The FedBizOps notice hits my inbox with a digital thud, ruining my weekend and trumpeting the opportunity I’ve been anticipating, dreading, for weeks. Request for Proposal—RFP.
Invitation to propose a technical solution to the Fed in response to an urgent need. Invitation to spend the next thirty days in federal proposal hell. Yay! You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe.
Whatever. Angela is gonna kill me.
Dead.
Again.
As I mouse over to open the FBO email, I note the time: 3:21 p.m.—Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend, of course—and realize that not only is she going to kill me, but we’ll be charged for the cabin rental at the lake, even if no one shows up. No cancellations within seventy-two hours of check-in. Such is life when you work for yourself, I guess—but it still won’t dampen my wife’s wrath.
Sometimes, life has a way of recalibrating you, despite your most heroic efforts to resist. You plan, you work—you give it your best—then some higher-power decides: No, not gonna happen that way.
I realize I won’t make my flight home that evening. Maybe she and the kids will go on the quick weekend away we’d planned anyway. Maybe I’ll be lucky and she won’t hold this against me.
Who am I kidding? I’ve never been lucky.
* * * *
I’m a specialist, of sorts.
My client is Excelaton, a hotshot cybersecurity powerhouse. They’re the company the government turns to when its most-classified digital secrets are compromised, exploited like so much innocent virtue on the dark web by nation-state adversaries. Excelaton has no business pursuing this particular opportunity, though—wrong technical swim lane, no competitive advantage, no substantial past performance, no innovative approach—a belief I’ve shared with their leadership countless times. It is the brutal, but accurate, truth, and I’ve hoped the client will shut down the pursuit and release me from this Sisyphus nightmare.
No such luck. Leadership had assured me that landing this contract would mark the rise of Excelaton 2.0 and would re-energize its revenues.
We are submitting a bid, or we’ll die trying.
I glance around the proposal war room—our conference room home for the proposal’s duration—surveying the motley crew of method-actor consultants I’ve been saddled with: five morose, occasionally mildly unreceptive faces stare back at me.
The only beacons of hope come from LuLu and Liz, who have worked with me before, Liz as my proposal coordinator. The three of us work well together—our approach and work ethic really sync; even when when LuLu is stoned, she gets the job done. Liz is a straight arrow and attractive despite the decade plus she has on me, but LuLu likes her wacky brownies a little too much.
Medicinal. Uh-huh.
Whatever, do the work well, and I don’t judge. And they both do, without fail.
“Shit.”
“Motherfucking government.”
“Goddamn govies.”
Muttered curses bounce around the room, off the whiteboard walls and seem to home in on me at the end of the large conference table.
We’ve already spent several weeks cooped up in the war room, brainstorming and crafting a technical solution to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s pressing problem that it wants proposals to address. Our work has been based on the government’s draft RFP, in which the feds said what they’re probably going to be looking for when the final—official—RFP comes out. With the arrival of that final RFP, it is now Day Zero—(D0) or (Dinitial) as scientists like to say. We are on the clock, with every second ticking toward D30—our submission deadline date, thirty days from now.
We’ll be working long days until the deadline, with brief breaks when absolutely necessary. No weekends. No vacations. No sick days. We’ll eat while we work. Sleep, shower, and change clothes when we have to. We’ll remind our families we’re alive via Skype. Hopefully, this work ethic, coupled with the work we did pre-final release, will produce a winning bid.
I raise an eyebrow and dip my chin in a subtle nod to Liz, whose job is basically being a fixer—helping us navigate the Excelaton corporate maze and making sure that the proposal we produce holds true to Excelaton’s corporate mission and guidelines. And doesn’t give away the Excelaton secret sauce, either.
She responds by passing out long, thin pieces of paper and pencils to each team member as I rise to address the team. I glance at my Apple watch, a recent high-tech but emotionless replacement for the Omega my father had given me: 3:30. He’d been a proposal manager too. Career bad luck must be hereditary.
“Some of you have worked with me before on prior opportunities. You just keep quiet and fill out your slips,” I say. “For everyone else, we’ve been hard at this for a couple of weeks, but the shit just got real. We’ve got Final, and, like it or not, we’re starting now in earnest. This is Day Zero, and we’ll sleep on Day Thirty, post submission.”
I pause, gauging my audience. Everyone has glanced at the slips they’ve received, and while there are some lingering expressions of surprise, they’re all busily putting tick marks in little boxes.
