Prologue: Special Projects
The lobby at Thorne Technologies looked like a place that took itself seriously.
Matt arrived a few minutes before nine. It was not early and not late. He had chosen it on purpose, because a building shows more of itself before it knows it is being watched.
Reception was expecting him.
“Mr Ellis?” the receptionist said.
“Matt’s fine.”
“Matt.” She checked her screen. “Matthew Ellis. Sorry, I just need to confirm that.”
“That’s right.”
The temporary card took several minutes, longer than it should have. She tucked her hair behind her ear while she waited. “It’s slow today,” she said, and giggled. It wasn’t that funny.
He noticed, the way he noticed most things, and did not encourage it. He had learned early that his looks drew attention in a room. The easiest response was to neither use it nor apologise for it.
He stood at the counter and waited.
A woman came through the doors a few minutes later. She did not stop at reception. Her card went through the gate without a second look. She said good morning to a man and a woman on her way across the lobby, both by name. She said it to the cleaners too, and her smile stayed the same for each of them.
She was sure of herself without making a show of it.
The lift took her. He watched the floor indicator climb until it stopped.
A few days later he was running his first cross-departmental meeting when he noticed an extra person at the edge of the room. She had a notebook and said nothing for forty minutes. Then she asked one question.
“Who signs off a tooling change once R&D has finished with it?”
Nobody answered straight away. Then everyone did, and the meeting started to move.
When it ended he checked the attendance list. Her name wasn’t on it.
He asked HR.
“Special Projects,” they said.
“What does that mean?”
“Cross-functional initiatives.”
“Who do they report to?”
“The CEO.”
He was the CEO. Nothing from Special Projects had reached him.
“Name?”
“Clair Smith.”
The next day, Special Projects appeared on the agenda for the operations review. She was already in the room when he arrived.
“Special Projects?”
“Clair Smith,” she said.
“Matt Ellis.”
“Welcome,” she said.
He took the head of the table.
A week later he passed her in a corridor.
“Mr Ellis.”
“Ms Smith.”
She nodded once and kept walking.
One morning he saw her on the production floor walkway, two fingers on the railing, looking down at the line. She looked like she was checking something she already knew.
She was gone before he reached the walkway. He stood where she had stood and looked at what she had been looking at.
The line was running well.
“Is it always like this?” he asked a supervisor at the bottom of the stairs.
“Lately,” the supervisor said.
Towards the end of his third week he caught himself thinking about her in ways that had nothing to do with the restructuring plan. He shut that down. It did not stay shut. He noted it with mild irritation and went back to the plan.
HR rang about Sarah that morning.
“Any news?”
“Complications,” HR said. “They won’t give a return date.”
That left him without an assistant. He knew what he needed. Someone who knew where the bodies were buried. Someone the building already trusted.
He had been watching the floor, and he had a list. It was a short list. Her name was the only one on it.
He was on the floor with Ops when he noticed the kitchenette hatch.
“We can’t move the date until tooling signs off,” the Ops manager said. “Matt?”
“Sorry. Yes?”
Clair Smith was at the hatch with a cup of coffee. She looked up and their eyes met over the rim. One beat. Two. She went back to her coffee as if that was all she had come for.
He held the look a fraction too long to be an accident. Then he looked down and made a note.
The note was not about Ops.
