Revenge of the Cube Dweller (14 page)

“Do you want a pipeline under yours?” I finally ask him.

He ignores that. “Pipelines are the safest method of transportation for petroleum products,” Buster begins, and he goes on from there for an eternity. I have heard this speech before from the Bishop brothers and from Winston before them.
Fine
, I think,
but they still need to be maintained to be safe. Cutting corners to save money is like stealing from everyone else
.

At last my watch tells me I can leave. “Well, Buster, my flight is boarding,” I say, getting up and starting to gather my carry-ons.

“Maybe we’ll run into each other again.” Buster stands up, demonstrating that he has been properly schooled in Southern manners. “Here’s my card, Tanzie from Tulsa. If you’re ever in the Big Easy, gimme a call. We can continue our conversation.”

“Thank you, Buster. Safe travels.” As I head to the escalator, I notice an abandoned
Handelsblatt
, the German financial newspaper. I fold it and stick it into the exterior pocket of my bag. Not as good as a
Watchtower
, but an adequate prop for my “Ich spreche kein Englisch” response should anyone try to strike up a conversation with me on the flight home.

I return to the Bishop building at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday to do the busywork Frank has given me. Once again, there is no security manning the desk, so I badge in and head for the elevator bank servicing the sixth floor. I log in and complete Frank’s request in less than an hour.

Frank is a guy who overcomplicates things, so for him even the most inconsequential task takes hours to think through, evaluate in every detail, and then execute and re-execute as new issues pop into his pea brain. I am usually able to isolate the core objective, make a decision, and then produce a workable result quickly and efficiently. Though not specifically identified by Dante, there is indeed a ring of hell where punishment involves being an underling to an idiot boss. I have no idea what I have done to deserve this punishment but I have lots of company, particularly at Bishop.

I hit
send
so Frank will have my work and also see that I produced it over the weekend. I am about to leave, but being
alone in the office gets my curiosity juices flowing. Remembering Moe’s request to continue with the building security review, I decide to go exploring. Snooping is exciting for me, and I enjoy having access to every part of the operation. If I go too far, well, I am just a go-getter who got carried away, not a criminal.

It isn’t as if they will even notice if I steal anything—say, a million dollars. I think about this idea for a while. The controls are so bad at Bishop that I am convinced that I could figure out a way to steal a million if I were so inclined. Maybe every board should ask Internal Audit to attempt to steal that amount just to test how secure their company really is. Trouble is, what if the internal auditor decides not to give the money back? Living on the run or in exile seems like a tall order for a few million, no matter how great John Grisham makes it look.

I wander up to the ninth floor and enter the cube farm near the western corner of the building, where Mazie’s desk is. I sit in her black cloth chair and wonder what it feels like to be her. How does it feel to work every day with the same people you are secretly stealing from? How does it feel to make chitchat at the coffee bar, talking about a TV show or your grandkids or the winning pass by the college quarterback, all the things that make office acquaintances think they know you? What would Elly May Clampett think?

I recall Bennet Bishop referring to us employees as “family” during one of the quarterly all-employee meetings. “We are the Bishop family,” he said.
Bullshit
, I think.
We are certainly not family. You don’t pay family to show up every day
. Further, if I truly were related to Bennet, I would be back on the golf course rather than producing meaningless work for the numbskulls on
the sixth floor. No, I am not a member of the family; I suppose Mazie isn’t either.

I start rummaging around inside her desk. Mazie doesn’t keep her password in the usual places, but she does not lock her desk either. I go through her desk drawers one by one and come up empty. I notice a two-drawer file cabinet under her desk that is locked, and I am unable to find the key anywhere. I help myself to candy left in a bowl in a neighbor’s cube and stuff the wrappers into my back pocket so as not to create a trash trail exposing my unauthorized access to the Accounts Payable department. But search as I may, I cannot find Mazie’s password or any other personal details other than a couple of framed pictures of the grandkids. Leave it to the thief to take security seriously.

I continue my search in the Accounts Payable area, scoring big time at the candy lady’s cube. I suppose she thought it was clever to embed her password in a grocery list kept in a manila folder by her desk. But I knew that trick and noticed 6#sParsley immediately. Who would ever buy six pounds of parsley, anyway? I did give her partial credit; this was not the same as leaving it under a pen set. I hit a couple more floors on the lower levels, and by noon I have sixteen passwords, a list of Social Security numbers I discovered in an HR wastebasket, and a copy of a potential acquisition memo found at a printer in one of the Environmental Health and Safety work areas. I feel bored and decide I have enough information for one day; it is all too easy.

As I exit the elevator, I notice the janitorial crew heading to the executive elevator bank, which I had used to ride up to the thirtieth floor almost a week ago with Keith. On impulse and
with total disregard for Moe’s instructions, I step in behind them as they get on the elevator, exit with them on the twenty-fifth floor, and piggyback in as they open the secure door that leads to Business Development and Treasury. This is an unexpected triumph. I smile at the cleaning women who assume I belong on the floor. I pass them and head for an empty office to figure out what to do next. Spanish chitchat is drowned out by the hum of vacuums as the women go about their work. Saturdays are the deep clean days, which means offices are unlocked to perform the extra duties. I decide to walk the floor and snoop around; a password here could prove useful. Not for Moe’s audit, but for my own surveillance of Bishop activities.