“I understand we all had plans this weekend, but we all also knew this day would come, and it’s what we’ve signed up for. The federal government is a cruel mistress. I’d love to sugarcoat it, but I can’t and I won’t try. You can enjoy the Memorial Day weekend next year. Now, we’re working seven days a week. We’ve got a huge lift ahead of us to put lipstick on this pig. But… ” I pause as Liz collects the paper slips, then begins pounding away on her computer. I nod in approval as I continue my briefing-cum-pep talk. “That is exactly what we will do, because our client needs this win, and we will do whatever it takes to deliver that winning proposal. Any questions?”
“Any good news, Ethan?” LuLu asks. I can always count on my friend to serve up a softball for the benefit of the audience.
I chuckle. “Okay. It’s time to formally kick off this proposal effort, folks. Liz?”
“On it,” she says, and slips out the war room door.
* * * *
The harsh glare through the windows has softened when the door bangs open an hour later, in the middle of my briefing. Liz is manhandling a cart brimming with takeout orders through the doorway. I’ve only scratched the surface of explaining the Proposal Management Plan—our order of battle until we submit our proposal. With a quick, surreptitious scan I see how the downtrodden faces have perked up at the sight of food. Carpe diem, I realize.
“Great place to pause. Food waits for no one,” I tell the team. While Liz and LuLu begin handing out orders, I focus the discussion on the team in front of me.
“I firmly believe that the success of any team project—proposal or otherwise—depends on group cohesion and collaboration. I’ve got no time and no stomach for dissension or working at cross-purposes.”
I make eye contact with each individual. A slightly more positive response, or at least slightly less negative, I hope. A hungry group is a malleable group.
“We have a fantastic team here,” I continue, “and we will need every ounce of our skills to meet our client’s aggressive goal. I’m a firm believer that an excellent environment is a key attribute to team collaboration and performance, and we are starting off right from the get-go with a meal break. Don’t get used to it.” The team laughs. Good. “Enjoy the food from Mon Cher Nakamoto. We may be stuck here for an interminable amount of time over the next thirty days, but at least we’ll eat well.”
LuLu, having benefited from my well-heeled approach to gastronomical team chemistry in the past, was furiously nodding and smiling as I spoke. Food likes her, and she likes food, almost as much as she likes her wacky brownies.
“Let’s eat,” I say, and we all dig in. Cracks from paired chopsticks splitting, wood on wood rubbing, and mass clicking ensue as the team devours the late-afternoon delicacies. I assess the rapid decimation of raw fish, the growing pile of discarded take-out boxes, and the lack of complaint from my otherwise occupied team, and on the whole, my approach seems to have swayed the mood toward the positive. A win in my book.
* * * *
The languid bulk of far too much lychee tea, dragon rolls, and sushi nigiri have settled low in my stomach as the full moon hangs in the sky. Vincent and I have diagrammed the technical solution we will demonstrate to the government and are debating modifications and alternatives on the whiteboard. Some of the team, it appears, have slipped into mini-food comas.
My rock, dependable LuLu, has her head on the war room table, occasionally chuffing like a sleeping bichon puppy.
Liz, chipper and vibrating energy, stands to the side, taking notes, retrieving research resources, and generally making my life easier.
The other two members of the team, Tucker and Rob, who work for Vincent, are busy surfing the web, playing with social media. At least that’s what I suspect; all I see are the shiny crowns of two prematurely balding heads buried behind computer screens. They could be buying and selling cryptocurrency for all I know. Who said only the young have mastered the digital age?
The only certainty is that they aren’t working; they aren’t contributing to the technical discussion, and they are the technical experts. Not a good sign for (D0).
Vincent leads the scientists at Excelaton’s contract laboratory, which specializes in dark-web and cloaked-proxy penetration defense. His group of white-hat hackers supports the Air Force Research Lab’s Supercomputing Resource Center on a large effort for offensive and defensive cyber engagements. Their work protects AFRL’s critical and sensitive cyber infrastructure; think, for example, cloud services-based offensive targeting solutions. Smart dude, kind of standoffish, and as prickly as he is brilliant.
Superior skills in cyber don’t relate, in my humble opinion, to the requirements that the NNSA listed in the RFP. They need innovative proposals on reverse engineering adverse-event nuclear forensics—evidence markers from events that go boom in a big way and leave large swaths of earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. NNSA deals in real, catastrophic asymmetric warfare, as opposed to the digital domain version Excelaton specializes in preventing. Hence my lack of faith in the client’s chances of success in the, dare I say, doomed pursuit I am leading.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Vincent’s hung in with me, still working at this late hour, though the quality of his production makes the term “work” questionable. His chicken scratches on the whiteboard are getting harder to read, and he occasionally rests his hand on the whiteboard, as if vertical is a state he doesn’t think he can sustain. I’ve never worked with him before this effort, but early on pegged him as one of my problem children.
