The Fourteenth Protocol: The Special Agent Jana Baker Spy-Thriller Series, #2

Chapter 1

May 1, 2011

One minute, yelled the commander over the thumping helicopter rotor blades as they thrashed through the night air.

The SEAL team operators flipped down night-vision goggles, popped safety catches on their weapons, and flashed thumbs-up to one another. Fifty feet from the ground, a metallic cracking sound burst from the helicopter’s tail section, reminiscent of an aging piano cord giving up its long fight. The pilot wrenched the stick in a violent attempt to prevent the craft from rolling sideways as the tail swung in a wild circle. The helicopter impacted the top of a twelve-foot cement wall surrounding the compound. Navy SEALs spilled on top of one another as the craft teetered onto its side and slid to a stop. Unfazed, the operators burst from the damaged craft and ran towards the first of several doors they would breach.

***

The president made the announcement on a Sunday evening. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body. We give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the result of their pursuit of justice.

Chapter 2

Present Day

It was a cool, springtime day in Atlanta under a crisp blue sky. Cade Williams’ windows sat half-open on his aging Honda/Toyota wannabe four-door. The car wasn’t going to attract any women, but it was paid for and had plenty of life left in it. He pulled out of his apartment, which was a pre-fab’d clone of every other apartment complex in the city. The grounds were so covered with pansies, it looked as if the owners had purchased a lifetime supply of the flower.

Those are probably why my rent is so high, he said to no one in particular. But being young and single in Atlanta meant you lived in the Buckhead area because that’s where the women were. Not that Cade knew any of them.

It was only a mile up Lenox Road to Peachtree Street and then to the office. Cade turned up the radio to hear the news as he limped through Peachtree Street traffic. Atlanta’s awful traffic was another reason he lived inside the perimeter. A tiny smile curled up the left side of his mouth. He had to admit, the rent was too high, but living inside the perimeter—or ITP, as they called it—had its perks. There was no reason to pay attention to the traffic report when you lived a mile from your office.

Another explosion last night, this one at a Little League baseball field in Tucson, Arizona. Four are confirmed dead, one of them a child. Reports are still coming in from the scene. This makes the eleventh bombing in eleven months. The bomb appears to have detonated as the players were coming off the field. Fourteen are known to be hospitalized, two in critical condition. Tucson Sheriff’s Department spokesperson, Amy Rumbaugh. ‘We’re still assessing the situation. The FBI is on the scene with sheriff’s deputies. But it looks to me like another homemade device. We’re going to do everything in our power to find who is responsible.’

Cade’s stomach tightened. Little League baseball fields? he thought. He’d played Little League ball at Murphey Candler Park in Atlanta when he was a kid. That seemed like a long time ago. He wasn’t exactly skilled at much of anything baseball-related back then, and as such, his backside became expert at cleaning the bench seats in the dugout. Man, it’s so hard to picture sitting there on the bench and having a freaking bomb go off, thought Cade.

Baseball was truly an American sport and was always played on great spring days like these. Nice weather, maybe a little hot, but my God, who the hell would set off a bomb? What are they trying to do, take away our ability to relax anywhere? Eleven small terrorist attacks. These weren’t the big ones like the Trade Centers or anything, but still. Kids. Kids.

Cade hit a red light in front of Lenox Mall, cruised farther down Peachtree, and turned into the office, a towering monstrosity that loomed over its neighbors. The black glass didn’t reveal much about the building’s hidden superstructure and thus looked like any other building. But underneath that layer of reflective mirror was a hardened shell designed to withstand tornados and even mild earthquakes. No, this was no ordinary building. It was a place designed to hide its secrets, and hide them well. In fact, Cade had slept here on more than one occasion as predicted tornados skirted the city. And Atlanta had its share of tornados.

That building is the safest place in the city if one were ever to come through, Cade had told his father. All of the glass on the exterior of the first eight floors was bulletproof. Not that the company expected an actual zombie apocalypse or anything. But bulletproof glass was an excellent way to shield the computer data center and its customers’ corporate secrets as they flowed across the servers.

Cade was an e‑mail operations admin for a true Wall Street darling. Thoughtstorm, Inc. exploded onto the stock market four years prior. He loved his job running the highly technical e-mail servers, but it wasn’t something he’d ever tell a girl. Being a geek just didn’t pay when it came to women.

