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Copyright © 2018 by Martin Jay Weiss
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This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people or places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Set in Dante
epub isbn: 9781947856844
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Weiss, Martin J., author.
Title: The Second Son / Martin J. Weiss.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Vireo Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781947856158
Subjects: LCSH Twins—Fiction. | Electronic surveillance—Fiction. | Stalking—Fiction. | Privacy—Fiction. | Information technology—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Suspense fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Psychological
Classification: LCC PS3623.E45553 S43 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23
For Elisabeth, Jasmine, and Jake
We are all alone, born alone, die alone.
—Hunter S. Thompson
If I ever had twins, I’d use one for parts.
—Steven Write
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
A Sneak Peak of FLAMINGO COAST
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Ethan Stone had never been alone, not even in the womb.
He and his twin brother Jack navigated their first three decades of life together, unwaveringly, in spite of enormous obstacles, despite prodigious differences.
That was all about to change.
“We need to talk,” Jack said as he ambled into the office after ten, rushed and harried as ever. “Where’s Bailey?”
“His plane was delayed,” Ethan told him. “He should be here any minute.”
“Let’s hit the pit. We need to talk before he gets here.”
Ethan followed Jack into the pit, a four-walled glass box with a sunken floor that they used as a conference room and for private conversations.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Jack said as he shut the door and began to pace, a sure sign that he was going into panic mode. “I know what this company means to you. But you’re going to have to continue on without me. I can’t do it anymore. I’m moving on.”
“Moving on,” Ethan repeated dismissively as he glanced down at an incoming text.
“I’m serious.”
“You freak out every time we have a little setback,” Ethan said, trying not to sound condescending. “But we’ll figure this out, I promise you. Everything will work out.”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought—”
Ethan cut him off, “You need to remember, every start-up experiences growing pains, but the ones that endure can revolutionize the way we live.”
“I really don’t need one of your insufferable pep talks—”
“Think about what Uber did for commuting, what Airbnb did for travel, or what Ashley Madison did for affairs. We’re going to transform the way people stalk. We’re going to be huge.”
Yep, that’s right, their company, aptly called Stalker, used advanced search technology, including biometrics, to make stalking easy, accessible, and affordable. Think there aren’t a lot of people who want to know how much their boss makes, the whereabouts of their children, if their spouse is cheating, or why an ex really left? And that was just the tip of the iceberg of what their company was designed to do. Ethan was determined to make Stalker a portal of full exposure, a beacon of truth that could prevent deceptions and explain betrayals; the go-to site for anyone who has been bamboozled, double-crossed, or inexplicably dumped. He believed wholeheartedly that the truth would set them free.
Unfortunately, Stalker’s face recognition software—the most anticipated feature on their mobile app—had been cursed with delays and obstacles, leaving them in desperate need of an injection of working capital to keep them afloat while they ironed out the glitches. Their CFO, Bailey Duff, had gone to London over the weekend to explain the situation to their angel investor, and hopefully bring back a check so they could make payroll.
“He’s here,” Ethan said, noticing the commotion in the lobby. “Let’s discuss this later.”
Bailey rolled in, his Burberry luggage in tow, as if he were walking a designer dog, a pampered poodle like himself. He was still wearing his London Fog raincoat for full effect, despite temperatures in the nineties. “Guess who’s back from the Big Smoke?” he announced.
Ethan hadn’t advertised the reason Bailey went to London—or their perilous financial situation—but those kinds of secrets are difficult to keep at a small company. And so the team of twenty-some twenty-somethings abandoned the coffee station, juice bar, Ping-Pong and foosball tables, like teenagers caught mashing in their parents’ game room, mumbling salutations as they drifted back to their workstations, taking refuge behind their computer screens. If layoffs were imminent, none of them wanted their bosses to think of them as foosball-obsessed, coffee-sipping daydreamers when deciding which of them had to move back into their parents’ basements.
Emily Tak, a mousy coder with tattoos drifting from her sleeves and leggings and a platinum pixie-do that made her amber-gold eyes stand out even more than they already did, greeted Bailey as he moved inside. “How was London Town?”
“Foggy, dreary, and congested,” Bailey quipped. “Prince William and Kate are having another baby. And bloody hell, I had a crying infant next to me on the plane, didn’t sleep a wink.”
