American Omens Read online

  “Your system is nowhere to be found,” Dina said as she quickly walked over to Cheyenne’s desk, wearing shoes that didn’t match. “I was just finishing my cereal in the break room.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb your breakfast.” Cheyenne kept swiping and holding her hand out over the sensor on her desk.

  “It was my break. I had breakfast two hours ago.”

  Looking up at the analyst, Cheyenne noted how extra curly her frizzy hair looked. Dina fulfilled only the minimum requirements about daily appearance, just enough that the front offices wouldn’t reprimand her about it again. She would have easily fit in with the casual work environment Cheyenne had read about from two and three decades ago when the tech world had exploded.

  The petite woman scanned the glass eye, and instantly all six of her stations showed up in front of them. “Mine are there,” Dina said. “Let me see if I can manually get yours to come up.”

  As Dina’s hand moved and typed in the air, Cheyenne glanced around the office. Nobody could be seen at the desks nearby. “Where is everybody?”

  “There was a large meeting in the conference room. I assumed you were in it.”

  “What was the meeting for?”

  “I thought it was a cake-cutting or work-relations sort of thing. The very things I avoid like a virus.”

  “Nakajima wants to meet with me.”

  Dina stopped concentrating on the electronic screens in front of her and looked at Cheyenne. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might have an idea.”

  This time it was Dina who glanced around the silent office.

  “They wouldn’t tell me if they were going to fire you,” she whispered.

  Most people wouldn’t go directly there in their thought process, but Dina did. And considering what had happened to the equally talented Malek, they knew anything could happen to anybody.

  “When is your meeting?” Dina asked.

  “Now.”

  “They took you off the system. That’s exactly what they did with Malek.”

  Another scan of the office didn’t reveal anybody. She was looking for the big guys in the flak jackets. Seeing them in an office meant someone had a gun or a bomb or someone needed to be escorted out of the tower.

  As Cheyenne went to pick up her coffee, the note she had slipped inside her tiny pants pocket fell on the ground. Dina scooped it up and looked at it.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a love letter from an admirer,” Cheyenne said, which wasn’t a lie.

  Dina grinned and gave her back the note.

  “Listen, I need to go to the meeting before she comes to find me,” Cheyenne said. “Stay in touch the best way possible.”

  This was their way of saying to keep the communication open outside of the PASK lines, though Cheyenne never really knew when the company was watching and listening to her and when it wasn’t. Her whole life was basically inside the walls of this building, a building Acatour owned, meaning they could be surveilling her twenty-four hours a day.

  “If they force you to leave, what am I going to do?” Dina asked.

  “You’re going to help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Help me figure out what in the world’s happening.”

  3.

  Halfway down the hallway, past familiar walls with photos showing off PASK’s global success through the years, Cheyenne heard an unfamiliar voice call her name. Her full name, one nobody here knew. She stopped and turned around, then glanced into the two offices next to her. Nothing.

  “Cheyenne Myst Burne,” the man said again.

  Her father had told her that Myst stood for mystery, and that’s what Cheyenne had been to them. Or at least to her father. This wonderful, beautiful mystery, according to him. A mystery her mother never pursued since she had left when Cheyenne was a little girl.

  The voice spoke again, slowly and carefully, sounding smart and thoughtful.

  “Do not overthink and analyze the situation you’re about to encounter,” he said. “Just act and don’t react. Deal with the road in front of you and the door that’s about to open.”

  He’s talking through my SYNAPSYS. But that was impossible because she would have to authorize it, and she hadn’t given any new authorizations in the last six months. Nobody—not the most notorious hackers out there, not the government, and not even Acatour—could break into an individual’s SYNAPSYS. It was scientifically impossible.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “This is your wake-up call, Cheyenne. You’ve been sleeping your whole life, dreaming those dreams. The alarm clock is about to go off, and there won’t be any way to press the Snooze button. So just keep walking. Keep breathing. And maybe start believing.”

  She continued looking around, but she couldn’t see anybody.

  “Who is this?” she asked again, then tried a few more times. But the voice remained silent.

  She hadn’t imagined the voice. It was real, just like not being able to log in to the system, and just like the somber look on Missy’s face, and just like Hoon giving her a note from her father.

  She knew she needed to read it. She needed to read it now.

  4.

  The all-watching eye couldn’t follow her into the restroom. At least that’s what Cheyenne believed. After making sure nobody was in the black-and-white bathroom that had been recently remodeled for no reason, she entered a stall and shut the door behind her.

  Her hands shook as she unfolded the letter. The handwriting was unmistakable. Her father had an elegant and deliberate signature, and immediately she knew this note had indeed been penned by him. Before reading one word, she closed her eyes and exhaled to calm herself.

  Dear Cheyenne,

  If you’re reading this in your office, don’t continue. You are in danger and must get out of the building as fast as you can. Save the rest of my comments for later.