I stop by the coffee bar adjacent to a locked wing, and to my astonishment, I see a keychain hanging out of the lock of a door propped open with a trash can. This is the mother lode. There are not only keys on the chain but also security cards for the entire building. As I take the keys and head back to the elevators, I feel a little guilty about the theft. Surely one of the cleaners will lose her job over this. I wonder, too, if the theft will result in security changing locks and badge configurations. I will just have to wait and see. Most likely, I figure, the janitorial group for this building will not report the loss and instead just work around with their additional sets of keys rather than risk all of them getting dumped.

Now, I can easily use the key cards to get up to the thirtieth floor and poke around, but I decide to get out of the building and save any additional recon for another day. I need time to figure out what to do with all this new access. I try to keep calm as I settle into my car but cannot help feeling the nervous excitement of having done something dangerous.

I decide to continue snooping in Baldwin’s computer. Tulsa does not have an Internet café, so I head to the public library near downtown.

“Excuse me,” I ask the librarian at the desk by the entrance. “Do you have Internet terminals for the public?”

“Why yes we do, ma’am. Right over there.” She points to a row of computer stations between the fiction and the children’s section.

I grab a terminal near the back and scoot the thinly padded chair underneath me. After hitting Bishop’s remote system, I log in as Baldwin and access the webmail on the monitor screen. I notice instantly that many of the e-mails I had read Thursday have now been deleted. I read what’s there, but nothing too juicy remains in the account. I suppose Baldwin is being careful. I check his calendar and notice that he is in meetings with the insurance folks, lawyers, and the executive team for the next two weeks almost straight.

I log in as Marla, and she too has purged any explosion-related correspondence on which she had been copied. All that remains are the e-mails organizing lunches, business trips, and other benign communications. I access Marla’s LEAR file, but LEAR_2008_17_Houston_Gas is gone. To me this is a clear signal that Bishop is trying to eliminate any evidence that they knew or should have known that the Houston pipeline was corroded.

So far, I haven’t run across any evidence that corrosion is in fact the cause; it could have been a construction crew or terrorism. Still, it turns my stomach to think they are preparing to dodge responsibility for their decision not to take preventive measures in 2008. As far as I know, I have the only copy
of LEAR_2008_17_Houston_Gas in existence, and now I have a responsibility to manage that information, even if I have obtained it illegally.

I feel a sense of importance for the first time in years, but at the same time I am terrified at the thought of mishandling it. This is not a Monday morning staff meeting, after all. I think about calling Bill Matheson to get some advice, but that doesn’t appeal to me; some big ego directing every move and cutting me out of decisions. I shake off my momentary lapse in confidence as I pull the flash drive and zip it into a secure compartment inside my purse. This is going to be great. If nothing else, it is an adventure of a lifetime.

“Did you find what you needed?” asks the librarian as I walk toward the glass doors leading to the parking lot.

“And then some.” I smile back at her as I make my exit.

T
he Sunday morning call from Lucy rings right on schedule, and I am in a heavy terry bathrobe sipping coffee on my balcony. Our conversation turns immediately to the explosion and how Lucy has known all along that “those people” I’m working for are evil.

“I’m beginning to agree with you,” I tell her, and I explain that my friends were casualties and what I have found in the files so far.

“What else do you have?” she asks after I tell her about reviewing the LEAR folders.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been through everything yet. This has all been really fast.”

“Why don’t you send me what you have and I’ll take a look?” Lucy offers.

I hesitate. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to send the files over
the Internet, Lucy. I’m trying to be very careful. Taking those files was illegal, and I really don’t want to take a chance, even a remote chance, that anything gets traced back to me.”

What I don’t tell her is that I know my sister better than myself. She is an environmental fanatic who is likely to include kindred spirits on our communication if she isn’t under careful supervision. While I’m fairly sure that Lucy would not do anything without my consent, I am not comfortable sending incriminating files to someone who thinks jail time is a badge of honor when it’s for holding up environmental principles. The temptation might be too much for her.

Still, Lucy is brilliant. As Uncle Agamemnon summed up one day, “Tanzie smart, Lucy smarter.” A painful but true assessment, I have to admit. She has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Cal Tech and a master’s degree in environmental sciences from Stanford. In her younger days, before venturing out into the world of colored cotton and sheep, Lucy worked in the oilfields wearing a hazmat suit that now doubles as her beekeeping outfit. She would no doubt be an excellent source of help in figuring out what other mayhem besides blowing up sleeping Houstonians the Bishop boys are covering up.

“How about coming to Tulsa, Lucy? We can work on this together. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“I told you before, I have sheep issues,” she starts, but she almost immediately reverses course. “But I’ll make it work, somehow. I can only stay for a couple of days, though. Can you pay for the flight, Tanzie? I have zero cash at the moment.”

Her sudden enthusiasm to leave her beloved farm gives me pause. It is common knowledge in our family that Lucy rarely
travels anymore. In her middle age she has become neurotic about food and prefers to control every bit of what she eats by growing it herself. She is hugely suspicious of mass-produced food and convinced that the genetically modified varieties are the reason for the obesity and bad health of most Americans. On her farm she grows or raises just about every morsel she eats. She even grows her own wheat for flour and churns her own butter. I sometimes refer to her as the original little red hen.

The lure of getting involved in something that could potentially harm those evil Bishop boys must be compelling.

“Now look, Lucy,” I warn. “I want to be very clear before I formally include you in this. You absolutely cannot breathe a word about this to anyone. You cannot send files anywhere without asking me first. If you don’t think you can follow my rules before you commit to helping me, you need to let me know right now.”