Or maybe he was just going to end up in a box, six feet under. Another number in all the statistics of black men that his father had warned him about and that his mother had feared. Don’t end up like your cousin. Don’t end up like so-and-so’s nephew—
Don’t end up in a coffin.
He remembered each of his parents in their coffins, each of their smooth faces beyond pain, even though when they’d died he’d seen the terror in their eyes.
He remembered those funerals. First Dad, with Mom to stand beside him. Then Mom, and only Uncle Ty to take care of him. He remembered standing there, not knowing how to cry and not knowing how to let go, with his stiff-faced uncle holding his hand. Don’t worry, boy. I got you. Your Uncle Ty’s got you.
The elevator opened, revealing an antechamber with locked glass doors. Beyond the doors BANKS STRATEGY PARTNERS gleamed on a wall over a secretarial desk.
“Welcome to the Doubt Factory,” Alix said.
Moses found he couldn’t move.
“You okay?” Alix asked.
Alix tugged him, and he let himself be pulled off the elevator. Moses swallowed. “I’ve spent the last three years wanting to get into here. Cruising by outside, looking for some way…” He trailed off. This was where all his pain had come from.
His father lying on the bathroom floor, gasping. Trying to get up and failing. And then his mother, a year later, collapsing under the stress of loss. Her collapsing to the floor of the grocery store, cans rolling, bottles shattering, lettuce spilling out onto the linoleum tiles while everyone turned and stared. And him standing there, stupid with shock. Seeing the thing he’d feared the most, happening right in front of him. He remembered trying to make his body move, to run to her, and instead finding himself frozen and unable to do anything at all.
It had all started here.
All those years living with his uncle, the man not knowing how to do anything except teach a young boy about the con…
And now, at last, Moses had come full circle. A business office, just like all the other polished business offices. It was infuriating that the place looked so normal.
“It feels like…” He hesitated. “It should be bigger. I don’t know. More…”
“Like Mordor?”
He nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. This is the place that did it to us. Me. Adam. Cynthia. Kook. Tank. All of us. Someone inside here came up with a plan and made sure that we all ended up where we did.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
It should have been filled with bats, Moses thought. Bats and the sulfurous stink of evil. Instead, it was sterile AC air and a tenth-floor view of other buildings that were just the same size. Modern evil. It didn’t look like anything except another office building.
If you wanted to look at evil, it was just a bunch of suits and ties, a bunch of cubicles and computers, the quiet whirring of commerce. Evil wasn’t anything. It was just business as usual.
“Moses?” Alix asked. She was looking at him, and her tone was worried. “Are you okay?”
He turned to look at Alix. The girl who had risked everything to join him on this Don Quixote quest, standing there in her custodial uniform, looking concerned.
You’re not alone, anymore, he realized. She’s with you. She cares about you.
The Doubt Factory had stolen so much from him, and yet it had also given him Alix. The thing that had destroyed his past had given him the girl who made him want a future. He wanted a future with her.
So let’s put the Doubt Factory in the past.
Suddenly Moses felt a weight lifting off him.
It was all going to work. He’d finally made it here. And thanks to Alix, he was going to make it through to the other side.
“I’m good,” he said, and couldn’t help smiling. “Let’s go dig some secrets.”
Alix booted up her father’s computer. Her face lit blue as it glowed alive with its security challenges.
“Okay,” she said, “This is where we see if Kook’s programs are as good as she thought.”
“Oh, they’re good all right.”
Moses plugged his slate into the computer’s USB drive and held his breath. A second later the retrieval program kicked back the answer they were looking for. The password was as long and as bad as a software-license code.
“Damn. Your dad’s serious about security.” He started reading off numbers and letters, letting Alix type, with her confirming each letter and number out loud as he worked through the sequence.
Alix hit Enter.
Authenticating…
They held their breaths.
The computer continued with its boot sequence and opened to a familiar desktop layout.
“I’ll be damned,” Alix whispered.
Moses couldn’t help grinning. “I told you Kook was good!”
“Yeah, she’s a genius. What do you want to get?”
“Let’s see if we can look at some client files.”
It took a little bit of rooting around in the server’s file structure, but eventually Alix found what she was looking for and popped open a database search window. One of the fields said Company.
Alix typed * in the window and hit Enter.
Corporate names started spooling:
Dow Chemical
Monsanto
ConocoPhillips
Philip Morris
Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals
Lukoil
Merck & Co
Pfizer Inc
Marcea
Apple Inc
Hewlett-Packard
American Petroleum Institute
Intel
National Rifle Association
Amgen Inc
Household Product Association
Eli Lilly & Co
American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers
Oxbow Corp
Microsoft Corp
Hill + Knowlton
Oracle Corp
Novartis AG
Bayer AG
AstraZeneca PLC
Exxon Mobil
Koch Industries
Facebook Inc
Amazon.com
National Association of Manufacturers
3M
Royal Dutch Shell
Chevron Corp
BP
Edelman
Procter & Gamble
Association of Equipment Manufacturers
Unilever
Personal Care Products Council
Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America
Archer Daniels Midland
CropLife America
Syngenta AG…
The list just kept going.
And going and going….
“This can’t be right,” Moses said. “It’s like every major company in the world. BSP can’t have done doubt work for all of them. I mean, BSP is good, but they’re not this big.”
Alix frowned and started opening files, checking the contents under individual company names.
“Some of this looks like standard PR,” she said. “Totally legit work. Crisis communications, that kind of thing. Some of it looks like it’s more like ad campaign stuff… just general image polishing.”
Fighting a feeling of disappointment, Alix went back to the main search screen and started checking pull-down menus. “The database is broken down by industry type, but it’s obviously not organized by ‘unethical business work’ or anything like that.”
“Okay, that makes sense. So what do we have?”
“I don’t know. There’s a ton of stuff in here. Some of this looks like they’re consulting with other PR firms. Some of it’s just letters and stuff. Just really basic correspondence.” She popped open a file. “This one’s just a pitch letter. I don’t think Google hired BSP, but I guess Dad thought they had an image problem that he could help with.”