Chapter 2: Breakthrough

It was a bit of a let down that we were done. I didn't expect to be chosen for another project right away, so I headed back to my old cubicle and wondered what I'd do next. I didn't get very far.

"Julie, hold on a second," I heard Rance call.

I stopped immediately and turned to face him. "Yes?"

"You have time for more talk?"

"Ah ... sure." I wondered what was on his mind.

We walked together as he led me to his office. I caught sight of a number of women giving me the eye as I walked side-by-side with my cowboy. I was curious what he wanted, but any time with Rance was time well spent as far as I was concerned.

"You probably know a lot more about what I do now when I'm not hangin' around you geniuses. My real job is make sure nobody steals anythin' from us. That means people from the outside and the inside. We've grown so fast that I'm havin' a hard time keepin' up. I need a sidekick to help me out. Would you be interested?"

I must have flushed with excitement. He was asking me to work with him. But hold on, there was a catch.

"Rance, I don't know anything about security. You're not asking me to be a spy or anything, are you?"

"Hell no, nothin' like that," he grinned. God, a smile from that man could make me weak in the knees. "I've got uniformed security for the outside of the buildin'. I need an assistant that can help me with the inside. As careful as we are to do background checks, someone could still slip through our screenin'. Your job would be follow up on new people, and check out anyone that might be actin' suspiciously. On top of that, you just finished designin' the database we'll be using. I need someone like you to look after it.

"As far as the security part, it ain't cloak 'n' dagger stuff, just old-fashioned diggin'. There's nothing I can't teach you, and you've already proved you can learn in a hurry."

"Aren't I overqualified for this type of work?"

"No ... I don't think so. It's kind of like learnin' to be a private detective. You have to have one part smarts, one part common sense, and one part intuition. Now, I always heard that women are the experts at intuition. You've already proven you've got the other two parts ... so ... what do you say?"

It was a rotten thing for him to do. I knew ... and he knew ... I was going to say yes. There was no way I was going to turn down a chance to be with the source of my everyday fantasies.

I nodded, probably a little too vigorously. "Okay. Let's do it."

"Great! Just what I was hopin' you'd say," he smiled. Oh shit, I was dead again.

"We'll start next Monday mornin'. If you find me on Friday afternoon, I'll give you a tour of your new office and we can talk about what you'll need for the job."

"I don't have to carry a gun or anything, do I?"

"No," he laughed. "No guns, no tazers, maybe a can of pepper spray, though."

He was teasing me and I smiled and chuckled at that.

Right after lunch Friday I headed for Rance's office. The door was open and he was sitting behind his desk, turned toward the window, his hands behind his head, seemingly lost in thought. I knocked softly.

He didn't react immediately, then acknowledged the knock and swung around to face me. The look he gave me was one I had never seen on him before. I was certain it was one of great sadness. It didn't last long. As soon as he recognized me, he forced a smile and stood.

"Here for your orientation, Julie?" he asked in the sexiest voice any man was ever given.

"Yes. If I'm not disturbing you."

"Nope. Good a time as any," he smiled. The Rance I knew was back, and the 'look' was gone.

We spent the rest of the afternoon together. First he showed me my office, which was a complete surprise. It was next to his and he pointed out that the two were soundproofed. There wouldn't be any overhearing of conversations held in them. The idea of having my own office was exciting, even if I didn't know exactly what the job was all about.

Then we went over his files and what type of information he had and how it was stored. He pulled my file out and placed it before me. I looked at it, and knew from experience that it was amazingly complete.

"Have you had this all the time I've been here?" I asked, a bit timidly.

"Yes, from before we decided to hire you," he answered, looking me straight in the eye.

"Then that conversation we had this week in the cafeteria ... what was that about?"

"Just that ... conversation," he smiled. "I think of it as an ice-breaker."

I looked at him with some suspicion. I looked back at the file. "This even lists the clubs and groups that I was involved with at Stanford," I said, getting more uncomfortable.

He nodded, no smile this time. "That was in your year book. When we interviewed you, you were the most likely candidate. That's when I was asked to do the background check and that's why you didn't hear from us for three weeks. You came up aces, so you were hired."

I don't think he realized how uncomfortable I had become. I was almost angry, but suppressed it to ask another question.

"What isn't in this file that you have dug up? What more do you know about me?"

I could see him change. Maybe he hadn't expected me to be this aggressive, or maybe he knew something he didn't want to share with me. I couldn't tell, but I had unsettled him. He put his hands together, interlocking his fingers and looked me straight in the eye once more.

"Nothin' you haven't told me. If it's not in this file, it either isn't important to Kleinhauser or I don't know about it."

There was no humor in his reply and I was forced to take what he said at face value. I wondered if it was the truth or not.

As we went through the procedures and methods used for background checks, Rance stressed it was important to obey the law and not violate any statues on privacy. That didn't make any sense. He had all kinds of information on me that I didn't volunteer.

"You'd be surprised how easy it is to get information in the public domain," he responded when I challenged him. "There isn't anythin' in your file that you didn't voluntarily offer or that I couldn't find on the internet usin' completely legal means."

"Oh." It was about all I could say to his response.

When I thought about it later, I realized he was right. I even did some test runs myself to be satisfied he was right. I felt better in one way, and concerned in another. Any idea of privacy was being eroded rather quickly in our country. If it wasn't the internet, it was CCTV cameras, Homeland Security, Credit agencies, or a dozen other organizations that collected our personal information through open sources. We had damn few secrets, it seemed.

"We're going to have to start from scratch when it comes to loading the database," I said.

"Don't you go worrying about that part of it. I've asked for Doreen Jamieson to help. She knows the project and wanted to see it through to the finish."

"Okay. We'd better get started, we've got a lot of work to do."

That got a big Rance Cameron smile. "Good! I'll look forward to havin' you here startin' tomorrow."

It took another three months to convert the nearly three hundred personnel files over to the database. I was still learning the job, but it wasn't boring and I was fascinated by what I could dig up about prospective employees that they'd rather not admit. If I ran into a roadblock, I'd talk to Rance and he'd show me how to get the information legally.

By now, I was comfortably settled in my new role and enjoying it. Doreen had finished her work and had gone on to another project. My job wasn't anything like I was trained for, but that didn't matter. I was sitting next to my heartthrob and learning a lot, so I was happy. We spent almost every lunch hour together, usually with a sandwich and a drink from the nearby vending machine. Sometimes we would splurge and go to the cafeteria, but more often that not, you'd find us in Rance's office, the door open, telling each other stories about our past.

I learned a lot about my cowboy boss during those lunches. Bit by bit, he told me about his life and, almost by accident, his abortive romance with a local girl in Trinidad. I think it surprised him that he even mentioned it, and he shut up almost immediately when he realized what he had revealed. I was pretty sure this was the girl who had sent him the Dear John letter in Afghanistan, but I didn't pursue the matter. He hadn't volunteered the information, and I wasn't going to press my luck. Not yet, anyway.

I never could get my head around the idea that a supposedly sane woman would dump a guy like Rance. It just didn't make sense. Sure, he was handsome, but he was so much more than that. He was one of those men who didn't have to act the part. He knew who he was and didn't feel like he had to show everyone. I think that was his most attractive feature. So why did this woman kiss him off? Was there something about Rance I didn't understand?