“We needs s’more,” Vincent says.
I glance at him, confused.
“You think we need one more?” I ask. Vincent’s eyelids seem to be fighting a losing battle, and he keeps shaking his hand holding the dry erase marker like it has fallen asleep, while scratching his face with his other hand.
Vincent doesn’t respond. I wonder what he might have slipped into the water bottle he has by his monitor.
“You think we need one more,” I decide, looking at Vincent to see if he’s even heard my agreement. “Fine, we’ll get one more.” I erase “12” and write “13” next to the words “Computational Physicist.”
“Happy?”
Vincent’s reply is to slowly withdraw from the support of the whiteboard; he topples backward toward the conference room table, his head smacking the polished mahogany as he falls onto the floor.
* * * *
Vincent’s shirt sleeve tears when I grab at it, trying to arrest his fall. As I hear his head smack the table, I shudder and drop to the floor beside him. His eyes are rolling back. I press my middle and index fingers against his neck where his carotid artery should be and wait.
After three seconds, I’m rewarded with a faint pulse under my index finger.
“Whew.” I’m relieved he isn’t dead—I can still hear the gruesome smack of his head—but he isn’t going anywhere either. Vincent’s body looks like a board, no movement, no twitching—nothing, except the blood seeping from under his head. Three seconds later, another faint pressure of a pulse.
“What happened?”
“Need help?”
“Is Vincent okay?”
The commotion has shaken the team from their varying degrees of stupor.
LuLu and Liz kneel down next to me, their voices intermixed. “How can we help?”
“Call nine-one-one! I saw an AED on the wall outside. Grab it,” I say, and Liz dashes out the door.
Operating on reflex, I tear my hand from Vincent’s neck and let it hover above his mouth as I look at his chest. No air is coming from his mouth or nose.
* * * *
I shiver in my sweat-soaked dress shirt; I realize I could probably wring out my T-shirt beneath. I’ve finished giving my statement; I’d been interviewed first. The defibrillator I used lies discarded on the floor, testament to the occasional futility of technology in the face of an emergency.
“Detective, can we move him?” a weathered, older man asks, looking up from Vincent. “Medical Examiner” is stitched ornately on his scrubs.
“Sure, we’re done with him, Doc,” says the detective who just finished interviewing me.
It irritates me, the cavalier way the cop referred to a colleague I’d been standing next to at the whiteboard an hour ago, but a certain amount of callousness must be an inevitable side effect of their job. I say nothing—my nerves are too raw.
LuLu moves past me, head down, carrying a tray of chicken teriyaki, yaki soba, and sushi remnants, headed for the trash can in the corner.
The detective who’d taken my statement intercepts her.
“Sorry, ma’am, but that is evidence, I’ll need to take that.”
LuLu looks up, startled.
“Yes, of course, officer… I was just trying to clean up. You know, stay busy, keep my mind off… ”
“It’s detective, ma’am. Yes, I understand, but that is evidence now.”
LuLu begins to hyperventilate and her facial muscles quiver. I move to comfort her before the floodgates open. I watch the detective move to interview Liz as LuLu cries on my shoulder. I’ve gone from leading a proposal to losing a teammate.
“What could have caused his heart attack?” I ask as the EMTs pack up their useless equipment strewn around Vincent, while the ME and his assistant lift the body onto a stretcher.
“It wasn’t cardiac arrest, it was respiratory arrest,” Doc answers. “His lungs stopped moving air, he didn’t get any oxygen, and he died.”
“What could have caused that?” Vincent had seemed perfectly healthy in the weeks leading up to today.
“Any number of things, pre-existing condition, seizure, allergic reaction. Too hard to tell without an autopsy,” the ME says over his shoulder as an assistant pushes the stretcher through the doorway.
I watch the body disappear, perplexed by what had happened.
* * * *
“Tough thing about Vince,” LuLu says Monday morning when I walk into the war room and greet the team, the secure door closing behind me with a loud thunk. Liz hasn’t made it in yet.
After the police finished taking the witness statements, I gave everyone two days off for nerves to calm down, but now we had to regain our momentum. Unfortunately, death on a proposal team is not sufficient reason for an extension from the government.
“Tough?” I said. “I think Vincent might take issue with your word choice, Lu.” Her comment seems harsh, especially given her previous crying jag. “Has anyone heard anything more about what happened?”
Liz walks in, her face a perfect mask of composure and comes straight to me, pulling me away from the others, her arm slipping around my waist and her hand resting on my lower back, just above my belt.
Odd.
She leans in, her invasion of my personal space distracting and uncomfortable.
