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We're looking at the figure walking backwards into the floor, and Jordan wants to know who it is.
It's Eddie, I say.
Eddie? Jordan says. Eddie, Eddie?
Yes, Eddie, Eddie. He's been upset all day I say, acting strangely. Worried about this whole Strategic Plan B thing.
There is no Plan B, she says.
What do you mean? I've been getting all these weird messages, Eddie's been looking for documents all day, hiding them somewhere...
We told him not to do anything, she says.
And you didn't know who he was when he walked in?
Pete talked to him, she says, I didn't know he had long hair now.
Pete, I say, I see. And you told Eddie, but you didn't tell me?
Plausible deniability. Actually, it was a surprise. Jordan says, and smiles, then shakes her head at the monitor. Why is he walking like that?
Maybe he's trying to avoid the cameras, I say. Let me see.
I press a few keys and we get a new view. Eddie's face, twitching madly.
He's not doing a good job, then, she says.
Maybe he doesn't know where all the cameras are, I say.
A few feet from the entrance Eddie gets in a cubicle and puts his bag on the desk, another piece of shrink-wrapped furniture. All the cubicles in the floor are empty, pre-packaged, ready to go. There's no one else in the floor.
So this is not part of whatever you're doing, I say.
Not really, Jordan says, Let's see what he's up to.
But shouldn't we try to stop him?
She looks at me and says, Do you want to run up thirty floors?
I think about it for a moment.
Maybe it's better if we see what he's up to first, I say.
Yeah, she says, and we both look back to the monitor. Eddie is standing in the cubicle, frozen like a statue.
I look at the other monitor, the one with the image of the boardroom and the meeting, and I see them laughing, the sound coming faintly through the headphones on the desk. One of the VPs is almost falling out of his chair, he's laughing that hard. The CEO must have told the joke.
Then I look back at the other monitor.
Slowly, Eddie looks up into the ceiling, searching for something. His head stops.
He looks straight at the camera. Our camera. Our eyes find each other, carried over circuits and cables and relays. If you know you're looking at someone in the eye, but they're not really there, are you really looking at them? Are they looking at you?
He knows, I say.
No kidding, Jordan says.
Eddie smiles. His face is eerily calm. No more nervous twitching.
In another monitor the door to the floor opens.
Ted walks in, carrying the same wad of papers he had when I last saw him. So this the meeting he was going to. The board meeting.
As the door closes behind him, a couple of loose pieces of paper fall out of his hands, and he stops to pick them up.
Eddie's head turns to the sound coming from the door, then he looks at the camera one more time before he looks down at the backpack on the desk. He opens the zipper, and his hand goes inside, searching.
Then he pulls out a gun.
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