  She didn’t have to think twice. Cheyenne refolded the note and slipped it inside her pants pocket.

  Twenty feet after she exited the restroom, Vice President Nakajima’s assistant walked up beside her, looking down with a big grin.

  “Right this way, Miss Burne.”

  With a shaved head and a square rock for a face, the man looked more like a bodyguard, which everybody understood to be the fact. Nakajima was fiercely private and handled most of her affairs herself, including setting up phone calls and meetings and sending messages. The assistant was there in case someone who didn’t like the VP decided to do something about it. Quite a few people fit in that category.

  “I really need to get back to my office before—”

  The man’s hand didn’t merely latch on to her arm. It locked on like a robot’s appendage. He guided her down the hall and didn’t let go. When they reached the office, Cheyenne watched the glass door open in front of her, and she thought of the words Malek had repeated over and over to her: “Don’t ever trust her. Not a bit.”

  Seconds after she took a handful of steps into the ordinary and average-sized office, bare enough to resemble one belonging to a newly hired manager, the door slid shut behind her, and the glass turned to frost. Nobody could see them now. The vice president stood behind her desk, and several screens were lit up on the black countertop.

  “Sit down.” Her voice carried a slight accent.

  So much for any pleasantries or early-morning small talk.

  The chair was less comfortable than the ones in the conference room. Cheyenne had a theory about this office and had confided in Malek about it. She concluded that the vice president had several offices in multiple areas in the building and that they were all a simple means to an end: to project power and authority and to never display any sort of emotion or life outside the company. Nobody knew if Kaede Nakajima was marr
ied or had children or anything else remotely personal about her. No official information was online anywhere, and the speculation included everything from her being a Japanese spy to her being a proxy for someone else running their division.

  “I was awakened this morning by a surprising call,” Nakajima said as she still stood at her desk. “Our CEO called me personally, something that never happens. Mr. Heyford had some rather unfortunate news to share with me.”

  Nakajima tapped on several of the screens and moved them to show Cheyenne.

  “All the national news outlets have it. Progress, Divisional, Foxnet. Mr. Heyford doesn’t know what their sources were, but they’re validated by the information and the pictures. They’re damaging, to say the least.”

  The words and images in the news feeds seemed to attack Cheyenne at once. The image of her father shocked her. The photos of him were recent. She had never seen him with his gray hair so long or his beard so unkempt. In one shot he carried a backpack, as a drifter might, and was looking over his shoulder as if monitoring who might be following him. Another showed him at a seedy motel. Then another set of pictures showed items that supposedly belonged to Keith Burne, including an assortment of automatic rifles, bomb-making materials, and confiscated letters written by him. According to the news these letters contained “hateful and racist” content.

  In the middle of all the materials, one item stood out: her father’s worn leather Bible.

  “Hate Crimes Linked to Missing Businessman,” one headline read. “Former Fortune 500 Exec Turns Rogue,” another declared. The last one she read contained all the information she needed: “Suspect Identified in High-Level Hate Crimes; Missing and at Large. Reward Posted.”

  Under one of the recent pictures, her father’s name was spelled out clearly.

  “By the look on your face, I gather you didn’t catch up on the morning news feeds. It’s a lot to read, of course, but I’ll show you the reason Mr. Heyford called me.” Nakajima tapped and expanded a paragraph in one of the articles. The words grew as big as the VP’s hands.

  Keith Burne’s only daughter is Cheyenne Burne, a technology expert at the venerable Acatour corporation, who both works and lives in the Incen Tower.

  For a moment Cheyenne forgot to breathe, her mind moving faster than the elevators ascending and descending this building.

  “Every article mentions you in some way,” Nakajima said. “I was amused at the variety of descriptions they had for your title, especially since we don’t like to officially give titles to our employees. ‘Technology expert.’ If they only understood what PASK’s most talented architect knew.”

  The last comment was both a question and a threat to Cheyenne, and she didn’t like being cornered and questioned and accused.

  “You’re wrong,” Cheyenne told Nakajima.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said you’re wrong. Sef Malek is PASK’s most talented architect.”

  “He was talented, but he never could approach your abilities. Malek had this wonderfully quirky charisma, one that caught your attention, did it not? But he also had a knack for snooping around in business that wasn’t his.”

  “Why did you fire him?”

  The smooth and porcelainlike face didn’t move, but Nakajima’s lips began to twist in a way that reminded Cheyenne of a worm on a fishhook. “Have you had any contact with your father in the last week?”

  Cheyenne wondered if the guy downstairs really was a friend of her father’s.

  The note is real. It’s more real than that image of the Bible, which could have been easily fabricated and manipulated.

  “I haven’t seen or heard from my father in more than a year.”

  “What happened to him?” Nakajima asked.

  “You know as much as I do. He went missing.”

  “After quitting his job, correct? After supposedly having some kind of divine experience and suddenly professing vitriol hidden in the sweet perfume of Jesus Christ. Does that sound familiar?”