“The police need to speak to us again. The lead detective contacted Excelaton’s corporate counsel and asked him to make us available as a group,” she says. “Apparently, there have been some unusual developments—at least that is what I was told. Vincent didn’t die of natural causes.”
“What? When?”
She turns as she walks away. “Tomorrow afternoon, three p.m.”
Not to sound harsh like LuLu, but that puts a crimp in my proposal schedule. Between the hours we’ve lost dealing with Vincent’s death and the two days I’d given the team to grieve, we are now three days behind the power curve on a thirty-day response.
A thought begins worming its way around my mind, pushing aside the urgency of the proposal we’re developing. The ME said an autopsy would be performed to determine cause of death. Has that happened? None of my team had been or seemed particularly close to Vincent, so why do the cops suddenly want to speak with us all again, en masse?
Vincent was difficult and quirky, but in this job you have to be able to deal with myriad personalities; he wasn’t the worst person I’ve had to deal with on a proposal team, and everyone seemed to get along with him.
Vincent and I had even eaten together at Mon Cher Nakomoto before. I knew the owner had been questioned regarding the take-out food he’d provided; I’d seen the detective in there as I walked to my nearby hotel the night of Vincent’s death. This morning I’d walked to Excelaton, and Nakamoto had been behind his counter, prepping for his business today. That means the police don’t think food poisoning from the take-out sushi caused Vincent’s death; they would have closed the restaurant down otherwise. But, if the police want to talk to my team again, it sounds like the cause of death was suspicious, wasn’t natural. That leaves…murder?
In all my years of running federal government proposals, I’ve never had someone die where the cause wasn’t natural; I’ve never even heard of that happening. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like teammates are dropping like flies across the proposal industry, but there have been several instances where the stress and demanding tempo resulted in deadly heart attacks. But never violent, manufactured death, which is what I think I witnessed. I feel a little out of my depth but also intrigued by the puzzle unfolding around me. As the leader of the group, while I still have a prop to bring home, I also feel a vague sense of responsibility to Vincent; a member of my team is dead.
I take a moment and look at each my remaining four teammates, wondering if I know them as well as I think I do. Vincent’s abrupt death—isn’t all death abrupt, at least for the one doing the dying?—makes me pause.
The police want to talk to us all, as a group. At least at first. I’ve watched enough True Crime TV to know what that means. Five potential suspects. I know I didn’t have anything to do with Vincent’s death…so then there are four.
First and foremost though, it means that if I don’t want my proposal timeline further jeopardized, I need to figure out what happened to Vincent. I can’t afford the police imposing their bureaucratic demands on my proposal team; I have a job to do.
Four people, two of whom I considered friends, and one of whom might be a murderer.
* * * *
I broke the news to the team that we would all be re-interviewed by the police tomorrow. That further dampened the prevailing subdued mood.
Ever since my realization that I might not know the folks working for me as well as I think, I’ve been racking my brain for a plausible way to move forward. As hollow as it sounds, my obligation to my client dictates that I continue with the proposal effort, but my obligation to a dead teammate I barely knew demands I satisfy my suspicions about my colleagues.
I have a strategy in mind that will satisfy multiple goals: engage the team and brighten the mood; brainstorm possible motives for Vincent’s murder, and maybe even reveal if one of my team is a probable suspect.
“All right, everyone, listen up.” A mixture of weary faces, red-rimmed eyes, and sorrowful grimaces are my audience.
“We need to get back to work, but I don’t think we can do that effectively until we bring some closure to Vincent’s death. The police will talk to us as a group tomorrow, so for now I just want to talk about our best memories of Vincent as a way to move forward. Let’s celebrate his life, however briefly we knew him. Who would like to go first?”
Like a hesitant child, Robert raises his hand.
“Rob,” I say, “we’re not kids. What do you want to share about Vincent?”
“Vince was my boss, but, truth be told, he was a horrible manager and an asshole, to boot.”
Not exactly what I want to hear at the ad-hoc remembrance I organized for team catharsis.
“Ah…okay.”
“But, while he could be a shit, he had a beautiful family, and I keep thinking about his twin girls, who are never going to see their dad again. Those girls were Vince’s pride and joy. I spent several hours on the phone last night consoling Emily, his wife. Her girls haven’t stopped crying since she told them. A tragedy.” Rob keeps talking but kind of zones out, his eyes dead to us, focusing somewhere far north, a wistful smile on his face.
I recall having met Emily the first time I’d come up here to Excelaton’s office an hour north of Manhattan. Vince had had everyone out to a nice dinner at a restaurant specializing in northern Italian cuisine that I swear was transplanted from Tuscany. Nice lady, too good for Vincent, I’d immediately judged, despite having met him that day for the first time. Thinking back on that night, Rob had sat next to Emily at dinner, while Vincent had occupied the head of the table.
