The Woman Who Stopped Traffic
Author: Daniel Pembrey
Date: 2013-07-06 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Mystery
Description: Librarian Note: Alternate/new cover edition for ASIN# B00DTK198U. Be careful who your friends are ... It’s the dawn of social media; Facebook is unknown and World of Warcraft is the world's biggest online game. An unhinged Hungarian-American Internet magnate is trying to take over it all, using soon-to-IPO web sensation Clamor.us. But nefarious content is coming to light on the Clamor social networking site, pointing to sex trafficking. Enter Natalie Chevalier, glamorous ex-Head of Security at a large Seattle software company... with a father she never knew, a disastrous track record with men

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Pembrey. No part of this novel may be reproduced, lent or otherwise distributed in any form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted material in violation of authors’ rights.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

Tom Nguyen was a man made for our times, Natalie Chevalier concluded.

There he stood next to the huge projector screen, in a dimmed function room of the Keaton hotel in downtown San Francisco.

The room was packed with investors, or perhaps more accurately prospectors. They stood down the sides of the room. They crammed along the back wall. Outside, afternoon mist drifted up Stockton Street. But in here the air was close, expectant. A marine horn could just be heard above the hushed conversation and purring mobile devices.

The house lights dimmed a little more. The stage light grew brighter.

Tom Nguyen wore cream chinos and a white cotton shirt, the top two buttons undone. One side flapped open with the weight of a small black radio-mike. There was a lightness in Nguyen’s moccasined step only otherwise found among dancers. The fates had apparently smiled on this young man, and his four colleagues up on stage.

He turned to his laptop and tapped in a password. The big screen went bright blue. He cleared his throat and began.

“Good afternoon everyone and thank you for making time on a Friday afternoon for our investor presentation.

“I want to talk to you today about groups, and about human connections.”

He paused for the screen to catch up. It faded to a dark, midnight blue background, offsetting the clean font of ‘Clamor.us’ – by far the biggest sensation of the ‘Web 2.0’ era so far, Natalie Chevalier reflected. Bigger than MySpace, bigger than YouTube and prospectively even bigger than YouTube’s parent company, Google.

Nguyen turned back to the rapt audience. An earnestness softened his features.

“I’d like to suggest to you that all of us want to belong. That all of us want to feel connected to our fellow human beings. That this is a universal condition, shared by seven billion people on the planet.”

And out of the dark blue came an image of the world as seen from deep space. It was slightly – almost psychedelically – out of focus, as though intended to be viewed through 3D specs. No matter, the screen quickly dissolved to a sight even more familiar: that of a Clamor.us profile page. Familiar because 350 million people across 145 countries – five percent of the world’s entire population – had now created one, and in tech savvy San Francisco, the adoption rate seemed closer to ninety five percent. If you weren’t on Clamor here, you didn’t exist.

“I hope you don’t mind me showing them yours,” Nguyen turned to Dwayne Wisnold, winking. There was an appreciative titter in the audience. Twenty-something year old Wisnold was the Founder-CEO of Clamor.us, Inc.

If Wisnold did mind, he didn’t show it. His profile page featured a photo in which his face was half covered by a cowboy hat several sizes too big. The photo was cropped of the two people standing either side of him, perhaps female, perhaps wearing bikinis. Spearing the bottom frame was the swizzle stick of a drink.

His user name was ‘Wiz kid’ and he had 1,719 friends. Interests included: Making things, Psychology, Midtown Doornail, Pulling stuff apart –

Midtown Doornail?

Natalie stopped rocking the foot of her crossed leg. Of course! – she resolved the anagram: World Domination. She couldn’t help smile. Eighteen months of spiritual retreat hadn’t blunted her critical reasoning after all.

“Shall we take a look at which groups Mister Wisnold is signed up to?” Tom Nguyen continued. It felt more like a gospel church moment than an Initial Public Offering presentation. Curiosity about this company and its supernaturally young CEO was insatiable. And Nguyen was shown as one of the very few with full access to Wiz’s profile page: a ‘Top Top Friend’, no less.

The front row of bankers brayed gleefully. “Show us the money!” one couldn’t help yelling. For you could almost smell it. The first day ‘pop’ of the IPO stood to become a whole new phenomenon. Natalie recalled Google going out at $100, defying all the skeptics. “A search company worth thirty five billion?” they’d scoffed. Just a few weeks later, the stock traded at $600, the company worth two hundred billion. What would Clamor be worth?

Nguyen navigated a sequence of screens. His long fingers played the keyboard like a piano. Fleetingly, an image pressed into Natalie’s retina: a constellation of interrelated spherical shapes, like an illustration from an advanced microbiology textbook. Nguyen moused over ‘the PLO’, the Pizza Liberation Organization. The bankers clapped and laughed, rolling the trunks of their bodies from side to side. It was already part of American college lore.

Even Wisnold flashed a grin at the ClamorBuy™ group buying service – ‘The Power of Many’, as the strap line went. The logo was a gavel hanging over the graphical representation of some smokestack industry.

According to online news reports, Wiz had tested ClamorBuy™ on a local high-volume pizza delivery company called Leaning Tower of Pizzas. Owner Tony Romano had told Wiz that if he ordered more than a thousand pizzas, the $10 price for a 12 inch thin crust would fall by a dollar for each additional 500 pizzas ordered. The highest single order Romano had previously received, over four decades of trading, was for 950 pizzas – for a Hewlett Packard company-wide meeting. The final order from Clamor.us came in at 8,422 pizzas and, according to the stepped fee schedule agreed, Romano was required to provide them for just 33 cents each. The contract was enforced. Romano’s 41 year-old family pizza business filed for bankruptcy. It was the first recorded case of a business being ‘clamorized’, as the phenomenon became known. So went the tale of The Pizza Liberation Organization. Dwayne Wisnold’s social life was transformed. The awkward straw-haired kid from Nebraska was voted Coolest Guy Around Campus, on – where else? – Clamor.us.

The joke suitably milked, Nguyen settled into a more serious posture:

“When I came aboard Clamor as Chief Scientist, two things got me super excited. One was very large data sets. The other was big problems.”

The image on the screen now showed planets in orbit. It was dumbed down for the investor crowd, Natalie knew, but Nguyen was working it well. Few people really understood the technology and what it was capable of, even among a crowd such as this.

“Sixty million affinity groups,” Nguyen forged ahead. “And a single big problem to solve: the digitization of identity. So that the web will finally –” he sighed “– know you. Not just what you tell it about yourself, the way it used to work back in web one-dot-o. Rather, it will know the essence of you, more than you do yourself.

“One of the great web pioneers, Jeffrey Bezos, was once asked what the future held for e-commerce personalization. Perhaps he was asked the question at an event just like this one.” The audience was on the edge of its seats. What had Jeff Bezos said? How would Tom Nguyen see him, raise him?

“Bezos replied that, one day, you would go on to Amazon.com, and there, in one square foot of pixilated selling space, would be a single product. Not just the product you always wanted, but the product you didn’t even consciously know you always wanted!

“Well, we’re applying the visionary thinking now. Not to products, but to people. To dating and mating. To workplace relationships and perfect careers. To all of the ingredients for happiness, fulfillment and social wellbeing. Here. Now.”

A river of applause ran through the room. Nguyen let it wash itself out.

It reminded Natalie of just what she’d been missing the last 18 months: working alongside super-smart guys such as Tom Nguyen at the big company in Seattle, where she’d ascended to the role of head of security while still in her late twenties. Teaching yoga in the Bahamas meantime had certainly had its rewards. But there were things about this world that she’d sorely missed, she now realized. Even the darting glances of the moneymen sat around her. She’d been more than happy to accept Tom’s invitation to the event, coinciding as it did with a trip to Seattle to see friends and former work colleagues. She was enjoying being there in a green wool wrap dress and strappy cork wedge shoes – being among these people, yet not exactly one of them.

“Why am I back-dropped by this representation of planets in orbit?” Nguyen’s hand ascended leisurely towards the massive screen again. “Is it another of Wiz’s college group conquests?” Laughter again. Wisnold was impassive. “In fact no. The North American Space Agency spent decades collecting the necessary data to conform these planets to their correct, orbital paths. Thankfully, we got to the point of inferring a Clamor user’s true affinity constellation and implied life path rather more quickly.” He lightened the mood once more. “Jon is a patient venture capitalist, but only so patient.”

Jon Vogel of the New Earth Fund sat quietly alongside Wisnold. He modified his permanently surprised expression into a grin:

“If I may add a word or two.”

Nguyen looked to Ben Silverman, the investment banker handling the road show. Apparently this was not part of the script. Silverman spread his palms: Just roll with it.

“Sure,” Tom Nguyen said. “The floor is yours, Jon.’

The ruddy-faced, sixty-two year-old swallowed a salt pill, gulped down some bottled water and stood up. A black T-shirted stage-hand clipped a mike to his patched corduroy jacket. This was definitely unscripted. Then again, according to those online articles, Jon Vogel’s whole life was unscripted.

Vogel was the original Berkeley radical. He’d lived the Summer of Love as a mainstay of at the Esalen Institute down by Big Sur. He’d left the ‘60s unusually lost. Reportedly, he could not explain to old friends what happened to him between mid ’73 and late ’74. He drifted, watching the world go by. In particular, he watched the growth of Silicon Valley in the late ‘70s and, according to those articles, there it dawned on him – that technology might just be the way to champion social reform and activist causes in new and far reaching ways.

So began the life of New Earth Llc. For two decades, it dabbled unsuccessfully, then struck gold with Google. More accurately, Vogel invested in a friend’s fund that only invested in Google, and several hundred million dollars rained down on New Earth. To Vogel it was a sign, a vital sign, heralding a new age.

The Clamor investment was both more and less accidental. One of the first groups set up on Clamor.us was the ‘Four More Wars’ movement organized at Stanford University against President George W. Bush’s re-election. Within 48 hours, almost 4,000 members had joined, many of the signatories coming from off-campus – Jon Vogel being one. By the end of that week, Vogel had bought 40% of Clamor.us Inc. for just $2 million. “It was a no-brainer,” he was quoted as saying. “Literally, my brain was not involved,” he’d apparently added, thumping his heart. “Dissent was just in the company’s DNA.”

There was a loud crackle as Vogel adjusted the mike, then a short blast of feedback. Audience members reached for their ears and narrowed their eyes. Finally he began:

“In 1984 a little-known sci-fi writer named William Gibson published a novel called Neuromancer in which people came equipped with computer jacks in their skulls and could become part of a massive worldwide brain.

“Is anyone here old enough to remember Arpanet?”

Quizzical looks came back from the crowd.

“Well Arpanet became the Internet, and the global human brain became you. Us. Your picture became mine. My information and thoughts became yours.”

Nguyen was looking again to Ben Silverman, who was watching the crowd. For the time being, they remained respectful. This was after all Jon Vogel, whose annual Woodstock-by-the-sea technology conference, down at his Monterey Peninsular home, remained a huge draw in the Valley. But how far would they let him go with his ‘dot-communist propaganda’ and ‘socialist networking’, before cutting him off?

“Instead of gathering in factories, we gather in collective digital work spaces. Instead of conventional means of production, we have desktop virtual co-ops. Instead of taxes and subsidies, abundance. A bounty of free goods.”

Now it was Vogel’s turn to pause for effect:

“The Wealth of Networks. Sharing! The foundation for the highest levels of social interaction.”

Natalie leaned forward, chin in palms, elbows on knees. Frankly, he sounded a lot like her father. Stripped of the techno-babble, it seemed like one of the late Henri Chevalier’s legendary columns for France’s Le Monde newspaper:

“So far, the largest efforts have been open-source ones. How large? Oh, significantly so. Perhaps six hundred thousand man-years of work went into last year’s release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.” Vogel gazed out at the crowd in wonderment, like a child lost in an enchanted kingdom. “I’d like to tell you a story, a true story. Once upon a time there was a boy named Craig who started a list, and he called it Craigslist…”

But the crowd was tuning out now, Natalie could tell. What had any of this to do with Clamor.us? They’d turned out on a Friday afternoon, yes, for some sci-fi magic, but mostly for the promise of untold monetary wealth – that alchemic transformation peculiar to this part of Northern California. Certainly not for plain old new ageism.

Vogel soldiered on into his Craiglist story anyway. It was in some sense a mirror to Clamor.us, possibly wider humanity too. The explosive growth. The social good of a free classified advertising service balanced by the menace of its un-policed backwaters and its notorious adult listings. The company was in legal dispute with minority investor eBay. This modern day fairy tale was not sitting well with the others on stage, Natalie could tell from their body language. Thankfully, Jon was nearing his finale: “The social web,” he exclaimed, looking around, almost blinded by the light: “Ask not what your web can do for you! Ask what you can do for your web!” and he punched the air!

Then he sat down, almost missing his chair.

“Well thanks Jon, for that. Um … does anybody have any questions?” Silverman turned to the crowd. A hand went up. “Yess!” he said with evident relief.

“Hi, Josh Hartman here from American Millennium,” a clean-cut young man said. “I’d like to ask about the financials if I may. I understand you’re looking to raise two point five billion at a post-money valuation of fifteen. That’s twenty five times current year revenues. I just wondered if you had any comments on revenue or profitability growth or both.” He handed the hand-held mike back.

“Hiiii,” a treacly voice came from behind. “I have a follow-on question,” the raven-haired lady said with her hand held high, a black T-shirt putting a mike into it. “Thank you. Brie DuBois of the Trumpington Bugle blog. Say, I heard that more than half the current five hundred million revenue line comes from a single search advertising deal that is set to expire. Perhaps you could say something about the risk of revenue erosion.”

“Good questions, good questions,” said Silverman, looking around rather helplessly. “Dwayne, would you like to talk about the product vision and how revenue opportunities fit into it?”

Apparently Dwayne Wisnold’s parents hadn’t even met when Arpanet was written about. ‘Wiz’ himself barely had living memory of a world without the web. He’d just entered grade school when the Netscape web browser rolled out in ’95. Prior to starting Clamor, his only entrepreneurial experience had been a joke, albeit a popular one.

If the online news reports were to be believed, in 1999 – at the crazed height of the Web 1.0 boom – he’d scored $1 million in funding from a Nebraskan VC called Luna Ventures, for a high school science project. He’d worked out a way to print digital photos onto bed sheets, then sell them back online at a site called virtual-bedding.com. The most popular image was of a bikini-clad Princess Leia from the opening scenes of Return of the Jedi. It allowed fellow students to claim they were sleeping with actress Carrie Fisher. Virtual-bedding was rumored to be in acquisition talks with a lifestyle products e-store, before both died in the 2000 bust. Thereafter, Wisnold went back to his science homework. His next venture would be a dorm room social experiment in his Stanford freshman year, which he jokingly called Clamor – owing to his housemates’ interest in the beta site, and specifically a feature called ‘HotorWhat?’ ranking female freshmen year book photos out of 10.

A black T-shirt struggled with Wisnold’s fleece, trying to find a place to clip on the miniature mike. Wiz kept his palms against his jeans. He stared down at his feet like he was looking at them for the first time.

“So, er – wow. Hi!”

There was a sympathetic stir in the crowd. He seemed so slight, so young!

“So, revenues. Yeah, we’ve been thinking about that. But before we talk numbers, let’s talk concepts. Like, consider Google.” The crowd and Silverman appeared to breath easier.

“Think about: expressed interest meets relevant products and services.” Wiz brought the index fingers of both hands together at face height. “Weird,” he said. “It’s like I’m doing some sorta mono stage show thing of ET...

“Anyways, that’s just what happens, when you enter a search keyword on Google, and the computer serves you up a Sponsored Link. It’s win, win, win. A win for the user, a win for the advertiser, and a win for … erm …

“Google,” said Silverman.

“Right!” Wiz laughed, the rustle of his fleece rumbling through the mike. “Don’t be evil!” It was Google’s founding slogan. Wiz laughed again and the crowd laughed too.

“So like Tom was telling you, users have signed up to these groups. A lot of groups. And we have the affinity characteristics mapped out pretty well now, so it’s like a lot of Clamor users have given us all these super-specific keywords about their interests and tastes and stuff. Does any of this make sense?”

Uh-huh, the crowd intoned.

“Well, let’s just look at a real group. Who’s got a group.”

“Triumph,” a British accent said.

“Triumph?” Wiz said, looking behind him, back to the stage. “Oh, hey Mike.”

Michael Marantz was Clamor’s Chief Financial Officer. He said: “Triumph, the motorcycle.”

“Cool,” said Wiz. “Let’s look at Triumphs.”

He moved over to the laptop, his sandals scuff-scuffing the stage. The big screen glowed to life again as the power-saver came off. Up came the web, then Clamor.us. Into the center-middle search box crept the first letters: T-r-i … Natalie shook her head upon realizing how trained she was to scrutinize such inane matters as keystrokes –

Then something happened.

The word auto-completed and resolved to Clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHoteland GiftShop.

Huh?

Filling the screen was a girl, the headshot of an Asian girl of indeterminate age. The photo could not have been more real. It was the girl’s eyes. Hurt, confused, pained and humiliated. Below the photo read:

Today feature: Jasmine, 13 yrs. Origin: Fujian. $8,250.US

It was like the north side of the Keaton had been struck by a thunderbolt. A shocked murmur went through the crowd. Natalie saw Brie DuBois cover her mouth, Tom rush over to the keyboard: “I think you’ve – er, here,” and he found the Escape key. The Clamor.us home page filled the screen again. “Yuri, maybe you could look into this,” Tom said loudly to Yuri Malovich, Clamor’s Head of Security and Privacy, also up on stage and thankfully on his feet.

But Dwayne Wisnold and one hundred and twenty others simply stared at the impression left behind from the screen. The haunted eyes of a haunting, trafficked girl. Finally Dwayne Wisnold turned and spoke one word. “Bummer.”

He sat down.

“Well, that went well,” Natalie heard Ben Silverman say.

CHAPTER 2

Ben Silverman returned to Carmichael Associates’ offices on California Street, his day far from over. He muted his cell phone, sent office calls to voicemail and slumped into the chair behind his desk. Exhausted, he could barely focus. He needed time to think, to consider how he’d give this latest update to his boss.

Through the window of his office, he could see the northern fringes of the city, the fingers of Fisherman’s Wharf. The bay shimmered lazily around Alcatraz Island in the late dusk. He tried to imagine what the view would have looked like to those more earth-bound, original ‘49ers. Those fearless men and women who led that first San Francisco gold rush, sixteen decades before.

His sparse bachelor office featured four tombstones, as the trophy plinths are called in the trade, celebrating successful capital raisings over the years. Front and center in his dark wooden bookcase sat the spherical-shaped one for PingPong, an online payments service that had gone up against PayPal – and lost. Next to it were others, for increasingly less memorable web-based businesses that had chewed their way through ever greater amounts of investors’ cash: an online grocery business, an optical broadband adventure, a new-age ‘wellness portal’.

Well, a fee is a fee, Silverman reminded himself, and they’d all paid Carmichael handsomely – while they still could. But there the tombstones sat, taunting him with the central conundrum of his career: just what was it that singled out the lottery-like winners on the web from the thousands – the tens of thousands – going nowhere at warp speed? If Silverman could only answer that question, he felt he had a real shot at being a truly competent technology investment banker, as opposed to being a merely well paid one.

He flexed back in his Aeron chair and stared up at the ceiling tiles, willing the guy above to get this Clamor debrief over with. What a day, he closed his eyes. But the question kept taunting him in its hydra-headed way. How many pre-historic e-commerce companies had foundered before Amazon.com succeeded? How many weird and wacky ‘price discovery’ models had to implode before eBay became the global brand it now was? He remembered all the Johnny-come-lately investors who’d thrown their money in at the peak, including Silverman’s own dad – a retired cop for Chrissake.

Silverman javelined his pencil into a far-corner waste bin and swiveled the chair round to his keyboard. But his hands refused to type. For then there was Google, Web 2.0’s founding father. To this day it bothered Silverman, intensely, that he understood Google’s success so imprecisely. Just how had Big G become such a spectacular winner, when so many apparently similar search engines had come and gone before? Sure, Google had a clean, ‘well-lit’ user interface – hadn’t Alta Vista too, back in ‘95? Yes its search algorithms were fast and accurate – was that to say Inktomi’s weren’t? The name itself, the socially infectious verb to google: it baffled him. Whatever its algebraic origins in geek-land, phonetically Google sounded like something his nine month-old nephew could’ve come up with. The only way Silverman could explain it was by a certain bigness that Google had somehow attained, allowing Google to match things. That Joe Six-pack, entering the keyword ‘asbestosis’ in Wichita, Kansas, could be brought together with a local class action law firm – and that Google could relieve said law firm of several hundred bucks for the introduction.

The desk clock clicked over to 18:30. “Come on, come one,” he willed his phone to light up, with Steven Schweitzer’s assistant’s name. “It’s a freakin’ Friday night.”

He turned back to his still warm turkey-and-fresh-cranberry sandwich. It had arrived on rosemary ciabatta with a side tub of turkey jus. He dunked the sandwich in the side tub and took a big bite of the juicy meat, dabbing his lips with the first of an accompanying mound of napkins.

He munched thoughtfully. For, of all the success-stories, Clamor was by far the most mysterious. Clamor had hit the big time providing its users with essentially two utilities: the ability to create a profile page, i.e. fill out a basic web template with photos and other random stuff, and the ability to link this profile page to other peoples’. Six Degrees was doing the exact same thing a decade before. And since then, hundreds of ‘community’ companies had sprouted and withered. Geocities, the ‘trailer park of the web’, bought by Yahoo. PlanetAll, bought and shut down almost as quickly by Amazon. All those ethno-sites, MiGente and the like. What was so special about Clamor? And yet unquestionably there was something special, almost magical about it. Five percent of the planet’s population and ninety-five per cent of the most evolved part it could only be so wrong.

‘Francesca H’ flashed up on the phone.

Ben picked up the handset, fighting to swallow: “Hi.”

“Ten minutes,” Francesca said.

“Fine,” Ben said.

“I’ll let you know,” and she hung up.

Google, Google – it sounded like some Silicon Valley heartbeat. Ben didn’t even want to think about the pain and humiliation heaped on bankers across the land when ‘Don’t be evil’ Google went out, avoiding the usual feather-bedding IPO process for a public auction designed to give little-guy investors access to that first-day ‘pop’. Shares were always slightly under-priced for the first day of trading, to ensure a ‘healthy after-market’ – a fair reward for the risk of backing bankers being saddled with large chunks of un-saleable stock, should circumstances change. In reality, Ben knew, IPOs simply got pulled when circumstances changed. It was indeed one of the few occasions he could recall investment bankers acting in unison, persuading institutional buyers to boycott Google’s 2004 IPO altogether.

And yet the auction had worked, well.

At least Clamor hadn’t followed Big G down that path.

The phone bleeted, causing Silverman to spill hot jus down his Hugo Boss suit – Fuck!

He wrestled with the handset again. “OK, I’ll be right up.”

The 39th floor was all dark wood. Francesca sat at a slim desk outside the corner office of Steven Schweitzer. Schweitz was officially Head of the Technology Practice – the title being a political compromise arrived at someplace along the way, for Carmichael Associates only did technology business. Walking out of Schweitz’s office was Leonard Carmichael, looking a little like Richard Nixon on a bad day. Silverman said: “Hello sir.” He never quite knew whether Carmichael recognized him. The Chairman nodded and went on by.

Francesca looked dark and lovely as ever, her curved lashes lifting fleetingly: “Ben.”

“Fran.”

“You can go right on in.”

Schweitzer sat swiveled to one side, his feet up on a row of low filing cabinets. He was throwing a plastic baseball against the wall. Occupying the opposite corner was a furled Stars-and-Stripes flag. Half way down the adjoining wall nestled a fireplace with ornately carved surround that Schweitz had bought from Butterfield & Butterfield, the august San Francisco auction house acquired by eBay back in 1999. He’d been trying to persuade Butterfield to drop its age-old advisors in favor of Carmichael. The play was to turn that role into a broader mandate, once the 134 year-old auction house was absorbed into the 4 year-old flea market with exploding technicolor logo, worth 200 times as much. But Butterfield was too disorientated to entertain Schweitz’s advances, and even Leonard Carmichael raised a thick eyebrow when an expense claim crossed his desk for a rare 1780s marble fireplace surround. The compromise was to install it someplace in the building, capitalizing it onto the balance sheet as a Long Term Investment.

Such were the benefits of the intimate partnership structure.

“Benjamin,” Schweitzer greeted Silverman in fatherly fashion. He looked like a slightly younger version of talk show host Jerry Springer, complete with specs. He wore a white shirt with silver striped tie, loosened. “What’s new in Dwayne’s World?”

“Hi. Good, Steven. Yeah, good. Wisnold seems to be doing great,” Ben said sunily, sitting down and handing his boss a deal update pack. “It was an interesting meeting.”

“Oh yeah? Like how.”

“Well let’s see: Jon Vogel treated the room to Jon’s New Laws of the Universe.”

“Only the fruits and nuts here in California Benjamin, only the fruits and nuts. You know that guy has some kinda steam clock in the grounds of his place down in Monterey, that’s supposed to cuckoo every ten thousand years? Jesus Christ in the morning.” He gave exactly the same shake of the head as Jerry did on the show.

“No doubt. Erm, maybe we should consider getting someone else on stage for the New York presentations.”

“Oh yeah? Like who.” Schweitz was already absorbed in the update pack, specs far down his nose.

“I guess Paul Towse. He’s a big holder, shows well. He’s got the chops to sell the boys out East.”

Schweitz nodded: “That’s where the real money is lying and waiting, Benjamin.” Two hundred billion. “That’s the away game we need to win.”

Schweitzer stopped at a certain point in the update pack. Ben knew which. “Oh my,” he said.

Clamor.us, Inc. ‘Pre-Money’ Capitalization Table

EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL

He said it as though in awe of a great painting, or some other priceless piece of art. “Oh my. Will you just look at the kinda money these pricks are gonna pull down.”

Schweitz fell silent for a moment. Then in a faraway voice: “You know, Bill Gates once remarked that a man changes when his net worth passes a hundred million...”

He snapped out of his reverie. “But I’m still here, Benjamin. What else?”

“Just verification work mostly, for the S1 filing. Trying to find out about that Multiworld investor. And, there is something else I need to speak with you about.” Silverman hesitated. “You didn’t see my emails?”

Schweitz eyed him. “Just got out of the meeting. Len makes us go topless. It’s a new edict.” He savored Silverman’s confused look for a second. “Lap-topless. No handhelds allowed in the Board Room either.”

It was something Silverman had consistently seen in alpha males: the exaggerated leisure of guys like Schweitz as the stakes rose. He knew better than to delay the crux of his update any longer:

“We had an incident at the end of the preso. The Kid got up to do his site demo turn, and managed to pull up the page of what looked like a human trafficking site, complete with thirteen year-old girl. Let’s just say there was a sharp intake of breath in the room.”

Steven Schweitzer was silent.

Ben: “Should I talk to the lawyers?”

“About what?” snapped Schweitz. “Does eBay talk to its lawyers when some lunatic posts hate crime material on their site? Yeah, maybe they do – to make sure their site use policies are absolutely clear, that they have nothing to do with it.

“Work with the Clamor team on this. Which of these guys can provide a little adult supervision in that department,” and he looked down the cap table again.

“We’re supposed to be working with Marantz. He’s the CFO. Old school: blue shirt, flies around trying to do web one-dot-o deals with old media companies –”

“Assuming there will still be any old media companies to do deals with. Who else?”

“Nguyen seems solid. He spoke well today.”

“Then work with him. Suggest they get a private security consultant on board to understand it better. Someone arms length and low key who could fly under the ‘Other Professional Service Fees’ note at the back of the S1. We could probably give them some recommendations.”

“Sure. But what about –”

“It’s good this happened here, where we have the home field advantage. Let me tell you something, Benjamin,” and Schweitz put the update pack down, picked up his baseball again and wandered off into some discourse about former Republican presidents. About how President Nixon “got a little over-competitive and was found with chicken-shit on him.” How Ronald Reagan “sold weapons to the Iranians, and used the proceeds to run interference throughout Central America… and that’s elephant shit, Benjamin. Yet we know which president had to go. So what does that little historical comparison tell us?”

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?”

CHAPTER 4

Going roller blading with Tom Nguyen was one thing, but staying at his apartment was quite another. Thankfully, the question didn’t arise. Tom informed Natalie that Clamor was now treating her trip as an official recruiting event, and paying for her room at the Keaton.

She got back there by late evening. An enormous box of Ghiradelli chocolates lay at the foot of her bed. She put a ‘Shhhh’ sign on the door, slipped into her silk pj bottoms and favorite ribbed top, then treated herself to a night of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, lounging among the cool bed sheets while picking off the dark chocolate creams.

She awoke early feeling sluggish. She meditated then went down to the stately lobby for a fresh orange juice, a large latte and a New York Times.

“Miss Chevalier,” called out the concierge. “How are we today? Hertz has delivered a rental car, courtesy of your hosts.”

She walked through the front entranceway. It was a glorious San Francisco day. A tram gave a mournful toot and ding ding as it whirred along California, half-a-block away. The Hertz car was a Ford Taurus Limited, but new and surprisingly solid feeling with its hefty three-and-a-half-liter engine and stitched leather seats.

By mid morning, she was ready. As she reversed the Taurus out of its valet spot, an image magically appeared in the rearview mirror – a camera view from the rear of the vehicle. It vanished again as she swung forward onto Stockton. Nice. Once again, she was impressed by how they’d thought to take care of her needs while in town.

She exited the city. A sign in garish motel neon flew past: ‘Yahoo! A Nice Place to Stay on the Web’. She passed the airport and, with the light Sunday traffic, was soon in the Valley.

The name had once conjured up things fertile and mysterious but that day it didn’t even look like a valley to her. It was flat and sun parched and it dissolved into bright haze as she searched fruitlessly towards the horizon. Silicon Valley would often be twenty degrees warmer than the fog-prone city. Here and there, a steel-framed, mirror-glassed building erupted from the tawny scrub, marking some start-up’s ascension to stock market success. Natalie suddenly couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live there. Perhaps for the reduced distractions from its infamous seven-day workweeks?

The Clamor office was a white, four story building on the nondescript outskirts of Sunnyvale. From the street, she could just make out the discrete logo next to a smoked glass entranceway. The cars in the parking lot were equally forgettable: an old Honda Civic, an older Ford Taurus … her Hertz rental car would fit right on in. Slightly off to the side was a pale-blue, modern Beetle. You would never have guessed that the owners would soon be worth as much as a small country’s GDP. Would the parking lot look any different post-IPO? Probably not. There would be the odd Audi or Volvo, but nothing more flashy. It was such an odd game of appearances, she reflected: ‘For bankers, for VCs, it’s about the money. For us it’s about so much more.’ Yet what if someone tried to take all that money away? It was just a different kind of religion, Natalie concluded – for which she was attending her first Sunday service in a while.

She parked and walked towards the main doorway, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair and scrutinizing the entry arrangements: simple key card access, no guard. Through the smoked glass, she could make out Tom Nguyen coming towards her. He’d probably been there since dawn, if not all night. The door sucked open: “How’re the thighs holding up?” he greeted her with a grin.

“Huh? Oh, the roller blading – fine thanks.”

The lobby was dark, functional and heavily air-conditioned. Behind Tom was an un-staffed reception desk bearing the company’s logo. No sign of a weekend crisis following the Friday investor debacle. Rather, it looked like there’d been a college party meantime, with paper plates and cans of Bud Lite covering the low tables of the lobby seating area.

Having adjusting to the light, she looked again at Tom. His hair was gelled slick, making him look closer to 25 than 35. A chain hung round his neck, disappearing into a white T-shirt. Over it he wore another, darker one featuring a gold elephant and something written below in Asian characters.

“What does your T-shirt say?” she asked.

“ ‘I don’t remember’.”

“Very good,” and she laughed.

“I guess elephants forget sometimes,” he said, thumping his sternum, where the golden animal glistened. He looked like he’d been working out. Surprisingly toned. “People always ask,” he added. “It’s my counter-personality test: anyone who thinks I’d put on a T-shirt without knowing what it says hasn’t got me figured me out so well!”

“There you go,” and Natalie laughed again.

“Come on through and meet everyone.”

He opened a side door into a long conference room.

The room faced back onto the bright parking lot. But the blinds were drawn, filtering the light into disorientating patterns. It felt like first day of school all over again. People sat spread out along each side of the elongated oval table, down the middle of which stood bottled drinks, coffee cups and plates of cookies. Most people had their laptops already open. Each head turned towards her. She struggled to keep up as Nguyen rattled off the names of a product manager and three technical program managers nearest the door. At the farther end sat the top team, whom Natalie had seen on stage two days prior. They stood up in turn: Mike Marantz, tousle-haired and red-eyed, in a crumpled pair of khaki chinos. Yuri Malovich, sallow and intense, in puma sneakers, drainpipe jeans and an old Atari T-shirt draping his wiry torso. Natalie couldn’t tell whether his top was deliberately vintage or had been lurking in his wardrobe forever. Furthest along, on the near side, was someone Natalie hadn’t encountered before: a petite Asian woman perhaps in her early twenties, extending her hand:

“Hi, I’m Nancy Wu,” the woman said. “The Chief Connectedness Officer.”

“Nancy? Natalie. Nice to meet you.”

Nancy’s mouth smiled but her eyes remained female-evaluative. Probably just like my own, Natalie chastised herself. Nancy was arrestingly pretty, with tumbling dark hair streaked cherry-red, porcelain fine skin and glistening eyes. She was in a dark blue polka dot dress above the knee, over which she wore a damson-colored cardigan. The girlish look was contradicted by her boots, sleek black, accentuating her athletic calves. But it was the heels that made the point. Beside them sat a bug-eyed pug, with matching polka-dot kerchief.

“That’s Minerva,” Nancy said, smiling. The dog looked terrified.

Nguyen guided Natalie on to the head of the table, where slouched Dwayne Wisnold, his faded denim shirt leaching the color from his face.

“Hey,” he said without getting up. His hand was lifeless. His energy had faded from Friday’s. He was almost a different person. He looked unnaturally pale, with purply-dark circles round his eyes radiating nervous irritation. Late nights, Natalie reasoned. And yet he dominated the room. Michael Marantz sat next to him on the far side of the table, asking him whether he’d be back in the Midwest for the upcoming holiday weekend.

“Why would I do that, when I have this?” he replied, waving disconsolately at his laptop.

Natalie took her place half way down the table, in-between the senior management team and the program managers. It gave her a view of everyone in the room. She pulled out a felt pen and note pad from her bag. Still feeling very much like the new girl, she flipped to a clean page.

Two things struck her immediately. One, there would be no discussion of the Friday investor debacle. That discussion had either already happened ‘off line’, or would not be happening at all. Two, for a company founded on the premise of connecting people, this was a decidedly unhappy family.

She sketched the table and everything she could remember about people’s names and roles, keeping her handwriting just messy enough to confound prying eyes.

Nancy asked the head of the table whether he wanted to say a few introductory words and Wisnold casually called the meeting to order.

“So, this stuff is like, real important, if we’re gonna build this company to last. Really, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it in terms of a one year product roadmap,” and he thumbed his copy of Nancy’s presentation, which he’d clearly had access to before the meeting. It was so striking, the come down in his energy from two days prior. Like an addict bottoming post-high.

“What we should be thinking about –” and he paused for an unnaturally long moment “– is how we’re gonna build Clamor.us for the next hundred years, or so. Or more.”

“Thank you Dwayne,” Nancy said. “Well hopefully it won’t be a hundred year war!”

The attempt at humor fell flat. Everyone looked too exhausted to laugh. Nancy proceeded to hand out hard copies of her presentation. Mike Marantz flipped to the back page and stared blankly at the final recommendation. It was one of Natalie’s pet peeves: give the poor presenter a chance to make her case!

The first slide was headed:

‘m.ID.e – status update’

– and over the next few slides, Natalie caught the gist of what the Multi-Identity Engine, or m.ID.e, was all about. The Clamor team had sought to recreate online the complex topography of our real world relationships – those subtle, subconscious ways in which people present themselves differently in differing social circumstances.

Certainly it was a step forward from the ‘autistic’ software defining user experiences of sites such as Friendster: ‘Are you my friend? YES or NO?’ The Clamor engineers had come up with a series of algorithms that dynamically reformatted a user’s profile page, according to the level of familiarity with each viewer. No longer would a user have to refuse the request of a boss, or ‘un-friend’ a lover upon breakup. The user tagged each of their contacts – ‘work stuff’, ‘ex-file’, etc. – and the engine edited the profile elements into an always-plausible result. All the user had to do was upload their photos and self-description and then label or re-label each contact from an impressive array of choices: ‘acquaintance’, ‘top friend’, ‘top top friend…’ From there, the engine would do the rest, learning from user behavior as it went.

The next slide unveiled the question that had really been exercising Nancy and team:

‘What causes people to reveal the very most about themselves?’

The null hypothesis, or starting assumption, had been ‘familiarity’. We tell our families more than we tell work colleagues. We tell a close sibling more than we’d tell a distant cousin. Apparently, it was a founding premise of the Multi-Identity engine, that the more trusted the connection, the more profile elements should be viewable. But the experiments had in fact revealed something that the team suspected all along, which ran entirely counter. That people disclosed the most about themselves to those they barely knew at all. The statistically inferred conclusion ran along the bottom of the slide like some fortune cookie message:

‘Anonymity tends to amplify inner tendencies.’

In a sense, it had been apparent since the dawn of the Internet: that people used the anonymity of the medium to do or say things they would never do or say in ‘real life’. Only, Clamor.us was now real life. The place where many of those 350 million members spent their days and nights! And in that light, how should the Clamor team re-view these ‘inner tendencies’? Slide 14 started:

‘Understanding the subterranean self’

“OK, this is getting a little creepy,” Mike Marantz said.

Wisnold narrowed his eyes. Natalie was struck by the curious, nervous energy circulating the room. It was flinty with tension, like a tinderbox –

“I just don’t know that the term ‘subterranean’ sounds entirely appropriate,” Marantz was saying. “Couldn’t we use another?”

“Like what?” Nancy said.

“You have ‘hidden’ on the previous slide,” Nguyen intervened.

“It still sounds weird,” Marantz said. “Come on, Berkeley psych major. There must be a better word.”

Nancy visibly bristled, controlled herself then said: “Carl Rogers talked about the true self. I guess we could use true sel–”

“I like true self.”

A pause hovered with a life of its own. “With all due respect Mike, you are not responsible for creating the engine.”

“Well neither are you.”

“How d’you draw that conclusion?’

“I coded it,” Yuri Malovich butted in.

“And? Nancy hunched her shoulders, turning her palms upwards. “Yuri, you may have written the code, but I wrote the rules!”

“Well if Yuri’s name is on the patent application as an inventor, perhaps legally we should be careful not to deny his contribution,” Nguyen tried to reconcile the room. “We should be mindful of the Six Degrees situation,” he added, somehow sealing his authority on the subject. “Although, with all due respect to you Yuri, on a go-forward basis my team does have responsibility for the engineering work on the engine.”

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 4th 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 underestimated 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.

“You all OK?” she asked, slipping into deep southern.

“Fine!” Fahn, they said. “So good to see you!”

There was moment’s pause. “OK. I’ll get the drinks. What’ll you all have?”

“Better make it wine – a chard,” Melinda said.

“Me too,” said Stacey.

Natalie strode over to the bar, noticing her friends sink back into deep conversation. A man dressed in black with lively grey eyes turned to her: “Hey, could I get a female perspective on something?”

“No!” she said. She didn’t want to be hit on, but she surprised herself with the force of her rebuff. “I mean, not now. Sorry, I’m just here with my friends.”

His hands shot up in a ‘that’s cool’ gesture.

As she brought the drinks back, they looked up at her – with concern, again. After all the day’s events, she felt slightly light-headed. What was going on?

“You all sure everything’s OK?” she asked again, quite tense now. “Melinda?”

“Yeah, I think so,” and they started to catch up a little. But how differently, how hesitantly compared to times gone by. When Melinda got up to go the restroom and Stacey made as though to join her, Natalie couldn’t take it any longer:

“Gals, what is wronng?”

They looked at each other, then at her.

“Stacey? Look, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it up here Saturday. I thought it was OK – that you were OK with that!”

“It’s not about Saturday, Natalie,” Melinda took charge. “It’s about your page on Clamor.”

The gnawing apprehension was back. “Huh?”

“Your Clamor page,” Stacey agreed.

“What are you talking about?”

“The profile page you have here on Clamor,” for the third time.

“Nuh-uh. I don’t have a Clamor page, I’m not on Clamor!”

“Yes you are!”

“No I’m not!” Natalie almost shouted, to the entire bar.

“Come on Natalie, you’re de-fi-nately on Clamor.” And Melinda reached for her handheld, pushing it towards her.

She was definitely on Clamor.

Natalie gave up trying to navigate Melinda’s handheld and pulled out her MacBook. A moment later, she had the wi-fi password from the barman and the three of them huddled round her Clamor profile page, their faces lit white in the darkness.

Natalie suddenly felt very weary. The lead photo of her was a simple headshot from several years back. She had about 20 friends, an odd assortment of people from over the years. Her English friend Verity was there, as was Hélène from Paris.

“When did you guys become my friends?” It felt like she was outside her own body.

“We got the ru-quest this morning. That’s the first time we saw it. We thought you’d caved and joined, an’ we were happy. Then we looked closer.”

Her stated interests were all semi-familiar ones: yoga, ‘lotsa eastern philosophy’, self-inquiry, ‘going-within’, and on went the list of self-indulgent attributes.

But it was the blog feed that sent her heart pounding in her chest cavity:

‘Feelin kinda antsy today. just went 4 a latte, gotta cut down on that caffeine. maybe I need 2 smoke something!’

It went on to describe, in a rather hectoring tone, how glad she was to be free of her last job. How that last job had succkked!!

It was everything Natalie had disavowed about blogging. She’d won prizes for her school essays, and who did she have to thank for that?  It had taken her father years to become a featured columnist for Le Monde. He’d trained under the most experienced of reporters, his copy obsessively researched, proof-read, fact-checked, with earlier attempts shredded by editors bearing down their decades of experience on him, his later attempts finally accepted and vouchsafed by one of the world’s great news organizations. It had been an apprenticeship. A calling. And that was before considering the substance. A single memory flashed up, of an elderly man sitting at their apartment on the Avenue Kléber, mumbling to her father about worldly matters. The tobacco smell was as pungent in her nostrils as though it were yesterday. She must have been three or four at the time. The man was Jean-Paul Sartre, in the last year of his life.

What would her father make of this self-referential nonsense were he still alive? She shivered and scrolled back to the photo area of the page. There she was on the beach, in a brown bikini, standing with hands in prayer position. She vaguely remembered the moment, with two other girls from the yoga organization, after snorkeling one afternoon: a Thank You to the wonders of the sea or some such. The photo had been cropped to focus on her glistening chest, down which water trickled. There was another photo of her on the beach, this time horseback riding. To avoid skin rash, she’d worn breeches and old boots. She remembered it well: galloping along in the early day with several others, sea spray and salt air and horse smell and the rhythmic movement of massive limbs filling her world. This time a three-quarter shot, from behind. Hers.

