7. Spycraft, Swag Bags, and Smooth Talking
CHAPTER 7
SPYCRAFT, SWAG BAGS, AND SMOOTH TALKING
OLLIE
I ’m waiting in the lobby of my building at ten minutes to five with a few manila folders full of papers that I do legitimately need to file in the records room before I leave. I’m also carrying a case to put the contracts we’re going to make a copy of. The thing that spy movies—or at least the ones I’ve seen—gloss over is that when you’re asked to secure documents to hand off to an intelligence operative, the case to put them in doesn’t come with the job.
After graduation, when I got my first full-time accounting job and started here at Pacioli & Blackwell , my dad gave me a soft leather briefcase-style bag to bring to work. I’m not about to hand that one off to Jace —that thing has sentimental value. Not to mention that it has a lot of stuff in it that I need. And it’s not like Jace asked me to do this mission while I was still at home and could grab an alternate bag.
Luckily , I had a cheap bag made of a thin material that was closer to plastic than fabric that we’d gotten as swag from a company. They had come to our offices to train us on their security software that would keep our accounting files safe from hackers. I still had the one they gave me folded up in the back of one of my desk drawers.
The bag is bright blue, and it has the software logo— StealthFile —printed in bright green and yellow. At the time, I thought it wasn’t a very logical piece of swag to give us because the bag seemed anything but a safe, secure, or stealthy way to transport files. They should’ve stuck with giving us a pen with their logo on it—there’s a reason why it’s a classic.
The bag might be anything but clandestine, but it’s briefcase-shaped, has a zipper, and I guess it’ll get the job done.
I’m standing at the back of the lobby, near the elevator, when Daisy walks into the building. Almost every time I’ve ever seen her, she’s been wearing jeans, a white button-down, and a Coffee Loft apron. Even when her dog set her up for disaster on that walk, she was still wearing the jeans and button-down.
But now, she’s dressed in office attire. A deep purple skirt that hugs her hips before it flares out, ending just above her knees, a silky dark gold top, and a teal fitted jacket. All in vibrant fall colors. She’s even wearing a necklace, dress shoes that are flats, and has her hair pulled up in a bun that’s much tamer than normal. And glasses that are a deep purple that match her skirt. She looks amazing. And it makes me realize that I’ve never really pictured her wearing anything other than what I’ve already seen her in.
I don’t even realize that I’m standing frozen and stunned into silence until she comes right up to me, motions at my current state, and asks, “ I take it I look okay?”
I nearly choke on a cough. “ Yes . You look more than okay.” I want to tell her that she looks incredible. That I love the bold colors on her. That I love seeing her outside of the Coffee Loft . That I just love seeing her. But I don’t want to come on too strong. Besides , she probably got all that and more from my expression. We walk toward the elevator, push the button, and don’t say anything more until we are inside and the doors close.
I press the button to the third floor, and she says, “ Are you ready for this?”
I clutch the manila folders I’m holding a little more. “ I think so.” I’m suddenly a bit nervous. Or is this excitement I’m feeling? It’s hard to tell. Both make my stomach feel like it’s trying to teach itself to break dance.
As the display over the doors changes to the number three, Daisy grins and says, “ Let’s go be spies.”
There is such a thrill of excitement beneath her words that I’m going to go ahead and call the stomach break dancing “excitement.” With her here, I think that’s what it is.
As soon as we turn from the third-floor lobby to the hall leading to the records room, Daisy reaches over and takes one of the manila folders from my hand, cradles it in one arm, and pulls a pen from behind her ear with her other hand. Then she opens the file and hovers the pen over it as we walk, like she’s going to make notations on it.
“ What are you doing?” I murmur, a little horrified that she might make changes to my work.
In a quiet voice, she tells me, “ It’s like they say—anyone can go anywhere in a building if they’re carrying a ladder because it makes people feel like they’re supposed to be there, even if they don’t recognize them as an employee. Me walking with you to the records room without an employee badge will look suspicious.” She lifts the folder a bit. “ This is my ladder.”
As she looks down at my reconciliation report, I can tell that the glasses she’s wearing aren’t fake. They’ve got real prescription lenses. So I ask, “ And the glasses?”
“ Do you like them? I took out my contacts before coming. Needed to look the part, you know.”
I chuckle quietly. Only maybe one-fourth of the employees here wear glasses, tops. Just thinking about them, though, makes me nudge my own glasses up .
When we get to the records room—without anyone questioning us along the way, so I guess the “ladder” thing worked— I tap my badge to the reader and the door lock clicks. We both go inside, trying to not act like we’re sneaking, and close the door behind us. Jace told me what last name Tad mentioned was on the file box, along with which decade it was filed in, so I don’t think it’ll take long to find.
