A Tangled Web

by A. Claire Everward

  “Do what you always do. If you give me an overview of the company in a way that later I can transition my thinking to its data, then, if you then give me access to whatever I need from the company itself, you I'll just need to fill in any gaps, answer questions when I have them.”

  “Give you the tangible,” he said and brought up the structural layers of Ian Blackwell Holdings on the wall screen . “How do you want to do this?”

  “Start as you normally do when you look at it, and I’ll follow. When I can I’ll start walking beside you.”

  “So, pretty much like the beginning of this marriage.”

  She laughed, nodding.

  He remained seated in his chair, running his company on the screen as he had that first time he’d noticed the discrepancies, and in the times he’d looked for them since. She came to lean back on the other side of the desk, facing the screen. What he saw, she saw.

  He was in it from the first image. She was seeing it for the first time, and looking at it his way, not hers. And so it took her more time, and she gave herself that time. She knew how her mind worked. With her experience after all the years at InSyn, she trusted it to keep everything she saw for later use when she would switch to working with the underlying data. She let the company schemes run, let the man who made this company what it was explain. After a while, it all began to make sense. And once it did, what she had seen until that point fell into place too.

  He began slowly, for her, then accelerated to go at his usual pace. He couldn’t see what was in her mind, had no idea what was happening there. All he saw was the focus set in, then intensify. From time to time she asked, and he answered. Whenever he reached a place where he had found a change that had been made, he dove down the layers and showed it to her. He noticed she wrote nothing down, made no notes. She didn't need to.

  They covered it all, the way he did every time he looked at his company as a whole. When the company schemes stopped, Tess had a pretty good idea of what he had built. It was, to say the least, impressive.

  She shook her head and looked at him. “All of that is yours?” Even when she had studied him, her search didn’t see it all.

  He smiled.

  “What makes a man build that?” Nowhere, in everything she had read about him, was this question asked. Or answered.

  “I guess we both have our pasts.”

  Her smile dimmed, and he regretted having said that. He moved on, not wanting her to distance herself from him again. “So now you need the underlying data.”

  “I’m going to start with the discrepancies you pointed out, within the companies you found them in, and see where it takes me.”

  “I’ll give you access to everything, you can work in here. I’ll try to have as many meetings as I can in my office, I won’t fly anywhere unless I have to. Still, most of my meetings I can’t cancel without eventually raising suspicion.”

  “There really is no need to. All I need is to be able to speak to you when I have questions, and as your wife I can do that without anyone wondering.”

  “How about we do more than that? Come with me to San Francisco tomorrow, work in my office. I’ll conduct my meetings in the conference room. You should be close to me, at least in the first days, when you’re bound to have most of the questions.”

  She thought about it.

  “Those who need to know, know you’ve been involved in InSyn, the company you used to work in. That’s what they’ll think you’re doing. And your working on it in Blackwell Tower wouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Other subsidiary representatives will be in the building, too, working with the internal auditors. Your proximity to me is accepted because, as you yourself said, you’re my wife. And you can work on your own laptop, as a standalone that isn’t connected to the company’s systems, so there will be no eyes on what you do. Just connect through the laptop I work with there, I’ll leave it with you.”

  It made sense. “Well, I suppose it will mean no time will be wasted.”

  “That’s settled then.” He was pleased that she’d said yes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  This wasn’t her first time in Blackwell Tower, or in her husband’s office. She had made her way up to the top floor in his private elevator several times already. To see the place, as would be expected of her, and to get acquainted with some of the people who worked with him on this floor and on others in this impressive building that was Ian Blackwell Holdings’ headquarters. She had also come here to meet him for a lunch or a dinner now and then, or for the occasional social function, if he couldn’t make it home beforehand, although more recently it seemed to her that he’d begun to make the effort to do so.

  And so she was familiar with the spacious sitting area, the offices of the administrative assistant’s assistants—she was no longer surprised to hear a range of languages as she passed by them—the conference room, Becca’s office, and finally Ian Blackwell’s huge office beyond it.

  She stood in the doorway of her husband’s office, which was nothing like his den in the house. There, there was a coziness, a warmth that was absent here. Blackwell Tower was built by its owner just a few years back, it was new and modern. And so was this office. The wall to her right was floor-to-ceiling glass, with a tint that constantly shifted to allow just the right amount of light inside and that blended in with the room’s colors, which were all in a play of the same dark shades—the dark brown, nearly black desk near the wall furthest from her, with the comfortable high-backed chair behind it, the just slightly lighter, textured wall behind them, with dark shelves on both sides, the sitting area to her right with its two sofas hugging the corner and the low glass-top table before them, the door far to the left of the desk that led to a private bathroom, the marble floor. Even the overhead lighting, built into the ceiling in a way that would throw light either separately on the desk or on the entire office, fit into the ambience.

  This time she was here to work, and although it didn’t show outwardly, her mind was already focused on what she had come here to do, processing what she had begun to work on with her husband the day before. She took a step in and looked at the sitting corner on her right, contemplating how to comfortably set it up for the hours of intensive work she needed.

