Defiled Page 9

  Platt cast the first vote to delay the trials and then went clockwise around the table asking each partner for his vote. It was three to three when it reached me. Hayes and Barker had voted “nay,” as had Archie Eckhart, the CPO. I looked around the table at the men who had joined with me in this risky venture, men who were counting on payback for their efforts. I felt a pang of remorse about what I had to do, but I couldn’t settle my divorce for half of five dollars a share.

  Platt grew impatient. “What’s your vote, Randle?”

  I feigned resignation as I said, “I vote to delay, Bob.”

  Platt nodded. He knew it would go this way. Turning to the chief people officer, Platt asked, “What’s your objection, Archie?”

  “I’m worried about keeping the people, Bob,” Eckhart said. “Every time we delay, a few folks lose confidence and leave.”

  Platt said, “Let’s address the question of how long this takes and see if you feel better about it then.”

  Masters took her seat, her job done, and Platt stood to take the floor. He said, “Peter, you’ll have to manage the trials. How long will it take to collect the case histories and recruit an external board of respected physicians?”

  Hayes tapped his pen on his notepad as he thought about the question. He wanted to minimize the delay. He squirmed in his chair a bit as he answered, “If we put all other work aside, maybe a month?”

  Platt turned to the CIO. “Harry? You have to load all the data, make all the test runs.”

  Without thinking, Higbee said, “I can load and run them in two weeks.”

  “Okay, Randle,” Platt said, “you’re the end of the chain. How long will it take you to produce and publish results?”

  Here we go. I said, “With all due respect, we’re being unreasonably optimistic. The board of doctors we’ve lined up expects to engage sometime next spring for clinical trials, not internal trials. You’re asking them to radically change their schedules and do different work, so we may have to recruit different doctors. We have live patients identified for clinical trials, but we haven’t yet collected any closed cases. That will take time. Even if Harry’s team worked 24/7 to load and run cases, it will take longer than two weeks because the runs always require interim reviews and adjustments.”

  My partners glared at me.

  Hayes said, “I’ll work my ass off, Randle, and I expect the same from you.”

  Higbee, my friend, said, “We’re building a tool to automate case loading, so I’m confident I can do it in two weeks.”

  Platt said, “Let’s not question one another, Randle. Just give me an estimate.”

  If Hayes and Higbee kept their promises, I could probably complete my work in three weeks, meaning a one-month delay in the IPO, but I didn’t want to give them that option. I wanted to move the IPO date well out of range of my divorce action.

  “Not only do we have to analyze the results ourselves, but we have to walk each doctor through the results, document their opinions, get them to certify the overall findings, and make sure they turn out the way we need them to turn out,” I said. “Then we’ll prepare final results that are as flattering as possible for publication to investors. The doctors will want to take time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so the best case would be January 15th of next year.” That would give me two and a half additional months to settle my divorce.

  Everyone spoke at once, most of it vile and aimed at me. Platt stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, like coaches do on the practice field. “Settle down, everybody.”

  Masters jumped in with, “Anything later than Thanksgiving gets us into the holidays, and then it’s January before we can do the IPO.”

  Thank you, Patricia. That makes it easy. “Well, there’s no hope of getting done before Thanksgiving,” I lied.

  Around the room partners inhaled sharply from shock, as though they’d been stabbed in the back. Of course, they had been. Each partner looked at every other partner to see if anyone had a way around me. The room was silent for some time. Platt planted his hands deep in his trouser pockets and looked at me with anger in his eyes.

  After several minutes, he said to no one in particular, “Where does that leave us?”

  No one offered an opinion, so it was left to me to shatter their dreams. “Let’s change the IPO date just one last time,” I said. “If we miss November, we’ll scare investors and employees with another delay. Give Peter an extra month to collect cases and recruit a board. Give Harry three weeks to load and run the cases. My team will work through the holidays, but the bulk of the work will happen in January. The IPO date should be February 15th.” And that would give me exactly the average amount of time to settle a divorce in Florida.

