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officially named the Subversives & Intrusions Task Force. However, they were known to most everyone as the Core SWAT team.
    â€œSWAT was a compromise name,” Whitley always liked to recall. “Some members wanted to be known as Army Rangers, others wanted the Coast Guard. Personally, I lobbied hard for calling us the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
    Responsibility for something like the SWAT team—and the rogue sections—was something I would have given only to Whitley. I’d hired Whitley when the company had hit sixty employees, all of whom were madly chasing the plan I’d laid out—domination of the high-speed mainframe networking industry through a fanatical commitment to drawing blood from mainframes around the country and the world. However, as devoted and well-intentioned as we tried to be, as revolutionary as our Blue Boxes were, none of us had a clue how to work together effectively. Departments didn’t communicate, managers didn’t coordinate, and so despite the best efforts of the best people, we were making only very slow progress.
    Whitley made us communicate.
    Whitley made us coordinate.
    Whitley made us make progress.
    She was one of those people who, in everyone she touched, instilled a sense of benevolent fear. She smiled, she was kind, she understood. And she made people fear any possibility of not doing their best.
    â€œYou’ll get it done,” she would say, nodding, hard shoulders dropping just slightly as she spoke. “I don’t know how, but you will.”
    And so, throughout the company, in any department, any division, Whitley was the only person who ever really told me
no.
Julie, Cliff and Leonard sometimes laughed off my suggestions, vice presidents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as I relayed an idea, the board of directors periodically moved to put one of my initiatives under “extended review.”
    But only Whitley told me
no.
    In the past three years Whitley and her SWAT team had, without realizing it, come closer and closer to various parts of my lie. Rogue sections, outside hackers, industry spies—all had caused security problems for the company. Each incident had led to an even deeper investigation of Core’s operations, a greater expansion of Whitley’s SWAT team, new security measures for Leonard and his technical staff. And all of that made my lie more difficult to sustain. SWAT pressing closer to the hidden satellites, the secret servers, the increasing flow of un-tracked money.
    My own secret police, unintentionally hunting me down.
    On bad days I pictured myself walking into my office to find Whit-ley and her SWAT team at my computer, studying the secrets of my spreadsheet model.
    And what they could find was almost unimaginable. My lie, grown terribly large and impossibly complex in the three years since it had begun. A high-tech fraud made up of a thousand interdependent deceptions. The people who worked here, the companies we acquired, the stock we sold—all of it was an unseen disease. A cancer, really, spread silently through this company and still, every day, infecting and reinfecting each department, each system, each person who was here.
    When it did finally kill us, it would do so suddenly. Completely. The computers would stop working. The mainframes would shut down. The satellites might as well fall from the sky. And no one—not SWAT, not Whitley—would be able to decipher what exactly had happened.

    Paper sorted, paper printed, paper copied, paper piled, paper flowing toward destinations unseen and unknown, paper sitting untouched in tall piles on bright tables, sitting dusty and still on high shelves along the wall. Paper bound, paper clipped, paper stapled and stacked and filed and sent and all of it reflecting white as it shot quietly from copiers and printers, or landing heavily as it was moved from desk to file, from file to binder, from binder to conference room. Paper was the