We're going to fix this, she said. Yes, he said. We are. Starting with the reporting structure, she said. I want a direct line from your office to mine.
No intermediaries for security related maintenance reports. Anything you flag goes to me same day. He looked at her steadily. That only works if you actually read them. I'll read them, she said.
All of them, he said. The ones that seem small, the temperature variances and the camera angles and the access pattern irregularities, the ones that look like maintenance issues until they don't. All of them, she confirmed. He held her gaze for another moment. Testing it the way he tested everything.
Not aggressively, but thoroughly. Okay, he said. That afternoon, Richard Whitmore came to the building for the second time to that week. He didn't arrive in a convoy. He arrived in a single car driven by himself and he walked through the front doors and stopped at the security desk and asked Terrence if he could have a visitor badge which was the kind of thing that a man who owns a company doesn't have to do and chooses to do anyway and which told Andre something he had already suspected about who Richard Whitmore actually was beneath weed mirrors the 71 years and the white hair and the 40-year empire he found Andre in the suble checking the biometric readers on the maintenance corridor, which Andre was doing personally because he needed to know the current state of every unit in the building before he signed anything with his name on it.
Richard stood in the doorway of the corridor and watched him work for a moment without announcing himself. Andre felt him there before he heard him. Another habit from years of paying attention to spaces. You learn what a room feels like when it has one person in it versus two. He didn't stop what he was doing.
"Mr. Whitmore," he said. "I told you Richard said." Richard is fine. Old habit, Andre said. He finished the reading, logged it on his tablet, and turned around.
Richard was looking at the corridor with the expression of someone seeing a place in a building they own for the first time, which was probably accurate. Men like Richard men who built things that got large enough often stopped being able to see the actual physical reality of what they'd built. The sublevel corridors, the maintenance logs, the biometric readers at 644A hem, those became abstract numbers, operational categories, not places where a man in a gray uniform showed up every morning before the sun and kept the whole thing from breaking. I used to know every inch of our first building. Richard said, "140 employees.
I could tell you where every pipe ran, which lights flickered in cold weather, which elevator had a lag on the third floor." He paused. Somewhere around 500 employees. I stopped knowing most people do. Said, "That's not a defense," Richard said.
"That's a pattern, and patterns that go unexamined are just failures waiting to happen." Andre said nothing. He didn't need to. I had Carver compile the Gerald Park review, Richard said. He reached into his jacket and produced a folded document.