by Jack Fuller
“Contractual relationships avoid the inherent challenges of full integration, difficulties that lead most mergers to fail to achieve their financial goals,” said Nyström.
“They forgot to tell that to Jack Welch at General Electric,” said Joyce. “But I take your point. It is our view, however, that the distinction between data and analytics will soon be entirely artificial. Enterprises structured along it will be built on a fault line.”
Rosten might have suggested another metaphor, as they sat along the San Andreas, but happily, nobody on the Gnomon side seemed shaken.
Joyce went on: Transaction costs—the time and money spent getting two sovereign entities to yes—are the enemy of urgency. You pay them just once in a merger. In a joint venture, you pay them every day.
Nyström had taken his MBA at the University of Chicago, home of the laureate of transaction costs, and so he was able to fight back with erudition. The members of his board must have heard all this before, but that was not the only reason they looked bored. They were obviously not thinking about costs; their minds were on price.
As the meeting proceeded, it became clearer and clearer that the deal was going to happen. When Gnomon’s stock had shot up after the Wall Street Journal article, the pressure had started to build. Now getting to yes had become seismic.
9
Gunderman returned to the Dome as soon as he had the proof. He went directly to Simons’s office, but she was not there, and the temp outside had no idea where she had gone.
“Look on her calendar,” he said.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to do that,” she said.
He took out his BlackBerry and walked down the corridor until he had enough bars. Simons’s line rang twice and went to voicemail. Next he looked for Lawton, who was not in either. Charlene said that Chase had called him to a meeting.
“Pull him out,” said Gunderman.
“Chase won’t like that,” said Charlene and smiled as she dialed.
Just then Lawton rounded the corner. Gunderman rushed toward him at such a speed that Lawton stopped and put up his hands against a collision.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” Lawton said.
“We’ve got him,” said Gunderman.
All the admins inclined themselves to hear.
“Not the place for this, Sam,” said Lawton, turning him and walking him through the office door, closing it behind them.
It was only a status call, but Berry revived whenever he breathed advocates’ air. He needed it the way an asthmatic needs an inhaler. He told his colleagues he was making this routine appearance to put the government on notice. Just his presence in place of a young associate might prompt the favorable plea deal he was looking for. The young assistant U.S. Attorney watched him enter the courtroom. Berry nodded: You against me, son.
After the next court date had been set and the assistant had called him aside to suggest a telephone conversation, Berry left through the lobby of glass and granite, breathing easily. The first time he had been inside the Federal Building, he had been a summer associate at Kirkland & Ellis. In those days you could walk right in, get on the elevator, and go straight into a courtroom with not so much as a glance from the bailiff. No metal detectors. No pat-downs if your artificial hip set it off. The only people who couldn’t come and go were in handcuffs.
When he was U.S. Attorney, he had arrived by car driven by a marshal. Though you would not have known from looking at it, the black Lincoln was hardened against 7.62-mm tungsten rounds. There had been credible threats. Danger justified luxury and smoothed his commute. Now he lived within walking distance and could buy whatever luxury he required; it was the danger that he missed.
The firm was in an office building near the Federal Building. He displayed his ID to the rent-a-cop at the security desk and was ticking along the stone floor toward the elevator bank when he heard the echo of his name.
“You’re gonna love this,” Szilard said, coming to his side.
“Who am I going to love?” he said.
“In the elevator,” said Szilard.
A security camera’s red eye blinked above them, but there was no microphone unless you pushed the emergency button. Szilard turned his back to the eye.
“D&D is in a hurt,” he said. “Their credit-history database has been jacked. They’ve fingered a very unlikely suspect. They’ve known about the problem for months and not disclosed it, even to their Audit Committee. Seems our mission just crept.”
There was nothing quite so satisfying as knowing someone’s secret when he doesn’t know that you do. Berry only wished that, in this state of grace, he were on trial.
When she wanted to, Marcia was able to pull a Masque of the Red Death face that could stop a party. The Gnomon meeting had just ended, and everybody was shaking everybody else’s hand when she pressed a note into Joyce’s palm. He looked at it and handed it to Rosten.
“See what he wants,” he said.
Marcia led Rosten to an empty office that she had prearranged for just this sort of eventuality.
“You’ll get four bars,” she said as he unholstered his BlackBerry.
Rosten had no idea what Berry could have said to give her the face. If he had found so much as a phony taxi receipt, Rosten would be shocked.
“What does he want?” he asked.
She whispered, “He said it was regarding the hacking.”
Rosten stared at her.
“Well, you asked,” she said.
When he told Berry’s secretary that he was from D&D returning the call, she told him to wait. Not “Please hold a moment for Mr. Berry.” Not “May he call you back?” Just “Hold” and then a shallow silence. There wasn’t even any music.
Marcia tipped her frosted hair toward the door, and Rosten nodded. Many minutes passed.
“I’ll connect you now,” the woman finally said, as if she were doing him a favor.
“Brian?” said Berry.
“Tom Rosten. He’s in the middle of something.”
“Yes he is,” said Berry.