  The room filled with angry murmurs and the harsh scraping of chairs. Masters interceded. “I agree with Randle,” she said. “You’d lose all credibility if you announced another slip in November.”

  Platt nodded like a man resigned to bad news. He said, “Richard, you’ll have to stretch our cash, maybe find a sympathetic lender to supply bridge funding. I don’t see any other way to stay afloat.”

  Barker flipped his pencil in the air and let it hit the table and bounce disrespectfully. “No hiring, no business travel, no capital expenditures until further notice.” He stared each of us down, and no one objected, so he added, “Bring your own shit paper if you intend to use the restrooms.”

  A few titters escaped, and the mood lightened a bit. I said, “We’ll work our butts off to make February 15th, but let’s remember that the panel of doctors will have to work to our schedule to certify the results. Make sure they are aware when you recruit them.”

  Platt sat back down. He said, “Okay, let’s formalize the plan with another vote.”

  Barker, Eckhart, and Hayes all voted “nay,” but this time Platt cast the deciding vote in favor of a February 15th IPO, and fifty thousand options slid off the negotiating table. Although Barker was adept at managing AMA’s money, rumor had it that his personal finances were a mess. He wanted to go public as soon as possible to keep himself afloat, and Eckhart was legitimately concerned about staff defections.

  Platt said, “I presumed Rich and Archie were voting for November 1st, but why did you vote against February 15th, Peter?”

  “I’d have voted for anything before Christmas.” Looking at me, he added, “But if Randle can’t go faster, we can’t go faster.”

  For the first time in my life, I had allowed my personal needs to influence my professional judgment, but it had been necessary. There wasn’t enough money on the table, after taxes and debts, for both Carrie and me to have a future. The judge had screwed me out of fifteen thousand shares that had vested before I met Carrie, and now I would get them back by moving the IPO to a date beyond the end of my marriage. The question was how to hide the news from de Castro and Carrie.

  Platt directed Eckhart to draft an announcement to the staff, and the meeting was adjourned. I didn’t want to explain my position to my partners, so I hustled out of the building and hightailed it back to the hotel.

  Jerry was waiting for me in the lobby. When we entered my room, he couldn’t fail to see a sealed bottle of Glenlivet on the desk.

  “Okay,” he said, “get online and follow my instructions.”

  I did as I was told. At the halfway mark of scrolling through the apps installed on my machine, Jerry stopped me. “That’s a redirector. Someone is snooping on your account.”

  “What’s a redirector?”

  “An app that makes a copy of every mail you send and every mail you receive and sends the copies to another email account. Businesses use it to create audit trails of incoming and outgoing mail, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes.”

  I’ll be damned. “How can I find out who’s snooping?”

  Jerry gave me another set of instructions, and a few minutes later said, “There it is! Your mail is going to shadylady44@spiritnet.com. Know who that is?”

  Carrie’s public e
mail account was catmarks38@flaweb.net. The letters c-a-t were the initials of her maiden name, Carrie Ann Tomkins, and her family and childhood friends still referred to her as “Cat.” She’d added the number “38,” her bust size, pretending she had to distinguish herself from the dozens of other “catmarks” in the world. She was smart enough not to use her public email address to steal my mail.

  “My wife is forty-four years old, and she thinks she has the right to snoop on me.”

  “Easy to remove—just highlight the app and click ‘uninstall.’”

  I had nothing to be ashamed about in my emails, but I felt violated—the sensation you get when you find that a tick has burrowed into your body. The urge to pull it out was powerful, but I had an epiphany. “I don’t want to remove it, Jerry. She’d know I found it. I can send her misinformation through this link.”

  “You read too many spy novels.”

  Indignant, I said, “How did she get this onto my machine?”

  “Easiest way is to log onto your machine and install it, but the sneaky way is to embed it in an attachment to an email and hope you open the attachment. That’s how most viruses are spread—through spam mail.”

