Beyond Business. Elizabeth Harbison

wasn’t the person ultimately making the decision. Better to play nice and try and work up their interest. “TAKA could be more powerful,” she said, smiling confidently.

      Kobayashi didn’t answer that directly, but the short breath he took before speaking again gave him away. He wasn’t willing to walk away.

      He was at least interested.

      “There is one concern we have, which you have not addressed,” he said to her.

      “What’s that?” Apprehension nibbled at Helen’s nerves. Were they going to throw a curve ball her way?

      “Hanson Media Group appears to have a growing liability in the radio division. We believe this is endangering any investment advantages.”

      The radio division was turning out to be more trouble than Helen had anticipated. But after all the time she had spent longing for more contact with George’s children, she wasn’t about to offer one of them the opportunity to help the company then snatch it away.

      Besides, she had faith in Evan. He didn’t have a lot of nine-to-five business experience, but he was smart as a whip. And he had a good sense of what people in their company’s most desirable demographic wanted.

      “I’ve just hired new staff to head the radio division, including my late husband’s son, Evan.” She smiled, hoping her confidence in Evan shone through, rather than the occasional uncertainty she felt as George Hanson’s widow.

      “It is our understanding that he is intending to change your programming to what you call ‘shock jock’ programs, specifically that of a Len Doss, who has already cost other broadcasting companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal Communications Commission fines.”

      Helen was surprised that Kobayashi had this information, which should’ve been classified. But she trusted Evan and Meredith to do what was best for the company.

      “Hanson Broadcasting hasn’t made any commitments to Mr. Doss. It is Evan’s full intention to investigate the possibility thoroughly and make an educated decision based on the balance of risks and gains.” She gave her brightest smile. “And if Evan Hanson decides that hiring Mr. Doss is in the company’s best interest, I have absolute faith in him.”

      “Is that so?”

      She nodded, and she meant it. Evan knew what appealed to young men his age more than she or Kobayashi did, that she was certain of. “Believe me, the division is in excellent hands.”

      Kobayashi looked dubious. “Are you able to prove that?”

      “Our numbers for the next quarter should bear it out.” She took a steadying breath. “Believe me, Mr. Kobayashi, nothing is standing in the way of Hanson Media and nationwide success.”

      Spying was such an ugly word.

      Meredith preferred to think of herself as brokering information that would benefit all parties involved.

      She was an investigator, not a corporate spy.

      Still, as she crept around the offices of Hanson Media Group by the fluorescent semilight of 2:30 a.m., jumping at every tiny noise, she felt like a spy. A sneak.

      A liar.

      Yes, she was doing what her employer had hired her to do. This was, in reality, her job. And she’d do it well; she always did. But this time it was personal, and that made all the difference. Instead of gathering sensitive corporate information from one company and handing it over to another, she was gathering sensitive information about Hanson Media—a name that had invoked various strong and conflicted feelings in her for over a decade—and providing it to a company that potentially wanted to take over and push the Hansons out entirely.

      Meredith didn’t know what her employer’s ultimate goal for the company was: it wasn’t her job to know.

      It was her job to collect pertinent information and pass it along to her boss.

      The ignorance of what would then happen because of it should have been bliss.

      She wouldn’t let her trepidation stop her, though. It was just raw emotion, and this job had no room for emotion. Emotion was a liar. It made a person believe things that might not be true. Whatever she felt, she needed to soldier on and get the job done.

      Just as she’d always done.

      So she proceeded. Her heart pounded with the fear that someone—some weary soul who wanted to get his work done before taking his family to Disney World, or some ambitious soul who wanted to impress his boss with work done early—would show up around one of the quiet corners.

      But the only sound was the hum of the building air conditioner, whooshing cold air through miles of air ducts.

      Meredith went to David Hanson’s office first. With any luck she’d find everything she needed there and she wouldn’t have to dig around in anyone else’s files.

      With a quick glance to make sure no one was standing in the shadows watching her, she turned on his computer to look for the files he’d told her about earlier in the week.

      “You can see our recent performance history broken down by day, week, month and year,” he’d said, proud of a former administrative assistant’s elaborate spreadsheets. “It’s like forensic science. I can tell you how many newspapers were sold in lower Manhattan by 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 13. I can tell you how many people listened to Garrett Pinchon’s Gospel Hour every Sunday morning from 1998 to last November.”

      This was just the kind of information her boss wanted to look at.

      When the operating system on David’s computer came up, she typed in the password she’d watched him enter earlier.

       Bubby.

      Whatever that meant.

      The system beeped and rattled through the rest of its processes and produced a desktop background photo of David’s wife, Nina, and his kids—Zach and Izzy, he’d told her proudly—smiling at the camera and giving Meredith a twinge of guilt.

      Pushing the negative thoughts away, Meredith quickly maneuvered her way through the system, finding the files David had alluded to earlier. She zipped them into a single file, then saved them to a thumb drive she’d put into a USB port. Once upon a time this had been the stuff of CIA espionage. Nowadays, every college student in North America could carry the equivalent of every paper they’d written since elementary school on a device no bigger than a child’s thumb.

      It worked for Meredith, who was currently saving spreadsheets that would have sucked up all the memory and then some on an older computer. Even now it wasn’t an instantaneous process. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the desktop while the large files took their time being converted and transferred.

      At one point Meredith thought she heard a sound like a cough in the distance. Immediately her hand flew to the monitor button, and she turned it off, waiting breathlessly in the dark to see if a security guard or, worse, another employee would come to investigate the quiet hum of David’s hard drive as it did her bidding.

      She waited a good five minutes in the dark, holding her breath nearly the entire time. Finally, thinking it must have been her imagination, she crept to the door and peered around the corner, down the hall. She braced herself for a shock.

      Nothing.

      With a sigh of profound relief, she went back to David’s office. The computer had finished saving. She pocketed the thumb drive, erased her virtual footsteps on the system and shut the computer down.

      Still cautious, she listened with the paranoid awareness of a lone wolf at night as she made her way through the maze of halls.

      She saw no one. Heard no one. But she had the most disquieting feeling that someone else was there. Maybe it was surveillance cameras. Or building security out in the main hall. Or the constant hum of countless computers hibernating or showing Star Wars screensavers to no one.