The Research Project

Chapter One

Lainey felt their eyes burning into the back of her head like pointed red lasers. She moved quickly. She was obstructing everyone's view and she was also making a spectacle of herself.

"Oh my God, Lainey. Can you just get it together?" snapped Morgan.

Lainey pushed her glasses up her nose as she felt the heat of embarrassment prickle the back of her neck. She finished sweeping the remnants of the smashed globe from the floor. Everyone else in the room obviously thought it was beneath them to actually get up and help her. She stood, readjusted the lens of the data projector and everything on the screen came into focus. Lainey breathed a sigh of relief.

"All ready, Ms Adriani," Lainey said, offering a small smile.

But Morgan ignored her and began her presentation. Resisting the urge to push her glasses up her nose again, Lainey clutched the dustpan in her hand a little tighter instead and moved to the back of the conference room toward the door/escape route. She twisted the handle and made to slip outside, but before she did she heard a voice.

"Remind me again why we hired her?"

Lainey froze for an instant before she continued to move. The voice belonged to Byron Vidler- the principal of Vidler Legal, in other words her boss, although she didn't have much to do with him directly. Lainey was low down on the food chain as a legal secretary so mostly he just ignored her presence, the same he did to anyone who was beneath him. Except for when she drew attention to herself, like just then.

It hadn't really been her fault. Morgan had booked the one conference room in the building without a mounted data projector. Of course, Morgan needed to do a Keynote presentation. So Lainey, being hired for her exceptional I.T. skills, that's why you hired me, Mr. Vidler, was given the task of setting it up. Morgan had given her the wrong time for the meeting, so everyone was already present and waiting when she wheeled the projector trolley into the room. In her rush, she hadn't seen that the corner of the rug had been snagged up in Morgan's chair. The trolley rolled over it, thudded to a stop and lurched forward, the projector flew off the trolley and straight onto the wooden floor, smashing the very expensive globe inside.

Lainey sighed inwardly and deposited the contents of the dustpan into the nearest bin. Of course, the whole sorry scenario had to occur in front of not only her boss, but all of the lawyers on the legal team- Morgan, who hated her, Murray and Theo as well as some very high profile clients. No wonder Mr Vidler was questioning why he had employed her. He was probably about to fire her. If she didn't need this job so much she would've made his life a whole lot easier and quit. Hopefully, one day, she could.

Hopefully, the small thumb drive concealed in a pocket in her handbag was her ticket out of this place. Lainey sat down at her desk and glancing about, reached underneath to where her bag was. Her hand closed over the thumb drive. She had just meant to check that it was still there because if anyone ever found it, she'd be out of a job. But as she looked about the office furtively to check no one was around, she found herself pulling it all the way out and feeling like a criminal, she plugged it into her laptop. She never did this at work, she didn't want to get caught.

Lainey dipped her laptop screen down to a thirty degree angle as the document she had spent hours working on last night appeared on her screen. The people she worked with didn't know who she really was or what she did once she was out of here. They had no idea that when Lainey went home of an evening she had the power to turn a situation like the smashed globe around so that Morgan was exposed as the incompetent moron and not her.

But as she began to read the document, she realised with a sinking feeling that everything she had done last night had been a waste of time. It was like reading another language. Nothing made sense so it was hardly worth the risk of being caught at work. Besides, she still had to climb paperwork mountain by the end of the day, she really needed to get back to work.