Take the Money and Come

Chapter 7: Interference In Love

Chapter 7: Interference In LoveWhen Olivia returned to work the next week she was careful to avoid Parker. Byron had objected to her returning at all, but Olivia still had trouble believing that her employer would have her followed. This was obviously Parker’s doing, the work of a man too cowardly to harass the women he worked with himself.

Of course, the security helped. It was pretty hard for anyone, including her stalker, to get into Black Earth’s highly secure research building without being tagged. Nonetheless, she had still popped into the security office to let them know she was worried about being followed, telling them that the man doing it was a creep she’d rejected romantically. As long as they were on the lookout she knew that whatever goon Parker had hired wouldn’t be able to get to her, and Parker himself would never dare try it. After all, putting a tenured research position on the line over an IT girl who got uppity would be absurd.

Then, this whole thing was absurd. The knowledge that she would be safer in her workplace than she would anywhere else was the only reason Byron had let her go without much of a fight. He’d driven her, though, insisting that the train was one of the easiest places for someone to attack her. Olivia thought that was spoken like someone who’d never been on a train in rush hour, but she agreed to the lift anyway. It was nice to avoid the rain.

Her little basement office was a serene as ever, servers humming away at their purpose while the tiny fish bowl on her filing cabinet bubbles away. She fed her fish, watching him gulp down the little flakes like a greedy pig with fins. She smiled at her tiny friend’s exuberance before sitting down at her desk and opening her ticket queue.

As per usual she was one of the only people there at that early hour, so she was surprised when her office phone rang. Her heart tightened, eyes locking on the call display.

Please don’t be Parker. She didn’t want to confront him, not one bit.

The number was an outside line, though. How odd. Why would anyone outside the building call the IT desk?

“Hello?”

“Miss Burnard.”

There was a short silence before she answered.

“Yes?”

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh...OK? Who are you then?” She asked cautiously.

She couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder at the servers, half expecting the man on the phone to be standing right there behind her.

“I have called to give you advice.”

The man’s voice was deep and unfamiliar, his tone even but firm.

“What’s the advice?”

Her caller seemed to contemplate this for a moment.

“You need to stop interfering.”

“Interfering with what?”

“You need to stop interfering with project M-1777.”

“Huh? I don’t work on our research projects, so I couldn’t be interfering. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong number?”

“Whatever you saw, it’s best to forget it. You must forget it. “

“What do you mean? What did I s--”

The line went dead.

The long , monotonous sound felt like the dying cry of a heart monitor, and for good reason. Olivia felt like her heart had stopped. The phone hit the cradle with a bang when she put it down. It jostled for a moment before hanging up properly, but she wasn’t watching.

Olivia was scared again. There was no denying that. Whoever this person was, they thought she was interfering with a project there on the Black Earth campus. Utterly ridiculous, of course. She wasn’t an engineer, and beside that, she certainly wouldn’t be working on mining equipment if she was.

Of course, this led to a very interesting question. Why did this person presume to know her intentions regarding a project she had never heard of?

A light bulb flicked on in her mind, illuminating that thought through the fog of her fear. The project. The man on the phone had named the project.

It took her all of three minutes to pull up project M-177.

A hungry little metal mouth stared back at her from the project screen. FeedMe.

The man on the phone thought she was interfering with FeedMe. But why? She’d been in Parker’s office just more than two weeks prior, and all she’d done was talk to Petrov about the accelerated release schedule.

She stared at her screen, unable to look away from the bullet-shaped machine. All of this for what was essentially an underground roomba?

The phone call also brought into question whether or not Parker was behind her recent stalking, because he of all people would know best who had interfered with his project.

Her sanctuary in the basement suddenly felt very isolated, and she nearly jumped out of her skin when her printer started to make sounds. She stared at it in alarm for a few moments before remembering its power cycle was on a timer.

Olivia printed out her IT tickets, something she never usually did. She didn’t want to sit alone in the basement again, not for a good while. She took the sheaf of paper upstairs with her and started her rounds.

By the time she told Byron about the phone call, she was getting more angry than scared. She all but shouted, ranting into her smartphone like she was arguing with her pursuer himself.

“Hey, I know you’re upset, but you‘ve gotta keep a clear head.”

It was the fifth time he’d told her that, and she was pretty sure she’d knock his head clear off if he did it again. She told him do.

