Session 4: Desk 108

We sold the only thing we owned, and spent the night learning one man's seating assignment.

Session 4: Desk 108

What happened#

First we got paid, which took longer than the job did.

Pike's offer was still sitting there, 17,500 a head for the fee assignment, and we did not take it. Ward had pointed us at Abram Sowell instead, who buys filed paper at twenty cents on the nuyen and then does nothing with it for fifteen years. He opened at 22,500. We pushed once, he said 30,000, and then he said that was his best and final, and it turned out he meant exactly that. No second number. No working shown, no argument offered, and no apparent interest in whether we were convinced. Ten thousand each, and the quarter of Ward's contingency with our names on it now has his name on it.

The other half of the payout has no number on it and might be worth more. Ward told the board who went into that house, and the Belmar Association is three hundred households deep on the Westside. What came back was not money. It was people who take our calls now: Reece, who can name every one of those households; Odell Prentiss, who sits on the board and reads offers out loud until somebody is embarrassed; Althea Rhodes, who keeps the Association's archive in two rooms above a dance studio and has read all of it; and Ward herself, who it turns out will answer a phone at any hour if you are the reason she still has a case.

Then Whitaker's job, and the rest of the night went into the AES complex at El Segundo.

We know where the cartridge has to go now. Desk 108, on the submissions floor, and the man it belongs to is Renato Buenaflor, finance, the one reconciling thirty years of San Onofre invoices into the exhibits Shiawase is filing. His terminal is the one that stays logged in at night, because he leaves mid-sentence to catch a shuttle.

Vinnie called him. Not as Vinnie: as Tony, a journalist, with the modulator doing the voice, and by the end of the call Renato had agreed to a work lunch in the cafeteria. A man who reconciles invoices for a living does not get asked about his work very often, and he said yes to the first person who sounded interested.

Trash went a different way and came back with the better thing, though the getting of it was Fiche's: they pulled a call off the complex's in-house counseling line and handed over what was on it. On the line was Dave from IT, who runs the department, six years in the building, talking to a therapist about a cat. The cat was called Mayonnaise. The complex runs Take Your Pet To Work Day every third Friday, and on one of them Mayonnaise got out, got down a service stair, and got into the kennel run with the hellhounds. Nobody was disciplined. The pet day is still on the calendar. Dave has been on that line since August, and the line is a company benefit, so Shiawase is paying to record a man grieving an animal its own guard dogs ate.

Trash thinks a cartridge could go into desk 108 in Dave's hand, on Dave's own authority, with nobody on the floor at all. He is talking about putting the idea there himself.

And Lux went and got himself a one o'clock with Adán Zepeda, a general manager at Shiawase on the vendor side. Nobody asked him to. He used his own name to do it, which is the only name he has, and Zepeda took the meeting without appearing to have looked him up at all. What Zepeda wants is off-the-books contracting: communications devices with explosives in them, built discreetly, for a government customer he will not name. That has nothing to do with Whitaker's job, and it is in the same building. Lux took the meeting anyway, which was always going to be the answer.

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