Thoughtstorm was the largest e-mail service provider in North America. Billions of corporate e-mails flowed across eighteen floors of rack after rack of servers. Telling anyone he worked in the e-mail service provider business, Cade would often see a glaze form over their eyes, but there was a lot of cool stuff hidden inside the racks of metal boxes covered in blinky lights. With all the corporate secrets flowing through, it was no wonder security was so ridiculous.

Cruising down Peachtree, Cade turned towards the parking deck. The morning sun reflected off the building and nearly blinded him. As he pulled up to the security gate, Cade leaned out the window, holding his ID badge for a guard known only as Chuck, who scanned it.

Hey, Chuck, said Cade, looking for any response. For four years Cade had been trying to get Chuck to say anything. Cade had been through a phase when he even tried treating Chuck like one of those London Royal Guards who won’t smile, no matter what you do. But he got bored with that as well. Chuck pointed to the finger scanner. Cade reached out his hand and put his pinky finger onto the scanner. He would try a different finger each day of the week, hoping that the scan would fail, and Chuck wouldn’t let him pass. Going through this check at the front gate each morning was almost stupid. Chuck knew good and well that he worked here and had access to go to the parking lot. But, the company did love its petty policies.

Chuck motioned Cade forward and raised the gate. Cade stopped at his usual parking spot, way up on the eighth floor of the deck. He went through the glass doors and scanned his card at the elevator. The lobby was another story. It always took a few minutes to get through. Cade put his whole hand on the scanner this time and keyed his security code onto the pad. The keypad itself was quite a piece of work. It wasn’t just a normal pad with ten numbers on it. This keypad was digital. The ten numbers, instead of being placed in numeric order, would randomly move around the pad each time it was accessed. This made it harder for someone to peer over your shoulder and steal your code.

A security guard behind a reinforced cement wall watched through four inches of bulletproof glass. Cade walked through the eight-foot-tall revolving turnstiles and put his hand on the cold, case-hardened door. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for the guard to buzz him in. Finally, Cade was free to go to the elevator. In the elevator, Cade had one more round of fussing through the same revolving keypad to get the elevator to grant him access to the sixteenth floor. This part of the job made Cade laugh—a Central Intelligence Agency security system and a Mayberry paycheck.

Cade reached his cube, not far from the server racks. The cube farm was separated from the servers by a long glass wall. This wall, however, was not meant to stop an armor-piercing round; instead, it was simply designed to keep the fifty-nine-degree air temperature of the server room separated from the employees who preferred to work without freezing their asses off.

Cade’s cube was a sight to behold, a true thing of beauty. He was easily the only guy in the building with a velvet Elvis tapestry hanging in his cube. Artwork of this quality was usually only found at the corner gas station, the local bowling alley, or hanging in a place of respect, right above the fireplace in some redneck’s single-wide trailer. But Cade, who was partial to being partial, admitted he was a bit eclectic. He had acquired the tapestry from an old friend who swiped it from a Dairy Queen late one night. None of his coworkers seemed to mind the bright yellow mustard stain on Elvis’s white leather pant leg.

Cade flipped open his laptop, which was secured to the desk by means of the obligatory cable lock. With all this tight security, Cade thought it amusing that a person without a key could easily open the lock with no more than an empty toilet paper roll, or anything else that would fit in the key slot, for that matter.

To say Thoughtstorm was paranoid wouldn’t quite sum it up. The paranoia level was palpable, something that could be seen and touched. Once, Cade had seen an employee, who he suspected worked upstairs on the seventeenth floor, be taken into the security office. Word was they had strip-searched him. Needless to say, that guy’s keycard was deactivated that day. But no one seemed to know what he had done in the first place to get fired, much less strip-searched. Cade knew, although he couldn’t prove it, that there were cameras watching all of them. It was really just a sneaking suspicion. So one day, Cade decided to place a little piece of masking tape over the camera built into his laptop. He always hated those things. You never knew if the camera was turned on or off. The thought that the Thoughtstorm security team was watching, all the time, sat on his stomach like a pint of rotten moonshine. He had affixed the tape to the camera fairly well, and sure enough, the next morning the tape was gone. No way that just fell off, no way. That was a while back. He hadn’t tried it again, figuring if they were going to watch, he might as well not fight the system. Besides, the job actually did pay well, and Cade pretty much got his run of the place. His immediate supervisor didn’t even work in Atlanta, so no one hovered over him, micromanaging his every project. The freedom was excellent.

Dude, came the lispy voice from the other side of Cade’s cube wall.

Hey, man.

