The Hunt (12 page)

“I don’t think whoever left this intended for me to bore myself to death.”

“Maybe there’s something already on the iPod that’s a clue of some sort,” offered Abigail. “A song or photograph. Something like that.”

This, in contrast to Luisa’s suggestion, was a good idea. I wondered if it was possible to trade in Luisa for Abigail, at least until Tuesday morning at ten. “How do I turn it on?” I asked. It’s possible I was the last American under the age of eighty who had never used an iPod.

“Here,” said Peter. He took the device from my hand and pressed the track wheel. A second later, the small screen lit up. We huddled around him, watching as the Apple icon gave way to a menu of options.

“Try Photos first,” I said, thinking about the picture we’d found in the safe, but clicking on Photos led only to an empty screen. He clicked on Music next, but this also produced nothing.

Then he clicked on the Videos option in the menu.

“Jackpot,” he said, tilting the screen up so we could all get a better look. There was only one item listed, but it was clearly meant for me: it was titled “Play Me, Rachel.”

It was a simple enough request, and it had worked for Lewis Carroll. “Okay,” I said, “Let’s play it.” Peter handed me the headphones, and I inserted the buds into my ears.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, and he pressed Play. The screen went dark for a moment, and I belatedly started worrying that I was about to see something I wouldn’t want to see. But before I could even think of any examples of things I wouldn’t want to see, images began appearing on the screen and a staticky audio track filled my ears.

The video was a montage of sorts, a series of black-and-white clips of the same man in a variety of settings: behind a speaker’s podium, striding through a crowd, shaking hands with other men, bending to pick up a child. Each clip morphed into the next as someone spoke passionately in a foreign language over the footage. I thought it sounded like Spanish, but, as I mentioned before, I’d taken French, and I remembered precious little of that. The man himself didn’t look unfamiliar, but I couldn’t place him. He had the same shaggy bulk Leo had in the picture in my purse, but these clips were clearly much older, and this guy’s favorite outfit seemed to consist of a beret and fatigues, whereas Leo had been wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

Luisa had pressed her head in close to my own to see the screen, and she said something beside me, but I couldn’t hear her. I removed one of the earbuds. “What?” I asked. “I’m trying to listen.”

“Give me that,” she demanded.

“Why?”

“Just give it to me.” She grabbed the earbud from my hand and stuck it into her own ear. I’d never seen her quite this testy before, and we watched the rest of the clip together in silence.

“Do you know who that was?” she said when the montage had drawn to a close a half-minute later. “Could you understand the Spanish?”

“Well, no.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said with satisfaction. “You may know everything there is to know about TV and American tourist attractions, but I spent my youth studying important subjects, like political history and foreign languages.”

I didn’t see what political history had to do with understanding Spanish. It also wasn’t a fair comparison given that Spanish was hardly a foreign language to Luisa, but we could debate that when she wasn’t nicotine-deprived. “Are you going to share with us your knowledge of political history and foreign languages? Or are we supposed to guess?” I asked.

“It’s Che Guevara.”

“Who?”

Page 42

“Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. El Che. Born in Argentina in 1928 and executed as a revolutionary in Bolivia in 1967.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d heard of him. In fact, I’d seen the movie, feeling virtuous since it had subtitles.

“You mean, the guy from The Motorcycle Diaries?”

“The movie was based on the actual diaries Che Guevara kept during a trip he made by motorcycle to a leper colony in Peru. The experience played a critical role in shaping his radical philosophy.”

“The guy in the movie was better looking,” I said.

“Che Guevara was a Marxist, right?” said Ben.

“Right,” said Luisa. “And the audio’s from a speech he gave in the sixties, talking about the importance of using technology to further socialism.”

“Well, whoever’s leading us on this scavenger hunt either knows a lot about leftists or he is one.

Or maybe both,” said Peter. “But where does he want us to go next? I’m pretty sure there isn’t a Che Guevara monument in San Francisco.”

My earlier frustration was turning to annoyance. “And we’re not any closer to knowing why he’s leading us on a scavenger hunt in the first place, or if any of this will help us find Hilary.”

