Yes, she had evidence. She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.
“I’ve got Alex working on password authentication,” she whispered. “It’s a new system called Verify, with a feature called electronic fingerprinting.” He held still as she told him. He seemed to hold his breath as she explained how the system recorded every user of every piece of data—a graphic history of each touch.
“Stop.”
“Did I say too much?”
“Of course not,” he said, but his voice was surprised. He’d never imagined she would confide so much in him. He was moved by the gesture. Overwhelmed.
She rested her head on his chest. “Tell me something too.”
She heard his heart beat faster. Why? Surprise? Chagrin? He was supposed to be the demanding one, the instigator.
“Tell me what’s really wrong with Lockbox.”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s really wrong’?” Jonathan asked softly, defensively.
Oh, she was proving his point. She was like him after all, competitive, even now. No, that wasn’t right. She only wanted parity, a fair trade of information. That wasn’t right either. All she wanted was to draw him in and hold him close. “What did Orion find?” she pressed. Curious, just like Jonathan. Alert, insatiable as he was. “Tell me.”
PART THREE
High Fliers
November and December 1999
11
Information was currency, and Jonathan understood this better than most. After all, his company encrypted Web transactions. Credit-card numbers, personal data, customer preferences—these were valuable, but other bits shimmered as well. Information about rival companies, hints at future trends, insider tips. In graduate school Jonathan had studied cryptography. In business he sold electronic Lockboxes and ChainLinx fence, but in life, his instinct was to trade on secrets, not to keep them. Therefore Emily’s information about electronic fingerprinting tempted. Alex’s idea was dark and clever, and while Jonathan was not sure exactly how such a scheme would come to market, he sensed its value. He had a strategic mind, and he could already envision a world in which some spied with electronic fingerprinting, and others tried to defend themselves against it with new ISIS products. What if ISIS developed an encryption service of its own? He could almost … but he loved Emily, and he would not violate her trust.
He had grown up in Nebraska, where he and his brothers rode the school bus an hour and a half each way. His parents, Dan and Jeannie Tilghman, had been farmers, and raised him to be smart, ambitious, and unsentimental about country life. When it came to living off the land, his mother told him, “Don’t even think about it.” And when it came to school, she said quite seriously, “You’re smarter than anyone there, including the teacher.”
By fourth grade Jonathan was working independently, whiling away the hours memorizing digits of pi. In fifth grade he studied bookkeeping on his own. He was known as a math genius, but he was also the fastest runner in his class. He could beat anyone in the sixty-yard dash, even Scott Livingston. In revenge for this, Scott lured him into a game of Crack-the-Whip at recess. Watching his classmates holding hands, tugged by the leader in a snaking line whose tail moved ten times faster than its head, Jonathan was tempted by Courtney Cahill, the girl everybody knew Scott liked. She was freckled, her eyes copper-brown with long lashes, her hair streaked gold from the sun. Jonathan stepped between Scott and Courtney and took her hand, the first girl’s hand he’d ever held, and as the line whipped back, he felt her soft palm against his, a rush of delight, and the next moment, an explosion of pain on the side of his face, smack against his nose. Scott had stepped out of line and thrown a roundhouse right. Jonathan fell to the ground with blood gushing from his broken nose. Kids swarmed, girls screamed. The teachers were coming, but Jonathan sprang up and sprinted after Scott all the way across the playground. Heart racing, shirt drenched red, he chased his enemy down, caught him from behind, and slammed him to the hardtop. He punched Scott in the face until he was bleeding on the painted hopscotch squares.
Jonathan returned home with a week’s suspension.
“How does the other guy look?” his father asked.
“Bad,” said Jonathan.
Then Dan was satisfied.
Jonathan’s mother wanted to take him to the doctor, but Dan said he would heal better naturally, and so the break mended on its own, into the bold and busted nose Emily insisted she loved anyway.