“Hey now,” he teased her, “no need to threaten violence. I don’t mean to be patronizing, hon, I just worry about how much this is disrupting your life.”

“Of course it’s disrupting my life! Whose life doesn’t get disrupted when they get stalked?”

The truth was, she’d stayed at Byron’s for several days after her ordeal. The doormen at his building said they didn’t see the car she described at all, though, which made her feel better.

Afterward she had returned to her own place, only to find herself with a brand new paranoia about locks. She found herself getting up and checking all of her locks, from doors to windows, several times a day while she was at home. Byron had noticed, of course, and even his reassurances that she’d checked them just hours ago, he’d seen her do it, did very little to comfort her.

Something in the back of her mind was still telling her to go to the police, but with the navy car out of her life and her stalker apparently losing interest the urge was quashed. On top of that, she knew deep down that Byron was right.

Olivia really did love Black Earth. they were her family. they’d hired her when they first built the research campus, and they’d supported her through further schooling. She wasn’t blind, though. When her company ended up on the news it was rarely for anything good.

the science blogs loved them, of course. After all, the research they did fuelled just about every industry that needed digging done. The rest of the media, however, tended to portray Black Earth as some behemoth of corporate greed and special interests, though. So much so, in fact, that employees rarely wore their ID badges off campus to avoid harassment by the hipsters in the coffee shops nearby.

No company should be powerful enough to buy the police, but Olivia had a feeling that if anyone could, it was Black Earth.

“Hello?” Byron’s greeting startled her, and she realized that in her thoughtfulness she had fallen silent on him.

“Sorry, I’m still here. I’ll talk to you after work, OK?”

“No, wait.” He blurted before she could hang up. She hesitated.

“Yeah?”

“I think you should look at those files.”

“Huh?”

The files that Parker had hidden. I think you should look at them. If you can, I think you should print them off and take them home.”

“What are you talking about?” she answered, lowering her voice despite the fact that she was completely alone in the sushi place where she had bought her lunch. “I can’t do that! It would violate my NDA, it would break a dozen policies that I‘m the one responsible for enforcing, and we don’t even have proof he was doing anything beyond using a computer wrong and overreacting to his correction.”

“I know, but we’ll never have any proof of anything unless you look.”

Olivia settled into the vinyl booth, quiet for a moment.

“That’s true.”

“I know.” He responded with a weary sigh. “At this point you’d be doing it to protect the company as much as to protect yourself. And, this will help you protect yourself. It’ll help me protect you too.”

Olivia’s heart warmed where she sat, her head dropping to rest her cheek fully against the smooth screen. She felt furious and exhausted all at once, like she had been cornered into running a marathon. For the thousandth time that day, she wished none of this had ever happened.

Except Byron. He was the only good, genuine thing to happen to her in the last several months.

“OK. “ She told him, voice low and steady. “I’m going to take a look. If it’s nothing, I won’t remove it from the premises. If it’s something, I’ll print it off.”

“You should come straight home.”

“Why? I have to work--”

“So take a sick day!” He cut her off, voice harsh.

She sat in stunned silence at the change of tone.

“I’m sorry.” He murmured. “I’m just, I’m just so worried about you, Olive. I can’t stand to see you hurt by these people.”

“You won’t.” She assured him.

“You’re in the lion’s den in there--”

“I know. I’m agreeing with you! I’ll take a sick day as soon as I take a look at the files. They can’t be accessed from outside of the secure network, not even by me. “

She didn’t tell him about her biggest worry. which was the fact that the call had come directly to her office. The switchboard operator hadn’t transferred it. Olivia wasn’t even sure she knew the direct number to her office off by heart. All the people who called it were usually in the same building, so they simply dialed her extension. The full number for outside lines to call was written in neat, looped handwriting on an aged card on the cradle of the phone, but it had already been there when she started her job.

So even if her stalkers couldn’t get to her inside Black Earth, they knew exactly where she was. The phone call had been a warning, a reminder that they could find her. She felt helpless, like a victim. She hated it. She couldn’t shake it.

Her walk back to Black Earth took longer than usual, her feet wanting desperately to drag on the pavement and impede her progress. Her instincts were telling her not to go back there. She did anyway, of course. She needed to know what was going on.