Did you see that instant messenger was down again? Whitmore was Cade’s cube-neighbor. At five feet nothing, Whitmore could almost stand up and walk under his cube. He was an effeminate guy to say the least, but could be trusted with anything.

No. Hey, give me a chance to boot up will you? And by the way, what time do you get in here anyway? It’s like you never leave. Is that the same shirt you had on yesterday?

Oh, go screw yourself.

Well, you know you and I can’t function without instant messenger. I mean, we work four feet apart. God forbid we’d have to speak to one another instead of using IM.

No way I’m talking to you, man. Whitmore couldn’t contain the sarcasm that came so naturally. He was a real piece of work, as they say. He never seemed to be seen outside of the office. A hermit, but an office hermit; the kind of guy every company secretly loves to hire. Tireless, smart, never whines. The true team player. Never fear. I’ll figure a way to fix that IM before the day is out.

Standing up and leaning over the cube wall, Cade said, So how exactly does an art director fix the instant messenger software, anyway?

Not your problem, my man. Not your problem.

Cade sat down, spun his chair into position, and started in on the day. His job was to project manage all upkeep and maintenance of the servers on the sixteenth floor. Eleven hundred and fifty-six servers, to be exact. The floor space rivaled that of a Wal-Mart.

That’s a lot of black boxes with blinky lights on them, Cade would say as he entered the server room each day. No matter who was walking by as he said it, they’d always give him a look as if to say, What a nimrod. That was the fun of it. Know your shit inside and out, and you can act like an idiot. And Cade did know his stuff. At twenty-eight, he was by far the youngest admin in the company. He graduated just ahead of schedule from Georgia Tech and had gone straight into the work of managing e-mail servers. He didn’t care so much about the business of e-mail itself; it was just a gig he fell into while co-oping towards the end of undergrad. And why not? Thoughtstorm was growing like crazy despite a million know-it-alls predicting the end of e-mail due to the rise of social media. If e-mail was dying, all these blinky lights wouldn’t be going bonkers all day long firing out millions of e-mails.

Even though Cade had been at Thoughtstorm six years, there was always one thing that bothered him. There was something wrong with the seventeenth floor. That floor was packed to the gills with servers as well. But you never seemed to meet anyone that worked on that floor. Not at lunchtime, the company Christmas party, on the elevator, nowhere. Hell, occasionally you’d meet someone from the company that you didn’t know at Good Old Days, the hole-in-the-wall bar across the street. But, even then, they never worked on seventeen.

The Buckhead area was the epicenter of nightlife in Atlanta. And after all, even server geeks go out once in a while. Thoughtstorm employees packed the place after work on Fridays because you could just walk across the street. Well, that and the fact that if you got there before six p.m., the pitchers were half price. The place was hopping.

But no one from the seventeenth floor, never. The more Cade thought about it, the more he realized how odd this was. He worked one floor below, yet never met anyone from there. Stranger still, there had to be a group of server dudes up there just like him, all operating black, blinky boxes, yet you never saw them. What the hell is that all about? thought Cade. Do they have their own sneaky elevator or something? At any rate, it wasn’t a mystery Cade was going to solve today. Not before he waded through all the e-mails in his inbox anyway. Cade had to admit, he might get paid a lot to control servers that sent massive amounts of e-mail, but he hated an inbox full of the damn things.

Cade culled his inbox. Not that any of these were spam, mind you. The company ensured spam didn’t make it past the front door. No, most of the stuff that he deleted was typical corporate hoo-ha. Training opportunities, the hours the building would be open during the MLK holiday, updates to the employee privacy policy, and when the refrigerators would be cleaned out. Unfortunately though, Cade’s inbox was always full of e-mails that were action items. There was always something to do.

Cade was supposed to make it out onto the server room floor by nine thirty each morning to make his rounds. It was not a bad idea actually. Sometimes being up close and personal to the machines gave you a better sense of what was going on with them and what they were thinking. However, he could just as easily monitor them from his desk on three wide-screen monitors. Cade opened his server monitoring software and gave a quick look across all his monitors to make sure he didn’t see anything with the color red. Red was the color of bad. Red meant his phone was about to ring as some server box entered a problem state such as an overload. His grandma would have called it a conniption. No red meant no server conniptions today.

The servers were grouped together in what Thoughtstorm called pods. The pods all had boring names like ACA or DRT to identify them during times of trouble. Most pods played host to over fifty customers at a time. But one, pod GSV, held just a single customer. GSV stood for Government Services and was located on the seventeenth floor.