A third photo: a close up, less flattering, revealing the fine lines spreading round her eyes. Others from the yoga studio… All real. Doubtless they’d been taken by retreat-goers and posted online somewhere, perhaps even the yoga retreat’s own website. None appeared to have been digitally altered. But the way they’d been edited together created an unmistakable impression:

Look at Me! Am I not gorgeously desirable, glamorous and SEXY!?

It was everything she’d tried to avoid for so much of her life. At boarding school, the daughter of Lorelei Chevalier-Smythe – not even a well-known model! – yet enough of one to make her an easy target for the comments and malicious gossip of other girls. Hence the avoidance of anything like these photos. Then she saw her whiteboard:

Downwerd  d oggie style oh YEAH

Her profile page apparently lacked even the minimum level of security. Anyone could access it and write whatever they wanted. And everyone could read the result:

Id like 2 ride that ! !

Pricks. But it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps she was overreacting? The photos were not awful. The lewd comments were self-evidently the work of prying creeps. Others were weirdly complimentary:

Super cool! Where d’ya get that bikini from?

– one woman, a complete stranger, had posted. Ordinarily, closing a Clamor account – the foundation if not entirety of many peoples’ social lives – was an arduous old task if you lacked the account login and password. But she was now working for Clamor. She resigned herself to calling Nguyen or Malovich, finishing up the night with her friends, then emailing everyone in the morning: “my account was just hacked…” At the end of the day, no one had stopped breathing.

Then she saw it.

The continuation of the blog.

Oh. My. God.

– guess I was the wrong person for my last job, coz it succkked!! Or maybe I just sucked the wrong guy, but that’s another kinda job Ha Ha!

She pushed the laptop away. Her girlfriends’ arms wrapped round her:

“We didn’t know how to tell you,” one said soothingly.

Noise and confusion…

“RAY-mee!” Stacey and Melinda were chorusing to the barman across the room, who was flailing among the dusty, expensive bottles in one corner...

“No-wh!” they called out: “The RAY-mee ex-oh!”

Only the Rémy Martin XO Excellence would do for this one.

She surprised herself by laughing out loud. What a strange gaggle they made! The whole room was watching. The shy barman poured a triple measure. She glugged it down, the sickly liquor coursing through her, warming her back up a bit.

She opened the laptop again, suddenly realizing how the identity hijacker may have gone about it. “Don’t – look at that!” Stacey said, reaching to close it, but Natalie told her No, it was OK: she wanted to show them something.

She opened a separate browser window and pulled up Friendster.com. It had lived on, popular now in Malaysia and the Philippines. Stupidly, she had not closed her account. There she still was, with the same 2003 photo and the same friends: someone had simply opened a Clamor account in her name, copied across the photo and found others, then tracked down as many of the same friends as he (or she) could on Clamor – the maverick Ray Ott being among them. It seemed likely that Ray had accepted ‘her’ request and checked out her profile on Sunday as well – after their Saturday email exchange. Suddenly, his radio silence that afternoon didn’t seem so strange.

Natalie remembered being sent to an executive course at a business school near Paris, and learning about the ‘sleeper effect’ in corporate communications: how over time, we remember only the message, not the source. It stuck with her because of the male executive colleague she went on the course with, a rising star at the company – whom she got to know a lot better that weekend. She vividly remembered the epiphany in that lecture hall, of why malicious gossip tended to be so effective.

Her very identity had been violated with the world at large – carefully, calculatedly. And if the perpetrator could do that, what else could he or she do?

“I need to run,” she told her two friends.

“Huh?”

“There’s something I need to do, immediately.”

“No!” Stacey said, “we’re your family, Natalie!”

But she was already packed up and half way out the door. “I’ll call you.”

CHAPTER 7

Outside, the rain had let up some. She made her way back to the Public Market. Its red neon sign hovered, reflected in the pools of standing rainwater she fought hard to avoid. Her car was fine, no ticket. Rather than getting in however, she hurried up Pike Street, away from the water. It was only four or five blocks to the big Bon Marché and Nordstrom department stores at the heart of Seattle’s downtown shopping area, but the vicinity of Second and Pike was a sketchy corner, particularly at night. Bums huddled under awnings, talking to themselves, cradling their one or two possessions. It wasn’t a place to loiter. Yet it was a place where she’d once seen an Internet café, just round the corner from Amazon.com’s original building on Second, she recalled. Would it still be there? Did anyone still use an Internet cafe in a city as digital as Seattle? There it was: beneath a cheap noodle bar. She descended the basement steps.

It was a florescent-lit rabbit hutch of a place where time seemed to have stood still. She prepaid and took a seat in front of a light brown Compaq, looking as old as she felt. She launched the web browser and opened her Clamor page again – unable to recall an Internet connection this slow, even back in the days of dial-up.

Please wait…  …  …

She reached into her bag, for what had required her to come to an Internet café. Detection avoidance. She delved into an inner, zipped pocket, emerging with a glossy red memory stick, which she inserted into the Compaq’s updated USB port. Then she clicked open a folder, entered her two-factor authentication password and launched the application. Onto the screen popped:

LoverSpy, Deluxe

Here was the more specific reason why she’d had to leave her job. A Californian company had created the spyware to track online activities of partners in intimate relationships, usually to find evidence of infidelity. Monitoring a partner's online activities without his or her consent was usually illegal – and that had proved problematic for the authors of LoverSpy. But not always illegal, Natalie had managed to persuade herself, as she’d started to realize that a love triangle may be at play in her own workplace romance. Rather, it depended on local laws regarding marital/communal property. A fawning programmer in her department had re-written the software so that it contained a rootkit, thereby becoming ‘LoverSpy, Deluxe’. Rootkits modified host operating systems, giving the hacker administrative or root access. After listening to her lover’s suspiciously fierce denials, Natalie directed the programmer to infiltrate her lover’s computer software not only to install and hide the spyware, but also to repel any attempts at removal.

She no longer wanted to remember.

How the spyware knew whenever a ghost-job was killed, how it would start a new copy of the slain program within milliseconds, how the only way to remove it was to slay both ghosts simultaneously (very difficult) or to crash the system altogether.

For right there had been her undoing.

Bringing herself back, she opened up the LoverSpy executable and re-parameterized it using a Boolean-style command: IF visitor accesses Natalie Chevalier profile page AND visitor first accessed login page, THEN scrape username, password. Next she copied the executable across to the open scripts of her profile page. From there, it would upload itself to the Clamor web servers in some hosting facility thousands of miles away, working its way in – then winging its way back.

She leaned away from the Compaq, crossed her arms and waited. Waited. Waited …

It still all felt so raw, so vivid.

How, from his account of it, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources had gone in to bat for her at the last minute. She could imagine it all: him dropping by the CEO’s office at the end of a day, the CEO with his sleeves rolled up, his ball-shaped head reddened by the day’s exertions, but still listening intently. HR, in his clipped accent, acknowledging that Natalie Chevalier had been naive to get involved with a fellow executive, that there had been no defense for what she’d gone and done. And yet the company had long since tolerated workplace relationships, she was growing into a “world-class senior software executive” (the cost of recruiting and developing a replacement being significant), the provocation had been unusual – it was an aberration. “She didn’t have it easy earlier in life,” he’d apparently said on his way out of the CEO’s office.

Natalie was left wondering what then went on behind closed doors. Perhaps that last remark to the CEO had proved her undoing. Perhaps it had been repeated to the Chairman, who could only have responded one way: “those are two mutually exclusive states: difficult childhood, total aberration – which?”

Perhaps, perhaps.

The CEO personally delivered the bullet. He told her that on a human level, he could empathize with what she’d been through. But business was about making the tough calls. She’d used the resources of her department to launch malware onto the personal computer of another serving executive. She would be given the chance to resign. She would receive twelve months’ severance provided that she signed a new non-disclosure and non-compete agreement covering that extended period. Both she and the other executive involved had reported into the senior leadership team. The circumstances of her departure would remain confidential to that small group.

“What about him?” she asked.

Her ex was not in a good place. His peers just didn’t care too much for his behavior. He’d been hit with improper use of corporate email or similar.

“He’ll be dismissed for cause. Whatever he chooses to say, I very much doubt people will pay attention to.”

But that wasn’t what she’d meant: “I love-d that bastard!” she’d burst forth, tears leaking out again, the sky falling in once more.

“You bawled that out to the big guy?” Melinda had asked, open-mouthed, in the Alibi Room. Natalie had been given just five days to get her story straight, get her emails out, say her goodbyes and vacate her office for good. Initially the headhunters called. She was still crouching in her comforter, knees to her chest, forehead to her knees – on the floor of the penthouse once shared with the man she’d loved, not even ten blocks north of where she now sat … … …

Where she now sat, in a ratty Internet café beneath a grimy noodle bar, in front of the world’s slowest ever computer. Living the latest nightmare. She’d been waiting for some alphanumeric sequence on the screen, and didn’t at first notice the double blink sound:

A computer-headed stick figure, appearing in duplicate.

What the hell?

She tried to run an image search, but the Compaq was too slow. She felt hunger. She pulled out her notepad and drew the character and stared at it till it danced above the page.

Then she trudged upstairs: the grimy noodle bar would have to do.

Just a couple of other diners at greasy formica tables. As with the basement, someone had gone to great lengths to ensure the place was awfully lit. An elderly owner took her order: house noodle soup, please. She pushed the boat out, succumbing to the Three Dollar Deep Bowl.

After wiping the table with a paper towel, she opened her notebook and stared again at the stick figure. What did it remind her of?

One of those Space Invader graphics, from the retro-‘80s video game. Suddenly she thought of Malovich, and that damned Atari T-shirt…

The soup arrived. It was warm, oily water but nutritious and flavorsome enough. She hoped it wouldn’t react too weirdly with the Rémy Martin triple measure and Alaska in-flight snack. Bringing the bowl closer to her mouth, she exhaled the steaming vapors into her face, closing her eyes. How she’d loved to do that as a child, in the Vietnamese restaurants around Paris, with her dad.

When she looked up again, the owner was smiling at her. She smiled back: he was almost a parody of himself. Right down to his wispy beard, like soft strands of wool.

“Ah,” he said. “Very good”.

He seemed to be talking about the soup.

“Yes,” she said.

“I can do better,” and he walked back to the serving area.

“No,” she called after him, “that was quite enough, thanks!”

But instead of returning with more soup, he came back with an old fashioned, ornate pen. “Here,” he said. And with the most beautiful, sweeping curves of his willowy wrist:

The black ink bled into the coarse paper.

“This very popular Chinese name,” he said proudly. “Woooo.”

The owl-sound went through her like a blade –

Had Nancy Wu signed her own forgery?

“And this, he pointed to her space-invader version higher up the page, “is American version of same name. More stray’-for-wah’,” he laughed.

Or was someone expecting her to infer that – someone impersonating Wu? With her head spinning, she paid, found her car, fervently hoped she wouldn’t be breathalysed and headed back to the airport.

For the rest of that night, she traded texts with Tom Nguyen. Ultimately, she was too tired to talk to him, let alone meet him – what she’d intended boarding the plane. On arrival back in San Francisco, she returned to the Keaton and there, fell into deep sleep.

*    *    *

No! – she tried to yell, awakening and realizing that she could only manage a suffocated gasp. The ‘Wu’ symbol had come alive in her sleep, wielding a machete-like blade. “No,” she repeated. She heard the murmur of the hotel’s air conditioning system, and felt cold sweat at the nape of her neck. Rubbing her wrists, she remembered the events of the previous day. The fraudulent Clamor page. She reached for her laptop and groggily googled herself. But before she had time to check the results, the room phone exploded –

Nguyen: “Are you avoiding me?”

She couldn’t tell whether he was pissed, joking or what. “I just woke up,” she said.

“Natalie. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

“No way! – Shit, I’m sorry!”

“Never mind. What did you want to talk about?”

She came right out with it: “I’m having second thoughts about this.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, me taking over Malovich’s security role – it feels like it’s stirring things in ways I don’t understand, or like. It feels as though it’s starting to make someone very unhappy – likely Malovich himself...”

“I doubt it,” Tom said. “At least, not any more.”

The phone silence rumbled loud in her ear.

“Yuri Malovich just took his own life.”

CHAPTER 8

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Ben Silverman said over the phone.

Natalie was leaning against the side of her over-heating Taurus Limited in the Silicon Bean parking lot. “But why? – Do we need to meet here?”

“One minute,” Silverman repeated and clicked off.

The meeting she’d just had with Nguyen hadn’t gone at all well. Indeed, he’d been uncharacteristically beside himself: “You come and sit in on the most sensitive strategy session of the hottest company in the Valley, about to go public … you take it all in – and then you decide you WANT OUT?”

A colleague and member of the company’s executive team had just died. It did rather put her fake profile page into perspective.

Silverman’s graphite grey Porsche sluthered to a halt alongside her.

She’d finally found a clothes store and was wearing a long crepe skirt. Chocolate-brown boots sheathed her feet – far too warm for outdoors in the Valley. Her toes wriggled uncomfortably. The smell of burned tire-rubber drifted. Silverman’s legs seemed to appear from the sports car long before he did.

“Follow me.”

Huh?

He strode not into the coffee shop but rather round to the side, past the cardboard boxes spilling out back. A Hispanic barista with sensitive eyes was on smoke break, sitting quietly on the back steps. Asphalt gave way to rough ground, which descended into a culvert caked dry with desiccated brush. Ascending the other side, they came to a wall of faded eucalyptus bushes splotched angry maroon-red in places, the leaves crinkling in the airless noon heat. Silverman held aside a branch.

“Where the hell are you leading me?”

“You’ll see.”

On the other side, they dropped down into the rear parking lot of a residential complex comprising twin level-blocks, all built in classic Californian motel style, outdoor stairs leading to the upper units. The amount of parking surface made the units seem like an afterthought to the automobile. The blocks were set at off-ninety degree angles to the street beyond, like huge airplane wings; everything seemed designed to connote with mobility and ease.

Blocking a street exit was an unmarked Crown Victoria Interceptor, electric-blue flickering ominously in the grill. For the first time, she heard the fierce crackle of police radio. Beyond gawked a kid on a pushbike and a Hispanic lady cradling a baby.

One crime scene operative was leaning into the shade, scrutinizing the screen of a black SLR camera. Another was showing a bottle of chemicals to a third team member. What appeared to be the medical examiner was talking into her recording device about “the conjunctivia of the eyelids caused by strangulation –”

A team like this didn’t attend to a straightforward suicide case – even one involving a senior software executive in the heart of Silicon Valley. But the question foremost in her mind was just how the lead investment banker advising the company that Malovich had worked for could belly-up to a crime scene like this – and, why said banker had brought her there?

Silverman moved to the edge of the area, stopping just short of the tape. A uniformed cop was reading out an odd inventory list: “slatted wooden futon bed with mattress and sheets, assorted toiletries including two containers of Lorazepam sleeping pills, a Linksys-Cisco wireless router still in its box … and in the kitchenette, twenty four bottles of Crystal Geyser mineral water, eight unopened boxes of Cracklin’ Oat Bran and a half-eaten beef jerky. It’s like the guy’d barely moved in.”

The man listening turned. He was heavy set, wearing comfortable jeans and a plaid shirt sporting a prominent yoke. She noted a finely knotted leather belt seeming too thin to encompass his mass. He had the look of a small-town sheriff, missing only a sweat-stained Stetson. His eyes met Ben’s, then Natalie’s. Otherwise his face was immobile. Perhaps in his fifties, he shouted quiet authority.

“This is Natalie Chevalier. She’s assuming Yuri Malovich’s role at the company. Natalie, this is Detective Pulver of the Sunnyvale Police Department.”

She was rather stunned by this introduction, feeling growing anger and confusion. “Pleased to meet you, Detective.”

“You can call me Bill. Welcome to 12A Garden Court, Natalie. Would you excuse me a moment? It looks like a couple of reporters have shown up,” and his steady gait took him over to the street exit blocked by the Crown Vic.

“Ben, I am not taking over Malovich’s role at the company! Now what the hell are we doing here?” she hissed. “What is going on?”

“My dad was a homicide cop in San Jose, recently retired. He plays in a golf tournament with a lotta these guys still serving in the force.”

“He golfs with this guy Pulver.”

“No, but he golfs with a guy who fishes with Pulver.”

“And?”

“So Dad gets the scuttlebutt. You find a dead senior executive of what may be the highest profile company in the Valley, its gonna draw attention –”

Pulver was back. “I guess the press already cottoned on to who this guy is. Was.”

He said to Ben: “So your old man ain’t goin’ quietly. Gotta keep his nose in.”

“You know it.”

“Well, can’t begrudge him that. I’d kill for his solved rate. And you’re a hotshot banker up in the city? Not following in your father’s footsteps, then.”

“Not directly. As I said on the phone, my bank works pretty closely with Clamor. It would be great to get a sense of what we’re up against here.”

Natalie felt Pulver draw back a little, his gaze lift to the screen of eucalyptus bushes behind them. “Short commute for the guy,” he said to himself. “Less than five minutes by car, and the same by that shortcut there on foot.” He nodded ahead.

“Yeah,” Ben turned back to him, having followed his gaze. “From my brief meetings with Malovich, he seemed to travel light through this world. Physically, that is.”

Ben allowed a beat.

“Mind sharing a bit of what went on here, detective?”

“Well, I guess your old man knows anyway.” Pulver looked at Natalie. “I’ll share what I can.” He wadded up some gum. “The deceased hung from a hook drilled into the two-by-fours of his ceiling. The construction of those units was so flimsy that after a few hours, the ceiling fell in, awakening the upstairs neighbors.” Pulver’s jaw sank down into the gum. “The arriving officer checked the body, and even a cursory glance told him all was not well. Burn marks on the neck.”

“Taser? Stun gun?”

“Wouldn’t be the first.’

Silverman said to Natalie: “It’s a popular way to disguise homicide as suicide. Believe it or not, a crime writer came up with a story like this involving a stun gun, causing copycat cases. Life imitates art, you could say.”

Natalie asked them which book.

“I never read ‘em,” the detective said.

Silverman said: “Anything from the ident technician yet?”

Pulver looked at him like he’d well over-stepped the mark.

“OK,” Silverman tried to backtrack. “Well, tell us how we can be of assistance. We both had contact with the vic in the days leading up.”

“Who said we’ve classified him a victim?” Pulver looked over to the street. A couple more cars had arrived, likely journalists. The blogosphere would be lit up over this one. “Who said we’ve pronounced it a homicide?”

She got it: how detectives needed to manage the information flow. You’d only got one chance to watch an interviewee react as he or she heard about it for the first time. They would want “homicide” kept out of the press for as long as possible.

Pulver drew matters to a close. “Where can I reach you both?”

“I’m probably flying back to my home in the Bahamas by mid-week,” Natalie said, “but can always be reached at either this number or email address,” and she handed him her card.

Silverman looked at her, but it was Pulver who said: “Miss Chevalier. It would be real helpful if you stuck around for the time being. We may need to talk to anyone who knew the deceased.”

The insistence in his eyes suggested he may become real unhelpful if she didn’t.

“Now if you’ll excuse me once more, I need to do something about these vulture scribblers descending on our asses.”

“What the –!” she said to Silverman as soon as Pulver was out of earshot.

His hands flew up, palms open. “Take it easy, Natalie.”

“Mind coming clean about just why you’ve got me roped into this?” she asked with arms crossed.

“I’d love to,” he replied. “I’ve got an appointment in forty five minutes with chief puppeteer Jon Vogel at his home on the peninsular. Why don’t you ride down with me, and we can talk it all through?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There are things you and I should discuss. It’ld be worth your while.”

They walked back to their cars. Finally: “What things?”

“Like how we get through this situation and return to our normal lives,” he replied.

She thought about returning to the Clamor office, and trying to re-engage Nguyen – no. What else?

The interior of his car was angular and masculine. It smelled new and clean. The scooped out seat offered welcome lumbar support.

“So,” she said. “Talk.”

CHAPTER 9

“Where’s that accent from?” Ben asked. “I keep trying to place it.”

“The South.”

“But whereabouts?”

She eyed him sideways, then stared back at the highway his sports car was devouring. “South Carolina.”

“I see. Columbia? Myrtle Beach –?”

“Charleston.”

“Of course,” he said. “Heard great things about it. The food… what was it that Rhett Butler said again, about Charleston? You know: something about going back there to see whether there wasn’t something left in life of grace and charm?”

She said nothing.

“Yup,” Ben continued. “I even remember my mom talking about it, quoting some etiquette expert as saying Charleston was ‘the most mannerly city in all of America’.”

She was conscious of having her arms crossed, of looking straight ahead, her hair shielding her face.

Ben: “OK, my concern is in protecting the IPO, which right now is looking like a pretty tall order.”

The road started to descend from the Valley into a section of two-lane highway, carrying them towards Salinas. The Porsche sucked down into the highway’s sweeping curves. Natalie pushed her boots deeper into the foot well, clasping a charm bracelet round her right wrist. “Hold on Ben. Just indulge me a little, would you? By telling me some more about yourself. This is all rather sudden. And try not to get us both killed while you’re about it.”

He eased up and started talking about his time at the University of California, Davis, due east of San Francisco. About beginning on the trading floor at Carmichael Associates, then managing to get into Stanford business school – before quitting a year later for the first dotcom boom. It sounded like he’d never left Northern California, physically at least.

Football, she was thinking. Football and perhaps head of bar ops, Delta House ’95 or whatever: “You play much sport at Davis?”

“Not a lot. I was too into my course.” He caught her look. “English major. But I kept up with the spelunking,” and he clocked her surprise again. “Sea caving, down the peninsular here.

“By the way, this here on the left,” and he pointed up towards the yellow-brown grass ascending skyward: “these are the Pastures of Heaven Steinbeck wrote about back in the day.”

Natalie took in the view, the new information.

He said: “Boy, The Grapes of Wrath. I tell ya, that book taught me all I needed to know about the Depression – and about my dad’s side of the family.”

Silvery remnants of barn and broken down corral sped past. She decided to lighten the tone a little: “So you weren’t tempted to become a writer yourself? Pen that Great American novel?”

“All I could think to write about was myself, and even I’m not that interested in me.”

She laughed involuntarily. “So why did you engineer for Buffalo Bill back there to forbid me from leaving town anytime soon?”

“Detective Pulver makes his own calls. From my perspective, it’s great to know that someone’s looking into the human trafficking problem at Clamor. Someone smart, someone technical. And, you’re not an investor in the company, which almost places you above suspicion.”

“Above suspicion? Of what?”

He didn’t answer, asking instead: “How much d’you know about IPOs?”

She hesitated, perplexed. “Back in the day, dotcoms seemed to treat them as these big marketing junkets. Whose is the latest hot web site everyone should visit –”

“But you’re aware an IPO is really about raising capital.”

“Of course I am.”

“And that the sudden marketability of the stock gives existing investors an opportunity to cash out. A liquidity event, we call it in the trade.”

“Right.”

“So, people get twitchy about their stockholdings as IPO day draws near. They want to lock in, to the big win. It’s within reach: they can feel it.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I’ve witnessed it many times.

“Take Malovich for example, who held options over 5% of the company. You know about stock options – how they give the right but not the obligation to buy shares at a set price, and typically a pretty low one at that?”

“Ben. I was a head of security for a rather big software company.”

“Well I calculated just how much Malovich stood to make. Given how early he joined the company, it would have cost him around five hundred thousand dollars to exercise those options. And after the IPO, he could have sold the stock for some six hundred and twenty five million dollars, based on what we expect the IPO to price at, which would have netted him a profit of – rounding up –”

“Six hundred and twenty five millions dollars.”

“Erm, right. So it doesn’t make sense for him to have committed suicide,” Ben continued. “But it may very well make sense that he died at the hands of someone else.”

“Why?”

“Because of what happens to options after employment terminates, whatever the cause.”

“How so?”

“When your employment ended at your last job, what happened – to any options you hadn’t exercised?”

She winced. “Sure, I had to exercise and sell them within weeks or the company would cancel them –”

“Just like at Clamor. You have a brief window after employment ends to exercise your options, or they’re gone. Which effectively augments everyone else’s stock holding by five percent.”

“But that’s not motivation enough. Let’s say you’re going to make fifty mil’ anyway. And you have the opportunity of making another two-and-a-half – only, for the extra gain you’ve got to get rid of someone. Doesn’t make sense.”

Silverman was silent.

“So,” she said, changing the subject. “You weren’t tempted to become a detective yourself, like your dad?”

“You don’t just become a detective, Natalie. You’ve got to become a cop first. Which is hard work, and dangerous work. Neither of my parents encouraged me down that path. But I’ll say one thing: my dad was an unbelievable detective. He said he got his clues from the victims themselves, like he was communicating with them beyond the grave or something.”

They swept down the long Carmel Valley. Ben checked his wing mirror then overtook a slow moving RV with out-of-state license plates.

“Why do we need to go see Vogel?” she asked.

“I’ve set in motion events to kick out these Multiworld guys. No one could tell me anything about them. So we’ll buy back and cancel their shares for the price they paid. Mail a check to a P.O. box in Aruba if need be.”

“And you can just do that? Force the repurchase of stock now worth hundreds of millions of dollars?”

“Technically, it’s worth whatever it was valued at in the last funding round, which – granted, is a fraction of the IPO valuation. But, if we can show that this Multiworld crowd invested fraudulently, we should be OK. We can get a court order.

“We’ve searched for Multiworld in every database at Carmichael’s disposal, and that’s a few. We even put calls in to the Aruba Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been through the paperwork at Clamor’s offices. They never submitted Foreign Investment Disclosure forms when they invested. The Clamor guys faxed those requests over several times, according to the physical transmission reports. Of course, the fax number’s now dead.” He shook his head. “Hell, we deserve a court order! Whoever’s heard of an investor who no one’s ever heard of!”

“OK, OK! – but how does any of this involve Vogel?”

“Oh. We’ll still need an extraordinary stockholder resolution to affect the buy back, and therefore Vogel’s vote. He owns almost forty percent of the company.”

At the valley’s mouth lay an oasis of smoky-green pine trees. They turned onto coastal Highway One, bypassing Carmel-by-the-sea.

“Ben, I know you suspect that another investor may have had something to do with Malovich’s death, but there could be other reasons why people wanted him dead.”

“No kidding. What was that PhD he wrote? Hunting and fishing among the Russian mafia?” and he grinned morbidly.

“Hey, there’s big money to be made from that stuff. You do it right, and people don’t even contest the rogue charges on their credit card statements. Why bother, for a buck? But if these guys can work that scam with a few million cardholders worldwide, well. Malovich’s thesis did a lot to curtail that stuff, directly or indirectly.”

“That could have been his problem right there,” Silverman said. “Particularly among the Armenians. I remember dad telling me about those guys, man. Some of the stories.” He whistled. “One crew presented a Russian Kamov Ka-32 military transport helicopter as a gift: to the San Francisco Police Department. Can you believe that?”

Finally they turned onto Pine Glade Way, home to movie stars, sports celebrities, technology billionaires, and not too many others.

She nodded. “I don’t know which prospect is worse. An insider taking the life of another shareholder, or the Russian mafia.”

Silverman said: “neither is good, but both –”

“Multiworld?”

“I just don’t have a good feeling about this one, Natalie.”

CHAPTER 10

The glade was peculiarly dense around Vogel’s un-gated entranceway. Pine, maple and scrub oak fought for sky. The canopy of the driveway almost totally shut out light. Only after a hundred yards or so did it open out, into bright meadowland. The sun was beginning to burn through the marine layer above, gently illuminating the yellow-white asters and mauve lupins dotted about. At the far end, trees pincered in around a group of wooden buildings. Beyond winked ocean.

“Well, this is where it happens. The annual tech barons’ Woodstock-by-the-sea,” Silverman said. “He must have a hundred acres. Unbelievable.”

“What’s that?” Natalie said, looking to the left.

Set back from the driveway was a complicated metal structure glinting unevenly. It looked like a Jean Tinguely sculpture – only, the size of a small house. Metal wheels whirred on different axes. Hammer levers rose and fell uncertainly. It creaked and groaned and moaned at its task. They pulled over and got out. A plaque read:

The Clock of the Eternal

NOW!

July 29th, 1967.

“Interesting,” Ben said.

Turning back to the meadow, Natalie saw something move in the trees opposite. “And what’s that?” she said.

“What?” he said, shielding his eyes from the brightening sun with a hand.

“Shh,” Natalie said. For a moment, there was only insect drone. Then she whispered: “Look. Over in that oak, the large one: the lowest branch, extending horizontally,” and she guided his vision down her outstretched arm to a pale golden shape straddling the limb in question.

“Must be another sculpture,” he murmured.

But she knew. She could sense its watchful, feline presence. Suddenly its eyes blinked frostily.

“Holy shit! That’s a lion over there!” Ben raised his forearm protectively.

She eased his wrist aside. “It’s OK. There’s a fence.”

There was a set of horizontal silvery strands just visible in the strengthening light.

“And that fence is supposed to stop a three hundred pound lion?” he said.

“It’s likely electrified. And it’s a lioness, look: no mane. The lion is over there.”

“Fuck!” Ben sucked in air. Not fifty yards from them a five-hundred-pound male had broken cover and was standing equally still, its eyes quietly and intently upon them, its enormous mane flattened here and there by the ocean breeze.

Natalie: “I read an article in last Sunday’s Times about the growing trend for these exotic pets. You know, rap musicians and basketball stars looking to bring a bit of the Serengeti to their back yards.”

“Yeah well,” Ben swallowed hard. “The only guy I heard of who kept zoo animals on his property was Michael Jackson. And we all know what happened to him.”

A purring rumble came their way – the kind the reptilian brain is designed to focus its fullest attention on. Ben hurried her round to the passenger side of the Porsche: “get in,” he urged.

“I’m sure glad this ain’t an open top now,” she laughed uneasily.

“No kidding.”

Still wary of triggering a predatory response in the lion – even encased in the Porsche, they moved slowly over to the huddle of low buildings. They leaned in to the raked windshield to take in the roof structure of the crescent-shaped central building. Beams thrust out of the ground like some giant, hand-held fan. Or perhaps the display of a male peacock, Natalie decided: the copper flashings had turned an appropriate shade of green. The view of the ocean from inside had to be stunning. Around it were other, smaller structures fashioned from natural materials and separated by mature trees.

Warily, they got out of the car once more. They could hear the boom-and-hiss of surf. The air was balsam fresh. There was another smell that Natalie couldn’t put her finger on.

A young woman with frizzy blond hair appeared out of nowhere in khaki shorts and a tight halter-top. She had a tiny frame and enormous, surgically enhanced breasts. Her eyes were like saucers.

“Hi!” she squeaked. “I’m Mysty – with two ‘y’s!”

“I’m Ben Silverman, two ‘n’s. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

“I’m Mister Vogel’s personal assistant,” Mysty said for Natalie’s benefit. On cue, a bear-like figure rounded the corner of the house. Jon Vogel was wearing only a lime-green Speedo. Natalie didn’t know whether it was a good thing or not that his belly hung down to almost cover the front, giving him the appearance of going naked.

“Jon, this is Natalie Chevalier –”

“Oh yeay! Oh yeay!” he rang out like a town crier. “All hail the visiting princess!” and he gave a wildly exaggerated bow, fingers twirling.

“I think they’re stoned,” Ben said in a low voice.

“You don’t say.”

“Well welcome to New Earth, Natalie,” Vogel said with disarming sincerity.

“Thank you.”

“We were admiring your big game,” Ben said. “The lions –”

“Life is a big game!” Vogel exploded with kinetic energy, “the divine game!” He seemed to inhabit some other place where color, contrast and volume were turned to MAX.

“ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’!” he cried out.

Ben: “Shakespeare.”

“As You Like It,” Vogel laughed heartily. He led them up a path away from the house, into a canyon-like area previously hidden from view. The subject of Malovich’s demise soon came up, briefly tranquilizing him: “I can’t believe Yuri’s a goner,” he said. “He was a good kid: someone who’d always do the right thing. Shit, it feels like only yesterday Wiz and I recruited him from Stanford,” and he gripped the sides of a ladder that rose vertically into a tree-house twenty feet above. “Come up to my office.”

Vogel’s sagging rear vanished up the ladder with the agility of a twenty six year old: an impressive, if not exactly pretty, sight. Next Mysty’s perfectly rounded cheeks bounced up the rungs, trying to fight their way out of her safari shorts.

Silverman turned to Natalie. “After you?”

“No, please,” she rolled her eyes. “After you.”

“D’you guys wanna drink?” Mysty asked. “Coffee? Beer? Some absinthe? A little pot perhaps?”

“I’m good,” Natalie said.

Ben: “Maybe some bottled water.”

The tree house had window openings so large it was more a case of four poles supporting a vine-thatched roof. A bird darted straight through. On Vogel’s desk stood twin iMac screens the size of large solar panels. One showed stock market updates. Stock and index tickers flew across, flashing green and red as they went. Vogel stood in front, his face crossed with incomprehension at this summary of the world.

“What’s that smell?” Natalie asked, noticing the foreign scent again. Food? Carrion?

“Yeeahhhssss...” Vogel groaned. An inset frame of the screen featured a talking head on CNN Financial News taking very seriously some issue or other. Vogel’s face reddened, seeming to bubble and subside. Finally he gestured at the screen as though giving it one last chance, before flicking over to a screen saver. Lurid-colored fish glugged underwater...

“That’s better,” he sighed. He turned to his iPlayer and put on some sort of surfadelic music involving reedy organs, jazz flutes and rumbling bass lines.

“OK,” he collapsed onto a beanbag. “I am he / as you are he / as you are me / and we are all together…” His pupils were massively dilated. “I am the Walrus.

“Which reminds me, has anyone seen George’s guitar?”

He turned to Mysty. “They haven’t had it up by the campfire again, have they? Oh Chrisst!” And he clambered back down the ladder with amazing alacrity.

“Mister Vogel just bought George Harrison’s first acoustic guitar at auction in London,” Mysty explained to Natalie and Ben. “Unfortunately, the DV8 people have been using it to sing songs round the campfire with. Here’s your water,” and she handed Ben a moist-cool bottle.

– “Guys!” Vogel’s voice could be heard echoing round the back bowl of the canyon, along with the noise of him crashing through undergrowth;“guys” –

“What’s DV8?” Natalie asked Mysty.

“Oh, it’s a group of students attempting a self-sufficiency program up the canyon. Mister Vogel is trying to perfect off-grid living. This rotation has sixty-two days to go. Ends on the summer solstice. Exciting!” and her eyes spiralled out at them again.

They made very small talk till Vogel eventually returned, guitar over one shoulder and a censer swinging from the other hand, looping smoke behind him. “Hey,” he said, squinting up into the uncertain sun. “They’re chanting 108 Trayambakams up there if anyone’s interested. Natalie! Why don’t you go see? Leave the nonsense of business to Spiderman and I. That’s what I would do, if I were – me.” His eyes narrowed, trying to make sense of his words. “Unfortunately my individual ‘I’ is still separate from the oneness that is me – but don’t let that stop you!” The facial trauma was returning. “Well at least my witness-consciousness should be happy with the distinction. Then again, what’s witnessing my witness-consciousness?”

“D’you know, I may just take you up on that – the offer of taking a look round,” Natalie called out to Vogel, before turning to Ben: “I’m going to take a walk on the beach. Come find me when you’re done.”

She made her way among the trees, pine needles crunching underfoot. By any standards, this was an extraordinary piece of property. The sound of crashing surf came from a neighboring bay; Vogel’s was perfectly calm and protected.

She pulled out her phone. The signal was in-and-out, but she managed to access email. There were reassuring messages from Melinda, Stacey, other friends and – mercifully – Ray Ott. She’d emailed them all about her fake Clamor profile earlier that day. Brie DuBois, the raven-haired reporter from the Friday IPO presentation, had posted an article about Malovich’s death in the Trumpington Bugle, stating the cause as ‘unknown’ – “although Sunnyvale Police Department’s veteran detective Bill Pulver, who handled numerous homicide cases for the SFPD before reassigning to the Valley, leads the investigation…”

There was also an email from Nguyen:

From: tomn@clamor.us

To: Natalie@nchevalier.net

Date: Tuesday, 11:38

Subject: meeting just now

Natalie,

Sincere apologies for my behavior at our meeting just now. Frayed nerves I’m afraid. What a day.

In any case, we really need a security professional now. Still hoping you’ll accept. Wisnold approved the $250K fee. You know the challenges we face. Would you like to propose what you could do for that and I’ll get it signed off?

Humbly,

Tom.

She made her way across the damp sand to a far headland lined with cypress trees. There, she found a rocky ledge to sit. Water sucked and gurgled among the rock pools. The sea was limpid and glassy, glistening through the lingering remnants of fog. From somewhere, a seal croaked. Reluctantly she returned to the matter at hand:

What to do?

Certainly she could return to the Bahamas. Her hacked profile and the Malovich murder were reasons enough to insist on not going back to this madness. But what about Detective Pulver’s admonition? And Silverman? The jury was still out on Ben, but she was getting to know the guy well enough to trust him at least. To like him even… in a professional capacity. But she would be working for Tom, and Nguyen didn’t seem to know what he wanted from her. Or would that be to her advantage? She bit down on her lower lip.

The truth was that yoga in the Bahamas hadn’t really solved anything. She’d sampled it all. She’d even done a twelve-day silent meditation. Twelve long days, cross-legged! Sure, some of it had helped. But no, she’d not found God. God had eluded her. Or had she been the avoidant one? Had she somehow missed her calling, someplace along the way? Most of the permanent residents of the yoga center seemed to be in denial about something or other.

She inhaled deeply, the smell of kelp filling her nostrils.

For the reality was that her last relationship and the departure from her old job had dealt a massive blow to her self-esteem. Her soul had somehow retreated inside, away from the world. But this introspection – perhaps healthy at first, now seemed to be feeding off itself.

She only knew two things. First, she had to get back on the horse. Second, she needed to do something about this trafficking.

Suddenly finding a signal, she replied “OK” to Nguyen’s email. Before she had chance to change her mind, she scrolled down to her draft folder, found the email she’d composed up in Seattle – the three point plan to deal with the trafficking, and hit SEND. “There,” she said out loud, burying the phone in her bag. She breathed deeply, sitting up straight.

The fog was gauzy again. A skein covered the opposite end of the cove and the path back to Vogel’s. The fog seemed to have a shape-shifting quality all of its own. She shivered, wishing she’d brought a sweater.

It was a supreme irony, she had to acknowledge, that she’d chosen security by way of profession – given how insecure she’d so often felt growing up. Almost like a doctor who smoked, or a bank manager who bet on the horses, she chastised herself. Dimly she was aware that the events and choices made earlier in life would pretty much dictate what the rest of her years looked like.

Or did she still have a choice in the matter?

Not for the first time, she searched for a sign. Any sign. But the fog had rolled in again, much thicker now. Ghostly wisps of the stuff attached themselves to the thick bank already blanketing the beach: it was fast turning into a white out.

CHAPTER 11

Natalie Chevalier heard the keening whistle first, then a woman’s voice calling out: “Fes-ti-val!”

Pebbles lifted and rolled with the waves more loudly, somehow amplified by the fog. Still the woman called out the strange name, coaxingly: “Fes-ti-vaal!”

From around the shrouded headland came a horse, its hooves crunching shale. It came to a halt not ten paces away from Natalie, breathing very deeply, eyeing her sideways, nostrils flaring then softening. The horse was white, its haunches and forward outline blurring into the swirling mist. Impatiently it jingled its lead rein.

Natalie went over to the animal and rested her palm on its crinkling neck, feeling its hot blood thrumming through her fingertips. Suddenly the animal clattered back, splashing, neighing from its deep chest like wind-bells resounding.

“There you are Festival!” A silvery haired woman appeared, snatching up the lead rein. Suddenly she stared at Natalie: “Who are you?”

“Um, I was just walking on the beach –”

“This is private land!” the older woman said. “Are you lost?”

“I was here to see Jon Vogel,” Natalie said. “Sorry, the fog came in much faster than I expected.” The whole situation was starting to feel slightly surreal.

“It can do that.” The woman’s dark, lively eyes bored into her. “I’m Star. Stop it, Festival!” And she jolted the lead rope hard. “He never normally approaches strangers. My cottage is right here: why don’t you come in for a while. Then we’ll get you back to Jon’s as soon as the fog clears. Likely just another twenty minutes. You look cold.”

“Thanks,” Natalie said. And she followed Star, and Festival, keeping well out of the horse’s kicking range.

A smell of wood smoke greeted them. Star’s house was a grey-shingled affair on a grassy bank above the beach. The cottage seemed to occupy a clearing in the fog – a strange pool of liquid sunlight. Rainbow colored prayer flags and peace signs fluttered. “OUT OF IRAQ” exclaimed one, “HANDS OFF OUR LAND!” warned another. Star tethered Festival and led Natalie inside, into a room full of blond woods and over-filled bookshelves. She sat down in front of the open fire while Star went into an adjoining kitchen. “Put some more logs on if you’d like,” she called out. “You’re here to see Jon, you say?”

“Yes,” Natalie said, following Star’s suggestion and reaching into a wood basket. “We’re involved in a piece of business together up in Sunnyvale.”

“That’s a relief. I thought at first you were with the government land people. If those bastards had their way, we’d be standing right here on a giant parking lot.

“It’s an ongoing struggle,” she continued, bringing in two mugs of steaming coffee. “Always has been. Since the sixties, at least. Which is as far back as I know.”

It figured. Star looked smooth-skinned and handsome in her linen shirt and pants – but on closer inspection, she had to be a contemporary of Vogel’s.

“This is an extraordinary place,” Natalie said, looking around. “Have you always lived here?”

“Tried to. Jon’s been good about that.”

“He owns all this?”

“Strictly speaking, it belongs to the trust. The Protectorate of the Eternal Now. You probably saw the clock coming up the driveway. Jon set it up during that summer of sixty seven.” Star sipped her coffee. “That would be a while before you were even a sparkle in your father’s eye, I’m guessing.”

The coffee had a slightly bitter, singed taste to it, but it was pleasant enough for her to wrap her fingers round the mug and stare away into the flames. “He seems to be a rather extraordinary man, Mister Vogel.”

“Oh he is,” Star said. “Or was. Still is, I guess. He’s hit it hard over the years. The substances have taken their toll. He used to be the most charismatic man when we were younger. He could have been Jim Morrison, had Hoppy or Fonda’s role in Easy Rider – he was that kind of man: a furnace of energy.”

“The end of that era must have hit him hard?”

“After Altamont, yeah. Jon indulged a lot of psychedelic substances. It became like this eternally frustrated quest, he’d freely admit, in his more lucid moments. I don’t know if he ever fully recovered, but he seems to be doing OK now.”

