Chapter
4: Another One Bites the Dust
-----June 1985-----
Adele and Meg Grant were leaving Opera Computing at the end of the day when they saw Joe Buquet, the night janitor, cleaning the windows. "Hey, had any ghost sightings lately?" he called out.
"Oh, yeah!" Meg squealed. "Just last week, the ghost made these weird messages appear on the bosses' computers. They said—"
Her mother cut her off. "Meg, you're too old to be making up stories. You and I both know that Carlotta wrote those messages." Meg rolled her eyes. She hated how no one took her opinions seriously, even her mother. She was eighteen, a grown woman—why did everyone treat her like a child?
Once out of Joe's hearing range, Mrs. Grant added: "And don't go around talking to lowlifes like that janitor."
-----1983-----
"We'd like to file a complaint about the custodian you have cleaning our office. He is rude to our employees—"
"He looks messy and unprofessional—"
"And he doesn't even clean very well!"
The fat man behind the desk in the Leasing Office leafed through a few papers and looked back up at Arnav and Frank. "Oh yeah, Opera Computing, right? Custodian by the name of Joe Buquet?" He sat up in his chair and leaned in toward the two men. "I ain't at liberty to tell you why, but I can't fire him. There's no way. He was there when we first bought this building seventeen years ago, and I tried to get rid of him every chance I could get. But he ain't just a janitor...he's something else."
-----June 1985----
Joe made up for his shoddy cleaning with the meticulousness in which he carried out his security duties. He double-checked that every entrance and exit was set with the heavy-duty alarms he had made himself. These alarms were not only immune to breaking by force, but also relied on a purely mechanical system that no computer could disable. Safeguards in place, he went to explore the tunnels beneath the office. Every night, he had become lost in the labyrinth of tunnels, barely finding his way above ground before the break of dawn. Yet every night he had descended the stairs with the hope that this time, he would find the fugitive that he knew lived somewhere below.
Meanwhile, Christine sat at Mrs. Valerius's kitchen table writing a letter. The doorbell rang, and since her landlady was upstairs watching a cooking show, she answered it. "Oh! Raul! It's so nice to see you!" she exclaimed as they entered into a tentative hug. "Here, come in. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Valerius."
Raul waved her away. "I'm only stopping by to see you on the way to my hotel. I'm here in town for the User Interface design review tomorrow, you know. But maybe afterwards, we can go out somewhere—if you can possibly skip your dear programming lesson," he chuckled.
"Oh, I'd love to, Raul! We have so much to catch up on! I think I can get out of those lessons this time."
Yet Raul's attention had gone from her to the letter on the table. "What's this, a letter?" He picked it up with a grin, expecting something humorous, and read: "'Dear Erik, I am grateful for the time we've had together, and enjoyed every moment of it, but'...and then the rest is unfinished. Christine, why didn't you tell me you have a boyfriend? You didn't have to worry about hurting my feelings, you know..."
Christine looked pained. "He's not my boyfriend, Raul. I don't really know what to call him." She proceeded to explain to him the programming lessons and the visit to Erik's home two weeks before, leaving out their near-kiss.
"He sounds like such a creep, Christine!" Raul sympathized. "I feel so bad for you, having to deal with someone like that. I'll tell you what—tomorrow evening, after work, I'll take you to the nicest steakhouse in town. You deserve a break from all this."
At the office the next morning, the two presidents of Opera Computing stared at their printer in disbelief. "This is beginning to not make sense, Frank," Arnav said.
Frank stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Well, let's consider our options. Christine could never have pulled off a technical stunt like this. The same goes for all the other programmers, except maybe Carlotta, but why would she have a message printed out saying that her design shouldn't be used for the review?"
"That's why I tell you there truly could be a ghost! We have no other explanation. Ever since the message from Carlotta, we have been logging all commands typed at our computers, and there has been nothing! These computers have not been touched since we left yesterday."
"You're right, this is strange. Still, just because someone is sending us messages, doesn't mean we have to listen."
Arnav was not reassured. "Christine has developed an alternative design, right? Have you seen it?"
"Yes, and it's much too risk-taking and unusual for a contract this important. Even if it weren't, we run this company, not some anonymous message-sender! Carlotta will present her User Interface design today just as planned, and we'll see what kind of 'disaster beyond our imagination' we have. What could possibly happen at a simple slide show?"
Indeed, Carlotta's discussion of the User Interface design began perfectly. The lead designer gained enough confidence after the first four or five slides to recite her presentation without looking at the projector. For this reason, she didn't understand why the sixth slide caused the entire audience to burst out laughing.
Carlotta looked down at the slide. Half of the presentation text was replaced with a caricature of herself, wearing ridiculously extravagant queen's robes and beating scared-looking subjects with a scepter. She quickly put on the next slide, but every one of them had half its text replaced with a different drawing. One showed Carlotta as a Nazi making the "Heil Hitler" gesture; another depicted her as a cackling witch stirring a cauldron. Turning furiously towards Arnav and Frank, she screamed, "You...said...no...more...ghost!"
Frank tried to placate the crowd and blustered, "Please reconvene in—an hour, when an alternative design for the User Interface will be presented by—one of our—new talents." He looked imploringly at Christine.
Raul led the audience out of the conference room. As he opened the door, he saw the dead body of Joe Buquet hanging from the door frame. When they took the body down to examine it, the first thing Raul noticed was the official FBI identification Joe carried in his shirt pocket.
