Elixir (20 page)

Sean gapes at the glass receptacles, sun streaks from the window glinting on them, the cure right in front of him so palpable and real. “Kid, you got anything for me?” Hank asks. “Merzberg said you had a list or something.”

Sean reaches into his jeans, slides out a piece of yellow notebook paper folded twice over, and passes it to him. “They’re all on here.”

He peels it open and lays it on a table. Scratching his neck, he reads it. He reads it again.

“What do you think?” the professor asks, discerning some apprehension in his expression.

He tucks the page in his chest pocket and says to the kid in a deadpan voice, “That’s not your run-of-the-mill request.”

“I realize,” Sean says, agreeable. “But a place like this should have it all, right?”

He juts out his chin. “Tell me a little more about this project you’re working on.”

“It’s an algorithm for predicting changes in the positions of particles.”

A pause. “Particles, huh?”

He nods. “When chemicals combine. Ones that behave...impulsively.”

Hank taps the pocket he put the list in. “You bet your ass this stuff behaves impulsively.”

“I’m aware they’re...potent. But I need them. And I’ll take full responsibility.”

The professor steps closer to Sean and says, “I vouch for him. I’ll shoulder just as much responsibility for the handling of the substances as him. If anyone from the university has any doubts, send them to me.”

Hank doesn’t speak for a while, his demeanor distrustful as he watches Sean. “Give me some time. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Sean asks, hoping for a quicker turnaround.

“Is that a problem?”

A couple moments go by. “No. Tomorrow should be fine.”

“Talk to you then,” he says, closing the cabinets, masking all those rows of colorful glass.

Around one in the afternoon Hank is alone in a booth at a dive bar near campus, bang of pool balls in the background, voice of a basketball game announcer coming from a TV.

Sipping his beer, he sticks his hand in his shirt, wiggles out Sean’s sheet of paper, and flattens it on the surface. He stares at it for about ten seconds, then pulls out his cell phone and dials a number. It rings for a while. “Mr. Phlace,” he says into it, tone upbeat and energetic as if he was on a job interview. “Hank O’Mara...yes. I was at your lab in Redwood City...in March...with Ike Marrow from Stanford.” He snags a few cashews from a bowl on his table. “Yup...well I came across a little something today that I thought could be of interest to you.” He chucks the nuts in his mouth.

Chewing, he says, “I had a student a few hours ago asking me for a whole bunch of chemicals. Unusual kinds. Supposedly for a computer-science project.” He listens for a bit. “I’ll explain. Now, I always get kids at this school bugging me for chemicals. They all have some wacky idea for some experiment. I usually just give them what they want and send them on their way. This kid before asked me for twelve of them. Now here’s the thing...eight were identical matches to the ones we were analyzing in your lab in March. Exactly. Michelangelo.”

He swigs his beer and says, “He’s not actually enrolled here...never even gave me a name. Visiting student from Canada apparently.” He nods a couple times. “Sure...I can do that. I’ll let you know what I find. Thanks Mr. Phlace. And if you ever have any more consulting contracts don’t hesitate to give me a ring. It was a pleasure working with all you guys at Colzyne. You too. So long.” He hangs up and opens the SoCal Tech website on his phone’s browser.

Logged into the faculty area, he scrolls through the contacts and selects “Steven Merzberg.” He types “independent study” in the search bar, clicks enter, and gets back a chart of every study the professor ever presided over, containing the research subject, name and photo of the student, final grade, and semester it was held. No topics on there are related to predicting particle movement.

He scoops another handful of cashews from the bowl. As he chomps, something catches his eye, an older project without a grade, one called “The Traveling Salesman Problem” with a student named Sean Malone, kid in the thumbnail picture looking similar to the person he met at the college earlier. He Googles “Sean Malone,” images of the boy during
Jeopardy!
appearing. Fascinated, he inches closer to the screen. He taps the link to his Wikipedia profile, reading:

Hank closes the web browser and says to himself, “Jesus Christ.” He hits redial.