Bailey’s dry humor and unremitting quirkiness amused the techies. Their token Englishman was over forty, shamelessly unhip, inappropriately vulgar, and unabashedly honest—often referring to himself as “the most un-LA bloat living in Los Angeles.” He wore his out-of-shape p
aunch and crusty gait like an entitlement and took pride in his disdain for exercise, sunshine, farmers’ markets, vegans, nonsmokers, happiness, and false praise.
Very un-LA.
“They started the Monday morning meeting without you,” Emily whispered as she took his coat. “They’re in the pit.”
“For the love of God,” Bailey called out as he passed nervous eyeballs peering over workstation cubbies, “would one of you gorgeous geniuses please fetch me a double-shot mocha before my head explodes?”
—
“Who died?” Bailey said, mocking the doleful expression on Jack’s face.
Ethan forced a smile. “Welcome back, Bailey. How did it go?”
Bailey set his suitcase down in the corner and said, “We’ll get the money as soon as we launch our Face Match Mode.”
Ethan felt his stomach sink. Since Apple, Facebook, and Google were battling privacy lawsuits over their facial recognition systems, Stalker had to limit the ways they collected, stored, and shared data—the reason their face recognition feature was fraught with technical issues. “Did you tell him that we have to work around the privacy restrictions and it could take another six months?”
“I gave him the whole spiel.”
Jack put his hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know what this meant to you.”
Ethan looked at Jack like he was speaking Farsi. “We’ll find the money somewhere.”
“The contract specifies, Stalker can’t raise money anywhere else for another year. We’ve been over this.”
“There has to be a way around that.”
Bailey pulled a check from his billfold and waved it in the air like a flag.
“You don’t have to find a way around it.”
Ethan reached for the check. It was from the angel’s anonymous shell company, Highpoint Corp, and it was for the full amount. “You got the money?”
“I got the money.”
Ethan hugged Bailey, his six-foot-five frame engulfing the portly Brit. “Why didn’t you just say so? You almost gave me a heart attack. My brother was about to quit.”
Bailey laughed. It was a nervous laugh.
Ethan was so relieved he couldn’t let go.
Bailey grunted. “You’re squishing me.”
Jack sighed, clearly vexed. “What’s the catch, Bailey?
Bailey escaped Ethan’s overpowering grip and sheepishly admitted, “There is one little rub.”
The brothers shared a look.
Bailey cleared his throat and told them, “We have to upload Face Match Mode now, as is.”
Ethan frowned. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
“I showed him the demo,” Bailey said, “and he feels that it’s working well enough—”
“Well enough?” Jack scoffed. “The point of that demo was to show how inaccurate it could be, so he would give us more money, not tell us how to run our company.”
“We need to stay solvent,” Ethan said with a conciliatory tone, staring at the check, “which means we need to keep our investor happy. It’s called compromise.”
Jack sneered. “Zuckerberg hasn’t ceded control. Elon Musk won’t kowtow to anyone. And Sean McQueen doesn’t compromise. Ever.”
Sean McQueen—aka the Wizard of Silicon Valley—was the founder of Stalker’s biggest competition, a company called Hounddog, and the sound of his name made the hair on Ethan’s neck rise.
Ethan sneered back at his brother. “Why are you being so negative?”
Jack moved closer to Ethan and said, “You and I have never even met this nameless angel and Bailey signed a confidentiality agreement to keep it that way. Now the moneyman is trying to turn Stalker into the next FindFace.”
FindFace was a controversial Russian app that allowed users to photograph people in a crowd to find their names, phone numbers, and social media profiles, often exposing and shaming them, with less than 70-percent reliability.
Bailey chimed in, “Our angel just wants us to do what we promised before anyone else does. Being first matters. Instagram uploaded pictures faster than any other photo sharing service. Spotify loaded stations faster than any other music service. Netflix produced premier content before any other streaming service.”
Ethan added, “The big five were also built on beating the clock.”
“Quite right,” Bailey said, “and that’s why we shouldn’t dillydally. We have great buzz. Projections show us having a profit by year-end.”
“Exactly,” Ethan agreed, “and then we can exercise our option to buy the angel out, and we won’t be beholden—”
“Those projections didn’t account for complaints and crappy reviews when the face recognition feature sucks,” Jack said.
“Throw a spanner in the works,” Bailey spewed as he grabbed the check and placed it back in his billfold. “I can cash this as soon as you get the feature up and running.”
Ethan assured him, “We’ll have it done by the end of day.”
