Chapter One
Bouncingdownthehallof the offices he built by sheer will to accomplish one of his many dreams, Benson Carter smiled and gave a cheery wave to his assistant, Joyce Franz. “Joyce, how ya doin’?”
“I’m good, Ben, but Kurt isn’t. He’s stuck on that project you gave him and terrified you’re going to fire him.”
Benson’s chest hurt at the thought of that. “Have I not conveyed that I’m not one of those shit bosses?”
“Guess not. I told him just to talk to you, but he’s…apprehensive.”
She was a peach. Out of the hundreds that applied for the job, she’d been the only one to come in and shake his hand with the grit and determination that he was looking for.
You see, Benson was a pushover. Always the optimist, people person, and people-pleaser, he needed someone with an iron will and that steel-eyed presence that he, himself, could never have.
Known as the Ice Lady at her two previous gigs, she looked the part. Prematurely gray hair, cut short and pasted back likeBridgit Neilson in Beverly Hills Cop, blue/gray eyes to match her hair, and never a smile unless it was one of derision.
“Joyce…did you maybe put that fear into him?”
“He’s already two weeks late, Ben. If he’s any later, we’ll be late with the contract, and we take the chance of losing four hundred million dollars to start. Overall, we could lose the company, and the billions of dollars this program could make for us. I thought you wanted this company to succeed.”
Well, that hit him in a much different place than the chest. That one hit him in the wallet. “Wow, that bad?”
“That bad. Get the grin off your face and go talk to him. I don’t care if you give him one of your patented pep talks, just end it with a threat of being fired and a black spot on his record, of which he won’t soon rid himself.”
She sat again and got back to her computer, effectively dismissing him.
It was like that every day. He always felt as if he worked for her instead of the other way around, but it was what he needed, after all.
After straightening his tie and forcing the constant smile from his face, Benson pushed the double doors of his office open to see a hunched-over man sitting in the chair in front of his desk.
The moment he stepped into the room, however, Kurt Dore stood, head bent, arms crossed over his chest. “Mr. Carter, hello, sir.”
“I said I didn’t want to be called sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
After a roll of his eyes, he went behind his mid-century modern desk in the room he’d had fashioned in the same style and sat, hands resting on the smooth surface of the teak wood. “Sit, please, Kurt.”
“Yes, sir.”
His lips twitched to smile. He was so used to it he didn’t know how to frown. Life was good, it was beautiful, and for all the downfalls he’d had, he’d clawed his way to success every time, because he never let gloom get to him.
The man in front of him, however, had gloom coming off him in waves, and Benson’s first impulse was to pick him up and help.
Joyce, however, would kill him.
“Kurt, I understand you are still behind on the project.”
“Yes, sir. I’m so sorry! It was a glitch in the programming, and my team and I, we’re working night and day to fix it.”
Swallowing the words,then you’re doing all you can, and that’s good enough for me, he cleared his throat of them and said, “That’s good, Kurt, but as you must know, not good enough.”
When he saw the tear falling down Kurt’s face, all his stern countenance left him and he took a tissue from the orange box on his desk, got up and went to him, setting one hand on his shoulder and handing him the tissue with the other. “Kurt, there’s no need of that.”
“Sir, two members of my team made viruses to check it. They both got through.”
“Your team are crack computer experts. They know coding better than people in the FBI and even the CIA, from whom I headhunted two of them. To make a virus that the program can’t kill…well…”
“The program should kill anything. Malware, Trojan horses, anything.”
