The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (5 page)

Natalie’s mind was whirring, keeping up: the Six Degrees patent was some seminal social networking idea later fought over by the founders of LinkedIn and Friendster, one of which won control in a bidding war or something –

“Oh this is like,
so
,
lame
!” Nancy cried, crashing her silver bangles down.

“OK!” Wisnold shouted. “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘t.e.a.m.’! Or ‘U’.” His eyes flashed at Marantz’s. “Let’s just take a ten minute time out. This is worse than friggin’ family meal time!”

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Natalie asked Nguyen.

“Sure.”

There was a door at the far end of the room, leading straight out onto the parking lot. By the time she caught up with him, he was lightning a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

The cigarette end reddened. “I didn’t,” he said exhaling, the smoke vanishing into the dazzling high-sun heat. They were a strange foreign brand – Krong Tip or something, unusually acrid.

“Well that was weird,” she said with ironic understatement.

“Which part?”

“All of it! Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning,” he said.

“Fine. What’s with Marantz?”

“What’s with Marantz. He’s pissed that he’s spent the last year pimping his underage boss beers when his boss is gonna be worth a hundred times more than him. He’s pissed that his boss’s main squeeze is two-thirds his age and now worth
twice
what he is. He’s pissed – he’s just pissed. I doubt he’s long for this place.”

“Another, in the departure lounge. Who’ll be left?”

“The CEO,” Nguyen speculated, inhaling again and attempting humor: “along with a supercomputer, back where it all began. Back in his living space.”

“So, any recommendations on what I’m supposed to be doing here? Other than getting back on the 101 and taking the first flight home to Nassau?”

What better reminder of why she’d chosen to do her own thing, far away from the madness of corporate life.

“Let’s see – I guess you should meet separately with Malovich. Hold on,” and he walked back to the doorway, leaning into the meeting room: “Hey Yuri!”

But Yuri Malovich was already disappearing out the far entranceway. “I need to code,” he could just be heard saying, waving an arm meaninglessly.

“Perhaps not today,” Nguyen turned back to her. “But I’ll get it set up.”

“I can handle it.”

“We may need to involve one of the Carmichael guys. I’ll take it.”

“Fine,” she said, pausing. “That really was fucked up in there.”

“Much more so than our old company?” he looked at her. “Isn’t it always?” And he ground his half-finished cigarette into the almost molten blacktop.

CHAPTER 5

Yuri Malovich’s attempts at personalizing his office were – interesting.

A Dilbert cartoon hung on a wall. There was the plastic Homer Simpson model that Ben Silverman was scrutinizing, resident to a bookshelf otherwise piled high with Java and C++ programming manuals. No photos. None of the usual chotskys or other random ephemera found in start-up land. It was as though he’d started to Americanize it and then given up, before ever really getting going. Yuri’s desk sat in the middle of the room, protectively facing outwards. He peered at Natalie and Silverman from behind his screen like a treed animal. He was still wearing that Atari T-shirt.

“Where’re you from?” Ben tried to make small talk. It was easier for Ben to stand than fit his frame back into the borrowed roller chair, an arm of which had just fallen off.

Natalie, seated alongside, had noticed Ben at the investor presentation and registered his good looks. Up close, he was distractingly handsome, the musculature of his torso and shoulders stretching the wool turtleneck he’d apparently dressed down into for the occasion. His legs were thick, in shape: football, rowing? 

“Armenia.”

“Armenia,” Ben repeated. “What brought you over here?” 

“There were many changes in my country in the early ‘90s. Some good, some not so. Several of us decided to leave and come here.”

Natalie was due on a plane in three hours and was rather irked by the vagueness of these preliminaries: “Under the Lautenberg Amendment?” she asked. One of her father’s newspaper articles had reported how the Lautenberg Amendment allowed 50,000 Soviets into the US annually after the easing of tensions in the late ‘80s. Yuri studied her closely.

“For several of my countrymen, yes. For me, no. I received an academic scholarship to Stanford. I had been working at a government laboratory. One of the lucky ones.”

No kidding, Silverman’s expression seemed to be saying.

“
Harvesting and Phishing: Statistical Fraud Inferences from Dark Pools of Information Clustering in Eastern European and Russian Email Harvesting Centers,”
Natalie said. “A well thumbed reference of mine, when I was a head of security. And a well-cited PhD thesis. Congratulations, Yuri.”

A smile flickered across his face. “Here,” and he picked up a ring-bound tome from a pile of papers behind his desk. Beneath was a sheet of paper facing forwards, with what looked like a corporate holding structure drawn on it. Malovich quickly put the ring-bound monster back down – “No! There is another copy, right next to you.”

“This one?” and Silverman picked up a copy from the bookshelf beside him. “Erm, thanks. I’ll bring it back.”