Three mornings later, New Year’s Eve, a suited man in his early fifties,
Wall Street Journal
tucked under his right arm, marches toward a monolithic tinted-glass tower in Redwood City, California, lasers of sun reflecting off the walls. He passes a Japanese-inspired garden, massive sign in the center with “Colzyne Systems” etched in black, “Our Work Is Your Life” in smaller writing below.

As he approaches the building, a bunch of people with corporate badges on their waists clear out of his way. “Good morning Mr. Stone,” the doorman says with a nod, pushing open the entrance.

“Hello,” he says without looking at him. He scans his ID card on a sensor by the elevator. Stepping inside, he presses “17,” the second-highest-numbered button.

“Can you believe this Goddamn bond market?” another suited man asks, sliding in before it closes.

“Our stock’s already down a quarter percent this morning,” Stone says to him, no eye contact.

“I don’t see it stabilizing before the next earnings call.”

“Thanks for bringing that up.”

The man laughs and asks in a dry tone, “Happy New Year, huh?”

“Yeah,” Stone says, even dryer.

“You and Elizabeth have any plans for tonight?”

“Just dinner. We have an early flight to San Tropez tomorrow.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he says, clenching his fist as if he made a mistake forgetting about the trip. “You go every New Year.” The doors open. “Have a good one.”

“Yeah.” Both stride onto the seventeenth floor, veering off in opposite directions. Stone heads down a hall buzzing with dozens of executives and their assistants, a few original Impressionist paintings hanging, view of Redwood City’s seaport outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

He opens a room labeled “Bruce Stone – Vice President of Global Sales,” tosses his jacket on a leather couch, and sits behind his desk, unfolding his
Wall Street Journal
. He crosses his legs, leans back, and reads about the bond market with a sour expression. He hears a knock outside. “Ashley?” he asks, still focused on the article.

A woman in business attire, late twenties, peeks inside. “Good morning sir,” she says with timidity.

“What is it?”

“I just got off with Mr. Phlace’s office. He’s calling an emergency meeting. Between all the vice presidents.”

Lowering the newspaper, he glances at her. “Emergency meeting? Now?”

“Yes sir.”

“Because of the bond market?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s your job to be sure,” he says, irritated.

“They didn’t give any details. All they said was they needed you there.”

“Jesus. All right.” Standing, he gazes into a mirror, adjusting his silk tie, examining his profile. “Have my breakfast waiting for me in here when I come down.”

“Yes sir. Anything else?”

“No.” She slips away. He pats the sides of his wavy chestnut hair, then exits, walks up the hallway, and returns to the elevator, hitting “18.” In a few moments he gets off, a large set of double doors in front of him, “Donald Phlace – CEO” emblazoned in thick chrome letters.

He turns the knob and enters, a tall, fit man in a tailored black suit at a desk, an eight-foot-high painting of two samurai behind him. “You’re late,” he says to Stone.

“I’m sorry Mr. Phlace. Ashley just told me.”

“Sit with the rest of them.” He joins five other men in designer suits at a cherry conference table, an air of worry to them. Phlace, Colzyne’s CEO, holds a gold letter opener with his manicured hand, tip digging into his leather desk mat. Eyeing his six vice presidents, he spins it for a while, then lays it down and picks up a thick laminated report.

He pushes back his armchair, rises to his feet, and approaches them with the document, each avoiding eye contact with him. As he circles them, the morning sun in the window stripes his clean-shaven face, his skin tight for a man in his late forties, not a wrinkle on it. He dangles the heap of paper in front of them for a couple moments, then lets go, the blue backside smacking the tabletop.

They glimpse the title, “Colzyne Systems: IT Breach.” Hands clasped behind his back, Phlace asks, “What are you people worth?” He fixates on an attendee, and another, then one more. “On average you all make what, about seven hundred fifty thousand a year? That comes out to...” He looks up for a few seconds. “Three seventy-five an hour. So in a ten-hour day each of you costs me three thousand seven hundred fifty bucks.” He loops around them in a slow, deliberate fashion. “Times six and that’s twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars. The daily rate for the lot of you.” He stops behind a man with a big forehead and double chin and grips the back of his seat. “Vern?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you know what’s in that report? That one right there.” Phlace points at the inch-thick document. “Right in front of you.”

