Blue raised his own glass. “To making righteous decisions.”
Chapter 6
“Have you seen this?!” Theresa tossed a pamphlet onto Corbin’s lap and slid onto the end of his desk. She crossed her legs and smoothed her maroon skirt.
Corbin recognized the pamphlet as the invitation to the office’s summer conference. This was usually held at a ritzy hotel downtown, and it was attended by hordes of industry people, all looking for some advantage to be gained by meeting the office’s senior staff. Cooper Wilson used these conferences to encourage the industry to lobby Congress for more funds for the office.
“Turn to the back,” Theresa said, “you’ll laugh yourself silly.”
Corbin flipped the pamphlet over. “Humma humma humma ‘office continues to struggle in an understaffed capacity’? ‘Imperils the mission’?” Corbin furrowed his brow. “Who wrote this crap?”
“Kak, who do you think?”
“What a lying sack of-”
“Do you think we’ll have to go to this one?” Theresa asked, cutting Corbin off.
“Don’t we always?”
“What’s the date?” Beckett asked. “Maybe I’ll be gone before it happens?”
“No such luck, partner, June 2nd,” Corbin said.
“Shoot.”
Theresa shook her head. “I thought there was some sort of mercy rule: once you’ve been to enough of these, they let you stop attending?”
“You should suggest that to Kak,” Corbin offered.
“Sure, next time we have dinner I’ll mention it right after the dessert course.” Theresa rolled her eyes. She disliked Kak as much as anyone. “At least we get a day off out of it.”
“Day off? From what?” Beckett snickered.
Theresa didn’t laugh. Beckett was treading into an area they had already fought over twice before, and she wasn’t going to let his reference to this ancient antagonism go unchallenged. “From work, what do you think?!”
“What work? Nobody works around here.”
“You know, I take offense at that,” Theresa responded over her shoulder, without turning to face Beckett. “I work hard.”
“I’m sorry, Theresa, but no one here can claim they work hard, especially compared to the real world.”
“Don’t give me that. You can’t compare the private sector to the government. I’m doing a public service, which requires careful deliberation. The private sector can’t do that, all they care about is profit. Besides, what do you expect, we’re underpaid. Do you know how much they get paid? I do. I worked in the private sector before I came here.”
“For six months, ten years ago.”
“It was enough, let me tell you. If they want me to work like I’m in the private sector, they need to start paying me like I’m in the private sector.” Theresa jabbed her finger against Corbin’s deskfor emphasis as she spoke.
“That still doesn’t explain why people here don’t give an honest day’s work.”
“I don’t accept that!”
“Really? How much of your day is spent playing solitaire on the computer?”
Beckett and Theresa both raised their voices.
“That’s not fair! This is a stressful job. I need something to relieve the pressure.”
“What pressure? There’s nothing stressful about this job!”
Theresa slid off Corbin’s desk and circled around toward Beckett like a boxer in a ring. Despite her tight pencil skirt and her unstable heels, she moved smoothly from years of practice as she wore nothing else. “Nothing stressful?! We make decisions that affect real people.”
Beckett stiffened. “No we don’t. We just review files to make sure money was spent properly.”
“It affects people. Not to mention, the support around here is miserable.” Theresa’s face contorted with disgust. Her nose flared, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes narrowed and seemed to come together to a point, and she bared her teeth as she curled her lips. “They do nothing,” she hissed. “I even have to write my own letters because my secretary is totally worthless. Now, she should be fired!” Theresa yelled in a voice that was strangely reminiscent of a Disney villainess. “People like her make the rest of us look bad!”
Beckett was temporarily startled by her tone.
Theresa squinted her eyes. “And let me tell you, I don’t see you working any harder than anyone else!”
“I sure don’t,” Beckett admitted, “but I don’t pretend I work hard.”
“I don’t pretend either,” Theresa gasped.
“Ok, tell me one thing you’ve finished in the past month.”
“That’s not a fair measure of what I do!”
“Then what is?”
“I’m not going to argue with you about this.”
“It doesn’t bother you that taxpayers are working hard to support my napping habit?” Beckett’s tone sharpened.
“I don’t nap at the office!” Theresa barked indignantly.
“Face it, if you had to hire someone for a job that mattered, you’d never hire anyone who worked as little as the people do in this office, including yourself!”
Theresa stepped toward Beckett, shaking her finger in his face. “Not everyone wants to work in a dog eat dog environment. I don’t want a job where my boss can fire me because he doesn’t like me or because he thinks I don’t work hard enough. I want the security this job provides, and you don’t have a right to criticize my choice.”
“That’s enough, both of you!” Corbin said, rising from his seat and pulling Theresa away from Beckett. He ushered her toward the door, where she stomped off down the hall. Corbin watched her march the length of the hallway before turning to Beckett.
“You’re just determined to be all kinds of popular around here aren’t you?”
“She started it.”
“Yeah, and she was gonna finish it too.”
“I’ll drop by later and make it up to her.”
“Why do those sound like famous last words?”
Chapter 7
Every criminal scheme needs a moment where the schemers stop thinking of it as a theory and start thinking of it as a fact. If that moment doesn’t come, the scheme never attains reality, it just slowly fades away into the realm of forgotten dreams. But if the moment does come, the plan takes on a life of its own, an inevitability, and it gains a momentum which pulls the participants relentlessly toward their fate. No one could say exactly when Corbin’s plan became a fact, but by early May it had.
Corbin and Beckett sat on opposite sides of Corbin’s desk. The door was closed and one of the extra chairs was pushed against it to stop anyone from barging in. Corbin reached into his leather wallet and pulled out various items. “Observe: one social security card, phony; one social security card, real.” Corbin set the two cards down side by side. “One Virginia drivers license, real. Another Virginia drivers license, phony. One Pennsylvania license, phony. You tell me, what’s phony, what’s real.”
Beckett picked up the social security cards. They were identical except for a nearly imperceptible coffee stain on one card. The Virginia drivers licenses also were identical, except for a frayed edge on one card and the laminate on the other appearing thinner and cheaper.
“Pretty amazing, I’ll give you that.” Beckett rubbed the social security cards with his thumb. “They even feel similar. Still,” Beckett held up the card with the coffee stain, “you can’t fake a coffee stain.”
“Actually, you can. It’s a digital image I added to the card.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“What about the licenses? Which one’s real?”
Beckett examined both Virginia licenses closely. “My money’s on the one with the frayed edge and the professional lamination.”
“Wanna bet lunch on it?”
“Apparently, not.” Beckett returned to the social security cards. “Where did you find the paper?”
“Staples. The clerk thought I was crazy feeling all of their card stock.”
“These are amazing, but I’m no expert. I don’t look at these things for a living. A banker might not be fooled.”