Reflecting on Rob’s words, I can’t help but wonder if there is something more behind Rob’s denigration of Vincent while espousing the extreme virtue of the dead man’s wife.
The monotonous drone of Rob’s voice begins to peter out as he runs out of Vincent-centric commentary, but I’m lost in the meaning behind his words.
I glance at Rob’s ring finger, and note that he doesn’t wear a ring, but a clear band of pale skin marks where a wedding band had once encircled it, freshly removed.
When I accepted this project and had been introduced to the team, Rob had been identified as the senior technical manager, the expert who would approve the ultimate technical solution design. He had also, in private, been pointed out as the man who should have been promoted to lead the New York office instead of Vincent, which explained the tension I had observed between them.
“But he was still an asshole.”
Rob’s remarks don’t set the bar very high in the laudatory in memoriam segment of our program.
“Thank you, Rob, for those very…personal thoughts. This is cathartic, even if Vince wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. We don’t have to sugarcoat our feelings, but talking about them might help us refocus and move forward, and deal with…what we are caught up in.”
“Vincent had a way of rolling into a room and assuming, demanding control—he was a bully.”
I glanced in the direction of the tinny voice. Tucker: good guy, the solution architect—the guy Excelaton paid to think big-brained technical thoughts and craft them into a solution the company could propose to the government.
Out of everyone in the room, in my mind Tucker was probably the most important in terms of crafting a winning proposal. Not to sell myself short, but proposal management is really just project management of schedules, ideas and words—lots of people can do it. But without a compelling, effective solution, a proposal can’t even get off the ground.
In the brief time I’ve been supporting Excelaton, I noticed that Vincent had disregarded Tucker, marginalized his experience and knowledge. Vincent seemed to shape the narrative so Tucker’s contributions became Vincent’s fabulous ideas. If there is anyone here with an ulterior motive, my money is on the diminutive geek. That would definitely bring my proposal to a grinding halt if the one critical guy is a murderer.
“Well, he was the boss, wasn’t he?” LuLu said. The trailing idiot implied by her tone was lost on no one. LuLu is super smart—a theoretical geophysicist by training—and occasionally jovial, but nearly 100 percent acerbic. I can’t explain why, but we get along fine, as long as I respect her boundaries. For me, that means steering away from incendiary topics, which unfortunately are where she likes the bulk of her conversations. She has opinions, and isn’t afraid to share them: political, religious, economic, conspiracy, or just plain kooky.
“Give it a rest, LuLu, we’re all on edge here.” I shoot her a frustrated stare; I have to maintain some shred of team cohesion or else we are never going to move forward.
She glares at me, surprised that I put her in check. Normally I let her comments roll by; I’ve found by ignoring her outbursts, her barbs generally fail to gain legitimacy and wither on the verbal vine. That said, we are friends. Life is strange, people are stranger.
LuLu is a great case in point.
Trained as a scientist like me (except I was an organic chemist), she is also a proposal consultant, and is ultimately responsible for our success, or heaven forbid, our failure. She recommended me to Excelaton to run the proposal so she could focus on thinking grand strategic thoughts to improve our competitive positioning, but she’s done it all in the past: proposal manager, technical writer, volume lead, compliance expert. If it involves proposals, she’s done it and has the certs to prove it.
“What if Vincent was using?”
Ah, there it was, Kooky Theory Number One, courtesy of my friend Lu, probably the only one of the team who has used.
“Vince didn’t have the balls to use.” Rob, defending his boss in a backhanded way. “Besides, Emily wouldn’t have allowed it around the girls.”
Once more, Rob seems to have a familiarity with his boss’s wife that I would not have expected.
I lean back in my chair and exhale through pursed lips the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I massage my forehead as I gaze at my team through open, but unseeing eyes. The discussion prattles on but is going nowhere. The octagonal war room, lined with windows and whiteboards, seem to be closing in on me. The clock on the far wall, black and round and covered with silver tines of protective chain-link armor, reminds me of an institution. Apropos, because I think I might go insane listening to this round robin of meaningless chatter.
I look to Liz, the one person we haven’t heard from, for salvation.
“It’s almost lunchtime. What shall we order?” Ever efficient, Liz is moving us on from the drivel, giving us an alternate fixation. If Liz has a motto, it is “Carpe Diem, Carpe Proposal.” That’s Liz, focused on the goal.
As my proposal coordinator, Liz is the general jack-of-all-trades. Eternally happy, sunny, and optimistic, she is a genuine gem. She can edit, desktop publish, schedule, order, tout the company line, and keep me in line and out of trouble so I can do my job.