We were all silent for a moment, thinking. The ambient noises of the city—traffic, a dog’s bark, the clang of a cable car’s bell—competed with the rush of the waterfall to fill the quiet. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to get the Rice-a-Roni theme song out of my head.

Every cable car I heard only exacerbated the problem.

Abigail was the first to speak. “You know,” she began, almost hesitantly, “Luisa had started to tell me about everything that’s happened over dinner. About Hilary’s disappearance, and the article she was working on and the picture in the safe. And then the keychain, and now this video. It’s all been reminding me of someone I used to know. Especially when you called it a scavenger hunt, Peter. The person I knew loved scavenger hunts—he loved any sort of puzzle.

But it can’t be him.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The person I’m thinking of—well, he’s dead.”

“Leo?” asked Luisa.

Abigail looked at her in surprise. “Who told you about Leo?”

“He was the other man in the picture Hilary stored in the safe. Peter’s mother identified him—she remembered him from when she used to teach at Berkeley. Then I called the university’s technical-support hotline, right before we met up for dinner, and I asked if a graduate student named Leo had ever worked there. The woman who answered had overlapped with him, and she told me about the fire. I was getting to that part of the story when Rachel called and we had to rush over here.” This last was delivered with yet another pointed look at me. If this kept up, I might have to release Luisa from the dare purely out of self-defense.

“How did you know Leo?” Peter asked Abigail.

“And you still haven’t explained why you think you can get in touch with Iggie,” said Luisa.

I’d been watching Abigail’s face, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but she was starting to look familiar in a whole new way, a way that had nothing to do with her resemblance to Christie Turlington.

“You’re Biggie, aren’t you?” I said.

She turned to me, her brown eyes wide. “How did you know?”

14

I’ d first met Abigail only six months earlier, just after she started working at Peter’s company.

At the time, Peter couldn’t stop talking about how pleased he was with his new hire’s business acumen and technical savvy, and, unaware of her current sexual orientation, I’d been far more concerned about what she and Peter might be up to together in the present than what she might have been up to on her own in the past. Nor had it occurred to me then to worry about what Peter might have been up to in his past.

Page 43

She had changed dramatically from the woman in the picture with Iggie and Leo, and it was more than the differences in shape and hairstyle that made her so unrecognizable. There was a self-possessed confidence to her now, a confidence the woman in the picture, hiding behind her veil of hair, had lacked. I could only guess as to how much of the change had to do with the physical transformation and how much of it had to do with extricating herself from a bad marriage. Either way, her caution in entering new relationships suddenly made sense in a way it hadn’t before—who wouldn’t be cautious after having been married to Iggie?

A security guard came by just then and informed us the park was closing, so we returned to the Four Seasons, settling around a table in the lounge off the lobby. I held my tongue when Luisa ordered a rum and Diet Coke, a drink I’d never seen her order before, her or anyone legally old enough to order drinks, but clearly she felt it necessary to torment me. I was feeling less than one-hundred percent myself—in fact, I was feeling about three percent—but judging from Luisa’s behavior, caffeine withdrawal was a mere drop in the withdrawal bucket compared to nicotine withdrawal, and she blamed me for everything she was feeling. I also didn’t give it much thought when Ben ordered a cheeseburger along with his beer. I’d assumed he’d had dinner with Luisa and Abigail, but apparently not. Still, I didn’t wonder what he’d been doing instead—I was too curious about what Abigail had to say.

“We all met in graduate school at Berkeley,” Abigail told us. “That was about four years ago. I was earning my M.B.A., and Iggie and Leo were both finishing up their doctorates in computer science, but we ended up taking the same class on entrepreneurship and technology. It was a popular class for business students, because so many of us wanted to find jobs at tech start-ups after graduation, but it was also a sort of crash course in business for people in the sciences.

Iggie and Leo had already been kicking around an idea for a software venture, and they wanted to learn how to finance and build a new company.”

