sixties, clear and breezeless. The kind of night I'm usually thankful
for, even when things are crazy in the office. Right now, all I can think about is whether I should entrust our entire system to this odd woman.

  I trust Alex, though, and it's not like I have a better option up my sleeve.

  I try small talk. "Where'd you drive in from, then?"

  "North."

  "Oh, that's…where?"

  "Just north."

  "Cool cool. Nice night, huh?"

  She stops her unique form of pacing to let out a long, judgmental sigh. "Yes."

  Small talk isn't working, so I choose a more direct approach. "I'm sorry. I'm usually not paranoid, but if I can level with you—"

  "You can."

  "Thank you. We had to fire our lead tech guy today."

  "Benjamin Singh. I know."

  "You know Benjamin?"

  "I know of him. When Alex told me you needed a lead tech person, I researched your outfit."

  The way she says the word "researched" makes me think she went well beyond a simple Google search. I don't know how hacking works, or how secure our system truly is, but I wonder whether this woman has more information than she's letting on. "What else did you turn up?"

  She crouches to get a better look at my face. As she studies me, I notice her eyes for the first time. Her small black pupils are surrounded by streaks of white and pale blue that grow dark toward her outer eye. Like a white star exploding in a blue sky. They're stunning.

  "Even though he's a sellout clickbait whore," she says finally, "Alex is a good judge of character. He trusts you, so I'm going to trust you. And I need to level with you." She pauses, as if deciding whether to go on. "I'm a little bit crazy. Probably more than a little. I'm aware that I have problems with paranoia, but I've been diagnosed with other stuff that…well...I disagree with. Before you freak out, though, I'm on meds now, and they help a lot. I can hold down a job, I can be, like, a person in the world. Alex said you need someone you can trust, and I get why you might not want to trust a crazy lady. But I can promise that whatever else might be wrong with me, I won't have copies of all new posts to your site forwarded to Peter Colton."

  "You…what?"

  I didn't tell Alex that. In fact, I don't even know that. All I knew for sure was that Benjamin told Peter about Justine Hall's upcoming events.

  "How did you know that?" I demand.

  "Like I said, I researched you before I drove south. I'm a bit paranoid. I accept that about myself and I'm moving forward."

  The last line sounds like something she's practiced saying in therapy. "That's good, but how did you 'research' us?"

  She continues as though she didn't hear my question. "You know, the fact that I'm paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get me. They are."

  "Who?"

  "I won't talk about that now."

  Her words and demeanor make me feel safe and unsafe at the same time.

  Two things still bug me. "I want to hire you, but tell me two things. First, why no phone? Second, how'd you get into our system?"

  "Phones are the most trackable devices on earth. You already know that, yet you carry one anyway."

  "I'm not running from anyone, though. I'm not being tracked."

  She gives me a look I can't read. Maybe a smirk, maybe pity? "You might not be on the run, but you are being tracked." She ponders for a moment. "But let's not get off on a tangent. Let me answer your second question. I couldn't get into most of your system. When Alex told me what you needed, I knew it had to be bad. You don't fire your only real tech guy because things aren't screwed. So I looked into him. From the outside, at least, the Ameritocracy servers are secure. The voting ones, at least. I only tried for a couple hours, but I couldn't get in. The email, though, not so much."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It only took me twenty minutes to gain access to the Ameritocracy email server. Benjamin's emails had a few extra layers of encryption, but I found a dummy address he'd set up to automatically send updates from your top candidates to Peter Colton."

  "That bastard!" I pace the street for a moment. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but I set them aside because, above all else, we need a complete system audit as soon as possible.

  I gesture across the street. "Will you come upstairs?"

  "I will."

  She follows me upstairs, trailing about ten feet behind the whole way. When we reach the office, she stands silently for a full minute, surveying the space, then points at the corner where Benjamin used to sit.

  Four desks are arranged in a square, each with two monitors. "That his spot?"

  "Yeah."

  "I assume you don't know his passwords or—"

  "We don't know anything."

  She sighs again, but this one conveys more pity than judgment. "And my hunch is that your worst panic concerns whether your voting is secure, right? If Benjamin helped Peter with candidate information, did he also rig the voting?"

  I'm relieved that, despite her eccentricities, she seems to know what she's facing. "That's it exactly. I'd love for you to check the voting and then check, well, everything else."

