Shimmer (27 page)

And she leans forward a moment, lets her eyes close, lets her face hide deep in her hands.

Somehow she should have been able to protect the company from everything. Regence, blackmail, everything.

And she knows that each threat means there will be one more problem.

It means all this will never end.

She's known this for years. But this morning it is so clear.

Regence means this will never end.

Eugene means this will never stop.

Network failures, Fadowsky journals, new markets and unexplained changes in production facilities in Asia, and this will never end.

Grace won't change that.

And so she tells herself to face this.

Tells herself to remember this will not end.

Tells herself to realize this is the life she wanted.

Tells herself she will have to choose.

You can choose to leave.

As always they'd set the meeting up through a series of vague and circular phone conversations. As always they'd had to see me in person. As always I'd never met them or seen them before.

Anonymous representatives of some large company or investment firm, here to try to buy Core Communications.

A few times a month I listened to the circling, probing questions of people interested in a purchase of the company. No one at Core knew how many offers there had been. I'd revealed only a few to the senior staff and the board. The others I'd kept secret. Because a sale was impossible, no matter the price, no matter the buyer. The shadow network made a sale impossible.

As always I was giving these emissaries no encouragement, no hope. As always I met with them only to spread the word that Core was not for sale.

And for me, especially after we'd restored our network, especially
after the life of the shadow network had been extended, today, especially, we were not for sale.

The woman was quite beautiful, probably forty, the carefully prepared image of financial savvy and street smarts. The man was nearly seventy and somehow perfect as well, this image of late-life fitness, stamina and experience.

“So where are you from?” I asked them.

The man sat back, turning his palms to the ceiling. Smiling wide. In a moment, he said, “I'm here at the request of a friend of a friend.”

“Who,” I suggested, “is really more a friend of someone else's friend.”

He tapped his hand on the table, moving it side to side as he weighed his response. Finally he said, “True.”

“You're a consultant,” I said, part comment, part question.

He shrugged. “Confidante.”

“Sounding board.”

“Go-to guy.”

“One thing I didn't mention,” I said, “is that you have just two more minutes before we're done.”

He held his lips awkwardly tight, beginning to sit back, then carefully leaning forward.

“A buyer,” he said. “I'm here at the request of a buyer of companies. Companies like yours.”

“Ninety seconds,” I said, smiling only slightly.

“Throw out a multiple, Robbie,” the woman said to me, then slowly, so slowly, she began to lean back in her chair. She appeared to not be breathing, still moving, back not yet touching the chair. “Give us an absolutely absurd, top-of-the-top, beyond-hypothetical multiple you might use to put a value on this company.”

“I'd have no idea where to start,” I said.

“Then paint a picture for us,” the man said, also leaning slowly backward, suspended in his own space, seeming to use the last of
his breath to form these words. “Draw out the future. Sketch out a path.”

“Describe a scenario, maybe?” I asked.

They both smiled wide, letting their backs touch their chairs, taking what seemed like their first breaths in minutes. “A scenario,” she repeated, exhaling easily.

“Give us the highest price you could ever imagine,” he said. “Then add another billion.”

I said nothing. Stared down at my hands.

“We would pay cash to your senior staff,” I heard him say.

“We would buy you a home,” I heard her say.

“We would accelerate grace,” I heard him say.

I closed my eyes. I leaned forward toward them both. I tapped very slowly on the table near his notepad. “Tell your friend that Robbie said, ‘No.'”

“No?” the man repeated tentatively.

“An unequivocal no.”

“An unequivocal no with an invitation to talk later?” she asked carefully.

“No.”

I reached out slowly, grasping the table, ready to stand. “Thanks for coming,” I said.

“Can I tell you something?” the woman asked, and I waited. It took her a moment, twice starting but stopping. A softness passing over her as, finally, she gave up.

When she did speak, her voice was much quieter than it had been, natural, the gloss of her sales pitch now gone. “You've performed a miracle,” she said quietly. “You know that, don't you?”

My first reaction was to make a joke, some response about her only stroking my ego with bits of praise and wonder.

But she leaned forward, staring now, talking now as if we were sharing some secret. “You know that, right?” she asked. “You did something no one else could do. These are the things that fables are made of. Fables of the new millennium, I guess. And whatever happened to
this company a few weeks ago, whatever Core went through that weekend, it only increased the aura even more.”

The man sat forward, breathing easily. The spell these buyers always cast upon themselves, it was long since broken for both of them. “I guess,” the man said, “I guess you're thinking you'll get that much richer without us.”

And what I said next was incomprehensible to two people like this. What I said next should not have been spoken to two anonymous emissaries, two people who could take my words back to buyers, brokers, analysts and investors. But I said it.

Today I told the truth.

“Actually,” I said, “it's not about the money. This has nothing to do with money.”

And I was already in motion again, walking back to my office, passing through the swirling hum of the building. Reading messages on my phone. Seeing people, seeing paper, seeing games in the hall.

What I'd said was, for people like that, impossible to believe. They were words I could not say. Could not think. Could not even hear.

But it was the truth.

This has nothing to do with money.

As I reached my office five minutes later, Whitley walked in quickly behind me, the black suit flowing out from her sides. She stared at me. Waiting. Finally saying quietly, “Who did you just meet with?”

It was a moment before I responded. “I can't tell you.”

She logged on to one of the extra computers near my conference table, opening a browser onto our intranet, entering a password, then clicking through a series of security-camera views of our building.

“Here,” she said, opening the image to full screen. “Look at this.”

