The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (3 page)

Perhaps that the man sat opposite him was finding increasingly inventive ways to avoid his gala-going wife on Friday nights, Ben surmised.

“To never underestimate the power of being likeable, Benjamin. And people like Clamor. They like the story. They like the Kid. It’s – he’s – an emerging icon. ‘That’s my opinion, I welcome yours,’ as the Trumpington Bugle says.”

“She was there today by the way, making snippy comments.”

“What a surprise. Who else spoke out?

“Hartman, over at American Milen.”

“Fuck’n’ short sellers. I look forward to seeing them try to lean against this one.”

Schweitzer sat up and rotated the baseball between his fingers, meditatively. “This is the big one, Ben. The Board meeting ran long today. Predators are circling Carmichael, with fat wallets. It’s especially helpful to land this deal
now
.”

Ben reminded himself of the deal they’d co-negotiated: a 2% success fee calculated on the $2.5 billion of money raised, assuming they achieved a $15 billion total first day valuation. A $5 million guaranteed advisory fee, and a 0.8% commission for the equity sales guys placing the new stock. All told, $75 million in fees would flow Carmichael’s way if the IPO went well, and that left out the profit spread on the stock placed. The closing dinner would be epic. Perhaps the impossible-to-make-reservations-for Gary Danko’s, fully rented out, banishing all memories of Opti Shaft – the optical broadband misadventure for which Schweitz had once threatened a closing dinner at the local Jack In The Box.

“… and if you can get this one between the uprights, we’ll be talking about a more central role for you, Benjamin.”

Now Ben felt a pin pricking sensation travel up his shoulders and neck, for the code was unmistakable: ‘central role’ meant partnership, the glamorous wife, cars, weekend place in Tahoe. But even more than that, it meant that Jack and Gwendolyn Silverman, Ben’s parents, might finally find contentment in their son’s achievements. 

“Who knows, you may even snag Francesca.”

“I wonder,” said Ben, restoring his poker face.

“I wonder if you wonder,” Schweitz said, dismissing him. But not before adding: “Stay close on this one Benjamin. We need this deal.”

CHAPTER 3

Tom Nguyen saw Natalie the next day for Saturday lunch in the Marina district. They met on a corner of Union Street without a restaurant reservation, preferring to play it by ear. It was a perfect San Francisco day in the late spring: extra sunny with a sharp breeze. The city seemed blotchy white, the hard building outlines clumped around its many hills. Above, Natalie glimpsed a bright orange kite thrumming against a blue sky. The bay was all whitecaps and rippling sails like carnival streamers.

Much as she adored Paris, and much as she loved Charleston, South Carolina – the respective hometowns of her parents – she’d always considered San Francisco to be the most exciting city on earth. A city whose optimism came in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its location on one of the world’s least stable geological fault lines (‘
live for today’
!) It prompted Nguyen’s funny response, when she asked him what it was like to have moved back down here from rainy Seattle. The irony referenced a freak Seattle earthquake in 2001 measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale:

“Well, the weather up there was great. But boy, those earthquakes…”

“But you never really told me the story,” she said, as they strolled down Union Street. “Of how it all happened. Getting the job at Clamor and all.”

“Oh, pretty simple really. I came down here on a recruiting junket for our old shop. Found a bright young Stanford undergrad called Dwayne Wisnold. But instead of me recruiting him, he recruited me.”

She laughed. “Don’t you have family here as well? That must be nice.”

“My dad, but not exactly here. Nearby.”

They passed Betelnut, an Asian eaterie decorated in fire-engine reds and lacquered bamboos. It reminded Natalie of a French colonial film set. Nguyen suggested a table in the inside-outside space spilling onto Union. After some good-natured debate, he ordered for them: Bein Pow firecracker chicken with szechuan chilies and almonds, seared scallops with Excellent XO sauce and two portions of the house speciality – minced chicken served with fresh lettuce cups. He ordered a bottle of Anchor Steam ale; she asked for a double Americano. She was wearing an Indian print summer dress with spaghetti straps, her hair loose around her shoulders. She wondered if the dress showed a little too much shoulder and cleavage but, looking around, she was hardly the most immodestly dressed gal there.

“Still jet lagged?” Nguyen asked, with reference to her double Americano.

“Yeah, nasty layover in Pittsburg. Not so used to it these days.”

“And how’s that going? The yoga, in Barbados.”