“Sure does, with all this,” and Natalie looked round the windows of the cottage. Outside it was still white like snow, albeit sunlit.

“It’s been a long haul, sister. A long haul. We had to get him out of here for a while. You have to understand: this whole stretch of coastline is very strong, energetically. It’s all old Indian land. And a lot of spiritual work happened back then, in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, to concentrate that energy. Vogel,” and she whistled. “The aperture was opened, man. I tell ya, his doors of perception were fully cleansed!”

“And so what happened? Where did he go?”

“’Nam.”

“Vietnam?”

“As a photographer. He wanted to record it all, show the full extent of the horror. That pretty much did him in. Even he doesn’t seem to know what happened for the eighteen months or so he was there. He never talked about it.”

“To anyone?”

Star was silent. She said: “It was the Protectorate that leveled him out.”

“What exactly is the Protectorate?”

“In essence, just a truth: that there’s no yesterday, or tomorrow. That we may only be specks on the infinite timeline of the universe, but that the one eternal is we’re all living in the Now. No point in reflecting or reminiscing – like you and I are now doing, damn! And I’m supposed to be a trustee of this thing. Certainly there’s no point in planning, ’cause the future don’t exist either. Apart from in our minds.”

Natalie thought about that, and Vogel’s potentially de-railing speech at the investor presentation five days before. He had seemed far less concerned with IPO wealth or the sort of sinister product planning seen at that Sunday strategy session than with what Clamor.us could do right now to connect people in new and interesting ways.

Natalie: “I guess life’s what happens while you’re out making plans.”

Star smiled at the John Lennon quote.

“A lot’s been written about the ‘Now’ in recent times,” Natalie said.

“Oh, don’t get me started,” and Star gave a snort. “A lot’s been written about ‘self improvement’ by lots of people least equipped to do so. It’s just like yoga. In the sixties, we had serious yogis here. Very deep people. This area was all so different, you can’t imagine. Back then, the land was practically free. Now it’s all billionaires from God knows where trying to kick everyone else out and smother it all over in nouvelle Californian wine and cuisine. And the government’s the worst of all!”

She paused, fighting like a cat to catch her thread back: “Yoga! Now it’s just an industry. A threefer, for the time stressed commuter!”

“Threefer?”

“A three-for-the-price of one: workout, therapy and religion, all in 90 short minutes!”

“I’m a yoga instructor,” Natalie said.

Star shot her a look, which soon softened. “Then you’ll know what it is to be a true yogi: to be in a very serious state of inquiry, and a state of service to other people.”

Natalie looked round the room again, wondering what all these books were about. Evidently not self improvement! Adjusting to the light, her eyes settled on a framed photo on a higher shelf. It looked like Vogel – only a younger, hotter Jon Vogel, standing next to a young child. His child? – Had Star and Vogel been lovers in years gone by? They must have been close if Vogel had made her a trustee of this Protectorate organization.

She brought her mind back to the present. It wasn’t so easy, this business of the Now!

“You don’t find horses fretting about the past or future,” Star was saying.

“No. Though I’m not sure we really know what enters horse consciousness.”

“D’you ride?”

“When I can. My mom’s family had a place with horses – where I’m from, in South Carolina. The Lowcountry, near Charleston. Used to go riding there when I was younger. I had this Warmblood, just like Festival.”

“Hmm.” Star smiled approvingly. The calm was broken by a male voice, yelling something in the fog. “What’s that?” she started.

“Shoot!” Natalie stood up. “That’s my ride. I need to get going. Ben!” and she opened the cottage door. Silverman appeared, silhouetted against the dissipating mist.

“Natalie! Holy crap. I was worried about you!”

For some time, Natalie and Ben sat immersed in their separate thoughts as the road from Sunnyvale rewound itself.

“How did your meeting go?” she eventually asked.

“When I finally caught up with Vogel, he seemed to be good with the Multiworld resolution, so just Wisnold to convince now. But, he freaked when I suggested he wasn’t needed at the upcoming New York presentations.  – We’re trying to get Towse as spokesperson instead. More so than ever, after seeing Vogel in his natural habitat!”

“Who’s Towse?”

“Paul Towse. He runs the other big investment firm. Holds around five per cent of Clamor. Has the third board seat.” Ben arched an eyebrow knowingly at Natalie: “He is also, according to Jon Vogel, “a vortex of darkness”.”

“Happy families all the way.” Natalie tapped her teeth thoughtfully. “I was wondering about something, while on the beach. D’you think the trafficking exposed at the presentation last Friday could’ve had something to do with Malovich’s death?”

“I just don’t know. As I understand it, Malovich wasn’t exactly standing in the way of that stuff, if that’s what you mean. After all, that’s why we needed you.” He glanced at her. “You’re just full of cheery scenarios, aren’t you?”

She sighed. “Goes with the security territory.”

“Yeah? I’d love to learn more about that at some point.” He overtook a weaving SUV.

“It’s really not all that riveting, Ben. My job is basically to study what can go wrong. The engineers get to spend all day thinking up ways to makes things work; my focus is on understanding how things can be made to fail.”

“Like worms, viruses? That sorta thing?”

“Not really. I mean yes, there were people on my team who looked at those things. But security can only really be understood as a system. Sure, attacks and specific defences matter, but they’re usually part of some system, which is invariably more complex than the individual pieces.”

“Huh.”

“And ultimately, systems come down to people. D’you see? If you can understand which people are trying to do what, to whom – and why, then you may have a promising future in the security profession.”

“I dunnow. Sounds pretty interesting to me. Your phone’s bleeping by the way.”

Nguyen had sent her an SMS text:  ‘Cool, sounds like a plan’.

“So you’ve always had this interest? – In security, I mean?” he continued.

“I just sort of fell into it, really. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.”

Silverman: “You know, I have this theory, about women and security.”

“Oh really,” Natalie rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “This could be interesting.”

He laughed awkwardly. “Well, dating in San Fran: a lot of women there are looking for the salary, the car, all that stuff. We’ve chatted it through – my buddies and I, and decided it’s this sorta age-old search, for resource sufficiency. That’s what we reckon women are on about when they talk about security.”

“I see.”

“And yet, I don’t think that’s what a lot of women are really looking for at all. I mean sure, it’s kind of this precondition, like not going hungry.”

“Really.”

“OK, at the risk of making a complete fool of myself here: it almost feels like the exact opposite, when you see how they react in different situations, in unguarded moments.”

“How so?”

“In that they want an adventure! Into some glamorous, foreign land! They want to be swept away! Or perhaps more accurately, they want to be brought fully alive… But like I said, what do I know?”

Perhaps he hoped she’d enlighten him. She felt a slight tingle inside. Not because of Ben per se, but because of this sudden distinction forming in her mind: between meaningless and meaningful adventure...

Ben filled the silence that ensued: “Back in Sunnyvale already. I have a one-on-one with Dwayne Wisnold about the financial forecasts. Should I drop you back at your car?”

“I’ll come to the Clamor office with you. I want to start looking at those databases.

“Let me ask you a question, Ben. It’s unusual I know, but it would help a lot to get a straight answer. The Asian community here: it remains a minority group in America, yet Asian women seem to feature big in male fantasies – pornography, sex trafficking too. Why do so many men have a thing about Asian women?”

He laughed uneasily. “Honestly Natalie, guys have a thing about almost all women. I mean not all, but –” He paused, thinking. “Truthfully... I don’t know. But I think it’s always been that way. Here in the Bay Area, many Chinese came over for the original gold rush. I remember reading about this in college: that by 1870, I think it was, there were several thousand Chinese women here. And the majority were prostitutes – officially that is, as recorded in the censuses. And very often they worked that way to pay off their debts, their transport costs, to their pimps, or whatever they were called back then. Certain patterns have a nasty habit of repeating themselves. I guess you’re right though: it wouldn’t be this way if there wasn’t a lot of demand for it. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.”

As they entered the Clamor parking lot, a livid sunset burned filament red through the tawny-grey smog.

It was time to get to work.

CHAPTER 12

Natalie and Ben went their separate ways in the lobby, Ben heading into the same meeting room Natalie had spent that Sunday strategy session in. At the far end, she saw Wisnold – accompanied by a man in a suit whom she didn’t recognize, and Nancy Wu. For a second their gazes locked, Wu looking back a little too neutrally for Natalie’s liking. She hurried on to Yuri Malovich’s office. Old office. It chilled her to think of working at the machine of a person so recently deceased, a person whom she’d only properly met thirty some hours previously – yet there was nothing comfortable or natural about any of this, and using his machine might just reveal something: a file directory structure, an access terminal configuration … who knew. The rationale turned out to be academic anyway. In Yuri’s old office stood Tom Nguyen with a man and a woman in smart casual dress.

“Natalie,” Nguyen said gravely. “This is Cindy Bayley, and, erm – sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Adam Lau.”

“Hi,” the woman took over: “I’m Special Agent Cindy Bayley of the San Jose office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Cindy had blond hair that gathered in thick ringlets round the base of her neck. She had an easy confidence, speaking in the distinctive accent of a southern state – Georgia, Natalie was pretty sure.

“I’m Natalie Chevalier. I’m doing some security consulting work here. Great to meet you both,” and they exchanged pleasantries. “I’ll be looking into some problems that the company’s been having with indecent content. Here’s my card, if at any point you all need to talk to me.” She realized she was handing out her yoga credentials yet again. If she was in consultancy for real, she needed a new identity.

But there was an instant rapport between the two women, like they already knew one another. “I may just take you up on that, Natalie.” Nguyen led her down the corridor and the two agents resumed their conversation. “So much for the paperless office,” Agent Lau could be heard saying, presumably about the piles of papers behind Malovich’s desk.

Nguyen showed her to an open workspace off the corridor, bare but for a chair, desk, computer terminal, phone and eight-foot high inflatable Godzilla with Colgate-white smile. “This machine is clean, never used before,” he said.

Natalie and Nguyen stood there for a moment. She placed a hand gently on his shoulder:

“You OK Tom?”

The shoulder paused, then withdrew. “Yeah. Fine, thanks.” He smiled.

He logged her onto the system, then opened up a window saying KISS at the top. “I wrote some middleware that should help you query the user database easily enough, but holler if you need anything.”

“KISS?”

“Keep it simple, stupid.” And he strode back to the federal agents.

Natalie pulled out her trusty red memory stick, where she kept her Security Toolkit. Loading up the relevant tools, she promptly found the system directory, collapsed Tom’s application and located the interface that allowed her to query the database direct, running her own scripts.

First things first: the purging of all records pertaining to ‘Natalie Chevalier’. Now, she had to be careful here, not to affect the forensic evidence, the authenticity of the audit trails – especially with the FBI involved. But this pertained to something different and the logs would be available for anyone to see: her fake profile simply couldn’t stay up there.

Delete.

That done, she opened a separate browser window and typed in the address: http://www.clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHotelandGiftShop.

There was ‘Jasmine’ – alongside several other girls, advertised on the mini-site. Toggling between their different profile pages, Natalie quickly inferred the common attributes: Chinese by stated origin, aged 13–17, all shown in full-length photos, displaying a price range between $6,000 and $26,000.

The higher values correlated with another attribute: ‘Unopened’. Virgins. She then ran a query to see how many profiles across the Clamor user base conformed to these attributes: 427.

She narrowed her eyes. One immediate question was the integrity of the data  – not unlike integrity among people, was it what it purported to be? The definition of data integrity Natalie abided by was ‘every piece of data being as the last authorized modifier left it’. The photos seemed to be real enough, but could someone have entered the system and tampered with other attributes, seeking to damage the company’s reputation?

Corporate computer security could be likened to the layers of an onion, Natalie learned early in her career. The onion represented the system’s Trusted Computing Base: all the hardware, operating systems and software requiring protection. The inner core was the Security Kernel, whose Reference Monitor governed access across all layers. It decided, for example, whether a user such as Natalie could access secured data without her own login credentials. Could someone else have done so before her, planting these profiles? Someone acting a little like those ‘fakesters’ and ‘fraudsters’ on Friendster, only on a larger scale – and possibly from within the company?

The onion analogy had become outmoded as corporate networks increasingly merged into the wider web, but Natalie still used it, because it transposed equally to people, with the company’s leadership team serving as the kernel, setting the rules and norms governing shops such as Clamor. No question about it, procedures had been lax under Malovich – often the way with start-ups undergoing a growth spurt. Now Nguyen was the most senior technical person there, which was a big security plus. But Nguyen reported into the Chief Executive Officer. From experience, visionary founder-CEOs could be among the highest integrity executives of all: missionaries, as opposed to mercenaries. Only, Dwayne Wisnold was an outlier – due to his youth, and due to other attributes Natalie couldn’t yet put her finger on. Getting a firmer read on Dwayne Wisnold was fast turning into a top priority.

As those thoughts rattled round her head, her fingertips found the keyboard and she set about querying how clustered together this group data really was. The 427 profiles belonged to just ten mini-sites, or Group Spaces™ as Clamor called them. She started to relax the constraints. She tried changing ‘Origin’ to ‘Chinese, Thai’ and 873 profiles came up.

Natalie could feel the blood thumping in her temples. She rubbed them as though an angry hornet was trying to escape. If these profile pages were real, the trafficking ring was much larger than expected – and absolutely fearless. She’d included a series of other Asian countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Philippines: 3,898 profiles. Korea alone added 1,028. She shuddered again as she realized these girls were collectively ‘worth’ more than $40 million.

Big money.

Surely organized crime.

Again, the data was tightly clustered. In a separate browser window, she brought up a sample of mini-sites. Each girl’s profile had the exact same link below the photo:

CLICK ME

Drawing in a sharp breath, Natalie clicked on the link.

A new browser window opened. It launched a separate website, a black page with greyed-out login and password boxes. The string in the address bar seemed to identify the site as ‘SurefarEnjoy’. It sounded like an Asian trading concern – yet, the web address featured a dot r u suffix: Russia.

Natalie’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.

From here, were she to take her investigation further, she would be entering the password-breaking world of cryptography. With time and the right crypto-analytical resources, the password could be deciphered – of that she had no doubt. But this would only bring about a new set of tactical considerations. It was one thing for the Allied code crackers to break the Nazi Enigma Code, quite another to act on the information gathered without revealing the breach and causing the enemy to change its codes. How might the site owners respond to any unauthorized entry here?

She identified a choice of next steps.

She could report back to Nguyen with what she had found, and let him make the call. She could turn it all over to the FBI and have them take the decision out of both their hands.

Or she could call up her old mentor, Ray Ott, and get his take on the matter.

*    *    *

Ben Silverman stared down at his laptop. There was a pristine quality about the empty Excel worksheet, not unlike like fresh powder in Tahoe at first light. The liquid crystal display even sparkled like the snow did in the dazzle of a new dawn.

He looked back up at the others. Nancy Wu, perfect and impassive, like an avatar of herself. Mike Marantz, the CFO – absent. Had Wu got him removed? In his place was a courteous Texan lawyer, Bob Swaine, considerably older and impeccably dressed, his disdain betrayed only by a pursed lower lip. Then there was Wisnold, who plainly didn’t want to be there at all.

Ben had just learned that, despite generating half-a-billion dollars in annual revenue, Clamor.us, Inc. apparently had no business model to speak of.

“I will repeat myself,” Bob Swaine was saying. “Our role is to present investors with historical financial information, not some cockamamie set of made-up numbers. Investors can make up their own minds, like the grown up boys and girls they all are.” The lower lip pursed a little more. “Common stock in Clamor.us may not be for everyone.”

The company’s historical financials were of course a matter of record, as audited by external accountants. Beginning with a mere eight hundred thousand dollars, Clamor had quintupled its sales in each of the previous four years. But two-thirds of the current-year revenue came from a single search advertising deal.

Ben had reviewed the other large revenue items in turn: Do-Re-Mi, a Korean gaming company so infatuated with Clamor that it had paid $85 million for essentially a set of site banner advertisements… All these revenue sources suddenly seemed suspect to Ben, as ‘lumpy’, one-off pieces of business – contrasting with the recurring, high quality revenue streams investors sought out and rewarded with high stock market valuations. In a sense, Bob Swaine was right: this was for investors to form their own judgments around. But Carmichael Associates was lending its name to this IPO, and its prominence meant there would be no tiptoeing away.

“Then what about the group buying service and all those ‘Clamorized’ companies?” Ben asked. “The group-based matching attributes we sold the crowd at the Keaton on, five days ago?”

“Three of those ‘Clamorized’ companies were local convenience food concerns, and as for the fourth  – well, never mind the fourth,” Swaine said.

What exactly did Clamor do, as a business?

Amazon made margin selling books; eBay clipped a percentage off each auctioned item sold. Google received an introduction fee every time someone clicked through to an advertiser’s site. What about Clamor? It was suddenly a total and utter mystery! Certainly Clamor’s users consumed its services. They drove costs every time they logged on to its servers and uploaded their storage-consuming freakin’ photos. Ben tried to imagine what would happen if Clamor announced a monthly registration fee, or some per-photo micro payments approach. It wouldn’t be pretty. Still, there was always advertising, the default model for any web-based business with a large enough audience:

“OK, let’s break this down into basic terms. You’ve got three hundred and fifty million total users. Now, we know that these users visit the site on average – what? Four times a week? And that they spend, on average, two hours there each time. So we can multiply all that through and get a total number of worldwide weekly impressions. Then we farm that out on a c.p.m. basis through an international network of ad agencies.”

“What’s c.p.m.?” Nancy asked.

“Cost per thousand impressions.” It was a holdover from the Web 1.0 world in which advertisers accepted that half their spend would be wasted, and probably the other half too. Search-based advertising had largely supplanted it, with Google’s advertisers paying only for qualified leads. And for that very reason, the search advertising deal with Clamor had turned out to be a total disaster. No one using Clamor was searching for anything product or service-related, much less such lucratively esoteric terms as ‘asbestosis’. The search logs revealed that Clamor users searched for: friends, romantic prospects, contacts, distant family members, more romantic prospects and more friends.

None of which seemed to worry Wisnold. “OK, so each of your three premises is, like, so wrong.”

“Which? – three?” Ben said, startled.

“First, no one really cares about ‘total users’ –” and Wisnold made dramatic air quotes. “It’s the quality of the sub-networks that counts: how many of an individual user’s friends and contacts they can find through the site. Second, visitor frequency – and third, duration: those are contra-indicators of user convenience. Users shouldn’t have to hang out endlessly on the site to find out what they need to know. It’s my goal to, like, push everything out to them, to their iPhones or BlackBerrys or dumb terminals in their cars, heads, whatever. OK, once we’ve grokked who they really are. And if we can’t figure out who they are, then maybe we’re not their lemonade stand after all. Not for a decade or so, leastways. So all the metrics you mentioned should be pointing down real soon.”

Ben pictured a set of graphs looking like the ski slopes of Tahoe. Panic gripped him. “OK guys!” he stood up. He paced the room. “This process won’t work. The kind of presentation we staged last Friday won’t work in New York. Human trafficking sites appearing out of nowhere, security officers dying in suspicious circumstances! This all needs to be way more buttoned-down! Way more buttoned-down!”

The other three looked on, becalmed. Drugged almost.

“Are we not all on the same team here? Do we not all want a successful Initial Public Offering?”

Silence.

Swaine spoke up: “With regard to the trafficking incident you mentioned, as long as we take down the offending material upon notification – duly received – we should not be subject to any lawsuits over user content posted by third parties. Now, you talked about being buttoned down.” He coughed softly. “I know how you investment bankers like to see things all nice an’ purdy. But of how much use were buttons to investors, when their very shirts were being ripped off their backs during the last craze? Just how buttoned-down was VA Linux? Or Opti Shaft?”

Which was when Ben Silverman had his epiphany. That maybe Dwayne Wisnold and his inner circle had absolutely no desire to cede further control of their company, through an Initial Public Offering or anything else. No matter what the business model turned out to be.

*    *    *

Ott picked up on the third ring: “What’s up, buttercup?”

“Ray Ott! Got time to talk?” Natalie said brightly.

“Always,” he said, which of course wasn’t quite true. “Been a while!”

“It has, it really has. How –”

“How’s the Caribbean?” he said, as she asked about his own travels. “Sorry!” they said in unison, like two awkward teenagers on a date.

She waited for him to talk.

“I didn’t do much last year. Actually, I did do the Tour de France – or part of it. And shipped the Porsche over for some hill climbing through the Alps. Yes. It was nice to get back to the Pacific Northwest.”

“I miss the Northwest too! I appreciated your email earlier. I can only tell you how weird that whole fake Clamor business was.”

“It’s OK, Natalie. I know about the circumstances of your departure from here. I don’t suppose that surprises you – that I talk to people, who talk to people. I’m just sorry that someone else knows, and wants to hurt you. They did a pretty good job. It really looked like you’d gone tilt! I imagine you’re trying to find out who’s responsible?”

“Not right now. Believe it or not, I’m doing some consulting work for the company, in the run up to its IPO.”

“Clamor?”

“Yup.”

“Isn’t Tom Nguyen over at that shop? – Say Hi to him from me.”

“He is; I will.”

She brought Ray up to speed on the investor presentation and the systemic trafficking problems Clamor faced: “I’ve been through the user database and run a bunch of reports. There are almost four thousand trafficked girls in the system. The higher bit is that every one of the profiles I’ve looked at links to a Russian website – secure-password protected, 256 bit key symmetric encryption from what I can tell.” She summarized various other technical aspects of her study.

“This has to be one for law enforcement, Natalie. What’s the end goal here?”

“I’m trying to build a complete picture of what’s going on around the company, among management and investors. Things are not right. The former head of security just died in mysterious circumstances!”

“OK,” he said, “one of the things I’ve learned over the years here at the mother ship is that if you ask the question ‘Why?’ often enough, you eventually get to a real answer. What are you really trying to accomplish, Nat? C’mon, it’s me you’re talking to.”

She sighed. “The consulting brief they gave me is looking like a big box-checking exercise, to reassure investors. And I’ve realized since leaving Redmond that I need a cause: something to serve. For a while, it seemed like spiritual inquiry. Only now I see that I have these real, practical skills I can use to help other people. My old job gave me a lot, Ray. It gave me financial security, but it also gave me a level of expertise and insight that is powerful. And I can put that to work, to help others.”

“Help who?”

“First of all, the people here at Clamor. The former head of security is dead – and I’m the closest to a replacement they got, the top priority of that role being the safety of staff and key stakeholders. No matter how the formal scope of my consulting brief reads.

“Beyond that, I want to help protect these women –”

“Natalie, there are law enforcement agencies to take care of that.”

“I can help.”

“You quite possibly could, and as the father of two teenage girls I’m all for crucifying the bastards behind that stuff. But you’d be up against some strong, dark, forces. What about your own safety?”

“Can we talk about the data puzzle at hand?”

“Okay, okay. I think I get the gist of where you’re trying to go. So you’ll need to widen your study. Where’s the embedded intelligence? See, this is where you tend to get your blind spot, Nat. You tend to look downstream, when you should be looking upstream, to the source. And you need to sort that out.”

For a moment technical, yogic and other, more personal thoughts collided in her head.

“Don’t take it personally, Nat. We’re just having a conversation here. Hey, what about that piece of software you wrote while still in college? That clever website mapper that got you recruited here in the first place?”

It was an application she’d written for her undergraduate science degree, allowing her to understand the relationship between known points in a network.

“But that’s precisely it: I don’t know the specific web addresses.”

“Then let’s come at this from another angle. How do search algorithms work? How does Google decide on its search results?”

“They index the web, –”

“But how do they establish relevancy?”

“Of course, by cataloguing how many users visit a given page. No, the significance of the pages users are linking from –”

“And so?”

“I need to look at these profile pages in terms of where traffic is arriving from –”

“Bingo. Originating website addresses.”

She was disappointed not to have thought of something so blindingly obvious herself. She said: “Sub-domains of Clamor?”

He thought. “Or beyond.”

“Ray, I owe you a latte – or ten.”

“Pay me back in dinosaur trivia, should you come across any on your travels. I’m trying to interest my thirteen-year old daughter in the subject. Only boys – and the bathroom mirror – seem to be winning out.”

Natalie laughed, imagining Ray’s finely tuned mental circuits shorting out on a daily basis.

As he rang off, she was already visualizing the task. It took a while to tag the profile pages, map the upstream traffic patterns and identify the source properties. She plugged away determinedly, her head filling with mathematics and computer queries – a far cry from the incense, chanting and mysticism that seemed to have occupied her days since leaving Redmond.

But it was worth it. For one originating website address returned over and over.

CHAPTER 13

Ben Silverman stood in his bachelor apartment on La Cresta Terrace in Russian Hill when the phone rang. The open fridge door cast a lurid glow across his dishevelled state. His tie was knotted somewhere down towards his navel. In one hand sat an oblong-shaped bottle of Bombay Sapphire, in the other, a litre bottle of tonic. Reconciliation seemed to lie in the automatic ice dispenser.

He picked up.

“It’s me,” Natalie said. “How did your meeting go? I trust that Multiworld is now locked and unloaded.”

He realized that he hadn’t even got round to discussing Multiworld with Wisnold and Bob Swaine. “Not quite,” he said.

“Well, I think I’ve got somewhere with the trafficking. I may have located the primary source of visitors – to the kind of profile page we saw up on the big screen last Friday.”

“U-huh,” Ben fumbled around in his kitchenette, looking for ground coffee and filters. His voice sounded thick and slurry, even to himself.

“Have you been drinking?”

“That’s a strong accusation, Miss Chevalier.”

“Ben, this is not a game. Well actually, it is a game – the originating website that is. A multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest: Dark Ages.”

“A what? What is this, Dungeons and Dragons?”

“Not exactly, but it is based on the Arthurian legends. I’m trying to figure out what that has to do with trafficked underage girls. The best I can come up with is the historical setting. You’re an English major, right? Wasn’t King Arthur supposed to be around in the fifth century? But written about by Mallory in the fifteenth? In any case, he came after the Romans but before the Reformation. Which means the cult of the Virgin Mary and virginity must’ve been – must be – strong, in this world. Plus, life expectancy was low, and everything happened young: marriage, giving birth…”

“Whoa! Natalie,” Ben said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “This is far from being a normal day already. Where is this going?”

“Is there a way to background the game’s owners? Through your bank’s research department? The homepage shows a logo in the footer saying ‘Further Online Gaming’, presumably the corporate identity.”

“You mean could I research it.”

“Why thank you for offering,” she said in her most southern voice.

“Hold on,” and he finally found the dusty coffee maker, on top of the cabinets. His voice was low and confidential as he came back on: “There is this whip-smart Korean kid who just joined on as an intern.”

“An intern,” she repeated sceptically.

“Good kid: writes topnotch research notes. Really cuts through the crap. Winston Ma. Total gaming nut.”

“Can you get hold of him?”

Ben checked his Breitling: ten o’clock. The first drops of black gold were dripping into the glass coffee pot.

“Don’t see why not. Some of these interns have been found leaving second jackets on chairs, sneaking off early. But he never seems to leave the place. Ever! Let me call him separately. I wanna explain what this is about.”

“I’ll await your return call with anticipation, Mister Silverman.”

*    *    *

From the game’s website, she could launch MultiQuest for $30 and a commitment to pay $24 a month. It sounded like a lot, still. She keyed in her credit card details and faced a series of choices about the character she wished to assume in the game. She chose ‘Enchantress’ – and a magnificent white steed called Phariance.

And that was it. She was in the game. An antique scroll unfurled across the screen:

She was now looking at the back of herself, wearing a nondescript brown cape, astride Phariance, in what appeared to be a dense section of forest.

The graphics were astonishing, with infinite shades of greenery. She could detect absolutely no delay in the way action unfolded on the screen, the horse’s rising and lowering flanks feeling entirely natural to her. There was a slightly fish-eyed effect to the view, with the low-hanging branches passing more swiftly at the outsides of the screen than in the center. Horse and rider proceeded on through the trees, her mount occasionally thrashing against underbrush. Then she heard a voice.

“Helloo, new-comer!” it said.

Strange, she couldn’t see anyone… She tried looking down. The point of view rotated and lowered dizzyingly.

An orc stood beside Phariance’s rear hoof, no taller than the horse’s fetlock, looking up at her reproachfully from beneath a pudding-bowl helmet.

“Will ye be needing any skulls cracked today?” the orc asked, his voice clear in the laptop’s speakers. He tried to scratch his head while apparently forgetting he wore a helmet.

“Why, not today thank you,” Natalie replied politely.

“Acchh,” the orc said, turning away huffily, almost colliding with a tree stump.

After a while, some semblance of a path appeared – at first nothing more than a vein in the underbrush, vanishing altogether in places. Every so often, the horse brayed as though counting off horse distances in its other-worldness. Then the path widened into a sun-bathed clearing filled with gorgeous flowers: giant yellow orbs, purple dotted spires, like foxgloves yet more arresting, swaying in the late afternoon haze. Suddenly she saw that hundreds of elves populated the clearing. They hid behind plant stems, or stood on tiptoe with arms stretched round tree trunks at the clearing’s edge, faces clamped to the bark. Some of the more oblivious ones danced round in rings. They had soft, winsome, sad features – the scene was absolutely delightful. As Natalie and Phariance began to traverse the meadow, a couple skipped up and started patting the underside of the horse, getting them to stop. “You need to see the woodsman!” they chirruped. “Don’t be out on this path after sundown. This whole vale is overrun with warlocks and malevolent faeries after nightfall! Go and see the woodsman!”

Natalie thanked them for their warning and continued on her way. She just couldn’t get over how exquisite the graphical rendering was: insects and dragonflies illuminated with breathtaking intricacy in the late, faltering sunlight…

Her phone rang. It was Ben: “Hey Natalie, I’ve got Winston on the line.”

“Great. Good to meet you, Winston. So you’re still at the office?”

“Sure am. These guys keep me busy!”

“Sounds like it. Winston, Ben tells me you know all about online games. We wanted to pick your brains about a fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest. D’you know it?”

“Oh man, MultiQuest.” He sighed. “Is that gonna be a smash. It’s new, still in development officially, but soft-launched into the gaming community a couple of months ago. You tried it? Un-believable.”

“I have tried it, and I may already be addicted.”

“I defy anyone not to be. The developers bought a Hollywood Computer-Generated Image shop a year-or-so ago. As you may know, these ‘immersive worlds’ take hundreds of people and years to develop. Games used to lag the graphics of big Hollywood movies by several years – but not so MultiQuest. It’ll add some costs to their model but boy, are they gonna clean up.”

“Extraordinarily low latency too,” Natalie marvelled. “Almost no delay. It is like watching a movie.”

“Yep, the game runs on peer-to-peer computer networks instead of central servers. Bet it overtakes EverCrack in its first year. It may even beat out Wow within two.”

“Ever-what?”

“Sorry. EverQuest is Sony’s flagship online fantasy game. It was the first real smash. Has millions of players now. They learned from Ultima Online’s mistakes. Ultima, you understand, was the granddaddy of them all. It did all the heavy lifting in terms of the reputational and resource systems that make these games so compelling. The things you accumulate as you progress through them, that is.”

It occurred to Natalie that these resource and reputational systems may explain the twinkling set of symbols lined up along the top of her MultiQuest screen.

“The media labelled it EverCrack because it was instantly addictive to so many kids. But EverQuest was soon beaten out by World of Warcraft, which now has twelve million players. More.”

“Wow indeed.” Ben had difficulty believing the number, larger than the population of many countries. “But isn’t this just Dungeons and Dragons taken online?” he asked.

“You tell that to some of these players, they may kill you. Actually, two Korean characters got into a vendetta spiral in one of these games, and one of them did end up killing the other. No, to many of these players, games have become their real lives. In Japan, there’s this phenomenon called Hikikomori. Withdrawal. Young men not leaving their rooms for months or even years at a time, living their lives through their computers. And it’s big business.”

“How big?” Ben asked.

“Wow charges fifteen dollars a month, one-eighty a year. Like I said, they have twelve million players and counting. That’s two billion dollars in revenue to Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s owners. And once the game is developed, operating costs are low. These worlds are self-governing. There’s hardly any customer service support. We’re talking huge profit margins here: ninety percent plus. You can put a ten times EBITDA multiple on that puppy any day of the week.”

“What are you guys saying?” Natalie interjected.

“That this World of Witchcraft game may be worth twenty billion dollars,” Silverman said, stunned.

“Warcraft,” Ma corrected him. “And MultiQuest charges its players over fifty percent extra. And it’s destined to attract massively more players, believe me boys ‘n’ girls!”

Phariance had brought her to the edge of a bigger clearing, more like the flood plain of a river valley this time. In the distance, mountains rose above the tree line into jagged, snow-dusted peaks. She thought she could make out a castle – and chimney smoke rising from below, up into the pale blue sky. A bird with a wingspan of what seemed like dinosaur proportions sailed leisurely across the sky. She thought to tell Ray that she’d found something dinosaur-related for his daughters when another voice came out of nowhere. Natalie turned to see an old man beside a waterfall, leaning on a crooked stick. Must be the woodsman. He was telling her, with volume turned down, to make for the village ahead – and to get there by nightfall. She clucked her tongue and the voice recognition module responded just as though she’d pushed Phariance on with her legs. Fantastic!

“But is this for real?” Silverman was asking Ma. “Are people really spending all this time in these gaming worlds?”

“You’d better believe it, Ben. Like I said, people are conducting their whole lives through these games now: joining guilds, trading game currencies against the US dollar, buying and selling virtual swords and land and other powerful or rare items – in the real world, that is. Just check out the relevant trading categories on eBay. Real or unreal, these interactive parallel worlds are becoming bigger and more compelling by the week.”

“Winston, could you find out who’s behind this game?” Natalie asked.

“MultiQuest? A private dev shop called Further Online Gaming.”

“But who’s behind that. Who owns it.”

“Sure. I can try.”

“Look everywhere,” Silverman told him. “D ‘n’ B, Lexis Nexis, Venturesource. Oh, and if you happen across a company called Multiworld on your travels, let me know, would you?”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, strike that last bit – just call us as soon as you get a hit on Further Online Gaming.”

“Yessir,” Ma said. “Stay tuned…”

Finally, as the sun had almost disappeared behind the mountain range, Natalie arrived at the entrance to the hill village. A handsome young armourer called Brastias opened the gates. He was tall and swarthy, with long dark hair and a crimson robe collected over one shoulder. “Hail!” – and he held up a gold-braceleted hand.

The horse clattered to a halt and surveyed its new surroundings. The village was arranged in concentric circles of cobble-stoned streets slicked wet with torchlight – all in the shadow of the castle. It was strangely real. Natalie would not have been surprised to find horse excrement, dying infants and dead animals, or whatever really belonged in medieval times, though all seemed safe and well for now.

“You made it, just. You’ve completed your first task. Here, let me,” and Brastias gathered up the reins while she dismounted.

She noticed the symbols modifying at the top of her screen.

“The challenges become harder from here,” Brastias told her. “And you shouldn’t have journeyed that last part on your own. Whatever happened to the woodsman? He was supposed to escort you.”

“Why is it so dangerous out there after dark?”

Brastias stopped un-harnessing the horse and looked at her searchingly.

“We’ll talk about Rage later,” he said. “I’ll take care of your mount. You’ll be sleeping in a room above the tavern. If you can ignore the noise, that is.”

She could hear the merriment of the hostelry from where they stood. The sound of a lute drifted above the hubbub. Evidently the mead was in full flow – by the flagon-load.

“OK, well at least tell me where I am.”

“You’re in the old kingdom. This is where the knights errant set off from, on their treasure quests. But, you won’t be going anywhere just yet. For one thing, we’ve got to get you into a guild.” He was watering down the sweaty flanks of the horse, to the latter’s great contentment. “I’m going to propose you for the Most Holy Respected Order of the Knights Templar.”

“Is that good?” she asked.

He almost choked. “Just a bit!”

He said: “If you can’t work through these quests with others, you won’t survive long out there. Or anywhere, for that matter.”

As an enchantress, she was rather affronted by this chiding, but wouldn’t have minded had he invited her for a herb ale or two at the tavern. Alas, he had to attend to Phariance’s stabling for the night. As he walked her horse away, he turned and said:

“Don’t you want to know your name?”

“Sure!”

“Caerleone. Caerleon is where the King – Arthur – was crowned. No one knew whether the word was masculine or feminine, so we added an ‘e’ on the end.” He shrugged as if to say he didn’t make the rules, then was gone.

It seemed like a good point at which to pause. So far, she couldn’t detect anything about MultiQuest: Dark Ages that suggested malfeasance – at least, not as it related to thousands of trafficked girls on Clamor.us.

She decided to do some research into the lore and history of these role-playing realms. Before long, she’d printed off a couple of hundred pages. So much for the paperless office indeed, she thought to herself. She blocked the still-warm pages, thrapping them down on the desk to form a neat pile, then started in, humming and rocking the foot of one leg as she read.

UltimaOnline was indeed the granddaddy of them all. According to the articles, Ultima was created by an ardent Tolkienist called Richard Garriot, who exemplified the parallel other-world-ness of these fantasy games. Apparently he lived in liberal Austin, Texas, and collected things – strange things. For example, a lunar soil collector called Lunakod 21 that the Russians had sold him for $60,000.What made it strange was that it was still on the moon.

“Hello?” – she stopped rocking her foot. For she thought she could hear a noise, from down the corridor. Perhaps it was just one of the vacuum cleaners whirring away at this hour. She checked her Spycatcher watch: fast approaching midnight.

Cautiously, she read on. Most noteworthy in the Ultima saga was the early experience of the online version, when players began interacting with one another remotely. They started killing each other. Hence the invention of the reputational system that most games now abided by. Like in the real world, people couldn’t just do whatever they wanted without there being repercussions. Yet at one point it got so bad that Garriot had to split his gaming world into two parallel ‘facets’ – Felucca, where killing other players was OK, and Trammel, where, except under rare circumstances, it most certainly was not. Four-fifths of players chose to live in Trammel.

And there it was a second time – the noise, from down the corridor. Or not so much a noise as a feeling, that she was being watched. She decided to call Stacey in Seattle, who thankfully picked up on the first ring:

“Hi there!” Stacey said. “I saw your email about your Clamor profile. You find out who was behind it?”

“Net yet,” Natalie said. She could imagine Stacey in the half-light of her computer, Microsoft Project purring away, a 24-oz Cherry Coke on the go. “Hey, does the name Cindy Bayley mean anything to you?”

“Er – no. Should it?” Stacey said.

“I don’t know. I think she may have been at our school.”

“While we were there? Who is she?”

“No, she’s well into her forties. She works for the FBI as a Special Agent.”

“Is this connected with your fake profile page?”

“Nuh-uh, it’s something different. Though it is related to Clamor.”

“Have you checked the alumni database online?”

“Yup, and there is a Cindy Bayley, who graduated in ‘eighty five. Just seems like a helluva coincidence, is all.”

“Not really,” Stace said. “I mean, ours was a military school before, only going coed in the mid ‘80s – right? Sometimes it felt like half the student body was going into law enforcement. Or computers,” and a discreet burp came down the phone line. “Ah’ll bet she didn’t get too many DMRs!”

Natalie laughed. Stacey had collected Dorm Misconduct Reports like bugs on a windshield, mostly for staying up too late. Then it occurred to her: the Honor Council. Their school had this special organization that reviewed more serious infractions of its Honor Code, which decreed that a lie was ‘the most detestable thing of which a person may be guilty’, that the truth was ‘the greatest virtue one may possess’, and that any dishonorable deed demanded action from the Honor Council ‘in accordance with its severity’. A specially bound edition of the Honor Code was given to each new student member. It listed the names of all those who’d gone before.

That’s where the name Cindy Bayley was familiar from.

Natalie didn’t want to mention the Honor Council to Stacey, who hadn’t been on it. She chatted on for a while before hanging up and returning to the pile of gaming articles.

Over the years, she’d developed a method of speed-reading that involved scanning down the center of the pages, like the prow of a ship, the words parting as she went…

Ultimately, everything came back to Tolkien, and his seminal otherworld of Middle Earth. The paperback version of Lord of The Rings came out in 1965. By the end of that decade, it had undergone two dozen successive reprints. It was wildly popular across American college campuses during the sixties.

But then Natalie uncovered a second, darker strand in the background fantasy literature, dating more from the seventies: The Chronicles of Gor, written by a philosophy professor at City University of New York. A signature feature of the Gorean world was the ritual enslavement of women. It had spawned a life of its own – not only in the online world of Second Life, but also in real life, with Gorean fantasies reportedly being acted out in secret across the globe.

And there it was again – that noise from down the corridor. She was almost about to investigate when the phone lit up: Ben.

“Natalie, Winston’s on. Winston, you got a name for us?”

“I went through all the data sources you suggested, and drew a blank, and then I remembered that I met this guy who works as a programmer for Further Online Gaming!”

“And?”

“And he gave me the name of the owner, but I’m not sure if it’s gonna be good news or bad news, Ben –”

“Winston!”

“It’s owned offshore by the Farther Frontier Fund. By Paul Towse.”

CHAPTER 14

Natalie had no clear idea who Paul Towse was. She just wanted to leave the building. Yet she was drawn to the corridor from which she heard the noise. She stiffened as she set down the phone. The corridor was dark and empty as expected. Half way down, she found an office lit orange-green by a lava lamp. She entered. The orderliness of the space suggested it was Nguyen’s. It was – on the wall hung his Stanford engineering degree certificate. The desk surface was supremely neat, his laptop removed from its docking station. There were no photos. The only personal item was a small gold elephant that seemed to shape shift in the changing light of the lava lamp. She was about to leave when she noticed the red light blinking on his phone.

Should she check his messages? Of course not. Why not? He’d know someone had – but, he wouldn’t know who.

She walked over to the desk, picked up the handset and pressed the Audix button: “Welcome to Audix. For help at any time press star, h. Please enter extension and pound sign.” She entered his four-digit extension: “Please enter password and pound sign.”

What would he have chosen? Nothing as obvious as the last four digits of his cell phone surely: “Login incorrect. Please try again.”

Natalie searched her brain for possibilities. Then she punched in 6878, the keypad numbers corresponding to MUST.

“You have two new messages.” Yes!

The first was from a mechanic at what sounded like an auto-repair shop. The man was harried, perhaps catching up on a day’s unanswered calls: “The boring and recalibrating work is all done. Tell ya, it packs a helluva punch. It’s ready when you are.” Apparently Nguyen’s car was ready for pick-up. The next wasn’t even a message. A silence followed by a click: someone deciding not to leave a message. Which didn’t exactly tell her much.

From the corner of her eye, she detected movement through the door. She froze. Then moved over to it, her heart beating painfully loudly in her chest. Her fingers felt for the doorframe, cold and foreign. Still there was no one in the corridor.