“ Okay ,” I say as we start walking toward the back of the aisle on the right, “ Jace said we’re looking for the last name ‘ Winfield ,’ in the two-thousand-tens.” I’m scanning the names that people have scrawled onto the boxes way before my time here. “ Got it!” I say, pretty triumphant. “ Winfield Construction , two-thousand-eleven.”
I pull the lid off the box as Daisy says, “ Winfield Limited , two-thousand-sixteen. Oh , and here’s a Winfield Corp from two-thousand-ten.”
I start scanning all the other boxes on the shelves and find another Winfield Construction and a Winfield Trust from two-thousand-twelve and two-thousand-thirteen. We keep searching and find a total of eleven boxes, all with the name “ Winfield ” on them, and all from the two-thousand-tens.
“ See ?” I say. “ This is why Tad isn’t good at his job. He doesn’t pay attention to details.”
Daisy nods. “ You never know when someone is eavesdropping, so you should always be specific in your narration of what you’re doing.”
I smile, loving that she’s playing along. “ Exactly . He could’ve said something like ‘ So I’m going to place this evidence of our wrongdoing in the file box that says Winfield Limited , two-thousand-twelve, which is on the third shelf up, five boxes from the end.’”
“ I mean, it’s only courteous.”
We take the lids off all eleven boxes and look at the first file in case he took the easy route and put it right in front. He didn’t. So we start searching through all of them.
It doesn’t take long before I hear Daisy chuckle quietly and I look over at her. When I do, she says, “ This just takes me back to my childhood.”
“ You spent your childhood going through boxes of files?”
“ Well , not my whole childhood. Actually , not very much of it at all. My parents are… let’s call them ‘impulsive.’ And not exactly fond of putting down roots. So whenever they got an idea for a business venture or a job that would be fun and interesting in some other location from where we lived, they’d get all excited about it, and we’d be packed up and moving to that place a week or two later.
“ One time, when I was about seven or eight, they thought a super fun business would be a time capsule service. So we packed up and moved to Asheville , North Carolina because they thought that’d be the best location for it. All they could talk about was how much fun it was going to be to help people create personalized time capsules filled with photos, documents, keepsakes, and meaningful objects.
“ They assumed the business would be a quirky blend of nostalgia, adventure, and preservation. What it turned out to be was a whole bunch of sifting through people’s dusty file boxes.” She laughs again. “ That business only lasted for… six weeks? Maybe eight weeks? Then my parents started talking about how much fun it would be to open an alien abduction experience and stage UFO sightings. A week later, the van was loaded up and we were on our way to calling Roswell , New Mexico ‘home.’”
I realize that my hands haven’t moved from the file they were on somewhere during that story and I’m standing frozen, staring at Daisy . “ Wait . This was really your childhood?”
She raises three fingers, touching, and says, “ On my honor, it really was.”
“ Girl scout, huh?”
She nods. “ Only for one summer, though. The same summer we lived in Aspen , Colorado , because my parents were running a luxury yurt glamping service.”
I’m looking at her, and as outlandish as it sounds, I know she’s telling the truth. And I want to know more. I want to know everything there is to know about her. “ What other adventures did your family go on?”
“ Um , let’s see. When we lived in New Orleans , they ran a voodoo-themed escape room, where visitors could solve spooky puzzles while learning the history of the city’s folklore. From there, we went to Bar Harbor , Maine , so they could run a whale-watching photography school on a boat.”
She’s looking through files as she talks, like this isn’t the most mind-boggling story ever, so I tell myself I can manage to work while I listen, too.
“ Oh , and in Sedona , Arizona , they became crystal healers and vortex tour guides and offered wellness retreats. One of my favorites, though, was in Key West , Florida . They decided to be ‘pirate historians.’ We all dressed in pirate costumes and gave interactive tours about shipwrecks and buried treasure. And it was fun! We stayed there longer than anywhere else. Probably a good nine months.”
My mind is being blown and I’m having trouble focusing on the contents of this box. “ And you really went all over the U.S .?”
“ Yep . We even went to Juneau , Alaska for a while so they could be ice cave explorers and survival instructors. Oh ! Is this it?” She pulls out a manila folder of papers from the box she’s looking through and hands it to me.
I open the folder and thumb through its contents. It contains twenty-six pages of contracts that are not part of the 2014 Winfield Properties documentation. It’s all contracts relating to another company, and they each have Tad’s initials and a recent date stamp. “ It’s definitely it,” I say.
We close up the boxes we still had open, push them back to where they were, and head to the front to make copies. “ So how well did you handle moving all the time?” I ask her as we walk. “ That has to have affected you a lot.”
“ It made me get good at going with the flow. It didn’t do the same thing for my sister, Laurel . It made her crave consistency and stability pretty fiercely. She tried to find ways to get that—for both of us—everywhere we went. I guess it was pretty helpful as a kid to not be too fazed by the constant changes to our environment, but of the two of us, Laurel got the more helpful traits for adulthood.”