Frankly, I’d been surprised when she’d been assigned the position; she is seasoned enough that she could have run this entire proposal effort herself. I wonder why LuLu didn’t just have her take point.
“I don’t care what we eat, but I brought dessert,” LuLu says, a twinkle in her eye.
Kind of a crass observation, given the circumstances.
Later, surrounded by the detritus of pizza boxes, Chinese food, a bacon double burger, and sushi—thank you, Uber Eats—Liz looks preoccupied, and, I think, a little sad.
“Liz, do you have any thoughts to share about Vincent?” As the clock marches deeper into the afternoon, I realize we were only getting closer to the second coming of the police detectives.
The sooner everyone contributes, the sooner we can move on and get back to work. I begin to doubt my own sanity, thinking that one of these folks might have been involved in Vincent’s death—I don’t even know if it was murder or not, do I?
I scold myself for my baseless, overactive imagination.
“Vincent wasn’t always like that,” Liz says. “He was sweet. We were engaged, once, before he met Emily.”
* * * *
Liz was engaged to Vincent? The thought blows my mind. I can’t envision it, can’t put the fact into a realistic context. Without a doubt, Liz’s revelation ups the ante on the Vincent remembrance anthology. What a small freaking world.
“Wow, I had no idea, Liz. I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounded lame, inadequate, but I have no idea what else to say to fill the yawning void that blankets the room.
Liz looks tired, sad still, but also a bit of smile tugs at the outer corner of her lips.
“It was a long time ago, ten years this month, and it just wasn’t meant to be. In those days he was young, fast-tracked, and accelerating, focused on his career, certain he was headed for CEO. When he was offered a job here, he knew it was a stepping stone on his path to the executive boardroom at Excelaton.”
A smile still tugs at Liz, but she also appears deflated, as if someone had deliberately, slowly let the air out of a balloon, leaving it flat with the wrinkles and ridges of its true shape after all the life had been sucked out of it.
“Vincent… ” Tears begin to cascade down Liz’s cheeks. “He wanted me to marry him, move here with him, but… ” She stands up, moving toward a tissue box on a counter.
With genuine concern, I go to Liz, this woman who works for me, and wrap her in a comforting, semi-distant, semi-professional embrace. It feels…weird, not to mention dangerous; I mean, I’m trying to be a gentleman, comforting someone in need, but in this #MeToo era this could kill my career faster than I can let go.
Sometimes, you recall the oddest memories at the oddest moments. I remember what the counselors at Christian camp said when they caught me embracing Rebecca Ann that summer, thirty years and several lifetimes ago—Leave room for Jesus, you two.
Discreetly, I hope, I shuffle a step back and pivot, all while trying to maintain my supportive hug, turning my back to the room. Truth is, I don’t know what to do.
To my dismay, it appears that Liz does know; she moves closer into my embrace, her tears moistening my ear and her rapid breath warming my neck. This is a problem.
It gets worse. Turning in slightly, Liz slips her leg, unseen by the others, closer against my thighs, nestling her body into me.
Complicating matters, not all of me is reacting with the same objective, professional disdain.
There oughta be a law.
Thank heavens I see LuLu walking back into the room with a tray covered in plastic wrap. I catch her eye, and she nods, as if she doesn’t need any explanation, she’s just here to save me from myself.
“Who wants dessert?” The brownies are piled high on the plate, and LuLu is making a show of sprinkling confectioners’ sugar on each brownie. “Liz dear, would you please help me?”
Relieved, I feel Liz’s scorching warmth slide off my thigh. Her wandering hand traces a slow, gentle path, as she turns to help LuLu.
As I turn, I realize that thankfully, no one noticed the little drama. I don’t know how I will repay LuLu for getting Liz disentangled from me, but whatever I do pay, it won’t be enough.
“Yes,” I hear Rob say, realizing he’s made a call while I was wrapped up with Liz. So much for worrying he was focused on me. “I want…yes, I know, no I can’t, not right now. You know I… ”
The rest of Rob’s conversation is too low for me to hear until he says his final goodbye.
“Yes, dear, I’ll call again tonight. Kiss the girls.”
He and his wife are separated, with no kids.
Puzzled, and a bit…curious, I turn to see if anyone else has heard.
Tucker is lost in his computer, muttering to himself.
Weirdo.
Probably figuring out how to kill someone else, maybe all of us. It’s amazing how extreme stress brings out the negative in folks, including me.
For a moment, I take stock of me, the team, our situation…everything.