  I couldn’t remember receiving any email from Carrie with an attachment, and she wouldn’t know how to install an app so she’d had help. Does Phil Simmons have the technical skill to install a redirector?

  “Listen, Jerry, are there ways to get something like this onto her machine without having physical access to her computer and without leaving any evidence behind?” I held my breath.

  “Yes, there are.” After a long silence, in which I wasn’t about to incriminate myself, he said, “You want me to help you with that?”

  “I do. I want to see everything she’s doing on her computer.” It would be ironic to catch my wife sending sweet nothings to boyfriends using the same devious trick she played on me.

  Jerry pointed to the bottle of Glenlivet. “Mind if I crack that before we move into the high-tech stuff?”

  “No, it’s yours.” I went to the bathroom to get Jerry a water glass. He offered me a drink but I declined, so he poured one finger and chugged it. Then he poured two fingers and set the glass down.

  Motioning to the chair, he said, “May I?” I watched as Jerry paged through a search engine list of websites. When he chose one, a garish red-and-black page popped up showing cartoonish characters in various spying poses. Jerry grabbed his glass and took a sip of Scotch, then leaned back to let me have a better view of the screen.

  “You can embed a redirector in an attachment to an email. Hope she opens it. Hope she’s sending the mail you want to find from the account you choose to monitor. Having spied on you, she may be wary of attachments in emails from you.” Jerry pointed at a picture on the screen of a box of software. “This would be a good product to buy, but you could get caught.”

  “Or …” My word dangled in the air.

  Jerry savored a sip of the whiskey. “You could buy a keystroke recorder that can be installed remotely.” He leaned toward the screen and paged down to another product picture. “This is the one I recommend,” he said. He turned the screen so I could read it.

  The software wasn’t as expensive as I had feared. “Okay. How do I use it?”

  “Do you know her machine account name?”

  “Her computer says ‘Hello, Carrie’ when you boot it. Then you enter a password.”

  Jerry got up and told me to take the desk chair. “We don’t need her password; we just need the directory name to load the software into. Buy this product and download it to your computer. Then we’ll transfer it to your smartphone. Next time you’re within range of the wireless router in your house, put your smartphone in Wi-Fi mode so you’re connected to the same router. Open the app and follow the instructions to load the software onto the computer named ‘Carrie.’ It’s that easy. The software will record all her keystrokes and put them in a file on the cloud. When you want to see what she’s doing, you log into your account on the cloud and read the file.”

  “Is this what the NSA does to snoop on us?” I said, referring to the National Security Agency.

  Jerry laughed. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be efficient to gather data from millions of individual computers, so the NSA breaks into the service provider databases where everyone’s emails are stored. To do that, the NSA twists the arms of the email services to get their encryption keys or else breaks the codes.”

  “Well, I only want to spy on one computer, so the challenge is to get my cell phone within Wi-Fi range.”

  I could see myself sneaking through the woods behind the house, creeping into the swimming pool area in the middle of the night, and doing the dirty deed like the CIA would do it. When I was in college, I was attracted to that lifestyle.

  Jerry showed me how to buy the software, download it, and then transfer it to my smartphone. It felt like I carried a concealed weapon.

  “You didn’t get any of this instruction from me,” Jerry said. “You never saw me today.”

  I said I understood.

  Before he left with the bottle of Scotch, Jerry made me change my account name so my computer was less vulnerable to hacking. I called it “Sneaky Pete.”

  Hours later, I approached Cortes County Highway 98, running east to west across the interstate. Before I could consciously resist, the Bronco took the exit and headed west toward the country house. I doubted there was any sort of surveillance on the house or that Carrie would be rocking on the front porch, yet my heart was pounding as I turned onto my own road.