Although it had taken a long time to build up the trust required, Cade could see the health of all servers in the building. The GSV pod was showing yellow. Cade noticed the pod appeared to be pushing out a huge volume of e-mails at the moment. The yellow would soon die down and turn soft green once the sending job was done. Why in the hell does a government agency need to send that much e-mail? thought Cade.

Most of the time, Cade had access to all data on the servers, which meant he could also see things like the list of e-mail recipients and even the content of e-mails they were sending. Not that the content was all that interesting. Most of the time, it was just a company sending out a boring e-mail newsletter to its customers.

But there was one exception. The GSV pod was blocked. Cade could only see the server health screens for that pod. What the hell is on that pod that makes it so special? And just how trusted does a guy have to be before they’ll open up that access? What do they think I’m going to do, steal the data? Cade mused. He’d never done anything like that in his life. And after all, if that server cluster ever had any real difficulty and started to redline, crap out, get flummoxed, or choke whilst uttering gurgling noises, somebody would be calling on good old Cade to look into the problem. But without access to the whole thing, that would be impossible. Not my problem, he thought. And even if they ever did call him to help out with that pod, he’d have to get some new permissions on his keycard. His keycard wouldn’t let him on the seventeenth floor, much less out into the server room. The likelihood was that that pod was locked off behind some metal mesh cages anyway and security officers would hover nearby.

The yellow slowly changed back to green on pod GSV, and all was once again well with the world. Cade spent a bunch of time in a planning meeting that day. Thoughtstorm was expanding the available server rack space at the headquarters building but was also opening up a new data center in Germany. Too many of Thoughtstorm’s European customers had been complaining that sending their e-mail data to the United States violated European Union privacy regulations.

Cade grabbed a Caffè Americano coffee in the cafeteria downstairs, which was a lot easier than exiting the building and fighting through all that security again. Back at his desk, he rubbed tired eyes and put his hand on his mouse. The three computer monitors glowed to life. Cade was surprised to find pod GSV in the yellow once again. This time it was closer towards redline than it had been in the morning. He focused on the screen and looked at the server readings. Something was definitely wrong. How much e-mail volume are they sending up there? My God, he thought. Normally, if a customer sends this much e-mail, the company adds more servers onto the pod, thereby spreading out the load. But that hadn’t been done in this case.

He was just about to go back to his own work, figuring someone on seventeen who actually has ACCESS will handle it, when the iPhone buzzed in his pocket. The ringtone that accompanied the phone’s vibration was only used when a server text alert was sent. That didn’t happen often, but when it did, it meant that you drop whatever crap you were working on. This was the not-so-fun part of Cade’s job—even if he was at home, sleeping like a big baby, having been rejected by another girl on a Saturday night, he had to get up and come to the office.

He looked at his pocket as if there might be a tarantula in there. An alert? For a yellow server? he thought. He already knew what the alert was about but had never been alerted to trouble on that pod before. Hell, he had never been alerted to trouble on the seventeenth floor before. When he read the text, his shoulders slumped and his eyes shut. He hated this. The text said Alert: EMERGENCY CODE RED. Server cluster GSV. 13:23 HRS EST. Cade had but a single pet peeve. It was use of the word emergency in a business setting. Cade’s father narrowly survived Vietnam and knew the true meaning of the word. He never allowed anyone in the house to so much as utter it unless someone was bleeding. We send e-mails, for God’s sake, thought Cade. There are no emergencies in e-mail. No one is bleeding.

Cade’s dad had been a right-seat pilot in a Navy EA-6B Prowler, a kind of jamming plane used to screw up the enemy’s radar. His dad was the technical type and not a warrior so sitting right-seat in a box of electronics with wings had suited him just fine. But it was one dark-skied night in January 1971, where Cade’s dad learned firsthand what the word emergency was really used for. A SAM missile had zipped off the jungle floor five thousand feet below and snaked across the sky when it clipped the portside engine. Cade’s dad had a hard time telling that story. He would avert his eyes as he recalled his best friend, Dan Tarlton, yelling into the mic, Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Voodoo Zero One Niner declaring an emergency . . . The story always stopped right there. His father just couldn’t relive it. It was like pouring salt on a raw wound. There were four men in the plane on that night in January. Three of them lived long enough to see their parachutes deploy, but Cade’s father, Cal Williams, was the only one to sneak out of the jungle alive.

