The Sensory Deception (2 page)

The whispering starts again. Now he can make out words: “Farley, get Farley.” They’re spoken in the well-worn English of someone with roots in the Middle East.

The voice adds, “Can anyone hear me?” The accent is common here on the Horn of Africa, though spoken English is not. Farley pushes back hope for another few seconds. The whispering is replaced by more of that clinking sound.

Farley stands in the largest of the caves that form this prison. It’s farthest from the opening and has the smoothest floor, providing both relative comfort and privacy from the guards. The air is dank, and the occasional breeze from the gated opening carries the stench of raw sewage.

Farley now stands against a wet wall at the end of the cave.

He discerns the sound: pebbles and dirt cascading from the ceiling down the rocky outcropping, clinking from rock to rock and then disappearing into a puddle.

“Damn it, Farley, are you there?” The volume of the voice surpasses a whisper.

“Tahir?” Farley whispers back. “They said you were dead.”

He hears a sigh resonate from the same hole in the ceiling from which the dirt and pebbles fall. “I’ve been reported dead many times, and to the best of my knowledge the reports have so far been false.” The whisper relaxes into the familiar clipped cadence. “What delays your escape?”

“A steel gate, for one thing,” Farley whispers. Then, with more intensity, he adds, “Can you access my lab?”

“What?” Tahir sounds angry. “Your lab? Now?”

“If you can get some data acquisition equipment down here, we can record—”

Tahir interrupts in a voice well above a whisper. “Here’s the only data you need. Catch!”

In the infinite dark of this dungeon, the lit display of a cell phone looks like a bolt of lightning as it falls into the cave, jolting from one rock to the next. Farley catches it with both hands a foot above the puddle.

The display shows a bonfire with people dancing.

“Hurry,” Tahir whispers, as though he can see Farley from above. “We have no way to recharge it.”

Farley presses the
Play
icon. It’s not a bonfire and the people are not dancing. It’s chaos. People scream as they try to flee the fire, but panic drives them in every direction. A woman carrying a child struggles into a wall of flames. A voice grows audible above the cacophony. The voice sets Farley’s heart racing. It’s Gloria. Gloria, whose voice always quickens Farley’s pulse. He concentrates on the voice, trying to decipher words. The first comes out as a gasp, unintelligible. The next are clear: “Chopper, stop!”

The display pans over a scene of destruction—exploding sparks, flames, and smoke—and then settles on the image of a man, Farley’s closest friend, Chopper. The video’s final image is that of Chopper with a rifle poised at his shoulder. The camera that captures this image stares straight up the rifle barrel.

“Shut it off,” Tahir whispers.

Farley presses a key until the image mercifully disappears. Darkness once again reigns over the cave, but the image is burned into Farley’s mind. He’s aware that several of the other prisoners are awake, some sitting up, others standing.

Farley whispers, “Where did this come from?”

Tahir says, “Farley, Gloria needs us.”

A man to Farley’s left asks, “What’s going on?” Another asks, “Farley, what’s up?” Farley hears them but can’t pry his attention from that image. The voice of a woman asks, “What was that light?” A fourth voice says, “Turn it back on.”

Farley forces his attention to the surface and says, “Quiet!”

The others go silent, but the command rings down the tunnel, eventually echoing its way back. The telltale metal-on-metal of a rifle against the steel gate follows a second later and, on its heels, the questioning note of a man’s voice. No one in the cave understands Arabic, but its meaning is obvious.

Farley whispers up the hole, “Tahir, you still there?”

“Attention from your captors will not help my daughter,” Tahir responds in a whisper.

“Where’d that video come from?”

“They are in Brazil. Gloria is in danger; can you help me, or shall I go alone?”

“But she’s with Chopper.”

“Chopper is the source of danger.”

“No way,” Farley whispers. He waits for Tahir to answer, but when there is no response, he speaks and, though the volume of his voice is below that of a whisper, his words are saturated with certainty. “Chopper will protect her.”

