tables and foosball and video games. When Whirl360 employees needed a break, they pushed themselves away from their monitors and played a few rounds of virtual golf, battled space aliens, watched some 3-D television. And when they felt recharged, they went back to work.
The office was quiet today. Only a handful of employees were seated at their terminals, entering in new images from Whirl360 cars that were photographing city streets around the globe every second of every minute of every hour of the day.
“Hey, Kyle.”
“What’s happening, Kyle.”
“How’s it going, Kyle.”
Everyone felt they needed to say hello.
He gave each of them a nod, found the computer station where he always worked. No individual offices here. Everyone, no matter where they were placed on the corporate food chain, worked here in the main room.
Kyle wished he could have done what he had to do from home, met the hostage taker’s demands immediately. But Whirl360 had one of the most hacker-proof systems on the planet. Access from beyond the building was impossible.
“I’m at my desk,” Kyle said quietly enough that no one in the office could hear.
“Excellent,” Nicole said. “We’re fine here.”
“I do this thing for you, we never hear from you again,” he whispered.
“That’s right. You erase the image, you wipe it from the system like it was never there, and we’re good.”
“I’ve got your word on that,” Kyle said.
“Of course,” Nicole said.
“Okay, I’m in.” A flurry of keystrokes. “New York…Orchard Street…This shouldn’t take long.”
NICOLE took the phone away from her ear, rested her hand on her thigh. If Kyle had anything to say to her, she’d hear it. She was feeling optimistic. She could tell he wanted this to be done as quickly as possible, that he wanted to please her. He wasn’t going to fuck this up.
“Is he doing it?” Rochelle asked. Just as Nicole had said, the bag was off Rochelle’s head now, but she remained bound with duct tape to the leather Eames chair in the Billings home’s expansive basement. There was everything down here. Billiards table. A bar. Sixty-inch 3-D TV. An elaborate Lionel train set with mountains and buildings and bridges that had to be ten by twenty feet, for Christ’s sake.
“He’s doing just fine,” Nicole said, sitting across from Rochelle in a matching leather chair. She was wearing another ball cap with visor plus a pair of sunglasses to make her face less identifiable. Her hands had been in latex gloves since she’d been in the house. The alarm system hadn’t been a problem. Nicole knew how to deal with these things.
“He’ll do what you say,” Rochelle said. “He will.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“We’ll never say anything to anyone,” Rochelle said. “Promise me you won’t hurt him.”
“I don’t think there’s any need for that,” Nicole said. She could hear something coming from the phone, grabbed it and put it to her ear.
“I’m getting some coffee, Kyle. Want anything?” A coworker’s voice.
“No, no, I’m good,” Billings said.
“You know that Jag I was telling you about? Okay, so we took it out for a test drive yesterday and it drove nice, you know, and it had everything on it, but it was red, and to my way of thinking, an XKE back in the sixties, that would look great in red, but today, I think red kind of screams at ya. Hey, did you go to that thing at the Hyatt last night?”
Nicole said, “Get rid of him.”
Billings said. “Yeah, we did. Got home kind of late.”
“That was the homeless thing, right?”
“Yeah. They raised a lot of money.”
“What’s that you got on your screen there?”
“Nothing, just…doing a test on the fudging. Seeing why sometimes not all plates or faces get totally blurred. A lot of it has to do with the angle. If the software isn’t sure what it is, it’s not going to fudge it.”
“Do I have to tell you again?” Nicole said.
“Listen, nice chattin’, but I got a lot to get done here, but thanks for dropping by.”
“Take it easy.”
“You bet.”
“Is he gone?” Nicole asked.
“Yeah,” Kyle whispered. “I’m good.”
Nicole breathed a small sigh of relief. She noticed that Rochelle was looking at her closely. She’d caught her doing that a couple of times.
“What?” Nicole said, putting the phone down on her thigh again, this time facedown.
“It’s none of my business what you’re doing, or why. I don’t care,” Rochelle said. “Doesn’t matter to me at all.”
“Good.”
“That’s why I want you to know you don’t have to worry when I tell you this. But I just, I just want you to know.”
What was that look Rochelle was giving her? Nicole had seen it before, but not for a very, very long time. The good feeling she’d been having about how things were going was slipping away.
“All I wanted to say,” Rochelle continued, “is that I thought you were amazing.”
“I’m sorry?” Nicole said.
“At Sydney,” she said. “I watched every minute of the Olympics. But especially the gymnastics.”
“Really,” Nicole said.
“The minute I saw you, even with the glasses on, there was something-I think it was your chin, the way you hold it. Just before you’d make your first jump onto the lower bar, there was this thing you did with your chin. This kind of determined way you set it.”
“No one’s ever pointed that out to me before,” Nicole said. “But, now that I think about it, I know what you mean.”
“I took gymnastics all through high school and even into college, but I was never as good as you. Not even close. I was your biggest fan.” Rochelle forced an admiring smile despite her predicament. “Like I said, I don’t know how you got from there to here, to what you’re doing now, but I’m sure there’s reasons for the way things turn out. Everybody’s life takes a different path, right?”
“That’s true,” Nicole said.
“What I really wanted to say was, you were robbed,” Rochelle said.
Nicole suddenly felt very…what was it? Sad. She felt sad. Sad about what had happened to her in Sydney, all that had happened to her since. Thinking about how her life might have been different, had she won the gold. Where she might be now. Not here, not in this basement in Chicago.
And there was something else she felt.
Touched.
“Thank you,” Nicole said, and meant it. “Thank you for saying that. That’s sort of how I felt, but you don’t say it out loud, because then everyone thinks you’re a sore loser or something.”
“Oh, you showed a lot of class,” Rochelle said. “You held your head up high when they gave you the silver on the podium there. But you know what?”
“What?” Nicole asked.
“I could tell. I could tell, looking at you, that your heart was broken.”
Nicole tapped at the bridge of her sunglasses. Didn’t want Rochelle to see her eyes.
“Well, it was a very emotional moment,” Nicole said, feeling emotional right now.
“I bet, if they did an investigation, I bet they’d find out that the judges took some kind of bribe. The Russian ones, maybe. Or the French.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nicole said. “There was never any suggestion of that.”
