Shimmer (9 page)

Meanwhile, the incoming money meant that, in the first year, I'd been able to build a massive secret network of satellites and mainframe computers. Stretching from Oregon to Ireland to Indonesia, at first the secret systems lived within the cracks of our normal operations. They were funded without the knowledge of our internal and external auditors, hundreds of millions of dollars shuttling between field offices, subsidiaries, foreign bank accounts and, increasingly, a series of shell corporations owned by me personally.

This was the shadow network, and, in the first months of our
growth, I accessed it through the main control center for all of Core's systems. Comprised of ten huge status boards and four long, dense rows of computers and monitors, the control center was staffed twenty-four hours a day by thirty technicians—a kind of small-scale Johnson Space Center in the heart of lower Manhattan.

Soon, though, I realized I couldn't manage the shadow network through the control center. Too many people had access to those systems. Too many people might see what I was really doing. And so I'd led Leonard and his tech team in the creation of a single server that would control the flow of all information through the company. It was located off to the side of the control center, behind a heavy door leading to a small, temperature-controlled room only I could access. No one but me could log onto the machine. No one but me could even touch it.

The machine was called Shimmer.

To all the employees, to the observers from the outside world, Shimmer was Core's ultimate corporate secret. By managing the movement of information among all our Blue Boxes, Shimmer was the key to having solved the problem of the Fadowsky Formula.

But in truth Shimmer was much more than anyone realized—more, even, than what the programmers themselves realized. Shimmer was an interface between the company and what soon became the thousands of pieces of the shadow network.

And so, late at night, I stared at Shimmer, Shimmer representing all the information in full motion, data transformed into images and color, curling shapes and ever-turning lines. Shimmer was omniscient, the infinitely powerful reflection of the secrets it tracked. And, of course, this was yet another reason I was the only person who had access to Shimmer. Because Shimmer simplified everything it controlled. With Shimmer, the shadow network could be displayed in the simplest of images, made clear to every manager in the company, to every analyst on the outside, and to Whitley and her SWAT team.

Imagine a dream, a dream with clarity and precision, a dream that
can't be explained or deciphered, but a dream so real you believe it, you touch it, you remember it completely because every idea in that dream, every person, every notion and decision, every part of it makes sense. That was Shimmer.

And so it was Shimmer that kept Core Communications alive. Because without it, without the simplified images and controls Shimmer gave to me, I would never have been able to manage the shadow network, its breadth, its changes and constant growth.

By the year 2007, Shimmer controlled a shadow network made up of almost two hundred locations inside and outside the company. Shimmer made sense of the elaborate mix of technology, finance and deception that drove the shadow network. Faced with handling an ever-increasing amount of information from the new clients we brought on, Shimmer could easily decide which part and place of the shadow network would be used to sustain the company. Shimmer might instantly decide to use one of Core's own satellites to bounce information to a strategic partner in Mexico, who in turn might send the information to a set of mainframes housed in a building managed by Tech Now, LLC, in San Antonio, Texas, one of the faceless locations that made up the shadow network. Essentially an air-conditioned warehouse feeding uninterruptible power to twenty-four mainframes and a satellite dish, Tech Now was housed in a building owned by an Arizona-based real estate development company of which I, personally, was sole shareholder. The mainframes in the warehouse were owned by a Washington-based networking supply company, which in turn was owned by Red Tree Limited, a holding company operated out of the Cayman Islands and funded entirely by me. The dish on the warehouse roof pointed to a satellite leased from an Austin-based company that resold the services of Global Satellite Security, one of fourteen wholly owned satellite subsidiaries of Core Communications. The few system administrators needed to operate the mainframes in San Antonio had been hired by yet another company, this one based in Germany and funded by a series of my personal foreign bank accounts.
These admins came from a local Texas employment agency, were paid high wages by the hour, and were given only the lowest-level access to the machines.

(Probably, given the usually disjointed, even paranoid state of mind so frequently exhibited by contract technical help, most of the admins thought—or at least wanted to think—that they were working for some secret outpost of the CIA.)

And what made possible the use of the San Antonio mainframes in the first place was that, months earlier, the mainframes and satellite uplink had been configured by a team of friendly customer service and tech support representatives from the world's leading provider of high-capacity mainframe networking solutions, Core Communications. A Core team had been hired to install twenty-four Blue Boxes. They'd gone through a test upload and download of information and billed the then Portland-based owner of the mainframes for the work. Once the invoice had been paid, Core had never heard from the Portland-based company again.

What this all meant was that, in a period of three months, I'd used one of my personal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands to push money through a short-lived Portland limited liability company in order to pay Core—whose stock I'd sold in order to deposit the money in the Caymans in the first place—to connect the computers to Core's real network. Once the bill was paid, a Seattle attorney working at the behest of an anonymous client had closed the Portland company, ended the contracts of the three workers and sold the company's assets, which consisted entirely of twenty-four new mainframes. The assets were bought by a recently formed company in Washington, D.C., whose attorney hired two local temporary employees to fly to San Antonio and install a relatively small piece of software on twenty-four mainframes sitting—untouched but operable—in a warehouse near the airport.

It was that final small piece of software that told Shimmer these mainframes were part of the shadow network.

These were the trails and connections that I tracked in my spreadsheet and that flowed through Shimmer. Even more, these were the
threads and connections wrapped around all my thoughts and all my dreams. The shadow network was, for me, a mass of places, people, machines, work and decisions. Bright and shifting and shimmering as it grew. And it did, always, grow.