“In the Bahamas actually. Yeah, great …”

“I was sure it was Barbados.” Nguyen looked away into the middle-distance as though seeking arbitration. How he hated to get his facts wrong, she laughed.

“So you’re not missing Redmond?” he asked. It was where their old office was located.

“Not so much,” she laughed. “You?”

He wiped his brow with a long finger as though to say, ‘narrow escape’. The drinks arrived, the beer bottle beaded cold on the outside. He waved away an offered glass.

“But I’m curious,” she said. “How did you know to jump to Clamor back then? The good folk in Redmond must have made it hard to leave.”

“Oh yeah sure. And meantime, how many more years would I have had to endure thinking up new spreadsheet features? Features that ninety nine per cent of users would never even know about, let alone use. No thanks. Clamor just seemed to –”

“– don’t tell me –”

“MUST!” they said in unison.

“Matter, be unique, sustainable … and what did the ‘t’ stand for again?”

“Tedious,” Nguyen said with a withering look. “I just needed more, Nat. And it wasn’t a financial home run at the old place, at least not for the foreseeable future. I needed to make a move, and I’m sure glad I did. But what about you? How do
you
feel about it now?”

“I wanna tell you about that, but first I have to ask you something.”

The food started to arrive already, sizzling hot. Natalie waited for the servers to leave then leaned in:

“What
happened
yesterday, at the end there Tom? That girl on the screen: her eyes!” and she shuddered.

“Yeah,” Nguyen sighed. He speared a scallop with his chopstick then let them fall to the side. “Tell me about it.”

“Tom, that didn’t look like any simple case of DNS poisoning or site spoofing. I’m guessing the page we saw up there really
was
on Clamor. The password and account history were yours, when that URL auto-completed. I’m guessing the laptop too, remembering how you liked to own a presentation at the old company. I gotta ask –”

He pushed his still empty plate aside, his head into his hands. Then he looked up at her, his features crossed with stress. “Listen Nat, we’ve been having some real problems.
Real
problems. Not just the usual soft porn or even sex tourism stuff among consenting adults. Real, nasty, underage stuff… like what you saw. Maybe it’s just the times we live in,” and he shrugged confusedly. “We’ve been trying to keep track of it, but –”

“But Tom,” she said, mystified. “You know better than to ever visit those places yourself…”

“Of course. And if we had a solid head of security, I wouldn’t need to rake over that shit in my spare time. Namely two to four in the morning.” He took a gulp of beer.

Natalie sipped her coffee, trying to keep eye contact.

“Nat. I was wondering whether you’d be prepared to come on board. Not!” he added quickly, reading her reaction – “necessarily in a full time role, but instead for a consulting gig, well defined. Just through IPO.”

“Tom, I’ve really moved on –”

“Just consider it, Nat. The money would be amazing. We’re talking – I dunnow. Two fifty K? For four, six months work? It’s worth it to the company.
You’re
worth it to the company. It’s more than enough to set you up in private consultancy out of Nassau” – and he saw her reaction again – “or build your own yoga world, or whatever the hell you want!”

She laughed again. “You know it’s not about the money for me, Tom. Besides, I walked away from the our former employer with enough.”

“But it couldn’t have been a home run for you either. I mean, I’m sure they gave you a boatload of options when you made VP Security, but the stock price did
nothing
over that timeframe. This’ld be a great way to top up the tank. Not just financially, but in terms of your professional contacts. Keeping the doors open. Why not? C’m’on, it would hardly hurt the resume to have a prestige consulting gig with Clamor at the top. All of us are only as good as our last movie, Natalie.”

“Who put you up to this?”

“Myself!” he said. “OK, I got a call from the bankers handling the IPO, late last night. They suggested we get a crack consultant on board toute-d’-suite, and there’s only one potentially crack consultant I know of in this domain, and that’s you Chevalier.”

She couldn’t help feel flattered. Frankly, it had been a disconcerting time the last 18 months, without the crutch of a big desk title, the status and self-esteem that went with.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

A couple scudded by on roller blades, their Jack Russell panting behind.
Live for today
…

“And how would this work, when you already have a head of security?” she asked. “That’s just
weird.”

“I’m telling you, strictly inside the good ole ‘cone of silence’: it’s not working out with Malovich.”

“Dead man walking?” Natalie resurrected another term from their previous chats.