Keep it, Malovich waved.

“I don’t know how much Tom has told you,” Natalie started in, “but I’ve been asked to look at some of the Clamor group activity, in the run up to the Initial Public Offering. As a sort of third party certification approach, if you will.”

He was a real computer guy, Natalie decided: pure input-in, output-out. If no answer was required, none would be forthcoming.

“I know this meeting has been hastily scheduled, and I can only imagine how busy you are. So what I wanted to do today was outline my study and agree a process for us to go through the group data together.

“Ben Silverman you already know,” and she opened her palm towards him. “He has some additional questions, relating to the IPO documents he is preparing for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He would like to be part of the overall process.”

“Hopefully Tom mentioned that bit too,” Silverman added, unnecessarily.

Malovich crossed his arms, behind his computer screen, behind his desk.

Input-in, output-out.

“I work for the CEO, not Nguyen.
And not anybody else
.”

“D’you wanna grab coffee?” Silverman asked Natalie in the now familiar parking lot. “There’s a place just up the street.”

The Silicon Bean was an oasis of normal interaction after the Clamor office. It wasn’t busy on a Monday morning, but the hiss of the milk foamer, the loud rock music and the uniformed girls’ chat about their weekends gave it a welcomely lively feel. Natalie ordered a latte to have there while Ben grabbed a sports-juice-water and insisted on paying. They sat at a high table in the front window.

“That dress is a great look for you, by the way. Really brings out the color of your eyes.”

“Thank you.” She’d become better at taking compliments. Hell, her mother had been a couture model: wasn’t like she had much choice in the matter.

His own eyes darkened thoughtfully. “What color
are
they?”

“Caramel, flecked with green,” she said, and looked down. The dress was the same one she’d worn on Friday. She’d packed for four non-work days. A trip to the Stanford Mall was already overdue. It wouldn’t happen today: her flight to Seattle was at noon. She looked back up at him. His eyes had that cheeky, confident glint often found in film stars. Not that she’d ever tell him as much. The last thing she needed was another work-related romance after the way her last one went. And yet the
brahma charya
celibacy regime her guru had recommended was proving particularly hard going now. “It’s just a different way of using our life energy, to spiritual ends,” she’d explained to concerned girlfriends. “But Natalie, you’re not
supposed
to be celibate!”

She pulled her wrap dress to and cleared her throat, her hand drifting up briefly, shielding her face and tidying a hair behind one ear.

She said: “I don’t know why Nguyen didn’t anticipate this and secure Malovich’s buy-in.”

Silverman was silent.

“I guess I’ll just call him,” she continued. “What was it you needed to know again?”

He had a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed dazed.

“
Ben
?”

“Huh? Oh – There’s an investor in the company called Multiworld that no one seems to know anything about. Neither Nguyen nor Marantz – though Nguyen thought Malovich may know something.”

“And what do you need to know?”

“That the investor’s in good standing. That it’s not laundering money or something crazy. We just need to be able to prove that to the SEC, if called on to do so.”

“OK.” She looked at her watch: 10:04. “I need to hustle.”

They parted ways. She called Nguyen and let him know that Malovich wasn’t playing ball. Neither with her about the group data, nor with Silverman about his mystery investor.

Then she sped off to the airport, content to be returning to Seattle.

CHAPTER 6

Alaska flight 16 was delayed, not touching down in Seattle till 14:35. It had been a bumpy ride up. “Stick around and you may see a lightning show,” the pilot had warned. Natalie added another rental car to her collection and was soon back on the road.

Surface water hissed beneath the tires as she pulled onto the main highway. The grey-green conifers, low cloud and cooler, moist air were a balm after the heat of the Valley. Her plan had been to take Interstate 405 and avoid the bridges over Lake Washington altogether. One glance told her that 405 would be equally slow. She drove instead towards downtown, taking her chances with the 520 floating bridge. It connected Seattle with Redmond and the familiar corporate campus.

Dreams of clothes shopping on familiar terrain were pushed aside for a meeting with her old technical mentor. Ray Ott had been with the company since it went public in 1986. An early, brilliant programmer, he was now something of a curiosity around campus: a futurologist contributor to national newspapers and magazines, with an avid interest in dinosaurs. The two-foot bone in his office suite was supposedly the smallest one from a brontosaurus skeleton. He was a great raconteur, he knew the company inside out and he was a close friend of the founder. He was also a gifted architect: a man for whom there was an answer to any conceivable data puzzle.

Natalie’s plan was to establish a dialog with him – within the bounds of acceptable confidentiality norms – about analyzing the relationships between the Clamor group data. The questions she needed to answer were if and how the site was being used
systemically
to nefarious ends. She needed to act fast. If Ray could help her come up with some kind of blueprint schema, and a Clamor data base administrator were made available, it was fully achievable. In truth,
Nguyen
could have done all of it with her. But she knew better than to hang around his office bugging him. Perhaps it would end up being just the two of them working on it anyway, but it was important to show initiative. And Tom should get a kick out of Ray Ott’s involvement. Tom had been one of Ray’s biggest fans.

