Navin Sanyal materialized in his elegant corner office, shot the cuffs of his Hermès shirt, and sat down hurriedly at his desk. He was typing madly on his laptop when the phone burbled. Its LED panel showed 3521, his supervisor's extension.
"Goddammit," he grated, reaching for the phone. "Yes, Andrea!" he said into it, as cheerfully as he could manage.
"I need to see you in Conference Room Three. Now." Her voice was cold, but then, it always was.
"Right in the middle of something--can you give me five minutes?"
"Three." The phone clicked in his ear. Andrea Schad never bothered with goodbye.
"You cow," he muttered, replacing the receiver.
Now, what was this unexpected meeting all about? All of his current projects were on schedule, he knew. He shrugged, closing down his laptop. Probably her own supervisor had some new departmental goal and Andrea wanted Navin to make it happen. He glanced at his Piaget Polo watch and sighed. He'd be too late to make the trade. Damn that fat bimbo, anyway.
Leaving his office, he walked down the hallway, passing the trading room on his right in which several dozen young financial officers tracked their puts and calls. He generally avoided the place because the arrogant young traders doing their deals in there looked down at him as a mere "IT drone." Had they been his underlings, he would have made their lives hell.
Navin paused at the window, checking his reflected appearance. He adjusted the lapels of his Brioni suit and straightened his tie. He had nothing but contempt for the FOs. He had built himself a secure little empire in IT, operating from under Andrea's wing. Whereas the FOs, the "fucking oafs," as he thought of them, jammed into their crowded, noisy room with computers and printers, had barely enough desk space for a can of soda or a PDA.
When he entered the conference room, he found Larry Millstein there, sitting at the computer in the corner, apparently readying some sort of presentation. As Navin entered, Larry hurriedly closed it down.
Navin hid his annoyance. Millstein was a new hire, a database wonk from the back office facility out in Whippany who had transferred here to the city. Navin had been obliged to take him on. Millstein asked too many questions and had a disturbing level of technical expertise. Navin was already working on a scheme to have him demoted and, with luck, terminated from the company.
Millstein was a real glad-hander, too, which wasn't a quality that Navin liked in his staffers. Millstein seemed to understand the corporate game and enjoy playing it. To Navin, that was more suspect than Larry's superior technical knowledge.
"Larry, good morning!" said Navin, greeting Larry like an old friend.
"Hi, Navin," Millstein said. Navin's eyes narrowed. There was something in Millstein's voice, an odd little note of triumph that Navin didn't like. He had no time to wonder what it might be, however, because at that moment Andrea Schad swept into the room like a pirate ship.
She was a big woman, taller and heavier than Navin and dressed in typical New York black, which was completely wrong for her coloring. Her hair was cut in a sort of Prince Valiant pageboy, incongruous on a woman her age. "Hello, Navin," she said in her typical monotone. "Show him what we've got," she added to Larry.
Even as Larry turned back to the computer Navin realized what was happening. He'd attended enough "this is how you screwed up and why your ass is being fired" meetings to recognize one.
"I'll make this short and sweet," said Andrea. "Larry?"
Millstein, not doing a good job of hiding his satisfaction, brought up on his screen a series of log files detailing all the puts and calls Navin had made over the past few weeks, puts and calls that had made Navin more than five hundred thousand dollars.
The logs included the short sell he'd been working on just a few minutes earlier.
Navin stared at the screen, knowing he had gone pale but keeping his face utterly impassive. Damn! Somehow they tapped into his computer--which they oughtn't have been able to do--and had been tracing his steps. Even worse, the bot he had put on Andrea's computer, the little chunk of code that was supposed to scan all her email and send him any messages containing his name, had only copied typical administrative stuff back to his machine.
"I'm really glad you were using a wireless system, Navin," Larry said, grinning unpleasantly. "They really make it simple to hack in. At first, we were just testing security on the LAN. Checking everyone's connections, that sort of thing. I found that cute little e-mail trace you put on Andrea's machine. It was trivial to re-write it, of course. I hadn't realized your coding skills were so out of date. But imagine how surprised we were to find you selling futures!"
"The one thing we can't figure out is where you've been getting your information," Andrea said, staring at him. Her dark eyes bored into his. "You receive Tokyo market data at least fifteen minutes early. I want to know how you're doing it."
Larry sat back at ease in his chair. "Because nothing comes in on your phone, or on your computer before you make your sells. After, yes, but not before. Yet you're always right."
"What have I done that is illegal?" Navin asked. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of seeing him squirm. "I've placed orders and been lucky. Okay, maybe I've done it on company time. Fire me if you like. I've done nothing that violates any SEC rules."
Andrea leaned forward slightly and her eyes narrowed to slits. "No one is that 'lucky,'" she said. "The police are on their way, Navin. I called them ten minutes ago." Her small, dark eyes remained fixed on his in that I-can-read-your-mind stare he had always hated. "You can discuss this with them. I think you're getting insider information from somewhere. And that is illegal."
"Ten minutes? Good, that gives me plenty of time." Now that the worst had happened, he found himself strangely calm. They thought they had him.