“Are you coming?”

Farley closes his eyes and reviews the layout of the prison for the thousandth time, searching the network of half a dozen flood-carved tunnels for strengths and weaknesses.
The only opening is blocked by AK-47–wielding guards beyond a steel gate set in concrete. But that’s not true, is it?
There is another opening right above him.

Farley says, “I’m coming.”

“You’re certain you can escape?”

Another voice pipes in. Though it’s a whisper, the South Central Los Angeles accent shines through. “No problem, man, we’ll, like, tear down the gate with our teeth, then we’ll eat the fuckin’ pirates for lunch, man—meet you at Starbucks. Dude, what the fuck?”

G
loria stepped out the door onto a path of redwood mulch and walked to the parking lot. Her silver Lexus was parked between a Ferrari and a BMW. She smiled at the three cars, especially hers. Her car payment was more than her rent. She thought of it as part of her wardrobe, the expensive veneer of success required for her to be taken seriously as a female Iranian Jew in the male-dominated culture of high-tech investing.
Oh well
, she thought,
business is like high school, all about fitting in while being different but not too different
. Her appearance also worked to her advantage. No one overlooked the most exotic woman in the room. She laughed, got in the car, and set her briefcase on the passenger seat.

Looking back at the eggshell-white stucco buildings with their red clay roofs snuggled together in the shade of redwood trees, she felt a sense of approaching success. She had the job she’d always wanted. Well, almost. It was definitely
where
she wanted that job, though.

She worked at famously cool Sand Hill Ventures at the northern border of Silicon Valley, where the heart of American innovation beats. Where entrepreneurs come for the venture capital nourishment they need to solve the world’s problems. Someday Gloria would be a partner, a mother of invention who could feed the brilliant men and women who came here to create.
Right now, though, her business card said “Research Associate/Junior Analyst.” Her bosses thought of her as a scout, and her clients thought of her as a gatekeeper. She visited would-be start-up companies to determine if they merited the partners’ time. If she judged them to have “high-profit potential” and turned out to be right, she’d get a bonus and take a step up the career ladder—and most pressing of all, she’d be able to keep her fancy car. If she was wrong, she’d have to trade it in for a Corolla.

She pulled a proposal from her briefcase. She’d read it a week earlier. Some sort of video game company; they called their product “virtual reality.” She zeroed in on the company name:
VRts
. If they deserved a look, she’d come up with a better name.

She told the GPS-navigator thing the address and headed for the freeway. Traffic clogged up in San Jose and was stop-and-go all the way over the Santa Cruz Mountains. She opened the sunroof to let in blue sky and turned up the heat to deflect the crisp breeze. She got to the coast just as the fog started flirting with the expansive old homes on the bluff over Monterey Bay. She took a hairpin turn up Cliff Drive, pulled into a driveway, and parked next to a sequoia whose trunk had a diameter larger than her Lexus.

If one of the would-be entrepreneurs could afford this house, why did they need venture capital? She double-checked the address and stepped out of the car. She took a deep breath and tried to exhale her traffic frustration.

The porch wrapped around the house, and wide, square columns supported the upper story—a signature of Craftsman architecture—but the driveway and porch were carpeted in pine needles and the house needed paint.

A tall man wearing shorts and a dark sweatshirt stepped out and held the screen door open. He had a full brown beard that accentuated his blue eyes. “Gloria,” he announced in a resonant
baritone that carried across the yard, into the trees, and out to sea. “Welcome to Santa Cruz, and thank you for coming down. I am Farley Rutherford.” As he spoke, his volume steadily decreased until, as he finished, she had to strain to hear. “You’ll understand in the next two hours why we couldn’t have this meeting up in the Valley.” She recalled from the proposal that Farley, a research zoologist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Oceanography, was the leader.