She started by printing out a copy of the Project page for FeedMe. No matter who was actually behind her stalking and harassment, she knew for a fact that it had something to do with the machine’s development.

After that she sat down at her desk, head bobbing to check that the door was locked. The server rooms hummed behind her, and the fish bowl bubbled. Even though she knew she was alone, she couldn’t help but feel a tingle crawl up her spine. Ever since the taxi ride home from Rita’s, she hadn’t felt alone once. When she pulled up her network access she froze, pausing to listen in absolute silence. She even held her breath. She wasn’t certain that the gesture was necessary, but it assured her that a SWAT team wasn’t going to drop out of the ceiling over her head.

She began by checking to see if Parker was logged in to his computer. If he was, he’d see a notification of her remote access, and she didn’t want to tip him off. After all, he was still their most likely suspect. After confirming that he wasn’t logged in, she accessed his computer and started combing through the files. Usually large data files were identified with formulaic ID numbers, but the corresponding files were usually kept only by the research team themselves. The files were date stamped for both the day they were generated and they day they were uploaded, though, so the files she was looking for would have mismatched dates.

She found four files with the correct dates out of place and immediately ran a backup on them. Anyone checking the system afterward might not see what she was doing at a glance that way, mistaking it for maintenance work. Then she logged off Parker’s account as quickly as she could.

The files were there in front of her, but she just stared. She hadn’t really done anything wrong, yet. She reminded herself that this was her choice, and if she wanted she could just walk away.

She didn’t want to though, not anymore. These people were making her scared, they were disrupting her life, and she needed to get to the bottom of it. She needed answers, even if they were only dead ends.

First she sent the files to herself via a webmail Black Earth didn’t have access to. Then she opened the first one.

As she suspected, it was a data dump, but it wasn’t one of Black Earth’s. This one read “Costgrove Medical Laboratories”, and the data was on a long list of patients.

Each one had an ID number, but no name. The information that followed included birthdate, weight, height, and diagnosis.

The diagnosis column was the most interesting. While the others seemed to represent a large and diverse population, each on of the diagnoses was nearly identical.

Stomach cancer.

Liver cancer.

Colon cancer.

Those three repeated over and over again throughout the list. Others were often mixed in, like ‘neurological damage’ and ‘blood poisoning’, but the cancers were present with every patient. Each person had at least one cancer in their row.

Why would Dr. Parker have medical records for cancer patients? It made no sense.

She opened the next file. This one was more helpful, showing top-sheet results for whatever study had been done. It took her several minutes of consternation and googling to understand them, but the results were fairly clear. Patients with higher rates of ‘exposure’ showed higher rates of cancers. The fact that no indication was made as to what they were exposed to concerned her, but not nearly as much as the study’s complete lack of footprint. It wasn’t in any online scientific journal, and as far as she could tell if had never been subjected to any peer review, despite being dated months ago. That meant it wasn’t an academic study, it wasn’t a source for Parker’s research, this was a study that had been contracted out and done especially for Black Earth.

She felt sick to her stomach. Knowing how Black Earth tended to end up in the news, she had a strong feeling she knew what they had been exposed to.

The third file showed results from water and soil samples. The last one showed a datasheet for a chemical compound that she couldn’t hope to understand, but sitting along the left hand margin was something she definitely recognized. The FeedMe’s gaping mouth looked like it was mocking her.

Olivia’s version of taking a sick day was to send the operations manager a slightly-more-graphic than necessary email and hope she understood. She’d better, considering how many of Olivia’s sick days went unused since her hiring. She had the files, and she left the building as quickly as she could. Her heart beat like a machine gun as the approached the security station at the door, certain that they’d somehow know what she was up to. Ned, who’d seen her come in that morning, waved her through.

“Going home early? You run out of stuff to do?”

Olivia laughed, but it sounded unnatural. She was not in the mood for their little inside jokes right now.

“No, I’m just sick as a dog.” She sighed, and he gave her a pitying smile.

She sniffled dramatically, walking away like a person who had nothing to hide.

She caught a cab to Byron’s condo, where the doormen now knew to let her up whenever she pleased. They still reminded her that they were on the lookout for my ‘creepy friend’. She know they meant to make her feel better, but she didn’t have it in her to stop her mind from recoiling any time they mentioned it. She’d still smile, though, and give them a pat on the shoulder as she passed to the elevators.