About Face (5 page)

He stood to show us out. Rod's tail was fully between his legs. Until he fully explained why, I had to hold back on getting tougher with Rupert.

I did reveal a bit of information when we reached the corridor. I wanted to catch Rupert off guard. “
[email protected]
,” I said. “Do you know that email address?”

“Not our type of person,” he replied. His eyes still did not meet mine. They'd avoided me since halfway through the interview.

A door at the end of the corridor opened. I glimpsed another world behind it, a severe world of clean, rectilinear lines, of chrome chairs and polished granite. A woman stood silhouetted in the door. She had come out to watch us. Her legs were jacked up on a pair of pumps sharp enough to open a letter. With her padded shoulders, she cut a figure far more formidable than Rupert. From the position of her office and the way she watched, I sensed she was the boss. And she had the power to back up every threat Rupert had made.

Men handle humiliation
in different ways. Rod, cowed though he was by Rupert, did not appear more troubled on the way back to his house than he had been on the way down. My surmise, after a week of working with him, was that the pecking order in which Rupert operated was not one Rod recognized. The tokens of status by which most men judged one another held little inflection for Rod. He saw them as merely that, signs in a system: He himself, as a master of codes, floated above it all, decrypting the systems, not so much to manipulate them as to comprehend the nature of code itself. The algorithms he designed performed a kind of magic on obstinate databases, unlocking new and unexpected insights hidden within them.

What bothered me so much, then, about Rod's meek submission to Rupert? Was it his failure to stand up for himself, or the fact that, hamstrung from defending him, I had to submit as well?

I let my steam burn off a little before I started putting questions to him. I kept it basic. “How do you feel, Rod?”

“I'm disappointed,” he said. “They really don't know where Alissa is.”

“What about the way Rupert pushed you around?”

He shrugged. His voice was calm and resigned. “It's his area of expertise. What could I do? He's got the control key.”

“I think we should go straight to the police.”

“No. That option is closed. If we do that, everyone will know Alissa was an . . . associate.”

“Rupert was bluffing,” I said. “He doesn't want the publicity any more than you do.”

“He wouldn't publish it in the newspaper. Just a few well-placed calls and I'm a laughingstock. You know how people are.” Here was one social convention he recognized, if only in recognizing that others recognized it: It's not cool to pay to have a girlfriend. At least not through a middleman.

“Is that how Rupert forces you to keep using the service? And can keep raising his rates on you?”

“That's their method,” Rod said. “But it's different for me—I wanted to see Alissa. She wanted to see me, too. So she said.”

“And you did have unauthorized visits, like Rupert claimed.”

“Yes. Alissa started them, but that's beside the point. Rupert's still got me for violating the contract.”

“I'm sure we can get around that.”

“The language is airtight. When I signed it, I thought the chances it would come into play approached zero. But it's not what Rupert can do to me I really care about. It's what he'd do to Alissa.”

We reached his shady Belmont street a few minutes later. He methodically pulled the car into his driveway, made sure it was straight, put on the brake, and locked the doors after we got out. This time he said to the front door, “Open, dammit.”

I expected Rod to start his habitual pacing and compulsive putting away of things. Instead, he sat down at the kitchen table. I sat across from him. He gripped his knees and looked up at the
ceiling. He did this often, as if absorbed in a screen in the corner of his eye. The real action was on the screen, and you were a bit of flickering distraction that happened to be in the room. He called it “deep hack mode” when he was working.

“Alissa's unique,” he said at last. “She plays a unique role in my life. I always thought she cared for me, too. Don't get me wrong, I had no illusions, but . . .”

“But you hoped anyway?”

Rod shook his head as if shaking off the idea. “No, it was absurd. But I did think she would treat me right. That she was doing her job but it was a little more pleasant with me. That she'd like to see Algoplex succeed.”

I waited for him to explain. He wouldn't without a prompt. He was contemplating the corner again. “Is there some reason she
wouldn't
want your company to succeed?”

“No, I just . . . I wonder now why she got so close to me. She was bright, but no wizard. I wonder about her motives. I wonder if they have something to do with her disappearance.”

“It sounds like you're talking about theft of Algoplex secrets.”

Rod's face was a virtual blank, but he gave a minuscule nod.

“Did she have access to your files?”

“I was careful. I've learned that lesson. When I started out in this business, I'd share my ideas freely because I was excited about them. Then they'd show up in an executive's memo as if he'd done the work. That's why I started my own company.”

“So you were careful, but then you got closer to Alissa.”

“It was unexpected.” His features glowed for a moment as he thought back. “We did hit it off that first night at the banquet. But also, as the night went on, I noticed the difference in how I was perceived. Before, people tended to avoid me if they didn't have some work issue to discuss. I don't do small talk. Mike
pointed out this was a drawback in gaining the confidence of investors. He was right about the need to change my image. That night, with Alissa on my arm, the other guests sought me out. They wanted to know who this beautiful woman was. They wanted to know me, too. They realized there was more to me than they'd thought. Alissa turned on the charm and I found a new conviviality in myself. It was remarkable.”

“It makes sense you'd call for her again.”

“Yes.” He gave me a bashful glance. “You saw her picture. I think you understand. It seemed a good investment, in any case. There were the public events, but she helped in other ways. She suggested clothes I should wear. Shoes—she said they were significant. She recommended a person to cut my hair.”

Somehow his mustache survived, though. I nodded at a giant platter in the shape of a fish leaning on a shelf by the stove. “She started to redecorate your house, too.”

“That was more recent, as she began to spend time here. She would call me—this is the honest truth, Bill—she would call me on her own on the weekends and volunteer to come over. For free. We took hikes, rode bicycles, went to the Santa Cruz boardwalk— places we weren't likely to be seen by Silicon Glamour people. She'd get in terrible trouble if we were. She did it because she wanted to see me. So she said. She never asked me for a thing.”

