Read Beating Ruby for Free Online

badly our bosses were panicking, to shut down all operations for that long.
    Kelly cleared her throat and called the first name in a loud voice. “Joshua Amberg.”
    We all watched as Joshua left the safety of his little group of Scala enthusiasts to walk bravely toward the officers. He waved at the cops with a smile, but they didn’t react. It appeared they hadn’t come here to fraternize with young engineers who wore their checked shirts over their jeans and coded with cutting-edge languages no one understood but them.
    As soon as the three of them were out of sight, I turned to Joel and Vishal. “I think I’m going to take advantage of the fact that my name starts with a C and go to the ladies’ room. I’ll see you guys later.”
    Vishal’s eyes started bulging out again, but I walked away before he could give the full measure of his talent.

    I worked in the “small tower” (the Kit Kat), as opposed to the “big tower”—on Broadway, and also referred to as “the Castle.” It basically went like this: EM Tech was stuck in a little brown building dating from the seventies while our mother ship, EM Group, a huge holding operating in a variety of sectors, got a sixty-story glass skyscraper, because there were only four hundred of us, and that amounted to less than 0.5 percent of EM’s total workforce worldwide.
    Things weren’t that simple, though. EMT’s meager staff might have been but a drop of water among EMG’s eighty thousand employees, but it nonetheless brought in almost 11 percent of the group’s net revenue, mostly through the sale of overpriced super-high-tech financial software like Ruby. The relegation of EMT to the ignominious Kit Kat was therefore perceived as an injustice—if not a direct provocation—and the five hundred yards EMT execs had to cover in order to attend Hadrian Ellingham’s annual charity cocktail for the leper kids didn’t help.
    As part of the insidious war raging between the two buildings, my colleagues discussed all kinds of crazy rumors about the Castle, such as the fact that EMG employees were treated to truffle-and-Parmesan Pringles imported straight from Europe, or that the executive toilet was flushed with champagne. Which leads me back to . . . Prince, who dutifully elaborated and spread most of these rumors.
    When the elevator doors opened to the lobby, he was still there, hunched behind the large desk—no doubt spying on some pretty girl from marketing through the surveillance cameras. He waved at me. “Hey, hey . . . Island!”
    I crossed the hall and entered his territory. Hidden under an impeccable glass counter, his actual desk was a mess, as usual. A row of screens delimited his kingdom, all covered with Post-it notes about every single thing that went on in EMT’s walls. A small stack of brand-new security badges waited near his keyboard—which he would need to distribute—and there was enough food stored everywhere around us to supply a small nation. Prince had passed the four-hundred-pound mark a couple of months ago, and he had yet to heed his grandma’s encouragements to start a diet.
    He patted the empty chair next to his with a tentative smile. “You feeling better?”
    I watched two of my colleagues sip sodas near a vending machine on one of the surveillance screens. “Prince.”
    “Isles?”
    “Did you see . . . I mean, do you guys have Thom jumping . . . on the security recordings?”
    He cleared his throat. “No. Someone cut the power in the west wing. The security cameras were down when he . . . fell.”
    My scalp prickled. “ Fell? Not jumped?”
    Prince reached for a mini Reese’s cup in an open bag. “Look, I heard some of the cops . . .”
    I shook my head when he pushed the bag toward me. “What are they saying? Do they suspect someone murdered Thom?”
    There was some more intense throat-clearing, and his brown eyes avoided mine. “I can’t say anything. You know I’m bound by