She eased her way down its darkened length, into the empty entrance lobby. No one. Through the smoked glass entrance, she could see her car – and a vehicle moving along the street beyond, tail lights retreating to red dots. She made for the door. Her head turned involuntarily to the meeting room off the lobby. White light from outside filtered through the blinds into sharp ridges – the harsh lines warping in one place, around the shape of someone sat there. Her heart almost jumped out of her chest… but no, it was just a jacket left over a chair. Jesus.

She hurried out of the building and hit the UNLOCK button on her key fob, the thunk resounding round the empty parking lot. The key trembled in her hand; it took a couple of seconds to turn it in the ignition, the engine starting on the second attempt.

She made for the 101 Freeway, checking over her shoulder at each semi-deserted intersection – to satisfy herself that no one was concealed across the back seat.

The freeway was mostly empty. Just the occasional eighteen-wheeler, which she swept past. Green signs flew by overhead: the airport, the entrance to the city. Still, for the entire journey back, she could not bring herself to look in the rear-view mirror. Just in case someone was staring straight back at her.

*    *    *

Meantime, Ben stood on the narrow fire-escape accessed from his fifth floor window. He rested into the crook of an angled ladder that joined his balcony to the one above. The breeze was soft. A sea of lights and traffic sounds heaved below: Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina District, blocked by the black bay. The view of Golden Gate Bridge was part obscured by a protruding roofline. Still, it was what had drawn him into taking the place within five minutes of first seeing it. Traffic on the big bridge was light at this hour, mostly eighteen-wheelers, slow moving and tiny like glow worms.

Dammit Chevalier, what have you started here?

He thought again about Natalie’s question, about why men had such a thing for Asian women. The more he thought about it, the more he registered how many of the guys he knew did seem to have a thing about Asian women. Those client entertainment evenings… He’d found a neutral enough, historical-sounding answer – or so he’d thought. But the real answer was neither neutral nor historical. Because, according to the fantasy, they’re small and always youthful-looking, even when older! Because they do subservience with kinkiness like no other. Wasn’t that the idea?

He thought back to his discovery, aged eight, of a pile of Playboys hidden at the bottom of his dad’s drawer. They were a source of wonderment to him at the time: these exotic older women, seemingly from another planet, willing to take off all their clothes – just for him! A strange awakening sensation had coursed through him, an intoxicating tumescence – blood filling that remote part of his body, his hands trembling as he turned those pages with growing amazement.

Years later, delving into American cultural constructs at college, Playboy became a source of curiosity bordering on fascination to Ben: how this magazine, born in a decade as culturally conservative as the fifties, could have found such widespread acceptance. The owner had struck a deal with the upwardly mobile men of the ‘50s and ‘60s: if you dress in this way, if you live in this manner, travel to these places, consume to this level – you’ll have access to these women. And mass-market advertisers couldn’t get enough of it.

For Ben’s dad, the overall ethos had sort of worked too. A man whose parents had tasted such undiluted bitterness during the Depression era found himself married to a sweet and well-educated woman from affluent Mill Valley.

He sighed, leaning more heavily in to the ladder, his arms crossing more tightly.

You could tell a lot, growing up in suburban San Jose, by where the kids wanted to play. The homes of the parents who truly loved one another were a magnet for them. The Silvermans’ house had not been. A weird aura of frustration and failure hung over the infrequent family gatherings, evening mealtimes too. Over time, Jack Silverman – brilliant professionally, a lauded police detective – had retreated as a father figure. He seemed to lose confidence as a man, inside the family unit. And for Ben, as an only child, that meant an acute loneliness, a lifelong search for approval, beginning with the pretty and popular girls in grade school.

He reflected on his own casual and ongoing relationship with pornography. The client evenings spent at Gentlemen’s Clubs, the weekends in Nevada with his college buddies. Todd’s bachelor party in Reno, organized with the help of Playboy BachelorParty.com. One moment stood out from that weekend, and it wasn’t the toast to his best friend from college. Rather, Petra: a waif of a woman he found in a strip club they spent the last night in. He legs looked too fragile to support her body. Even the ultraviolet light of the club’s rear seating area couldn’t disguise her pallor. He chatted away with her anyway, hardly able to believe she was 18. It was late and the cocktails were flowing. She’d do for a lap dance or two. Then she asked whether he wanted ‘extra services’. There was a beseeching look in her eyes, the look of a girl who’d long since lost the right to say No. The look of a girl who was perhaps in real trouble, with someone.

Later, crossing the parking lot in the safety of his loud group, he thought again about Petra: about what fate the rest of that night held for her. He’d half a mind to go back and help. But, drunkenly, he’d reasoned that trying to save a prostitute was a great way to wind up in the emergency room.

What really amazed Ben Silverman was how acceptable porn had become in mainstream culture. How Paul Towse could be revealed as the owner of an online fantasy role-play game that was, according to Natalie Chevalier, linked with sex trafficking via the web’s foremost social networking site. Was it really possible that pornography, big business, technology and people trafficking could be telescoping together this way?

The timing was interesting. For he was due to have dinner with his boss Steven Schweitzer, Schweitzer’s boss Leonard Carmichael and Paul Towse himself  – the very next evening. This evening, he corrected himself, eyeing his expensive wristwatch.

CHAPTER 15

Natalie slept as badly as expected and awoke puzzled, troubled. Puzzled by the lack of outward connection between MultiQuest and Clamor, troubled because she’d checked Nguyen’s voicemail. She smacked her forehead with open palm: just how many other people had chorused “MUST!” with him over Saturday brunch recently? Of course he’d know it was her. She sat up and sighed heavily.

Perhaps Ray was right. Perhaps she really was blighted by these blind spots. One of which seemed to be that every time she became frightened, it triggered within her this urge to violate against other peoples’ privacy: invading their hard drives with malware, ferreting through their office voice mail... Why hadn’t she just gone to Nguyen or the FBI with what she’d found, as any sensible person would have done?

She swung her legs to the side of the hotel bed. Filled with pins and needles, her left leg felt like a lump of wood. She rubbed it, then picked up Cindy Bayley’s business card from the bedside table, playing with its edge.

But first she wanted to speak with Winston Ma, about that MultiQuest connection. She texted Ben for Ma’s number, received a response within seconds and was soon on the phone with the intern-who-never-sleeps:

“Heeyyy, Natalie! How’s it goin’?”

“It’s goin’. Thanks for your custom research work last night.”

“Any time. I kinda like that covert stuff. Reminds me of Casino Royale.”

He must have been referring to the video game version. “Well, I’ve got another mission for you if you’re interested.”

“Always!”

“Winston, this may sound like a pretty odd question, but is there anything about the content of MultiQuest that could be linked to prostitution – of younger women?”

“There’s a question.”

He said: “No, it’s really not that kind of game, Natalie. I’ve been playing it for almost a month. There certainly are games with that kinda content: single-shooter RPGs like Grand Theft Auto –”

“RPGs?”

“Role player games. But MultiQuest –” And he thought more. “I can’t honestly think of anything. But maybe something’ll come to me.”

“If it does, would you mind giving me a call?” And she gave him her cell number.

“Sure thing. You can count on it, Ms Bond!”

She met Cindy in the Special Agent’s gold Yukon SUV, parked down the street from Clamor’s office. Cindy had suggested the venue, presumably for privacy reasons. Natalie was happy not to re-enter the Clamor building after last night’s crazy scare. Cindy was in the driver’s seat, Natalie in the back, and in the passenger seat sat Agent Lau. Smooth-skinned and suave, he looked like some kind of precision instrument. He was holding a white polystyrene cup filled to the top with black coffee.

“You met Adam Lau, Natalie?”

“Briefly, yesterday,” Natalie said, ready to shake his hand properly.

“We’ve met,” he said, blowing on the edge of his hot drink. He kept looking straight ahead, towards the building entrance.

In the call setting up this meeting, Natalie had established that Cindy was indeed an Honor Council member at boarding school. She’d learned that the older woman was now a mother of two, a trained psychologist who’d been in the FBI for two decades, and a transplant to San Jose from her native Atlanta – a real ‘Georgia peach’, Natalie thought. Though perhaps a little bruised from her years in the bureau. Natalie liked everything about her.

“OK, what cha got for us Natalie?”

“I was hoping you could fill me in a little first, on what you’re looking for.”

Cindy turned, the upholstery creaking. She looked at Natalie dead-on with her bright blue eyes. “Horse tradin’, huh?” And finally she winked. “Well, I always say – though I’m unusual in this respect: if you don’t say anything, you sure-fire won’t hear anything.”

She paused, considering where to begin.

“For several years now, we’ve been investigating Russian-related organized crime, across the Bay Area, as it relates to prostitution, escort services and all the trimmin’s – pimping, blackmail, extortion, racketeering. It follows on from Operation Gilded Cage, if you remember that one.”

Natalie vaguely remembered but asked for a recap.

“In 2005, we busted a massage parlour ring imprisoning hundreds of Korean girls, from San Jose up to San Fran, and taking in all these towns, right here in the Valley. Suburban massage parlours in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Millbrae – everywhere. We coordinated with ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that is – and a bunch of other law enforcement organizations. And we indicted fifty bad guys.”

It made Natalie wonder. “Why are Korean women so often mixed up in this stuff?”

“It’s the debt culture. Korean girls are desperate to work their way out of the transit debts. Which their pimps, of course, make sure they can never quite do.

“The problem’s grown like a weed since. We know the clubs, the venues; very likely they know that we know. But this time we wanna go deep. Get all those nasty roots out from underground.

“Now, Russia and the former Eastern-bloc countries: they’ve developed this world class expertise, in moving young girls from one part of the globe to another.” The irises of Cindy’s eyes sharpened perceptibly in the rear view mirror. “They’re bringing in girls from the Far East, direct across the Pacific, by the boat load – literally. Again, I’m only telling you things any good journalist would already have dug up. What we’re going to be talking about next, you must not speak about with anyone.”

Natalie thought briefly about Ben. “OK.”

“Is that an ‘OK, I agree’?” and she turned again to look Natalie dead on.

It was like speaking with her mother! Jesus, “Yes, I agree.”

“OK. The bureau, and I’m taking national now, has spent the last few years following the money. We’ve had our forensic accountants and our best surveillance jockeys –” she eyed Adam Lau – “monitoring the path of the proceeds. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, moving from one company to the next. Daisy chains they’re called. Pretty term, huh? Problem being they always end in what’s known as a ‘burn’ company: a parent entity that ghosts on us.”

“Ghosts?”

“Vanishes. The P.O. box expires, the server gets unplugged – typically in some offshore jurisdiction where we don’t have extradition rights. – We’re working on that.

“We need whatever leads we can get. The Internet, social media sites... We noticed this Malovich guy’s sudden death, and his Eastern European background, and we got curious. Telling ya, it took some work getting that search warrant from a judge, but we got it.”

Natalie: “And what have you managed to find out, about Malovich?”

“We’ll come back to that. Your turn.”

Natalie ran through the events since the investor presentation: the four thousand profile pages on Clamor, the links with the mysterious website identifiable only as Surefar Enjoy – “which has a Russian domain name, by the way.”

Cindy thought. “Sure far enjoy, you say?”

“Yes.”

“OK,” Cindy looked at her colleague. “We’ll check it out. This dog may hunt.”

Natalie: “Actually, there’s more. I think I may have uncovered an upstream link to a new online fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest.”

Both turned towards her. “Huh?” Cindy said.

“It’s where the site traffic to these profile pages originates from.”

Cindy remained puzzled. Adam looked thoughtful but said nothing.

“Adam, we maybe need to get you a role in this game,” Cindy said.

“No need,” he said, doubling the number of words he’d spoken the entire meeting. “Hi, I’m Brastias,” and he turned back to Natalie with outstretched hand. He couldn’t help smile at her surprise. “I know, I know. It was very weird the first time this happened to me too. After we met in the office yesterday, I went home and into the game, and noticed you arrive.”

Natalie was too disorientated for words.

“– I was up on the Scintanel Plateau when you were crossing the Quorn Valley,” he said, to Cindy’s total bemusement too. The Special Agent looked at her partner like he’d taken leave of his senses.

“Well I’ll be darned,” Natalie finally managed, smiling back.

CHAPTER 16

The Woodside Village Pub was situated in one of Silicon’s Valley’s ritziest enclaves. With its humble exterior, white-veranda seating area and lazy flower boxes, it was still possible to imagine the avocado orchards and horse farms of Steinbeck’s era – except for the Bentleys, top-of-the-range Mercs and other European supercars filling the parking lot.

Inside, there was a large central room with a bar at one end, backlit honey-amber. The décor mixed old English and even traditional Japanese themes: a real fire, lacquered-brown geometric ceiling beams, candles set on white linen and blood red upholstery. It was a meticulous and yet a rather crazy, Pacific Rim reformulation of the village pub.

The four men arrived at the maitre d’ stand within minutes of each other. Towse was last to arrive, at 7pm precisely. He was lanky – 6’2” maybe, with wild, nervous energy. He wore an open-neck shirt and dark gabardine jacket. While greeting the three bankers, he rubbed the back of his neck.

“Right this way gentlemen!” – and the maitre d’ led them to a private room. Eyes lifted from the candlelit linen as they passed through. At one table sat actress Michelle Pfeiffer; at another, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

The private room was like the main room in miniature. They took their seats, Towse fussing for a moment with his place setting, arranging a battery of mobile communication devices within reach. The maitre d’ said the sommelier would be right along, then she left them to it. Napkins were drawn.

Ben had done his homework, researching Towse’s background in detail. He’d consulted all the usual sources: Forbes, Business Week, the Journal, Financial Times and Economist, but focused on his favourite: the technology-business magazine Gold Standard, which had published a recent, in-depth piece on him with the rhyming title:

The Future: Who Knows? – Towse

And though it too dwelled on his Farther Frontier Fund, the article gave a fascinating personal portrait of the man as well.

Paul Towse was 39 years old, single, and a billionaire.

His father was born in Hungary, his mother in Minnesota. Pál Tőzsér senior had taken advantage of the post-‘56 freedoms to emigrate from Budapest, improbably landing near Reno, Nevada, as a pit boss at a local casino. His soon-to-be wife worked as a dancer at the same gambling resort. Paul junior grew up with a gift for numbers, and went on to specialize in mathematics at Princeton.

While still in college, Paul visited Europe, and detoured east, to his father’s homeland. One thing led to another and he soon found himself investing throughout Eastern Europe in basic commodities: copper, aggregates and other re-building materials. He hardly became an oligarch but, by the age of 30, he’d accumulated several million dollars worth of capital.

Towse missed the 2000 tech party altogether, but was happy to participate in the clean up. He developed a theory that the companies which had built out the Internet’s infrastructure were significantly undervalued by 2002 – that the vast amount of network capacity installed would inevitably get taken up, as web usage grew. Accordingly, he bet heavily on networking stocks such as Juniper, Foundry and OptiShaft. He evolved a complicated statistical model and an associated philosophy he termed ‘Re-contextuality’ – something which few people understood at the time, and least of all Towse it appeared, whose net worth promptly halved. However, he made some valuable contacts in tech circles, hitting on the idea of taking US technology models that did work to Russia, the Ukraine – wherever. He would wait to get bought out by the very same expanding US companies whose ideas he’d ‘emulated’ in the first place, or – in the worst case scenario – do it the old-fashioned way, building actual, profitable businesses. Social media became his focus.

His first big hit was a Russian dating website almost indistinguishable from Match.com. He went on to make a killing, his fund averaging annual rates of return in excess of 1,250% during the mid noughties. Soon he was getting first look at hot Silicon Valley deals, one of which was Clamor.us.

He decided to move the center of his business operations to the Bay Area, acquiring an estate in nearby Woodside and a mansion in Pacific Heights (San Francisco) once owned by the movie mogul Sullivan B. Wentworth. Wherever he was in residence, no fewer than five chefs attended to him, each specializing in a different regional cuisine, his current favourite being Balinese. He gave generously to the arts, donating to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He meditated, he was a Chess Master, and – Gold Standard mischievously disclosed – he had an eye for the ladies.

The sommelier arrived and proposed two eye-wateringly expensive bottles of wine: a red and a white. Nobody objected. Schweitzer and Ben ordered the grilled New York Angus steak, medium-rare, with braised Romano beans and a sauce Bérnaise. Towse went for the American Ossetra caviar weighing in at a remarkably reasonable $90 an ounce, while Leonard Carmichael had a cup of warm milk and a pale, viscous-looking soup, not on the menu. He was like a bear with a sore head. Ben had just learned from Schweitz’s assistant, Francesca, the reasons for the Chairman’s permanently foul mood: a bad and worsening stomach ulcer, and a yet more debilitating feud with his 18 year-old daughter.

Conversation got off to a cautious start.

“So how d’it happen?” Towse was asking after Malovich in his staccato-flat voice. He seasoned his caviar.

“Suicide apparently,” Schweitzer said.

“Apparently?” Towse suspended his fork. “We don’t know?”

“Law enforcement’s working the case. They have a team of forensics looking at it. It’s OK: we already have somebody else on point, for the company’s security affairs.”

“Who?”

“Her name’s Natalie Chevalier. She used to run security up at –”

“Chevalier,” Towse interrupted, his eyes flickering recognition. “Not the daughter of Henri?”

“I don’t know.”

“Philosopher, used to write for Le Monde newspaper in Paris?”

“If you’d met her, you’d remember,” Schweitzer said, hoping to warm this male assembly up a little: “early thirties, she’s a traffic stopper.”

“Let’s talk strategy,” Carmichael said.

“Sure. Ben?”

“Thank you. So, the plan is to head out east in two weeks’ time and do a couple of select pitches, before the road show proper gets rolling – assuming we still need a road show proper. We’ve set up two meetings: one with Constellation Capital, the other with Ensign – Ensign being the private investment vehicle of Sheik Yasan. Has a hundred billion under management.”

“A hundy, huh,” Towse ruminated, pushing his picked-over caviar to one side.

“And Constellation?” Carmichael asked Ben to clarify, ostensibly for Towse’s benefit.

“It’s a quant fund based out of Connecticut,” Towse answered for him. “Hedgies,” he said disdainfully.

“Constellation Capital is a wild card,” Ben conceded. “Consider it the warm up act. But Ensign’s the real deal. The Sheikh is a big personal user of Clamor. His Chief Investment Officer is signalling he may be in for a billion, plus.”

“We’re calling him the pivot,” Schweitzer said laconically. “He takes half the issue, the rest is going to one-fifty a share, no question about it.”

The blood was up. A large killing suddenly felt real, imminent. Schweitzer continued: “We were hoping you could accompany the management team out east. Spread a little of your futurist gold dust.”

“Right right right,” Towse said like a machine gun.

There was a foreign silence.

“I think,” Towse said, fingering his napkin, “that we all agree on the desirability of a liquidity event.”

The silence resumed, Carmichael and Schweitzer eying one another. Finally Schweitz said: “It’s called the IPO, Paul.” Nervous laughter.

“The question being whether we’ve explored all the possibilities.”

Possibilities?

“For example, whether a combination could also make sense.”

There was another pause as Carmichael, the heaviest heavyweight on the banking team, pondered dignifying this statement with a response.

But this was Paul Towse. “A combination with whom?”

“I have a company in my fund,” Towse went on, “involved in the online entertainment space.”

“Online entertainment,” Carmichael repeated slowly.

“Not porn or gambling,” Towse said quickly. “M.M.O.R.P.G.”

Carmichael frowned. “What?”

“Massively multiplayer online role player gaming,” Towse said. “It’s a fantasy world, like World of Warcraft, only – bigger! Better. It’s destined for ten times as many users, and disproportionately more profits. With the right distribution partner, that is.”

“But this is perfect,” Schweitzer said with apparent sincerity. “A deep commercial partnership: this could complete the story! A new and sustainable revenue source, showcasing the versatility of the Clamor partner-advertiser base –”

“Do-Re-Mi’s already in there,” interrupted Towse. "Exclusively promoted on Clamor.”

“The Korean gaming company paying Clamor eighty-five million,” Ben murmured to Schweitzer.

“Outright ownership’s preferable,” Towse said. “Definitely preferable.”

Ben started to wonder just what else could go wrong with this IPO, now that the hoped-for cheerleader-investor was questioning whether there should even be one!

“But Paul,” Carmichael said, with as much good humor and flattery as he could muster, which wasn’t much. “Fifteen billion dollars is a lot of money, even at this table.” He spoke in soothing, doleful tones – as if talking to his daughter, Ben imagined.

More uneasy silence.

Towse looked like a child being denied his Christmas toys. He was rubbing his neck again.

Schweitzer: “What makes you think it’s such a great fit, Paul? Sure, Clamor’s got lots of users – but where do the synergies lie?”

“The kid – Wisnold, and what’s her name? Bitchy Wu – have created this piece of technology for abstracting identity roles. It’s called a multi-identity engine.”

“Sure,” Schweitzer said. “But how –”

“It can be custom-tuned, to encourage new users into the game. Getting newbies into character roles that truly delight them. I assume you guys know about the psychological concept of liminality?”

Schweitzer rolled his eyes; it even rhymed with Re-contextuality, the concept that had lost Towse half his fortune after the tech bust.

“And then there are the groups, and the mapping of them to the guild system in the game –” but Towse suddenly caught the glances being exchanged among the bankers.

“Paul, I’m not privy to the specifics of your company, nor your fund,” Carmichael said, “but Clamor.us will shortly be valued by the public markets at fifteen billion dollars. I submit that you’d end up issuing so many shares, Clamor would own you!”

Towse paused, controlled himself and swallowed hard. “And that’s where you guys could help. Say you arrange a ten, twelve billion dollar loan facility for Further Gaming. What kind of fees are you making off of the IPO? Because I could give you a point. Right there, that’s a hundred, hundred-and-twenty million. Right there. Pays for a few bottles of this.” He picked up one of the wine bottles. The sommelier arrived and vanished as fast, perhaps afraid Towse was about to throw it.

“Paul,” and Carmichael clutched at a salad fork, as though to steady himself –

Schweitzer: “Paul, Clamor doesn’t have the stability of income – yet – to fund that kind of debt. The corporate credit markets aren’t what they once were, you know.”

“But Further Online Gaming will have the income, once we merge the two companies,” Towse said. “And the Fund can backstop it.”

“The Fund –” But Schweitzer could apparently sense the danger of where he was now heading. “Your Frontier Fund –”

“Has real business assets, Sweetzer!” Towse snarled, losing all power of name recall.

Frantically Ben entered the breach: “We’re a long way down the IPO path, is all, Paul. The senior management team’s onboard” – was his first untruth. “Documents are being readied, meetings set up. Clamor’s current business model – this IPO process – will ensure you the very best return on your five percent stake –”

“There is no business model! There is no business model!” Towse was on his feet.

Oh Jesus Christ.

“These are kids!” Towse exploded, his eyes boiling angry. “Sharing photos, textual pi-gion English!” His hand fluttered theatrically. Thank God they were in a private room. “Most of ‘em don’t even own a credit card! And I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but online commerce isn’t so fucking common without a fucking credit card!”

Ben thought briefly about the alternate payment possibilities of PingPong – but no. “Then what would you do differently with the user base?”

Carmichael cut in: “Paul, we’ve gone too far. Tonight – and down this IPO path, together. So let’s all take a day or two, to reflect on this.” He made as though to leave. From nowhere a waiter appeared, ready to pull back his chair. It was irresistible-force-meets-immovable-object, Ben registered – only, too late! Somehow the Clamor IPO was going terribly wrong, bewilderingly fast. And as the ‘lead’ banker on the deal, Ben was witnessing his prospects of partnership receding almost in slow motion, in front of his very eyes –

How could it have come to this?

“I won’t – be – denied!” Towse was smacking his palm down, from high above head height, onto the walnut table, with its slenderest of legs, to a God-awful cacophony of glassware, cutlery; the returning sommelier blanching – it looked like it might all collapse!

Oh God, Carmichael is leaving. Leonard Carmichael is getting up, out of his chair, and walking out of the private dining room in which everything was supposed to come together, for my IPO, my job – my life! – Ben Silverman now saw with horrible clarity, like a freeway accident unfolding in infinite time.

As the others dispersed, with barely a word said among them, Ben no longer had any idea where he was with the process – or whether indeed there was still a process. Into his mind came those three words, Who Knows? – Towse.

“Your check sir,” the maitre d’ was saying to him with unusual supplication.

CHAPTER 17

The next day, Natalie spent in her hotel room. Heavy rain drummed down on the windows, the sound drowned out by the hypnotic click of fingertip on MacBook. The proposal to Nguyen had specified that she would write up her data investigations into a report. A hundred and twenty five thousand dollars had already landed in her Bank of America account, twenty five of which she’d kept. The rest she’d paid on to an L.A.-based anti-trafficking organization called Captive Daughters. The report structure was starting to take shape when the phone rang. It was Winston Ma. He had news:

“When we spoke yesterday,” he said, “I mentioned Grand Theft Auto – and it got me thinking.”

“How so?”

“Well, a few years ago there was this big hoopla surrounding GTA and a mod that a Dutch hacker had written for it. You know what a mod is?”

“Remind me.”

“It’s a software patch that gamers can download, which modifies the game – so that it runs differently to the version the owners develop and release. The Grand Theft Auto mod I’m talking about was called ‘Hot Coffee’, and it involved the central character going round to some woman’s house for coffee, then having oral and full sex with her. All pretty lame stuff. You can still find a version on YouTube, if you’re interested.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“So, what was interesting was the furore. It was what got Hilary Clinton all stirred up, proposing legislation to protect underage kids from these new gaming worlds. Most controversial was the role of the game company itself, which maintained that it had no involvement with the mod.”

“Why would anyone think they did?”

“Because of the notoriety. Sales of GTA went massive. We’re talking lines round the block, for the subsequent releases – back in the days when you still had to go to a physical store to pick up an install-disk –”

“And did they? Have any involvement?”

“Depends who you believe. The Dutch hacker claimed to the end that the developers left code buried in the game that he worked with to create the mod. The developers said Nuh-uh, they had absolutely no control over any of this stuff, to their never-ending frustration and dismay and wah wah wah. So who d’you believe?”

“Who do you believe?”

“Hey, I’m just the intern.”

“Winston!”

“OK, well let me put it this way: the motive for these gaming companies to push the envelope with new online experiences is pre-tty strong. Now, MultiQuest.”

“Yes.”

“I was checking out the forums and discussion boards and came across this buzz about a Hungarian hacker who’d been boasting ’bout some so-called re-rendering work he’d done. And when I looked into it, I did find a mod for the game. You got a pen handy? Or I can text you the link.”

“Verbal is good. And be careful what you leave on your work computer, Winston.”

“OK. It’s called: ‘m’ ‘q’ colon, ‘hot’ hyphen, ‘mod’ hyphen, ‘e’ ‘l’ ‘s’. Search for it and you’ll find it easily enough. It certainly changes the game.”

“How so?”

“You’ll see.”

Natalie installed the patch and was back in the game, waking up to the sound of someone hammering on her door in the tavern.

“Get up!” the man was yelling, presumably the landlord. “You’ve been asleep so long you’re starting to lose life experience points!”

Clever, this ‘persistence’: the game didn’t just stop because the gamer neglected to log in. Things moved on, quests occurred in absentia. Natalie could see why it kept the gamers coming back, again and again, for ever longer each time.

Dutifully she got up, and saw someone in a looking glass propped against the wall. The looking glass had a heavy patina, but she could now make out the person clearly enough. The sight that confronted her was surprising to say the least. For it was herself! She had a younger, peaches-and-cream complexion; her hair was done in pigtails. Her cape, which she remembered going to sleep in, was gone. In its place was something leather, halfway between a cuirass and a bustier. Her breasts had grown considerably in size. On her lower half was a very un-medieval looking miniskirt, so short that it would ride up into nothing more than a belt on horseback. She was wearing underwear – but a thong, and barely that. This costume was completely ridiculous.

A sensation crept over her, very like the one she’d felt upon seeing her fake Clamor profile: is this how people see me? She looked for her cape, then tore down a heavy drape and wrapped it round herself.

She descended the wooden steps into the street. It was broad daylight, the street filled with people going about their business hither and thither. But the mood of the game had changed completely. Men slouched in doorways, consulting with one another, exchanging confidences. The women, for the most part, wore the kind of get-up that Natalie had woken in. It was neither especially sexy nor scandalous: just normal. The men eyed them covetously, lasciviously – hungrily, with a palpable sense of entitlement.

Natalie clutched the drape more tightly and hurried down the radial street leading to the gate she’d first entered through. Where was Phariance? Or Brastias?

Beyond the gate, on a broad expanse of grassland, was a city of tents with brightly colored pennants atop the taller structures. A Renaissance Faire. Jugglers, falconers and animal tamers greeted her, encouraging her in. She shook them off and wandered among the lanes of tradesmen. The deeper recesses of the fair had the flavour of an oriental souk: pans of brilliantly colored spices, rolls of fine silks and other lustrous fabrics… There were also cages of rare and exotic animals – baby lions, snow leopards and small reptiles that she’d never even seen before. And, every so often, groups of young women, chained together.

The first gang that Natalie was invited to inspect, she shied away from entirely, hastening her step down another back lane, starting to feel lost – among smaller, ever more cramped and run-down stalls. Then a man grabbed her arm firmly:

“Mistress looking for slave? Mistress look for slave?” – and before she had chance to free herself, he commanded one of his young girls to dance for her.

“This Yum-Yum,” the huckster said, as the girl disinterestedly swayed her straight hips from side to side. There were angry welts round one ankle where the chain secured her. She was wearing child’s underwear, the upper half a tube top that she shyly began to remove. She barely had breasts: she must have been ten or eleven years old, at most.

Or rather, the near-perfect avatar of a ten or eleven year old. Again, the graphics were extraordinary, mixing in Japanese animé influences this time.

A dialog box popped up on the screen of Natalie’s MacBook:

‘Take away, today? Click here,’ and Natalie did.

And suddenly she was on the Clamor website.

Looking at the real life photo and profile of ‘Yum-Yum’: thirteen years old, “luscious”, origin Thai and available in the flesh and for keeps for ninety-five hundred dollars.

Outside her hotel room, the rain had turned into a deluge that smoked off the sidewalk below. Natalie slumped back in her desk chair and stared at her MacBook screen, stupefied. So often she’d had this feeling: of having been born in the wrong time, or place. Wrong age even?

She thought about the fierce sense of self-sufficiency she’d developed at boarding school and later Seattle. Only once had she truly let her guard down, allowing herself to believe in the future of a white picket-fence, kids, pets – and that man had let her down from a very great height. She was not making that mistake again.

The question that had most often arisen in her mind was why her sexuality had to be this socially sanctioned bargaining chip, to be traded. She didn’t want to ‘give it up’. She didn’t want some suitably eligible man ‘getting some’ from her. And now she saw more clearly why: because of what lay at the less socially acceptable end of that spectrum.

Mother of God, what’s this?

A news alert had landed in her inbox. It was from the Trumpington Bugle blog:

BANKING HEIRESS TO LOSE VIRGINITY LIVE OVER THE INTERNET

By Brie DuBois

The article was in the Raw Nerve social commentary section of the blog site and began by debating the ‘recent trend of auctioning your maidenhood off online.’ It referenced the extraordinary recent case of Natalie Dylan – ‘not her real name of course, real names being so confusing nowadays’ – a 22-year-old girl from San Diego who’d reputedly received a high-bid of five-and-a-half million dollars from a 39 year old, unmarried businessman...

Natalie sat upright:

‘But what happens when the girl in question has a real name, and is the real scion of a prestigious West Coast banking dynasty? Wren Carmichael is the only child of Leonard Carmichael and his third wife Mitzi – Len Carmichael being of course Chairman of the same-name San Francisco investment bank claiming to have done every technology deal worth doing (as it happens, they are handling the upcoming IPO of social web sensation Clamor.us)’

– ‘What happens’, according to the rest of the article, is Wren Carmichael accepts offer from adult film company to star in a feature-length production titled Wrendition ‘sparing no detail of the deed, and all themed on the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison scandal’:

‘Wren Carmichael’s appearance fee allegedly exceeds even the Natalie Dylan windfall. The cherry never falls far from the tree, as they say. It must come as a bitter irony indeed for Len Carmichael that the venue for his daughter’s de-flowering will be your friendly neighbuorhood Clamor group space, although the soon-to-be-IPO’d phenomenon would of course neither confirm nor deny anything, and neither Leonard nor Mitzi Carmichael were available for comment at the time this EXCLUSIVE went to upload’

Bugled Tuesday 03:18 PST

That’s MY opinion – I welcome yours...

Ben was calling her on her cell phone.

“Bad time?” he said.

She thought about her interrupted report. “No, it’s fine. Welcome distraction, actually. Have you seen this news report about your boss’s daughter?”

“Schweitzer doesn’t have a daughter.”

“No, Carmichael’s.”

She could hear him tapping at his computer.

“Damn that Brie DuBois. She’s been bugging me for days now to comment on the sex trafficking she saw at that investor presentation.”

“I guess she’s gone with another story.”

“No, she’s working up to a big investigative feature-special. Which is wonderful, just wonderful…”

Natalie could hear him scrolling down the article using the wheel of his mouse. It sounded over the phone like a real mouse nibbling lettuce.

“Wow,” he finally said. “This would explain Carmichael’s mood last night at dinner, with Paul Towse.”

“You had dinner with Paul Towse?”

“That’s what I’m calling you about. There’s been a development. Towse wants to buy Clamor and merge it into Further Online Gaming.”

“Oh great,” Natalie said. “So now we’re dealing with Further Online Clamor.”

He laughed. “What’s happening your end?”

She caught Ben up on the game and the ‘mq:hot-MOD-els’ patch Winston had found, the links through to Clamor once installed, and, “something else: a missing piece. Because there has to be a mechanism by which the johns – clients of these prostitute-slaves – are able to exploit the Surefar Enjoy website, via Clamor. Meaning, minimally a login and password, but I’m guessing a real world point of interaction too.”

“Because of the sums involved?”

“Yeah, partly that. It’s hard to imagine putting ten grand on your credit card at some Russian domain name website without alarm bells going off all over your card issuer’s fraud department. But there’s also the physical delivery of these girls: how does that work? And, the risk that some unknown john is in fact an undercover cop. No, it could only really work if there’s a physical world location these johns have first visited, frequented even – where they’ve become known to the slaver-pimps.”

“Like a club maybe?”

“Maybe.” Natalie thought for a moment. “What about Towse? You say he wants to buy Clamor. Sounds a bit extreme.”

“Clamor has invented this piece of technology that reconstructs people’s identities online, or fragments them, or something –”

“The Multi-Identity Engine? I heard all about it at the strategy session on Sunday.”

“Oh. Well, that seems to be much of the reason. And, if you’re a modern-day video game impresario, where else can you get access to three hundred and fifty million, technologically savvy and demographically qualified leads, from all over the world?”

“But why does he need to own it? Couldn’t he just strike a business deal to get what he wants?”

“There’s this Korean gaming competitor that snuck in there first and has an exclusive promotional pact with Clamor. I checked out the contract: there’s a mutual termination option triggered if either party undergoes a change-of-control event. Towse has evidently done his homework. If he acquires Clamor, he can kick out this Korean competitor. He’s out trying to raise twelve billion of debt to fund the purchase – before Clamor goes public.”

“He can’t buy it as a public company?”

“He could. eBay bought PayPal as a public company.” Ben paused. “But what if the share price doubles in the first week’s trading? What would cost him fifteen billion today might end up costing him thirty, more. And that’s starting to stretch the pocket book even of Paul Towse.”

“Still. It seems like a pretty big bet, no? To buy the entire shebang.”

“To me, yes. To others, I don’t know. Frankly I’m used to seeing senior execs do strange things.”

“There’s an admission.”

“There’s a fact. Most mergers and acquisitions fail. But CEOs keep wanting to buy, and banks like ours are only too happy to take their money in the form of advisory fees.”

Natalie quite liked this previously unseen side of Ben, the refreshing candour of it:

“It plays to their egos,” he continued. “To grow an empire and hang out with glamorous investment bankers instead of dull functional managers. It’s a complete racket, really. Because who pays for it all in the end? Shareholders, of acquiring companies: your pension plan, and mine too.”

That didn’t sound so good. “It certainly seems ill-considered to me,” she said, “to try and buy a social media site the size of Clamor.us, and hope to transpose the entire network into these new gaming worlds. I mean, how many Clamor users would really go for that?”

“But this is where Towse may be in the smart minority,” Ben said, in another about-turn. “He’s surely playing a numbers game here. I’ll bet he’s modelled this out to the nth degree. Doubtless the streetlights of Pac Heights or Woodside dim when he fires up the model he’s built for this one. He must be reckoning on converting some significant percentage across, and not caring about the rest.”

Ben was clicking away, perhaps opening a forecast model of his own: “OK, so we’d been conservatively expecting Clamor to hit half-a-billion worldwide members by next year. Now, suppose this game turns out to be the phenomenon that Towse – and others in fairness – expect it to be. Assume also that this multi-identity-engine thing is firing on all cylinders, though that part is more of a mystery to me. What’s a reasonable conversion rate? Twenty percent? – of Clamor users? We can adjust the number up or down,” and she heard him tapping away once more, “but it’s important, I think, not to underestimate the fit. Again, we’re talking about a member base interested in novel online experiences...”

“A hundred million people, then. Playing MultiQuest.”

“Right. Now just think about that number a moment. Winston and I worked out that World of Warcraft might be worth twenty billion with just twelve million players. Natalie, it’s no exaggeration to say that if this scenario really plays out, MultiQuest could be worth as much as Google – and every other tech company combined, in time!”

It sounded too fantastic for Ben to say out loud. A fantasy online role-playing game. And yet, so many things had seemed fantastical online. Like, 350 million people on Clamor, four years into the company’s existence.

“But what about all those other Clamor members?” Natalie asked. “What happens to them?”

“They’ll probably move their wagons on to the next new social networking thing. I’m afraid it pays to fire your worst customers, Natalie. Or maybe Towse will keep Clamor running as a sort of feeder engine, who knows.”

Ben paused. “But just when we learn Towse wants to buy it, I’m getting the vibe that Wisnold doesn’t want to sell.”

“How so?”

“I don’t think I updated you from my meeting with Wisnold, right after we got back from visiting Vogel’s place that day?”

“No. Tell me about that,” she said.

“Well, it was his nonchalance. It would be easy to interpret as Wisnold getting cold feet. But I was combating the same thing at that presentation in the Keaton, even before. It almost feels like he’s wanted to queer the deal from the start. So why engage bankers in the first place? Why set off down the IPO path at all?”

“But don’t you see,” Natalie said, “that the two reconcile absolutely!”

“How?”

“If you’re Towse – or anyone else for that matter, and you want to acquire something rare and valuable that’s not for sale: what’s the very first step in the process?” she asked.

“Writer a big check. Lay siege. Bombard them with lavish nights out and other, nefarious forms of entertainment. To be honest, I’ve never cracked the code on that one, Natalie. And I’m sure our M&A department would be eager for enlightenment!”

“Ben. Create an emotional space, in which the owner can become comfortable letting go. If they can allow themselves to imagine letting go in a way that’s non-threatening, they’re so much more likely to do so. It’s mostly a fear thing that has to be overcome. People hide themselves away behind things when they’re afraid.”

“So that’s Towse’s play: get Winsold thinking, ‘OK then, we’ll have a liquidity event so existing investors can cash out, but we’ll only sell a fractional amount of the company’ – which is what any IPO entails after all – ‘and I must remain in charge!’

“– but,” Ben built up the theory, “by then the company’s in play. Towse is now pushing on an open door.” He thought about it some more. “Maybe you should be doing my job, Natalie.”

“Not my cup of cha I’m afraid. But there is one person we’ve left out of the equation: Jon Vogel. Without his consent, Towse is stuck. And you mentioned that Vogel hates Towse.”

“True, but I kinda got the feeling that Jonny V wants to cash out now. What was that organization his neighbor mentioned to you, The Protection of Hippy Camp Heaven?  Well, newsflash, campers: buying up large chunks of land around Pine Glade Way does actually require billions of dollars nowadays.”

Natalie tilted her head from side to side: Maybe. “But do we really know enough about Vogel?” she asked. “What was that ‘Deviate’ self-sufficiency group, up the canyon behind his house?”

She briefly explained to Ben the dark ‘Chronicles of Gor’ novel-series that she’d come across while researching the background fantasy literature. “How do we know he’s not running some kind of Gorean slave-camp in the woods back there?”

Ben: “I hardly think he’s going to have set up a female slave camp for the inspection of hundreds of high profile guests at his annual technology fests!”

“Okay, Okay. But I did have this weird dream last night about his beach. You remember the one I got marooned on in the fog that day? It’s actually a perfectly protected cove. Perfect for smuggling illegal immigrants, that is.”

“Oh Natalie, please! People haven’t been smuggled by boat for – I dunnow, centuries.”

“You’re wrong about that,” she said. “Don’t you remember that case a few years ago of the ship sailing from China to the US, that got into trouble near New York?” Natalie googled it. “Here we go, the Golden Venture,” and she began quoting: “‘At least ten of the ship’s estimated 286 passengers died plunging into the icy waters off the Rockaway Peninsular, after their traffickers reportedly ordered them to’ – Jeez – ‘swim ashore. An unassuming older woman named Cheng Chui Ping stood trial for her alleged role in the disaster.’ – She was Fuzhounese by the way, Fuzhou being the capital of Fujian Province, where little Jasmine came from. Anyway, here: ‘Interpol eventually caught up with her at Hong Kong Airport, seeing her own son onto a flight’, would you believe it. ‘By that stage she’d amassed a fortune smuggling Chinese immigrants into the US estimated to be in the region of forty million dollars’.”

“Couldn’t have taken long to backfill that role,” Ben brooded. “And the waters off the Monterey Peninsular are a little warmer than those around the Rockaways. But, there’s no way Jon Vogel would get involved in anything like that, Chevalier. Maverick though he may be.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she sighed. “I was just exploring.”

“Well, I vote you explore the weird and wonderful world of Paul Towse. He’s the one who holds the key to all this. We’re wasting our time with anyone else at this point. And I bet he’d be willing to talk to you.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your name came up in conversation last night. Or rather your dad’s.”

“My father?”

“Yup. Something about him being a philosopher. Towse likes his philosophy, it seems. Floats his boat, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

“Ben, people died when that wreck of a ship ran aground! –”

“Sorry, but this is all getting a little too morbid for my blood. Anyway, you’ve the perfect pretext for meeting with him, given the security report you’re due to present to the Clamor Board at some point. And I’ll guarantee you one thing: you’ll get far further with him than we bankers ever will now.”

CHAPTER 18

Paul Towse had been rather unforthcoming on the phone with Natalie, suggesting only that they met at his office, which was also his home. He hadn’t asked her anything about her role at Clamor, and he hadn’t volunteered anything about his own. Indeed, the only question he’d posed was whether she played chess. He struck her as one of those people for whom silence is a weapon: “He who speaks first dies,” as a deal maker at her old company had once said.

