Igloo felt the room spin around her. How could Angie have known Amber would ask for an extension? It was like she knew how everyone would behave. Were they all being manipulated by Angie even now, even after her death?
Amber continued. “But this conversation isn’t about the government’s search interfaces. It’s about Tapestry 2.0 and making sure that no one on the team does anything stupid.”
Igloo controlled her breathing. She wanted to have this battle, right here, right now. Angie would say that was stupid, because if she argued too vehemently, Amber would know Igloo wouldn’t obey her order. And indeed, she had absolutely no intention of doing that. But Angie would also say giving in too easily would make Amber suspicious.
“There has to be some aspect of 2.0 that we can keep,” Igloo finally said. “I refuse to let Angie’s vision die.”
Amber gestured all around them. “The whole company is Angie’s vision. This is her legacy. Everything surrounding us. I am trying to preserve Tapestry. If the government shuts us down because we tried to route around them, then there’s nothing left of what she built.”
There was merit to what Amber said, strangely enough. In the short term, Amber’s approach would make it more likely that Tapestry would survive. Not to mention that they could avoid stuff like fighting head-to-head against the government or the possibility of going to jail and losing her freedom and her relationship with Essie.
But over the long term, Tapestry would turn into another puppet of the government. That’s why Angie wouldn’t have played it safe. She’d argue that they had to stay ahead of the government. She would have preferred to see Tapestry disassembled than have it turn into just another offender.
She understood Amber’s viewpoint: they had a winning hand in the game she was playing, and she didn’t want to change games. Following Angie’s dream meant changing games, playing for far higher stakes against a much more formidable opponent. No wonder Amber wanted to kill T2.
Shit, she was destined to play What Would Angie Do? for the rest of her life. She’d have to pull the What Would Buffy Do? sticker off her refrigerator. She took another breath, chose her words intentionally.
“A legacy isn’t a piece of static code,” Igloo said. “It’s a living institution. She wouldn’t want us to cave. Look, I accept that we can’t do all of Tapestry 2.0. But let’s do something. A piece of it. We can keep the onion routing, for example, it helps make people safer on insecure networks. Meanwhile, the backdoors give the government access to everything they want.”
Amber glanced at the lawyers, who shrugged and nodded. “As long as we’re in compliance, there’s no rule that we can’t add security features.”
“If you do this, will you make sure that all other work on 2.0 stops?”
With this statement, Igloo confirmed what she had suspected: Amber didn’t actually know who was working on 2.0. If she didn’t know who was working on it, that implied Amber didn’t have access to the secure group they’d been using for collaboration. She probably didn’t even know the full extent of what they were doing. Amber was shooting in the dark, assuming that Igloo would be in the know. Amber was correct of course, and it would be ridiculous to deny it at this point. At any rate, she couldn’t just give in. That wouldn’t be plausible. But if she could make it seem like she was trading T2 for something important… She took a dramatically deep breath.
“If you’re the CEO, then I want the CTO position.” She swallowed hard and stared at Amber.
Amber shook her head in confusion. “What does this have to do with anything? Besides, I’m just the acting CEO.”
“Then make me the acting CTO. And if you become the permanent CEO, then make me the permanent CTO.”
Amber sighed. “With all due respect, Igloo, you don’t have experience. You’ve only ever led a single R&D team—for autonomous chat—and the R&D organization is over a hundred and fifty people and growing.”
“Pair me with an R&D manager. I don’t want to manage all the people. I want to drive the vision.”
“What if I give you a future products research organization? Then you could create whatever you want.”
“And sideline me from actually influencing the product? I don’t think so.”
Amber clenched and unclenched her fist, but didn’t respond.
“I was employee number three,” Igloo said. “Our AI personalities, which I designed and built, are one of the most popular features of Tapestry, and the reason we’ve gotten so much attention. It’s the biggest social benefit we’ve delivered. You can’t say that I’m unqualified to hold the position of CTO and give us visionary leadership when that’s exactly what I did.”
Amber tilted her head to stare at Igloo. “I’m a little surprised that you’re trading T2 for a position in the company hierarchy. What happened to the Igloo who said we should use SHA keys for employee IDs instead of monotonically increasing numbers, and who wanted a flat company structure?”
“I’d still have a flat company structure if it was up to me. But I didn’t impose that hierarchy. You and Angie did. I’m just fitting into the system you created.”
“Touché.” Amber stared at Igloo. “I guess Angie and I didn’t realize that’s what you wanted. Fine, you can have the CTO position. I believe you’ll bring a lot of passion to it. But that doesn’t make you the dictator of product features. We’re still going to be building what marketing and business development tell us. You’ll influence the direction we take.”
“Understood.” Igloo felt confused emotions run through her. On the one hand, this maneuver was just a ploy so Amber would believe that Igloo would terminate the T2 work. On the other, Igloo was really going to be CTO, something she’d wanted for seemingly forever. Why’d she wait until now to demand what she wanted? What if she’d done this a year ago? Two years ago?