He skipped two grades, read Ayn Rand, and planned to go to Harvard and become president of the United States, and make a gazillion dollars. Harvard didn’t work out. He hit a speed bump at Woodrow Wilson High, where he was too bright and warlike to get along. He got into trouble in his senior year, a brawl involving alcohol and school property, and he was not allowed to graduate—a fact he enjoyed telling interviewers. He could have done time in summer school, but he took the GED instead and enlisted, serving in Desert Storm, after which he attended Dartmouth, where he became a rugby player and confined his scuffles to the field. He had not yet explored politics, but the gazillion dollars went without saying. He had enormous confidence. He simply knew what to do. Was this good judgment or the extraordinary financial moment? History had never been his subject.
Investors fought to place large sums in Jonathan’s hands. He seemed a new breed, part genius, part industrialist—a game changer—and Jonathan did not disabuse them of this notion. But Emily never looked at him this way; she knew his moods and saw through his stratagems. She understood his business as well, because she’d blazed the trail. Long before ISIS, Jonathan had heard of Emily and Veritech. Back in 1996, when he was still pursuing his Ph.D. at MIT, he caught his first glimpse of her. He had been at Orion’s place, and Molly was flipping channels when Emily materialized on television—cool, slender, bright-eyed as she explained to an interviewer why she did not pursue an academic career in computer science.
“That’s the CEO of Veritech?” Jonathan exclaimed.
“Why are you surprised?” Orion asked. “That’s Emily Bach. Who did you think it was?”
“You know her?”
“I’ve known her forever,” Orion said.
“Introduce me,” Jonathan said. “I’m serious.”
He’d turned back to the screen. She had the longest neck, delicate and white. Just the sight of her stirred him, but what she said next changed his life. She expressed exactly what he was feeling and had not yet put into words.
“I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there’s money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn’t you go out and paint?”
If you lived then …? Jonathan remembered those words when he entered MIT’s 50K business-plan competition with Orion, Aldwin, and Jake. Wouldn’t you go out and paint? The four of them took the T downtown to Filene’s Basement and bought cheap suits and bad-ass ties—screaming purple, scaly green like lizard skin. In those nasty clothes they presented and fielded questions from the judges. When they won their 50K seed money—pocket money, really—they drank all night and dropped out of school to found ISIS in the morning.
Jonathan abandoned MIT without a backward glance, foregoing orals, academic conferences, third-floor potlucks, and staid job prospects at Microsoft or PARC or IBM Almaden. Cannily, he convinced his advisor to come along for the ride, naming the eminent cryptographer, Oskar Feuchtwangler, Senior Scientist. As a finishing touch, he proposed stealing Mel Millstein, the best of the computer-science administrative assistants, and naming him Director of Human Resources.
Jake had balked at this idea and suggested that hiring Mel away migh
t alienate the department.
“You were fine with Oskar,” Jonathan pointed out.
“He’s just taking a leave of absence,” said Jake, “and he’ll come back. He’ll always be around. Once Mel is gone, he’s gone. We’d be stealing him.”
“It’s his choice if he wants to leave,” said Jonathan.
Jake shook his head. “Maybe we don’t want to burn our bridges.” He had always been the most academic of the four cofounders, the most theoretical, as he was also the hairiest, with a wild mop of brown curls and thick unruly eyebrows. Dark-eyed, driven, shy, he was an idea man, a Westinghouse finalist in high school, and a gifted pianist as well, a former student in Juilliard’s pre-college division. Lockbox had been built from Jake’s algorithms. ChainLinx came about as a series of answers to Jake’s questions. The others needed him and his exceptional mind. Technically they were formidable, but Jake was creative. He pointed out, “We might want to go back to school eventually.”
Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “What fun would that be?”
He liked a good time. His idea of a corporate Christmas party was paintball. His highest praise, uttered without an ounce of irony: “You guys are animals.” His rough edges never failed to impress.
