Shimmer (15 page)

And the laugh they shared—a nervously embarrassed, almost reflexive release—was possible only because of the stock and bonuses awaiting them.

“Grace,” Julie said quietly, and the rest of them were quiet, nodding.

Grace
was what people called the waiting period. It was the grace period, an unusually long one, between the IPO and the time when employees could sell their stock and receive their bonuses.

There was no specific date for the end of the grace period. Instead the end was defined by a series of revenue and profit targets. And so, every day, we moved closer to, or sometimes farther from, the target, from grace, moving at a pace that was mysterious to some people, elegant to others, and barely understood by most. It was because the calculations were so confusing that most people now called the date itself
grace.
Personified, ethereal, mythical.

By Cliff's calculation we were, on this day, four months from grace.

Cliff and all the senior staff held stock and options valued at nearly $100 million. And every employee, regardless of tenure, was offered options to own stock in Core.

But none of them were free to sell more than a fraction of that stock or to exercise any of the options or to receive the bulk of their bonuses until we reached grace.

It was because the date for grace had shifted so much—and had always moved closer—that many people had been borrowing against their stock packages for most of the past few years. Seeing grace within their reach, people had decided to secure quite uncommon loans from family, friends, even banks and finance corporations.

Even Cliff—the CPA and father of six known for the safest, most conservative decisions regarding the finances of this company—even he had overextended himself in the lead-up to grace. “Around here,”
he'd once said to me, “there is only the room or energy to go forward. You can't stop. You can't step back. You end each day excited and anxious and hopeful and tired,” he'd said slowly, absently, drifting in his tiredness even as he spoke, our feverish CFO now finding an almost poetic place from which to speak. “Then you wake up. And you know there will only be more.”

Some days, I wondered if we'd make it to grace.

But most days, I tried not to think about it.

And of course, the restrictions placed on the employees hadn't been placed on Trevor or me. We could—and did—sell our stock freely.

“Of growing concern,” Julie was saying now, “is that I can't manage to get the basics done.”

“Food for the dog,” Cliff said.

“Milk in the fridge,” Leonard said.

“There is no time,” Whitley said.

“None,” Leonard said.

“I know we've made a choice,” Julie said.

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“But still. Within that choice, there is no time,” Cliff said.

“This isn't just me,” Whitley said.

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“It's my friends,” Julie said.

“It's the people under me,” Cliff said.

“If I could just get the basics done,” Julie said again.

“My wipers have fallen off,” Cliff said.

“I still haven't paid last month's bills,” Leonard said.

“The food in my refrigerator has all congealed,” Whitley said.

“My dogs have been waiting at the vet for days,” Julie said.

“My home phone's not working.”

“The car's making a noise.”

“I'm wearing dirty underwear.”

“I haven't worn any in weeks.”

This was the day someone tried to blackmail me.

A man called, speaking distantly about threats and concerns, and at first I wasn't sure why I kept listening to him.

“There's talk,” he kept saying.

“I don't follow,” I said.

“There are rumors,” he said.

It was Friday.

“Rumors about?” I said into the phone, leaning forward toward Shimmer on my screen, hardly listening to the voice.

Alone in my office. Ordering data to be moved. Satellites repositioned. Connections rerouted. I hired six outside consultants. I severed two contracts with lawyers. I sold my own stock in Core to cover more purchases. Sixteen million dollars in purchases. Another sixteen million of my money into hiding.

Another sixteen that was, inadvertently, protected from the collapse. Selling my stock in the company as I built up the shadow network.

“Longtime rumors,” the man was saying, “that have now resurfaced.”

“I think I'm going to hang up,” I said, phone against my shoulder, typing.

“Rumors aren't important to you?” the voice said.

“You aren't important to me,” I said absently.

I wasn't sure why I continued to listen. Why I didn't hang up like I'd threatened. Maybe it was the offhand confidence in his voice. Maybe it was something beyond the calculated confusion, the distracting crossways conversation he wanted with me. Something real. Something authentic.

And something familiar.

“Talk means little to you,” he said. “Am I right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Except when talk becomes rumors and rumors become not even a reality but a possibility,” the man said. “Do you know when something moves from rumor to possibility? Can you see that point in time? Can you, Robbie?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Then think about this, Robbie,” he said slowly, and I was sure I could hear his lips, his mouth, all of it forming a smile. “There's talk of another journal, Robbie. A lost Fadowsky journal.”

And I slowly turned away from my screen. Turning around, toward the window, as if this man stood behind me.

“Fadowsky was a prolific note-taker, you know,” he said. “It's always seemed so unlikely to me that he wouldn't have documented the formula behind his boxes. Don't you think?”

And again it was only that authenticity in his voice, the familiarity in his speaking, that kept me from hanging up. Although now I wouldn't have been hanging up out of annoyance. Now I would have done it out of fear.

This man was laying the groundwork to blackmail Core Communications.

It was not just the Fadowsky Boxes—and the Blue Boxes we plugged into them—that had made Core possible. And it wasn't just the shadow network. Just as important was the fact that Frederick Fadowsky had never documented his formula. Because without possessing this unknown formula, we appeared to have found a way to talk to the Fadowsky Boxes. This was what it meant to draw blood from a mainframe. And no one else had ever come close.

“Do you know what kind of effect a lost journal would have on the stock market?” the man asked, and I pictured his smile.

