Kill Process (22 page)

“It only needs to carry you until you’re a little more viable, refined and proven. Then go to a venture capitalist, and get a bigger investment.”

“And go through all this pitching stuff again? Why don’t I get more money up front?”

“The more valuable you appear, the more money you get for a given amount of the company. Let’s say you convince someone the company is worth a million bucks. You trade ten percent of the company for a hundred thousand. Down the road, you’re closer to release, more of what you’re doing has proven out, and you seem like a sure thing. Then the company is worth ten million and you trade ten percent to get a
million
. Later, when you’ve launched and acquire customers who love the shit out of you, the company will be worth a hundred million. Then you trade away ten percent for ten million.”

“If I try to raise too much money up front, I’m going to give away too much of the company, and I’ll have nothing left to offer later, when the company is worth more.”

“Exactly. Listen. Work on the pitch, and I’ll email you an introduction to my buddy, Owen. He’s an angel investor here in Portland. I can get you a meeting with him. But you’re the one who has to convince him you’re worth the investment.”

*     *     *

I join Thomas for a walk after lunch, and tell him about the morning, and he tells me about his case. It’s a quick walk, because I’ve got an appointment with Charlotte.

“Can I see you tonight?” he asks, before I leave.

“Ahhh . . . I promised Igloo I’d stop by today.”

“At night?”

“No, this afternoon. Then I need to work with Amber tonight. She wants to define the chat API, and write a reference chat provider to interface with IRC.”

“That’s urgent?”

“It’s all urgent. We’re racing against time and money and Tomo and people’s goodwill. I also have to work on the pitch, and reply to a bunch of emails.”

“This weekend. Saturday. You have to take a day off.”

I wrap my hand around his back and pull him close. “Saturday. It’s a date.”

I race over to Charlotte’s office, where she greets me at the door as usual, and waits for me to take a seat.

“How are you?”

“Fine, just fine.” I’m tapping one toe, and realize I’m impatient to be out of here, even though I sat down only moments ago. I’m counting the things I need to do in my head. “I guess I have a lot on my plate. Like ten things I must do by tonight.”

“Sounds like a lot. Is that exciting or stressful?”

“I guess exciting. It reminds me of the early days at Tomo. I was employee number forty-eight.”

*     *     *

2002, San Francisco, 29 years old.

I’ve been in San Francisco two days and I’ve only slept for four hours. Everyone knows augmented social networks are going to be the next big thing, and this is my chance to get in on the ground floor, employee number forty-eight, thanks to a recommendation from Repard. Sometime during this never-ending fire drill caused by an onslaught of new users signing up for Tomo, I become convinced leaving the consulting firm was a mistake.

I need to remove a database column, and look at my list of chicken scratch. SQL is not my forte. DROP is the command I want, I think. I type in the DROP command, then query to verify the column’s gone. I receive an error message that the table doesn’t exist. I stare, dumbfounded, at the screen until I realize I’ve deleted not a single column, but the entire table. Now I’m going to have to replicate this entire database again. Hours of work wasted.

“Fuck my life. Who the hell invented SQL?”

I turn to the nineteen-year-old next to me, who also happens to be my boss. “Hey!”

He pulls his headphones off and I hear the tinny sounds of The Offspring escaping from the speakers.

“You hired me to do security work,” I say. “That’s what I know. Why am I working on the database?”

“Because the database is the bottleneck. We’ve got ten thousand users signing up each day. You see that guy over
there—”
He points toward someone in slacks and a dress shirt who’s hunched over in front of a big CRT. “He’s from finance, but he’s working on the database too. He’s using Visual Basic macros to migrate the data because it’s the only language he knows. Everyone does what they can.”

“Jesus. Visual Basic. Aren’t we making things worse?”

“If we survive today, we can fix it tomorrow.”

I want to quit, except I’ve never given up at anything. It’s an ongoing struggle, upping capacity, bringing new servers online, refactoring the database, the one thing that’s hardest to scale. I manage a few hours of sleep here and there, and survive on pizza and burritos. Someone purchased a literal pallet of frozen burritos and the refrigerators are stuffed with them.

