Paranoia by Joseph Finder

took me to the elevator and up to the sixth floor. We made small talk. I was trying to sound enthusiastic but not geeky, and she seemed distracted. The sixth floor was your typical cube farm, cubicles spread out as far as the eye could see, high as an elephant’s eye. The route she led me down was a maze; I couldn’t retrace my steps to the elevator bank if I dropped bread crumbs. Everything here was standard-issue corporate, except for the computer monitor I passed by whose screen saver was a 3-D image of Jock Goddard’s head grinning and spinning like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Do that at Wyatt—with Nick Wyatt’s head, I mean—and Wyatt’s corporate goons would probably break your knees.
    We came to a conference room with a plaque on the door that said S TUDEBAKER .
    “Studebaker, huh?” I said.
    “Yeah, all the conference rooms are named after classic American cars. Mustang, Thunderbird, Corvette, Camaro. Jock loves American cars.” She said Jock with a little twist, almost with quotation marks around it, seemingly indicating that she wasn’t really on a first-name basis with the CEO but that’s what everyone called him. “Can I get you something to drink?”
    Judith Bolton had told me to always say yes, because people like doing favors, and everyone, even the admins, would be giving feedback on what they thought of me. “Coke, Pepsi, whatever,” I said. I didn’t want to sound too fussy. “Thanks.”
    I sat down at one side of the table, the side facing the door, not at the head of the table. A couple of minutes later a compact guy wearing khakis and a navy-blue golf shirt with the Trion logo on it came bounding into the room. Tom Lundgren: I recognized him instantly from the dossier that Dr. Bolton had prepared for me. The VP of the Personal Communications Sector business unit. Forty-three, five kids, an avid golfer. Right behind him followed Stephanie, holding a can of Coke and a bottle of Aquafina water.
    He gave me a crusher handshake. “Adam, I’m Tom Lundgren.”
    “Nice to meet you.”
    “Nice to meet you. I hear great things about you.”
    I smiled, shrugged modestly. Lundgren wasn’t even wearing a tie, I thought, and I looked like a funeral director. Judith Bolton warned me that might happen, but said it was better for me to overdress for the interviews than to go too casual. Sign of respect and all that.
    He sat down next to me, turned to face me. Stephanie shut the door behind her quietly as she left.
    “So working at Wyatt’s pretty intense, I bet.” He had thin, thin lips and a quick smile that clicked on and off. His face was chafed, reddened, like either he played too much golf or had rosacea or something. His right leg pistoned up and down. He was a bundle of nervous energy, a ganglion; he seemed overcaffeinated, and he made me talk fast. Then I remembered he was a Mormon and didn’t drink caffeine. I’d hate to see him after a pot of coffee. He’d probably go into intergalactic orbit.
    “Intense is how I like it,” I said.
    “Good to hear it. So do we.” His smile clicked on, then off. “I think there’s more type A people here than anywhere else. Everyone’s got a faster clock speed.” He unscrewed the top of his water bottle and took a sip. “I always say Trion’s a great place to work—when you’re on vacation. You can return e-mails, voice mails, get all kinds of stuff done, but man, you pay a price for taking off time. You come back, your voice mailbox is full, you get crushed like a grape.”
    I nodded, smiled conspiratorially. Even marketing guys at high-tech corporations like to talk like engineers, so I gave some back. “Sounds familiar,” I said. “You only have so many cycles, you’ve got to decide what to spend your cycles on.” I was mirroring his body language, almost aping him, but he didn’t seem to notice.
    “Absolutely. Now, we’re not really in a hiring mode these days—no one is. But one of our new-product managers got