He badged into the building at 6:17. He did a walk of the lower floors, checking systems, reading temperature logs, looking at the overnight reports. Everything was normal, or it appeared to be. He was on the fourth floor checking the HVAC relay panel when his radio crackled. Andre, it was Diane from facilities.
Different Diane office Diane. CEO wants you her office now. He paused, set down his clipboard. In five years, the CEO had never called him directly. The previous CEO, a quiet man named Harrison, had known Andre's name and had once stopped him in a hallway to shake his hand after a water mane issue was caught and resolved before it flooded three floors.
That had been a good day. Clare Whitmore had been CEO for 4 months. Andre had seen her twice in that time. She walked fast, always, with the specific velocity of someone who had decided that every moment not spent on a priority was a moment wasted. She had reorganized two departments in her first 6 weeks.
She had ended three vendor contracts. She had installed new performance tracking systems that the senior executive team was still complaining about, though quietly because nobody wanted to be in Clare Whitmore's crosshairs. She was brilliant. Everybody said so. She was also in the way that certain brilliant people are somewhat terrifying.
Andre took the elevator to the executive floor. He had been up here perhaps a dozen times in 5 years, mostly for infrastructure works, servicing the climate controls, checking fiberline connections, replacing a panel in the server access corridor. He knew the layout. He knew where the cameras were. He knew which door locks sometimes stuck in cold weather and which elevator button panel had a lag on the sixth floor that nobody had reported because everyone assumed someone else would.
He knocked on Clare's office door. Come in. She was standing behind her desk, not sitting. Her jacket was already on, which meant she had been here since before he had another early riser, which he would have respected under different circumstances. There were two other people in the room.
One was Gerald Park, the head of corporate security, a former law enforcement officer who had the posture of someone who had spent 30 years not relaxing. The other was a woman Andre didn't recognize with a laptop open on the side table and an expression that gave away nothing. Close the door, Clare said. He closed it. Where were you?
She said, not asked, said the sentence, arriving without a question mark between 11 p and 1:00 a.m. 2 nights ago. Andre felt something tighten in his chest. Not guilt. Something more like the recognition of a trap being described to you while you're already standing inside it. Home, he said.
With my daughter. Can anyone confirm that she's eight? So that's a no. She was asleep by 9. Andre said.
He kept his voice even. I was home all night. Clare looked at Gerald. Gerald slid a printed document across the desk, a security access log. Andre's badge number.