  “Take my chair.” Ian indicated his desk. “See how you like it.”

  A step behind Tess, Becca started in surprise. Although she would never say anything—her loyalty to Ian Blackwell was heartfelt after all her years with him—she herself had wondered how real his marriage truly was. It lacked too much of what she should have been seeing in the conduct, the demeanor of her newlywed boss. And this was all too pronounced whenever she saw him together with what should have been the woman he was in love with. But this, Ian Blackwell offering his chair to his wife in this way, made her question what she had thought. This was a first for him. With anyone.

  But then she hadn’t seen Mrs. Blackwell for some weeks, and the two of them seemed different now together. Closer.

  “You look good there,” Ian teased, grinning, when his wife placed her laptop on his desk and sat behind it, on his chair. It was a good fit, she was only a few inches shorter than him.

  “Go away,” she said, smiling back at him, and he raised his hands in surrender and left for his first meeting. Becca followed him out, throwing another astonished glance at them both.

  Tess worked both on her husband’s laptop and on hers, which was not registered to the company she was looking into and was therefore suitable for her purpose. When her husband came back from his first meeting, she was intent on both. His was running data, hers was showing speculations.

  “All yours,” he said, settling down on a chair on the other side of his own desk and leaning back comfortably.

  “Want your chair back?”

  “No. I meant it, you look good there.”

  “I’d tell you to go away again but I need you.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Shut up,” she said without looki
ng up, but she was smiling, and he marveled at how far they had come.

  And at the euphoric feeling that washed over him. He wondered what she would say if he asked her out on a date. A real date. It was time to find out, he thought, once they figured out what was going on in his company. He would take it slow, give her all the time she needed. And find a way to break through that impenetrable barrier around her.

  She asked, and he answered. She had quite a few questions, many of them with regard to subsidiaries he himself hadn’t yet found discrepancies in, he was concerned to hear. That meant that whatever was going on, it involved a greater part of his company than he’d thought.

  They were engrossed in one of his foreign subsidiaries when Becca called to inform Ian it was time for his next meeting. When he opened the door to leave, Tess saw Brett outside. Brett Sevele was the chief technology officer and one of the founders of IBH Additive Manufacturing, a company Ian Blackwell Holdings had purchased three years earlier. She had met Brett in some of the social functions she had attended with her husband. He had seemed to be good with people around him, seemed to enjoy the company, the mingling. But she’d had a feeling that he was trying too hard to be near her husband and her. He seemed amiable enough, but she felt uneasy around him. At first she had accepted that she couldn’t fully rely on her instincts in these surroundings she was still getting used to, but months later the uneasiness hadn’t ebbed. Brett was around them a bit too much. He’d never been to the house, and this was only the second time she’d seen him here, on the top floor of Blackwell Tower, but still.

  Anyone who came to meet Ian Blackwell was required to wait in the sitting area, everyone but his wife, who could go right into his office. But Brett had somehow gotten in, managing to pass Becca, and was now approaching the office, his hand extended to shake Ian’s.

  He caught a glimpse of Tess inside, sitting behind Ian’s desk. “Is that Mrs. Blackwell there?” he asked Ian. “Well, isn’t that nice. I should say hello.”

  “Maybe later,” Ian said and led him away smoothly toward the conference room where the internal auditors assigned to Additive Manufacturing were waiting.

  Brett let himself be led away, throwing a glance back at her, before Becca hurried to close the door.

  Tess and Ian had lunch in the office, not wanting to stop their work, and when they finally returned home, late enough for Graham to complain that he understood they were busy but they really should call to inform him if they were going to be late for dinner, they still had no idea where the discrepancies they were finding throughout Ian Blackwell Holdings had come from.

  Over the next days, Tess alternated her time between the Woodside house and her husband’s San Francisco office, until finally the day came when she opted to stay in the house, spending the day in his den. By now she had some idea of what was going on, and she didn’t like it one bit. She wanted to test her theory outside the company, and so she used Ian’s personal system, which she had disconnected from Ian Blackwell Holdings to ensure the privacy of their work, and that was powerful enough to do what she needed it do.

  When her husband returned home, as soon as his last meeting of the day was over, he found her sitting at his desk, both his laptop and hers working, as well as the external screens on the desk and the one on the wall. As soon as he walked into the den and closed the door behind him, she began to speak.

  “Whoever is doing this, they’re not trying to steal or anything like that. I think they’re trying to take you down.”

  He focused instantly. “As in?”

