Dean Walsh was happy with his new life, his job, his girlfriend. Until his boss, billionaire Salomon Ellis, discovers his darkest secret. From then on, he will hold Dean hostage to his whims in exchange for his silence.
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On Monday, Bill stumbled upon a glitch that would take him a couple of days to fix on his own, so he asked Aisha to let me lend a hand. I was thrilled, not only to be requested to assist such a skilled tech, but also to work with him again.
We had to do some reverse engineering to locate the problem, that led us to a malfunction in one of the server towers. Like a proud surgeon, Bill refused to call our shift's other senior IT over and insisted that we could handle it. The other senior knew Bill wouldn't say so unless he was positive, so he let us finish the work and Aisha processed our authorization to go on.
My gawking face made Bill laugh when he took me to the server. It was the beating heart of the whole company, and better guarded than the West Wing. It wasn't located in the Square, but in a two-story building I'd always thought was a furniture storage.
The bulldog at the front desk had two security guards keeping the doors behind him. The man checked our clearance four times, scanned us against a screen that surely showed him what we'd eaten three days before, and made us leave all metallic objects on a tray. Only then he signaled a third guard to lead us into the building, to the sensitive towers room. The guard let us in and remained the whole time between us and the door. We couldn't care less about him. We were there to run a diagnostic on one of the towers and, if necessary, replace a secondary hard drive.
Finishing the job took us three hours, and we left the towers room about six-fifteen. We'd left our phones with the front-desk bulldog, and there was no signal in the building, so the absence of notifications when I retrieved mine was only natural. I'd get them over the next minutes, but surely Big Ellie would take it back at me for making him wait. So I didn't want to risk being later than I already was and headed straight from my station to the third floor.
Over the last week, since he'd started to summon me every day, the stiff reception lady just nodded when she saw me, and the masked guard stepped aside and gave me way to room twelve.
Not that Monday. I was in a hurry, and didn't pay any attention to the lady's frown. But I was forced to stop when the guard stood in my way.
"I'm here to see Mr. Ellis," I said curtly. "He's waiting for me."
The lady looked me up and down like wondering if I was crazy or what. She raised a finger and made a call on her desk phone. I rolled my eyes, that fell on the clock behind her. Six-twenty. Shit! The son of a bitch would surely made me pay for being so late, no matter I'd just helped avoid a server crash and kept his company running.
"Mr. Dean Walsh is here," I heard the lady say. "He says he's here to see Mr. Ellis."
Maybe I was so late he'd given order to not let me in? I turned to her again and found her observing me, still on the phone.
"Yessir," she said, and hung up to talk to me. "Please wait here, Mr. Walsh."