She entered his property off Alta Plaza at the very top of Pacific Heights. It was a giant wedding cake of a house, all white and cream stucco, complete with it own porte-cochère. Beneath glinted a dark Maybach Zeppelin.

The property had to be priceless. In the lexicon of real estate agents, there could no ‘comparable’ across all of San Francisco’s super prime market. It occupied a city block. The main door opened as a maid greeted her in silhouette. The maid seemed tiny against the opulent interior. Natalie followed her through an enfilade of grand spaces with stone staircases leading off. At the far end was what appeared to be a ballroom, judging by the high polish of its parquet floor.

“In Japan they call this Pin Dom,” a quiet voice said.

His eyes gleamed like coal as he poured the pink Dom Perignon. It frothed in the champagne flutes, one of which he offered her. He was wearing a salmon colored shirt, soft herringbone jacket and gold-buckled loafers. She caught a whiff of citrusy cologne. To the side of them sat a modest repast of vegetable crudités, thin toast with the crusts cut off and sturgeon’s roe. The latter glittered delicate-black in the flickering light of a log fire. The shadow play turned them both into great dancing bears on the far walls. She looked up. Round the top ran rococo swag in striking relief: cherubs with coy faces, putti and babies’ buttocks – all vaguely obscene. This room alone was large enough to house a penthouse apartment, and yet, apart from the food table and a chessboard with chairs either side, it was absolutely bare.

“The house was built by Sullivan B. Wentworth. Made his money in the silent pictures era. Very nearly bankrupted him, and ultimately became his mausoleum. He was interred somewhere beneath where we now stand,” Towse said. They sat down at the chess table. “I find I can learn so much about people by playing them at chess,” he went on, giving her white. She’d once been school champion, but again it struck her as an unorthodox way to spend a first meeting together.

She executed a classically defensive opening. Queen’s Gambit Declined.

“Well, this is nice,” Towse said. “And good. And right.”

These weren’t exactly the first adjectives to pop into her head. He lost no time in bringing out his knights, bishops: the works. Out they all came, deep into her territory of the board. The pieces were large, carved-stone fantasy figures. In the ever-moving light of the log fire, they appeared to mock her.

Towse sank into a meditative silence, surveying the increasingly complicated board.

“I understand you’re involved in another game – a multiplayer one, online,” she said.

He looked up. “How d’you know that?”

She gave the name of Winston Ma’s programmer contact at Further Online Gaming, whom she implied she knew direct.

“Yes.” He relaxed a little. “Fantasy online gaming is the new frontier.”

Evidently he’d decided the board needed thinning out, for he was now exchanging mid-value pieces in violent, almost suicidal moves.

“A new frontier,” she repeated. She thought of President John F. Kennedy, of a ‘man-on-the-moon’ by the end of that decade – and then of all the techies subsequently weaned on Star Trek, Star Wars and dreams of colonizing that final frontier: “Space –”

“– is for the others,” Towse interrupted her, taking her knight. “Bezos, Branson, Paul Allen,” he sat back. “All that money they’ve poured into civilian space travel, decades after man first walked on the moon. And what do they have to show for it? I’ll tell you exactly what they have to show for it: a bunch of lunatics throwing themselves weightlessly around jumbo jets, seventy thousand feet up in the air! That’s what they have to show for it!”

He thought about it, laughing to himself. “Let them have it!” he suddenly cried out, in spontaneous, startled delight!

He seemed almost psychotic to her, and yet. “The new frontier is not in space! It’s where people have already begun to migrate to, in their millions, and very soon their hundreds of millions.”

His eyes darted round the board, searching for a new victim.

“D’you know what the most significant development of the second half of the nineteenth century was, Miss Chevalier?”

She wondered what he was about to say. The railways? Telephone? Otis’s elevator?

“The US Census Bureau declaring the westward American frontier finally ‘closed’, in 1890.”

Despite her southern allegiances, she might have put it a quarter century before, with Lincoln’s 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Still.

“The frontier ethos descends down into the American psyche to depths no one can possibly fathom.” He removed her second knight – never her favourite piece anyway, with its weird, doglegged move. Pawns, rooks, queens and kings remained.

“The path untravelled,” he continued. “Which is also – and by no coincidence – the very foundation of the grail mythologies: ‘And each entered the forest at a point they themselves had chosen!’ he rang out: ‘Where it was darkest, and there was no path!’

He said: “Why ‘no path’? Just for the merry hell of it?”

It didn’t look like he was waiting for an answer.

“Because if there’s a path, it’s somebody else’s pissing path!”

He picked up the knight he’d just removed from the board: “The lone horseman, answerable only to his own inviolable code of conduct, and to God. The vanguard of the few, driving forward the many, to the benefit of all. That great, heroic, westward push,” and he placed the chess piece down mournfully. “Do you think that impulse has just gone away?  Do you think we’ve just – forgotten – in some collective fit of amnesia, the thrill of the undiscovered, the challenge of great new lands to be civilized, of resources to be secured, treasures to be won… treasures, that is to say, that reside in the very soul of mankind?”

He said it like she were responsible for the frontier closing a century-or-more before.

“No! It’s as present as ever – only, subverted, contorted, by social do-gooders and nobodies… by bureaucrats, intermédiaires … bankers,” and he hissed the last word, staring away into the fire.

She began to feel light-headed, like she needed air.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said, leaning in again. “What do you know about liminal states of existence?”

There was a thud of familiarity – and a falling feeling in her stomach, as she lost her queen to a rook-based skewer. She sacrificed it for his rook; she’d no choice.

“– About that threshold place, between illusion and reality? Because you should know about it, Miss Chevalier, given how eloquently your father wrote on the subject.

“You see, these immersive fantasy worlds are really no different from this world – the Lebenswelt, or life world, as I like to call it – which your father wrote about so brilliantly. Because in the end, all of us are just playing out some role that we chose, or that was chosen for us: father, mother, journalist-philosophe, businessman, security consultant, whatever it might be. We can look to the Lebenswelt’s greatest role players, by which I mean movie stars or theatre actors – indeed, let’s look at Olivier.

“When Olivier plays Hamlet, who exactly are we looking at, up there on the stage? Who is he? Is he the man whom someone happened to name Laurence, who longs for greatness and for love, as any human being does? Is he an actor, performing the emotions and feelings of the role, memorizing his lines and sometimes suffering stage fright? Is he – rather more improbably now, I accept – the bodily facsimile of some mythical Danish prince? No! Laurence Olivier, up there on that stage playing Hamlet, is none of those things. He is in fact not there at all! The audience sees only Hamlet – in somebody’s physical presence.

“And so we can conclude then that the greater the role player is, the more he or she dissolves. That the role becomes their existence.

“Now, you may think that all of this is rather fanciful, highbrow nonsense. But all of us are playing roles that are in essence theatrical: scripted, situated and performed in front of an audience in accordance with some set of social norms. And allow me to add my own prediction: that during the twenty-first century, our lives will become as much narratively constituted as actually lived. That we will story ourselves. Three hundred and fifty million stories, buzzing away on a social networking site: ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ People treating weekends away as carefully staged photo opportunities, uploading the results before they even return. Do you think the vast majority of peoples’ lives are in reality anything like those glamorous, carefree and socially voracious existences as seen on Clamor.us? When they get back to their bed-sits, and eat alone, and don’t even know the name of their neighbors, the other side of a shared apartment wall? – whom they’re ten times more likely to meet on Clamor than ever run into in real life? Do you think half of them have even met most of the people they claim as friends on that site? No! But in their minds this is how things really are, which is all that matters in the end.”

He shrugged, and Natalie thought again about her fake profile page – wondering increasingly about Paul Towse…

“Film! Was the natural art form of the twentieth century, but it was already a ghost form, of the old frontier. The itching, phantom, forward movement of it all. The movies!” and his eyes danced crazily, “with the audience sat there in their hundreds, in dark picture houses, immobile!” His loafer tapped softly on the parquet floor, beneath which Sullivan B. Wentworth lay interred. “Whereas now we author our own stories in these new online realms. Co-author them I should say, self co-authorship being the emergent art form of the twenty-first century. Because these are interactive, immersive worlds – audience, performer and interface being one now.”

It was his move. Cursorily, he looked over the board. Then he castled abruptly, tucking his king in protectively behind a row of pawns.

“I want to tell you a story about a man called Jim, I believe his name was. Actually, his life story was a non-story: fantastically and representatively so, which is what makes it such a story.

“When we began to develop MultiQuest, five years ago, we did a large amount of focus group work, is how I came across him. He worked by day as ‘Customer Assistant Manager’ – a title which, by the way, nobody, anywhere, could define for us. This was at the Check-in desk of a major airline at O’Hare International Airport, in Chicago. Back in the days when I still flew on commercial jets. Anyway, Jim was that man who, when his workday went exceptionally well, nobody remembered at all. Perhaps he could cajole the system into giving an occasional upgrade, and the grateful passengers concerned would recall his face for about thirty seconds, before realizing that they had not worn their slip-ons and would need to remove their shoes going through the radiation machine, or whatever. In any event, mostly Jim’s day was filled with this unimaginable level of rancour: passengers who’d booked the cheapest, most restrictive fares, visiting the full force of their stress and frustration upon him when they ‘found out’ their tickets didn’t allow them to re-book onto an earlier or a later flight, or whatever the fuck people do when they’re not flying by private jet. Jim made it quite clear to us that his workday was rather lacking in meaning.

“But come eight o’clock, James Aloysius Donovan – how could I forget that name! – would get in his six year old Honda Accord, drive home, throw a cheeseburger bag down by his couch-side, boot up his computer and enter the other world – as Sven, an unusually well-resourced dwarven barbarian. And join an army of 147 elite figures: priest-kings, the most powerful warriors of the realm, the highest ranking clerics and summoners, special teams of experienced healers for the inevitable field casualties… and up, up all of them would sail, up into the rare blue yonder with its twin suns, seeking out some marauding monster of the underworld who’d burst up into an adjacent land, terrorising women and children and cattle and generally wreaking havoc with people’s lives. And here James does make a difference. Here, nobody can doubt the essential contribution asked of him, willingly given. Here, James’ actions unambiguously make a memorable difference to the lives of thousands of others.

“You see, Jim had always yearned to make this difference. To do something heroic, and noble. And yet all his previous attempts had been consistently and subtly shut down. His teachers inured him with a sense that there were no absolute truths – that good and evil were always relative. Under standardized tests, he discovered that he wasn’t as bright as the average classmate, whatever that means. He wasn’t particularly talented at sports either. Jim thought briefly about joining the military, but, not knowing anybody serving, he decided against. Fear of income failure and social ostracism followed. By-and-by, his life became a quilt work of little compromises, leading to his job at a Customer Assistant Manager at O’Hare. Such is the tragi-comedic nature of our Lebenswelt.

“It was Tolkien, of course, who asked ‘why a man should be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he strives to get out and go home.’ Now there’s a figure who dared to dream of other worlds! – worlds rooted in myths that our modern society has so glibly overthrown. Were you aware that Tolkien conceived of The Hobbit while lying in the trenches of World War One?”

“Perhaps we should all become dwarven barbarians like Jim then,” she said.

“It’s not a question of becoming dwarven barbarians,” Towse said curtly. He was studying her closely now. “To start with, there are so many different types of warrior: paladins, knights, beastmasters, rangers, archers, thieves and rogues – just as there are myriad types of magicians, other than enchantresses that is: mages, wizards, spell-casters, sorcerers – to name but a few. Always wanted to be a musician? Why not become a bard, or an entertainer! An acrobat even, or a storyteller, or jester – the list is just endless. And if you’re not sure about any of it, then let us propose something: it may just be the thing you most deeply wanted all along, yet never knew till now.

“Check.”

The word echoed into the very cavities of her ears. His rook was threatening her king from three spaces away. Two moves from mate.

“Natalie, what exactly is it that you’re not agreeable with this evening?”

The question caught her off guard. “If I recall correctly what my father wrote,” she looked for the words, “liminality comes from the Latin word līmen, simply meaning a threshold. Not necessarily losing ourselves into a socially prescribed role, or any self-storied fantasy existence, but rather, a pulling away.” She managed to move a rook back to protect her king. “The deviation, rather, from those roles… This being what creates our true sense of selfhood… Meaning, our stability may come from solid social institutions, which we need, to feel we belong, but our true identities exist in the gaps… in these infinite little resistances, these… deviations…”

“And what a solid socialist institution Le Monde was, Natalie. Tell me: was he a deviant father?”

This time he didn’t exchange pieces, instead moving his queen up to guard his rook. Next move mate. There was a knowing look in his eyes, burning into her: “Did he take liberties with you, Natalie?” His voice came from afar away, like a recollection from another time and place. The lips curled into a smile: “It happens to one in three of us. Incest was quite common, back on the old frontier.”

She grasped the top of her other rook, and sent it down, all the way down – to the far end of the board, where his king was still protected, still locked in behind that row of pawns.

Check.

Towse stopped dead.

A hand fluttered up, then settled down again slowly. His eyes jerked round the board. None of his attacking pieces were in a position to return and guard his king now.

Mate.

He pawed the back of his neck, febrile. A minute elapsed, feeling like an hour.

He regained composure, dabbing his lips: “I must leave you now.”

Getting up, he sent shadows dancing into yet crazier patterns. He took one more look at the chessboard, his eyes narrowing to slits. “There is work to be done. I have much work to do.”

And he left.

She made for the doorway; the maid appearing and handing her a raincoat, mentioning something about a driver – and then Natalie Chevalier disappeared, out into the aqueous San Francisco night.

CHAPTER 19

Ben glanced at the display of his cell phone and contemplated calling her again. She’d promised to update him as soon as she was through with Towse.

It was now 8:45 the following morning.

He was standing beside Francesca Horniman, on the 39th floor – to which he’d just been summoned. “What’s this about?” he asked Fran for the second time.

“Like I said, Steven just mentioned wanting to see you.”

Ben wondered about that. Fran was cordial with him. Not complicit in his cause, like she’d been but a few days before. She returned to her typing, her fingers flat over the keys. Presumably to protect her nails. Occasionally she paused, running them through her long, straight hair. It was easy to underestimate just how much influence these executive assistants had. They pretty much ran the show, in fact. For one thing, they controlled access, determining who got to see whom. And then they were in a position to read all those emails. They just knew what was going on around the place. Fran’s behavior was a barometer, and Ben didn’t like today’s reading – and why hadn’t Natalie called him back?

Fran pushed her roller chair away with her shapely legs, sliding over to the partially drawn Venetian blinds of Schweitz’s office. “You’d better go in or he’ll be late for his nine o’clock,” she said. “Just knock first.”

He knocked.

“Come.”

There was a strangely oppressive air in the room. Schweitzer was sitting in his chair, same position as that Friday before, but silhouetted against the big windows was Leonard Carmichael, facing outwards. The fabric of his suit had a lustrous sheen – and a hard time arranging itself over his bulky form. But here was no mistaking where the power in this room resided. He didn’t turn.

Schweitzer: “So just what is the problem with this IPO, Benjamin?”

His face flushed. If it was an attempt at humor, he didn’t see the funny side. The problems with the Clamor IPO were certainly not of his making – but perception seemed to be otherwise, and up here on 39, perception was reality. Or soon would be.

“Paul Towse ...” he started, but all three of them had been at the Woodside debacle. He started again: “We’re up against a couple of things here, Steven: a dead senior executive for one, and a homicide investigation opening up –”

“Thought it was suicide?” Schweitz cut in.

“No. The police may have said that, to protect the investigation, but it’s definitely homicide. I spoke with my dad about it.” He added for Carmichael’s benefit: “My dad was a homicide detective, recently retired,” but Schweitz waved him along. “We have a CEO, and a CFO, in no way assisting the preparation of financial forecasts. And we’ve got a significant investor who no one seems to know anything about. Though I did visit with Vogel, who’s OK with kicking Multiworld out.”

At the mention of Vogel’s name, Carmichael turned his thousand-yard stare in to the room.

“Fuck Multiworld,” Schweitzer said. “We’re bringing this IPO forward before the sky falls in. I need you to bird dog Ensign’s CIO and make sure Yasan follows through on his commit. That’s the only way we’re gonna bring this thing in down the flight path. You think you can do that?”

The orders were clear enough. Sheikh Yasan had apparently committed to investing; Ben was to focus on his pre-existing relationship with Yasan’s Chief Investment Officer. But Could he do it? – What kind of question was that? Carmichael Associates was a notoriously ‘up-or-out’ culture: was he no longer moving up?

Then he had a different thought: was Carmichael the one in trouble? He tried to read into the Chairman’s inscrutable stare. Schweitzer had said the prior Friday that predators were circling Carmichael Associates with fat wallets. The bank was a niche player in a market where size definitely mattered: a ‘boutique’ in an industry increasingly looking like a giant mall. And why hadn’t Natalie called back? Had Paul Towse gone and swept her off her feet?

Ben said: “What about the road show? – Constellation, the investors out east?”

“Can you handle this piece of it or not?” Schweitzer repeated.

“Yes, of course I can, Steven.”

“Then get to it. That’ll be all.”

Certainly his role at Carmichael felt a lot less “central” now. He walked straight past Francesca and away from the elevator, opting to take the stairs down to his floor instead. Still no messages or missed calls on his cell phone. Then he changed his mind altogether and rode the elevator down to street level, to grab coffee, some air – to see if he couldn’t reassure himself by focusing on one of his dad’s most often-repeated expressions: that things were never as good or as bad as they seemed.

*    *    *

Natalie woke in her room at the Keaton with a hangover, angry as a hellcat. She recalled going on to a late bar, and must have really tied one on, because she couldn’t now remember getting back to the hotel. Her clothes lay around on the floor. She grabbed the phone:

“Front desk, good morning Miss Chevalier –”

“Hello, this is rather embarrassing I know,” she began in a forthright tone, “but I don’t recall how, or when, I got back to the hotel last night. Is the doorman there to jog my memory?” Which sounded pretty odd indeed – even to Natalie, in her confused state. She added in feigned jest: “I may have been a little over-served.”

“No problem, Miss Chevalier. It’s Rosanna here, the desk manager. It happens to us all. At least, I hope it does. Max, our night porter, was on last night. Let me call him and come straight back to you.”

She felt badly about the night porter being woken up, but she needed to know. Memory of the prior night returned in instalments. She recalled the house at the very top of Pacific Heights, the shadow play on its walls like some very dark fairy tale. Waiting for the call back, she went into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror, in her underwear, as if to make sure that she hadn’t undergone some transformation like in the game.

The phone rang, piercing her skull. She picked up the bathroom handset: “Hello again Miss Chevalier. Max said you came back towards two o’clock – yes, a little the worse for wear. A taxi driver apparently dropped you off, explaining that you may indeed have been over-served –”

“But how – did I –?”

“– and then Max helped you up to your room. He said that you looked fine, that you just needed to sleep it off.”

“OK.” That seemed to be all. “Thank you.”

She checked her phone: Ben and Detective Pulver of the Sunnyvale Police Department had left messages. She decided to call Ben; in his voicemail he’d sounded as flat as she felt, asking her to call him back asap.

“Natalie! How’re you doing? How’d it go with Towse last night?”

He was outside, in a street someplace. “Hi Ben. It was OK. We just talked a load of random nonsense, basically.”

“About what, if I may ask?”

It was still coming back to her, like a bad dream.

“Eesh. He was holding forth on why these online gaming worlds are destined to become so big. The quest for the undiscovered. He reckons that we all have this deep-seated attachment to the adventure spirit of the Wild West, or something. His shtick was that, with the earth-bound frontier being long since ‘explored out’ – and space travel still a non-event, these new online worlds are the new frontier… I think.”

“Huh?”

“Then he got hold of one of my father’s theories.” This much she remembered well. “One suggesting we’re all role playing anyway. Playing roles we’ve chosen for ourselves, or that society has chosen for us, which we lose ourselves in. He claimed that most of us are so dissatisfied with these parts that we secretly crave this fantasy role playing stuff. Let’s see, he gave this example of an airline employee they’d focus-grouped –”

“They’d?”

“The MultiQuest dev team, I guess. Only, that’s not what my father actually said. What my father said was that sure, society creates roles for us, without which we’d be lost. But it’s our resistance to those roles – our deviations from them, which creates our true identity…”

“I’ll buy that,” Ben said, slurping down his drink. “And you pointed out the discrepancy?”

“Yes. More or less.”

“What’d he say?”

She paused, hearing the breeze flapping in the mouthpiece of Ben’s phone, her head still aching, deeply. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Wait, I’m confused: how d’you mean, you don’t know?”

She felt herself become angry again… from the sense that Towse was acting like he’d actually known her father, in some way. But how? She wished her dad were still around, dammit, to ask about these things.

She said: “He disappeared on me. Perhaps because of the chess game, I don’t know.”

“You were playing chess? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he threw a complete hissy fit. You should’ve seen him the other night. Almost smashed up the joint! – D’you beat him? Betcha did, didn’t you? Damn, he’s an International Chess Master; that’s awesome, Natalie!”

All she knew was that Paul Towse would forfeit more than a chess game if she had anything to do with it. “Ben, could we talk about something else? I just got a call from Bill Pulver. He wants me to go in for an interview this afternoon.” She chose her next words carefully, remembering her secrecy pact with Cindy Bayley: “You know how federal agents have been searching Malovich’s office?”

She could hear Silverman saying something about “another double shot”.

“Are you in a bar?”

“I wish. No, it’s just a caffeine stop…” He wasadding something about “more caramel and whipped cream”, then to her again: “What’s that Natalie?”

She repeated the bit about the FBI.

“Makes sense,” he said, “with a homicide case this prominent.”

“What I don’t understand is how both the police department and the FBI could be carrying out such separate investigations into Malovich’s murder.”

“How do you know they’re so separate? Though yes, it often does go that way. The federals bring the resources – and the interference. But you needn’t worry about Pulver. He’s solid. He’ll be trying to speak with everyone. This is what the police do really well, even at a small department like Sunnyvale. They’re dogged. They’ll run down the leads. They won’t give up.”

CHAPTER 20

Natalie stopped in to see Tom Nguyen on her way down to Sunnyvale Police station, ostensibly about her security report – but really to take the temperature, following that phone message break-in. Nguyen had never sounded more busy. He told her they’d have to catch up another time. The implication seemed clear enough to Natalie: that Nguyen knew very well she’d hacked in to his voice messages.

She drove on to All America Way. From the outside, Sunnyvale Police station had a fine sense of civic accessibility about it, surrounded with its mature trees and friendly signage. The temperature in the Valley had dropped to a pleasant seventy-seven degrees.

But the interview room Pulver led Natalie into was windowless and battleship grey. It contained nothing more than three chairs and a table. She set down her tote bag. There was a strongly institutional smell about the place. A young officer with the name tag STEVENS accompanied Pulver. He was crew cut, uniformed and deferentially silent, placing a file down on the table in front of him. Pulver offered Natalie a drink, and she accepted: coffee, black, no sugar.

The drinks machine was down the hall from the interview room. Through a small rectangular window, Natalie watched Pulver palm his face with his big, bubble-like hands.

What was he thinking?

They were almost four days into a homicide investigation. According to an old adage, the likelihood of apprehending a killer halved with every passing 48 hours. She thought about those reporters gathering at the crime scene and wondered just how easy it was to get any real detective work done with the modern, Internet-based news cycle. Specifically, how often the top brass needed updates – on the work that probably couldn’t progress, because of all the updating – that likely only heightened the need for updates.

What really mattered to Pulver? Well, there was the crime scene itself. Investigating teams had differing durations of control over crime scenes, she figured. On a busy section of freeway, control could last less than an hour. The area around Malovich’s apartment would likely still be locked down – but for how much longer, before people needed to get back to their homes, their parking spots?

The other issue would be identifying motive. The complicating factor here had to be finding people who’d recently or unusually entered Malovich’s life. The guy seemed to have had no roots whatsoever in America, and few real relationships of any kind. Had Malovich left behind any social ‘footprint’ at all?

And then there was the inter-agency coordination Ben had commented on – the feds bringing ‘the resources and the interference’. And what was that, written at the top of Stevens’ file? It was upside down, but readable, circled: ‘Monterey County Sheriff’s Department’. Through the window she saw Pulver returning, balancing three coffee cups as he re-entered the room.

Stevens closed the door and switched on a small digital recording device: “Interview with Natalie Chevalier, person of interest to the Yuri Malovich inquiry, commencing fifteen-o-seven Pacific Standard Time. For the record, Miss Chevalier has declined the offer of legal representation.”

The ‘person of interest’ designator came as a surprise. It all felt rather different to Ben’s assurances just a few hours before – that she ‘needn’t worry about Pulver…’

“OK Miss Chevalier, could you give us a brief account of your role at Clamor, how you came to be there. You can skip all non-essentials, we’ll ask follow-on questions.”

She tried to include everything as briefly as possible: her pre-existing relationship with Nguyen, the presentation at the Keaton and the Jasmine incident, Nguyen’s offer for her to become a security consultant, and the report she was now writing up.

“And how would you characterize Yuri Malovich’s role at the company?”

“By his job title: Head of Security and Privacy.”

“So is it fair to say, just going by title, that your roles overlapped?”

She paused. “Well yes, it’s common enough for an outside advisor or consultant to work together with a corporate officer in that way. Consider a senior external auditor and a Chief Accounting Officer –”

“Maybe,” Pulver said. “Would you say that your involvement was prompted by concerns over the way Yuri Malovich discharged his duties?”

She hesitated again. Stevens wrote a word down in his notebook. “I guess there may have been a level of frustration, yes, about Yuri not having fixed the problem that resulted in a trafficking victim appearing at an important investor presentation.”

“Were there other concerns about Malovich, which you were made aware of?”

“That was the primary one expressed to me.”

“Who?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You put it in the passive. Who expressed the concern to you?”

“Tom Nguyen, over our brunch together – when he first offered me the consulting role.”

Pulver took a moment, then said: “Were you aware of any strong views held by other management team members towards Malovich?”

She thought back to that Sunday strategy session and the argument over the Multi Identity Engine, which had somehow involved Malovich – only, she couldn’t remember how, and wasn’t inclined to pull out her notebook. “Not abnormally so.”

Again Pulver asked her to rephrase.

“From my understanding, in a successful start-up there’s always this jockeying for position with the prospect of such massive imminent wealth. At least, that was my feeling about how the team interacted when I observed them together. Look, I only met with Yuri Malovich twice, and he said little enough on each occasion –”

“You knew him prior to your involvement with Clamor?”

“No! I knew of him, because of the security thesis he’d written at Stanford. It was an influential text in the industry. But like I said, I only met him twice: I didn’t know him. ”

Pulver asked for the full name of the thesis and Stevens wrote it down. She started to think this interview had been a mistake. There was still time to back out or ask for a lawyer.

“OK,” Pulver said, and thought again for a moment, flipping back through his own notepad. “You mentioned this “massive immi-nent wealth”. You were aware then of how much money Malovich stood to make?”

“I was aware of how much his stock options would be worth, yes.”

“How did you come by that information?”

“From one of the investment bankers involved in the IPO process.” Natalie knew that Pulver knew which one. But Pulver avoided all mention of their mutual acquaintance, going down a different path:

“Would it be reasonable to assume then, that if Yuri Malovich was replaced as security head, his successor would enjoy a similarly outsized level of remuneration?”

She didn’t like where this was heading. Yet, she wanted to set the record straight: “Stock options aren’t like that. They’re largely a lottery. Yuri just happened to join the company early on. A successor wouldn’t receive anything like the option position he’d managed to accumulate.”

“But sorting out this kind of embarrassing situation: that’s gotta be worth a considerable amount to a company at this sensitive stage of its development?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash for a fixed term consulting contract,” she said, wanting to be as transparent as possible. She immediately regretted it. Both men’s eyebrows rose.

“A quarter of a mil’, cash – in addition to what they’d planned to pay Malovich. Perhaps I should be in private practice,” Pulver said, and Stevens smiled, but not really. “Security sure pays,” Pulver continued. “At least, at Clamor.us it does.”

He let that observation hang there longer than perfect courtesy allowed.

“Now just for housekeeping purposes: what were your coordinates Monday night?”

She couldn’t believe it. She’d heard it said so often on TV, at the movies: Where were you on the night of the murder? It just didn’t seem real to her. None of this seemed real. And what had she been doing on Monday night? She couldn’t even remember. Wait –

“I was flying back from Seattle, where I’d been to see old friends.”

“And your flight got in to Oakland, or SFO? At what time.”

“SFO, just after ten I think.”

He waited for her.

“I then drove straight back to the Keaton.”

“And what time did you arrive there?”

“I don’t remember. I was tired.”

Both men looked at each other, as though putting a pin in that one for later.

“OK, now the next day, you approached the crime scene –”

“– in the company of Ben Silverman,” she said, feeling betrayed by this whole situation now. Pulver looked at her like she was trying to sabotage his interview.

“– and you approached from the rear of Garden Court. There’s quite a dense row of eucalyptus bushes, I’m sure you recall.”

“Yup, the way Ben led me.”

“Why did you choose that approach?” Pulver asked, flat-out ignoring her remark.

“It wasn’t my choice,” Natalie reiterated. “If I were to guess: someone with an unmarked police car had blocked off the entranceway to Yuri’s apartment complex, and Ben and I had been to the Silicon Bean before, making it an easier path of approach.”

Both men looked at Natalie, weighing every one of her words. She didn’t need to know all the details to recognize that the no-mans land between the Silicon Bean café and the Garden Court complex was of unusual interest to them.

Pulver’s cell phone was ringing. He eyed the display: “Talk to me.” His thick limbs lifted him out of his chair and the room.

Silence followed. The air was unaccountably close. Had someone turned the heating way up? Which made Natalie think of something: this particular yoga exercise – like an internal lifting of the stomach into the chest, which almost made her pass out each time she’d attempted it. The effect was no different this time. Sure enough:

“You OK?” Stevens said with widening eyes.

“Not really,” she said, her face burning up.

“Jesus Christ, you need water?”

“That’d be great,” she exhaled. As soon as the door sucked to, she reached across and grabbed the file. What looked like ‘IS’ upside down became ‘51’, form 51s: the case notes. She flipped through, speed-reading. The more revealing ones read like a diary:

‘Malovich apartment frustratingly lacking in evidence. No signs of forced entry. Perhaps killer is an expert lock picker, I doubt it. In other important respects – the way the murder was dressed to look like suicide – this homicide appears to be the work of a rank amateur.

No killer this artless could have covered all their tracks…’

Presumably these entries would be written up into some investigative chronology. Another entry seemed to summarize the medical examiner’s findings:

‘ME flagged two issues. One, the conjunctivia in the deceased’s eyes: the way the capillaries burst isn’t consistent with rupture patterns seen after a noose snaps the human neck. Rather, it appears to indicate that death came slowly to Malovich, from asphyxia / strangulation. Two, the ME detected extensive, subcutaneous, post-mortem bruising around the deceased’s shoulders: “Combined with the lividity” – and I’m quoting Annelise verbatim – “this indicates the victim was dropped onto, possibly dragged along, hard ground”…’

The note then referenced the medical examiner’s report, marked ‘pending’. Natalie looked up through the small window. Mercifully the near water fountain was out of commission; Stevens had gone down to the far drinks machine. She kept flipping back-to-front, the entries becoming more recent and relevant with each turn of the page:

‘Clamor receptionist just commented on Malovich’s method of commute. Total paradox for a guy living in what is effectively a drive-though apartment complex that he didn’t actually drive. Owned a 2007 Toyota Camry with 189 miles on the clock. Shortest walk between the Clamor office and Garden Court being via the back lot of the Silicon Bean…’

Natalie could feel the growing urgency in Pulver’s comments: he needed manpower, resources – to find the evidence, the material witnesses. Before matter and short-term memory vanished. After interviewing the owner-manager of the Silicon Bean, he’d added:

‘Cafe was closed and empty at time of estimated death (11pm-midnight, ME reckoned). Something must turn up. Have ordered examination of twelve bags of dry brush from the disused water culvert separating the two properties. Fair amount of material to search through for DNA, I know. But forensics already turned up a button that matched the shirt Malovich wore on his last day –  with more sewing thread than usual for a button that’d merely fallen off…’

Stevens was returning, 20 yards away. She read on:

‘An overall picture is emerging, looking something like this: The killer knew Malovich’s commuting pattern. Finding the right occasion, late Monday night, the killer tracked Malovich home, overpowering him some place around that water culvert out back of the Silicon Bean, where the terrain is extra dark at night and the ground recedes from view –’

Stevens at 10 yards.

‘Killer manages to incapacitate Malovich with the Professional stun gun then asphyxiatse him. Killer rolls Malovich’s body through the eucalyptus bushes where he (she? – Malovich just 125 lbs) waits to ensure the coast is clear, taking the opportunity to fish out his keys from his pocket. Over the low wall they go, into the rear lot of Garden Court, then to Malovich’s end-of-block apartment ten yards away, and finally the mock hanging…’

An image came to her of Malovich suspended in that small, fetid place: his burst eyes bulging, his once sallow skin now waxen...

The door blew open. The file was already back on the detective’s side of the table, right way round. Pulver picked it up and thrust it into the chest of Stevens behind, causing him to spill the water.

They sat down. Pulver put his phone back in his breast pocket and Stevens handed Natalie what remained of her water.

The two men took a moment, getting settled.

“See, this is the slight problem we got, Miss Chevalier.” Pulver leaned in a little: “That in the space of a single day, you show up at the scenes of two sets of homicides.”

His eyes locked onto hers like lasers.

It made no sense! “But who – the other one?” she stammered.

Pulver waited a beat.

Then he told her, and it floored her like a prize fighter’s one-two: Jon Vogel dead!

The suspicion that she was connected with both killings: multiple!

Suddenly it felt like the floor was opening, swallowing her. She felt her eyes widen: “Vogel – How –?” she gasped.

“We’re still verifying that,” Pulver said, in a warmer tone of voice all of sudden, apparently accepting her version of events, finally. “The report we received earlier today, even I’m having difficulty accepting.

“And believe me, I thought I’d seen it all.”

CHAPTER 21

Natalie was nearing Monterey when she thought to call Ben. Her mind was going in six directions at once.

She’d managed to get through to Vogel’s neighbor by phone, and while Star hadn’t exactly invited her round for dinner, she hadn’t totally discouraged her either. It was the closest she’d get to the circumstances of Vogel’s death.

Ben picked up on the second ring. “Holy Cow,” was all he managed, for a good few seconds. Eventually he came to. “Fuck. Jon Vogel is dead! And with utterly bizarre timing.”

“How so?”

“Schweitz and Carmichael have brought the IPO forward to Monday morning. An investor committed to take half the issue. They think the company is hot enough to get the rest away fast, so they want to go now. The final registration statement was filed at lunchtime and announced after the market closed.”

“Which investor?” Natalie asked.

“Some sovereign wealth fund based out of the Middle East.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter what I think. Never mind: how did Jon die?”

“Don’t know. I’m on my way down to see Star, the neighbor in the beach cottage, to try to learn more.”

“Damn, this is starting to wig me out.”

“How d’you mean?”

“I don’t know. I could leave the city right now and join you?”

“No, it’s OK. I’m almost there. But I did have a question for you. You remember last time we drove down together, we were talking about Malovich’s stock options? You were explaining how his options cancel and everyone else’s stake rises accordingly.”

“Sure.”

“Well how does it work with Vogel’s forty percent?”

“Oh, I see where you’re going. No, Vogel bought that stock outright. It’s his, free and clear.”

“Huh.” It didn’t seem to fit any pattern.

“– or was his,” Ben said. “Ownership now being governed by his will, I guess.”

“OK,” Natalie said. “I’d better drive. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

“Please do. And call me anyway, to let me know you got back safe.”

Outside Vogel’s entranceway was a Monterey County Sheriff’s cruiser with its distinctive badge: a bear lumbering across a gold star. There were three other cars, two unmarked, all with police lights on. The flashing lights occasionally synchronized but more often flickered wildly at one another. People were leaving the property – earthy folk wearing loincloths and other strange attire, several carrying muddy sleeping bags over their shoulders. Evidently the self-sufficiency camp had been disbanded.

Natalie put the Taurus back into Drive and proceeded on down Pine Glade Way. She didn’t know the direct route to Star’s place, but guessed there was an access road further along. Sure enough, a prayer flag marked out a track leading off the main road.

The track wound its way down through thick woodland, the sturdy Taurus thudding and rattling away. As with Vogel’s driveway, the woodland began to open out, this time into silvery trunks with high branches. It was like driving through a giant pincushion.  Between the spindly trees, she could see the water of the westward cove flash golden-white in the low sun. She tried to phone Star to check she was on the right track, but her phone had moved out of range. Then she saw a horsebox, and the beach cottage itself.

Star was ashen-faced as she opened the back door. Natalie gave her a hug and the older woman’s bony frame sank into hers.

They went in and sat at a wooden table near the fire. Star was in the middle of supper: thin, sweetcorn soup and day-old walnut bread. She offered Natalie some and Natalie gratefully accepted, realizing that she hadn’t eaten all day.

For a while, the two women sat in a stable sort of silence, just the clink of spoon on bowl, the fizzing and popping of the fire and cries of faraway gulls. Finally Star spoke:

“You know we were there, at Altamont – that December of sixty-nine. They say it marked the end of the sixties, an’ I guess they were right. We were up front, next to the stage. I remember thinking how strange it was, with the stage being only three feet high an’ all. But the vibe was so different. It was so sudden. Something in the air just shifted. We were gonna leave, during Airplane’s set, but Jon wanted so bad to see the Stones. That was Jon: he always wanted to be right there, in the moment.

“We saw everything, with our own eyes: that guy Hunter wave the gun at Jagger, the flash of metal as the Hells Angel security crew piled in – Sweet Jesus, did the curtain come down that night. Like hope was gone, before it ever had chance to take hold. And now it really is gone – forever.”

She was rocking back and forward on her hands.

“Star, what happened today, to Jon?”

She rocked more determinedly. “The lions,” she said.

The lions? Natalie somehow knew what was coming.

“Someone let ‘em out. Pulled the fence down. Hadn’t been fed in four days. Someone told them not to feed the lions.”

“Someone told who, Star?  Was there an outside company involved, or something?  Did someone give instructions to a pet services company – that the animals were not to be fed? Is that what happened?”

“They left meat, in the top of the tree, above Jon’s office.”

Natalie recalled the foreign smell in Vogel’s tree house.

“The lions tried to get it, but found him and Mysty first,” and she crumpled forward, face in hands. Natalie put a hand on the woman’s knobbly upper-back. Star looked up, direct into Natalie’s eyes: “They were torn apart!” and she gave a guttural wail; “torn to pieces! It took three state troopers with rifles to put those lions down up the canyon!”

The sense of unreality returned, stronger then ever. “Were others killed, wounded?”

Star’s head lowered into her hands. It seemed to shake ‘no’.

“I tried to sleep this afternoon,” she gasped, and Natalie noted the prescription meds at the other end of the table. Most were familiar from her mother’s medicine cabinet: strong stuff. She mustered her clearest voice: “Star, there’s something I need to ask you. I realize this is a terrible time, but –”

Star continued with her bent-head rocking.

“– what happens to Jon’s estate now? Do you know who inherits?”

“The Protectorate.”

She recalled from her last visit how Star was a trustee of this thing.

Star: “It all goes to the Protectorate of the Eternal Now. To hold together what’s left,” and a hand waved around them.

Yes, Vogel and Star had been lovers, Natalie was now sure. Although, logically that was merely an inference – of him appointing her trustee. Perhaps he’d simply trusted her? But something didn’t compute. What? She decided to come at it from another angle:

“There were no next-of-kin?”

The older woman kept up her rocking, increasingly pronounced.

Directly: “Did Jon have any children, Star?”

“Oh God,” she wailed; “I swore my secrecy to him! At the Biker’s Tavern, up the highway! On New Years Day of, what, shit – nineteen seventy something, I don’t remember! I can’t say!”

“It’s OK. There, it’s OK. And you’re sure you’re not an inheritor, Star?”

The elder lady looked at her sharply: “I’ll show you the will! You can see for yourself! It all goes to the Protectorate, to hold together what’s left!

“That’s OK, I don’t need see the will,” said Natalie, coaxing her back down. But if Star had the will, then that likely made her an executor of the estate – as well as a trustee of the inheriting organization.

Reflexively, she looked back up at the bookshelves, for the photo she’d noticed when first here, of a young Vogel, with a younger child –

It had been removed.

CHAPTER 22

She thought to call Nguyen on her way back, but decided against. Instead, she called Ben, letting him know the fate of 40% of the company that was going public on Monday morning. Back at the Keaton, Rosanna, the desk manager, approached her:

“Miss Chevalier, I just wanted to impress upon you how seriously we take the security of our guests here, especially our female guests. I asked the security team to edit together the CCTV footage of your arrival last night, and of Max assisting you up to your room. The camera in the corridor outside is time stamped and shows Max leaving you at your door –”

“Really, there’s no need.”

“This is the Keaton. And I understand how upsetting memory loss can be,” Rosanna said sweetly. “My mom has early Alzheimer’s.”

Refusing to accept any further protests, Rosanna gave Natalie the disk.

And the disk gave Natalie an idea. She arranged to meet Detective Pulver early the next day. She felt a rush of euphoria as she drove up to the front of the Silicon Bean café: her memory had been accurate. She parked and walked round to the rear – there was another.

Pulver was waiting in his cruiser. She had on tan-leather sandals, beaten-up True Religion jeans and a lilac polo top. Her hair was in a loose ponytail and she wore tinted sunglasses. For his part, Pulver looked like he’d stepped out of a 1950s Sears Roebuck catalogue. He chewed his gum, taking it all in.

“Smile,” she said. “Look: you’re on camera.”

His eyes flicked up to the eaves of the building. The camera was tiny. But it was there.

They found Josie, the owner. She was a big girl, all in black with lots of rings – including two for her nose. Down one shoulder ran a tattoo of a tarot card called the Hangman: bad boyfriend break-up perhaps, but an eerie coincidence nonetheless.

Pulver started to reprimand her for not mentioning the CCTV cameras during their interview two days prior. Josie explained that her building insurer had required them to bring her deductible down: she hadn’t revisited the system once since installation. Pulver was mostly angry at himself, Natalie knew.

“Could we take a peek?” she said.

“Sure,” Josie said, and led them into a small office-cum-stock-room filled with towers of paper cups and sacks of lids. “I guess this is it,” she said, more as a question than a statement.

It was a VICON VDR-204 digital video recording machine: standard, closed-circuit surveillance kit. Input for four cameras, set to record at five frames-per-second. On that setting, the 300-gig hard drive would go for months before needing to be backed up. The machine was operated by simple front panel controls. You could search by time, date or alarm – the alarm being redundant in this case. Natalie also liked the ‘JOG/Shuttle’ dial that afforded quick and responsive playback and frame-by-frame viewing. Pulver would no doubt have preferred the whole shebang to be bagged, logged and turned over to the forensics. But against that, Natalie knew, he had to weigh investigative velocity.