Millstein guffawed. "Plenty of time for what, Navin? Cleaning out your desk? Where you're going, you won't need any office supplies."
Navin stood up and walked toward the door.
"Where do you think you're going?" spat Schad.
Ignoring her, he stepped out into the corridor. Two doors down was the men's room. He entered, went into a stall, and closed the door. The lavatory door opened behind him and he heard Larry says, "Navin, we're not done with you."
"I am not done with you, either," muttered Navin. He pulled a strange little device out of his pocket and fiddled with the settings.
Larry knocked on the stall door. "Poop your pants, Navin? I don't blame you! I'll just wait right out here until you clean up."
Navin pressed a button on the little console in his hand. He was enveloped in a sparkling peach-colored aura. When it died away, he bared his wrist and set the Pavio for split-screen display. The left hand side he left alone. The right side he set back to the maximum, 43.6 minutes.
On reflection, he re-set the entire watch for the earlier time. This was one little jaunt from which he would not be returning to the present: his future, now, a future he had no intention of reliving.He stepped out of the stall. He was alone in the lav. Purposefully he strode out and turned left down the hallway.
He had about half an hour to get out of the building before Andrea called the police. He assumed that she and Larry were "now" reviewing the files they had been monitoring from his computer. He spared a moment to kick himself about the wireless LAN the company had been experimenting with. At the time, he'd seen it as a boon to his illegal activities, but he'd obviously been wrong about that. Despite his title, he understood less than he would have cared to admit about computer security, relying on his underlings to keep him apprised as necessary. He had risen through the ranks out of marketing, and always delegated the technically challenging parts of his assigned projects to his staff of carefully chosen programmers, all competent but easily cowed and deferential to him.
He headed for the elevator bank, then remembered the security cameras. Better make his exit as unobtrusively as possible. He took the stairs instead. Despite signs warning of video surveillance, he knew there were no cameras in the stairwell.
It would have been nice to rescue his laptop, but it obviously was being monitored, and it wouldn't do to alert Andrea and Larry ahead of time. He'd have to abandon it.
The nine flights gave his anger time to crystallize, so that by the time he was on the ground floor he was so furious at Schad that he felt as if he must be shooting off sparks. He exited the stairwell into the main lobby unseen by the security drones at the front desk. They were used to people sneaking down that way for a smoke.
It was a brisk autumn day, but not too chilly for a man without an overcoat. Navin walked out of the building and into the anonymous river of pedestrians on Madison Avenue.
Busy passersby flowed around him, in various stages of their quest for money and financial wellbeing. None paid the least attention to him. None knew or cared that his life had been ruined.
His Porsche was parked in the company's underground parking garage, but he knew better than to attempt his getaway in a car like that. Among the first things he had done when the money started coming in from his short sells was to purchase--with cash--a beat-up old Honda Civic and arrange a parking place several blocks away, using an assumed name. The police would trace him soon enough, most likely, but not before he'd be safely out of the city.
Navin walked along the street, feeling oddly alienated from the crowds of young suits all around him talking on their cell phones and smoking their cigarettes. Up until an hour ago he had been one of them: an ambitious young man from a poor village in India who had early on decided that his future lay among the moneyed classes of the American capitalist dream.
He grimaced. Now he was simply another white-collar criminal; albeit one with a time machine.
After making a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM, he retrieved his car from the parking garage and headed west, across Manhattan for the Henry Hudson. At this time of day traffic wasn't too horrendous. Soon he had passed the Javits Center and the Intrepid and was curving up around the maze of access roads leading to the George Washington Bridge.
He started to relax a little as he drove across the bridge. True, he had been forced to abandon his beloved Porsche, and he dared not return to his apartment in West New York. It pained him that he'd never again see all his expensive electronic gear and his closet of tailored clothes--but he had not always had those things. His manicured hand crept up to touch the slight bulge the time-twister made in his suit's breast pocket.
"You and me, baby," he murmured. With the twister, he would have little difficulty in starting all over.
In Fort Lee, he stopped at a gas station. Grabbing a satchel from the Honda's trunk, he ducked into the rest room and emerged a few minutes later in clothes purchased from a thrift store: old jeans, old shirt, old boots. He had burned his old ID and credit cards in the bathroom's sink.
Navin Sanyal was gone--temporarily. In place of the Wall Street financier was "Abhijit Koomasawamy," LAN supervisor for a startup software company in Old Tappan, not far from where he supposedly lived, in South Nyack near the Tappan Zee Bridge.
It hadn't been that hard to arrange for a new ID. Thanks to the time-twister, Koomasawamy would soon have a marvelous stroke of good fortune. Perhaps he would win the lottery. Perhaps he'd make a killing at the racetrack.
Navin smiled as he guided the Honda back into traffic, heading through town toward the Palisades Parkway leading north to Rockland County.
)
We are not always the same person because our feelings and motivations keep changing who we are from day to day. One day we are driven by a search for hidden knowledge, another day for riches, another day for revenge. What if these separate selves all met in the same room at the same exact moment?
