Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle by Matthew Blakstad Read Free Book Online

acts surprised when he gets caught in the tractor beam?’
    Pemberton stared at Danielle until his BlackBerry lit up and started to fizz.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘this is – ah, I need to –?’
    Jonquil lifted a hand, sure, sure. He scurried to the window to take the call and Jonquil turned boss-face on Danielle. She adopted the soft-but-firm register, designed to rein in her most out-there nerds.
    ‘Yo, Danielle. Two things I need you to do a-sap.’
    The tone flipped the girl’s on-switch. In spite of all her smarts and cheek, Danielle was just like the other geeks here: no sense of direction without clear instructions given. Her Myers-Briggs was more of a challenge than Pemberton’s. Most people would put her in the I and T buckets along with him. Introvert, Thinker. But Jonquil had a hunch she was a closet E and F. Extrovert, Feeler. Oh, she feels. This girl is all hard shell but inside? Soft as taffy and needing constant validation.
    Jonquil’s control of Danielle was an uneasy compromise. No hacker-type respects authority based on because I say so. You need to be an authority on something: and something worth their respect. As soon as you know less than they do, forget about it. From the start Danielle had proved even more impossible to manage than her peers. She’d always known she was too good to be let go – and she’d been wilder in Parley’s start-up days. Impossible to tame. Lord knew what fuelled that cauldron of fury she carried inside her. Maybe nothing. Maybe that was simply who she was. One day last year it had gotten the better of her and she’d broken the nose of that little rat-fink Billy Dukakis. Billy had without a doubt deceived this treatment but by all rights Danielle should have been for the high-jump. Still, there was something in her painful remorse that touched Jonquil profoundly, and she’d given the girl a bye; and from that point on, whenever Jonquil called, Danielle had jumped. Turned out Danielle was as dogged in her loyalty as she was in her pursuit of the perfect piece of C# code.
    Any case, everyone has their levers. Two things were guaranteed to set Danielle on course: one, a near-impossible intellectual challenge; and two, the Stern Mom treatment.
    ‘Find out where this thing came from,’ said Jonquil. ‘OK? We know this didn’t start with sic_girl. So give me just one link to the person who originally made these accusations, and tell me how the sic_girl algorithm picked it up. Do this by close tomorrow and you’ll make me very happy. OK?’
    Danielle did that duck-of-the-head nod. The lights had come back on. Good girl. Jonquil pressed on.
    ‘And make nice with this guy Pemberton, OK? Tell him everything he wants to know. We need a friend in government right now.’ Then a wink. ‘And he seems a nice boy. No?’
    Danielle looked over at Pemberton. With his back to the women, one hand holding the smartphone to his ear, he was hitching up his suit trousers with the other, leaving great folds of shirttail unaccounted for. Danielle turned back to Jonquil, shrugged, whatever , then got up to go; but Jonquil touched her pale forearm to stop her.
    ‘Hey, two things, remember.’
    Danielle parked her butt on the table and Jonquil turned the volume dial down to setting one.
    ‘I’m going to get Sam our PR guy to talk to you, OK? We need to get our story straight before this thing lands on us. You can fill him in. I want the two of you tight on this.’
    Danielle just stared in response . Then she was gone.
    Jonquil watched Pemberton rattle information into his phone and make swoops with his free hand. Which presumably represented cricket. Either she was going to have to spend the whole day whispering, or she needed to find somewhere else to park this dorky but effective infiltrator.

¶Nightshade >>whisper -> ¶thegrays
jonquil’s face gets even tauter when she’s stressed
if she has any more work done, her eyes will end up on the back of her head
 
    ¶thegrays