Hidden - Laura Griffin Page 0,54
beneath the streaming sunlight. Everyone had a laptop in front of them or was scrolling through a phone.
Seth stepped up to the counter and ordered a chai tea. Bailey asked for plain drip coffee and tried to pay, but Seth waved her off.
“It’s free for employees.”
“Really? Wow.”
“Hey, there’s Lucinda. One sec.”
Bailey turned to see a rail-thin woman in a charcoal suit talking on her phone as she collected a frothy green drink from the end of the counter. She wore a pale pink blouse that should have softened the severity of the suit, but didn’t, possibly because of her three-inch black stilettos. She ended her phone call, and Seth approached her.
“Lucinda, this is Bailey Rhoads from the Herald.”
Her gaze narrowed and she turned to Bailey with a tight smile. “Hello.” She stabbed a straw into her drink.
“Bailey’s hoping to sit down with you briefly—”
She turned her tight smile to Seth. “Today’s impossible.”
“I would only need a minute or two,” Bailey said.
Irritation flickered in her eyes as she looked from Bailey to Seth. “Have Levon set something up for next week.” She grabbed her phone off the counter and nodded at Bailey. “Enjoy your visit.”
She strode away with her cup, and Bailey noticed she had the calves of an Olympic athlete. She kept her gaze straight ahead, ignoring people’s nods and greetings as they passed by.
Bailey glanced at Seth. He seemed a bit embarrassed by the brush-off as he led her to a table overlooking the atrium.
“Free coffee is a nice perk,” Bailey said, taking a sip.
“Yeah, it’s good for morale.” He smiled. “Cheaper than stock options.”
Bailey pulled out her notebook. “So, you know Nico from college?”
“Not really. I met him there. We were both CS majors. But I didn’t really know him until he joined our Ultimate team.”
“Ultimate Frisbee.”
“Right. We’ve got about twenty people. Most of them work here or at Dell. We have a few from Google, too. Nico’s the odd man out, working for the paper.” He smiled again. “You play?”
“No.”
“It’s fun to watch. You should come out sometime.” He nodded at her notebook, where she’d jotted his name and title. “Nico said you’re writing about data security?”
“Sort of. I’m interested in the background checks you do for people. What information you collect and how you keep it private.”
He nodded. “We take privacy very seriously. It’s one of our three bedrocks.”
“Bedrocks?”
“Bedrock tenets. Security, privacy, liberty.”
She jotted down the words.
“Those principles are ingrained. Literally.” He nodded at the atrium, and Bailey followed his gaze. “They’re engraved on the granite floor down there. Bedrock. See?”
She peered over the railing at the granite floor ten stories below where employees streamed back and forth. The design showed a globe surrounded by the words SECURITY * PRIVACY * LIBERTY * GRANITE TECH.
“Interesting. Aren’t those concepts kind of . . . contradictory?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how does liberty go with privacy?”
He nodded. “Freedom from worry. We keep your life secure, so you don’t have to.” He smiled. “Or something like that. I sound like a commercial, don’t I?”
“A little. Your main business is background checks for clients?”
“And increasingly we’re getting into storage solutions. Cloud storage, that sort of thing. We take extraordinary measures to secure digital data for all our clients. That includes sensitive documents, emails, telecommunications, biometric data.”
“Such as?”
“Fingerprints, faceprints, everything. Also, social security numbers, tax information.”
She flipped a page. “I read about a data breach several years ago.”
He winced. “Yeah, we got some bad press on that one. It was overblown, though.”
“What happened?”
“Your basic phishing scam. Someone posing as one of our executives sent an email to an assistant in HR, asking for a list of social security numbers.”
“And they provided it?”
“Yeah. The email looked legit. It was only off by two letters from a real Granite Tech email address. But it was phony, of course, so the list got sent to someone outside the company. We found out what happened when April rolled around and people started discovering someone had filed fraudulent tax returns and claimed refunds.” He shook his head. “Like I said, it could happen to any company. It happens way more than you would think, but when the press got a hold of it, we took a real beating.”
“That was three years ago?”
“Four.”
“And now?”
“Well, that coincided with a rough patch, financially.” He paused. “Can we talk off the record for a minute?”
“Okay.” She put down her pen.
“Tensions were running high here at that time. We’d just had a round of layoffs. I know you know what that’s