Page 28 of 56 Days
There has to be a more efficient way to find out who she really is.
“I’m going to be late back.” He looks at his watch—he still has a good twenty minutes left on his lunch hour—and stands up.
She stands up as well. “Yeah, I better go, too. Well... thanks for the coffee.”
And then he has an idea.
“Look,” he says, “I was going to go see that new Apollo documentary. On Monday. Night. They’re showing it at this tiny cinema in town. Maybe—if you wanted to—we could, um, we could go see it together?”
He can’t read her expression.
Is that shock? Unease?Panic?
Maybe he’s pushed her too far. If she’s been tasked with getting close to him then this should be welcome, but if that’s the case she also knows who he is,whathe is, and this would explain her hesitation at the prospect of spending more time with him.
“God,” he says, looking away. “I’m so shit at this.”
But then she appears to recover and tells him that sounds great. He offers to book the tickets and suggests they meet at 5:30 p.m. outside his office. She asks where that is and he explains.
“I’ll give you my phone number,” he says then. “Just in case there’s anylast-minuteproblems.”
He calls out the digits and she taps them into her phone—and just as he’d hoped, she sends him a text message so he has hers.
“I’ll add you to my contacts as Space Shuttle Girl,” he says.
She smiles. “I like it.”
“Better put in your actual name as well.” He keeps his eyes on his phone as he says this, tapping away at the screen, tone as casual as he can make it. “Ciara...?”
“Wyse,” she finishes. “W-Y-S-E.”
Mission accomplished.
They walk back together as far as his office, then wave goodbye.
As he turns to enter the building, he realizes that she never askedhimhis last name.
Oliver takes the lift up to the fourth floor and turns left into the offices of KB Studios. Friday is always busy withoff-siteclient meetings and this combined with the time of the day has most of the desks deserted. He goes to his and tilts his computer screen so that even if someone were to come and sit down right next to him, they’d have a hard time seeing what he was doing.
He opens the internet browser and typesCiara Wyseinto Google. When he presses Enter, the screen fills with results.
A Ciara Wyse recently retired as the principal of a local school. Another has a professional bio on the website of a firm of Donegal accountants. There’s a smattering of social accounts belonging to teenage girls with the same name and a Pinterest board linked to that name filled with ideas for tattoos.
None of them seem to be her.
But there are also a number of LinkedIn profiles. He logs on to the site anddouble-checkshis privacy settings; as ever, they are set to hide his identity when browsing other users’ pages. When he searches for her within the site, he finds her straightaway; she’s the top result.
The photo is a professional headshot of her with longer, darker hair. Under Education, it lists a secondary school in the Isle of Man and a BSc in business management from the University of Swansea. Class of 2017, just as she’d said. Experience includes three different positions in something called Operation and Supply Chain at Apple’s plant in Cork—she went back there after Swansea, then—and her current role: Technical Customer Service Concierge for Cirrus Web Services, Dublin office. The start date is listed as February 2020. There’s very little else on the profile and she only has a couple of dozen connections, but everything on it fits with what she’d said.
Still, it’s just a page on a website where the user enters the text. He could make one right now that says he went to Harvard and works as a NASA astronaut.
What he needs is independent confirmation.
He searches on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but finds nothing—at least, nothing set to public—that looks like it could be her.
He drums his fingers on his desk, thinking. Then he goes back to Google and putsCirrusWeb Services Dublininto the search box.
There’s a local phone number listed for the building on Burlington Road. He doubts it’s anything more than a connection to a faraway call center where Ciara won’t be, but it’s worth a try.