And none of it—none of this growth—was questioned or doubted inside or outside the company. Because as long as we were acquiring new businesses every few weeks, as long as sales continued to exceed our best projections, as long as the press continued to treat Core— and me—as a darling of the business world, then the board of directors, the investment bankers, the brokers and financial analysts, no one would look past the surface of what I did.

From the beginning I'd feared every sale Trevor made, each addition putting pressure on the shadow network. But from the beginning, I'd known that in truth Trevor and his salespeople were the key to keeping the lie alive.

But not even Trevor knew all the details of the system I'd built. He'd never seen Shimmer. He didn't know about the spreadsheet I used to track the pieces of the shadow network. And really, Trevor didn't care. For him, Core was only about today's sales. From the beginning Trevor was sure I would figure out how to support the commitments he made every day, each sale adding pressure to the shadow system I was frantically attempting to build, each sale sinking us further into our fraud, lies and secrets. But Trevor had never worried about the collapse. Not only because he was soon worth half a billion dollars but also because Trevor found easy justifications for what we were doing.

“Core works today,” Trevor would say to me. “If it crashes tomorrow, we'll cash our last checks, drop our bankruptcy papers at the courthouse and move back to beautiful California.”

Early on I'd found myself repeating Trevor's logic. I'd told myself it was an end no different—to the outside world at least—than the unintended failures of so many tech companies.

Except that we were lying. And we'd been lying from the very beginning. Except that we were violating untold laws and regulations
just to stay afloat. Except that when Core collapsed, Trevor and I would go to jail if someone managed to figure out what we'd been doing.

And except that, for me, the commitments I was making to people every day—to clients, investors, the board and, especially, to the new employees I had asked to join what soon became a high-tech crusade—all that ultimately outweighed Trevor's prearranged justifications for the collapse. These people were giving their time. They were leveraging their futures. And they were doing it all for Core Communications.

And so the only exit possible was to keep building the company. To try to outrun the collapse.

That, at least, is what I told myself each morning. Each night.

Make it work.

Once Shimmer had been completed and I was able to rely on it to manage the growth of the systems, I realized that as long as sales continued to explode, as long as cash from investors continued to pour in, it would not be a lack of money that ultimately caused our collapse. What would bring about the end was the very size of the system I was building. The shadow network would collapse at the exact moment when the amount of information passed by our growing number of clients finally and very suddenly outstripped the capacity of the network. And when that moment came, the system would simply stop working. The shadow network, Shimmer, the real operations—all of it would suddenly go dead.

That is what Shimmer told me.

The only thing it couldn't tell me was when the collapse would happen.

Again and again throughout those first years, Shimmer showed me ways to extend the company's life. I'd stare at Shimmer, watching on my screen as Shimmer ran through scenarios, possibilities, options, answers. And each time I'd see it, in the images and notions and numbers of Shimmer, I'd see another way to keep the company alive a little longer.

It had been three years. Three impossibly long years of anxious, exhausting work by thousands of people.

And when it did collapse, I would be rich. Because every dollar I spent building up the shadow network, every shell company I established, every outside asset I purchased, all of this meant I was moving my money away from the collapse of the company. Moving it to safety. Hundreds of millions already were safe.

None of this had been set up by Trevor. None of this had been his thought or suggestion. From that first moment on the airplane when he'd told me the truth about his lie, from then on, Trevor—the evil cousin who'd haunted me since we'd been children and who I wanted, more than anything, to blame all of this on—from then on Trevor had been completely uninvolved in making the Blue Boxes work or in creating a shadow network to support us.

From that moment on, all of it had come from me.

It's in the morning that he sees it. Having been here all night. In the dark of a test center on eleven, he feels it in his eyes. Feels suddenly that it is morning. Knowing it before he even looks at the clock. And it is, of course. Morning again. And Leonard makes his way to nineteen, to an old storeroom with a window that still opens, and he lifts it, looking out toward the sunrise with the air pouring in, and he wishes he could describe it. Wishes he could draw it on paper. Put it into words.

What Leonard sees is the company. All of it. Each building and each office and each server and each keyboard and screen. And, even more, what he sees is each connection. The machines and the lines and the information, each tiny bit of information on and between each building and office. He sees it. There. Frozen but moving. Captured and described in his vision. There is no part that he does not see. Does not know.

And he smiles.

He feels the morning light growing warm on his face, the morning air clean, blowing in on his neck and eyes. Clean like California air,
clean like San Francisco. And now, for a moment, this is not New York. This is somewhere else.

He wishes he were somewhere else.

Not a different company. Not a different job.

But a different city.

I hate this city. I hate it, every day.

For this morning, though, there are the connections. And in the sunlight they feel real and full and within his reach, and he loves these mornings, when he can see it all. Seeing something more, something like all the lines between everything around him. Not just in the company. Not just in the systems. But connections everywhere. There have to be connections.

How could there not be?

How could it not, in the end, be made sense of?

He tells himself he doesn't believe in God. But he knows he does. Because there has to be an architect. Of everything Leonard knows and sees and especially everything he feels, now, in the sunlight, in this window. There is good and bad.

I hate this city.

Maybe it could be different, though. Maybe, if he knew more people. Knew some people from here. From New York. Even from work.

Just some people. Friends.

And he knows he can't really see all the connections in the company. Knows that Robbie's kept him from seeing so many parts of the company. There are secrets only Robbie can see.

Leonard knows that.

I know.

But he doesn't like it. Because it's not safe. Not right. He should be able to see it all, see the whole of the company. It's the safest thing. The best thing.