“The guy’s a natural,” the VCs whispered to one another, and shook their heads at Jonathan. Oh, brave new world that had such creatures in it. And yet he had a thoughtful side; he recognized and pursued excellence in every form, particularly in the shape of Emily. He loved her brilliant, principled mind. Why did she test him then, tempting him with Veritech’s secret project? How could she, knowing him as she did? He was not high-minded on his own, and he looked to her to model what his soul might become, once he got exactly what he wanted. When he was rich and eminent, a policy maker and philanthropist, Emily would be his wife and chair the family foundation and they would have daughters delicate like her, and athletic sons like him—and all their children would go to Harvard and major in math and play rugby and take up sailing. This was how Jonathan would live when he lay down his arms and beat his sword into time-shares. But not yet! Emily’s behavior baffled him. She had set up a kind of competition, trusting him like that, and demanding a secret from him in return. Did she doubt he loved her? Did she want some expensive proof?
After Thanksgiving, when he met with ISIS CEO Dave, Jonathan kept electronic fingerprinting to himself. This was not difficult. Dave was rich and he was experienced, with his years at IBM and BBN behind him. He was a sport, approximating native dress at ISIS, so that where Jonathan wore jeans, Dave wore khakis, and where Orion wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, Dave wore an Oxford button-down. Dave knew about marketing and goals and five-year plans, but even in his shirtsleeves, he would always be a suit. Dave just barely understood what ISIS was doing now, and could scarcely intuit coming trends. He had his silver-gray hair styled in a salon and he lived in a Cambridge mansion, a brown Victorian on Highland Ave. That wasn’t even his first mansion. His first had been companies ago, along with his first wife and first set of kids. Retro CEO Dave carried a fountain pen. He even played golf. The man was like a car with fins.
Jonathan sat in Dave’s office overlooking redbrick Kendall Square. The company was about to go public, but it was newer than Veritech, and in keeping with the accelerating market, its rise had been faster. ISIS had yet to build a leafy campus out in Dedham, or renovate a funky mill. ISIS squeezed into an ordinary flat-pack office building off Broadway, starting with the top floors, and working its way down until the company leased the entire building. Electricians and carpenters had just renovated the first floor, finishing the space as a control center with a bank of monitors displaying Secure Web Traffic across the globe. The control center had a space-age look, part NASA, part flight deck from the Starship Enterprise. If the control center was designed to impress visitors, Dave’s office was built to reassure them. New hire, designated grown-up, the CEO held court behind an actual mahogany desk with family photographs in frames.
“Where do you see us in five years?” Dave asked, philosophical as always when he sat down with Jonathan.
“Five years?” echoed Jonathan as he fiddled with his BlackBerry. “Let’s talk about five weeks from now.”
Dave smiled and refrained from asking Jonathan to put his new toy away. At times Dave bridled at Jonathan’s manners, but no one could argue with his results. The ISIS client list spoke for itself, and to watch Jonathan pitch ISIS to a new company—the kid could give a clinic. Dave was full of admiration for what he called the growing ISIS family, and often said that he learned more from his young colleagues than they could learn from him. Jonathan readily agreed.
“I want you to take the long view,” Dave said.
Jonathan nodded. “After the IPO, I want to see ChainLinx adopted by every Fortune 500 company, and Lockbox standard for every transaction, so no one dares to buy anything on the Web without seeing our logo guaranteeing the site’s secure. And I want at least fifty more programmers working on new products….”
“You’re thinking about more people,” Dave mused in his deliberate way.
“Of course.” Jonathan glanced at the smooth-shaven face on the other side of the desk and marveled at the way Dave missed the key words—new products, code for fingerprinting, scramblers, all the possibilities in the strange new realm Veritech was poised to enter. Dave didn’t even ask.
“We need to have a conversation with Mel,” said Dave.
“Okay.” Jonathan turned back to his BlackBerry.
