Hidden Fortune

Adrian Vale had been famous for exactly eleven years, and he had hated every minute of it that he could remember. Not the work. The work he loved. He had built Vale Technologies from a dorm-room idea into a company that employed thousands of people. It made software that hospitals and schools actually used. It paid its taxes and, most days, tried to do the right thing. That he loved. The fame he did not love. The photographs outside restaurants. The articles that called him a genius in the headline and a control freak in the third paragraph. The parties where strangers told him they admired him, and meant, Adrian suspected, that they admired his money. So on a grey Tuesday morning in Manhattan, his head of security walked into his office. He closed the door and said, "We have a problem." Adrian did something he had been dreaming about for years. He disappeared. "Say that again," Adrian said. Jamie O'Connor, his best friend since university and the only person Adrian trusted completely with his safety, put a folder on the desk. He did not open it. Jamie never opened folders dramatically. He just waited. "The product plan for Aurora leaked," Jamie said. "Not the public version. The internal one. Dates, prices, partners. Someone inside sent it to Victor Lang." Adrian stared out of the window at the city. Forty floors down, taxis moved like toys. Somewhere down there, people were going to work in offices Adrian owned, in buildings Adrian had never visited. They were doing jobs Adrian had once done himself, back when Vale was three people and a broken coffee machine. "And the threat?" Adrian asked. Jamie hesitated, which was unusual enough that Adrian turned around. "There was a note," Jamie said. "Left at your apartment building. Not a death threat, exactly. More like a promise. 'Step down, or we step in.' There was also a photograph of you leaving the gala last week." Adrian laughed, because there was nothing else to do with that information at nine in the morning. "Charming." "It's not a joke, Adrian. Victor wants the company. If he gets Aurora first, or if he scares the board enough, he'll get a takeover vote. And if the leak came from inside, we can't trust the usual channels to find it." Adrian sat down. He thought about his mother, Eleanor, chair of the board, who would tell him to hire more lawyers and say less. He thought about the staff, who would hear about a leak and worry about their jobs, quite rightly. He thought about Victor Lang, his former business partner, smiling on television and talking about "unlocking shareholder value." That was a polite way of saying "taking something that isn't yours." "What if," Adrian said slowly, "I wasn't here to be threatened? What if I wasn't Adrian Vale for a while?" Jamie frowned. "What do you mean?" "I mean, what if I go undercover in my own company? A temp. Junior IT support. No one looks at a temp. Temps see everything, and no one tells them anything important, which means people talk freely around them. I could find the leak myself, from the floor, not from the boardroom." Jamie stared at him. "You want to pretend to be an ordinary employee in a company you own." "Yes." "For how long?" "Until I find who sent Aurora to Victor. Or until someone recognizes me, whichever comes first." Jamie rubbed his face. "Your mother will kill me." "My mother will kill you if I get hurt, and she'll kill you if I do nothing," Adrian said. "At least this way I might actually fix it." It took three days to arrange. That was fast for a billionaire disappearing, and slow for a man who wanted to be gone by lunch. He got a new identity, but not a false one. He became Adrian Cole. The name was close enough to his own that he would answer to it. It was distant enough that a quick search would find a perfectly ordinary CV. He got a temp contract in IT support, starting Monday. He got a small rented apartment in Brooklyn, with a shower that took five minutes to get hot and a view of a brick wall. To his surprise, Adrian found that rather comforting. On Sunday night, he stood in that apartment with one suitcase and a laptop that was not his usual laptop. He felt something he had not felt in years. Free. Not safe. Not happy, exactly. Free, in the way you feel free when no one is watching you. When no one wants anything from you. When you can just be a person for a while. On Monday morning, he took the subway to Vale headquarters — his headquarters — and queued at security with everyone else. He showed a temp pass with a photograph that made him look tired, which was accurate. Then he walked into a building he owned as if he had never seen it before. The IT support floor was on the seventh floor, which was a long way from the fortieth, in every sense. The coffee was worse. The chairs were older. The people were kinder. "You're the new temp?" a woman said, when he sat down at a desk that wobbled. She was about his age, with dark hair and a project manager's lanyard. She had a look that said she had already decided he was going to be trouble, in the best possible way. "Adrian Cole," he said, holding out his hand. "Junior IT support. I fix laptops and pretend I understand printers." "Mia Harper," she said, shaking his hand. "Project manager. I break laptops and pretend I understand deadlines." She smiled, and Adrian felt something shift, inconveniently and completely. It was not the smile of someone who recognized a billionaire. It was the smile of someone who liked a joke, and who was too busy to be impressed. "First day?" Mia asked. "First day," Adrian said. It was true, in a way he had not expected to enjoy. "Well," Mia said, "welcome to Vale. It's a good company, mostly. Just don't believe everything you read about the man who runs it." Adrian blinked. "Oh?" "He's a billionaire," Mia said, as if that explained everything. "They're all the same. They build something good, then they sell it, or they close it, or they forget the people who built it with them. My dad worked for a company like this. One day he had a job, the next day he had a redundancy letter and a speech about 'difficult decisions.' So forgive me if I don't swoon over Adrian Vale." Adrian laughed, and it was a real laugh, and also a wince. "Fair enough," he said. "What about Adrian Cole?" Mia looked at him, considering. "Adrian Cole," she said, "hasn't disappointed me yet. Give him time." She walked away to a meeting, with a laptop under her arm and a coffee in her hand. Adrian watched her go, and thought, with a clarity that frightened him: this woman hates billionaires. I am one, and I have just lied to her about who I am. I am going to have to tell her the truth one day, and she is going to walk away, and I will deserve it. And yet, for the first time in years, he wanted to be known for something other than his fortune. He wanted Mia Harper to like Adrian Cole, the temp who fixed her laptop. He wanted that before she ever met Adrian Vale, the billionaire who owned the building. It was, he thought, a terrible plan. It was also the only one he had. Later that day, when the office emptied and the lights went low, Adrian stayed late, fixing a printer that did not need fixing. He looked at the list of people who had access to the Aurora plan. The list was long. Too long. Someone on that list had sent it to Victor Lang. Adrian did not know who, or why, or what they would do next. But he knew one thing. He stood in an office that was his and not his. He was himself and not himself. And he was going to find them. And he was going to do it, he realized, with a woman watching his every move who hated everything he was supposed to be. With a best friend who thought he had lost his mind, and a rival who wanted his company. With a secret that would, sooner or later, come out. He took out his phone — his new, ordinary phone — and typed a message to Jamie, then deleted it, then typed it again. *Day one. No one recognized me. I met someone. This is going to be complicated.* Jamie replied in under a minute: *Then don't fall for her. That's an order.* Adrian put the phone away and looked out at the New York skyline. Lights were coming on one by one, in buildings he owned and buildings he didn't. He smiled, despite himself. Too late, he thought. Already too late.