Every couple of days I use the shower in the bathroom next to the bike lockers and change into a new set of clothes from my suitcase, which is here in the office with me. I haven’t even seen the furnished apartment that’s waiting for me.

On day seven, we swap in a new database schema and deploy code, and miraculously the database engine runs at ten percent load. We’ve gotten ahead of the incoming users and given ourselves a month of breathing room.

I’m shocked to realize I’m having fun. Security stuff had gotten routine, but this is living on the bleeding edge. It’s a rush.

Later that year, my boss leaves for another startup and I become Tomo’s database architect.

*     *     *

“When you became the database architect,” Charlotte asks, “what happened to computer security?”

“I did both for a while. Then we hired someone else to do computer security in 2004. Someone I . . .” I don’t know what’s safe to say here, what she must report or even might repeat. I can’t dive into my long history on the wrong side of computer security laws.

“Yes?”

“Someone I knew from my college days. That turned out to be a big mistake. He screwed up, big time, which came back around to me, because I’d recommended him. I thought I was going to be fired.”

“Really? Merely from recommending someone?”

“Neil was someone I’d known online, from a board I frequented when I was in college. I’d known him for a few years.”

“You met him?”

“Online, not in person. The hacker community is small. Everyone knows everyone else. He was working a dead-end sysadmin job when he was brilliant and should have been doing so much more. He said he wanted a real job, and we needed someone, so I thought it would be a perfect match.”

“What happened?”

“Everything was fine for six, seven months. He did his job, stayed on top of all the threats, kept our systems patched, ran penetration tests. Then one week he didn’t come in, didn’t answer his phone. We thought he’d taken a vacation or found a girl or something. The next thing we knew, our users’ data was showing up on Russian sites. He sold us out.”

My voice catches, and I realize this old story, this forever ago event, affects me more than I imagined.

“Eventually he showed up on the old boards, bragging about it. He’d done it for a lousy twenty-five thousand, which he could make in a few months working at Tomo. The whole thing had been a scam from the beginning. He never was interested in the job. He wanted to prove he could social engineer his way in, and I fell for it. I’m an idiot.”

I grab my coffee, take a slow sip, before I continue.

“Tomo was a month from closing funding. I had to meet with the board of directors and all the executives to explain why we’d been compromised, and how I was responsible. They talked about me like I wasn’t even there. Why was I responsible for the database? Could I be trusted? I wasn’t a person to them, only a potential risk.” I take a deep breath.

“They forced me to take three months off while they investigated, because nobody trusted me. It caused a month delay in funding. I came in one day to grab a few things from my desk and they had security escort me the whole time. Everyone stared.”

“That’s awful.”

I nod. “It seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, although I also couldn’t imagine the situation getting any better. I went from being on top of the world to doubting everything. My skills, my judgement. Was I worth anything at all to anyone? I was thirty-three years old, and all I wanted to do was move back to New York and live with my mother.”

Charlotte scribbles something in her notepad. “You didn’t?”

My blood pounds in my ears, and I try to rub away the unexpected tick in my eye. “No. I met Jeremy. I should have gone to New York. Fuck!” I punch the couch and little clouds of dust puff up. I’m glad I’m angry. I usually can’t even feel anger when I think of him. Anger is better than the total sense of powerlessness that usually engulfs me. That bastard.

“How did you meet?”

I shake my head and my breath wheezes in and out through my nostrils. “Not gonna talk about it.” I want to scream. All I can do is sit here on the couch, feeling like I’m going to explode. I can’t say anything, because if I do, I’ll fall to pieces.

“He was nice in the beginning. I had been single for a while. Curled up in bed talking about our dreams, I felt whole again. Because of all the shit at work, I had stopped believing in myself, and he believed in me. When it felt like I didn’t matter to anyone, he cared about me. It was . . .”

My throat closes up, and it’s impossible to swallow. I feel like I’m choking and glance around for water.