The machine had apparently come with a flat screen monitor, which Natalie now unpacked and switched on.

“What’s the time range we’re looking at?” she asked.

“Monday 11pm to midnight – give or take three hours.”

“8pm to 3am,” she said. “That’s a lot of frames.”

It soon became apparent that the scene shot from the back of the Bean was one of almost total darkness. Just a dim pool of phosphorescence at the bottom of the screen, from what may have been a down light above the rear exit: whatever it was, the camera was angled to look over it, out into an undisturbed grade of black.

“Josie, could you leave us be for a moment?” Pulver said.

“Sure. I should open up. D’you guys want coffee?”

Both hesitated. “No thanks,” they said together, Natalie smiling thankfully.

Pulver waited for the door to close. “There was a stun gun. It emits a light arc.”

“I see,” and Natalie sped up the shuttle.

The time field whirred through the minutes and seconds, the image unchanging: nine o’clock, ten o’clock – “There!” Pulver said.

Natalie shuttled back: 22:10, 22:09, 22:08, manipulating the sensitive control just so. Sure enough, there was a splash of white at 22:08:32.

The image was vexingly low resolution. That was the trade off for such small cameras – and of course the settings, allowing so many months’ of recording time.

“Can we intensify it or something?”

“I can zoom in…”

Between the white arc and the surrounding darkness, one or two elements became distinguishable. It was like a flattened sand tray that had been nudged just so, the grains minutely reorganized. Now discernible were branches, maybe – or stems? – of the bushes behind. There were also two vertical forms, more solid, in the middle.

“That’s him,” Pulver said, his plump fingernail hovering over a pattern of pixels, right above the white splash.

“Where? Move your finger –”

Natalie could just make out a triangle of black dots, each one barely more than a pixel’s-breadth. She zoomed in as far as she could. Sure enough, the dots appeared to be the underside of a nose and two eye sockets – like a skull, up-lit by the white light.

“That’s the killer’s face,” Pulver said. “Can I get a print?”

Natalie hooked up a printer sitting at a nearby desk. The printer whirred. Pulver snapped out the image and scrutinized it in the light of a high window.

Meanwhile, Natalie played back the sequence leading up to the light arc, slowly, at three frames per second. It was like watching a very early, silent movie.

“What’re you looking for?” he said.

“Here,” and she pointed to the bottom right of the screen.

“I don’t see anything.”

“A small wand of light moving. See?”

He wasn’t sure.

She said: “Let’s go check something out.”

He followed her through the coffee shop, out back. To the right was a pile of broken down boxes depressed in the center. Surrounding it on the ground were cigarette butts.

“Would you mind standing beside the building over there, where Yuri would’ve walked by?”

Pulver did so. She sat down, recreating the view of the smoking witness.

“Where would you say that up-lit face was?” she said.

“Right about where that snapped-off branch is,” and he pointed to a bush in the middle of the eucalyptus row. “Or a yard in front, I guess.” From their respective positions it formed the apex of an isosceles triangle.

“I reckon that’s fifteen yards away from each of us,” she said.

“Give or take,” he agreed.

“So the person sat here couldn’t help notice the people go past, and what happened.”

“A material wit. No question about it.”

“Thing is, I’m sat here smoking.” She turned towards him. “Surely the killer would’ve noticed me?”

“That depends,” Pulver said, “on how experienced, calm and collected the killer was. It was dark. This was a pursuit. Adrenaline does strange things to a person’s senses. And there are few higher doses than when you’re taking another man’s life. Playing God. He might have gotten tunnel vision.”

Could he really not have seen the smoking witness? It was possible. “Not a professional killer then.” She didn’t want to let on that she’d seen the 51s.

“Judging by this and other aspects of the case, he or she most assuredly was not.”

Pulver looked back and up. Natalie tried to guess what the detective was thinking. The camera was discreet, beneath the eaves, but still visible. If the killer had cased the route at night, it would have been hard to spot, but it did seem unlikely that this was the work of a professional killer – unless it was an incredibly rushed job.

“And the killer was known to Malovich?” she asked.

Pulver didn’t reply. But he didn’t deny it.

They kept looking at the triangulation of the path by which Malovich and the killer had entered the camera’s view, the arc of the stun gun and the fleetingly lit skull – then the location of the mystery witness, known only by his cigarette wand. The sky was sultry, slightly overcast. With her sunglasses on, it made it easier to imagine the scene at night.

“Of course!” she snapped her fingers, as she was apt to do on such occasions. “Let’s go look at the VDR again.”

Camera 3, covering the inside seating area, showed a Hispanic-looking man walking out through the fire escape at 22:06:47, and re-entering with faster motion at 22:08:30 – two seconds before Malovich was stunned. It looked like he had something to hide too.

“Josie, could you come in here for a moment!” Pulver hollered.

“Shoot, that’s Sal!” she said, staring at the frozen figure. She shook her head.

“Who’s Sal?”

“Sal Polanco. Used to work here. Took off Wednesday, the day after someone – I’m guessing him! – cleared out the cash till.” She looked closer: “What’s he doing? Casing the place out?”

“Salvatore – Polanco.” Pulver wrote it in his notebook. “OK: address?”

“Like I said, he took off. I called his place Wednesday morning when he didn’t show up for the early shift, and his housemate said he’d left.”

“Did you report the cash theft to the police?”

“No, for a coupla reasons.”

“Which were?”

“The float was a few hundred bucks, well below my insurance deductible.”

“And the second?”

“His housemate said that he’d left for Mexico.”

CHAPTER 23

Bill Pulver’s departing cruiser passed Adam Lau as the federal agent pulled into the parking lot, the front grill of his Acura dipping and rising. Lau had texted Natalie to see whether they could grab a few minutes together. Meeting FBI agents in their cars was fast becoming routine.

“The Pulverizer,” Lau said, inviting comment, as she got into the passenger seat. She didn’t know what level of cooperation was occurring between the local police department and the federals; certainly, she didn’t want to become a go-between.

“You heard about Jon Vogel?” he started over.

“Yeah – bizarre. Unbelievable.”

He shook his head in agreement. “Bizarre, and at the same time meaningful.”

“How so?”

“This makes it the more likely that other people connected with Clamor will be targeted. You need to take precautions. I’m guessing you don’t have a gun?”

“No.”

“Well you need one.”

“Well, I’ll bear that in mind.”

She thought of the gun rituals cherished her by mom’s hunting-and-fishing side of the family, down in South Carolina.

“Natalie – Jesus. Look, I’m going to give you my spare service weapon. There’ll be some re-registration paperwork, but we have to secure your safety – now.”

“Agent Lau, that hardly seems necessary –”

“Call me Adam. I already ran your background. No mental health issues or criminal convictions on record, you’ll be pleased to hear. Now, reach into that glove compartment and pull out the box.”

She did, and handed it him. It was a moulded plastic case filled with textured grey foam, holding a boxy looking piece.

“This is a Glock 17C. The bureau swears by them. They’re Austrian made and extremely safe, which is of course our first and last concern with any firearm.”

She stared at the foreign-looking object resting in his hand.

“You ever used a handgun?”

“No.”

“Any firearm?”

She shook her head.

“Never mind,” he said, cupping the gun with one hand while gesturing with the other. “The slide at the top here draws the first round up into the chamber.” And with a supreme economy of effort, he ejected the magazine from the handle, rasped the top slide back and forward and pushed the magazine back in with the heal of his palm, leaving it unarmed. “For your peace of mind, there are two internal safeties: a firing pin safety and a drop safety. They’re disengaged one after the other when the trigger is pulled, re-activated once it’s released.”

“Wait, run that by me again.”

“The internal safeties? They allow you to carry the gun with a magazine in, reducing time-to-deploy. They allow you to focus on target acquisition, rather than manipulating the kinds of external safeties seen on other handguns. OK, the magazine,” and he pointed to the boxy handle. “The Glock 17 feeds from a double column box magazine with a seventeen round capacity. We’re talking nine millimetre parabellums: more than enough to get you out of trouble.”

She didn’t especially want to hold the gun, let alone fire it.

“Sighting,” he continued. “Hold the gun with your arms out straight but not rigid. Do not point it up vertical like in Charlie’s Angels. Do not point it sideways like in Lethal Weapon. Keep the sighting arrangement nice and straight between you and the target.”

“What’s the sighting arrangement?”

“Here,” and he turned the top ridge towards her. “This ramped front sight at the end of the barrel, and the notch near the back – see? Now, pay attention: there’s a white dot on the front post and a white border round the rear notch.”

She took the gun and pointed it through the windshield with one eye squished shut, aligning the white markings with the row of bushes behind the Bean. The polymer grip felt warmer to the touch than she’d expected. It occurred to her that only a man would have invented an object like this, designed for such a singular purpose. But she thought too of that light arc and the skull on the CCTV footage.

“Now, real important: when you squeeze the trigger, do so gently. No sudden or jerky movements. Remember to breath if you can. If you’re ever in a hostile situation for real, your adrenalin levels will be through the roof. Your heart will be banging in your ears. Time will feel totally distorted. You have to remain calm and present – or it may be your last out-breath. Deep breathing’s the only way I’ve found to cope.”

She was trying to get used to the feel of the gun, but she just couldn’t.

“The good news is that the 17C is designed to help you out,” he was saying. “It has slots cut into the barrel and slide, to compensate for muzzle recoil and rise.”

She placed the gun back in the foam cutaway and snapped the carrying case shut. That was quite enough recorded death and anticipated mayhem for one morning.

“You handle it well – with respect,” he said. “You ever thought about a career in the bureau? Protecting people for real? We need smart people with technology backgrounds. And, you’ve found a fan in Cindy. She doesn’t normally open up with people the way she has with you.”

Natalie didn’t reply, commenting instead: “This just all feels so weird to me, Brastias. Adam I mean! You know, like who you are, in MultiQuest?”

“An armourer?” and he raised one eyebrow in acknowledgment. “That’s the other thing I need to talk with you about. Stuff’s been happening up on the Scintanel Plateau that may have a bearing on this.”

“Bearing on what?”

“Vogel, Malovich,” he said. “Either that, or it’s one helluva coincidence.”

“Give me an hour or so to get back in the game.”

She had already uninstalled the ‘mq:hot-MOD-els’ patch from her laptop, allowing MultiQuest: Dark Ages to run normally again. If others chose to see her in that ridiculous get-up then that was their problem. She had in fact been playing the unmodified version for an hour or so each morning, receiving training in swordsmanship, jousting and even un-mounted combat. By way of graduation acknowledgment, she’d been given her own sword: a rather dull-looking piece, unlikely to command much of a premium on eBay, but still tempered to battle-grade. She’d also come by a quite fetching fighting cape, the shoulder-clasp of which was fashioned with innumerable emeralds.

It was a three-hour, hard-riding horse journey up onto the Scintanel Plateau in the foothills of the Atalantans – beyond which lay the polar regions to the north, and the never worlds to the west. The view back to the Quorn Valley was spectacular, causing them to stop every so often and rest their horses. Riding with her and Brastias was a white-robed cleric called Tolemy, who hailed from someplace out east. He was carrying their identification standard – for the Order of the Knights Templar. Natalie studied it for the first time. It was a circular design, with ancient-looking letters and symbols running round the edge. In the center were two knights on the same horse, wearing full battle regalia and bearing pointed shields with red crosses. The horse that the knights shared looked to be acquitting itself of the extra load pretty well. Tolemy explained that the image depicted the Order’s earlier state of poverty. Knights needed to share horses back then. Thereafter, as a result of countless treasure quests, the Order had become one of the wealthiest in the realm. The motto meant: ‘Not for self but for God’. Tolemy spoke with pride, yet in a most sombre way. Natalie wondered why.

On they rode, up into the higher air. Nearing the edge of the plateau, she halted Phariance, allowing the others to catch up.

“Where d’you learn to ride like that?” Brastias asked, breathless.

“A rider’s only as good as her mount,” she said, patting Phariance’s foaming neck. The horse’s ears flicked this way and that. “What’s this?” she said.

Ahead of them was a solitary tree, lichen-covered and bent over by the wind. Hanging upside down from a branch was an emaciated man, perhaps a vassal or a retainer. Quite dead.

He hung by one leg, the calf of the other folded horizontal – making a characteristic upside-down ‘4’: the signature shape of the Hangman tarot card. Natalie thought of Josie at the Silicon Bean café – her shoulder tattoo. She couldn’t help wonder whether the likes of Josie were already avid players of MultiQuest. Her red, black and blue skin art had looked recent. But Natalie needed to keep her head in the game now.

Tolemy arrived and set down his standard. “I’m afraid to say,” he breathed hard, “that this arrangement has a particular meaning in these lands, and an inauspicious one at that: as a harbinger of darkness, and doom.” His words dripped disapproval. “It’s acquired almost cult-like status.”

The three riders climbed up on to the plateau, a wide expanse of grassland. The wind made a continuous low whistle, occasionally ascending to a high-pitched wail. Directly in front of them was a semi-circle of pavilions, brilliantly colored – in scarlets and lime-greens – yet utterly wrecked, the high gusts ripping through the tattered remnants.

Brastias turned his horse to face hers while Tolemy attended to something.

“We need to talk about Rage,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Who he is we’re not exactly sure. Sightings have been rare and perhaps apocryphal at that. What we do know is that he came from the east by south-east, and that he’s been making his way west ever since. That he’s known first-and-foremost by his wake – of murder and plunder. We also know that among his entourage are various beasts of prey: this here being the work of a pride of lions, let loose.” He looked at her knowingly.

She now understood the primary villain’s identity in the game, and the parallel with Vogel’s death. But was Rage really another player – or a ‘non-player character’, i.e. one operated by the game itself?

They circled the scene, remaining mounted and vigilant. Various men lay fallen. Tolemy was attending to one in particular.

“John de Monfrey,” Brastias said. “Le roi père, or father king. One of the regional successor kings chosen by Arthur himself, and a patron of our Order.”

Tolemy had reconstituted the body, laying him out in chain mail, visor closed and palm of right hand rested on heart. For some unexpected reason, she thought of her dad’s death, or disappearance. Her chest became heavy and, feeling her eyes well, she walked her horse forward a few strides.

Between two torn-apart pavilions was another figure: a young woman, kneeling – with hands and feet bound. The catch in Natalie’s throat was checked by something else: a tumbling sensation inside. For the young woman had been beheaded.

“You see why I needed to bring you here? Why your protection is so important?” Brastias said, rejoining her.

“What were these people doing up here anyway?” she managed.

“Preparing for a tourney.”

She nodded, as though at some destiny she was powerless to avert. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Tolemy finished his pre-funeral benedictions, rising slowly from where John de Monfrey lay slain. Then they spurred their horses and galloped back down, re-entering the walled village shortly before nightfall.

CHAPTER 24

Tom Nguyen had still not returned her calls from Friday night. There wasn’t much point continuing her report till he did. She left the hotel to eat dinner in Chinatown and consider the week’s tumultuous events. The lengthy drives down to Sunnyvale and the Monterey Peninsular had afforded her some measure of reflection on what had taken place, but so much had happened now.

It was almost impossible to take it all in. Since last Saturday: the strange Sunday strategy session in Sunnyvale presided over by Wisnold, the identity theft on Clamor and the revealing of the ‘Wu’ symbol up in Seattle, Malovich dead and his killer appearing on CCTV behind the Silicon Bean, Vogel’s own extraordinary death at his property in Monterey, the time she felt watched in the Clamor offices, the even spookier night at home with Towse at the top of Pacific Heights… and then there was MultiQuest, this Rage character and the killings there – not to mention an armourer who happened to be an FBI Agent who’d just handed her a gun! “So how was your week?” she imagined calling Stacey or Melinda in Seattle. Her life was heading in a new, unreal trajectory. Or maybe it had a logic of its own?

She just needed time to think.

For Sunday turned out to be no day of rest. Cindy Bayley woke her at 7:30am asking her to breakfast, pulling up at the Keaton not twenty minutes later, with Brastias, or rather Adam Lau, in the passenger seat. Natalie jumped in the back and Cindy’s bright blue eyes met hers.

“Well ain’t your Sunday morning just got a whole lot better honey,” said Cindy. “Coffee an’ eggs-over-easy, on the Feebies.”

And with that, Cindy navigated her Yukon into the light, northbound traffic on Grant.

Cindy explained in rather cryptic fashion how they were in town following a tip off from another law enforcement agency: for health-related reasons, they may have to go in and rescue a group of smuggled girls approaching their destination point. Right here in the city. Cindy said she’d been hoping to maintain surveillance for longer, to cast the net wider in preparation for a larger, more coordinated bust. It all sounded rather vague and disjointed but the intelligence gathered suggested the destination for the girls was nearby, so they couldn’t stray far.

Cindy knew of a good local diner in neighboring North Beach. The two agents seemed remarkably relaxed, considering. Perhaps it was their way of dealing with the limitless intrusions of work. The cold front had lingered over the city. Large raindrops still fell, but intermittently, the car’s moisture-sensitive wipers only occasionally reacting. Adam resumed a briefing about the events in MultiQuest, and the character called Rage:

“Sometimes these characters turn out to be NPCs,” he was telling Cindy.

“NPCs?”

“Non Player Characters, controlled by the software of the game itself. As opposed to a human player, that is. But the consensus view among the gamers I’ve talked to is that he’s a Player Character alright. If we could get his account details from the game company, or his ISP – and any related email correspondence, we could crack this case wide open.”

“That’s a toughie,” Cindy said. “Proving probable cause to a judge, based on events in some virtual world?”

He said: “Do we need to wait for a beheading to demonstrate probable cause? A high status individual called John was killed by a bunch of lions, at the instigation of a character called Rage.” He let that hang there.

Cindy was silent for a second, then said: “OK, lemme see what I can do.” She turned her attention back to Natalie.

“We got something to show ya, girlfriend,” and she nodded to Adam, who passed back a piece of paper. “We found this among Malovich’s papers. Scribbled along the bottom of a power point presentation.”

“Let’s go round clockwise,” Cindy said, keeping her eyes on Grant and the festooned stores of Chinatown. “Starting at seven o’clock: the ‘fifty one percent’ circled, annotated ‘Clamor’ – we’re guessing the goal of whatever’s going on here is majority control. Adding up all the percentages above gets you to fifty one.”

“From left to right, “ Adam took over: “the thirty nine percent we assume to be Wisnold’s.”

“Why Wisnold’s?” Natalie said.

He shrugged. “Only he, as founder, would have such a large stake.”

“Not true,” Natalie said. “Jon Vogel also had around forty percent of the company.” But it got her thinking, about Ben’s account of his meeting with Wisnold and Swaine, and the young CEO’s apparent urge for control.

“OK,” Adam said, correcting his copy.

“I know Malovich had five percent,” Natalie said, reading across the row.

“What about the one per cent?” Adam asked.

“Could have been any number of people,” Natalie said.

“Nancy Wu?” Cindy asked.

Natalie wondered why Nancy. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I could make a call.”

“That’s OK, we’ll handle it. We just wanted to get some extra context before firing off questions. The six percent,” she resumed, “making up the fifty-one total: this seems to go with an entity called Multiworld. You ever heard of that?”

“The investment bank handling the IPO was trying to find that out too. They were having a hell of a time doing so. Apparently certain disclosure forms, I forget which, were never filled out when this Multiworld entity invested. The bankers even tried calling the Aruba Chamber of Commerce to see if they knew.”

“Aruba, huh. And did they?”

“I don’t know.” Natalie looked over the names on the right hand side of the sheet, recognizing ‘Surefar’ – Surefar Enjoy of course being the password-protected website she’d accessed from the illicit Clamor profiles. Then she remembered Cindy’s previous comments about organized crime in the Bay Area – the escort and prostitution rings, the ‘daisy chains’ handling the cash and the mysterious ‘burn’ companies thwarting investigative efforts. Perhaps only now was the puzzle being solved. But how, she wasn’t clear.

And something struck her as odd: “If it is Malovich’s five per cent shown here, his death means that this no longer sums to fifty-one. His options go away, raising everyone else’s stake by five per cent, but that would only get you to forty eight point something – not enough for majority control.” There seemed to be other questions they were overlooking, but Natalie couldn’t quite think which. She said: “Maybe Yuri wasn’t directly involved, but it was enough that he suspected something to get himself killed.”

“How would the killer have known though – that Malovich knew, when this sheet lay buried in a pile of papers behind his desk?” Adam asked.

“We don’t know,” Cindy said. “Maybe he mentioned his suspicions to someone.”

Natalie looked at the right hand side again – the arrows and dollar signs pointing back to Multiworld. If it meant that these organizations were funding Multiworld’s acquisition of stakes in Clamor, then the sums involved would have needed to be large. Was that possible? Was that what Malovich had suspected? The question mark he’d written alongside seemed to suggest that he didn’t know either.

“What are ‘LLA’ and ‘Sayonara’?” Natalie asked.

“I’m sorry,” Cindy said matter-of-factly. “We can’t tell you as much as we’d like to.”

They were getting snarled up in traffic, trying to drop down to the North Beach section of Columbus Avenue. Natalie knew what Surefar Enjoy was. And wasn’t Sayonara an old war movie about some marriage between a serviceman and a Japanese girl – in Korea? It seemed to fit a pattern. “But if these organizations are doing what I strongly suspect them of doing, why can’t you close them down anyway?” Natalie said.

Cindy bristled. “Trafficking – primarily of young women – is the third biggest illicit industry in the world. Yet compared to arms control or the War on Drugs, the policing of sex trafficking is still in the stone age. Now why is that? Maybe because at the end of the day, sex trafficking is driven by prostitution, which in turn is fed by porn, and the majority of men – cops, medics and judges included – are users, one way or another.”

Outside, the cause of the traffic hold-up became clear: whistles and percussive chaos surrounded them as a banner went past announcing ‘North Beach Gay Pride Day – Find us on Clamor.us’.

“But if the supply was shut down?” Natalie said, looking back down at the sheet.

“Oh honey, let me put this in context. Korea. A country the size of Indiana, with an estimated 330,000 sex workers, 80,000 brothels and 70 red light districts. Porn and prostitution contribute twenty billion bucks to its GDP – more than electricity and gas combined!” Cindy was drumming her fingernails on the steering wheel. The march moved past them slowly, horns and yells rising above the rattle and din. Having given up on breakfast in North Beach, Cindy was trying to get back to Columbus southbound, supposedly still open to traffic.

“Then what? What can be done?” asked Natalie, sensing Cindy’s deeper despair.

“Criminalize the purchase of sex services, right here in the US. Like Sweden has. Move the risk and responsibility back onto the johns, where it belongs!”

“Sex services including pornography?”

A large man went past dressed entirely in black leather, complete with peaked cap. He was pushing himself along on a pink bicycle. He looked to be having fun with it, the parody of it all. He waved at them. Adam narrowed his gaze quizzically. His lapel was crackling…

“10-4,” he replied, then to Cindy: “ICE has the address, half-a block from Mission. Mission and Sixth. They want to go in.” So Immigration and Customs Enforcement was handling the operation.

“When?” Cindy asked.

“Right now.”

“Shit, thanks a bunch guys,” she said, using her horn, to no avail: it merely blended in with the carnivalesque chaos. She reached beneath the steering column for a fuzz light and thrust it on the roof, flipping the siren on. It was absolutely deafening, immediately parting the nearside of Columbus. To the crowd’s surprise and catcalls, they roared through, soon joining Market, speeding down to Mission – Adam checking the magazine and action of his weapon as they went. Things seemed to happen faster than Natalie could process. There was a series of radio exchanges, the car nosed into a narrow alleyway, accelerated frighteningly then sluthered to a halt on wet cardboard behind a black sports utility vehicle and an ageing container vehicle open at the rear. Doors flew open. Adam turned to Natalie and raised his left palm like he was stopping traffic: Stay Here, then the assembled group of agents disappeared down a passageway between the two buildings. She saw Adam pull back the slide of his Glock; she glimpsed the white letters ‘I’, ‘C’, ‘E’ emblazoned across broad shoulders of navy-blue windcheaters, glowing strangely in the gloom.

Then all was quiet. No gunshots. No great drama. The loud drone and dull thud of a chopper hovering, a common enough sound. Just another Sunday morning in the city. A smell emanated from the rear opening of that container: in the enclosed alleyway, it was like a garbage truck that hadn’t been emptied, ever.

She reached forward and closed the Yukon’s front doors.

Time ticked on: ten, twenty minutes.

Two ICE agents came out the passageway, walked past the car: “– younger all the time,” she could hear one of them saying. Then Adam reappeared, waving her back.

“Did you get anyone?” she asked.

“The Dragon, as he’s known in these parts: Dragan Voransky, a 34 year old Armenian. Your garden-variety, street level pimp. He won’t talk, and he’ll probably be back at it within two years.”

The passageway was strewn with busted furniture, rotting garbage and broken glass, which the other agents stepped into to let them pass. At the far end, in a musty alcove formed by a rusted water-heater and a huge fan, trembled a huddle of young girls, wearing soiled lingerie, none of them even in their teens from what Natalie could tell. One of them had a badly cut foot. An agent was tending to the gathering mess of crimson.

They entered the back of the building.

Inside the doorway came rank odours: the yeasty smell of fresh semen, the stench of used cooking oil. The rooms were disorientatingly warren-like – improvised partitions, mattresses, makeshift latrines. Hell on earth. Shouting from somewhere – a Miranda warning? – translated into Eastern European or some such. A super-sized box of condoms, dropped, the distinctive wrappers spilling out. A computer terminal, which someone had hastily logged out of – the login page being for Surefar Enjoy. So right here was that physical-world meeting place, in its depressingly unoriginal guise. Right here, in the middle of the city.

Her head swam.

She followed Adam down a corridor into a far room. A young female ICE agent was retching into a scum-encrusted basin. Further inside the room, she saw Cindy and someone else tending to a young girl, glossy with perspiration, twitching violently. In the half-light the scene looked almost elegiac, like an old master’s painting. Except the girl had a gaping wound at the base of her neck, grey-white muscle tendon peering out.

Someone had tried to behead her.

CHAPTER 25

Monday, 3.30am and the lights of Carmichael Associates’ 36th floor dealing room blazed out into the San Francisco darkness. The surrounding office towers were lit unevenly at this hour, like King Kong himself had taken great bites out of them. Inside, seventy or so traders and salespeople helped themselves to urns of black coffee, platters of pastries, tureens of egg-white omelettes, breakfast meats, fresh bagels. These troops needed sustenance. Some had not woken up. Most had not been to sleep. For this was IPO day: the most exciting and miraculous event in the life of a West Coast technology investment bank. Modern capitalism too, come to that. By the time the NASDAQ opened, a new public company would be born, vast sums of money made, images beamed round the world of dealers staring entranced at their screens or hanging speechless on the ends of phones. It was new, economic life – with Carmichael Associates as the midwife.

Ben Silverman walked over to the assembling group with mixed feelings about it all. First and foremost was the death of Jon Vogel. Was it right to be holding this event so close to the passing of a founder-investor? Sure, the registration statement had been filed before his death was announced. Yet it still wasn’t sitting well with Ben.

It all seemed too sudden to him. Since the start, he’d argued for a lengthier, more thorough preparation period. For more meetings with potential investors, explaining (first understanding) the Clamor business story.

But perhaps they were right. Perhaps these older, savvier players had grasped far better the big picture – those mercurial market forces that dictated why and when certain companies ‘got out’, while other, possibly worthier ones never did.

In this ultra-high stakes game, market timing was everything.

He joined them at the podium: Carmichael, elevated like a general, flanked by his lieutenants Steven Schweitzer and Head of Equity Sales John Cavanaugh III. Cavanaugh ran the desks of sales people who, over the coming hours, would be responsible for placing the stock. It may be 3.30am here in San Francisco, but it was already the start of the working day in New York, late morning in London, lunchtime in Geneva and mid-afternoon in the Middle East. Those were where the deep pools of equity risk capital resided. Where the Carmichael boys (and girls) were going fishing with their baited hooks. Schweitz and Cavanaugh were wearing baseball caps bearing the Clamor logo. Leonard Carmichael, turned out in his charcoal grey suit, had refrained from such gimmickry. He was making a short yet portentous speech about the importance of this IPO to Carmichael Associates’ future as a leading independent investment bank able to hold its own in the big league, or something; frankly, it was all lost on the audience, who cared about one thing and one thing only.

And this one did promise monster-sized payouts. The seventy-five million in advisory and success fees was just the start of it. The IPO structure agreed with the client was called a firm commitment, book building exercise. Simply put, Carmichael Associates had agreed the prior evening to buy the entire issue for $93 a share or $2.325 billion. Their task now was to build a book of investors to whom they could resell the issue before the new stock started trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange at 09:30 eastern time – three hours later. The 7% spread between the $93 cost to Carmichael and the $100 anticipated resale price was where the bank started to make the real money: $175 million, on top of the other fees.

It was a curious thing, for an industry advocating such free market practices – to have this perfectly collusive arrangement, Ben reflected. It was just the going rate if you wanted to be led out by a top tier bank: seven per cent of the proceeds. Sure, bankers argued that they maximised proceeds for the client company – but a quarter-of-a-billion-bucks, for a few weeks’ work! And there was more. For Carmichael had also negotiated an Over-Allotment Option. They could cause the company to sell another 15% of the issue – another 3.75 million shares, at the $93 price. If the stock really started to run, to $150 say, then that right there could be worth another two hundred million dollars. It was stupendous.

For in the end, who knew? Who knew what this thing could do? What if the stock doubled like in the good old days? What if it went the way of Google? It was perfectly possible to imagine Carmichael Associates making a billion dollars from this IPO! It was a miracle of modern capitalism, a fabulous place in the economic sun. Ben couldn’t deny the exhilaration of it. There was something archetypically masculine, almost primeval about it: the hunt, roaming the corporate plains, bringing down the big game. Surely his dad had never experienced anything quite like it during his long career as a police detective. And he would probably never experience anything similar again, should he choose to go off and do something else.

Yet Ben felt odd about this billion-dollar possibility. Why? Certainly it wasn’t out-of-the ordinary for investment banks to turn that kind of profit on a single deal. Carmichael Associates was minting a fifteen billion dollar company – out of what, exactly? Out of bits, bytes, dorm room dreams… Then he saw it: something in the way Schweitz surreptitiously checked his BlackBerry while Carmichael held forth.

Carmichael was readying the bank for sale, Ben suddenly knew.

The old man was 68, had a bad ulcer and an heiress about to debut in a porn movie! Just how does a relationship with an only daughter go that badly wrong, Ben couldn’t help wonder… In any event, the bank would be valued as a multiple of profits. No vast multiple, as these bank trading profits were slippery as eels, but a multiple of at least four or five times profits. Which meant that a billion dollars of IPO windfall could in turn yield five billion in eventual proceeds to the bank’s owners.

Ben sipped his strong coffee, feeling a good jolt go through him.

Schweitzer’s piece of the action went way beyond an ordinary bonus or even profit sharing arrangement. Schweitz held a minority stake in the bank itself. A meaningful minority stake, if the rumor mills were to be believed. Supposedly, that was why he’d accepted the diminished title of Head of Technology. How Schweitzer hungered to join the billionaire’s club while still in his early forties, Ben sensed. Hell, he’d all but celebrated those predators circling with their fat wallets! What was his stake? – 10, 20%? This IPO could get him there on its own! Quite what he’d do with all that extra money Ben couldn’t imagine, but that was a problem he and his wife could solve –

Ben thought back to the sequence of events: to how dismissive Schweitz had been about dissident Jon Vogel in life and death, Yuri Malovich too... Come to think of it, why had Schweitz been so ready to recruit an outside consultant rather than try to work things through with Malovich, the then head of security? It all pointed to one question: just how far were Steven Schweitzer and Leonard Carmichael willing to go, to remove roadblocks from this IPO?

Still they had to shift up to 28.375 million shares at $100-plus each. In an era of stock market volatility, who could say what investors would actually do over the coming hours? It was why investment banks so often chose to syndicate out share offerings. To diffuse the risk. But not this one. Why cut Goldman or J.P. Morgan in on the action, the internal discussion had gone? – Why give away that stupendous upside, when Carmichael had done so much to shape this opportunity? Carmichael’s award-winning economist was now expecting Monday’s Non-Farm Payroll numbers to handily beat expectations, evidencing a more robust economy then anticipated. Check. Also predicted by an in-house analyst: tech bell weathers Microsoft and Intel announcing stronger-than-expected earnings after the market closed Friday. Check! And then there was that ace-in-the-hole. Or rather the pivot. The nickname had come about when Schweitzer pointed out that the entire deal pivoted on one investor, Sheikh Yasan, who had committed to taking half the issue at full resale price. The transaction hadn’t gone through. The transaction couldn’t go through till the offer had been declared effective, but it was all but a done deal. Leonard Carmichael himself had made a ‘verbal handshake’ over the phone with the Sheikh. Check, check, check! A good day for the markets, a great day for the tech sector and as for Clamor – a blow out.

John Cavanaugh III swapped his Clamor cap for an old army cavalry hat as he was wont to do on such occasions.

“OK,” he twirled his forefinger above his head: “Mount up warriors. You know the drill. So start smiling and dialling! Let’s do this!”

“Fuck yeah!” someone hollered.

Clapping, whistling, chest bracing and girding broke out across the floor. Cavanaugh retreated to his glass office to monitor the fray. For this was now a war footing. And these men needed a little room to breath. To work off some aggression if need be. So long as it got results.

“Samuelson,” Ben heard Cav squawk one of the senior sales guys: “Is Constellation in or what? You working that one?”

“Sir, that deal is already closed – like a dooor!” And the ‘or’ of door soared! The Connecticut hedge fund had agreed to take a million at full price. One down, twenty four to go.

“Good, good,” Cavanaugh said, soothed. “Show ‘em how it’s done. This should be an exhibition game for you.”

Wanting to be in the middle of it all, Ben parked at an empty dealer’s terminal. He flipped his cell phone open and found the number for Serene Al’saran, the intelligent and measured Chief Investment Officer of Ensign. She was a Georgetown International Politics graduate and London Business School MBA. They’d established a good, easygoing relationship. He dialled and got through to her voicemail, leaving a message for her to call him. Barely had he finished when Cav beckoned him over:

“Spiderman, get in here,” Cav said in his patrician way. “What’s going on with your pivot guy? You M&A guys are killin’ me. We’re calling your boss.”

Cav’s phone rang first. Stay here, Cav motioned to Ben. It was the market strategist, calling with an update on how the European bourses had opened. A computer glitch in the oil market, a ‘phantom’ contract of some kind, had caused the price of Light Sweet Crude to rise and fall by four bucks. Though the price had ended up right back where it started, the glitch had spooked the commodities markets. Stock markets were trading nervously in consequence.

“The VIX volatility index is spiking. Asset-classes are re-correlating,” the strategist warned on speakerphone.

“Goddamit,” Cavanaugh growled.

“And there’s something else,” the strategist continued. “A news service has picked up accounts of unrest in the Iranian capital.”

“Who’s peddling this stuff?” Cavanaugh said, as though a worldwide conspiracy were fomenting against his stock sale.

“Reuters, sir,” the strategist said.

“So where are they getting their misinformation from?”

“From the dissidents themselves, sir. From the Clamor dot u s web site, actually.”

The upshot was that the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices were expected to open down by a full percentage point.

Cavanaugh stared at his dealing screen. It was configured to show real time information on the share sale. Crawling across the bottom were order sizes and prices, cumulative shares sold, average price achieved and ‘Total Book Profit/Loss’. Leonard Carmichael, Ben knew, would be scrutinizing the exact same numbers on his rosewood-encased monitor – so too Steven Schweitzer, second-by-second.

After a promising start, the order sizes were getting smaller: 50,000 ... 100,000 ... 40,000 – as hedge funds and high growth investors nibbled rather than feasted on what the Carmichael team had set before them. The ‘price achieved’ was drifting down too: 98.875 ... 99.125 ... 98.5 ... In total, 2.341 millions shares – some ten percent of the issue – had now been placed, at an average price of $99.3. The softening price was less of a concern than the sales momentum, than creating an aura of invincibility around the issue, a supreme sense of confidence on the sales floor. For here was the front line. The place from where investors would take their cues, draw their inferences. From the tone of voice, the terms offered. It was just a variant on the age-old art of seduction: You want it, you can’t have it – but seeing who you are, perhaps we can work something out…

What did it mean, this oil glitch? The stuff about the streets of Tehran? – What did it mean for the pivot’s level of confidence? When would those magical numbers appear on the screen: 15,000,000 @ $100.00! … 15,000,000 @ $100.00! … 15,000,000 @ $100.00!

Cavanaugh ended the call with the strategist and hit speed-dial.

“Hey,” Schweitz crackled, on speaker.

“No news?” Cav said.

“He’s in a meeting, or taking a siesta, or something.”

“Probably with his harem. We should be callin’ him the pervert, not the pivot.”

“Yeh.”

“Spiderman’s in here with me. Can you boys tell me who’s eligible to make the call? The CIO?”

“Has to be him,” Schweitz said. “Promised he’d take care of it by close of business.”

“What time is it over there again?”

“Ten after four.”

“OK.”

The two men wrestled with the unsatisfactory-ness of the situation.

“John. You can stretch the budget, with the spot prizes for the sales guys an’ all.”

It was Schweitzer’s way of saying that something, anything, should be done to pull this issue along.

“I’ll take that under advisement, Steven,” Cavanaugh said, hanging up.

Back out on the floor, Ben’s phone rang.

“Hey Ben,” Winston Ma’s voice came on.

“Winston, what are you doing up at this hour?”

“Oh, you know me. The intern who never sleeps.”

“Hold on,” Ben said. There was a commotion at a neighboring desk – “I’ll call you right back.”

But it was just the usual antics of an area of the floor known as the Bull Pen. Bruce Battistuta, singing “Life in the Bike Lane” – a spoof of the Eagles song.

A young intern named Lance Dryden had just walked in, trying to make himself look as inconspicuous as possible. He was a slightly built Yale Economics major – a nice enough guy, Ben had concluded from a conversation with him, but not at all cut out for the rough and tumble of the trading floor. As well as being called Lance, on his first day, he’d placed a cycling helmet down on his desk. Bruce Battistuta had thrown it across the floor like a football. “No one sits at this desk without a respectable rig – meaning four wheels, fuck-head!” Hence, the reworking of Life in the Fast Lane – when not likening Dryden’s genitalia to the size and shape of a baby mushroom. ‘Shroom boy’ soon became his nickname. His internship at Carmichael Associates had turned into the worst ordeal of his life, he’d confided in Ben.

He was trying to focus on making a call, from a list he’d just been handed, when his neighbors looked up in unison, tracking Cav’s leisurely walk out onto the floor. Cav was doing that trademark finger-twirling thing. Only, this time, with a set of car keys.

“Listen up warriors! Prizes-time already. I hold in my hand here the keys to a three-week old McLaren with less than fifty miles on the clock.” His wife had chosen the custom color – fuchsia – then changed her mind. Frankly, there were enough cars blocking the Cavanaughs’ driveway anyway.

“Next one to bag a seven-figure lot size drives it home tonight.”

The hum of calls resumed and intensified. Lance Dryden returned to dialling his number. Ben couldn’t help smile; somehow, he’d got himself caught up with the phone chord, his call inadvertently on speaker:

“Hi, this is the sales desk at, um, Carmichael Associates in San Francisco, calling about the Clamor Initial –”

“Yes, I ’ave been trying to call you!” a voice cut in. It sounded like Marc Bodin, the Chief Investment Officer of Firebird Growth – an ultra aggressive, Geneva-based hedge fund. “I want two.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Mee-lion! This call is being recorded, I know. Do not me screw up! I want two mee-lion shares.”

Dryden came off the phone with eyes popping. “Yes!” he pounded the desk, hard. “Yes!” He pounded it again. “Yes!” Thump. “Yes!” Thump –

“Jesus Christ Dryden, that last client thought I was calling from a Tijuana whorehouse,” Bruce Battistuta said, slamming down his phone. “And outstanding result for the desk by the way, you cock sucking son-of-a-bitch!”

“OK, at ease over there,” Cav squawked over them both. “And stop by after work young man, to arrange delivery of your new ride.”

Two million shares. A fourteen million dollar profit for the bank, and more than enough commission for Cavanaugh personally to cover the cost of a used McLaren. The appetite was out there. It was now two hours before the opening bell. Twenty percent of the book built. Firebird paying full price. If the pivot came in for 60% and they sold just another two, three million shares – hell, the old man would surely let the remaining stock ride, recapture some of that upside should the market turn back positive.

Ben remembered he owed Winston a call back.

“Ben, you remember you asked me to look into the ownership of Further Online Gaming?”

“Yep.”

“And I found out that it was owned offshore by Paul Towse’s Farther Frontier Fund?”

“Winston, just show me the baby!”

“Multiworld! It’s the same thing!”

“Huh?”

“You mentioned you were also looking for a company called Multiworld? Well my contact at Further Online Gaming finally sent over the email he’d promised, explaining it all: Multiworld is the offshore entity tied to his Farther Frontier Fund, that owns Further Online Gaming.”

What the hell was going on around here? – how could Paul Towse fail to disclose – but another call was incoming: Serene! – “Winston, I gotta take this call,” and he clicked over. “Serene, I saw the spike in the oil price and the situation in Tehran; not an ideal day so far I know, but –”

“That’s not the problem, Ben,” the Sheikh’s CIO said in her perfectly rounded vowels.

“Then what is the problem?”

“We received an anonymous tip that there would be some very bad news about Clamor during the current trading session.”

“Serene –,” but Ben didn’t know where his sentence was going.

She said: “We recognize that this may just be noise. The Sheikh is a long term holder. I have another meeting with him in five minutes. We may be willing to take even more, if the price is favorable.”

“That may work. I’m not authorized to speak on behalf of Carmichael, but – hold on, Serene …” With his free hand he swung round the doorframe into Cavanaugh’s office.

“We’ve both put a lot into this,” she was saying into his ear, “let’s see if we can still make this happen…”

But the hope was short lived. Cav was staring at his screen, the ‘related activity’ part of it. Ten thousand short-dated ‘put’ option contracts, giving the owner the right to sell shares at a given price, had appeared. Right in front of their eyes the number doubled, and doubled again.

Someone out there was beginning to bet big – to bet big against Clamor.

CHAPTER 26

John Cavanaugh hit speed dial again, got Steven Schweitzer then Leonard Carmichael on the line. “The pivot’s back,” Schweitzer said. “He’ll take the rest – all twenty million, at ninety-three dollars a share.”

Carmichael: “At cost, no profit? We had a deal.”

“He’s agreeing you had a deal, and he’s saying you still do have a deal, only that the market has since turned, which the price needs to reflect some,” Schweitzer said. “I’m not saying we should agree. I’m just saying that’s what he said.”

Carmichael: “The market has turned – by seven per cent?”

Ben looked at the market information area of Cav’s screen: the Dow and ’DAQ futures were pointing down 1%, not even.

