The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  —

  Sunday. Deadline minus six days and counting. Also notable: two hangovers in a row. She really had to get busy with something.

  10:38 A.M. Hi it’s Catherine again. Sorry to be a pest.

  11:12 A.M. I notice your former faculty page is down. Everything all right?

  2:20 P.M. Well I just called. Message says voice mailbox full. Call me back?

  There were a handful of people in, even though it was Sunday. Catherine heard the ping-pong ball going back and forth. She counted fourteen bikes.

  “Go team,” she said, rounding the corner and into the space, across to her own workstation. Various voices called back and Catherine had a brief moment of feeling everything was utterly normal. She sat back in her chair, stretched her legs.

  She stood up again. “Kali?”

  “Not in,” someone called back. “Later, I think.”

  “Do we have video cameras in this place? As in surveillance?” She was looking around now, not seeing anything.

  One of the guys from Kali’s team came over. He was grinning, pointing up over her head. She craned her neck back and saw the lens nestled into the elbow of one of the roof members. “Huh,” she said. “How could I not have noticed that?”

  “Live to web,” he said. “It’s part of our Customer Connect program.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “Is that safe?”

  “It’s a super-wide picture. Nobody’s reading emails over your shoulder.”

  “Pictures of me, out there?” she said. “I don’t know if I love that.”

  She pulled up the DIY website and clicked through to the Warehouse app. The image opened up. And there she was, hunched over her keys. She could see the programmer too, standing there in front of her desk. “Look at that,” she said. “There we are.”

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “Archives?”

  “Archive tab maybe?” he said, winking at her.

  “Hey,” she said, as he walked away. “I saw that.” He laughed and didn’t turn around.

  Back on the site, Catherine clicked through to the archives and found that the site designers were keeping edited clips from previous days. Notable moments, life in DIY. Many of the moments Catherine had no memory of herself. A meeting at one of the pods ending in high-fives. Somebody rolling a vintage Harley-Davidson into the Warehouse, which was immediately surrounded by people. Lots of dog clips, as there were always dogs around. Hapok’s Vizsla, Cooper. A Great Dane that belonged to a woman in social media. A snip of film showing people entering the teepee. Someone doing a handstand. It was an odd feeling to think that all of this had happened here while she was sitting in that very desk and unaware. A sign of success, perhaps, that so much life was facilitated. She opened another one, at random: a clip of her walking down the length of the Warehouse. Catherine stared at this one intently, mesmerized. It was from behind, so her face wasn’t visible. But it was so clearly her. Slow steps, head down. When had this been taken and what had she been thinking? She looked to be brooding, perplexed. Walking, looking out over the workstations as though assessing the status of things, getting the sitch as the boys liked to say. And it was thinking of that word, the situation, that brought her sharply to her present one, and the sudden dawning awareness, just as Kalmar entered the bottom of the frame in the video and approached her from behind, that it wasn’t her at all.

  Not her. And once sensed, it was as if a blindfold had fallen away. She didn’t walk like that. She was always in more of a hurry. She wasn’t prone to brooding, to pacing around with her hand on her chin. She didn’t survey the Warehouse as if she’d never been there before, as though she were doing a head count or sizing up the inventory.

  Her heartbeat was up, her skin was flushed, she felt herself sweating lightly, sitting in place. The fight-or-flight response, as if her body was already anticipating action.

  —

  This is how adrenalin affected her, Catherine thought. It made her stupid. The smarter person recognized that death was probably not impending despite the adrenal medulla’s frantic misfirings, all that catecholamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine storming through the system. You had to suppress it through sheer will or here was a cocktail of neurotransmitters that would turn you into a beast.

  Catherine thought she was becoming a beast. She was in her car, driving nowhere. Looking in her rear-view mirror the whole time, wondering if she was being followed. Noticing herself wondering if she was being followed. Worried about wondering what she was wondering. And always at the moment of chasing herself off that line of thinking, seeing a car with darkened windows change lanes at the same time she did, or a van pull out in front of her and drive very slowly, someone’s face in the rear-view. That guy was looking at me. I mean, I’m not making this up.

  Val called. Score, she said. She had an address for Mako Equity.

  “Well that was fast,” Catherine managed, thinking only that at the moment this was information she hardly had the strength to use.

  A few degrees of separation indeed. Turned out husband Mark knew a lot of angel investors through dealings with his own fund. One of them was Gorman’s husband.

  “Stephanie Gorman?” Catherine asked.

  The same. So Valerie had picked up the phone and called her. Client privilege be damned, just a conversation off the record. “I think she likes you,” Val said to Catherine. “She agreed.”

  Gorman put Valerie and her husband in touch. He actually lived most of the year in Palo Alto, where he was an engineer at Google. But he was also a member of an angel investing co-op called the Kaizen Forum. They got together monthly to look at pitches from start-ups. Members voted and the group threw their money behind projects. One of the investments made a year before was to fund development of a hook-up app for foodies called Salivacious.

  “Hook-up app for foodies,” Catherine said. “I swear to God I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

  Valerie wasn’t joking. Nor was Gorman’s husband. The user did an initial profile, including a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample—there was a proprietary disposable swab tool used with the application—and the app created a personal flavour profile. Salty, sweet, sour, spicy, umami, et cetera.