“I assume you took the photo on one of those outings.”

“Yes. In Carmel. What a glorious day that was.”

“And you managed to put up with her visits.”

I smiled to let him know I would have, too. But Rod wasn't in a smiling mood. He zeroed in and held me with his slate-gray eyes. They were incredibly intense when they ceased their wandering and focused on you. Suddenly I understood why he didn't do it often.

“It was amazing, Bill. New synapses started to fire. I felt doors being opened inside of me. It was so easy to talk to her. I wanted to tell her everything. Favorite books, films, foods. Stories from childhood, things I didn't know I remembered. Personal quirks—she thought they were so funny. I couldn't stop talking. I won't lie to you, Bill, I haven't had a lot of relationships. In school, I never understood why other students were so obsessed with dating. Now I know.”

“Intimacy is addictive.”

“I find myself thinking that. But I didn't let myself go. I didn't let myself fall in—” Rod halted at the word. “I knew the score. Yet still, she seemed as surprised by it as I was.”

“Did she talk about herself?”

“Oh yes. We're not such different generations—she's thirty, older than she looks. We had very different upbringings, yet we seemed to share so much. Mine was reasonably standard: Ohio, civil engineer father, chemist mother, jock older brother who beat me at everything. Alissa's was hard. Always on the move, always new men in her mother's life, always being told she was a drag on her mother. Yet she talked about it in such a sweet way, not laying blame, not asking for pity.”

“Yet she stayed in touch with this mother of hers.”

“That's something I wanted to mention to you. When you asked Rupert about that email address, foxylady, it occurred to me it could be Alissa's mother. It's the kind of name Wendy would give herself.”

“Does Rupert know Wendy?” I asked. “Because the way he reacted was interesting. He said he didn't associate with such people—as if he knew who it was.”

“God, I hope not. I hope it wasn't Wendy who got Alissa into this business.”

“I sent a query to that email address last night, asking if they knew where Alissa was.”

Rod's plump lips formed a pout. “I wish you'd checked with me first. I've been telling Alissa to stay away from Wendy.”

“It's worth the risk,” I said. “I'm going to work on getting inside Silicon Glamour. I want to talk to Erika, that friend who works with Alissa. But it'll take some time. The email is the best lead we've got right now.”

“I felt so bad for Alissa.” Rod's attention strayed into the corner again, where he seemed to see the past. “I wished I could make it all better. I was thinking about helping her, Bill, sort of adopting her, like an uncle or something. Getting her out of that life, giving her a chance to acquire more advanced skills. What a fool I was.”

Now we were back to the real subject. “You think Alissa set you up somehow?”

Rod tapped his teeth with a knuckle. “Maybe.”

“You're afraid she got close to you in order to get access to Algoplex technology?”

“Maybe.” His voice was getting miserable.

“Is there any evidence?”

“Maybe. I checked the log on my computer downstairs. Some crucial files were copied on an evening when Alissa was here. I may have done the copying myself—I just don't remember.”

“Who would she have been working for?”

He kept tapping. “There are a lot of things that don't make sense. First of all, I didn't give her any IP. I talked about what we do, but not with any granularity. She's not a technologist anyway; she wouldn't know what to look for. The one possibility I can think of is that she strung me along to the point where I was
comfortable having her in my house, where she could copy files. That would assume someone told her which files to copy. But who? I can't imagine SG has any use for my work.”

“They could sell it. If you had this suspicion, I really don't understand why you didn't challenge Rupert.”

“I keep hoping it doesn't add up. Alissa was unhappy at SG. She still had three years to go on her contract and she felt trapped. If Rupert had gotten what he wanted from her, why send Brendon over to harass me? Rupert convinced me he didn't know where she was.”

“I agree that he believed you had information he didn't. Still, I think it was an act. His reasons were not what he said.”

“What were his reasons, then?” Rod said.

“We need to find out. That's why we shouldn't have buckled.”

“Possibly. I know there's a grammar and a syntax to social behavior, but in my world we say what we mean. We solve real problems. We scream and we argue about how our technology will get us there, but our motives and ends are shared.”

“Rupert's problem is real enough. Money is to be made.”

Rod glared at me. “By
real
I mean a problem whose solution will improve life in some way. Making more money just transfers resources.”

“Rod, I know there's a difference between you and him. That's why I'm on your side. And you could be right, he may be as in the dark about Alissa as you are. Which would mean she's diddled you both.”

He flinched, and I wished I hadn't put it so bluntly. “Sorry,” I said. “Look, I know it's hard. I've been there. Remind me to tell you a story about a woman named Lynda someday.”

His little giggle came out again. “She diddled you?”

“In every sense of the word. But then, it happened to everyone in those days.” I didn't have to spell out which days I meant: The late nineties seemed like ancient history now.

Rod's face softened into relief that he wasn't the only chump in the room. He fidgeted with a napkin, tearing it into uniform strips. “It's like getting a spell cast over you. You become helpless in its power. Someone else is pulling your strings.”

“Yes,” I said. It was an embarrassingly old story, but everyone had to discover it for themselves.

“A glamour,” Rod went on. “I remember a Dungeons & Dragons–type game where you could cast a glamour over someone. It's like a spell but more—well, glamorous. I looked up the origin of the word. I always thought it meant the appearance of beauty where none existed. But it came from a Scottish variation on the word
grammar
. That's because in the old days, only the magician-priests knew how to write. Inscription was one of their occult powers. I used to play computer games where you had a
grimoire
, a book of spells. See, I've always thought the spelling of a word contained the spell of its meaning. For instance, the origin of
algebra
is the Arab
al-jabr
: bonesetting.”