“With all due respect gentlemen,” Cavanaugh spoke up, “and please pardon my French here, but we may be about to get fuckin’ flattened: some bastard’s piling into at-the-money puts equivalent to half the issue in volume, and counting. These at-the-moneys are not cheap to acquire. If some Middle Eastern son-of-a-bitch is willing to hold the bag on this one, I vote we hand it on and close out our position, now.”

Ben glanced over at the related-activity window: 130,000 put option contracts were now showing, short-dated, $100 strike. One contract covered 100 shares. He watched with amazement as the number grew: 136,500 contracts, 148,000…

“Jesus Christ,” Carmichael said. “Who?”

“We don’t know,” Schweitz and Cav chorused.

Cavanaugh asked to call Carmichael back, just the two of them. Ben turned away.

Outside: a swampy San Francisco dawn with purple-grey canyons between tall buildings, the red light atop the pyramidal Transamerica tower blinking sleepily. Far below, he thought he could make out a black Lincoln Town car, waiting at the bottom.

The wheels were coming off this thing.

He turned to Cavanaugh: “Can I asked you a question?”

“Why do people always ask that?”

“What?”

“Just ask the question!”

“Why do you call me Spiderman?”

“Because, God help us all, you’re climbing the building – all the way up to floor 39. Or were rather, while the building was still standing…”

Ben opened his mouth but Cav waved him quiet, handset pressed to his ear: “Leonard. We need to close this thing out now. We need to keep our powder dry, for another day. And we’ve been through enough cycles to know that other day will come.

“Let’s close up shop, call it a family day for the troops. I have to explain to my wife that her custom colored McLaren now belongs to a summer intern,” and he laughed, humor having apparently worked on Carmichael before. “And if there’s any shred of truth in that online rag, your daughter may be about to make her movie debut, and not in a way you’d want. I’ve no doubt there’s time to turn that situation around too. Let’s fold up our tents.”

There was a pause.

“Leonard –

Pause.

“Len–”

Cavanaugh gripped the handset then replaced it. Carmichael had apparently hung up on him.

“What’d he say?” Ben asked.

“Said we’ll give Yasan half the issue at 96. Said with that discount, he could add another Airbus to his fleet. Said that any more dissent, and the price is a hundred and six. Who the fuck does he think he is, John Pierpont Morgan?”

The number of put option contracts out over Clamor stock had now reached 245,000, equivalent to the entire, new-issued share capital. It was a massive, multi-billion dollar bet against the stock sale and Clamor’s fledgling market debut. “Who?” – came the owl-like chorus from across the salesfloor: “Who?” For only a frighteningly well-resourced investment concern could ‘lean’ against them like this. And in an already nervous market, the signalling effect was deadly persuasive.

A ‘grey’ market had now opened up in Clamor stock. Led by one of Carmichael’s own market makers, there were now bid/offer quotes to buy and sell Clamor’s stock, priming the liquidity pump, getting a jump on the official open.

The bid price was settling, lower.

96.875 … 97.125 … 96.375 … 96.5 … 95.625 … 95.125 …

Ben detected a whiff of panic as fragments of conversation ricocheted round the room, as the sales guys sought to sweet-talk, cajole and threaten prospective clients: “Is this Ethical Investments 2050? Mary Rosen? How many dead cert deals have we put you into over the years, Mary? You are invited to take a million. That is an order!”

95.25 … 95.0 … 94.875 … 94.5 … 93.875 … 93.375 …

The price was edging closer to cost. Investors who’d climbed aboard were beginning to step off, to hedge, reduce their exposure – exerting further, downward pressure on the price. Conversely, the big option buyer was moving deeper ‘into-the-money’ – the money that Carmichael Associates should have been making, in the opposite direction.

Carmichael Associates’ world was beginning to turn upside down.

At 08:30 Eastern, just an hour before market open, a news release crossed the wire:

TRUMPINGTON BUGLE EXPOSES CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING RING ON LEADING SOCIAL NETWORK SITE

– an investigative feature about several thousand young girls for sale on the Clamor.us web site. Dealers and salespeople read the 3,250 words fast, trying to make sense of it:

“... and a related, confidential inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, following the mysterious recent deaths of security head Yuri Malovich and early investor John Vogel...”

The stock was suddenly 83.0 bid.

– but no volume, just one trade of 10,000 going through, market makers absolutely not wanting this stuff sitting on their books –

79 bid.

The price drop was staggering, ghastly. A hushed silence pressed down on the dealing floor. People stood suspended, phones on shoulders or idle on cradles. Ben saw John Cavanaugh run a finger under the back of his collar like he couldn’t breath. At $79, the rump 20 million shares on his books was $280 million dollars underwater. Adding to the feeling of chaos, a fire alarm was sounding in some part of the floor. Judging by the smell, someone couldn’t wait to go outside for nicotine.

Senior salesman Carl Samuelson was calling Cav: “Sir, it’s fuck’n’ Omaha Beach out here, time for a tactical withdrawal?”

“Negative Samuelson, now man up! Man those Goddam phones!”

“Yessir!”

This was hand-to-hand combat. Pretty soon every man for themselves. “Omni-Investors?” Samuelson was yelling into his phone; “I’m trying to reach Omnipresent Investors in Oman – hello?”

Ben approached Francesca’s desk on 39 further to another summons from Schweitzer. Walking down the corridor to his boss’s corner office, he suddenly thought to call Natalie. He got her voicemail: “It’s Ben. You’d better turn on your TV. Gotta run. I’ll call you.”

Francesca’s graceful neck turned towards Ben. He stopped at Schweitz’s door. Inside, a conference call was underway. He recognized the voice on speaker: Sara Harding, chairperson of the Credit Risk Management Committee. Evidently, she was playing catch up. It was astonishing, the concentration of resourcefulness and intelligence in an investment bank like this: Sara was a gifted Stanford double major, now having to sort out what exactly had been agreed with Bob Swaine and the Clamor boys eight hours before. Also on the conference call was David Hannah, Carmichael’s thorough if timid General Counsel. He had been involved in finalizing the IPO terms – if not exactly an architect of them, as he was now quick to point out. Ben stood. Fran’s head stayed up. That impeccable carriage, questioning.

Ben just couldn’t bring himself to go in there, for the end game – the blame game. They were now discussing whether they could hedge their position. Anything they tried to do in the derivatives markets would simply place further pressure on the price. It was too late for any syndication. Or could they offload a large block onto another, better-capitalized bank? What’s going on with that oil sheik, Sara was asking. And who was this mysterious put option buyer? Then a shrill voice shrieked: “If it’s Josh fucking Hartman over at American fucking Millennium, I will rip that prick’s fucking face off!”

Schweitzer’s auto-censor had apparently flipped to OFF.

Conversation resumed, on another subject – something else Sara hadn’t been made aware of: that if the price fell below $75, the bank was contractually obligated to engage in ‘price stabilization’ activity. To begin buying Clamor stock. It was the quid pro quo for the Over Allotment Option. “Jesus,” Sara said, “We bet the farm.”

Ben turned to Francesca.

Her glacial beauty, inquiring.

He searched her eyes for something, anything.

They seemed to register vague surprise. But nothing more.

He suddenly wondered what he’d found attractive about her. In the eye of the storm came this insight: that a woman like Francesca Horniman would never slake his thirst. Her goal in life seemed to be keeping him thirsty! Like a shallow pool, where there’s never enough water. For all her refined hotness, she only reduced him to his base drivers: money – for things, and sex. The idea of marrying someone like her suddenly made him think of a genome sequence spiralling out of control: after all the cars, vacation homes, kids and toys would inexorably come the arguments, affairs, medication and divorce.

Standing there in Schweitz’s doorway, he felt like a tree with shallow roots. He thought about that. There was some profound truth in it, someplace. How trees thrive in certain environments, wilt in others. Which environments? What did that mean! People, of course. How some people grow us, others deplete us. But there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. His dad, awkwardly raising him up. His mom – loving – curiously diminishing him; his best friend Todd from college –

Natalie! Had that ability, to draw out his higher purpose in life – whatever that was.

Natalie. Of course! He felt a weird energy current burst back through his limbs. But how do you win a woman like Natalie Chevalier? He’d no idea. None of the opening lines he’d finessed around the bars and clubs of San Francisco were going to work on her. What would?

He needed time to think through his play here. They’d worked well enough together, hadn’t they? Perhaps in the first instance they could start some sort of techno-financial security start-up, or something. No, that didn’t sound right at all. He mussed his hair.

“Ben!” Francesca was yelling; “Steven wants you in there, now!”

But the call had already disintegrated, Sara Harding insisting that someone call Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Butt Fuck Anybody! – “and offload whatever we still can! We have to close out! We do not have the capital base to withstand this kind of pounding!” Schweitz asking about the meaning of “best efforts”, the term that Clamor’s Bob Swaine had insisted on putting into the price stabilization agreement; just how would “best efforts” be interpreted by a court of law? David Hannah saying that a judge had ruled “best efforts” to entail entering bankruptcy in support a contractual obligation if need be. “We went through all this last night,” David Hannah said.

“And Len Carmichael signed off on it,” said Schweitzer, signing off himself.

Ben returned to 36 to get his bag, taking the stairs down four at a time.

The sales team had left their terminals and were gathering around TV screens relaying the Trumpington Bugle story, taking it from online prattle to worldwide headline news. Any remaining investor confidence now collapsed. The price fell like a failed parachute. It was unreal, cartoon-like. Bruce Battistuta giggled.

68.0 … 55.0 … 43.0 … 34.0 … 32.5 …

The Carmichael market maker was no longer making bids. Before the markets had even opened, Clamor was closed to further trade.

Ben Silverman left the building.

CHAPTER 27

The irritating buzz of her cell phone woke Natalie at six.

She dozed, then dialled voicemail: “It’s Ben. You’d better turn on your TV. Gotta run. I’ll call you.”

Suddenly awake, she remoted the TV on to a breakfast news channel. A news anchor with suitably stern look was announcing the unfolding Clamor IPO/sex trafficking drama. She pushed on her elbows, sat upright – the other news channels were running the same story. She grabbed her laptop and found Brie DuBois’ widely cited article. The only bright spot was that it seemed much milder than the news anchors suggested, mostly involving what was already observable on Clamor’s website, seasoned with some law enforcement hearsay.

She tried Nguyen, left him another message. Then, via the Clamor automated switchboard, she left voicemails for Wu, Michael Marantz, Wisnold, anyone she could think of – while trying to sound as serious as possible, shuffling round her room in a hotel dressing gown and slippers.

Eventually it dawned on her. The wake that would be taking place down in Sunnyvale. The IPO party that wasn’t to be. Corporate birth-to-death in one morning! Famished, she rang room service and ordered salmon eggs Benedict, a tall glass of fresh orange juice and a large cappuccino. Perhaps it would all make sense on a full stomach.

A stock market correspondent on TV was now reporting that, after a series of hastily convened calls with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Clamor would be allowed to start trading at the open. Market makers had apparently found support as vulture investors picked away and as the ‘mystery options trader’ betting against the issue unwound his (or her) position. Still the price floundered in the mid-$30s. She padded round the room, pondering what it meant for Ben, but – given the tense tone of his earlier voicemail – she decided not to call him back yet.

By late morning, it had become clearer why neither Nguyen nor anyone else at Clamor was returning phone calls. Beneath a radioactive-looking Breaking News! graphic, the news anchor was reading an announcement that Clamor CEO Dwayne Wisnold would be going on sabbatical “effective immediately” as the company dealt with the Trumpington Bugle allegations. Chief Connectedness Officer Nancy Wu would also be stepping down. Interim-CEO Thomas Nguyen thanked her and Wisnold for “their contribution towards making Clamor.us the world’s leading social networking site –” Interim-CEO Thomas Nguyen! – his statement concluding: “We will vigorously defend the company’s reputation and unmask the slander being propagated in the blogosphere.”

The stock price had fallen to $19.

Natalie couldn’t hold off any longer: “Ben! – Ben? Hello?”

A flight departure announcement drowned him. “Can you hear me?” Then: “– is that better?”

“Yes! Where on earth are you?”

“Heading off to the cabin in Tahoe for a coupla days, to clear my mind.”

“Are you OK?”

“No, not really. But my dad always cautioned me against making rash decisions – either from positions of unusual strength, or weakness.”

“Oh.” The news cut away from the studio to live pictures showing a cortege of black Lincoln town cars leaving the base of Ben’s office building. The commentary was not encouraging: “losses exceeding one-and-a-half billion dollars … clear breach of capital adequacy ratios …  the question now being whether Carmichael Associates can open for business tomorrow?”

“Listen Natalie, I really do have to run for my flight,” Ben was saying; “But I’ll call you when I get back to town, OK? I really wanna talk to you about something.”

“OK,” she said glassily.

Coverage had now moved to a suave-suited reporter standing in front of the columnar, Coliseum-like entranceway to the Federal Reserve building at California and Market, barely eight blocks from the last scene – and even fewer from where Natalie now stood, transfixed by the TV report: “We understand that Leonard Carmichael will be attending, along with General Counsel David Hannah, and Credit Chairperson Sara Harding. Technology Head Steven Schweitzer will not be attending, having pleaded a pri-or engagement!” A can-you-believe-it expression – then the camera unsteadily swung round to catch Leonard Carmichael being hustled through, looking like Richard Nixon during his last hours in office.

The session at the Federal Reserve was short enough for coverage to stay with the camera-friendly reporter, a ‘Live!’ graphic rotating above him like the slowing arm of a roulette wheel. Updates were passed to him, first quoting the regional Fed Chairman as saying it was “no longer acceptable for decent, hard-working American taxpayers to subsidize, with jumbo welfare handouts, investment bankers behaving like drunken sailors on three-day shore leave!”

And then the reporter broke into his own breaking news: “Wait! The gavel seems to have come down, folks! Carmichael Associates has been sold for … now let me make sure I’m reading this right: Carmichael Associates has been sold for one single dollar, to Occidental Bank of the Middle East –– with the assumption of all debts, and the rescinding of executive remuneration contracts. Now we assume this last part means the undoing of any bonuses or profit share arrangements, with Occidental free to pick and choose from the Carmichael staff pool at will. Well, the market for bankers isn’t what it once was…”

Poor Ben!

Natalie turned to her email, and the briefest of responses from Nguyen:

From: tomn@clamor.us

To: Natalie@nchevalier.net

Date: Monday, 12:42

Subject: yr v.m.

lots going on as i’m sure you’ve herd. please finish trafficking report and shoot it across

Sent from my BlackBerry handheld wireless device

She finished it that afternoon, saved it to her red memory stick and shot it across.

CHAPTER 28

The next day, a new development broke online: that Paul Towse was bidding $25 a share for the company, valuing Clamor.us at $3.75 billion. Following the IPO, $2.3 billion in cash was sitting in Clamor’s coffers. So the company would be his for $1.5 billion net of the cash raised at IPO – or just a tenth of the cost he’d confronted a few days before.

The report claimed that Dwayne Wisnold had already accepted the offer. Now what’s all that about, Natalie wondered. Perhaps for Wisnold it was binary: either full-spectrum control, or nothing. She wished that Ben were there to talk it through with. What was he doing up in some cabin in the woods, anyway?

She huffed and then noticed a separate but related article about how that ‘mystery options trader’ had made ‘one-and-a-half billion in profit from the Clamor IPO, net of option purchase costs’.

A billion-five in net cost, a billion-five in net profit: had Towse come by Clamor that week effectively for free? But as the first report pointed out, other shareholders still had to agree to the sale.

She looked up the San Francisco skyline, the fantastic westward sun turning the buildings to hammered bronze. Thinking back to that Malovich sketch Cindy showed her, she had an idea. She reached into her bag for her glossy red memory stick and was soon looking at:

It was the application Ray Ott had reminded her about – the one analyzing how well two known points in a network were connected. Her university professors, giddied up by the mid-‘90s tech boom, had encouraged the patent application. Over the years, she’d updated the underlying code.

She entered her usual login name: ‘search-girl’, and her password.

When fed two IP/web addresses, the application would score how closely connected they were out of 1.0. The higher the score, the stronger the connection. Everything came down to correlations, to patterns of connection, Natalie had come to conclude – whether with her yoga and the wider universe, or with the world of networked computing that she’d discovered earlier in life.

Well, now she had known points.

She recalled ‘Multiworld’ featuring prominently at the top of that Malovich sketch. She searched for it, soon encountering what Ben seemed to have run into: there was no relevant site for an organization of that name. Must be masked. Or did it exist at all? She tried another name, this time from the right-hand side of the Malovich sketch: ‘Surefar’. She froze, from recollection of those appalling scenes at the raid she’d gone on with Cindy and Adam. Regaining composure, she typed a name she knew would connect with it: Further Online Gaming, the corporate owner of MultiQuest.

The score was high at 0.68. No wonder, given the known clump of paths between Further Online’s game and the Surefar Enjoy site – through Clamor.us, of course.

Next she ran the application’s Thematic Extractor command, the function that got her university professors so excited. It identified key attributes of the path. It was similar to the technology that went on to make investors in certain search firms so wealthy. The key attributes in this case were: ‘Dating’, ‘Singles’, ‘Casual Relationships’ – the usual euphemisms…

Recalling the other entities written down the right hand side of Malovich’s sketch, she entered ‘Sayonara’. There were many apparent ‘possibles’, but with the Theme Extractor running, the point of connection resolved to a single point: an investor called Xiao Lin.

She ran a separate search on him, the most eye-catching result being a feature for the local section of the San Francisco Chronicle, according to which Lin was a Chinese citizen, US educated, with a penthouse in Nob Hill – barely a few blocks away. She stared for a long second at the picture of him in the Chronicle, at his clenched jaw and hollow, prison-like eyes. Was this the man at the source? – of the Jasmines, their supply?

So many unanswered questions. The last name on Malovich’s sketch, ‘LLA’. Again there were innumerable results with such a common acronym, but again the Theme Extractor forced a hit: ‘The Leading Ladies Agency, an elite escort agency featuring the finest girls from the Baltics, Hungary, the Ukraine –’ Paris-based, Armenian registered, and password protected.

Around the world in 80 clicks.

*    *    *

That evening, Paul Towse appeared on the top-rated TV financial affairs show Money Now. He appeared against a slightly out-of-focus Transamerica Building back-dropped by blue sky. He wore a loose grey jacket and periwinkle-blue shirt. Despite the ‘establishing’ background, he didn’t appear to come from – or belong to – anywhere.

Yet he was everywhere. Omniscient!

The presenter in the studio was a real blond honey, Natalie noted. Sassy, wearing a form fitting beige suit profiling the swell of her breasts, her skirt ending above the knee just so. Never mind the recent deaths or the child sex trafficking allegations. The audience was to be treated to the sexual chemistry between these two.

The presenter led with a series of teasingly provocative questions about his intentions for the takeover bid, the resistance he may encounter – “Just how would you overcome the company’s challenges, Mr. Towse?”

Certainly his TV persona was well crafted. He was clear eyed: optimistic, yet pragmatic. He answered directly. He spoke of everyone being “wholly unprepared for this sequence of events”, of these being “the most unusual economic times for all.” He likened Clamor’s stock market debut to “a flag ship of the Web 2.0 economy, tragically sunk on her maiden voyage.” Help was at hand. He was ready to put his fund’s resources and acumen at society’s disposal. “What matters, I think, is that we preserve the integrity of our technology sector – and the jobs, innovation and wealth that flow from it.”

The on-screen duo then touched on another of Towse’s ventures: “long term retreat centers”. Young gamers could move into honeycombed condominiums below ground – and play MultiQuest: Dark Ages to their hearts’ content. All ‘support services’ would be arranged, including ‘physical relationships’ – whatever that meant. It sounded like assisted-living for the young. He’d broken ground on the first center in Pine Bluffs Nevada, not thirty minutes from where he grew up. It was already 75% sold through with plans for another 40 such centers across North America and a further two hundred or so around the world, the immediate focus being on the Far East.

At some level, Natalie had to hand it him. He was, quite simply, a brilliant businessman. It was a more-than assured performance on Money Now. Indeed it looked like an outright PR coup. Which it needed to be, if he was to elicit that precious consent for his tender offer from those other Clamor shareholders – the largest undeclared one, Natalie reminded herself, being Jon Vogel’s estate.

CHAPTER 29

Natalie and Ben met up again on his return from Tahoe, at an outdoor café near the Keaton. It was silly, really: all those phone calls, with her hotel and his office having been just a few blocks apart, but perhaps they’d already become too close already.

The weather had cleared up entirely. The sky was California-blue, the eclipsed sun hazy between the tall buildings.

He appeared different to her. The tightness of his face had dissipated, his eyes were clear. He seemed happy, relaxed – at least more so than at any time she’d known him.

“Nguyen accelerated my data study and report,” she updated. “He’s made it pretty clear that my stay at the Keaton is coming to an end.”

Things had in fact never been quite right since she’d logged into his office voicemail late that night at the Clamor office, she knew.

“But after the Bugle ran that story on IPO day,” Ben said, “surely the sex trafficking problem is more pressing than ever?”

“In one sense, yes. In another, not so much. From Tom’s point of view, the worst has now happened. Whatever media embarrassment they feared, it’s played out. I guess it’s the difference between the fear of being hit, and actually being hit. The first is maybe far worse. I mean, sure, something should be done, and no doubt will be done once Cindy and the federals are through with it. But the business press is already acting like Clamor.us never had any responsibility for what users do on its site.”

“Bob Swaine was right,” Ben said.

“Huh?”

“Oh, just some assertion he made, when I met with him and Wisnold – that Clamor wasn’t culpable for its members’ actions. You got paid for your consultancy work, though?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t mention the eighty percent she’d paid on to the Captive Daughters charity. “But just back on Dwayne Wisnold for a moment: didn’t it strike you as odd that he sold out to Towse?”

“You mean by agreeing to Towse’s tender offer? Honestly Natalie, nothing about this situation surprises me any more.”

She was wearing black yoga pants and a top sporting the logo ‘Be Present’. She’d found a nearby yoga studio and hadn’t yet changed after class. It had been a powerful, revivifying flow class. Her eyes felt blazing alive.

A jazz band struck up across the plaza – double bassist, drummer and singer with two-tone wingtip shoes and upturned hat: pure San Francisco.

Sure looked back to him.

“What’ll you do next?” he asked.

“Return to the Bahamas, I guess,” and she hunched her shoulders. “And you?”

“Looks like Occidental may be interested in me. Occidental now being in charge of Carmichael’s operations. Somebody apparently put in a good word, about how I at least tried to steer Clamor away from total calamity. It’ld be a promotion, even. You now, I –”

He waited a beat, then another. He looked at the band. ‘Everybody – Loves My Baby / But My Baby – Don’t Love Nobody But Me –’

“You were saying?” she said.

“I did a lot of thinking up in Tahoe, Natalie. It’s a very special place for me. Looks straight down into the lake itself. Anyway, I thought a lot, about growing up, and about who I’ve become. And some interesting stuff came up.”

“Like?”

“Like when I was growing up: I never knew why this was, but my mom used to talk my dad down a lot. Or to put it another way, she never seemed to show him any real love. My dad wasn’t the most demonstrative guy either, but in his own way managed to make it clear he loved my mom. Not the other way around though.

“And I think, at some level, I drew this lesson: that a man isn’t worthy of a woman’s love.”

“Ben! C’mon, we all have our family issues…”

“No, but hear me out: that for so much of my life, I’ve lived by other peoples’ expectations. But I realize it doesn’t have to be that way. That I get to choose.”

She said: “Maybe it’s no bad thing, to want other peoples’ approval?”

“Maybe it isn’t. But maybe my own approval should count for more. Therefore, in answer to your question, I don’t know what I’ll do next. But I intend to figure it out. Perhaps I’ll go to write that book after all. Who knows?”

“Towse?” she said, with a sidelong glance. But neither of them was quite ready to treat casually Paul Towse’s fait accompli at Clamor.

“At least I got to the bottom of the Multiworld mystery,” he said.

She couldn’t talk to him about the Malovich sketch, the FBI having sworn her to secrecy.

“Towse,” he answered himself. “It’s his company. It owns Further Online Gaming. Winston Ma found out about it from his contact there. Told me so on IPO day.”

“Huh,” she said deliberatively.

It was an intriguing elucidation of the pattern. For, if Multiworld was Towse, then according to that Malovich sketch, all those illicit organizations – Surefar Enjoy, the Leading Ladies Agency – pointed to him. And what did that imply about his relations with other key stakeholders in Clamor? – Or entities beyond? What about this Xiao Lin guy, who she’d just uncovered using her Mapper?

Wait: could it be that Towse and Wisnold had a deal going from the start?

“How much of Clamor does Dwayne Wisnold own?” she asked.

“About a third, following the IPO,” Ben said. “Look! There’s something I need to tell you Natalie.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve worked pretty well together, haven’t we? I mean, you and I. And …”

Uh oh, where was this going?

“How much before the IPO?” she interrupted him.

“Huh?” he said. “Oh, around 40%. Natalie...”

“But that means –”

“Jesus Christ, Natalie!” Ben almost stood up: “Can you just leave that stuff alone for five minutes?” He started to take both her hands, then hesitated: “What I wonder is – whether … we should start a security company, perhaps Silverman-Chevalier Associates.”

She raised both eyebrows.

He caught the need to lighten it: “Maybe get Winston in on the act, ya know. Silverman, Chevalier and Ma.”

“SCAM,” she said, laughing.

“Huh? Oh, that’s what the initials would form. Right!” And he laughed too, after a pause. “I guess we’ve witnessed enough financial scamming for one week.”

He struck her as such a genuine, decent guy. Why was she always drawn instead to the cad, the blackguard – her ex from her last job being merely the most extreme case yet? All they’d ever shown her was a proven ability to wreck everything.

Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps she needed their darkness, to find her light.

Ben: “Meantime, I guess I should take the Occidental job. I mean a job’s a job, right?”

She wrinkled her nose affectionately, in assent.

A buzz came from her tote bag. She rootled around in it. Snapping her phone open: “Brastias!”

“I may have to ask for my spare weapon back,” her federal agent friend informed her.

“Of course.” He knew she was leaving? Funny, she hadn’t told him yet –

“Natalie, I think we got ‘em. – The suspects, for the Malovich and Vogel murders.”

W-o-w, she mouthed.

Ben looked on.

Adam: “I can’t tell you who yet, but –”

“But you can’t just call me up, and tell me … that you can’t tell me!” she fizzed.

“Sorry Natalie, I really can – not do so. But in all likelihood the coast is clear, so it would be great to get the Glock back. It was pretty irregular procedure handing it out to you like that.”

“Just give me a sign then, if I throw out a name: Wisnold!”

Adam said nothing.

“Well what about Rage, in the game? Did you get a warrant? Did you get into his MultiQuest account?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you about that either. But we’re real close to bringing charges. We just have to establish intent. We’ve got a top profiler out here from DC, looking at the homicides, Rage’s behaviour in the game and the likely character profile behind it all. It’s starting to piece together.”

Natalie tried to classify Wisnold’s profile there and then. He’d struck her as having Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism found among technologists in the Valley, characteristic of which were extreme intelligence and social impairment – and the impulse to seek attention and control through alternate channels of influence. She thought back to Wisnold’s behaviour at that Sunday strategy session – his bizarre mood swings, how transformed he’d been by a call from his publicist…

But Adam had said suspects, plural. Natalie couldn’t help but think of Wisnold and Nancy Wu sat in that same conference room together – the other day too, with Bob Swaine. Even stepping down from Clamor in tandem. She thought as well of her fake profile page, and that Wu symbol.

But still it didn’t seem to piece together.

For one thing, why go to the lengths of killing people involved with the company? Was it that Asperger’s sufferers had some need for space that no one else could intrude on? – that a switch had somehow flipped inside Wisnold? But how did that implicate Nancy?

So many questions. So much uncertainty and ambiguity. The beach in the Bahamas – her way out of all this – beckoned.

Adam was saying: “I just wanted you to know that you’re likely no longer in danger.”

“Well, is there nothing else I can do to help?” she said.

“Nope, we’re in good shape. We’re just trying to go slow with the interviews down here in San Jose, to get the cooperation going … It’s good cop all the way.”

Probably a good thing Pulver hadn’t been handling the interview then. Then again, where was the Pulverizer? Because of the institutional rivalry, Natalie didn’t like to ask. She said: “I can drop the Glock off later today. I have to make a last trip down to Monterey, to see one of Vogel’s neighbors. I could drop it by on the way back?”

“Good enough. Which neighbor?”

“Her name’s Star. I met her when I was down visiting Vogel one time. She runs the trust that will inherit his estate. She’s been a mess about it all, and asked for my advice.”

Ben was following her every word.

Adam said: “Star Williams?”

“Don’t know. Must be.”

“We interviewed her. Yep, she was taking Vogel’s passing real bad. I may be down that way myself, at the County Crime Scene lab.” He paused for a moment. “But yeah, probably best if you drop the gun off in its case, in a padded envelope, at the bureau office. These in-car meetings are starting to look a little clandestine. Mark it confidential and for my attention. Don’t leave your name.”

“No kidding! And no problem, will do.”

She closed her phone and pressed it against her pursed lips.

“What happened?” Ben asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think the FBI may have taken Dwayne Wisnold in for questioning. Maybe Nancy Wu too.”

He shook his head, like nothing could surprise him any more.

CHAPTER 30

Natalie approached Star Williams’ cottage gingerly. The older woman had sounded jumpy on the phone when asking for her advice. The horsebox was there and she could smell wood smoke too.

“Star?” she called out.

No answer.

She walked up to the back door. It was slightly ajar, and croaked as she eased it open. The main room was a mess. Notepads, documents and legal forms filled the space. “Star?” she called out again.

Still no answer.

She picked up one of the documents: IRS Form 706 – Federal Estate Tax Return. Another: Notice of Petition to Administer Estate. Was that the will, sitting next to it?

“Star, are you here?

Suddenly the woman appeared behind her in silhouette, giving Natalie a start.

“It was good of you to come back,” she said, hugging Natalie close – in so doing, holding something behind her back.

Star turned, and set down the nobbly end of a carrot on the table. “Just keeping Festival warm and fed,” she smiled sadly. “That’s what it’s all about for me now. Please,” and she gestured for Natalie to sit.

Natalie had been moved by the older woman’s plight during her last visit, right after Vogel’s death. Seeing Star all alone had recalled to Natalie the trials of probating her own father’s estate after his death. Disappearance rather. In any event, she’d found it almost impossible to refuse Star’s request for help.

But now she was left wondering why exactly she’d come all the way down here. She’d highly likely overestimated her ability to assist Star. Jon Vogel had died an extremely wealthy man. His estate was vastly more complex than her father’s had ever been, despite her dad’s trans-national lifestyle. The Vogel estate held significant sums of cash, liquid securities, illiquid investments, prime real estate, collectibles, exotic pets even. It was doubtless implicated in a web of social causes and other formal and informal obligations that Vogel had accumulated over the decades.

“Here,” and Star handed her another set of documents: Offer to Buy 40,000,000 Clamor.us Inc. Shares, for $25 each. “It was addressed to the trust.”

A cool billion dollars.

“The shares seem to have fallen so much,” Star fretted. “I’m worried there won’t be anything left by the time the Protectorate sees any of it.”

Natalie was careful not to say anything, to keep her suspicions about Paul Towse to herself.

“I know Jon disliked Towse intensely,” the older woman said. “Which was unusual for Jon. And yes, I have my own misgivings about anyone like that trying to turn our world into a machine for living in. Shoot, I hardly know how to use my cell phone! What use for me is there in a world like that?”

Natalie was silent.

“– I suddenly find it so hard, to know what Jon would have wanted. I find myself second guessing…” And she looked at Natalie searchingly.

What Star needed, Natalie reasoned, was an experienced probate lawyer practicing in California, a firm of tax accountants perhaps, an investment expert, possibly even a media-relations advisor for the press interest in Towse’s offer. She thought about getting a recommendation from Ben but remembered his romantic interest in her. She defaulted to Ray Ott: surely he’d have some good recommendations.

Yet, once again, she was struck by something being not quite right, like the last time here. She tried to analyze the feeling but, maddeningly, it defied categorization. She placed the tender documents back down, next to another set – Proof of Holographic Instrument. These would pertain to the will. A written will, apparently –

“Star, this is complicated,” she said. And, as naturally as possible: “Could I see the will?”

Star hesitated, then handed it her. She was smiling curiously again. “He wrote it one night, back in the day, on the beach. Under a beautiful moon.” The handwriting was slanted, curvilinear. Contrasting with it was a typed, stapled back sheet that named Star Mary Williams as Estate Executor. It bore Vogel’s spidery signature.

Natalie paged gently through the ageing sheaves. In the preface, Vogel decreed that: “everything I own and will ever own shall pass into the Protectorate of the Eternal Now” – a crude pour-over provision, Natalie recognized. If legally binding – and she saw no reason why it shouldn’t be – then his net assets would automatically be distributed according to the terms of the living trust, the ‘Protectorate’. Star as trustee would soon have control over Vogel’s most valuable asset: the forty million Clamor shares.

“Of course, back then he only had his VW van and a guitar,” Star sighed.

From the corner of her eye, Natalie caught sight of another document: Proof of Subscribing Witness… She picked it up, perusing it briefly.

“Thing is,” Star said, “his witnesses were a cow at the end of the Wurlitzers’ field and a young traveler staying with us from Oregon. Rufus, I believe his name was. Only, I never learned Rufus’ last name. We never saw him again.”

“It may be that wills written in testators’ own handwriting don’t need to be signed in front of witnesses,” Natalie said, “so long as you can prove that it is indeed their handwriting.”

As Estate Executor, why wouldn’t she know this?

“Oh, I doubt that’ll be a problem. Such distinctive penmanship. Just a few burn marks from the beach fire,” the older lady gestured.

Hm. Natalie leafed further into the will, finding hieroglyphic-looking symbols.

“Covers a lot of philosophy, early mysticism and ancient pagan history,” she added.

What’s this?

Right before the end – the stapled back sheet – was what looked to be a handwritten addendum. The ink was darker. More recent. But it didn’t take a graphologist to tell it was Vogel’s writing: “I hereby leave one million dollars separately to Thomas Nguyen of San Francisco.”

“What’s this?” Natalie said.

“Something Jon felt he had to do.”

Natalie considered what that could mean. Was it some sort of ex-gratia payment, dating to Tom joining the company – back in Clamor’s early, freewheeling days? – Some wacky agreement originating on a bar napkin? Or something that Nguyen, a gifted technologist, had done for Vogel outside of the company?

But why in the will?

Natalie said: “And Tom knows he inherited this money?”

“Sure,” Star said. “I already spoke with him about it. The day Jon died.”

There was a peculiar half-light in the cottage. Only, Natalie was pretty sure that this ink was fading as well. Not as much as the rest, still … did this addendum predate Clamor’s existence?

In which case, what would the original relationship between these two men have been? It hit her like punch in the gut: that Nguyen was Vogel’s son.

The one in the photo.

Barely recognized to the end.

The name Nguyen being Vietnamese!

Vogel was over there, in what – ’74? Right around the time Tom Nguyen was born. Nguyen never talking about his family – but didn’t he say his father lived “nearby”? Her intuition told her strongly that it was so.

Odd that it wasn’t more widely known – or was it?

She was about to ask Star straight out, when she remembered again her own star-crossed relationship in her last job, and that fierce urge to keep a personal relationship personal. Probably the few who did know about it were sworn to secrecy, Star among them.

She felt a wave of empathy towards Nguyen. No wonder he’d been so preoccupied that last time she tried to visit him at his office. How Natalie knew what it all meant. ‘Régime de l’absence: Présomption de décès après une période d’absence de dix ans’ announced the document she’d received about her own dad, shortly before things really started to fall apart in her last job. Presumption of death after 10 years’ absence.

No closure.

Zero closure.

Just a gnawing, rodent-like need to know, remaining.

She was indeed in some God-awful hall of mirrors, feeling a familiar urge to leave – to get away from this place, Star’s cottage; “I’ll find you the name and number of a good attorney,” she said, hurriedly giving Star a goodbye hug.

The older woman watched Natalie drive back up towards Pine Glade Way.

She remained in Natalie’s rear view mirror, then turned slowly back towards her door.

CHAPTER 31

The dam burst, the memories flooding in, the questions and doubts swirling as if in some roiling dark whirlpool. That Spring Break of 1996, spent like a skiptracer from detective stories of old – tracing the man who’d skipped out on his obligations, his debts falling due.

Paris: where she met his old colleagues at Le Monde, and even a representative of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire – France’s equivalent of the FBI. She heard again how Henri Chevalier had spent the late ‘80s as a correspondent for the former soviet satellite states, reporting on what was revealed there as the iron curtain parted. He’d been one of the first to investigate the dark side of economic liberalization. In a seminal, award-winning article, he’d exposed how Amid New Political and Economic Freedoms, Sexual Slavery Returns to Young Women of the East…

She heard too how he’d come to focus on Hungary, spending more and more time there, to the cost of his marriage. And so that Spring Break of ’96 got extended, to the cost of Natalie’s own commitments back in Seattle. Like father like daughter. The apple never falling far from the tree. Pick your metaphor. His old friend Sartre was the great existentialist, the great believer in responsibility for our actions, yet somehow Sartre concluded that: ‘Long before we are born, even before we are conceived, our parents have decided who we will be.’

Budapest then, that May of ‘96: the grand bridges spanning the Danube, the atmospheric streets of stone apartment buildings predating the communist era: Paris’s sister-city to the east. What had happened to him out there?

Had he turned over a wrong rock, been bitten by a snake?

All she could confirm was that he was last seen alive outside the landmark Hotel Gellért, getting into a dark-colored Mercedes, parked a hundred or so yards away. Whether of his free will or coerced, the doorman couldn’t say.

Questions on questions.

Rejoining Pine Glade Way, her phone moved back into range, lighting up with a voicemail and a text.

The voicemail was from Cindy, simply: “Natalie please call me back as soon as you get this.” She sounded pissed, or stressed, or both.

The text was from Star: ‘Something else to tell you please come back’. Natalie’s heart sank. She hesitated, slowed down and called Cindy back on ‘hands free’.

Cindy answered sharply: “Where are you?”

“Near Monterey. I’ve left Star’s but she just texted me. I’ve got to go back again. If it’s about the Glock, I told Adam that I’d –”

“Never mind the Glock. We got the wrong guy. We’re going to make another arrest, right now.”

Natalie almost crashed turning the car around: “Who?”

“Natalie, did you know anything about Bill Pulver following a material witness down into Mexico?”

“I didn’t – I mean, we looked at some CCTV footage together, and thought it may have shown a witness. But no, I had no idea that Pulver had gone to Mexico!”

“Dammit Natalie! If we’re going to work together, we have to be able to trust each other with important information like this!”

Feeling the sting of her rebuke, she tried again to explain her involvement with Pulver’s investigation. Cindy interrupted her:

“Pulver skrrrr tracked the wit down to Ajijic skrrr.” It sounded like she was sneezing with the deteriorating phone reception: Ahee-sic. “Skrrrr a town on Lake Chapala, near Guadalajara. Dragged the kid into a local police station and conducted the skrrrrr skr-self. Using a folio of photos, of possible suspects, skrrrrrrrr direct hit skrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

“Cindy, I’m losing you. My phone’s moving out of range.”

She pulled over halfway down Star’s driveway. She got out of the vehicle to see if it helped with the reception, but the call dropped. Damn. Maybe it would come back in again nearer the water.

Then she paused among the silver trees. Something was very wrong.

Cindy Bayley flashed up on her phone. She was even more broken, yet louder:

“NATskrrr skrrrrrr skrrrrrr skrrrr skrrrr skr skrrrr skrrrrrr skrrrr STAR skrrrrr skrr skrrrr DON’T skr skrr skrrrr skrrrrrrrr NOT skrrr TEXT! Skrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… ”

Before she could get back in the car she heard the crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, the whack as it went into wood, followed by a bang.

The rifle report rumbled round the empty glade. A goose honked and beat its wings over the water. Her senses were supernaturally alive. The downy hair was up on the nape of her neck. The distant water heaved, sighed indifferently. Wind chimes sounded balefully. She was down on the ground beside the car. As far down as she could get.

Think.

Judging by the fresh, axe-like cut in the tree – and the direction of the report sound – the shooter was someplace the other side of her car.

The shooter! Dear God, what was this?

She caught her breath sharp and shallow. Ok, ok. Breathe deep. Breathe! Nice and easy. That’s Ok. It’s OK, it’s OK –

Think!

Back to those days spent with her mom’s hunting side-of-the family, down in South Carolina –

How far away was the marksman? From the delay in the report, a few hundred yards. Had he – surely a he? – pulled off Pine Glade Way…

Then why hadn’t she seen a car? Other direction maybe –

The Glock…

The Glock was in its carrying case, in the glove compartment. Very, very slowly she felt her way into the cabin of the car. It rocked, ever so slightly – then an almighty BANG! resounded through it; he or she’d hit the passenger side door.

Jesus Christ.

The sound of the report came earlier and louder than the first time. The shooter was on the move, getting closer.

Probably reloading right now.

Click: glove box open. Snap: case open. Gun: Glock in hand.

She hauled the cold metal slide back between thumb and bent forefinger, pulling the first round up into the chamber, then she crouched back down beside the driver’s doorsill. The Glock suddenly seemed so tiny, so puny compared to whatever this person was aiming at her. Even from this range, she could feel the intent to extinguish her life, like a palm pressing down on the crown of her head.

Think.

Oh Lord of Mercy and Love –

Think!

The phone had jumped right out her hand with that first shot. It was now lying someplace in the bushes nearby. Not a good time to go looking. No service anyway.

The car?

Problem being it offered no protection. If the shooter was up near Pine Glade Way, he or she held elevation gain on her. To drive, she’d need to see out, and to see out… She glanced at the inside passenger door: that last bullet had spread out as it nosed through the inner door skin like some ghastly great pimple in the black vinyl – right below the window. Two inches higher, and it would have been goodnight.

What did offer protection? Tree trunks were too narrow.

Star!

Why hadn’t Star heard the shots?

There was only silence.

The ground was cold, the seat of her jeans damp. She was trembling, she now realized. Out the corner of her eye, she noticed an edge of movement. A rabbit? Or had she? – noticed anything? The silvery trees stared back at her. Would this person be camouflaged? The trees and brackish background were staring back at her, starting to play tricks on her.

It was late afternoon. Don’t be out on the path after sundown, the elves in MultiQuest had warned.

She heard a crackling of underbrush, not near, but not so far either – and too loud for a rabbit, or an elf, or anything other than a human being.

She had a sense of someone being almost clinically prepared for this encounter. Did the shooter have night vision? She imagined the glade as seen in green phosphor, like that ‘embed’ footage from Iraq on the nightly news: the intensified thermal image of her body, already appearing like a ghost –

Was she destined to haunt this glade once dead?