“Yup, he can’t be long for the job. He
owns
the problem. And the problem ain’t getting solved. Far from.”

“So what does Wisnold have to say? Surely it’s his call in the end.”

“Should be,” Nguyen slumped back, the stress becoming ever more apparent. “I guess he’s concerned about the Friendster experience.”

“The
Friendster
experience?
Huh
?”

“You know, the game of ‘Whack-a-mole’ they got into at the end there. No matter how many times they whacked the mole back into the ground, another popped up someplace else on the screen. Shoulda turned it into a game on Clamor!”

It seemed like a life-time ago, but for a brief period back in 2003, in exactly this kind of San Francisco neighborhood, it had been impossible to avoid the name Friendster. Natalie recalled flying down for a due diligence trip involving an acquisition, and going on out to an electronic music venue with one of the guys from the team. She overheard the name Friendster every time they approached the bar.

A technologist started the site, partly to improve his dating life. It took off due to the adoption of two distinct social groups: fans of the Burning Man new-age festival in the Nevada desert, and opinion-leading gay men. But ‘Fakesters’ soon joined these early adopters, whose goal it was to create blatantly fictional profile pages. Burning Man himself received one. This was not the vision of the founders, who started taking them down, citing house rules requiring profile pages to feature real people. The ‘fakesters’ morphed into ‘fraudsters’, assembling fake pages with photos and other profile elements that looked fraudulently
real
, hence much harder to detect. Pages appeared for the founder himself. “Eesh,” Natalie remembered wincing, when a friend pointed one out: “
that
can’t be good for his dating life.” Eventually, all the ‘fakesters’ and ‘fraudsters’ were whacked, but not before the in-crowd had moved on. Tumbleweeds blew through the previously vibrant forums of Friendster.

So perhaps Dwayne Wisnold had reasons to be wary.

“He wants to wait. To let sleeping dogs lie,” Nguyen said. “But there may be other ways of coming at this. Look Nat, I know I’m preaching to the choir on this one, but security at a shop like Clamor can’t just be about technical engineering. It has to be about
social
engineering. That’s the higher order bit. And that’s why we need you on board.”

The higher order bit
. It was a resolutely techie term, recognizing what her old employer had ultimately been forced to accept: that in the end, the security of a corporate entity came down to its people. That software worms, trojans and viruses were not the real threat. The real threats had stalked the physical corridors of their old company, in powerful, insidious ways. “It’s not like I couldn’t build a bot to try and deal with what we saw yesterday,” Nguyen was saying, “flagging relationships of attributes: age, price field, image maps –” but Natalie’s thoughts were elsewhere now.

She cast her mind yet further back. The real problem – the one that launched her career – was exposed to have been the behavior of her old company’s hyper competitive, over-achieving staff. In the federal antitrust inquiry resulting from the late ‘90s ‘browser wars’, the browser team had effectively made the Department of Justice’s case for it: that they should be split off from the herd. Natalie could still remember a startled Connie Cheung, the local Komo 4 newscaster, delivering the shock news: that a Federal Judge had ruled her old company should be broken up.

And yet, it took the necessary survival steps, including that of recasting Security entirely. Natalie was chosen to sit on a top secret, cross-divisional task force, where she first met Tom Nguyen. She found herself working with the most able lawyers, the most trusted members of the Human Resources department. She’d gained a reputation for her psychological assessments of situations – and an ability to bring people together. In 2003, while still in her late-twenties, she’d been named Vice President, Security. She liked to think of it as her old company’s recognition that security began and ended in the social realm. For that was a dictum straight out of her father’s playbook.

“So whaddaya think?” Tom was pressing her. He had that same, single-minded look as in his old job, when about to ship new software.

“I’ll need to think about it. I’m actually heading up to Seattle, to see the old gang.”

“Oh yeah, who?”

“Stacey, Melinda, –”

“Is Melinda still taken?”

“ ‘fraid so.”

“Too bad. Well look, at least come visit the office while you’re here. We’re having an offsite meeting tomorrow, about all the new ‘n’ cool stuff we’ll be launching shortly. It’s not really an offsite, it’s at the Sunnyvale office – but it will be a Sunday, so we should get some stuff done. You really should come along.”

“I need to fly to Seattle.”

“Natalie!” and he gave her his finest doggy-dinner-bowl look. “Come along tomorrow.” And before she had chance to say ‘no’:

“Hey, wanna go blading?”