He headed straight for the sundries store and bought a postage-paid
Walt Disney World postcard with a little magnetic patch mounted on one
corner. You filled up the memory with a couple hours' worth of video
and as many photos as you wanted and mailed it off. The pixelated
display on the front played a slide show of the images -- at least
once a year, some honeymoon couple would miss this fact and throw a
couple racy bedroom shots in the mix, to the perennial delight of the
mail room.
He hastily wrote some banalities about the great time he and the kids
were having in Disney World, then he opened his computer and looked up
the address that the Church woman had checked in under. He addressed
it, simply, to "Suzanne," to further throw off the scent, then he
slipped it into a mail-slot with a prayer to the gods of journalist
shield laws.
He walked as calmly as he could back to his golf-cart, clipping on his
employee badge and tucking his shirt back in. Then he motored calmly
to his office building. The Disney cops were sweating under the
mid-day sun.
"Mr Page?"
"Yes," he said.
"I'm to take your computer to IT, sir."
"I don't think so," Sammy said, with perfect calm. "I think we'll GO
up to my office and call a meeting of the executive committee
instead."
The security guard was young, Latino, and skinny. His short
back-and-sides left his scalp exposed to the sun. He took his hat off
and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, exposing a line of acne
where his hat-band irritated the skin. It made Sammy feel sorry for
the kid -- especially considering that Sammy earned more than 20 times
the kid's salary.
"This really isn't your job, I know," Sammy said, wondering where all
this sympathy for the laboring classes had come from, anyway? "I don't
want to make it hard for you. We'll go inside. You can hang on to the
computer. We'll talk to some people. If they tell you to go ahead, you
go ahead. Otherwise, we go see them, all right?"
He held his computer out to the kid, who took it.
"Let's go up to my office now," he said.
The kid shook his head. "I'm supposed to take this --"
"I know, I know. But we have a deal." The kid looked like he would
head out anyway. "And there are backups in my office, so you need to
come and get those, too."
That did it. The kid looked a little grateful as they went inside,
where the air conditioning was blowing icy cold.
"You should have waited in the lobby, Luis," Sammy said, reading the
kid's name off his badge. "You must be boiled."
"I had instructions," Luis said.
Sammy made a face. "They don't sound like very reasonable
instructions. All the more reason to sort this out, right?"
Sammy had his secretary get Luis a bottle of cold water and a little
plate of grapes and berries out of the stash he kept for his visitors,
then he called Guignol from his desk phone.
"It's Sammy. I need to call an emergency meeting of the exec
committee," he said without preamble.
"This is about Hackelberg, isn't it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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