Heavy rain spattered her windshield as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by. She reached for the wiper switch. The columns of taillights ahead wound their way towards the distant clump of downtown office towers. Still it was humid. She turned the air conditioning on. Between 4
th
of July and September’s Labor Day, Seattle was reliably warm and sunny. Either side of these holidays, all bets were off.

Natalie wondered again about this engagement – about allowing herself to be sucked back in. Was she really going to go through with it?
Should
she? Hadn’t she walked away from all this? Right now she could be back in the Bahamas, meditating on the beach – and yet there was something else at stake here.

Nefarious ends.

Human trafficking: remote and removed from her life. Or was it?

She remembered a
New York Times
article way back in 2001.
Naked Capitalists: There's No Business Like Porn Business
. It claimed pornography was worth $10–14 billion in America – bigger than any of the major league sports, bigger than Hollywood even. Porn was ‘no longer a sideshow to the mainstream, it
was
the main stream’. And what a vast underground river it had turned into. Natalie had done the math: assuming the average porn consumer spent a couple of hundred bucks a year on his or her habit, that implied more than 50 million people. Maybe a few consumed an awful lot. Maybe the industry was smaller than the article claimed. Or maybe, with the growth of broadband access and free web content since, that number vastly
under
estimated consumption levels now.

What a dismal prospect. The average family man, just yards away from his wife and two-point-something kids, entombed in his study, expression bovine – and then there was the age factor.

Inwardly, Natalie had recognized that most men lusted after women aged up to around 35, or thereabouts. Yet, clandestine research had suggested an age closer to
half
that. Her last significant partner had once asked her to dress up in school uniform – pigtails, white shirt, short plaid skirt: the whole nine yards. She later found a way into his online history, and there uncovered his stash:
Barely Legal
,
Cheerleader Orgy
,
College Freshmeat
–
“All standard porn,” her friend Stacey tried to reassure her. “Dogs bark, cats meow, guys check out porn. Come on, it’s just how their brains are wired, simple creatures that they are!” But ‘Barely Legal’ sounded like an elastic concept, and never more so than now.

Was it legal in some parts of the world to sell a thirteen year-old girl for $8,250? Maybe it was. Was it possible that many millions of men wanted a woman of dubiously young age in the role of performer, escort, mistress – ‘wife’ even? Possibly they did. Did Clamor, with its 350 million members and 145-country presence, represent a new and unique means of matching demand with supply?

Clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHotelandGiftShop – the group space that had momentarily flashed up at the Friday presentation: how many such groups were running on Clamor? How many girls, all told? What physical routes did the girls take: northwest through the former Soviet countries, eventually to the US East Coast? Or via the Pacific? What route did the
money
take?

Natalie had seen a
60 Minutes
documentary on human trafficking suggesting the process was always the same: girls were enticed into independent lives elsewhere, usually with the lure of some glamorous role – perhaps nothing more than a regular paying job behind a bar. But once they’d entered their bargain with the trafficker, they were isolated altogether, their passports seized. They were ‘seasoned’ – physically and psychologically abused, likely raped and threatened with reprisal against family members in their home towns and villages. They learned that their transit ‘debts’ needed repaying, that these debts were accumulating enormous levels of interest. They had to work. Girls earned $400 an hour in major Western cities and could be put to work for fourteen hours a day with an efficient booking system. But they saw none of it.

For their trafficking masters, their cost could be recouped over a single weekend. How many such girls around the world were implicated?

Nguyen had not yet given her a job description. That was fine. She’d always done well with shaping her own role. Now that she’d spent the weekend getting orientated, she would propose a three-step approach. She activated the digital recording function of her watch. Her friend Verity had bought it for her as a 30th birthday present, from a store in London called Spycatcher.

“
One
: analyze Clamor group data using a ‘clean’ machine and approval of local law enforcement – in place of your nocturnal attempts at the same, Tom. Not sure which law enforcement org, local FBI maybe. Present report to Clamor management team, better still Board of Directors. Invite feedback.

“
Two
: solution. Tom, you had it dead right: can’t just be technical fix. We’ll need to arrive at set of processes that organization buys into. Ideally, fraud investigation team reports to Chief
Financial
Officer. Possibly updating a Board sub-committee direct through IPO period. Team needs to work with stakeholders inside and outside the company: FBI, external PR, others t.b.i.,”
to be identified
.