  “Like a Myers-Briggs test for foodies who want to have sex, basically. After that it works pretty much like a combo of Tinder and Urbanspoon.”

  “Wow,” Catherine said. “Technology making the world a better place.”

  “Maybe not,” Valerie said. “But Mako bought them.”

  That was three months ago. The Kaizen group was taken out. And something about the way the deal was negotiated made it clear to Gorman’s husband that Mako was in acquisitions mode. They were looking at very particular kinds of software and applications.

  “They’re building something out of parts,” Catherine said. “I get it. I guess DIY has a fit. But I feel like they’re pressuring me. These strange things that have been happening.”

  Valerie was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “Maybe none of it is really that strange.”

  “Some of it seems really goddamn strange to me,” Catherine said.

  “Try not to think that way,” Valerie said. “Mako wants DIY. But so do you. So you defend yourself with what you can. Go talk to them. You got a pen?”

  Valerie the finder. She’d somehow accomplished this through a friend who was a realtor. That friend got talking to her own network, looking for quick sales to numbered companies. “A realtor’s hunch,” Valerie explained. “The buyer is really rich and two weeks ago they were based in Seattle. So Mako wasn’t shopping for fun.”

  “And this other realtor just coughed up the info?”

  Turns out agents loved to boast among themselves. The woman who gave up the address that cross-referenced to a numbered company owned by Mako Equity and sold the week prior didn’t even ask for anything in exchange. It was a status thing, Valerie said.

  Valerie was being so level-headed these days. Catherine longed for the l
uxury. She was in the commercial district of East Vancouver now, just off the waterfront. She pulled over and turned off the engine. There was a woman standing on the opposite corner, cigarette in the corner of her mouth. They made eye contact. The woman looked away, watching for cars.

  “I’m pulled over,” Catherine told her sister. “I’m parked across the street from a prostitute who looks to have a pretty serious methamphetamine problem. I wonder how her day is going.”

  Catherine had fished a pen out of her purse and an envelope to write on. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be going over to confront Speir immediately. She’d wait until Monday to steel herself. But she’d get the data, gather what she could to use in her own defence.

  She wrote the number down: 1300 block Nicola Street. She folded the envelope and tucked it into her purse. Then they talked about not much for a moment before hanging up.

  Catherine sitting in a tiny car in a bad part of town. She saw the woman opposite was gone, but hadn’t noticed her getting picked up. And what if she had noticed? What would she have done? She could have written down the licence plate number or followed the car. She could have done a whole range of things and still had no effect on the scene as it played out in front of her, as it played out in that woman’s life.

  Catherine thought about that, about being essentially powerless. And then, it came to her all at once, in a dark rush. It was as if the windows of the car had suddenly tinted, the light gone blue and textured, blurred. A sound in her ears, too, a sharp ringing, instant, penetrating. Her heart rate was up, and her breathing. Nicola Street was in the West End. Just across the water.

  The phone in her hand trembled violently as she punched the address into Maps: 1386 Nicola Street.

  And there it came. Crucial information she wished she didn’t have to process just that second: 1386 Nicola Street was at the corner of Nicola and Beach Avenue. Kate Speir wasn’t just in Vancouver. Kate Speir had bought a place staring across False Creek pretty much directly into Catherine’s living room window; 1386 Nicola was Kensington Place. And seeing it on the map, the distance between them the width of a fingernail, Catherine’s hand began to shake so hard that she dropped the phone and heard it rattle and bounce to a spot directly under her seat.

  Catherine and Kate. Cate and Kate. Catherine thought she could feel dominos falling inside her, some process unleashed. Because there was no longer a reasonable explanation for these data points she was plotting, not in Hawking territory anyway. And that meant she was nudging and slouching and sliding on down into that lower and darker land of King.

  The beast had stirred powerfully again. She was driving too fast now. She was parking illegally. She was pulling on the big glass front door to Phil’s office building, and pulling and continuing to pull for probably three full minutes before she realized that Phil’s office wouldn’t be open on Sunday and that even Phil tried to take his weekends off.

  So she took the highway. Out into West Vancouver. Swerving past cars on Taylor Way, then up the ramp and onto the Upper Levels Highway. She was stopped for speeding about thirty seconds later: $225, and it could have been much worse. They normally impounded the car when people were more than sixty kilometres an hour over the limit, the officer told her. He was staring down through the small window at her, hands on his thighs.

  “Have you been crying, miss?” he asked.

  No, she had not been crying. Okay, emotional. Yes, she was driving out that very minute to talk to her lawyer, or at least the man who used to be her lawyer, and she’d been thinking about that and not her foot on the gas until she saw the flashing lights and noticed she was going 150 kilometers per hour.

  “I honestly didn’t think this thing could go that fast,” she said. “Totally my fault.”

  The cop was still crouched in that same position, like he was talking to a child.

  “I think I know you from somewhere,” the cop said, expression very focused.

  Okay, here we go, Catherine thought. It took him a few tries. Did she work on television? Was she in the movies? Then she gave him his answer.