“As long as I have you on the phone, I want to tell you that we are feeling a lot of urgency about completing the forensic audit,” said Rosten.
“Actually I have you on the phone,” said Berry. “And you are not my first choice.”
“In any event.”
“Let’s get to your real problem.”
“The audit plan you signed off on makes abundantly clear the limit of your involvement,” Rosten said.
“You haven’t thought it through,” said Berry. “Even if you have the black woman dead to rights, you still have trouble.”
“That is none of your concern.”
“I did not give my children expensive educations by handling clients’ first mistakes,” said Berry. “I did it by handling the problems they created by thinking they could handle their first mistake by themselves. What happened was a crime. An undisclosed major corporate crime.”
“It was of no consequence,” said Rosten.
“Oh, it had consequences,” said Berry. “It caused you to cover it up. That’s going to help me educate my grandchildren.”
“Let me be sure what you are saying,” said Rosten.
“I want you to understand that this isn’t a threat,” Berry said. “It would be easier for you if it were. It is a prediction. Share it with your boss. Tell him that next time, he needs to take my call.”
“So this is the way you get business,” said Rosten.
“I have more business than I need,” said Berry. “This is fun.”
Gunderman was waiting at Simons’s office door when she returned from lunch.
“What are you doing here?” she said, blowing past him.
“Just listen. Please,” he said, following her to the closet door. “When you and I went into Margery’s office, I made a copy of her hard drive. Now I’ve been able to compare it with the one Greener used to implicate her. The bad code wasn’t there before Greener got hold of
her laptop. That proves that she is not the hacker.”
“You let her be humiliated,” she said.
“It wasn’t until Dell snuck me back into the loop that I could prove her innocence,” Gunderman said. “Please understand that.”
“I don’t understand anything,” she said so the whole floor could hear.
“We should close the door.”
She did, loudly.
“It was Greener,” Gunderman whispered. “He put the evidence on her computer then accused her.”
“They treated her like a criminal,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Sara,” he said. “I did the best I could.”
She looked at him looking down. What kind of name was Gunderman? You couldn’t tell any more from it than you could from Simons.
“Will you help me off with my coat?” she said.
He was clumsy, but he managed.
When Rosten emerged from the little office, the Gnomon people were still mingling with the D&D team in the lobby, basking in possibility and taking one another’s measure. He went outside to wait in the parching sun. Soon the limos pulled up. He let Sebold and Harms get in with Joyce. This always seemed important to them. Before Joyce ducked into the car, Rosten whispered, “A word with you at the terminal.”
Rosten rode with Sebold’s deputy and the director of financial analysis. How did you think it went, Tom? Don’t you think we could have left out that third slide? Rosten mumbled something and retreated into his BlackBerry. There he saw that during the meeting, a call had come in from Gunderman, of all people. He disregarded the voice mail; one hundred seventy-nine e-mails had priority. But he could not concentrate. The limo sped down a freeway lined with new money. He opened a piece of spam and rested his eyes on it.
When they reached the Signature FBO at the airport, he went directly to the counter and spoke to the woman with wings on her chest. She said that if they needed privacy, they could use the office of the assistant manager, who was on vacation. She had the kind of smile he remembered receiving from stewardesses in the old days. The office was two doors down on the right. Rosten had to peel Joyce away from Harms.
“We need a minute,” he said.
“Boy talk,” she said.
“He’s a man of secrets, as you know,” said Joyce.
On the walls of the assistant manager’s office were photos of airplanes soaring in the blue. The window looked out onto the tarmac, where the D&D pilots stood talking on their cell phones near the nose of the company plane. Joyce went to a plastic model of a Falcon 20, which was just like the one outside except for the color of the striping and tail. He picked up the model as if he owned it.
“We’ll probably have to get another, with all the back-and-forth,” he said. “Maybe a 50 for range. Before you know it, we’ll be global.”
“I talked to Berry,” Rosten said. “He knows about the breach in the database.”
Joyce banked the plane this way, then that.
“That’s old business,” said Joyce, bringing the model in for a smooth landing.
“He also knows about Strand,” said Rosten.
“You were supposed to make the limits of his role clear.”
“He thinks we don’t fully appreciate the risks.”
“Which he would be happy to talk us through slowly at his exorbitant rate,” said Joyce.
“He called the way we’ve handled this a cover-up.”
“Put the whole thing in the deep freeze and close the door,” said Joyce. “Pay Berry to follow you in.” With that, he turned his back, left the office, and soon was striding across the tarmac as if he commanded an air force.
Rosten was last into the plane. The seat facing Joyce had been left open for him. Location made it coveted, even though it meant flying backward. He buckled up tightly. The pilots liked to catapult off the runway as if it were a carrier deck. As the Falcon went into the third derivative, the force bent Rosten over his seat belt, the rate of acceleration accelerating like something at the far edge of control. Soon the thrust eased. The seat belt loosened across Rosten’s belly. As the plane settled into a steady cruising speed, mountains came into view, then the whiteout of the clouds.