“Was that Iggie’s first business, the one that never got off the ground?” I asked, remembering Alex Cutler’s comment the previous evening. It was hard to believe that conversation had taken place barely twenty-four hours ago.

“Who told you that?” she asked, shaking her head. “If anything, their original idea was exactly what Igobe’s become. They first called the company Igleo, a combination of both their names, but after Leo died Iggie stripped out his name. But the concept was always to create software to help people maintain their anonymity on the Internet. They hadn’t yet begun development when I first met them, but they knew what they wanted to do, and they’d mapped out how it would all work technically. What they hadn’t figured out was whether they’d make money off it.”

“Why couldn’t they just sell or license the software to people?” asked Luisa. “That’s how Microsoft and other software companies do it, right? And isn’t that how Igobe’s doing it now?”

“That’s how the software business has worked traditionally, but more and more Internet businesses are making their money from advertising instead. All of the major portals like AOL

and Yahoo! are supported by ads, and so are the big search engines and social networks,” said Peter. His own company was working on ways to speed the flow of data across the Internet, but it didn’t deal with consumers directly. Instead, his customers were the cable and phone companies that provided consumers with Internet access.

“So Iggie and Leo couldn’t decide whether to sell the software to people or to let advertisers support it—was that the crux of the matter?” asked Luisa.

“No. It was a lot more basic than that,” said Abigail. “What they couldn’t agree on was whether to make any money from the software at all.”

We all stared at her, collectively perplexed.

“Not make money?” asked Ben.

“What do you mean?” asked Peter.

“Then why bother?” asked Luisa.

I was relieved the concept was just as shocking to them as it was to me—I sometimes worried that working in finance had so steeped me in avarice I no longer had a firm grip on how regular
Page 44

people felt about these things. “How could Iggie not want to make money?” I asked. “Iggie’s been obsessed with making money for as long as we’ve all known him. The guy had an autographed picture of Bill Gates in his dorm room, and it wasn’t because Bill was such a babe.”

Abigail smiled at our reaction. “I know it’s hard to process. But it wasn’t Iggie—he was all for making money, and for making as much of it as he possibly could. It was Leo. He was pretty left-wing to start with, even by Berkeley standards. And then his father died while we were in school, from cancer. I don’t remember what his father did—some sort of middle-management job at a big corporation, I think—but Leo was convinced if he hadn’t been working so hard his entire life he wouldn’t have gotten sick. The experience made him even more radical. I went to the memorial service, and Leo did a reading from Das Kapital and then went on a rant about how his father had been alienated from the fruits of his labor.”

“And that’s why all of the leftist clues made you think of him?” Peter asked.

“That’s part of it. But only a part—it was more than the politics that reminded me of Leo. I mentioned before that he loved puzzles, and not just solving them, creating them, too. I could practically picture how much fun he’d have coming up with the clues you’ve been getting. A lot of developers hide surprises in the computer code they create—they call them Easter eggs—but Leo took almost more pleasure from burying Easter eggs in his code than in writing the code itself. In fact, the only thing he liked better was hacking into other developers’ code and finding their Easter eggs.”

I was already paying close attention, but this made me lean forward in my seat. “Leo was a hacker?”

“A lot of software developers are. It’s like a game to them, and there’s a certain amount of ego involved, too. They’re all trying to one-up each other by showing they can hack each other’s code. Some companies even pay hackers to try to get into their systems, to help them identify weak spots by seeing if they can break through firewalls and find flaws in security protocols.”

At this point, only Peter knew about my conversation with Laura Taylor. He looked at me.

“Sound familiar?”

I nodded. “Abigail, have you ever heard of a hacker named Petite Fleur?” It was hard to ask this with a straight face, but somehow I pulled it off.

“Excuse me?”

“Petite Fleur is the online pseudonym—at least, I think it’s a pseudonym—of someone who says he can hack Igobe’s technology.” I filled them all in on what Laura had told me. “It sounds so much like everything you’ve told us about Leo. An old friend of Iggie’s who’s now an enemy but has the technical know-how to compromise Igobe’s security. Who better to do that than Iggie’s partner in developing the technology in the first place?”