I pull my head back in surprise and confusion. Especially because she sounds like she’s regretful of the skills she’s developed. “ You are spontaneous and adaptable. Those are some of the most incredible traits of all, and I’m in awe of your ability to do both. I would love to have a fraction of your skills in those areas.”
She gives me a curious look like she’s maybe never considered the fact that they are positive traits, and it’s baffling to me that she has seen them as being negative.
I’ve barely placed the pages of the contract on the document feeder and pressed start when my coworker, Cameron , comes in.
“ Hey , Ollie .” Then when he spots Daisy , he adds, “ Oh ! Hi . Do you work here?”
I freeze. I’m in the records room with someone who isn’t an employee. Which is against the rules of our company, not to mention the rules of ethics. But much worse than sneaking in Daisy , I am doing clandestine acts with no proof that I’m supposed to be doing it. I have taken contracts that are not from my client, that contain information about espionage and colluding with terrorists, and I am making copies of them without the permission of the document owners. I am a ball of nerves. There’s no chance I can respond in a way that’s believable at all.
Before I have to even worry about what to say, though, Daisy scoots beside me and holds out her hand to shake Cameron’s . “ I don’t work here. Hi , I’m Daisy Maxfield . Ollie and I have a date. We had decided to meet here, but he wasn’t quite finished with work yet—he still had to make copies and get them filed before we left.” She places a hand on my chest. “ So , I decided to join him while he finishes up.”
I was nervous when Cameron came in for so many reasons. Now that Daisy’s hand is on my chest, though, I can’t breathe. I think I might pass out. But I do completely forget to be nervous about Cameron finding out what I’m doing in here because all my nerves are focused on the fact that the woman of my dreams is with me in my work space and she has her hand on my chest.
“ That’s what I was about to do, too,” Cameron says. “ How much more do you have?”
I manage to say the words, “ Just about finished,” which I get out as the last copy comes through. I grab the originals and the copy and slide them both between my manila folders before Cameron can see them. Hopefully , he doesn’t notice that my hands are trembling a bit or that I’m holding my breath. Then I grab my anything-but-subtle case, motion to the machine, and say, “ It’s all yours.”
As soon as Daisy and I make it back between the aisles, she takes the original contracts from me and I keep the copies. Since the shelves are all wire, I can see through the space above a row of boxes. Once Cameron’s back is to me and his eyes are on the copier’s screen to select options, I slip the contract copies into the colorful bag. I go over to the boxes where I actually need to file the documents I brought with me.
I glance at Daisy . She’s holding the papers low at her side, which is good because they’re at the height that a row of boxes hides them from Cameron’s view. I could never go deep enough down the aisle to get to the box we got the illicit papers from without Cameron wondering what I am doing. But Daisy can.
She’s keeping an eye on Cameron through the spaces between boxes. As he turns around to lean against the copy machine as it does its thing, Daisy says, “ I can’t believe how far back these go!”
I don’t know how she’s going to put the originals back in the place where Tad had left them without being seen until the copy machine jams and Cameron’s attention goes back to the screen to see where the jam is. Daisy uses the distraction to remove the box’s lid, find the right file, slip the papers back in, and put the lid on.
As soon as she’s no longer touching it, she says, “ There are so many files here!” as she heads back toward me.
She has such a look of wonder on her face that I answer genuinely, “ It’s a whole lot of years of files from a whole lot of employees helping a whole lot of clients. The impressive thing is that this room only contains files from the accountants on our floor. Every floor has its own records room.”
“ Wow ,” Daisy breathes as she reaches me. “ Just the thought of all these numbers in one place.”
“ There’s something almost magical about it, right?” I say, feeling like she gets me.
Cameron seems to have fixed the paper jam, and as he’s closing the front panel of the machine, he says, “ You two sound perfect for each other. I hope you have a good date.”
I tell him thanks, and Daisy and I head down the hallway. The place has mostly cleared out now—there’s only a random employee here and there who remains. As soon as we’re out of earshot of everyone, Daisy says, “ We did so good! We should get some kind of spymaster award for that.”
I can’t help but think that we did, too. Then we round the corner to the elevators and see Tad , who happens to be standing in the middle of the foyer, talking to a woman in a black suit that I can only guess is a client.
As we skirt around him to go to the elevator, he breaks away from his client and comes right up to us. He looks Daisy up and down, notices she isn’t wearing an employee badge, and says to me in a way-too-accusing voice for him not being my boss, “ Why do you have a non-employee here on this floor? What are you guys doing?”
It’s because Daisy’s no longer hovering her pen over an open manila folder. She has lost her “ladder.” And just as she’d guessed, without it, she looks suspicious.