Jennifer Sturman - The Key

There was nobody there, obviously, and the dark night outside meant I could see nothing through the window but my own reflection, yet I still had the eerie feeling I was being watched. I yanked the shade down.

Then I read the e-mail again.

Perry’s dirty and so is this deal.

And they’ve done it before.

The questions started flowing into my brain, but it took a couple of minutes before I could get over how creeped out I was to even articulate them, let alone begin to address them.

First, who was manofthepeople@rsnd.net? And why was he e-mailing me? Here, at home, on my personal e-mail account? How had he even found my personal account?

Second, how was the deal dirty? I wasn’t surprised to hear somebody else thought so, too, but Man of the People had been a little stingy with the details.

Third, what, exactly, had they done before? And who were “they” supposed to be?

And fourth-well, I was back to Question One, Part Two-why was Man of the People e-mailing me?

“Rach?”

I shrieked. The entire concept of jumping out of one’s skin made sense in a way it never had before.

“Sorry-I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that dinner’s served.”

I gaped at Peter.

“You remember dinner? The logical outcome of what I was working on in the kitchen? I know the entire dining-in thing is a bit novel and usually involves the delivery guy being buzzed up, but I promise there’s food on the table.”

“You need to see this,” I told him.

“Can it wait? I don’t want everything to get cold.”

“I don’t think so.”

He came around to my side of the desk and leaned over my shoulder to look at the screen.

“You just got this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“On your personal account?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t know who this Man of the People guy is or why he’s e-mailing you, much less how he got your e-mail?”

“No.”

“That’s sort of creepy.”

“It’s very creepy.”

Peter convinced me it would be unwise to discuss matters any further on an empty stomach. I plopped myself down at the table and allowed him to cut me a large slice of lasagna and top off my wine.

The food was delicious-much better than anything that came out of a box-but it was hard to give it the attention it deserved. Under Peter’s careful questioning, I fleshed out the details of the Thunderbolt deal. We weren’t supposed to discuss work with people external to the firm, but it was common knowledge that nobody obeyed that rule with spouses and significant others.

“I knew there was something wrong with this whole thing,” I told him. “The company’s practically in the toilet but meanwhile Nicholas Perry wants to do a buyout and Gallagher can’t wait to help make it happen. I bet Gallagher’s part of the ‘they’ somehow.”

“At the very least, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out what Perry’s done before, or even if Gallagher was involved, too.”

We left the dishes on the table and returned to the study. My desk chair wasn’t really big enough for two, but we squished onto it together. It was probably a good thing I’d passed on the third helping of lasagna.

A page on Thunderbolt’s own Web site providing biographies of its management team quickly yielded the answer to our first question. Several years ago, Perry had been CEO of another company, this one, like Thunderbolt, a major defense contractor. I recognized its name-Tiger Defense Enterprises-immediately. One of the Lucite deal mementos lining Gallagher’s credenza bore its logo.

“What do tigers have to do with tanks or body armor or whatever this company makes?” asked Peter.

“Nothing. But a tiger is the Princeton mascot. That’s where Gallagher and Perry met.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“It’s better than Thunderbolt.”

“Not by much.”

Apparently the Tiger buyout, under Perry’s leadership, had been very successful. Perry had not only added the Tiger to the company name, he’d implemented an impressive turnaround. The company then sold shares to the public at a price considerably higher than the buyout price. Perry’s investor group more than tripled their money in a comparatively short timeframe. And Ryan Brothers, Gallagher’s old firm, had handled both the original buyout and the offering when the company went public again. Perry was lauded as a management guru and left Tiger shortly after to join Thunderbolt as CEO.

“So they have done it before,” Peter said.

“Yes. But I don’t know what’s dirty about it. If anything, it’s a textbook LBO. Take a failing company, buy it out, improve operations, and then sell it at a nice fat profit.”

“Why don’t we just ask him?”

“Who? Perry? Or Gallagher? I don’t think either of them is going to be too receptive to my asking how their last joint venture was corrupt. They didn’t seem too forthcoming when I tried to figure out what’s going on with the deal they’ve got on the table now.”

“No-not them. I meant your new friend. Man of the People.”

I thought about this. It was one thing to talk things over with Peter, but it was quite another to engage in any sort of discussion with an anonymous correspondent. “If anything, I should probably be reporting him somehow. Communicating about a deal underway with somebody whose real name I don’t even know is the sort of thing that falls into the strictly verboten category.”

“Give me a few minutes to play around a bit with the e-mail address. Maybe I can find out more about who this guy is.”

“How?”

“Rachel,” he reminded me, “I’m sort of a geek.”

“So that’s why there are suddenly all of those Star Trek episodes on the TiVo.”

“Worried that I’ll record over your Dawson’s Creek reruns?”

“I still get a rush every time Joey chooses Pacey over Dawson.” I went to clear the table.

I rinsed the dishes and added them to the dirty pots and pans already in the dishwasher, another rarely used appliance. I rummaged under the sink, located a box of detergent that bore the logo of a long-since bankrupt grocery chain, poured some powder in, and selected the Power Scrub function.

The casserole was still half-full of lasagna, so I covered it with tinfoil and slid it into the refrigerator, noting with yet more astonishment that I actually had to rearrange one of the shelves to find room. Peter had bought more than the ingredients for lasagna. It was peculiar to see my fridge, which usually held only a limited selection of life’s basic necessities-Diet Coke, white wine, and hot sauce-harboring a more usual assortment of groceries. There was actually butter in the butter compartment and eggs in the little indentations on the shelf alongside.

Peter was hunched over the computer when I returned. “Any luck?” I asked.

He sounded frustrated. “I’m not as much of a geek as I thought.”

“That’s probably not a bad thing,” I said, perching on the arm of the chair beside him.

“All I could figure out is that he’s using an e-mail resend service. It’s pretty sophisticated, too. It’s not a commercial service but a program that some hard-core techies set up for themselves.”

“So you think he’s a hard-core techie?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just friends with one. Either way, I can’t get to any information about where the e-mail may have originated. Usually you can track down the various stops a message makes as it goes over the Internet, but the service he used erased all that. I’m afraid that the only way we’re going to find out more is if you e-mail him back.”

“I’m tempted to. But it’s a bit of a quandary, in terms of professional ethics.”

“If the deal is dirty, don’t you have an obligation to find out how?”