Dave marveled at the way Jonathan missed the key word conversation. Attached to Mel, possibly even loyal to him for old time’s sake, Jonathan didn’t realize that conversation meant they had to let Mel go.
Yo Mel, Jonathan was texting. Find more people your slowing us down.
“Maybe we could set that up for Monday,” Dave suggested.
“I’ll be in San Jose,” said Jonathan, “but you can meet with him.”
“I think it would be good for you to be there.”
“I just talked to him,” Jonathan reassured Dave. “He knows what to do.”
Mel was finding people as fast as he could. He didn’t know how to hire faster without pulling programmers off the street. Quality did matter. “I have a process,” he told Dave.
“I respect that,” Dave assured him.
But Jonathan said, “Just speed the process up.”
He had never worked like this before. Résumés haunted his dreams. Aldwin talked about opening two new groups, and Jake demanded more support staff. Suddenly Mel was trying to hire HR people to help with all the hiring. With so much money flowing through ISIS, and so much demand for ISIS services, Mel had become the human bottleneck. “You look frazzled,” Barbara told him.
Oh, frazzled was not the word. Fragile. Dazzled. Fraggled. He woke in the morning sick with anxiety—certain that at any moment Dave would call him in for the talk. He thought about that meeting constantly: I’m sorry, Mel. It’s just not working out; you have not met our expectations. How he dreaded those words—and also longed to hear them. He was in over his head, and far too old. ISIS flew at warp speed, and as for competitors, Odin snapped up prospective hires if Mel so much as blinked. Green Knight and Akamai were always in there hustling for talent, and those were just the local companies. Mostly young and single, the programmers Mel stalked thought nothing of moving to Mountain View or Berlin or Austin. He suffered from motion sickness every day on his commute—not from the train, from the economy.
And yet … and yet, Mel had never been part of something magical before. He had never inhaled the fumes of such success, and although every fiber of his body rebelled against the insane pressure of his job, his soul rejoiced. Thirty years toiling in support services at MIT, but Mel had not been so ordinary after all. He was part of the world other people read about in newspapers. He had been one of those people, reading The Boston Globe each morning on the train, and now he was in the Globe himself—not mentioned by name, of course, but by associ
ation. He had ascended to a realm where companies were named for gods: ISIS, Inktomi, Janus, LOKI. ISIS was already the stuff of legend. “One of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year” was just twelve days away, and Mel felt like Marco Polo, seeing firsthand what others might have written off as myth.
In the past year, he’d watched in awe as his young bosses auditioned VCs twice their age. One morning Mel arrived at work to find Jonathan scribbling the names of venture capitalists on his whiteboard under the headings “Bozos,” “Morons,” “Losers,” “Sharks.” Was this the same kid who had borrowed quarters for the vending machines at the department? There were no vending machines at ISIS. All snacks and drinks were free.
Alas, the faster ISIS grew, the more troublesome Mel’s fifty-seven-year-old body became. Nausea, insomnia, diarrhea. At first he blamed the lunches Barbara packed for him. Then he blamed the Middle Eastern food truck that pulled up each day behind the building, but everybody ate there and no one else got sick. He went for tests, and the doctor found nothing. Reluctantly Mel admitted the cause of indigestion was anxiety. As soon as he arrived at this conclusion his stomachaches subsided, and his back went out.
“What did you do to it?” his young coworkers asked him wonderingly.
“Nothing. I did nothing!” he replied.
Of course he remembered the day, the hour, the very second he threw out his back. Tuesday, October 12, 1999. Three forty-five in the afternoon. Sitting at his fifth-floor desk, he had been discussing health plans with a new hire on the phone. Carpenters were snapping cubicles together. Cardboard boxes containing workstations stood stacked against the walls, and all was quiet—except for the whoosh of programmers batting a birdie with badminton rackets.
Mel was finishing the routine medical-benefits conversation when he glanced up and saw an electrician grinning at him from a square hole in the ceiling where he’d popped out the acoustic tile.
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