be in for a couple of hours, and Gil would have plenty of time to figure out how he was going to play down last Friday’s dinner fiasco with Ludlow.
The familiar “You’ve Got Mail” alert interrupted Gil’s final sip of coffee.
Jesus! What’s he doing in this early?
Obviously, someone had already informed George of the problem. Nothing but a potentially lost source of income would get the big guy in at this hour.
A piercing alarm proclaimed that Gil’s main computer had gone down and the rest were about to follow. He rushed to delete George’s message. He was too late. The screens on his two alternate computers and the lights on his Internet server went dark. Gil held his breath as he waited for the whirr that would confirm that the backup system had kicked in. He sighed with relief. The backup system’s welcome drone promised that, within a few minutes, everything would be up and running and more than seven terabytes of information would have been saved from oblivion.
Until recently, George’s e-mail would have simply meant yet another pain-in-the-ass communication that required Gil’s attention. For the past two weeks, however, any incoming e-mail bearing George’s screen name sent Gil’s computer network crashing.
Gil had warned George that if he continued to refuse to incorporate RSA security codes, they were inviting a major hacking catastrophe. George refused to discuss the matter. Gil offered to brave George’s maze of computers to try and tease out the problem. George refused. Finally, they came to a truce. Gil agreed to drop the whole thing with the promise that George would phone, rather than send any e-mail until Gil figured out a workaround. The cease-fire lasted two days. By the third day, the big guy was sending e-mail messages as if there had never been a problem.
Each time an incoming e-mail shut Gil down, George would claim, as if for the first time, that he was doing his best to remember. “After all,” he would add with a shrug and an innocent smile, “I guess I’m just a creature of habit.”
Gil pulled his chair in close to the largest of the monitors and rapidly typed in a series of commands. Line by line, he examined the high-end security program he had designed for himself only days before the trouble had first begun.
What was triggering the goddamn thing to crash? And why only with George’s e-mail?
Even his Dobermans couldn’t find the source of the problem. Gil grabbed the phone and dialed George’s extension.
“I’m coming. I’m coming,” Gil said as he continued to type. “And for Christ’s sake, don’t send any more e-mails.”
Gil shook his head. What a waste. A brilliant mind like George’s imprisoned in a four-hundred-pound body. With the maturity of a preadolescent, to boot. Nobody at work had ever seen the mountain of a man with a friend or had ever known him to go out socially. George simply shuffled from home to the offices, eating and sitting in front of one computer or another or playing with his latest tech toy. Though George had no one to blame but himself, still, it was a pathetic waste of a life.
Given that he was probably terribly lonely, or maybe because of it, George wasn’t half bad to work for. Though he was smart as hell, he wasn’t competitive. He spoke his mind when he didn’t like the way something was going but, in general, he appreciated Gil’s work and told him so quite often. George was okay and just self-conscious enough about his appearance to make him easy to get along with. All you had to do was tell George there had been a noticeable decrease in his ample middle, and he’d beam at you like a happy five-year-old. Just a big old puppy dog—a greedy but lovable big old puppy dog.
The last computer kicked in and, before George could send yet another e-mail, Gil headed for what could be loosely referred to as George’s office.
EIGHT
A few minutes later
The top floor of CyberNet Forensics shuddered with the combined boom of two televisions and a radio. On-screen reporters offered details on the latest disasters against a background of country music.
Since George had come on board, two finance people who had been working in rooms adjacent to his office had been moved to other locations. Another had taken a leave without pay until the company could relocate him to a lower floor, and one of the bookkeepers had just up and quit.
Management had changed the location of George’s office twice before exiling him to the far end of the longest hall in the building. George couldn’t have been happier. The huge man simply could not bear to work in silence. Even normal levels of noise were not enough. Surrounding himself in the clamor was not a mere idiosyncrasy, it was a necessity. And one that afforded him some extra perks.
“What can I say?” admitted George with a devilish grin, when the last person on the floor finally fled. “It leaves all that extra space just for me.”
Gil approached the office and steeled himself for an even greater rush of sensory overload; a few minutes of audio abuse was all he could endure. He had given up on asking George to turn down the volume. His request always met with George’s self-analysis: “News, computers, and country music. Them’s all I know, them’s all I love.”
Gil knocked and, without waiting, walked in on the all-too-familiar scene of George stuffing his face with food.
This morning, the big guy was polishing off the last of his high-fiber breakfast cereal. It was a daily ritual that never seemed to make any difference in his health, weight, or, as George so often explained in far too much detail, his regularity.
Gil entered. George did his best to rise to his feet. He looked as if he had been caught doing something quite obscene. In the ensuing confusion of dislodging his bulk from his rolling chair, George overturned his plastic bowl and spoon. The remainder of the soggy cereal and a half-opened container of low-fat milk flowed over the jumbled spread of computer printouts that were strewn across his desk amid research reports, memos, graphs, and journals that lay one on top of the other. All became potential blotters for the fast-spreading white liquid. In a half-hearted attempt to contain George’s most recent food-spill disaster, Gil reached below the soggiest section of paper and lifting it, turned toward the trashcan. George tripped over himself in an attempt to stop him.
Gil shook his head. “Why do you do this?”
“Do what, eat cereal?” George asked. He flashed Gil what was supposed to pass for an endearing smile and attempted to sop up the milk with a single paper napkin.
“I’m serious. This is nuts. You probably have two weeks’ worth of downloads here from every crackpot website in the world.”
“I know, but I haven’t had time to go over them yet. I spend a lot of time researching this stuff, you know, and some of it could be really important.”
Gil shook his head.
“You might be interested to know I’ve been saving one of these downloads for you!” George added.
Foraging through the pile, George carefully extracted one set of papers that had not escaped the sludge of cereal and milk.
“It’s about your Ludlow job…” George began.
“Look, about Ludlow. I think we ought to…”
George pulled one of the pages free. “Hold on. Where did I see it? Oh, yeah, here it is. Look at this. It’s a reprint of a Reuter’s news release from a while ago. It says that Ludlow, well, not Ludlow himself, but DeVris, the guy he works with in Israel, has one already.”
“One what?”
“One copper scroll, you putz. It says that they already have a copper scroll. So Ludlow, acting all academic and everything, isn’t just looking for this diary to lead him to any old scroll, he’s looking for the mate to one that the Museum already has,” George concluded. He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “And, from what the article says, I would imagine the complete set could turn them a very nice profit.”
Gil shrugged noncommittedly. He had