Despite all her attempts to suppress it, she could almost see the person in her mind’s eye. Had she pieced together the puzzle of the last few days? Did she subconsciously already know? Tumblers clunked obscurely into place. And yet she felt like she didn’t know anything anymore, or anyone. Where was Phariance? She felt a hallucinatory level of fear. That this person could and absolutely would wait it out. Wait for her inevitable mistake. One mistake. That was all they needed.

Risk-situation security assessment: she was going to die!

This just wasn’t fair! She hadn’t done anything, yet! Got fired from her job, failed to get married! What The Fuck, Lord! She stamped in tearful frustration, vowing that if she ever lived to survive this situation, she’d do something pretty damn useful with her life.

Tendrils of mist crept up the driveway from the cottage. With the fall in temperature, the evening fog was starting to roll in again.

Somehow it intertwined with a base, primordial anger in her. All of a sudden she was on her feet in a crouching run, the Glock exploding into action. She fired in the direction of the branch-breaking crackle while trying to dart among the trees beside the track without running into any of them; Bang! Bang! Bang!

Bang! – the Glock punched back into her hand – Bang!

Counting off the rounds was a massive comfort, each new one affirming she was still alive. Glock 17 – she had seventeen rounds: six, seven, eight…

She was firing the gun sideways, everything Adam Lau had told her not to do. One disadvantage of this approach, she noted for next time, was that the ejecting copper shell casings flew rather distractingly in front of her face –

– ten, eleven –

Twenty-five yards to go, to a low wall, just ahead of the cottage, and now she felt a –

Whhuuummmpphhhhh

– as a fierce air current buffeted the back of her head.

Her lungs turned to lead. She slid down behind the wall, an excruciating pain engulfing her lower body. She’d twisted her ankle. Or broken it? Shit! – no, it was only sprained, thank God.

The boom of that last bullet hitting the empty horsebox and its report had arrived almost together. She breathed fast. Heart rate very fast, faster than she could ever recall. Alarmingly so. Star’s back door was twenty yards away, not even. The stone wall extended to the side of the cottage. She reckoned it was just tall enough to give cover, depending on how close this person really was.

Branches breaking again under foot: he or she really was close, coming for her now. She couldn’t wait to look. She crawled behind the wall, by instinct commando-style – as fast as she could with the pain shooting from her ankle, all the way up to her hip, beyond. Suddenly she was there. She was at Star’s door. Reaching up for the handle, already ajar. She rolled inside. Then she stood up, felt her ankle throb and heard herself scream. Star. Lying on her couch, with one arm aloft like she’d fallen asleep at a strange angle. Her right eye fixed Natalie with unswerving gaze. On her right temple, a small red circle. The exit wound joined with her other eye socket; a fir tree-like spatter of blood and other matter ran off into one corner of the room.

Things happened very fast, like in a dream. A car speeding down the track, smashing off the side of the Taurus, skidding to a halt broadside, driver’s side opening beside the back door – Cindy Bayley appearing in the doorframe, asking if she was OK:

“No! I’m really not OK!” She’d already ‘acquired’ her in the sighting arrangement of the Glock. “What are you doing here?” Taking no chances. Not one.

“I’m here to help you, Natalie!” Cindy yelled back, sounding unnaturally outraged. “When you said you got a text from Star Williams, I realized something was very wrong!”

She felt her arms perfectly straight, forefinger firm and steady on trigger.

Cindy shouted: “We found it almost impossible to even set an interview with her. She said she never used a cell phone, never mind text – what the hell! –”

She was having difficulty looking at the life-like corpse of Star Mary Williams.

“How did you get here so soon, Cindy?” she asked loudly.

“I was down at the County Crime Scene lab, checking on Vogel’s remains!”

“Adam said he’d be doing that! What were you really doing in this neck of the woods, Cindy?”

“Adam was called away, to make the right arrest!”

She had six rounds in hand.

Who were any of these people? Did she have any idea who this woman was? Had she ever even seen an FBI badge? As for her supposed partner – a man who’d ‘found’ her entering an online game? – An armourer?  When, shit! – Yuri Malovich had been killed with a stun gun, her own life very nearly extinguished with a high-powered rifle?

And now Cindy wasn’t even answering her questions.

“Drop your service weapon and kick it towards me,” Natalie yelled.

All the while, that white notch and dot dead straight with the center of her forehead. Taking no chances.

“Natalie, what the hell are you doing, it’s me!” she yelled back.

“Disarm, NOW!” she roared. Some reptilian part of her brain caught the shadow now entering the still-open doorframe behind.

Cindy dropped to the wooden floorboards like a magician’s cape – unblocking the view:

Nguyen.

With the rifle.

Sighting between her eyes.

His boot now pressing Cindy’s face into the floor. Cindy squirming, writhing for something at her ankle, the barrel of the rifle skating left, right –

Impulse travelled down her trigger finger before further thought could intrude. Where Nguyen’s left shoulder deltoid muscle had been, there was now a cloud of red droplets. He wheeled. She saw dust particles lift off the cottage’s timber beams as a booming wave rolled through her, a bang so loud it made her ears drone, the blood humming deep.

The bitter-singed smell of cordite filled her sinuses.

He’d discharged his rifle into the open roof space.

With his good arm, Nguyen was mechanically chambering another, massive round of the hunting ammo, staggering back through the still-open doorway.

In a split second everything replayed, including the voicemail she’d listened in to: The boring and recalibrating work is all done: tell ya, packs a helluva punch… Cindy was scrambling for her Glock – getting unsteadily to her feet, a boot mark visible down one side of her face.

She disappeared too, out into the mist. Savage, fast footsteps. A terrible crack; a hole blown straight through the top of the wall, admitting pale evening light. Then three pops in rapid succession, and silence.

Had they killed each other?

“Man down,” a voice finally said.

The voice was Cindy’s. There was a surprised radio crackle in response.

Nguyen lay like a wounded animal. Presently more cars and people arrived.

CHAPTER 32

The FBI office in San Jose shared a building with a financial services company, according to the digital lobby directory challenging Natalie’s entry. Architecturally, it was a study in institutional facelessness – just a satellite of the San Francisco Bureau, one of several hundred such ‘resident agencies’ around the country. But Natalie knew that its proximity to the heat and heart of the Valley made it special. After all, someone from law enforcement had to keep tabs on what these kids with their deca-billion dollar companies were trying to do to the world. The San Jose office covered four counties – including Monterey, and came equipped with a full complement of agents and state-of-the-art interview suites.

Tom Nguyen had been shot in the left shoulder, the left thigh, and the left thigh again. With the first shot, she’d recounted, Cindy had missed Nguyen’s body altogether. She then regained composure, realizing Nguyen was out of ammo again, and brought him down with two precise wounds to the man’s nearside hamstring.

After five days in Monterey County Hospital under armed guard, Nguyen was on crutches and painkillers. His new home was an interview suite here – just a few doors down from where Natalie now sat, at Adam Lau’s desk.

She slid the Glock 17C across the shiny desk surface. He met it with out-stretched fingers. They looked at each other. Natalie was just aware of some deeper understanding, some threshold crossed.

“Keep it,” he said finally. “Which reminds me,” and he reached down into a drawer, his hand re-emerging with some special gun re-registration form, for her to sign.

“Adam,” and her eyes became moist. She shook her head.

“You can stop apologizing Natalie,” he said softly. “It’s me who should apologize to you, for giving you such a bum steer. For saying that the coast was clear, when it manifestly was not.”

He won. She dried her eyes and withdrew the weapon, wrapping it in an oilcloth. From the recesses of her bag, she found a pen and signed the form. Adam was about to say something when Cindy blustered in and gave a good-natured salute: “At your service M’am,” she said. “That was some shot.” Through sheer luck or otherwise – Natalie still wasn’t sure – she’d prevented Tom Nguyen from ever aiming a rifle again. And yet kept him alive.

Cindy set her clipboard down. “He’s cooperating. Trying to move up the snitch chain. But there’s only one place to go.”

“To the person really pulling the strings,” Adam said, eyebrow arching.

“Yeah, but I was thinking about the recommended sentencing: all we can do is try an’ knock it down to life, without.”

Adam brooded. “After all, we’re talking three first degree homicides, and at least one attempted murder.” He tilted his head from side to side. “The only person round here who’s gonna work the snitch chain to any effect is one Salvatore Polanco: turning state’s evidence in exchange for dropping charges of breaking, entering and stealing $370 from the cash register of the Silicon Bean café.”

“Our local P.D. friend William Horatio Pulver. God bless ’im,” Cindy said.

Natalie said nothing about Sal Polanco, Bill Pulver nor indeed Nguyen’s attempts to shoot her. She was thinking mostly of the man she’d known for seven years at her old company. The man she’d maintained contact with ever since.

Do we ever really know anyone?

It was also Nguyen who’d brought her into this situation in the first place. Why?

“He thought he could control you. At least, better than he could control Malovich,” Cindy said. “And guys like that have to exercise control – in highly specific ways.”

“Like how?” Natalie said.

“Like making you feel vulnerable. Like, faking a profile page on Clamor, and even faking the faker’s identity. Perhaps hoping for a lil’ ole girl-on-girl rivalry between you and Nancy Wu.”

“Right,” Natalie said glumly. It was the same principle used by traffickers, pimps and pornographers the world over: make them feel vulnerable. Make them afraid.

“Seems he got good at faking stuff,” Adam said. “A master of misinformation, you might say.”

“How so? What else?” Natalie said.

“Dwayne Wisnold’s MultiQuest account,” Adam said.

“Nguyen was Rage, in the game?”

“Actually, as determined by Clamor’s own Multi-Identity Engine, Nguyen was a beastmaster.”

“Oh, did our profiler love that one!” said Cindy. “The beasts out there, or the ones inside?” and she patted her stomach. “Which ones was he really trying to quell?”

“I need to hear more about this,” Natalie said.

“See, Tom Nguyen had a certain early-life experience, we’ve pieced together,” Cindy said. “How much do you know about his family history?”

“I worked out that Jon Vogel was his dad.”

He’d killed his own father.

Cindy said: “Vogel met his mom in Saigon, in ’74. By all accounts, Jonny was in a bad way back then. Lotta drugs. He and Ms Nguyen spent a few days together, a week at most. She got pregnant, and had Tom in a Thai refugee camp. Mom kept hold of dad’s ID pendant.

“Tom Nguyen was a ‘trick baby,’ as they’re known. The refugee camp he grew up in was adjacent to a military R&R quarter, where servicemen went for I&I.”

“That’s not an acronym I’m familiar with,” Natalie said.

“Intoxication and intercourse,” Adam said.

“Just one of several notorious acronyms from that era,” Cindy added. “Like LBFM. – Ms Nguyen being one.”

Natalie shook her head.

“Little Brown Fucking Machine. One night, she was passed round the camp guards – and not heard from again. Spoils of war, I guess you could say.” Cindy paused. “Tom eventually made it out to the US, under the Orderly Departure Program.”

It seemed consistent with what Star had mentioned.

“Of course, he was a very badly damaged young man, perhaps sexually abused too at that camp. He suffers from a condition known as crypto-amnesia: he has trouble remembering important aspects of his past.”

Natalie recalled his attire for the Sunday strategy session: the T-shirt with the gold elephant saying ‘I don’t remember’, the pendant round his neck…

Cindy: “Our profiler managed to pull his school and university reports. Through grade school, he made a tremendous effort. He managed to have an almost normal time in high school. But there were problems, of course. Several women filed complaints against him at university. He had a habit of sneaking up on them in dorm halls, late at night. He picked different women, reducing the risk of being caught, but one time he threatened a senior with a knife, his come-on line being: ‘Wanna go blading?’”

The room temperature dropped. He’d used the very same line on Natalie at their brunch that day in the Marina district –

“For whatever reason, the University administration let it go.”

Cindy pulled a copy of Malovich’s drawing from her clipboard.

“We eventually got hold of the Clamor cap table from the bankers. You were right: the 39% was Vogel’s. And you were right about the 5% too: it wasn’t Malovich’s.

“It was Paul Towse’s.”

Cindy and Adam explained how the real driver was indeed Paul Towse’s quest to take control of Clamor and grow the Farther Frontier Fund into a new media phenomenon worth hundreds of billions of dollars:

“For Towse, a broken down man like Nguyen was a godsend. Multiworld was the stake-building vehicle Towse had set up to take control of Clamor.”

“And the 1% was Nguyen’s.”

“Yup,” Cindy said.

“And so Malovich was killed because he found out about the stake building scheme.”

“Nguyen already confessed to it. Our amigo Sal Polanco has good eyesight. Could even tell us what Nguyen was wearing that night Malovich died out back a’ the Silicon Bean.”

“But how did they think they could get their hands on the 39% stake, when Vogel had already willed it to his trust?”

But Natalie answered her own question: “If Vogel died without a will, an inheritance claim could successfully be brought under Californian Law by his biological son, legitimate or not. And for that, two things needed to happen…”

“Forensics found the remains of Vogel’s will in Star’s fireplace,” Cindy said. “Vogel’s assistant, Mysty Summers, was already dead; Star was the last person with living knowledge of his affairs.

“Until you entered the frame, that is.”

Still Natalie struggled with it. Her left-brain could accept the logic but her right, intuitive brain had a very hard time seeing Tom in this new light. The man who’d left to become Chief Scientist of one of the hottest start-ups in the Valley. Perhaps she had her disputing hemispheres mixed up. Perhaps it was the right side accepting it and the left one not? She frowned.

“I get why Nguyen was a very useful instrument in helping Paul Towse take control of Clamor. But, OK: why would Tom ever go along with Towse’s plan? When he already held one percent of a company worth fifteen billion dollars!”

How much is enough?

“That’s the persuasive power of a man like Paul Towse,” Cindy said. “He did promise Nguyen a slice of a vastly bigger pie. But crucially, he promised Nguyen the CEO spot. Of course, it was ‘Interim’. Towse would never have allowed Nguyen to become a permanent CEO, after folding Clamor into Further Online Gaming. But for Nguyen, it was always about control.”

There was a long pause.

Cindy went on: “I guess we all need a leadership figure in our lives. God, a mentor, call it what you want. But our profiler stressed how this particularly applies to people who’ve grown up without having had a father figure around. A dad who’s strong, present and appreciated. And daddy certainly wasn’t present in this case.”

Natalie ground down on that one.

“ ‘A vortex of darkness’,” she mumbled, “is how Vogel described Paul Towse.”

She looked again at the Malovich sketch. Specifically, the right hand side of it: ‘SureFar Enjoy’, ‘Sayonara’, ‘LLA’…

“Don’t worry,” Cindy said, “we’ll bring Paul Towse in. Just as soon as we’ve got enough from Nguyen; we’ll get ‘im.”

CHAPTER 33

But that wasn’t how it went. By the time they swooped on Paul Towse’s Pacific Heights mansion, he’d ghosted on them, Adam informed Natalie the very next day.

“Gone where?”

“We don’t know.”

“Right,” Natalie said uncertainly. “So what now?”

“Biggest source of traffic to SureFar Enjoy remains MultiQuest, via the Clamor site. Rage has lived on. Has now turned into a Non-Player Character, like some dark deity ascended into hell.”

“God in heaven.”

“We need to get back in the game.”

They all got together at the Silicon Bean café.

Josie, the owner, made it available to them after hours. Natalie was pleasantly surprised to find Winston Ma there. He sat in a big brown armchair: a diminutive figure with spiky hair and sharp-angled glasses, engrossed in his laptop. Natalie had only spoken with him on the phone, and recognized him first by his voice: “Oh there you go, you little bitch!” he was saying into his headset. “Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Who’s daddy now?”

She tapped him on his shoulder. “Um Winston, it’s me. Natalie.”

“Hey! Natalie! What’s up?” and his face lit up with a thousand-watt smile.

“Winston, who were you just talking to?”

“Just some angry fighting gnome.”

“What had she done?”

“He. Got on my wrong side. It’s so great to finally see you!”

In the game, he was a particularly flamboyant magician going by the name of Magé. “It’s pronounced like Sade,” he said. “The pop singer that is, not the Marquis de’.” Magé had a penchant for purple satin gowns and spectacular golden scepters, “the difference being the ermine collars,” he said, stretching his neck up and out in a regal sort of way.

She said: “Bit of a trek down from the city, isn’t it?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I got laid off. Yup, found out through Twitter! The all-new combined HR department of Accidental Bank And Now Carmichael sent out a global tweet to the summer interns, telling ‘em twasn’t to be. Thought I’d try my luck down here in the Valley.” He looked round approvingly. “I like it here! Just went for a job interview at Clamor, with Nancy Wu.”

“I thought Nancy left Clamor?”

“She came back. She’s now running the show. Lot of the staff there really liked her apparently, wanted her to return.”

“What about Dwayne Wisnold?”

“Oh, he’s on permanent sabbatical. Or some fellowship thing? Who knows. Who cares! Nancy Wu’s cool! Or rather, she’s hhh-ot!” – And Ma’s face turned into the surprised look of a freshly caught fish.

Tolemy, the cleric whom they’d ridden up to the Scintanel Plateau with that one time, turned out to be a tall, good-looking Indian programmer – one of the original search-algorithm engineers at Google. He wore a knee-length green leather jacket and introduced himself as V.K.Venkateshanonandonananda.

V-and-on-and-what?

“You can call me V.K.,” he smiled, with the easy confidence of a man who’d received early Google stock options. In addition to being perhaps the most respected cleric in the land, he had an alter-identity in the game: alchemist.

There were half-a-dozen others present, all members of the Order of the Knights Templar, including a large teenage girl who’d evidently come straight from work. She wore a Burger King uniform. In the game she was a fierce old warrior queen called Lyne.

Adam, or rather Brastias, called the Order to order. “Let’s get straight down to it. We’ve been searching for Rage for a week now. What are we going to do?”

“The interpretation of the religious texts is clear,” Tolemy warned. “Either Rage is slain by sundown on the 13th – this Friday, that is – or the world is condemned to another great age of darkness. Perhaps several.”

“That’s two day’s time! Magé said. “How do we slay him when he won’t engage?”

The stakes had risen. A group of hackers had managed to de-activate MultiQuest’s billing engine, making it free to join. The rave reviews continued to roll in; the widely followed consumer technology post of the Trumpington Bugle blog had lauded it as “perhaps the most mythologically complete representation of modern times available to any gamer anywhere.” It was adding a million new members a week. A hundred million total members didn’t seem so far fetched now.

“Listen, I hate to come out of character,” Natalie said, “but there are some pretty serious real-world issue here – human trafficking for one. We can’t risk another dark age of the game. Not with the number of players involved. If someone could hack in and unhook the billing engine, why can’t we go in and delete a Non-Player Character such as Rage?”

“It’s just not that simple,” V.K. said. “The billing engine is a discreet piece of software – necessarily so, as it interfaces with the banks’ payments systems. But, Deep Thought – the code base running the game itself – is a different animal altogether. To allow the graphics to build as fast as they do, the code is distributed across peer-to-peer networks. Millions of personal computers, all around the world. There is no central server to hack into.”

“– or Central American server farm to blow up, Ms Bond,” Winston said, eyebrow arched.

“OK, I get it: so the game effectively runs itself now,” Natalie said, frowning heavily. “What the hell is Deep Thought written in, anyway? Why can’t we ask your friend, Winston? The one who told us about the ownership structure?”

“Eeesh, he was fired. For that reason.”

Winston steepled his fingers. “As for what Deep Thought’s written in, it’s actually derived from the concatenation of internal numeric commands, textual commands, and a nonce, hashed using an MDX algorithm, then inserted into blocks finally encrypted with 4,096-bit keys. And that’s about all my newly unemployed friend would tell me,” Winston shrugged. “Oh well.”

V.K. said: “I think what Winston, or rather Magé, is trying to say is that Rage resides deep in Deep Thought itself. That the only way out is to defeat him in the game. Which first means finding him. By Friday, sun down.”

Lyne said: “We’ve already reached the high pass of the Atalantans. We may as well keep going and cross to the west side. Everything we’ve heard points to him lurking somewhere in the new worlds there.”

“But we also know he only ever engages one or two people at a time,” Magé said.

“That’s true. Two of us should go ahead. It really would be faster,” Tolemy said.

“Which two?” Lyne asked.

“An armourer for sure. And the best rider among us, I guess.”

“Then that’s Brastias, and Caerleone,” Lyne said. Turning to Natalie: “Guess it’s your destiny.”

The plan was for Tolemy to help Brastias and Caerleone traverse the treacherous high pass, while Magé, Lyne and the others returned to the Quorn Valley, in case Rage showed up there instead.

The high Atalantans were an alpine wonderland of emerald waterfalls, wasted glaciers and pristine snowcaps. On and on they traveled, through the high windy pass, through horizontal hail and sunrays so fierce that they felt like they could’ve fried a Pterodactyl or Quetzalcoatlus egg on whatever rock surface wasn’t shaded. That night, Tolemy kept guard while Brastias and Caerleone rested in an incense-filled monastery (separate rooms), barnacled to a high cliff-face.

The Silicon Bean was starting to resemble the dispersal hut of a war time fighter squadron: fully clothed figures dozing fitfully in seated positions as dawn broke.

Waiting – for Rage to arrive.

V.K. with his eyes half open, a book spread in his lap. He was thumbing the bottom of the pages. Funny, he didn’t seem to be turning any, Natalie noted.

At 06:55 hours, they had to stand down. Josie needed to open the Bean up to the regular early work trade. Time was running out.

CHAPTER 34

That evening, Natalie drifted off in her hotel room, dead to the world.

She awoke at 02:45, unable to remember her dreams, yet incapable of returning to sleep. Finding the remote, she turned on the TV, and was confronted with an array of entertainment options at that hour, ‘Adult Desires’ being most prominent among them.

Curiosity led her. The types of movies displayed alphabetically, ‘Asian’ being first, ‘Asian Dreams’ the lead title from a list filling the screen. A prompt asked her to confirm her purchase for $16.95 + tax, reassuring her that the title would not appear on her bill. After the briefest of title sequences, the film cut straight to a young girl with long black hair riding an older man. Her back was arched, her head back, mouth forming a perfect ‘o’. Pause, Play and Fast Forward controls appeared along the bottom of the screen.

Natalie looked at the actress. “Hahh,” she kept crying, to a rhythmic slapping sound, the orgasmic throes contradicted by her void eyes and flaccid stomach. Her crotch was depilated to look like a little girl’s – who was this actress? What was her story? Natalie fast-forwarded. The scenes followed a sequence of sexual positions like some latter-day ritual. There was a repeating change in the actress’s demeanor from defiance, hostility even – to compliance, gratitude finally.

Every scene ended with the man coming in the woman’s face.

The businessmen, movers and shakers staying a place like the Keaton were among the more influential members of society. As a woman and a security professional, Natalie was struck by the vast insecurity system it amounted to.

Why did it have to be this way?

The phone rang – Adam Lau: “Rage is up.”

They thundered down the far-side foothills, picking up speed as they went, the horses’ hooves sounding their urgent, four-thump gallop. Finally they entered the infamous Serafin Valley where, word had it, Rage lay in wait. Scenes of devastation confronted them: healers consoling the injured, fires burning out of control. At one point the heat became so fierce their entire field of vision wavered watery white. Still they did not let up: the sun’s orb was sinking ever lower in the sky, ever closer to that serrated horizon.

“Here,” Brastias yelled over the thump of hooves, and handed her something long, thin and sharp: “This is the legendary Sword of swords.”

“Huh? It is too light!”

She was about to discard it for her heavier weapon when he urged: “No! It has weight enough.” He was having trouble keeping up with her. “It is not point heavy, the handle is weighted. The magic is in the balance!”

He was right, she realized, taking a couple of practise swipes. It sang, the blade humming through the onrushing air.

“OK,” she said to him – but he had already fallen behind. Phariance was now swimming with energy like a river bursting its banks, flying forward!

And then there he was, coming towards her like he’d ridden straight up out of the underworld. All in black, with coal-black eyes, his massive warhorse black too, the dark shaffron and crinet of its head armour chinking ominously. Her innards sank as she recognized the hundreds of pounds weight advantage they had over Phariance and her.

Still, she looked resplendent, in a dazzlingly bejewelled fighting cape.

The horses accelerated into such a fierce gallop that the hoof beat became continuous. For a second it looked like the two horses would collide head on at a closing speed of more than eighty miles an hour. Somehow they knew to pass at just an arm’s distance on the left. Shocked by the pace and aggression of it all she froze, gripping her sword before her. His blade flashed crosswise – the beheading stroke, clattering hers flat against her visor. Sparks showered and she saw stars, halo-like shapes behind her eyes.

The horses cantered round in wide, preparatory circles, Phariance attempting to look back over its shoulder, checking on its charge. Rage was looking at her too, studying her with expressionless eyes. He seemed familiar to her. His arm hung casually, the razor-sharp blade slicing dead scrub.

She heard the others through her cell phone, set to LOUDSPKR:

“Crouch lower in the saddle, Caerleone!” one of them was saying; “Make yourself less of a target!”

“No! – Sit up tall, so you can manipulate the sword properly!”

“Celestial clock’s ticking, Nat,” a third voice said.

She punched the phone to OFF as the horses squared off again, breaking into another gallop, terrifically fast this time, Rage and his warhorse hurtling towards her like some great black streak. At the last moment, with all her will and might, she kicked her horse onto its opposite leg. Instead of leading with its left hoof it switched to lead right, lurching violently through the transition and shouldering into Rage’s horse such that the two ton-weight mounts really did almost collide. At the last second, Rage’s horse veered, throwing Rage off balance, his favoured beheading stroke thrumming the air above her awfully as she feinted and – with the dexterity of a seamstress – nicked his saddle girth, briefly exposed.

There was a scintilla of contact with his stirrup too.

Again the horses cantered round, Rage checking his foot armour, finding it to be fully intact, but studying her differently now. That was when she realized that this was no Non-Player Character.

This player was all too human.

Through the pixels, she felt a familiar presence.

He’d slowed to a walking gait, silhouetted against the sun’s orb dipping precariously below the horizon. High above a circling eagle screamed. For a third time they faced off. Then they charged again, utterly exhausted now. She saw Rage dig his spurs in hard, the blood whickering off the black beast’s foaming flanks. Phariance, with a lolloping gait, plunged forward, carrying her ever onward. At the last moment, Phariance shouldered in towards its heavier opponent-horse in a suicidal lunge, the other wavering in response, Rage swaying from side to side above – first away from Natalie, then towards her, the saddle girth starting to unravel; the saddle slipping half way down the horse’s nearside.

The real challenge with jousting, Natalie Chevalier had discovered, was that the shoulder floats free from the rest of the skeleton in a harness of soft muscle and tissue… She couched the Sword of swords like a lance, pressing her elbow against her bodice as hard as she could. The tip punctured his breastplate. There was no further resistance, his lower body jerking ragged in the stirrups. And then she felt herself tremendously light, as Phariance’s front legs buckled. She was somersaulting over his shoulder, hitting the scrub ground with a thud. Winded.

Fighting to keep consciousness.

Rage had planted his sword in Phariance’s neck.

She scrambled back across the prickly scrub, to where Phariance now lay on his side, shaking.

She buried her face in his dishevelled mane. “Don’t go,” she whispered into his still-alert ear.

His heroic sideways glare found her gaze one last time, then the eye dulled, and gently rolled skyward.

CHAPTER 35

She was asleep for a while. Then a voice penetrated her consciousness: “Natalie? You there?” A familiar voice, through the hotel room answering machine.

“Cindy.”

“Ah! I was wondering if I could buy you that coffee an’ eggs-over-easy. You know? Like we were gonna have the other day, before being so rudely interrupted.”

“What time is it?”

“Six forty five. – Six.”

Natalie groaned, and Cindy said: “We still can’t find him, Natalie. Let’s talk about it. – over breakfast.”

At Cindy’s favorite North Beach diner, Natalie heard how federal agents had drawn a complete blank on Paul Towse’s movements since Nguyen had been taken into custody. “Zip. Nada. No flight plans filed for his private jet. No cell phone activity. The only chatter being through Internet surveillance. That online game you and Adam are so intimately involved with.”

Changing the subject, Natalie said: “Cindy, d’you remember at school, our Honor Code? How a dishonourable deed demanded action ‘in accordance with its severity’?”

“’Course I do.”

“Well, what could be more severely dishonorable than the deeds we witnessed during that raid?”

Cindy looked distant. “That girl whose head was almost severed. It felt like I was holding my own daughter...”

“Right. You said yourself it was a question of going deep, of getting those nasty roots out. But surely the source is several thousand miles away?”

“It’s not that easy. Oh, you’ve guessed right: Towse is only half the story – and just like any other business joint venture in China, Surefar Enjoy does have a local partner there – and here. But things are real delicate with the Chinese these days, Natalie.”

“Would this local partner go by the name Xiao Lin?”

The two women looked into each other’s eyes for an unusually long time.

Ben called. She was going to ignore it, but she’d missed his calls all week.

“Natalie,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that you’re safe and well.”

“I really am, thanks. But I’m with someone; can I call you back?”

“When d’you fly off to the Bahamas?”

“Don’t know. I may be staying here on the West Coast for a while. I never got to see my friends in Seattle properly, so I’ll probably spend some time up there.”

“But that’s great! I’m up there often enough for work. We could go for cocktails sometime?”

“Sure Ben, that would be nice,” she said. Hanging up, she thought about the Alibi Room. Maybe Ben could be inducted. Yes, that would be quite OK. “Sorry Cindy, where were we?”

“Towse. We searched his place down in Woodside, then the one up in Pac Heights. He ain’t there. We had a team comb through it. All fifty rooms. The wine vaults even –”

Natalie recalled something. “Did you check the mausoleum?”

“What mausoleum?”

“The original owner, some movie mogul. He built a mausoleum there – or so Towse told me one time, over a game of chess.”

Cindy fixed her with another look, before grabbing her bag and Natalie’s too.

Her Yukon got them up to Towse’s mansion in under seven minutes. It was raining again. As they approached, a black Lamborghini Murcielago flew out of the entranceway, its low haunches twitching on the rain-slicked road surface. Cindy’s head shot round: “Lin.”

She sped up to the duty officer guarding the main entrance: “John, what was that guy doing here?”

“He drove in, saw me and fled,” the duty officer replied.

“You get eyes on him?”

“Here,” and the duty officer spun round his laptop – to which CC cameras were apparently hooked up, judging by the rain-blurred image. It showed the man with the blank, prison-like stare, looking up through the Lamborghini’s long windshield.

“Adam,” Cindy said into her radio: “Get a team on Xiao Lin. Now.”

She waited for Adam to say something. Then: “Yeah, just leaving Towse’s place – apparently eager to find the man too.”

Cindy asked the duty officer for a copy of the city plans used by the search team.

The lower level comprised a rectangular arrangement of underground rooms inside the larger square of the building’s foundations. Two flights of stairs led off the enfilade of main entrance spaces, in opposite directions. The right, eastward flight led down and round on itself into the wine cellar, which pointed back into the center of the house. The westward flight followed the mirror opposite path, into the underground cinema – the end of which almost met the end of the wine cellar, but not quite. This had to be the location of the mausoleum. “I’ll check the wine cellar approach first,” Cindy said, hurrying off with her Maglite and Glock drawn. Natalie followed.

The floor plan had simplified the cellar system greatly. Yes, there was a main, barrel-vaulted passageway – but off it ran innumerable spur cellars, each dedicated to a different age. They had iron grille gates, several rusting off their hinges.  Damp mustiness pervaded all. They were unable to find the light switches, relying on Cindy’s powerful flashlight instead. She held it over her left shoulder, her gun drawn in her right hand.

They walked down the main passageway. There was a strange humming sound, perhaps the heating system. Or did Towse have a generator? The ages chalked beside the cellars announced that they were getting older, now down to the 1900s – no, 1890s. The hum grew louder. But they’d taken a wrong turn, Natalie felt sure.

She said: “I’m going back to the main floor.”

“Good idea. Wait for me there,” Cindy said. “I’ll just check the far end.”

Looking over her shoulder, Natalie saw Cindy’s flashlight reflect off naturally uneven rock surface, perhaps the far end.

There was barely enough light to find her way back, but Natalie managed. She waited on the main floor for a moment. Then she acceded to a deeper curiosity, descending by the opposite flight of stone steps, back into the bowels of the building.

The opposite path, taking Natalie down to the cinema, was much grander. Wide stone corridors turned right and right again, back into the center of the building. Soon she found herself in the hundred-seater picture house. The light switches she located easily enough in the entrance vestibule; the original gas-lamps in the wall torches and ceiling chandeliers had been swapped out for candle-effect bulbs, flickering dim orange. There was enough light to make out the blood-red velour seats and wall coverings under decades of dust. Over the front screen was a delicately patterned curtain, dead and brittle like pressed moths’ wings.

She tried to imagine this underground cinema in the time of Sullivan B. Wentworth: early Hollywood’s dapper, dinner-suited elite, tucking into a Fatty Arbuckle comedy or a von Stroheim masterpiece. As she looked around the long-ago deserted rows, she could almost imagine the commotion there: how real it must have all seemed to those tense limbed men and women in the audience, dwarfed by twenty-foot high planes and trains and the rest of the modern age hurtling towards them, in silent black and white. But wait, what was behind that screen?

As Natalie came closer to the curtains, she could make out a rectilinear pattern. She parted them. No screen. The screen had been raised – recently? – into a concealed, tightly coiled roller above. Ahead was a metal portcullis-like structure. A hinged section inset, ajar. And in the wall beyond, an ancient looking arched doorway, the wooden door just outlined with light. It looked awfully like a crypt.

She opened it. There was a narrow staircase, the steps hewn from bedrock. Many steps, taking her much deeper, until finally she was in another, cooler corridor, which felt considerably older – except that she could hear that humming sound, and see pullulating light reflecting off rock surface.

The first thing she came across was a display rack of swords. The one nearest eye level bore an engraved plaque: ‘Shuang Shou Jiàn – two-handed Chinese fighting sword’ – over five foot long. Looking down, she noticed one of the shorter swords missing.

She rounded the corner, into a larger, cavernous space, the light and sound source becoming clear: a giant curving HD screen, somehow set into the rock surface and even bigger than the cinema screen of the picture house above. The image was familiar from just a few hours before, the immersive scale less so: the aftermath of a medieval battle, with a dead knight in black armour hanging by one leg from a stirrup, the legs forming the upside ‘4’ of the hangman. Facing the curving screen was a chair equipped with a floating keyboard and other computer-related peripherals.

He sat slouched with his slip-ons at odd angles on the floor. His head hung back out of view, his arms dangling straight down. Rising vertically out of his chest was the missing sword, his shirt and business slacks soaked darkest vermilion.

She took a step towards him. He was still breathing, very shallow. The sword had smashed in his sternum, from which blood was still bubbling up. He hadn’t quite managed to kill himself.

“Natalie.” It was almost a whistle. “Finish it.”

She stood.

“Before I tell you something, that will change everything.”

She half reached for the sword handle, clasping its metal ridges, finding the purchase that eluded him, that would send the blade in an inch or so deeper, into his heart – and yet she couldn’t.

“You know that your father, he … Our paths crossed. You know that,” and he gave a strange-sounding cough, almost a gargle: “– that he was a client of mind, when I was just starting out, with my Leading Ladies,” and he coughed again, in way Natalie had never heard before.

“Though,” he smiled thinly, “he graduated on to other things altogether in Budapest.”

The cough was thoroughly wet, ragged now.

“He went native out there Natalie,” Towse hissed into nothingness, the darkness rushing in.

By the time Natalie became aware of Cindy’s presence, his face had sunken into its death mask. She sensed Cindy’s arm round her shoulders. “You found him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Dead.”

“Quite so.”

“I need to call in a few folk, to take care of this.”

“Please do.”

“Then maybe we can get out of here.”

“That would be nice.”

EPILOGUE

Lauhu Bridge Station, the key border checkpoint between Hong Kong and mainland China. At peak hours, it processed more than a quarter of a million people through the main floor of its chaotic three-story structure, the transit point for trafficked women from Fujian Province and much further afield, destined for Jinshan, the ‘Mountain of Gold’ – America.

From her observation point, Natalie Chevalier could see the late straggling commuters crossing back from neighboring Shenzen into Hong Kong. There was an almost metallic smell about the place. Closer to hand, the odour of earth. Possibly urine too.

Hong Kong had a peculiar history. The Brits had taken it under a war that sat somewhere between the good, the bad and the unmentionable of their colonial past. By eighteen forty something, the thirst for oriental fineries had become so constant, the trade imbalance with China so great that the Chinese were demanding silver, exclusively, in exchange. Silver was a reserve metal and not one the Brits wished to give up lightly, so they started filling the trade gap with opium instead. Before long, addicts were slumped across dens the length of the Chinese coast – all the way up to Shanghai, soon renamed the ‘Whore of the Orient’. The Qing dynasty declared the narcotic illegal. The Brits sent in gunboats, the superior technology of the time. Upon a successful conclusion to the Opium Wars, they’d not only won Hong Kong but various other ‘free trade’ concessions to boot. It made you wonder exactly what trading lessons the local merchants had learned and passed down the generations. Certainly none of it was easy for Natalie to square with the fabled British sense of fair play but, hell.

We all have our public and private sides, don’t we?

She lay face down in the darkness. She wore thin-soled sneakers, loose black mobility pants, a plain roll-neck sweater and a scrunchie tying her hair back. She brought the little finger of her right hand to her mouth, pressing the signet ring to her lips. It bore the insignia of the Knights Templar Order, victorious in the first great age of MultiQuest.

It was uncanny how the game had pegged her true identity. Upon first joining, she’d chosen the role of “enchantress” – a sort of fluttery southern butterfly, as she’d so often seen herself reflected in the perceptions of others. But the game had quickly renamed her Caerleone, an old soul – a knight errant no less. An existence predating the excrescences of modern society. Bizarrely, it had then all made complete sense to her – that yearning for a true cause in life: a worthy quest...

All that time spent at her old company, pushing email around, sitting on calls or in meetings, trying to work around whatever was in the way of some software release, or something. All she cared to remember now was her old technical mentor Ray Ott arguing that good security engineering proceeded not from cool technology to “product” – rather, from requirements to solution. Which first meant defining the threat model, and only then selecting the technology that suited.

Her right hand returned to the underside of the high-powered rifle, forefinger on trigger. Where Agent Adam Lau had obtained it from, she didn’t care to know. Just in case it was Tom Nguyen’s impounded weapon after all. Again, she felt a sense of equivalency with the guy, now serving four concurrent life sentences in San Quentin. Were their actions really so different, in the end?

She shuffled, slowing her breathing right down, letting her body settle into the dry earth like a sack of soft sand. There was some pressure on each elbow and her left breast pinched a little, but not too much, actually. Her right hip was raised, right leg gathered up slightly, her dominant right eye aligning with the scoping. Through it she could see into the main room of a wooden building, perhaps fifty yards back from the border station’s perimeter. Certainly it was within earshot of the immigration officials and newly changed police guard standing outside the three-story structure. How could they not know what was going on in there?

A single, hanging light bulb divided the dusty room: on one side stood a young man, on the other sat a young girl.

A squat man sat guarding the door behind: a ma zhai – ‘little horse’, or enforcer.

The briefing had been spot on. The standing man was indeed Xiao Lin. For a moment, Natalie wondered again what he was doing there, in person, at Lauhu Bridge. Then she recalled reading how ‘hands on’ he was as an executive, like a Head of Retail who takes over the cash till, just to show he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

“No blowback,” Cindy had insisted.

Usefully, the FBI Special Agent was in-country for Google’s hacker-spat with the Chinese authorities, the Mountain View-based search giant falling squarely within her jurisdiction. “No blowback,” Natalie had confirmed, while acknowledging that in an ideal world, there would be unimpeachable local policemen, cooperation across borders, fair extradition treaties. In an ideal world, hell, people may even behave decently towards one another in the first place. But this was not an ideal world. Just ask the girl sat in that dusty room, whose face Xiao was now stroking. Natalie could almost hear him sweet-talking her, all tian hua luan duo, ‘flowers dropping from the sky’. Her expression wasn’t so rosy however. Perhaps because her infant daughter had just been wrested away from her, removed from the building altogether.

Not good.

She – the mother – was being readied for the air route from Hong Kong International. But apparently Xiao wanted to sample the merchandise first.

There were a lot of things about the human trafficking trade that had confounded Natalie’s expectations. For example, as between the air route and the sea option: she’d expected air to be vastly quicker, easier. Even large cargo ships took months to cross the Pacific, and that didn’t allow for embarkation and disembarkation time. Yet it turned out that by air, the wait alone averaged two-and-a-half months: the time it took to obtain forged documents, notably the fake ‘photo-sub’ passport, altered by photo substitution. Actual journey time ran more than 100 days on average, due to the many transit points involved. People from places such as Fuzhou City in Fujian Province couldn’t just go abroad for the first time from their local airport. They had to fly out of Hong Kong. And from there, they may pass through three or more countries. It was not uncommon for them to be sold on to other ‘snakeheads’ en route.

All of which represented a market consolidation opportunity for an entrepreneurial and well-connected and man like Xiao Lin.

The girl opposite Xiao wasn’t taking in anything he was saying anymore. He was becoming impatient, gestures all big and sweeping … all magnified into the four quadrants of the rifle’s crosshairs. But the girl wasn’t to be reasoned with. Evidently she just wanted her daughter back in her arms.

All of a sudden Xiao clapped his hands over the girl’s ears like two cymbals smashing together. The forced air would perforate at least one of her eardrums, possibly both. The more painstaking version of this move, Natalie knew, involved chopsticks: from that, there could be no recovery of hearing. But this was quite enough to do psychological damage, for life.

The girl’s head hung for a stunned second then slumped, a dark rivulet of blood running down her slackened jaw. Even the guard looked away. Xiao couldn’t conceal his grin, his chin and chest puffing up in victory.

His eyes glowered down at the girl.

Natalie’s parted lips pressed softly back together again. Vital not to lose focus. Any microscopic movement could mean missing. Once that bullet smashed into the building, either he’d be dead or on the move – and if on the move, impossible to sight at from this range. It was what had saved her life on the Monterey Peninsular, when Tom Nguyen was shooting at her. You simply can’t track a moving target through telescopic sights at this distance. Not successfully, at least.

Nguyen had in fact come damn close.

But damn close wasn’t nearly good enough here.

Very gracefully, Natalie retracted her right eye further from the metal rim of the scoping, in anticipation of the kick. Xaio’s raised chin blurred slightly in the lens.

That made it easier.

The stock thumped back – and a second later, his head smudged pink.

She was already on her feet, breaking down the rifle. She made her way down from the dark hilltop. She saw the lights glitter on the horizon. One of the firecracker bursts heralding the Chinese New Year should have coincided with the rifle report, but there was a growing sense of commotion down at the Station. Her very soul already felt strafed with remorse: Xaio Lin had a mother, father, siblings, cousins – who doubtless thought the world of him, as a ‘guest of the beautiful country’.

Doubtless they had no idea.

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