Just then, Emily Tak burst through the door. “Per His Highness’s request,” she said, delivering a steaming mocha espresso drink. “I hope this cures Sir Bailey’s jet lag.” Unlike everyone else who poked fun of Bailey behind his back, Emily unabashedly teased him publicly and praised him in private.
“Mmmm…” Bailey moaned as he took a sip. “How I’ve longed for my delicious American indulgences.” He winked at Emily and added, “Especially my favorite tart.”
“Thanks.” Emily blushed. “I think.”
Coworkers called her Bailey’s puppy dog. Ethan had another thought about why she followed Bailey around so much, but it would have been inappropriate, and possibly legally actionable, to say so.
“Thank you, Emily.” Ethan said, glaring at his brother, who still looked uneasy.
Emily took the cue and headed back to her workstation. “Adios, amigos.”
Once the door shut, Ethan asked, “What is it, Jack?”
“I meant what I said before. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what?” Bailey asked.
Ethan stared at his brother. “You’re serious.”
Jack nodded. “I’ve made up my mind.”
“About what?” Bailey asked.
“I’m moving on,” Jack said.
Bailey choked on his mocha. “Why?”
Jack cleared his throat and delivered another bomb: “Hounddog made me an offer.”
Ethan’s jaw dropped further south. Everything he had heard about Hounddog—all unverifiable rumors—had them snapping at their tail, ahead in staff size, growth, and development. “They’re our only real competition.”
“There’s room for everyone to succeed,” Jack said, mocking one of Ethan’s favorite proclamations. “And you have other good programmers—”
“You’re an exceptional programmer and we need you,” Ethan said. “Even the slightest difference in execution could give two similar tech companies completely different results—think Facebook and MySpace.”
“Hounddog and Stalker are dissimilar enough to coexist,” Jack countered, “like two different dating sites, think JDate and ChristianMingle.”
Ethan groaned, which made Jack chuckle.
“You signed a nondisclosure,” Bailey charged. “You can’t share anything about our software or strategies—”
“I would never do that,” Jack said, “and they’re not asking me to.”
“You walk, you get nothing.”
Jack headed for the door. “I know the deal. I have to vacate the premises immediately. I’m leaving now.”
“You’ll be giving up ownership,” Ethan blurted, desperate to change Jack’s mind. “You’ll go from entrepreneur to intrapreneur.”
“The world needs both.” Jack looked back at his brother. “I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I really thi
nk it’s for the best. You and I haven’t been the same ever since we started this thing. It’s just not worth it to me anymore.”
Ethan had to ask, “Is that where you’ve been sneaking off to every weekend, Silicon Valley?”
Jack nodded.
“I thought you had met someone.”
“I know you did.” The corners of Jack’s lips twitched, another nervous tick Ethan knew all too well. “Hounddog is sending movers this afternoon. I’ll be gone by the time you get home.” Jack pushed the door open, paused, and then turned back. “For better or worse, I hope you do change all public and private transparency forever and it all works out the way you want it to. Good luck.”
Ethan watched Jack leave, his mouth agape.
Good luck?
In nearly thirty years, his brother never wanted to leave his side, almost to a fault. Now he was walking out the door and moving up the coast, just like that.
The door slammed shut and reverberated.
Ethan went aphonic.
Bailey flapped his hand and shouted, “Do something!”
Ethan ran after Jack blindly.
CHAPTER 2
Ethan cut off Jack at the reception desk. “This is what we always wanted. Why would you give up now?”
“I have my reasons,” Jack huffed.
“You owe me a better explanation than that.”
The harsh light from the wall of windows overlooking the Third Street Promenade shed a spotlight on the statuesque twins, turning the open, airy floor plan into a stage to air their dirty laundry. The staff couldn’t hear their conversation, but Ethan’s frenzied body language and Jack’s hardline stance said it all.
Jack looked away and mumbled, “It’s just too much.”
Ethan tried his wonted upbeat spin. “All start-ups have growing pains, unexpected hurdles, but once we get to the next level—”
“I want to have a life.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I know you don’t.”
Ethan felt as if his right hand had said it no longer wanted to clap with his left. He and Jack had been obsessed with the tech boom in California since their first coding club in elementary school. Growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, the twins from the Twin Cities had dreamed of becoming Internet entrepreneurs—always together—changing the world for the better, like Jobs and Wozniak or Page and Brin. Ethan was a visionary, the idea guy, and he was driven. Jack was a great programmer, loved solving technical problems and the solitude coding required. This was their shared destiny. Now Jack was pulling out, without warning. And worse, he was going to go work for their rival.
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