Gasping, each word an epic struggle to force out. “A lie. Manipulation. He. Planned. It.”

“Breathe in,” Charlotte says, “long, slow breath out. Again, breathe in.”

I struggle for air, gain control bit by gradual bit.

“Go to your magic garden.”

I hate her for telling me what to do, but I’ve spent so much time in hate. I don’t want to be there any more. I listen to her. The magic garden, another of the endless tools she shared, a special place to go where I feel safe. I imagine the beach in New York in the winter, the pounding waves off Fort Tilden, cold air blowing off the ocean, empty sand and dunes as far as I can see. Eventually I’m calm again.

“Why?” I ask. “What’s the point of taking me to the edge of terror?”

“Right now your fears, very justified and reasonable fears given your experiences, control you. A fear of something is not the same as the thing itself. It is smart to be cautious of a bear in the woods, but it’s not helpful to be so afraid you can’t discuss bears, or act intelligently when you encounter one. Eventually, if we keep returning to this uncomfortable space, your fears will lose their power over you.”

“So it
is
all about power, after all,” I say.

Bend, Oregon. Chris Daly, Bureau of Research and Intelligence, field agent.

C
HRIS
D
ALY
flips to page eleven, handling his notebook with a gentle touch. He’s never accidentally burst one of the destructive solvent packs capable of dissolving both ink and paper, but it’s happened to agents in the field, who then suffer the embarrassment of being completely without mission instructions. Electronic devices, of course, have their own risks.

Under the glow of a red flashlight he reviews the crude black-and-white map of surveillance cameras, plotting a path of least coverage to the congresswoman’s driveway where her red Tahoe is parked.

He removes a Ziploc bag from an outer envelope, touching it only with his gloved hands. It contains a single folded sheet of paper with the Congresswoman’s name on the outside. They possessed the means to send an untraceable electronic message, of course. Unfortunately, the congresswoman’s zealous ban on electronic devices during her family vacation made the delivery of it a complete impossibility.

There’s something to be said for a bit of old-fashioned fieldwork now and then, even if electronic methods are more efficient. He and his partner even broke in to bug the vacation house before the congresswoman arrived. He hadn’t done that in years. Standard operating procedure now was to hijack computer and mobile device microphones and cameras, which had sufficed for all except a handful of cases since he joined BRI.

The high-desert sky here in Bend is clear, the stars bright to his dark-adjusted eyes, though from six houses away the Tahoe appears black in the starlight. The plastic bag is slippery under his gloved hand, the single sheet of paper within a minimal payload, four sparse lines of text. He had studied the congresswoman in countless photographs and videos, knew how she reacted to good news and bad, could tell her public face from the private one she used when she thought no one was looking. She would open this letter in a few hours, her eyebrows would raise slightly, then she’d frown, the corners of her mouth curling down, her forehead tightening. Because no one would be there to see her, she’d grimace, her teeth slightly uneven, the result of a biking accident in college. She’d once confided over instant messaging to a close friend that she hadn’t gone for medical treatment because she didn’t want her parents to know.

Chris’s breath quickens, his grip tightening on the letter, as he strides faster in anticipation of her reaction. It isn’t possible to own someone like the congresswoman. She’s too principled to buckle under blackmail, even with powerful leverage on her. But she could still be manipulated.

She’d been fighting the Bureau of Research and Intelligence for months now, scrambling to unveil BRI’s charter and gain oversight via the House Committee on Intelligence. Once she read the note, though, she’d be outraged and distracted. Her attention would turn away from BRI and back to one of her earlier passions: gun control.

Once upon a time, leverage meant searching for useable dirt on a person. Once found, it would be applied blindly. BRI has refined the process, using dozens of psychologists and data analysts crunching profile data, to turn the application of leverage into a science with predictable outcomes. What did you want from your subject? Compliance, cooperation, distraction, anger, apathy, suicide? Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand, and with a lever, I will move the whole world.” For BRI, profiling is the place to stand, intel the lever; and the objective is not moving the world, but manipulating targets of interest.