Tucker and Rob are huddled over a desk, arguing. LuLu and Liz are in the corner, whispering in a conspiratorial, inaudible tone around a plate while LuLu continues to dash a shaker of confectioners’ sugar over the brownies.
I don’t know what’s going on, but Rob and Tucker raise their voices. From the biting tone of his rant, Tucker isn’t happy, and without warning, he turns and stalks off, slamming the door as he leaves. LuLu glances at me from across the room with a smile and winks.
What the hell?
I feel like I’m in a deranged dystopian Mad Libs. Officially out of my comfort zone, thanks.
Vincent is dead, and folks are edgy and getting up way too close and personal. Let’s hope I survive. I’m beginning to have my doubts.
Approaching steps snap me out of my reverie. LuLu saunters toward me carrying a plate of brownies and wearing a smile I’ve never seen before—and we’ve been on a bunch of jobs together.
Behind her, I see Liz offering brownies to Rob, who is back on the phone, whispering. His dark, hooded eyes threaten to extinguish the fledgling positive energy the ladies are trying to introduce. I’d hate to have those eyes rest on me, I decide.
“So…what was that? With you and Liz?” LuLu asks me.
Obviously my disentanglement from Liz hadn’t gone unnoticed, and LuLu’s “rescue” hadn’t been as altruistic as I’d hoped. Try and comfort someone, and you end up getting screwed.
“That… ” My mouth is full of brownie—wacky or not, it’s good, though I feel the annoying whisper of confectioners’ sugar dust the corner of my mouth. I drag the back of my hand across my face and rub it across my slacks. “That was me trying to be understanding, compassionate.”
“Hmm. Okay. Well, that’s how it appeared…compassionate.”
I don’t know how to respond. I chew thoughtfully and stare at her.
She smiles. “How’s the brownie? As wacky as you hoped?”
“LuLu,” I say, “this whole day is wacky!”
LuLu grins. “Isn’t that the best kind of day…unpredictable.” Her eyes take on a weird, omniscient cast as she purses her lips.
At that moment, I decide I am out of my element. My blood pressure doesn’t need this shit. I’m considering shutting the whole effort down and waiting for the police to start waterboarding. I’ll even hold the hose, anything to sort out this situation.
I look up and see Rob lumbering my way, his anger from the argument with Tucker radiating from him. I see him reaching into his pocket, struggling to yank something out of his pocket.
Sweat breaks out across my forehead and my face goes slack.
I can see Rob is talking to me, his lips moving and his spittle-laced tirade assaulting me. But I can’t understand him. As fast as it erupted, his eruption moves on, as his hand clears his pocket, clutching a packet of cigarettes, and he stalks outside. LuLu’s grin has disappeared, genuine concern in its place. She bolts after Rob, glancing my way as she disappears through the doorway.
Turns out Rob is the least of my problems.
Air.
More precisely, the lack of it.
A wet, ragged wheezing has replaced the silent, dependable process that previously brought precious oxygen to my body and brain. In vain, I struggle to make my lungs do their damn job, as a pounding bass drum takes center stage in my head.
My hands itch as a million phantom fire ants crawl from my pores and march up my arms in military cadence. I desperately try to shake them off, but there are battalions of them. Fire radiates up my arms. If only I could peel off my skin, but my hands no longer respond to commands.
Liz must sense something is wrong; she’s at my side in a moment, helping lean me into the warm, comforting, protective embrace of the V where the walls met.
“Shhh. That’s a good boy.”
I don’t have a chance to analyze her odd, soothing, but in no way urgent words, before gray begins to lower like a final curtain. It isn’t an on/off transition but an inexorable march to the inevitable.
Ice quenches the fire when Liz gently wraps my hand in hers, interlacing our fingers in an intimate grasp, sensitive palms caressing. Weird, but comforting nonetheless.
I feel my balance shift, and the room begins to tilt, like one of the old animation books you had when you were a kid. Each page had the same character in the same spot in the top right corner, but in each page, a single detail was shifted, but in a small way. Hold the book in your hand and shuffle the pages at speed, and a full-motion cartoon was born. My cartoon showed a dashingly handsome guy who no longer had control of his life or body slide, in a slow, sad, pathetic gasp, toward nothingness.
With a vague awareness, I barely feel the carpet fiber scratch my lower back, where the slow journey down the wall pulled my shirt, exposing my skin.
Losing touch with the rest of my body, my brain is sending out pings, but sensory answers are few. The warmth from Liz’s palm is the reassurance I count on.
But the warmth doesn’t help the fire radiating up my arms, doesn’t remove the elephant on my chest. So many questions, but I feel the light inside flicker.
With a weak revelation, I realize the irony.