Gloria stood just a couple of inches over five feet. Farley was at least a foot taller, but he made eye contact in a way that suggested they were on the same level. He reached out, took her hand, and gave her a welcoming pat on the shoulder. The combination of this gesture, his voice, those ocean-blue eyes, and something about his smile—something sort of hippie-like, as though this was the guy who led the drum circle—made her feel like an insider, not like family but like part of a team, and she still hadn’t said a word.

A thin black man stepped across the threshold.

Farley said, “Gloria Baradaran—did I pronounce that right?” She nodded and he continued, “Meet Ringo Hayes.”

Ringo wore a Spider-Man T-shirt, flip-flops, and shorts that revealed skinny legs. His spongy hair was sun-bleached to a dark brown and his long, narrow face emphasized his smile. He looked every inch the African-American übergeek; Gloria figured he must be the electrical engineer described in the proposal as a design ace. He leaned toward her and, as he said, “Hey,” his elbow rubbed her arm. She took it as a kind gesture, if overly familiar and unprofessional. Standing between Farley and Ringo, she introduced herself as the venture capitalist scout and explained that she was there to evaluate their business prospects, not to make any decision about their funding. “But if everything goes well, I’ll get you a meeting with the partners.”

“Excellent,” Farley said. He guided her in and let the wooden screen door crash shut behind them. The wood-on-wood impact, along with the ocean breeze and, most of all, the disarray of furniture inside, reminded her of summer camp. A picture window on the far wall showed the sun hanging over the sea. It was dark inside, as though the lights hadn’t yet been turned on after a long summer day.

It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the light. Then she saw another man standing across the room. Where Farley’s stature and voice had captured her attention, this man’s very silence grabbed her. He had a chiseled jawline and his deep-set eyes squinted as if the room were brightly lit. His dirty-blond hair, faded jeans, and the tight black T-shirt that emphasized his biceps did not present the image she’d expected from the proposal, but he could only be the neurologist-pharmacologist. She had to pry her eyes away, and as she did, she saw him smile.

Farley said, “Gloria Baradaran, let me introduce Romeo Vittori. We call him Chopper. Someday maybe he’ll explain how he got his nickname. If he does, please fill the rest of us in.” Then he laughed. His laughter was thick, slow in its modulation, and nearly impossible not to join. Chopper walked deeper into the house.

A worn suede sectional couch filled the living area, with one section facing the ocean view and the other oriented toward the kitchen. A beat-up guitar rested on a driftwood coffee table. Surfboards leaned against the wall on each side of a whiteboard and a pile of wet suits lay on the floor. The dark brown carpet felt stiff, and she could see sand at the base of its pile. She felt a slight urge to tidy up after these boys.

She thanked them for inviting her down and, as she spoke, realized that she’d left her frustration outside. She looked at Farley again. He had a broad forehead and a straightforward approach
that conveyed patience and competence. For some reason she felt both an urge to impress him and a sense that he believed in her. She had to turn away and remind herself why she was there.

He had it. Oh, yes, whatever that magical quality is that separates leaders from managers, the Holy Grail of MBA programs, Farley Rutherford had plenty of it.

She looked up at him, and he said, “I want you to experience the demo before we say too much.”

“Virtual reality, right?” she asked.

Ringo said, “It’s the next generation of entertainment.”

Gloria said, “Please try not to use the phrase ‘next generation.’ In venture capitalism it translates to ‘no known market.’”

As Farley guided her through the kitchen, she combed her memory. She wasn’t certain if Sand Hill had ever invested in a virtual reality company, but she had overheard the partners discussing it. One had agreed with Ringo’s assertion that it would be the next phase of entertainment; another had written it off as stillborn back in the 1990s.

They walked through a laundry nook and then reached the garage. Gloria couldn’t help laughing. Since taking this job, she’d seen a lot of garages that had been converted to laboratories. Always garages. This one was typical: poorly matched carpet remnants, cast-off cubicle partitions, desks covered with computers, test equipment, and circuitry.