Part of her wanted to celebrate. Tell her mom. No, her mom wouldn’t even understand. She’d tell Angie!
She felt like someone had hit her in the face with a brick. She’d never tell Angie anything again. She felt like she was going to cry. She squashed her feelings until there was only a hard, icy emptiness left inside her.
“Is there anything else you want?” Igloo asked. “Because I want to go home and be alone and deal with this.” She glanced toward Angie’s empty chair.
“You’ll send the message to the 2.0 team, calling it off?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to tell them? How will you get them to stop?”
“I’ll tell them what you said. If we don’t comply, we risk losing everything Angie worked for. That keeping Tapestry going is the best way to honor Angie’s vision.”
“Thank you,” Amber said.
Igloo stood and nodded.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Maria said.
When they got outside the conference room, Maria grabbed Igloo’s arm, and made her stop.
“I want to tell you something,” she said.
Igloo looked into her eyes.
“I’m on your side,” Maria said. “What’s happening here is wrong. I just want you to know that. I have your back.”
Igloo tried to puzzle out what she meant. Was Maria saying that she would help hide the T2 work? Could she actually confide in Maria, or was Maria just trying to trick her? Not trusting herself to say anything, she simply gave Maria a hug, then turned and left.
Outside, part of Igloo wanted to celebrate. Not only did Amber buy her answer that she’d stop work on Tapestry 2.0, but Amber was planning to delay before complying with the FISA court order. That was everything she’d hoped to accomplish.
Unfortunately, any expression of joy felt like a betrayal of Angie. Yet this is what Angie would want. She didn’t know what to feel.
She glanced at a clock. Shit, almost two hours had passed. Essie would be back with food by now with no way to get into the container. Igloo made a quick detour to her office on the way out and grabbed a phone and a pile of SIM cards. She plugged one in
and sent a message to Essie > “Had to run a quick errand. Back in 20 minutes.”
She’d need to teach Essie about operational security. How to hide her location, her messages, everything. She waited a minute. No reply. She thumbed the hard switch on the back of the customized device, killing the battery connection. She couldn’t ride back to the container with an active phone.
She retrieved her pilfered bike and headed north, using a bike route on a secondary road paralleling the main avenue. Aside from gentle speed bumps every block, she rode undisturbed. At noon on a Saturday, the bike route, normally heavily trafficked by commuters, was nearly empty.
Her mind raced with the details of everything they needed to do to release 2.0 within a week while also giving the appearance of curtailing all the work. It helped that several 2.0 members had quit the team. Now she’d only need to hide the activities of a smaller group.
A van passed her, veering onto the other side of the road to give her space.
Ben and Diana wouldn’t be a problem, because nobody could ever find them anyway. That left six people. If she claimed three were working on the onion routing, and three pretended to take vacation, that would cover everyone.
Igloo edged right as a black van pulled up alongside her.
Although, it would take extra work to give the appearance of merging the onion routing back into the main code branch. She could share the code with someone on the client team, let them work on it.
She glanced left. The black van paced alongside her. She looked back, noticed another van a half block back. And the first van was still half a block in front—Oh! Oh, shit.
She squeezed hard, her brakes bringing her to a halt with a skid. She cranked the handlebar hard, jumping up onto the sidewalk, looking for an alley or path the vans couldn’t follow.
A screech came from behind her, and doors slammed. She glanced back to see several people on foot, chasing her. The vans kept pace. There! A walking path cut across the middle of the block.
She veered onto the path, only to find it blocked by a woman calmly holding a badge up in front of her.
“Agent Forrest. Can we talk for a minute, Igloo?”
Igloo’s heart pounded. She ran through an inventory of what she had on her body. The phone. A suspicious number of SIM cards. How long had they been tracking her? How’d they find her?
Igloo found herself being led toward the back of one of the vans. Someone took her bike from her. Belatedly she noticed the Hello Kitty sticker on the side, and realized that if they arrested her now, the bike’s owner would never get it back. She wanted to say something, but before she could, she was led inside.
It wasn’t anything like what she expected from TV. She thought there’d be a row of computers and geeks wearing headphones and whispering commands. There was none of that. Jump seats on either wall, only one occupied by a man who smiled at her. Agent Forrest climbed into the van after her and shut the door.
“Take a seat,” Forrest said.
Igloo sat on one side, belatedly realizing she was wearing Essie’s sweat pants and a t-shirt, basically pajamas. The two agents sat opposite her.
“I’m very sorry about Ms. Benenati,” Forrest said. “You two were close.”
Igloo tried to gather her thoughts. She needed to be smart here, but she felt scatterbrained, hardly able to connect two thoughts in a row.
“We were once close,” Igloo said, the words sticking like wool in her mouth.
“We’re not involved in that case. I understand the local police are investigating. Personally, I hope they find it was just an accident. Not that accidents are any easier to emotionally grapple with, but certainly a loved one being murdered is worse.”
Igloo couldn’t grok what kind of conversation they were having.
“Umm, thanks. Why exactly are we here?”
