Deception Read Online Free Page A

last, however, made him pause. It reported a phone call from Leonard. The time of the call was illegible. Below the time, Daisy had scrawled a single word: Negative.
    Negative , Keyes thought.
    His eyes, already swollen from fatigue, crinkled into thin slits.
    He fell into the chair behind his desk, reached for the phone, and stabbed a button. Through the cracked-open door, he could hear the buzz from the next room. “Yes?” Daisy said, through the intercom.
    â€œWhen did Leonard call? I can’t read your handwriting.”
    He heard the edge in his own voice, and tried to press it down. A moment passed. Paper rustled. Everything at Applied Data Systems was done in old-fashioned triplicate. Until he had started on this goddamned diet, that had never seemed quite so irritating.
    â€œThree-fifty,” Daisy said. She had injected a hint of solemnity into her tone, sensing his mood. “He’ll call back.”
    â€œWhat did he say, exactly?”
    â€œJust ‘ negative .’”
    â€œWhen he calls, put it through. No matter what.”
    â€œAll right,” she said.
    He pressed the button again, and the speaker went dead.
    Negative.
    What in hell was that supposed to mean?
    He touched an index finger to either temple, made small circles for a few moments—tight circles, circles within circles—then knuckled at his eyes, reached for the messages, and went to work.
    Dick Bierman had called from INFOSEC with a question about Applied Data Systems’s network’s “ping response time,” whatever that was. Keyes scrawled an evasive answer on a Post-it note—Bierman was eternally digging, coming up with stupid questions in an effort to learn details about ADS’s computer setup—then affixed it to the message sheet. The message sheet with the Post-it note attached went into the Out basket. Let Daisy handle Dick Bierman. Next was a message from Alex Petrov, in charge of the screen house at gamma site in Nevada. Petrov needed more water pumps, which meant he needed more money; yet the man was too impatient to go through the regular routine of paperwork. He would rather waste Keyes’s valuable time. Keyes read the figure Petrov suggested, cut it in half, and slapped another Post-it with the new figure onto the sheet. Into the Out basket. Let Daisy handle all of it. He was too hungry to think straight. He was in no goddamned mood for any of it.
    He stared at the next note for a full minute before his mind switched gears and he was able to comprehend it. The caterer’s quote for his daughter’s wedding—criminal, but they could get away with it, he supposed, thanks to their reputation. And they had cleverly waited until the last minute to provide the quote, leaving him in the lurch. Nothing but the best, he thought sourly, and crumpled the note into a ball.
    Negative.
    What the hell was that?
    Perhaps he had made a mistake, in leaving Epstein up to Leonard. Perhaps he should have followed official channels …
    No. This wasn’t brain surgery. It was one elderly scientist who had run on the spur of the moment. According to Roger Ford, Leonard was more than capable of handling it.
    Lunch would make him feel better.
    â€œIf Leonard calls,” he told Daisy on his way out, “patch it through to my cell.”
    2.
    There was a blackboard in the elevator.
    In the goddamned elevator , Keyes thought; for Christ’s sake. Did the eggheads truly need that? Was it really probable that inspiration would strike during the five or ten seconds they spent traveling between floors, and if they couldn’t scrawl down some figures at that very moment they would lose the inspiration forever? Well, perhaps it was. The truth was that he didn’t understand how their minds worked. Half of them couldn’t drive a car, program a VCR, or do their own laundry—but those same men could recite pi to two hundred decimal places, right off the top of their