The employee fidgets for a moment, then clears his throat and says, “I can guess sir.”

“Oh, you can guess,” Phlace says with sarcasm. “He can guess.” He applauds. “Three quarters of a million dollars a year and I get a guess in return.” He gestures at the report again. “This tells me that our computer network was hacked a few days ago. Hacked so badly that our most tightly held project, my golden baby, was stolen from under me.” He slams his fist on the cover, a shake to the table, a grimace from some of the men. “So my question. Why, when I was spending over twenty-two thousand dollars on the six of you on Friday, did I need to get a phone call from some ex-contractor in Los Angeles telling me there was a problem?” The room is near hushed for a while, the faint click of a chair spring, the groan of a hungry stomach, a cough.

“Sir, if I may,” one of them says, the oldest, horn-rimmed glasses, rosy cheeks. “I read the analysis this morning. Verbatim. As you’re aware I’ve been working with corporate IT systems since the late seventies. I’ve seen every type of hack attempt and hack defense.” He folds his hands. “I logged into the network earlier. I inspected our entire security spectrum, pre-breach, then post. What happened to us last week was...it was a system intrusion foreign to anything I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Well. Picture it this way. Let’s say a bank robber needed to break into a safe. And it was one of the strongest in the world. He needed to blow up the entire thing to gain access. Heavy explosives. Are you following?”

“Keep going.”

“Now let’s assume he successfully destroyed it. He blew it to pieces, collected whatever it was he wanted inside, and ran off—”

“Get to the point Meyerson.”

“In our case sir, our firewall was destroyed in the same manner a physical safe would be blown up. Our cyber-security environment essentially exploded.” He gazes out the window at the seaport, a block of clouds about to overtake the sun. “But here’s the strange part. Every single piece of our so-called safe was put back in place perfectly after the intrusion. Almost instantly.” He looks Phlace in the eye. “To be honest, unless you got that phone call and we scrutinized downloads of the Michelangelo files, nobody here ever would’ve noticed any sort of violation. There was no trace.” He pauses. “Mathematically I’ve been trying to understand how the hacker was able to do that, especially with a firewall as sophisticated as ours. And quite frankly, I’m dumbfounded.”

Phlace doesn’t talk for about a minute as he processes what he just heard, then wanders to his desk and descends into his Italian-leather seat. Clutching the gold letter opener, he pokes the corner of a single piece of paper and drags it close. Lifting it, he leers at a printout of Sean’s Wikipedia profile and says to the room, “Well we know who he is. The question is how do we deal with him?”

“Wait, we know who did it?” Stone asks, doubt in his voice since he missed the beginning of the meeting. Phlace slides the sheet to the edge of the desk, Stone getting up and grabbing it. “He’s the hacker?” he asks, eyeing eleven-year-old Sean standing behind a
Jeopardy!
podium with his head sloped to the side.

“Apparently.”

He reads the boy’s bio. “Says here he’s dead?”

“The contractor in LA assured me it’s bogus. He just saw the kid in person. He said his face is an older version of the one in the picture. No doubt in his mind.”

“What’s his end game? Does he want to sell our research?”

“I think he may have finished our research.”

“What?” He stares at the printout a while longer, grasping the magnitude of this potential disaster for Colzyne, then sets it down. “Why do you think he finished it?”

“This Hank in Los Angeles, who’s a very accomplished research scientist himself, had a pretty convincing argument if you look at the compounds he’s considering adding to ours. I already ran them by our chief chemist and he agreed. He’s...onto something.”

“If we know the substances he’s using, why don’t we just copy them and round it out ourselves?”

“It’s the proportions. We have no idea how he’ll mix them. That’s the most complicated piece of it. Our chemist looked at it all night. He can’t comprehend how it would exactly work. This of course doesn’t mean there’s not an answer. It just means we don’t have it. And as I’m sure you can guess, without the proportions in our design diagrams we wouldn’t even be able to use patent protection if he tried to sell what we started. We’d have no claim on any of it.” That block of clouds in the sky takes over the whole of the sun, Phlace’s creaseless skin darkening, then the rest of the room.