Free Paranoia by Joseph Finder Page A

Goddard to know she’s cut from the same cloth. She’s slick, that Nora.”
    The elevator was crowded with other employees going down to the third-floor cafeteria. A lot of them wore Trion-logo golf or polo shirts. The elevator stopped on every floor. Someone behind me joked, “Looks like we got the local.” I think someone cracks that joke in every single corporate elevator around the world every single day.
    The cafeteria, or employee dining room as it was called, was immense, buzzing with the electricity of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Trion employees. It was like a food court in a fancy shopping mall—a sushi bar, with two sushi chefs; a gourmet choose-your-own-topping pizza counter; a burrito bar; Chinese food; steaks and burgers; an amazing salad bar; even a vegetarian/vegan counter.
    “Jesus,” I said.
    “Give the people bread and circuses,” Noah said. “Juvenal. Keep the peasants well fed and they won’t notice their enslavement.”
    “I guess.”
    “Contented cows give better milk.”
    “Whatever works,” I said, looking around. “So much for frugality, huh?”
    “Ah. Take a look at the vending machines in the break rooms—twenty-five cents for peanut satay chicken, but a buck for a Klondike bar. Fluids and caffeinated substances are free. Last year the CFO, a man named Paul Camilletti, tried to eliminate the weekly beer bashes, but then managers started spending their own pocket money to buy beer, and someone circulated an e-mail that set out a business case for keeping the beer bashes. Beer costs X per year, whereas it costs Y to hire and train new employees, so given the morale-boosting and employee-retaining costs, the return on investment, ya de ya de ya, you get it. Camilletti, who’s all about making the numbers, gave in. Still, his frugality campaign rules the day.”
    “Same way at Wyatt,” I said.
    “Even on overseas flights, employees are required to fly economy. Camilletti himself stays at Motel 6 when he travels in the U.S. Trion doesn’t have a corporate jet—I mean, let’s be clear, Jock Goddard’s wife bought one for him for his birthday, so we don’t have to feel sorry for him.”
    I got a burger and Diet Pepsi and he got some kind of mysterious Asian stir-fry thing. It was ridiculously cheap. We looked around the room, holding our trays, but Mordden didn’t find anyone he wanted to sit with, so we sat at a table by ourselves. I had that first-day-of-school feeling, when you don’t know anyone. It reminded me of when I started Bartholomew Browning.
    “Goddard doesn’t stay at Motel 6s too, does he?”
    “I doubt it. But he’s not too in-your-face about his money. He won’t take limos. He drives his own car—though granted he has a dozen or so, all antiques he’s restored himself. Also, he gives his top fifty execs the luxury car of their choice, and they all make a shitload of money—really obscene. Goddard’s smart—he knows you’ve got to pay the top talent well in order to retain them.”
    “What about you Distinguished Engineers?”
    “Oh, I’ve made an obscene amount of money here myself. I could in theory tell everyone to go fuck themselves and still have trust funds for my kids, if I had any kids.”
    “But you’re still working.”
    He sighed. “When I struck gold, just a few years after I started here, I quit and sailed around the world, packing only my clothes and several heavy suitcases containing the Western canon.”
    “The western cannon?”
    He smiled. “The greatest hits of Western literature.”
    “Like Louis L’Amour?”
    “More like Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Kafka, Freud, Dante, Milton, Burke—”
    “Man, I slept through that class in college,” I said.
    He smiled again. Obviously he thought I was a moron.
    “Anyway,” he said, “once I’d read everything, I realized that I’m constitutionally unable not to work, and I returned to Trion. Have you read Étienne de la Boétie’s