  “The discrepancies you’ve found, because of the changes these people are making in the company’s figures, are interconnected, in effect creating threads. That’s what they—although it could be one person, I don’t know yet—that’s what they’re doing, they are virtually weaving threads throughout a growing number of your subsidiaries. And every such thread is a computer code. The threads form webs that are each centered in a company or a part of it, depending on the company, its size, its structure, its position in Ian Blackwell Holdings’ global structure, and so on. And these webs are also interconnected and are gradually forming a larger web that will eventually span Ian Blackwell Holdings. All of it. Wherever the point of origin of that encompassing web is, the place from which it started to form and where it’s controlled from, when they pull at it, that is activate the threads that make up the overall algorithm, the company will crash. Financial systems, supply chains, production lines, human resources systems. You name it, it will come down.”

  “Will? So it can’t crash now.” Ian’s tone of voice was factual, pragmatic.

  “Whoever they are, they’re not done. I don’t know yet when they started, but I do know they need more time. These webs are still only in, I estimate, fifty-odd percent of Ian Blackwell Holdings’ subsidiaries, and less than that in the parent company itself. It sounds a lot, hard to miss, but this web of webs is being constructed so delicately, with discrepancies that are negligible enough to indeed be chalked up to human error, so that no one would notice unless they knew the entire company, all of it, across and top to bottom, and actually tended to look at it as a whole. Like Ian Blackwell himself.”

  “Except no one knows I do that.”

  “Your company is huge. Who would imagine you still look at it now the way you might have when it was small? And even if someone thought you might, they would probably trace your movements in your office.”

  “While I do it here, in my home.”

  She nodded. “I know your company has good cybersecurity, I checked it out when I was in your office. But this, whoever they are, they’re good. Smart, careful, and I’m betting this took some planning.”

  “How on earth did you figure it out?” He was impressed.

  “I just . . . saw the threads.” She shrugged. “See? You should have kept me as your employee.”

  “No,” he said absently, his eyes on the layered scheme of his company she had put up on the wall screen. “I much prefer having you as my wife. What’s that?” He pointed to a symbol on the top left of the scheme.

  She was still reeling from his answer and it took her a moment to focus again. “That’s a completion scale. I calculated the estimated worst-case scenario to completion.”

  He reached back to his laptop and clicked it. The scheme filled with fine threads, a timeline showing at the bottom.

  “Are you sure?” This was bad.

  “I think they’ve created a learning algorithm. Whenever they complete a part of the web at a strategic node, they can use it to reach out and initiate others around it, so that they’re covering more ground over the same time span as they progress, and their work is less dependent on them and can continue without their being there. I can tell you they’re not accelerating as much as I would expect them to, though. I ran a temporal scan to check that. I think they’re progressing carefully. Which makes sense—the more threads they have, the more they run the risk of being discovered.”

  “So, one month.”

  “No.”

  He looked at her.

  “We’re going to stop him. Or them.” Her tone of voice was determined. She wasn’t going to let anyone hurt him.

  He frowned. “You think it’s one person, don’t you?”

  “I can’t be sure, but yes. The pace the changes seem to have been made in at the beginning is too slow for this to be more than one person. And again, the fact that the independently forming parts of the web are forming slower than I’d expect despite the learning algorithm makes more sense if it’s one person who understands he needs to watch what he’s doing because there’s no one to check that he—or she—hasn’t made mistakes. One person can do it, it would simply take longer and require more focus.”

  “Could you do this?” He was genuinely curious. He was learning just that much more about who he had beside him all this time.

  She shrugged. Yes, she could cause some damage. People who knew data also knew how to manipulate it. And data
wasn’t all she knew.

  “I’m glad you’re on my side,” he said evenly.

  “Point is, they don’t know I am. Or, he doesn’t know I am, if we do assume one person is doing this.” She turned to him. “Mr. Blackwell, someone really hates you.”

  “You’re me, you make some enemies over the years. Hell, nowadays I probably make enemies just by being Ian Blackwell.”

  Her brow furrowed. She’d never thought about it like that. She’d seen the money, the power, the freedom of it. She’d never considered there could be other sides to it. But then, wasn’t his having to get married in the first place an example of that, albeit a negligible one compared to this?

  Ian turned to look at the scheme again. “So now we find the point of origin and disarm it.”

  “Without him knowing. If he decides to trigger it even now, it’ll still do some damage.” She touched her laptop screen and the view on the wall screen changed. “I ran a trace that hit three pseudo-points of origin.”

  “Already?”

  “It was easy to set up once I understood what the threads were forming and had some webs to follow.”

  Easy, he thought. Right. “Why pseudo?”

  “On the way to each of these three points, the trace encountered all the dead ends and snags I’d expect to see if it was intentionally made to seem difficult, to make me think someone is trying to prevent me finding them, that I’m on the right track. And by me I mean whoever might be looking. And every time I changed the search parameters, the trace found a different point of origin, in a different subsidiary, all three in Europe.”

  “Which ones?”

  “It doesn’t matter. None of them were it.” She wasn’t sure how to explain it.

  “You’re not sure how you knew. You just did.”

  It was her turn to be surprised that he got her. She nodded. “Something just wasn’t right with them. It’s like . . . when a piece of the puzzle looks perfect but when you try to push it into place you have to put some effort into it because it’s actually not.”