  “I don’t know exactly why my father quit his job,” Cheyenne said.

  This was the first lie, but it wasn’t a full-fledged, bold-faced one. Her father had told her about finding God and having a new outlook on life, but his words hadn’t made any sense to her. It had been as if he’d gone to Tibet and climbed Mount Everest and then had tried to talk to her about it while speaking in Tibetan.

  “A man like your father, as deluded as he most certainly happens to be, would contact his one and only beloved daughter.” Nakajima leaned over the desk and glared at her. “I bet he’s spoken with you recently. We’re already checking records.”

  “I’m sure you did that before I even woke up, and I know you didn’t find anything because there’s nothing to find.”

  “Obviously you can see the problem this has created.”

  Cheyenne stood up. She was taller than the vice president, so she liked this position better. “I have had no contact with my father in a year, so I have no idea if any of these things they’re saying are true. But my father doesn’t know how to make bombs. He doesn’t own automatic rifles. How could he even find one? They’ve been outlawed for years.”

  “So are drugs, yet even something as dangerous as I-Murse can easily be obtained.”

  “My father and hate do not belong in the same sentence,” Cheyenne said.

  “Sit down.” Nakajima swiped off the screens.

  “I can already see where this is heading. Malek certainly disappeared for doing far less.”

  “Do you know what your ‘buddy’ did?”

  Cheyenne stayed quiet for the moment, despite the anger and adrenaline racing through her.

  “The problem is that you have participated in many more campaigns and have been presented with much more sensitive material than Malek would ever dream of having contact with. You, the lovable Cheyenne Burne, were our golden child who could do no wrong.”

  You’re jealous and have always been jealous, and it still looks ugly after all this time.

  “Your work in the last year—”

  “Is confidential,” Cheyenne interrupted. “I’ve always known that, and I still do.”

  “Then surely you can see our current impasse.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Cheyenne turned around and headed to the glass door. It remained shut.

  Nakajima circled her desk like a wild animal moving toward its prey. “You can’t simply walk out of this office. Or merely gather your belongings and be on your merry way. This is not The Wizard of Oz.”

  Cheyenne turned. “Open this door now. I know my rights. I can blink and send a message to the authorities on our floor. If you want a national public relations nightmare on your hands, just try to keep me in this office.”

  A glimmer of hesitation could be spotted in Nakajima’s eyes. A very rare sight indeed. But she quickly hid it by displaying her smug grin again. “Those authorities you talk about receive their salaries from the same people who pay yours.”

  “That’s fine, but my friends at Divisional News would love to hear about my firing. Since I’m a hot commodity in national headlines, the so-called groundbreaking tech person in the company, people will kill to interview me.” She deliberately stressed the word kill.

  Again Nakajima seemed to be weighing her options.

  “Open the door,” Cheyenne said.

  “What do you think is out there anyway?” the vice president asked as the glass door slid open.

  My father. And I’m going to find him.

  5.

  The glow of the orange numbers on the wall showed the slow passage of time. Even though a voice out of nowhere had told her to wake up and to keep moving, Cheyenne wasn’t moving at all. She remained stuck on the hard leather couch she seldom sat on, one of the expensive and stylized pieces she had purchased after starting w
ork at PASK and earning a salary she couldn’t have ever imagined making in her life. Just like the figures that increased in her account every week, the fancy furniture couldn’t fill the void inside, nor could it provide the comfort she had felt as a child living with her father.

  Now her job and income were suddenly…gone. Just like the voice she’d heard in her head earlier this day.

  Who was talking to me, and how’d they get inside to do that?

  That was the number one question she had after the hundreds of questions she had about her father, such as where was he, and what was he doing, and what sort of danger could he be in, and would she ever see him again? They had unfinished business, to say the least. As her mind kept returning to their last encounter, she stopped herself, ending the movie before it began, turning off the images and sounds and forcing herself not to go there, not now. Not after everything that had happened today.

  Outside her apartment door stood two uniformed security men, making sure she didn’t leave and nobody came in. After forcing her way out of Nakajima’s office through threats, Cheyenne had been greeted with another set of men wearing uniforms and carrying sidearms, ones who were so courteous as to usher her out of her own office. At least she was able to see Dina one more time and tell her she would find a way to be in touch, knowing her assistant understood it would be in a way that nobody could hear or read or intercept. As the men told her to gather her personal belongings and leave the building, once again Cheyenne had forced the issue.

  “I don’t know who you report to, but you can tell them I’m not leaving right now. I can’t vacate my place in five minutes.”

  When the two men, brawny and acting the part of bullies, tried to intimidate and frighten her, Cheyenne didn’t back down. That only made her more defiant.

  “Neither of you has any security clearance whatsoever, so get out of my way, and tell those above you that I will leave first thing in the morning. Or else you will have every single person who hates this company at your doorstep demanding an explanation. Do you understand?”