I’d expected, decades from now at my life’s end, to slide in broadside in a cloud of wheel smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out—nothing left—and proclaiming, “Wow! What a Ride!” Now, I don’t know if I could raise the breath to proclaim my surrender as the curtain continues to inch lower and the gray obscures my sight.
The overpowering smell of Chanel No. 5 jerks me from my unplanned but peaceful rest. I feel a determined, tender hand ease behind me, slide under my collar, push upward on my neck and cradle the base of my head with love. Warm breath wafts across my ear.
“Vince got your sushi.”
With supreme effort, I manage to force one eye open a crack. I look at Liz, wanting to form a questioning look, but I can’t feel my face. A searing pain lances through my abdomen.
“What you are experiencing is the effect of tetrodotoxin on your central nervous system and muscles.”
I stare blankly through the small slit. Tetrodotoxin sounds familiar, but my brain feels like it is drowning. I can’t move my lips; I couldn’t talk if I wanted to, and all I want is to rest.
“Why, you ask? I know you, Ethan. Even as you go, you’ll want to understand.”
Tetrodotoxin…something about sushi tries to rise through the molasses of thoughts from my oxygen-starved brain. Vince wasn’t the target, I realize.
“You and LuLu have been holding me back, taking opportunities that should have been mine. I should have been the manager for this proposal, not you. This is my time, but Excelaton didn’t recognize it, so I decided to remove the obstacle—you.”
I’d been poisoned over a proposal? By a proposal coordinator, no less?
The fire in my chest is titanic; I can’t laugh, I can’t cry. The slit of light connecting me to the war room goes dark, but in the darkness I can’t escape her mocking voice.
She chuckles, and her voice rings with a detached, singsong quality.
“LuLu gave Vince your sushi by accident. No matter. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
I can’t tell if Liz is lowering her voice as LuLu, Rob, and Tucker approach, or if my hearing, my last link to the world, is abandoning me.
A shard of memory rips through viscous thoughts. Tetrodotoxin is a toxin in fugu. Puffer fish. But Mon Cher Nakamoto doesn’t serve fugu.
“Amazing the things you can buy online from China, like powdered, synthetic tetrodotoxin, a bargain at one hundred dollars a gram. Everyone knows how much you love your sushi, how you kick off every proposal by serving it to your team—bonding over food.” Liz chuckles again. “Look where your team building got you.”
I guess I’m more predictable than I thought. I pride myself on my situational awareness, but I realize now my pride is a sham. I know nothing about the reality around me. All I know is I need air and I need the pain to stop.
“Everyone would’ve seen LuLu serve you sushi, but the stupid cow served Vince instead. So I had to pivot. Fortunately, she took my suggestion for some welcome-back wacky brownies. And everyone saw her serve you the brownie today.”
I struggle to recall the brownie. All I remember is the excessive layer of confectioners’ sugar that made my tongue tingle.
“The tetrodotoxin crystals I scattered around LuLu’s purse will seal the deal. Poor jealous LuLu. And everyone saw our affection earlier. In fact, Ethan, I was pleased and pleasantly surprised that I had that effect on you. Perhaps, in another life… ”
My head droops sideways.
“Shhh, just a few more moments now, honey.”
A beeping comes from my wrist, my Apple watch alerting me to my dangerously low heart rate, but it is in vain. I am a frozen, mute spectator at my own murder.
“Goodbye, Ethan. I win.”
Ironic, I think, that a colleague not as experienced as me has bested me in a game I didn’t realize we were playing.
The door bangs open as I hear Liz yell to the other team members, “LuLu, anybody, help me. Something’s wrong with Ethan!”
I strain to hear over the rustle of cloth as Liz pulls my head into her ample chest and begins to wail.
The pain stops and my thoughts slow, gradually compressing the whiteboard of my mind.
My consciousness is like lines of vanishing code, disappearing a line at a time into a black void. Then the characters begin to march toward the center, evaporating into blackness in a steady rhythm that ticks off my remaining time, until, finally, just a single line remains on the field of black:
D(final)
Britt Alan is the author of The Dragon Proxies thriller series. His debut, Tiananmen Ascending, was hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “highly recommended for readers who enjoy cerebral, absorbing narratives about contemporary politics and the devastating potential of global terror.” Britt has twenty-six years’ experience in military science and technology, technical and persuasive writing, international relations, and communications. His interest in global politics started when, at age eight, he wrote the Islamic Republic of Iran to protest the Iran hostage crisis. The response sent to him by the Islamic Republic’s charge d’affaires introduced him to propaganda and years later inspired Tiananmen Ascending. Britt lives in Washington, DC, and is writing his next novel of international intrigue, aggression and deception. www.BrittAlan.com