His first day, he wore the jacket. He arrived at 7:42 a.m., which was 18 minutes before anyone else in his department. He found his desk a low traffic corner of the fourth floor, the kind of spot where ambient noise accumulates and natural light doesn't quite reach, and he sat down and opened the system they'd given him access to. Within 4 hours, he had identified three inefficiencies in the current operations workflow that were collectively costing the company somewhere between 60 and $90,000 a month in redundant vendor fees. He didn't report them.
Not yet. He wrote them in a notebook instead. Old habit. By the end of the first week, he had filled six pages. Like the other employees on the fourth floor fell into roughly three categories in their relationship to Caleb.
The first group ignored him completely. They were busy with their own work, their own deadlines, their own complicated relationships with the department hierarchy, and a new operations associate wasn't worth the energy of curiosity. The second group was politely neutral. The kind of people who would say good morning, ask about his weekend if they were getting coffee at the same time, and never once make him feel unwelcome, but also never quite invite him further in. The third group, smaller than the first two combined, was led informally by a man named Derek, who sat three desks away from Caleb, and who had apparently appointed himself the cultural immune system of the fourth floor.
Derek was 29 years old, had been at Harrington for four years, wore shirts that were slightly too fitted, and had a way of talking about the company that suggested he believed his continued employment was doing the company a favor. On Caleb's third day, Derek came and stood at the edge of his desk. "So, what's your background, man?" He asked. Not unfriendly, but not warm.
"Operations," Caleb said. "Before this, consulting mostly." Derek nodded slowly, looking at Caleb's desk setup, which was a single legal pad, a pencil, and the company-issued laptop. "How'd you end up here?" Derek asked.
"I mean, no offense, but this isn't exactly the role people fight for. You know what I mean? This is kind of a transitional slot." Caleb looked at him. "Maybe for some people," he said.
Derek waited for more. Caleb didn't offer any. "Right," Derek said, and walked away. Amanda Pierce began stopping by the fourth floor with a frequency that had nothing to do with her actual job responsibilities. At first, Caleb assumed it was coincidence.
By the second week, he understood it was surveillance. She never said anything directly. She would appear near the coffee station talk to Derek or one of the other employees and in the middle of the conversation let her eyes drift toward Caleb's corner of the floor. He always had something in front of him when she looked. But twice when she didn't think he was paying attention, he caught her watching him the way someone watches a stray animal that has wandered into a neighborhood.