Forrest sat back in her chair, at least as far as the upright seat would allow, and crossed her fingers in her lap.
“Why did you meet with Amber and Maria at Tapestry?”
“What is this about?” Igloo asked.
“Just answer the question.”
“Don’t you have to read me the Miranda rights?”
“We’re not arresting you, Igloo. Trust me, that would be a very different experience.”
Forrest turned to the other agent. “Can you excuse us?” She waited for him to leave. When the van was empty, the door closed, she went on. “Tell me what you talked about at your office.”
“Confidential company matters.”
“Such as…”
“You do understand the term confidential, right?”
Forrest took a deep breath. “Look, your CEO died last night. I get that. A terrible thing. So it’s a little surprising when you convene a meeting the morning after.”
Angie always said the best lies were mostly truth. “We had to discuss succession. Who takes what position. I didn’t want to be passed over for the CTO role.”
“So you went to work in your pajamas?”
“As you said, Angie died last night. I can barely think and get myself to work. My clothes are the last thing on my mind.”
Forrest rubbed her hands on her pants and nodded slowly. “And yet you didn’t just go into work. You made a side trip to the safe house.”
Before Igloo could fully suppress her startled reaction, Forrest continued.
“I’ve been working with Angie for about a year and half. Not all of us in the government are the bad guys. I believe in what she was doing, and I want to help. I know about the plans for T2.”
Despite her best efforts at self-control, Igloo was afraid her eyeballs might pop out of her head. She forced herself to take a breath. What the fuck?
Forrest leaned forward. “I need to know what you discussed at the office.”
Igloo’s mind raced. Could Angie really have been working with a government agent? Why hadn’t Angie said so? Forrest must be phishing. That was the only explanation. Pick up the loner, extract them from any support system, then feed them lies. Standard procedure, according to Angie. If Forrest knew who she was, what they had done together, then she could come up with an infinite number of details that would corroborate her knowledge. If she wasn’t forthcoming, then she didn’t know as much as she was pretending.
“We just discussed the succession. Amber becoming acting CEO, me the acting CTO. I don’t know anything about T2, whatever that is.” Igloo tilted her head. “What is going on? Am I under arrest?”
Forrest looked down and mumbled something Igloo couldn’t catch. Then she leaned closer and stared into Igloo’s eyes.
“Had Angie been acting strange in any way? Was she afraid of anyone?”
Igloo backed away. “I don’t know what you mean. She was just Angie.”
“You met with her, outside of work. You kept it secret.”
“We worked together. Is Angie in some sort of trouble?” Her brain stumbled as she realized Angie was no more. “I mean, was she?”
“You’re the one Angie trusted with everything,” Forrest said. “I’m hoping you can tell us something, try to make sense of what happened.”
Igloo tried to back up more, but she was pressed into the corner of the van. Forrest was phishing, guessing, right? She couldn’t have known everything, no one else did. Igloo forced herself to think about last night, to imagine the flash of light before the explosion, the outline of Angie in the car.
Igloo started crying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Igloo took a sobbing breath. “Angie didn’t tell me anything. I got left behind. Angie, Amber, they got all the positions, all the titles. I’m just another cog in the machine. I thought we were going to make a difference together, but somehow I got sidelined. I’m sad Angie died, but I’m not going to miss my chance to influence Tapestry again. If that makes me a criminal, then arrest me.”
Forrest stared at Igloo a moment longer, then turned her head away in disgust. She bent to her phone and sent a message.
“I’m sorry we bothered you,” Forrest said, holding out a card with a number on it. “If you think of anything, get in touch. You’re free to go. Thank you for your time.” She opened the back door of the van and gestured for Igloo to climb out.
Outside, the sun was bright, and Igloo shaded her eyes with the plain business card as they adjusted. An agent held her bicycle out for her. She took the bike from him and stood blinking. He climbed into the rearmost van, and all three vans pulled away at the same time.
Igloo turned around. Everyone was gone, leaving her and the bike alone in the middle of the street. What had just happened?
The government mole that Angie was always worried about came back to mind. Had Angie learned about the mole from Forrest? Was Forrest somehow the mole? She assumed the government informant was someone inside Tapestry, but she supposed they could be someone on the outside who had an influential relationship to someone key inside the company. Nothing made sense, and she was more confused than ever.
She climbed back on the bike and make her way slowly back to the house where she’d stolen it, watching more closely now for followers.
Chapter 36
Forrest typed a quick summary to Nathan out of sight of her other agents.
Forrest > She doesn’t know anything.
Nathan9 > Bullshit. She was Angie’s partner two years ago. She’s continued to work with Angie. She’s been to Angie’s safe houses.
Forrest > Maybe she’s not as important as you think. Maybe Angie pulled one over on you.
That must have been more biting than she thought, because Nathan didn’t reply. She didn’t know a lot about their history, only that Nathan and Angie had once been hacker friends or maybe allies, and then they weren’t. Also, Angie had something Nathan really wanted, and now that Angie was out of the picture, Nathan thought maybe he had a shot at it.
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