Chapter 3

You can’t see America from the interstate, Alyssa McTee’s mom would always say. From the time Alyssa left Atlanta, she glued herself to the rural roads and vowed to never use the highway. She pushed the thick-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of her nose and touched the play button on her phone tucked inside the docking station in the VW Beetle. Another Indigo Girls song harmonized across the car speakers as her fingers tapped in rhythm. She shifted in her seat to adjust the frumpy dress. Most girls her age were wearing tight-fitting skirts, but Alyssa never seemed to show any interest. Not that she had anything to hide in those loose-fitting dresses. Actually, she was quite trim. Although, according to her, no one would notice it. Lifeless hair drifted across her forehead. She tucked it back behind her ear and glanced in the rearview mirror only to see an image of her mom staring back at her. Having reached her early twenties, Alyssa now knew she really did look like her mother at this age. In fact, Alyssa had looked like her mom at all ages. The likeness was in the blue eyes and straight hair. There was a photo from 1969 of her mom, dressed in true Woodstock attire at the age of six. The long straight hair, little leather bandana, and bell-bottom jeans truly captured the era. The resemblance was striking.

Alyssa needed this vacation. Work had been pressure-filled the past few months, and she needed to get out of there and go see something—something different. And she needed to be alone for a while too.

Never one to speak up at meetings, she more or less followed the crowd, except in the way she dressed. Her normal attire hid her figure and probably hadn’t exactly helped in the guy department. Still, this trip had been good for her wandering spirit—a spirit inside her that she attributed to her mom. Sitting in that cubicle at work didn’t exactly capture the essence of a free spirit on the open road. Her mom never said so directly, but Alyssa knew that deep inside her mother, there was something wanting to come out. Her mom had somehow lost herself along the way through life. Alyssa was determined that wasn’t going to happen to her. She wasn’t going to look back and wish she had done something really great with her life. Regrets are the food of conformers, she thought, and she didn’t like regrets.

Wandering the rural roads through the southeast had been her outlet. Her obsession for funky coffee shops had inadvertently created an odyssey of sorts. Alyssa’s first idea was to drive—simply drive. Go out and see something of the country. Wind her way into small towns, find the town square, eat at a little corner diner, see if there were actually any waitresses named Flo, and maybe make just one friend along the way.

Then the trip kind of took on a life of its own. She had stopped in what she thought was the coolest little mom-and-pop coffeehouse she’d ever seen. It was a little place not far from Helen, Georgia, on her way out of the state. It was called simply Sweetwater Coffeehouse, and sweet it was. Soft velour couches, rustic planks on the floor, and an aroma, something reminiscent of hickory-smoked barbeque folded into roasted coffee. Apparently the guy in the shop next door made the pottery mugs himself. Real local charm with not even a hint of tourist-ish-ness. And better still, not a hint of corporate. Alyssa had done something there she normally wouldn’t. She had ordered a scone.

What the hell is a scone anyway? she asked the barista. This pastry looked nothing like the scone-things she’d seen at the big chain coffee shops in town. No, this was homemade, fluffy deliciousness.

Alyssa looked around at the place as if to check if anyone was watching her. She was on her own. For the first time in her life, she was on her own. It made her feel so at peace, so in charge of herself. A candle lit inside her, and the delicate smoke that wafted off of it was pride.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t even thought of work since she left her apartment near Little Five Points in Atlanta. In that coffeehouse, a few things changed for Alyssa. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something settled inside her. She felt like she knew who she was. She thought about that picture of her mom. Her mom would be so proud of her right now. She was on an odyssey. Her mom would have never had the nerve to do this, not after she got married anyway.

Alyssa knew this would be a trip she’d never forget. She’d go out and find the country. Literally find the people of the country. Find her roots. And maybe find just a little bit of herself that she thought was lost. Somewhere in the untapped subculture hidden within the coffeehouses of this country, she’d make peace with herself.

And she would discover more than that along the way. One thing struck her as funny. Unlike all the coffeehouses she had been to in Atlanta, the baristas in this one, near North Georgia’s Sautee Valley, didn’t have even a single body piercing or visible tattoo.

I guess it’s hard to find true grunge in the North Georgia mountains, she said.

Alyssa took the last sip of coffee goodness. She glanced over at the stone fireplace. Man, it would be so nice to curl up here on this couch on a freezing day in front of the fire. She took one last glance around, swearing to memorize the scene. A small poster clung to the old stone mantel. There was something so relaxed about its design and the way the fonts and colors drew your attention.

