You Fired a Tech Genius novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Kostas Floor

Zoe gives Axel a desk and one rule, he shows her in six sentences how Ledgerline 5 fails, and a Summit email at 7:40 p.m. kills her booth.

Bridger was sitting on the curb outside my building with a banker's box on his knees and a fern in his lap.

"They let me take the fern," he said. "Security said it was a biohazard until I watered it in front of them."

"You didn't have to follow me."

"Axel, I'm twenty-six and I work for the guy who writes the Ledgerline tests," he said. "Who else is going to explain anything to me?"

I took the fern from him.

We went to West Fulton in one cab, and the driver looked at the fern the whole way.

Kostas Ledger lived in an old printing house with brick walls, iron windows and a clock that still ran six minutes fast.

A hundred and forty people worked on the second floor and half the third.

Nobody wore a badge on a lanyard.

At the end of the long room, behind a glass wall, Zoe Kostas stood at a whiteboard in her shirtsleeves.

She had a marker in her teeth.

She waved us in without turning around.

"The fern is staying?" she asked.

"He's called a fern," Bridger said.

"Then he gets the window," Zoe said. "It's the only sun on this floor."

She took the marker out of her mouth and looked at me.

"One rule," she said. "No lies. Not to me, not to a customer, not to a board."

"If it's bad, you say so before it's bad."

"That's the rule?"

"It's the only one I enforce."

"Fine."

"Good." She pulled out a chair for me. "Tell me why Ledgerline 5 breaks. Six sentences. I'll count."

I sat down at her table and picked up a marker.

"The old system checks every merchant's books at midnight," I said. "It's slow, and it's boring, and it catches everything."

I drew a box and a line.

"The new one skips the check to save four seconds," I said. "On a normal day nothing happens."

"But the first of the month isn't a normal day," Zoe said.

"Every grocer pulls payroll at six a.m. The new system treats the pile-up as one fraud and freezes the whole network."

She counted on her fingers, her lips moving.

"That's five," she said.

"Nobody will notice for five minutes," I said. "At six-oh-five the stores will notice."

Zoe put her marker down.

She was quiet long enough that Bridger set the fern on the sill and pretended to study its leaves.

"How many days to stop it?" she asked.

"Nineteen."

"How do you stop it?"

"Braxton won't put the check back," I said. "He'd have to admit I was right."

"So we give every merchant a way off the network before the thirty-first, with no shutdown and no fee."

"A lane out," Zoe said.

"A lane out of Ledgerline and into yours."

"Mine's not built for nine thousand stores."

"It's built for two thousand," I said. "And I know where the other seven live."

She looked at me.

"You'd move nine thousand stores in nineteen days," she said.

"I'd move the ones who'll listen. The rest will listen at six-oh-five."

Bridger made a small noise behind us.

"That's the scariest thing I've ever heard you say," he said.

Zoe didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth moved.

"The grocers decide at one place," she said. "The Midwest Grocers Summit, October twenty-second and twenty-third, at the Lakefront Hall."

"Nine hundred owners in one room, and every Hallett renewal is signed that week."

"You've been planning for it."

"For four years," she said. "I have a booth, a stage slot and a demo."

"What I don't have is a reason for them to leave the man they've used for thirty years."

"You have one now," I said.

She studied me.

"You're not what the magazines say," she said.

"What do the magazines say?"

"That you're a quiet little genius who wouldn't leave his boss for God."

"I left."

"You were pushed," Zoe said. "Don't confuse the two. The pushed ones come with a grudge. It's useful if you aim it."

"I'm not aiming at the grocers."

"I know," she said. "That's the condition. I heard it the first time."

Her phone buzzed on the glass.

She picked it up, read the screen, and her whole face went still.

"What?" I said.

She turned it so I could see.

The email came from the Midwest Grocers Association.

It said that Kostas Ledger's exhibitor registration had been withdrawn at the request of a platinum sponsor, effective immediately, with a refund to follow.

The platinum sponsor was Hallett Systems.

"Seven forty p.m.," Zoe said. "He didn't even wait for you to have a desk."

"He planned this before the all-hands," I said.

"Of course he did." She set the phone on the table very gently. "He fired you in public so he could call it the reason."

Bridger put both hands on top of his head.

"So we have no booth, no stage and no sponsor?" he said.

"We have the Summit, and we don't have an invitation," Zoe said.

She looked at me and smiled for the first time, a small hard smile that showed one tooth.

"Good," she said. "I never liked being invited."

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