Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [74]
CURRENT USER LEVEL: 0 (ENTRY)
NO FURTHER MODIFICATIONS
There it was: they had locked him out of the system. User level zero was the level that assistants in the company were given.
Sanders slumped back in the chair. He felt as if he had been fired. For the first time, he began to realize what this was going to be like.
Clearly, there was no time to waste. He opened his desk drawer, and saw at once that the pens and pencils were neatly arranged. Someone had already been there. He pulled open the file drawer below. Only a half-dozen files were there; the others were all missing.
They had already gone through his desk.
Quickly, he got up and went out to the big filing cabinets behind Cindy’s desk. These cabinets were locked, but he knew Cindy kept the key in her desk. He found the key, and unlocked the current year’s files.
The cabinet was empty. There were no files there at all. They had taken everything.
He opened the cabinet for the previous year: empty.
The year before: empty.
All the others: empty.
Jesus, he thought. No wonder Cindy had been so cool. They must have had a gang of workmen up there with trolleys, cleaning everything out during the afternoon.
Sanders locked the cabinets again, replaced the key in Cindy’s desk, and headed downstairs.
The press office was on the third floor. It was deserted now except for a single assistant, who was closing up. “Oh. Mr. Sanders. I was just getting ready to leave.”
“You don’t have to stay. I just wanted to check some things. Where do you keep the back issues of ComLine?”
“They’re all on that shelf over there.” She pointed to a row of stacked issues. “Was there anything in particular?”
“No. You go ahead home.”
The assistant seemed reluctant, but she picked up her purse and headed out the door. Sanders went to the shelf. The issues were arranged in six-month stacks. Just to be safe, he started ten stacks back—five years ago.
He began flipping through the pages, scanning the endless details of game scores and press releases on production figures. After a few minutes, he found it hard to pay attention. And of course he didn’t know what he was looking for, although he assumed it was something about Meredith Johnson.
He went through two stacks before he found the first article.
NEW MARKETING ASSISTANT NAMED
Cupertino, May 10: DigiCom President Bob Garvin today announced the appointment of Meredith Johnson as Assistant Director of Marketing and Promotion for Telecommunications. She will report to Howard Gottfried in M and P. Ms. Johnson, 30, came to us from her position as Vice President for Marketing at Conrad Computer Systems of Sunnyvale. Before that, she was a senior administrative assistant at the Novell Network Division in Mountain View.
Ms. Johnson, who has degrees from Vassar College and Stanford Business School, was recently married to Gary Henley, a marketing executive at CoStar. Congratulations! As a new arrival to DigiCom, Ms. Johnson . . .
He skipped the rest of the article; it was all PR fluff. The accompanying photo was standard B-school graduate: against a gray background with light coming from behind one shoulder, it showed a young woman with shoulder-length hair in a pageboy style, a direct businesslike stare just shy of harsh, and a firm mouth. But she looked considerably younger than she did now.
Sanders continued to thumb through the issues. He glanced at his watch. It was almost seven, and he wanted to call Bosak. He came to the end of the year, and the pages were nothing but Christmas stuff. A picture of Garvin and his family (“Merry Christmas from the Boss! Ho Ho Ho!”) caught his attention because it showed Bob with his former wife, along with his three college-age kids, standing around a big tree.
Had Garvin been going out with Emily yet? Nobody ever knew. Garvin was cagey. You never knew what he was up to.
Sanders went to the next stack, for the following year. January sales predictions. (“Let’s get out and make it happen!”) Opening of the Austin plant to manufacture cellular phones; a photo of Garvin in harsh sunlight,