  I drove past my house at full speed, just a random vehicle on the road, so I only noted that there was no visible activity around the three-story faux plantation manor. Two miles down the road, after ensuring there were no cars following me or coming at me, I made a U-turn. On the second pass, I slowed down and took in the details. Two yard lights had burned out. The water pump for the homemade rock waterfall in the center of the yard wasn’t running. Carrie’s car was not in its usual position under the carriage porch. The garage door was closed.

  Down the road, I pulled over and put my smartphone in Wi-Fi mode, then made another U-turn and crept up to the house. I let the smartphone search for a Wi-Fi signal, but after more than a minute it was obvious my phone could not connect to the Wi-Fi from the street. I wasn’t brave enough to pull into the driveway because Carrie could catch me violating my restraining order. Since she lived alone now, she may have adopted the safety measure of parking her car in the garage. Carrie could see me if she glanced out a front window.

  So I did yet another U-turn, accelerated away from the house and through the turn onto Highway 98. When I rejoined the southbound traffic on I-75, I felt like a kid who had disobeyed his mother and gotten away with it.

  A little voice in my head said, Why do you care where Carrie is or what she’s doing? You aren’t a couple anymore. I answered the voice with, I don’t care about Carrie. I wanted to prove that I could violate the restraining order too. And the little voice said, Uh-huh.

  I took the back way to Dolphin Beach and snuck up on the Walgreens parking lot. The white panel van was waiting for me. I parked and went into the store, waving to the driver as I did so. Inside I bought myself a bottle of chocolate milk and a candy bar for the kid. When I came out, I shocked him by placing his chocolate on the hood of the van, and then I went home.

  In a chaise lounge chair next to the pool, drinking my chocolate milk, I wondered if I should be worried about myself. The cat and mouse game with Carrie had become an interesting, almost exciting, contest of wits, and I was enjoying it. That’s pretty alarming, isn’t it?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I had called Glenda on my way back from Atlanta and asked her to dinner on Saturday night, but I was far from deciding that I wanted her. The last thing I needed to do was jump back into a relationship that had failed once before.

  We agreed to meet at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa so she didn’t have to cross the cau
seway to St. Petersburg. My task was to lose my tail. When I exited my neighborhood, I turned left onto Gulf Boulevard, toward Pass-a-Grille, and the white panel van pulled out of the Walgreens parking lot and fell in line one car back. I timed the lights so I could stop for a red light at the head of the straight-ahead lane, waited for a few cars to use the left-turn arrow, then pulled the New York taxi trick of turning along with and outside of the cars in the turn lane. While I headed in the opposite direction for the Corey Causeway, the kid was forced to wait for oncoming traffic to stop for the next light change. Around the corner on Corey Avenue, I pulled into the Ace Hardware parking lot and waited for him to pass. When he flew by, I doubled back down Gulf Boulevard and took the Pinellas Bayway to I-275 North and across the Bay to Tampa.

  I arrived early at the restaurant, sans the tail. When Glenda pulled up to the valet parking stand, I opened her door for her and gave her a quick kiss. The restaurant’s Howard Avenue location was an easy jaunt from her shop in Oldsmar, so I expected her to be in work clothes, but she wore a little black cocktail dress with a modest neckline, three-inch open-toed heels, dark hose with a seam up the back of her legs, and evening makeup.

  “You are stunning,” I said. And provocative.

  She smiled. “So you do have taste.”

  Walking into the restaurant, I placed a proprietary hand on the small of her bare back and enjoyed the rocking of her hips, accentuated by her high heels. A mixture of cigarette smoke and Obsession perfume, the most effective aphrodisiac ever concocted, wafted from her and triggered an automatic response in my loins. Inside, the lobby décor reminded me of a Roman palace—marble floor, statuettes on pedestals, heavy red draperies on the walls—and belied the quality of the wine and steaks. I strode up to the hostess station and announced myself. Soon we were led to a semiprivate back room where the light was low and the conversation muted. Walking behind her, I noted that Glenda had no visible pantyline.