Chapter 16 : Active Investigation
Liz asked him how long he'd worked in advertising.
Not during a sketch discussion, not as a follow-up to something he'd said. She asked it in the hallway outside the break room at 9:15 AM on a Monday morning, holding her coffee in both hands, the question dropping into the conversation with the specific weight of a question that hadn't originated with her.
Albert looked at her. "I mentioned it once. Couple of months."
"What firm?"
"It was a consulting arrangement. Freelance."
Liz nodded in the way people nodded when they were storing information rather than accepting it. "And before that?"
"Grad school." This was technically supportable — the host body had two years at a CUNY program that had dissolved in 2004, which was the kind of institutional history that left minimal paper trail. "Communications."
"Right." She took a sip of coffee. Looked at the floor. "Devon Banks asked me about you on Friday."
Albert waited.
"He said he was reviewing TGS's development talent roster. For potential promotional tracking." She said promotional tracking the way people said phrases they hadn't generated themselves. "I told him you were new and useful." She looked up. "He asked what I knew about your background."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were good at patterns." A beat. "That you caught the Cat Accountant problem and the Bear Patient thing and the spreadsheet." Her expression ran a brief calculation. "He seemed interested in that."
"I'll try to be less interesting," Albert said.
Liz looked at him for a moment. The puzzle expression — the pattern recognition sound-test face — and then she made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and went back toward the writers' room. She stopped at the door.
"He asked if I'd recommend you for development consideration." She didn't turn around. "I said yes before I thought about it." A pause. "That might have been a mistake. I don't know."
She went inside.
HR kept employee files accessible to the employees they concerned. Albert had confirmed this during his first week — standard NBC policy, standard institutional practice. He went to HR at lunch with his employee ID and asked to review his file.
Diane, the photocopier, was at a different desk today. The person who brought his folder was a man named Gerald who set it on the review table with the practiced neutrality of someone who had done this before and found it neither interesting nor suspicious.
Albert opened the folder.
He'd been building a mental model of what Devon would find, and the file confirmed the model. Employment history: NBC Page Program (current), listed start date, reference from Community Television Workshop on West 23rd Street. Previous: Marketing Consultant, AAT Solutions — a small firm that had dissolved eighteen months ago, leaving no forwarding contact. Education: BA from SUNY Binghamton (correctly on file), some graduate coursework (correctly listed as incomplete). Address history: the studio apartment, with a prior address in Queens that belonged to the host body's previous life.
The previous Queens address matched nothing that Devon would be able to verify easily — landlord was a private individual, lease was expired, gap between the Queens address and the Manhattan apartment was eight weeks that had no documented explanation.
AAT Solutions was gone. The CUNY coursework was incomplete. The reference from the Community Television Workshop was a real organization but a contact whose name Albert didn't know and whose direct line he'd never called.
Thin. Very thin. The file read like someone who had assembled a person from available materials rather than accumulated a history through living. Devon was good at exactly this kind of analysis — the Corporate Archive said so in three different documented cases.
Albert closed the folder and pushed it back across the table to Gerald.
He needed to spend the evening creating supporting documentation that would survive a moderately persistent inquiry. Not fabrication — the system's fraud detection would be a problem, and more practically, fabrication left seams. He needed to add texture to what existed: a phone number at the Workshop that someone would answer, a name at AAT Solutions that resolved to a real person who remembered him. The kind of thing that required calling in favors, except Albert didn't have favors yet.
He thought about the Entertainment Archive. Jack Donaghy had been at GE before NBC. GE had a consultancy arm that had been folded in 2003, the details of which were publicly documented. A person who had done project work during that transitional period would have references that were now technically defunct but professionally plausible.
He filed it under tonight and went back to the writers' room.
The hallway between the elevator bank and the TGS corridor was wide enough for two people to pass without contact but not wide enough to avoid each other's attention.
Devon Banks was coming from the direction of the executive stairwell at 4:30 PM, carrying a manila envelope that was thicker than it should have been for a casual errand. He was reading something on his Blackberry with one hand and holding the envelope under the other arm, and he saw Albert approximately three feet before the paths would have crossed.
He didn't stop. He didn't slow. His expression didn't change.
But his gaze moved across Albert with the specific quality of an assessment that had moved past gathering stage into organizing stage — not collecting new information, cataloguing existing information. The difference between a researcher taking notes and a researcher reviewing their notes before drawing conclusions.
Albert held his pace.
Devon passed. The manila envelope passed. The hallway resumed its normal density.
Albert turned toward the service alcove and stood there for a moment with his hands on the cart handle. His pulse had not changed. He checked this deliberately, the way he'd learned to check it in advertising rooms when a client went hostile and the only reliable tool was physiological steadiness. Normal. Or close enough.
He pulled out his notepad and wrote: AAT Solutions — contact: need a name. Community Television Workshop — confirm phone number. GE Consultancy 2002-2003 — research available alumni.
Back in the writers' room, a message was on his desk in Kenneth's handwriting on NBC notepaper: Mr. Donaghy's assistant called. Mr. Donaghy would like to see you tomorrow at 6 PM. His office. Dress appropriately. (Kenneth's note: this means your good blazer. I don't know which one that is but I'm sure you have one.)
Albert folded the note and put it in his blazer pocket.
Two people with two different files. One of them wanted to understand what Albert was and stop it. The other one wanted to understand what Albert was and use it.
The useful thing about having a Devon problem was that it made the Jack problem look comparatively manageable.
He finished the afternoon's script filing and went home to work on his paper trail.
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