Joyce’s seat had a console that let him control the temperature, raise and lower the lighting, and select the music. One year the senior team had bought Joyce a captain’s hat for his birthday. He had worn it once during the weekly staff meeting. No one ever saw it again.
He was reading the newspaper, paying no attention to Rosten, which had become pretty much the rule. Ever since being named chief operating officer, Rosten had been trying to figure out who that meant he was supposed to be. There was no space at the top that Joyce did not already fill. He gave Rosten only tasks that he despised, and it was not long before the work started to become the man. Joyce seemed to look upon him as an infirm part of himself—a crack in the voice, an eyelid that twitched, a tired muscle that would not lift. Rosten would stare into the mirror in a men’s room and see there a photo in a trade journal, a man a step behind Joyce or in his shadow at a reception, with a drink in hand. The caption recorded his name, an empty line of letters. He could not remember the time when Joyce had actually sought and accepted his advice on a matter of consequence. If someone had asked him what a COO did all day, he would have had to point at a mirror where the face in the trade journal lived and say, “Better ask him.”
Joyce seemed about to come up out of his newspaper, so Rosten took cover in his BlackBerry. The pilots did not believe in the FAA rules, so most people left the antenna on, pinging away into the ether as if to call, “I’m here. I’m here.” Rosten’s had no bars now, but before takeoff his message queue had grown to more than two hundred. It contained the usual mix of spam and gruel. Focused now, he deleted item after item, opening only a few to make sure they did not say anything. As he purged from the top, new items rolled in from the bottom. One had the heading “Old Flame.” It came from Harms.
From the time stamp she must have sent it in the middle of the deal meeting. He scrolled down until he was on it then looked over at her in the seat directly across the aisle from Joyce, the next-best position after Rosten’s. She kept brushing her hair away from her eyes as she leaned over her laptop.
He opened the message, which forwarded another. Harms had obviously given it a new heading and added her own introduction:
—This got intercepted after the leak. Somebody finally realized it was personal and was thoughtful enough to give me a look. Good luck.
Beneath this, Grace’s message was short—cut off, in fact. His first thought was to reply. He tapped with his thumbs, erased, tapped again, but the words were either too cold or too close. After erasing everything, he hit Send. It was a ping into the void—“I’m here”—two vessels running silent in the dark.
The plane bounced and dipped as it passed over the crest of the Rockies. The seat belt sign was on, but people were up in the aisles on sea legs. Rosten tightened his belt a pull and continued through his queue. A little before Harms had forwarded Grace’s message, Gunderman had sent him one under the subject line “The Real Hacker.” Something had gone a little off in that man. They said his marriage was collapsing. Keeping him on after he had made a fool of himself in front of the board had been a bigger mistake than bringing Berry in. At least Berry might come in handy.
—We got it wrong. I know who the real hacker is. And I can prove it. Call me ASAP.
Rosten deleted the message immediately, as if words could be made to disappear despite all the servers that backed up servers that backed up other servers. He needed the airphone, which was in the console under Joyce’s arm.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “I have to make a call.”
Joyce said nothing as he opened the compartment, pulled on the retractable cord, and handed the device across.
Whatever it was that a COO was supposed to do, certainly among the duties was to contain trouble and protect the CEO from unpleasant surprises. He p
unched Snow’s number into the back of the handset.
“I’m sorry,” said Taleisha. “May I say who called?”
“Find Ms. Snow and tell her Mr. Rosten needs to talk to her from forty thousand feet in the air. Right now,” said Rosten.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I didn’t recognize your voice.”
To avoid looking at Joyce, Rosten turned to the window as he waited. The clouds below were a featherbed, but he was anything but comfortable.
“Tom?” Snow shouted.
“I can hear you at a normal tone of voice,” he said.
“I guess you know,” she said.
“I guess I don’t,” he said, the words poised between her on the ground and Joyce in the air across from him.
“Does Joyce know?” she said.
“Better start with me.”
A hiss enveloped him. He looked at the little screen on the back of the phone to see if he was still connected.
“Tom!” she shouted so loudly that even Joyce heard it. He made a question mark with his face. Rosten just closed his eyes and shook his head.
“I’m right here, Alexa,” he said. “Better talk fast and not shout.”
“Long story short, Greener has done a number on us,” she said.
“How?”
“He’s the cybercriminal,” she said. “And Strand is not happy.”
“Can you manage it?” he said. Contain. Protect.
“It would help if Simons was on our side.”
“Elaborate, please,” he said, glancing at Joyce again.
“She is even unhappier than Strand, if that’s possible.”
“Should I call her?” he said.
“She’s ready to blow.”
Rosten beeped off the call. Now Joyce was watching him. He reached his hand out for the phone.
“I have another to make,” Rosten said, “unless you need it.”
“Something happening?” he said.
Rosten forced a laugh.
“When isn’t there?” he said.
“Everything under control?” said Joyce.
“The center is holding,” said Rosten.
Joyce opened up a Forbes, and Rosten punched Simons’s number into the handset. There was a rush of white noise in his ear. Fortunately, she picked up herself, so he did not need to say her name. The interference made it seem as if they were speaking in a gale.