  “Air France Flight 801,” she said. “Brittas Bay.”

  “Wow,” he said, solemnly. But at least he didn’t have any theories. And he didn’t tell her how lucky she was, either. He seemed merely to think that she could use a break. And he reached into the car to shake her hand before leaving. Saying thank you and please stay safe.

  Please stay safe.

  She drove more slowly that last distance to Phil’s house, five minutes. Ten, tops. Emotions brimming fresh.

  “What’s wrong?” Phil said. “Oh geez.”

  He was hugging her. She was getting a hug from her ex-lawyer. Trying not to sob into his shoulder. They were standing on the front steps of his uselessly large white house with its forest and ocean views and the ghost of his long-gone marriage.

  They walked in through the house and sat in the kitchen. Out the porch windows, she could see the sky growing stormy to the west. Up through the chute of the Strait of Georgia, something very big seemed ready to roll in from the sea. The wind was up. And as Phil put the water to boil, Catherine sat with her chin in her hands, eyes out on the horizon, seeing the darkness there, the bruised brown and grey of the clouds, the air heavy with water and heading in their direction fast.

  Phil came back with cups of tea. He had a plate of cookies too.

  “Is this how people do it?” he asked.

  Catherine looked up at him.

  “Is this how you entertain when someone drops over? I don’t know. She used to do all that.”

  Catherine had met her once. Wide-set eyes, the coils and flows of jet-black hair, glossy and aromatic with floral shampoos. A dancer, she’d been told.

  “You’re doing fine,” she said to Phil. Then gesturing to the cookies, “Yes, please.”

  Phil sat heavily. He looked more tired than Catherine ever remembered seeing him. His eyes were red and rimmed darkly. His forehead held high and creased, some permanent question outstanding.

  “So I’m processing all this, okay,” he said, finally. She’d told him the truth about dinner with Rostock. The mad things that had been said. She’d told him told him about Speir in the Warehouse, on the video. What Gorman’s husband had added: Mako in acquisitions mode. And more, Speir in Vancouver. Speir in Kensington Place, where Catherine had herself for so long imagined living. She’d gone further too, told Phil about feeling hemmed in and encroached and shadowed.

  Then she’d stopped. “I sound hysterical,” she’d said. “I fully realize it. I hate myself like this but I can’t just pretend these things haven’t happened.”

  Phil’s face was directed towards the glass. He appeared to be squinting into the wind that was not reaching him, only making the house quietly groan and creak. She herself felt this wind on her skin like cold blades, her skin hurting, her nerve endings jangling. She sipped her tea then set it down. Hugged herself closely.

  “I don’t know,” Phil said, getting up and walking back into the kitchen. He was at a loss for words, she realized. It was all clearly too crazy for him and he was embarrassed. She decided she wasn’t going to cry again. Just don’t let that happen. Other people didn’t deserve it. But some other variety of frustration and anxiety was rising within her, and Phil could surely read it.

  She stood up and went to the window. She looked out at the storm clouds to the west and thought about Saturna Island, the hobby farm there. A peaceful arrangement that under other circumstances she might herself have enjoyed. But Phil wasn’t following her gaze. He’d come back across the room, but was looking at her instead, looking at her profile with a wistful, helpless expression on his kind, round face.

  Here was a pragmatic man, who wasn’t superstitious or weird in any way. A regular guy, approaching his middle years, who wore size 43 suits and twenty-year-old rugby shirts on the weekend. He had hundreds of clients and very few friends. Catherine knew all these things about him from years of observation, and so s
he also knew now that his mind was working on an explanation and failing to find one, unwilling to contemplate a world where explanations went missing.

  Fair enough, Catherine thought. And fair too that she might now have to find these explanations on her own, even if it meant looking in unusual places.

  Phil had said nothing in several minutes. But Catherine saw that something had just come to him. She lifted her head and looked at him squarely. He made a gesture that they should step outside. And sliding the glass doors, he went out onto that wide, seaward deck. When they were at the railing together, with the wind swirling around them, he started to speak in a low voice, telling her what he could. And as he spoke, Catherine felt something in her taking a firmer shape. It had a real form and substance. Like a new body growing inside her own, filling her out to the skin.

  There had been other Mako Equity acquisitions, Phil confirmed. Valerie could never have found this out. Gorman’s husband wouldn’t have known. But they knew in house, at Phil’s firm.

  “I’m into actual lawyerly misconduct here,” he said. “But I’d like you to have some context. It might help you see this picture more clearly.”

  The other purchases were all in the start-up phase as well. And that was notable in itself. Mako was a huge fund. They didn’t take positions in start-ups, or never had previously. They bought mining companies. Or airlines. They’d had an interest in private security for a long time, holdings in two of the world’s largest military contractors. Then suddenly, a year ago, this new thing. A genetics modeller called Helixer. A back-end massive-scale file architecture management tool called LogJam. A portable medical records database called MedRec. Salivacious she knew about already, in essence a DNA collection and matching technology.

  If Morris was now teamed up with people building something out of those particular parts, Phil was saying, well then Catherine probably wanted to take a step back and think about that.