Tammy Lynn’s Bluegrass Pickin’ Party and Hog Roast

— Pineville, Kentucky.

If you’re looking for authentic Kentucky flavor and tradition, head to the mountains at the height of bluegrass season and enjoy America’s finest bluegrass festival and hog roast!

Alyssa stared at the poster a minute. This was America. If you wanted to meet the people, you had to be where they worked and lived.

Maybe it was the caffeine talking, but she stood up with a new resoluteness. She was sick of being scared, sick of being shy, and sick and tired of being sick and tired. She wasn’t going to live the same demure, quiet, proper existence she had always known.

Alyssa walked out the swinging wooden door and got into her car. When she put the key in the door, she realized it—she hadn’t locked the car door when she pulled up to this place. To Alyssa, not locking the car door was akin to walking into a coffeehouse and ordering some fluffy, fat-laden coffee flavored with pumpkin-mango-spice, crème-hazelnut, froth-de-blah-blah. You just didn’t do it. She smiled. Not locking the car door was a strange experience for her. Never did she remember not locking a car door in Atlanta. The Little Five Points area where she lived was like a haven for car-pilfering thugs who mixed in with the peace-loving, hippie crowd. Nonetheless, she hadn’t realized when she pulled up to this little place, way out here in the North Georgia mountains, that a comfort level like that would drape across her. It felt like a warm blanket soaked with safety, confidence.

She backed out and glanced down at the map on her smartphone. Thinking better of it, she put the map down. It’s not an adventure with too much of a plan. No plans, no agenda, no schedule. Just discovery, she thought. That bluegrass festival might be nice though. About the only thing she knew was that she’d weave her way north, glued to the back roads.

So she headed up the road into whatever it would bring. The world lay at her feet, and she wanted to drink it in. She pushed her way north through tiny Georgia towns with names like Cornelia, Walhalla, Pickens, Travelers Rest, and Landrum, slowly drinking in the smell of pine trees and simple quiet of life outside the city. As long as she was far away from the interstate, she was happy. After all, interstates were for suckers, for conformers.

Chapter 4

Cade snapped out of his fixation about the use of the word emergency and picked up the phone. What did they want him to do about some server going haywire on the seventeenth floor? He’d never been called to go to seventeen, ever.

Cade Williams, he said into the phone.

Williams? This is Johnston. I have a real situation here. Drop what you’re doing and get up here.

Yes, sir. Ah, sir?

Don’t worry, I’ll meet you at the elevator on sixteen, and I’ll bring you up. Time to earn your pay, boy.

Cade hadn’t even gone to the bathroom yet. Well, this was shaping up to be a fun day. And by fun he meant giant pain in the ass.

They better have coffee on seventeen, Cade said as he stood up.

SEVENTEEN?! came the retort from Whitmore. Come on, man. You and I both know there is no seventeenth floor. It doesn’t exist. It’s like a ghost or something.

Well, time to find out. Do you think they have cream and sugar, or do you think I should bring my own? And maybe I should bring one of those little wooden stirrer things? The sarcasm hung thick.

Oh. My. God, said Whitmore. Mr. Big Shot. ‘Just git yer ass up there, mister!’ Cade thought it was hilarious when Whitmore imitated the accent of Rupert Johnston. True southern redneck-speak combined with a lisp. Both of them knew Cade going up to seventeen was a big deal. No one on his floor had ever been asked up there.

Maybe I’ll be named CEO by the end of the day, said Cade, breathing a little uneasy. I need to calm down. Man, it’s not as if Elvis is up there or something.

By the time Cade walked the fifty feet from his desk into the lobby, Rupert Johnston was standing there, peering down at him. Rupert Johnston was every bit of six feet five inches tall, at least 220 pounds, and not exactly what you would call portly either. He was old to be sure, but it was like seeing a man made out of sinew and covered in striated leather. Cade had never met him in person and had never wanted to. His heavy-rimmed glasses and furrowed brow did not exactly invite conversation. Old guys like this look at me like I’m such a wuss, thought Cade, his eyes looking anywhere but into Johnston’s, where they would meet utter defeat.

There was a story going around the office about Rupert Johnston. Cade never knew what to believe, but the story was that Johnston had snuck out of his mother’s farmhouse at the age of fifteen, hiked into town, and gone to the recruiting station. Vietnam was heating up in 1965, and Johnston was going