Now I was telling myself,
Don't show him you're afraid.

“People like you,” I said to him, staring toward the window, “call me all the time.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Why would I believe your story?” I said, seeing myself in the window now. Seeing my eyes blinking, my hair strewn across my head, my mouth gnawing slowly on my lip.

“I think you already do believe it,” he said. “I think you're just looking for a reason not to.”

Don't show him you're afraid.

“Rumor,” he said. “Possibility. That's all it takes.”

Clearly he didn't even have a real journal. But that didn't matter. And he knew it. A substantiated rumor—a rumor that seemed plausible, possible, only maybe real—it could send our stock down by twenty, thirty, even forty points.

In a day.

Grace would be pushed back by months. Even a year.

And the shadow network, dependent as it was on the price of the stock, would be deeply wounded. It might even crash.

“People like you,” I said again, “call me all the time.”

“But how many of them,” he said carefully, “how many do you talk to for more than a minute?”

And I couldn't answer.

“You believe me, Robbie,” he said. “I know you do. I can hear it. In your voice.”

And I couldn't speak.

And I'd realized who this was.

“You're right to believe me,” he said. “You're right to be afraid. Because I want what's due to me,” he said, and I realized I was leaning back in my chair, closing my eyes, hearing his voice turn dark, like the charismatic villain in a story of good and bad, a turn so comfortable, so predictable, and I could hear the simple joy in his words. “I want my share,” he said. “You see, Uncle Frederick owes me. But I guess it's you who will have to pay his bills.”

Again I was sitting in a child's chair pulled up to a low wooden table. This time I wasn't in Perry's office, though. I was in Whitley's office, where we'd immediately called a meeting of key SWAT members in order to respond to the call. And where Whitley had, for some reason, recently brought in a low table and set of children's chairs.

“Friday,” Perry was saying quietly, “and I was sure we'd get through the week without being blackmailed.”

I passed him a written note as others were speaking.

I thought you weren't allowed to leave your office?

He scribbled a response with only a glance at the paper, his face expressionless, eyes turned away.

Just don't tell Robbie.

Perry had been added to the SWAT team that day, Whitley insisting that he be made a member of the group given the severity of this threat. Perry had agreed without argument, a surprising decision on the part of my burned-out head of R&D.

I've asked you to join SWAT for two years,
I'd written him in an e-mail.

Sure,
he'd responded,
but Whitley never has.

“I can confirm with ninety-seven percent certainty that you were in fact contacted by Eugene Fadowsky,” said Ronald Mertz, our head of corporate security, now taking control of the discussion.

Ronald was a serious and intimidating man in a padded nylon jacket. He stood near the end of the table, towering above us all as we sat in our low chairs. He seemed not to have acknowledged that the rest of us sat in children's furniture.

“Certainly,” Ronald was saying, “this is a move consistent with Eugene's profile.”

Eugene Fadowsky was Frederick's nephew. That was why he'd seemed familiar to me. I'd read articles Eugene had written, had seen footage of him speaking, had even met him briefly at a Core shareholders meeting two years earlier. He'd been invited to the event by one of our PR people. No one had thought to check his background, instead assuming that as a descendant of the famed Frederick Fadowsky, Eugene would bring an air of history and consequence to our gathering. He didn't. A highly sophisticated and well-placed malcontent, Eugene had instead accused Core Communications of abusing his family's name, of making unauthorized and illegal connections to the Fadowsky boxes and of stealing profits that should have gone to the Fadowsky family.

To keep his phone call to me from being outright blackmail, what Eugene had done was simply offer to sell me the lost journal. “I'm
thinking of this as a right of first refusal,” Eugene had said to me. “Which is only fair to you, don't you think?”

The catch was that I had to buy the journal sight unseen. And I had to do it at a huge—and as yet unstated—price.

For now, we were all looking to Ronald for guidance.

Even at seventy-four years old, Ronald Mertz possessed a deep and obvious limberness, a strength that always hinted at the inevitability of rapid, sudden action. Moreover, Ronald was one of those people who stand. He stood through staff meetings, he stood eating lunch in a break room, he stood while talking on the phone in his office. Even now, as he spoke, he paced the carpet at the head of our low table.

Ronald was noting that Eugene was actually the nephew of Fadowsky's brother-in-law, the former electronics salesman who'd first sold Fadowsky Boxes to corporations worldwide. Eugene hadn't been born with the last name Fadowsky. But, upon turning twenty-one, he had changed his last name—the first in a series of steps he'd taken to try to make himself chief representative of the Fadowsky family.

The family had made hundreds of millions of dollars off Frederick's invention. Frederick's death and the ensuing realization that the formula could not be found had done nothing to slow the brother-in-law in his selling of the Fadowsky Boxes. Upon his retirement in 1989, the brother-in-law had placed the rights to the Fadowsky Boxes into a family trust, which in turn paid the entire Fadowsky family a substantial licensing fee.

“But,” Ronald said now, “the share of this fee that young Eugene receives is, apparently, not enough.”

Whitley closed her eyes, hand slowly crossing her lips, breathing quietly but sharply. Julie pressed both her hands flat against the table, pushing hard, and I thought the table might break. Leonard's dense legs looked so large, so very large near the floor, the weight of them barely held by the tiny chair on which he sat. And Cliff, he'd crossed his arms and hands over his chest, as if trying desperately to keep them from jerking away from his body.