She paused. Her ultimate ‘deliverable’ would need to be a 200–300 page instruction manual detailing everything: the technical parameters of the fraud monitoring software, the full job descriptions of the head of fraud and the investigators, the processes for engaging law enforcement…

“
Three
: Clamor should forge strategic alliance with anti-trafficking organization, pref making meaningful financial contribution to it. Ultimately Clamor’s actions will be ruled on as much in court of public opinion as anywhere, should it come to that...”

Her $250,000 fee sounded excessive. But avoiding a scandal in this arena was certainly worth that much to the company, and she knew better than to expect the Clamor team’s respect and attention if she hung around their Sunnyvale office for free. Perhaps she would give most of it to the anti-trafficking organization that the company allied with.

The sound-activated recorder clicked off. Once the file was downloaded to the voice recognition module of her laptop, it would kick out an email ready for her –  and Nguyen’s – review.

The car’s dashboard showed 15:27. She’d made it as far as the downtown section of the arterial 5 Freeway, a canyon formed by the busy office buildings either side. Traffic was already slowing to a crawl in the right lanes ahead of the 520 turn off. To the left, cars and trucks went by, tires sticky on the asphalt. But her lane had stopped. A curtain of the famous Seattle rain was crossing Lake Union. Soon, heavy raindrops turned the metal surfaces of the car into a timpani drum. Scarlet taillights spangled in the windshield. She flipped the wipers to FAST, sloshing a half-bucket of rainwater onto a neighboring car. Considerate!

Which reminded her: she reached for her iPhone and looked up Ray’s number.

“Hi, I have an appointment with Ray at four,”
she told the cool-sounding executive assistant who answered. “I’m afraid I’m going to be late.”

There was a pause. “He doesn’t seem to have you on his calendar.”

“We arranged it by email over the weekend. It was meant to be just coffee.”

“Hold on,” the assistant said, and came right back on: “He’s actually in a meeting, which may run for a while.”

Natalie hesitated. “Well could you ask him to call me when he gets out?”

“I’ll let him know. He’s got your number?”

“Sure.” She gave it again.

The cars and trucks around her seemed to murmur imprecations now, back on gridlocked I-5. The rain intensified, sounding like a rice bowl being emptied. She ran her hands round the edge of the steering wheel. Had she got the dates mixed up? Picking up her iPhone again, she hurriedly accessed email:

Hi Ray,

Long time I know. I happen to be in town Monday at short notice and wondered if you’d like to grab coffee?...

Scrolling back up:

stranger! great to hear from you. sure, im around. what time will be you over on the darkside?

She hit REPLY:

Chaos on the 520 bridge. Just spoke with your e.a. – may need to resched. so sorry

Certainly they would need to resched: it was gone 4:30 by the time she exited the freeway, just a half-mile further on. Ray had not called her back and she was due to meet Stacey and Melinda at five. Cursing the traffic, her old town, corporate life and the twenty-first century in general, she made her way towards Seattle’s waterfront Public Market, parking in front. At least the fish throwers were happy, tossing their slippery catch for tourists. Water ran down from broken gutters in unbroken lines.

Stacey and Melinda still worked over on the Eastside, but lived in the more lively downtown corridor. The Alibi Room was a favorite of theirs: intimate, dark and hidden away. They liked the unpretentious northwest menu, they liked the slightly conspiratorial name itself, and they loved the bellinis.

The place never failed to bring back memories. It was where they ended up the night Natalie was promoted to first ever
female
head of security. It was where they celebrated the evening Melinda got engaged, and where they toasted Melinda a week later when she got un-engaged. It was where they went after Stacey learned of her mom’s illness. And it was where Melinda and Natalie could be found that other night she didn’t care to remember. Melinda Dayne was an old family friend from South Carolina. Stacey Stafford, from Tennessee, had been Natalie’s roommate through boarding school. She’d gone on to nearby Georgia Tech, been in Atlanta for the Olympics and – after the bombing there – had almost gone into security herself.

Natalie’s discomfort persisted as she thought about seeing them again. Originally, the plan had been to come up Saturday afternoon. They would have gone out as part of a bigger group, then headed off the next day to the Cascade Mountains. In all probability, they wouldn’t have left before noon on the Sunday, so Stacey and Melinda had arranged to take Monday off work. They would have stayed at a friend’s log cabin, thrown wood on the fire, drunk lots of wine, told jokes and done some serious talking.

Then came the turn of events at Clamor, and Nguyen’s out-of-the-blue offer. “Take it!” they’d implored her, sounding happy – that she was getting back in the corporate saddle, that perhaps the gang was getting back together. So why did Natalie feel such apprehension as she walked into the candle-lit bar, looking out for their familiar faces?

There they were, at their usual table.

She walked over and they hugged and kissed and said their hellos! – yet, it felt oddly restrained. The immediate ease and warmth of yesteryear wasn’t quite there. She thought she noticed a guarded look in their eyes.