It was a video recording of the lobby, people walking in and out of the building, some in pairs, some alone. I saw that the images had been recorded just a few minutes earlier.

“Security was running the standard background checks on your visitors,” Whitley said, “and something came up.”

In a moment, I saw the two people from my meeting. They were
leaving an elevator, talking quietly as they made their way to the front door.

Whitley had turned to me, staring, smiling a little. In a moment, she said, “He's with Regence.”

“Not her?” I asked, slightly scared, unsure, thinking something was about to happen. “Just him?”

“SWAT says only him. They're already retracing every step he made in this building. Looking for anything he might have done, anything he might have left behind.”

I turned back to the two people on the screen, both these images of Wall Street finance, suitcases and overcoats carried easily out the front door. Whitley switched the browser to another camera, this one pointed at the street. The two of them shook hands, the woman walking quickly down the sidewalk, the man getting into the backseat of a waiting silver car.

Whitley was pulling at her sleeve. She stared directly at me. “What was the meeting about?” Whitley asked.

“An investment,” I said quickly, knowing already that I did not want to tell her about their offer, just as I hadn't told her or anyone about so many other offers for Core. “Nothing came of it,” I said. “Probably this was just a way for him to get into the building.”

“What investment?” she asked.

“In some company,” I said, lying, lying so easily.

“At some point,” she said, “you'll have to tell me more.”

We were quiet a moment. I didn't nod or disagree. She only stared.

The video was set to loop, so that once more I could see the two of them walking out the front door, shaking hands, the man turning toward the car.

“Look,” I said quietly, reaching for the mouse, already half smiling, shaking my head, entirely confused by what this meant. I rewound the video. “There,” I said as the man turned toward the car, and Whitley saw it too, and she was smiling just barely, shaking her head very slowly.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked quietly, and she rewound it herself, to the moment he turned away from the woman, and we watched as the man looked directly into the camera, a hidden camera mounted behind a glass fixture on the outside of the building. He couldn't have seen it. He should have had no way of knowing a camera was there. But he looked right at it. And worse, his hand was at his side, his thumb flipped up.

“What the hell is going on?” Whitley asked again.

I realized what it was, now calling Leonard on a speakerphone. “Check the security cameras,” I said to him. “Check for some kind of intrusion.”

“Hang on,” he said above the noise of his office, people talking to him, typing at computers, each now joining Leonard's search.

In a few minutes, I heard one of Leonard's people say, “There. That. Damn it, that.”

“Oh, no,” Leonard said quietly, and I don't think he meant to say it out loud. In a moment he said into the phone, “It's a shadow.”

“A what?” Whitley asked.

“They got into the cameras,” he said slowly, voice fading, then rising, as if he were looking around, or shaking his head. “Regence can see through our security cameras.”

“And so what is he doing?” Whitley asked, turning to me. “Why is the man giving a thumbs-up into a security camera? Did the meeting go exceptionally well?”

“The meeting went nowhere,” I said quietly. “I think what he's doing is giving the go-ahead. To something.”

“Why wouldn't he just wait till he got into the car and then call his people back in Helsinki?”

I thought about it for a moment. Shrugged. “Regence is a company that understands the value of drama,” I said.

She nodded. She smiled just barely.

The video looped again.

“Did he give the go-ahead to another attack?” Whitley asked.

I shook my head. “I don't know. But be ready,” I said, then turned
to the speakerphone. “Leonard, don't shut them out of the cameras yet. And everyone needs to keep this absolutely quiet.”

Leonard started to speak. “I'm really—” he said slowly, then stopped. “Right. We're checking. We're checking where else they might be.” He hung up.

“At some point,” Whitley said to me again, “you'll have to tell me more about the meeting.”

“Would that qualify as a favor?”

She tilted her head back, hair falling away from her face. Smiling slightly. “It's about to qualify as a formal request.” In a moment, she left.

I stood alone, wondering what reaction the senior staff would have if I told her the truth about the meeting. If I were forced to admit that this was one of many offers I'd had this year. I wondered how they and the board would react.

And I wondered what any of them would say if they knew what I'd told Regence.

This has nothing to do with money.

I stared at the screen, SWAT team members all around me, and there was the shadow network in front of us.

Monday morning, and Leonard had called SWAT to a conference room near the DMZ. There had been nothing on any screen as he'd called us into the room. No sense there was anything I should fear.

But I could see immediately that there was something wrong with Leonard. His large hands flat against the tabletop. His eyes turned away, not looking at anyone as they entered the room.

“I want to talk about Shimmer,” he'd said quietly as he'd started the meeting. “It's time. Given the threats, the attack, it's time to discuss Shimmer.”

And slowly, everyone in the room had turned to me.

Leonard was not asking for access to those parts of Shimmer that controlled the Blue Boxes. What Leonard wanted to do was point
Shimmer at the rest of the company, using it to view the very insides of the operation. Leonard and Perry had long said that Shimmer could dramatically improve the productivity of every area of the company. Shimmer's representations, its ability to assimilate so much information, all would allow managers companywide to streamline their areas, Shimmer pointing out holes and gaps and breakdowns and strengths. Most important of all, Leonard wanted to make Shimmer self-teaching, adding code that would make Shimmer an almost independent entity, a thinking, learning machine scanning all areas of the company, suggesting changes, highlighting problems, representing the company in all its complexity and detail.

And, of course, this self-teaching component—something Leonard had never been able to complete—would be able to find and decipher all types of security problems in the company.

“You know my concerns about this,” I now said carefully.