  She walks to Benjamin's desk and sits as Walter appears at the door with a large bag of food.

  By the time I get to the desk with the food, Leslie—or "Leslie" as I'm starting to think of her—is lost in the screen. I have no idea what she's doing, but I choose to trust her. I don't see an alternative.

  "I'm gonna head upstairs." I set the food on a chair next to her. "There's food here. I sleep upstairs if you need anything else."

  She ignores me.

  "One last thing. Is your name really Leslie Carrington?"

  She glares back at me, then returns to the screen.

  "I'm sorry," I offer. "That was kinda rude of me."

  She doesn't look up from the screen. "Look, Ms. Rhodes, I can talk about my real name or I can fix your problem. Pick one."

  9

  The following morning I wipe sleep from my eyes as I make my way downstairs.

  It strikes me that I didn't set "Leslie" up with a place to sleep. She wasn't especially forthcoming about where she lived, so I don't know if it's close enough for her to drive back. I assume she grabbed a spot on the couch.

  At the bottom of the stairs, my phone rings and I take the excuse to sit on the bottom step. I set my mug on the step beside me, quietly grateful not to have to face the office for another minute.

  I check the caller-ID. "Alex? What's up?"

  "You were right. Catch and kill."

  I take a long sip of coffee, breathing in air to help cool it as I sip. "You're sure?"

  "I haven't seen the contracts, if that's what you mean. But one of our writers worked at The Weekly News of America or whatever the hell they're called. She got it from an inside source that one of Peter's lawyers approached them to buy your story. They've done it for Peter before, apparently."

  I shouldn't be surprised. Men like Peter have been using tabloids to do their dirty work for years. When they want to keep an affair or other scandal out of the press, they simply have a friend at a tabloid purchase the exclusive rights to the story from everyone involved.

  That's the "Catch."

  After obtaining the exclusive rights, they stick the story in a drawer. It never comes out.

  That's the "Kill."

  I used to wonder why they'd want to kill a big story after catching it. If I sold them the story of my breakup with Peter, for example, surely it would sell a lot of newspapers. I can see the headline now.

  Redheaded Ameritocracy Vixen Catches Billionaire Playboy Cheating...With a MAN!!!!

  A story about me catching Peter in the shower would be huge for a tabloid like American News Weekly. But not as huge as a friendship with Peter. He can offer them stories, business advantages, and outright cash payments. All perfectly legal, and far more valuable than one big story.

  Just as well. Being called a "vixen" in print would be more than my sanity can take right now.

  "So," I ask Alex, "what do I do?" />
  "That depends on your answers to the following questions. First, do you want the story to be out there for your own personal satisfaction? Second, do you want it to be out there to hurt Peter? And third, if you don't want the story out there for either of those reasons, do you want to make some easy money?"

  The answer to the first question is an absolute no.

  As upset as I am with Peter, I'd get no satisfaction by revealing personal sexual details about an ex-boyfriend. And the fact that the media would treat the story differently because it was a man as opposed to a woman...well, that pisses me off.

  The second question is a bit trickier.

  Even though he hasn't broken any rules, Peter's entry into the competition was a major betrayal. In today's media climate, there's no telling how people will react to the revelation that he cheated. It probably wouldn't help him.

  Hurting his candidacy is more tempting than hurting him personally, but still...no. I've always believed that the sex life of politicians has little to do with their job performance. If something brings Peter down, I want it to be something else.

  The third question is easy. "No," I say. "No to all three. I'm still broke, but I have plenty of job offers on the table for when Ameritocracy ends. If I'm not gonna let the story out anyway, I'm not going to let some rag pay me for it."

  There's a long silence. "There's another factor to consider," Alex says. "If you take the money for the catch and kill, you'd be legally prohibited from talking about the affair. Most of those contracts have clauses about million-dollar penalties if you break the terms of the agreement. That's what makes it a kill."

  "Yeah, and?"

  "Well, when you told me you needed to replace Benjamin—"

  "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. Um, Leslie Carrington? arrived last night."

  "Who?"

  "The tech lady. I assume you know her by a different name."

  "Sorry, say that name again?"

  "Leslie Carrington?"

  "Wow. That…wow. What does she look like?"

  I take a moment to process that question. "She looks like a half-crazy woman cosplaying Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Or like she might be dating a guy who has a Nancy Reagan fetish."