The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  “Oh, pretty simple really. I came down here on a recruiting junket for our old shop. Found a bright young Stanford undergrad called Dwayne Wisnold. But instead of me recruiting him, he recruited me.”

  She laughed. “Don’t you have family here as well? That must be nice.”

  “My dad, but not exactly here. Nearby.”

  They passed Betelnut, an Asian eaterie decorated in fire-engine reds and lacquered bamboos. It reminded Natalie of a French colonial film set. Nguyen suggested a table in the inside-outside space spilling onto Union. After some good-natured debate, he ordered for them: Bein Pow firecracker chicken with szechuan chilies and almonds, seared scallops with Excellent XO sauce and two portions of the house speciality – minced chicken served with fresh lettuce cups. He ordered a bottle of Anchor Steam ale; she asked for a double Americano. She was wearing an Indian print summer dress with spaghetti straps, her hair loose around her shoulders. She wondered if the dress showed a little too much shoulder and cleavage but, looking around, she was hardly the most immodestly dressed gal there.

  “Still jet lagged?” Nguyen asked, with reference to her double Americano.

  “Yeah, nasty layover in Pittsburg. Not so used to it these days.”

  “And how’s that going? The yoga, in Barbados.”

  “In the Bahamas actually. Yeah, great …”

  “I was sure it was Barbados.” Nguyen looked away into the middle-distance as though seeking arbitration. How he hated to get his facts wrong, she laughed.

  “So you’re not missing Redmond?” he asked. It was where their old office was located.

  “Not so much,” she laughed. “You?”

  He wiped his brow with a long finger as though to say, ‘narrow escape’. The drinks arrived, the beer bottle beaded cold on the outside. He waved away an offered glass.

  “But I’m curious,” she said. “How did you know to jump to Clamor back then? The good folk in Redmond must have made it hard to leave.”

  “Oh yeah sure. And meantime, how many more years would I have had to endure thinking up new spreadsheet features? Features that ninety nine per cent of users would never even know about, let alone use. No thanks. Clamor just seemed to –”

  “– don’t tell me –”

  “MUST!” they said in unison.

  “Matter, be unique, sustainable … and what did the ‘t’ stand for again?”

  “Tedious,” Nguyen said with a withering look. “I just needed more, Nat. And it wasn’t a financial home run at the old place, at least not for the foreseeable future. I needed to make a move, and I’m sure glad I did. But what about you? How do you feel about it now?”

  “I wanna tell you about that, but first I have to ask you something.”

  The food started to arrive already, sizzling hot. Natalie waited for the servers to leave then leaned in:

  “What happened yesterday, at the end there Tom? That girl on the screen: her eyes!” and she shuddered.

  “Yeah,” Nguyen sighed. He speared a scallop with his chopstick then let them fall to the side. “Tell me about it.”

  “Tom, that didn’t look like any simple case of DNS poisoning or site spoofing. I’m guessing the page we saw up there really was on Clamor. The password and account history were yours, when that URL auto-completed. I’m guessing the laptop too, remembering how you liked to own a presentation at the old company. I gotta ask –”

  He pushed his still empty plate aside, his head into his hands. Then he looked up at her, his features crossed with stress. “Listen Nat, we’ve been having some real problems. Real problems. Not just the usual soft porn or even sex tourism stuff among consenting adults. Real, nasty, underage stuff… like what you saw. Maybe it’s just the times we live in,” and he shrugged confusedly. “We’ve been trying to keep track of it, but –”

  “But Tom,” she said, mystified. “You know better than to ever visit those places yourself…”

  “Of course. And if we had a solid head of security, I wouldn’t need to rake over that shit in my spare time. Namely two to four in the morning.” He took a gulp of beer.

  Natalie sipped her coffee, trying to keep eye contact.

  “Nat. I was wondering whether you’d be prepared to come on board. Not!” he added quickly, reading her reaction – “necessarily in a full time role, but instead for a consulting gig, well defined. Just through IPO.”

  “Tom, I’ve really moved on –”

  “Just consider it, Nat. The money would be amazing. We’re talking – I dunnow. Two fifty K? For four, six months work? It’s worth it to the company. You’re worth it to the company. It’s more than enough to set you up in private consultancy out of Nassau” – and he saw her reaction again – “or build your own yoga world, or whatever the hell you want!”

  She laughed again. “You know it’s not about the money for me, Tom. Besides, I walked away from the our former employer with enough.”

  “But it couldn’t have been a home run for you either. I mean, I’m sure they gave you a boatload of options when you made VP Security, but the stock price did nothing over that timeframe. This’ld be a great way to top up the tank. Not just financially, but in terms of your professional contacts. Keeping the doors open. Why not? C’m’on, it would hardly hurt the resume to have a prestige consulting gig with Clamor at the top. All of us are only as good as our last movie, Natalie.”

  “Who put you up to this?”

  “Myself!” he said. “OK, I got a call from the bankers handling the IPO, late last night. They suggested we get a crack consultant on board toute-d’-suite, and there’s only one potentially crack consultant I know of in this domain, and that’s you Chevalier.”

  She couldn’t help feel flattered. Frankly, it had been a disconcerting time the last 18 months, without the crutch of a big desk title, the status and self-esteem that went with.

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  A couple scudded by on roller blades, their Jack Russell panting behind. Live for today…

  “And how would this work, when you already have a head of security?” she asked. “That’s just weird.”

  “I’m telling you, strictly inside the good ole ‘cone of silence’: it’s not working out with Malovich.”

  “Dead man walking?” Natalie resurrected another term from their previous chats.

  “Yup, he can’t be long for the job. He owns the problem. And the problem ain’t getting solved. Far from.”

  “So what does Wisnold have to say? Surely it’s his call in the end.”

  “Should be,” Nguyen slumped back, the stress becoming ever more apparent. “I guess he’s concerned about the Friendster experience.”

  “The Friendster experience? Huh?”

  “You know, the game of ‘Whack-a-mole’ they got into at the end there. No matter how many times they whacked the mole back into the ground, another popped up someplace else on the screen. Shoulda turned it into a game on Clamor!”

  It seemed like a life-time ago, but for a brief period back in 2003, in exactly this kind of San Francisco neighborhood, it had been impossible to avoid the name Friendster. Natalie recalled flying down for a due diligence trip involving an acquisition, and going on out to an electronic music venue with one of the guys from the team. She overheard the name Friendster every time they approached the bar.

  A technologist started the site, partly to improve his dating life. It took off due to the adoption of two distinct social groups: fans of the Burning Man new-age festival in the Nevada desert, and opinion-leading gay men. But ‘Fakesters’ soon joined these early adopters, whose goal it was to create blatantly fictional profile pages. Burning Man himself received one. This was not the vision of the founders, who started taking them down, citing house rules requiring profile pages to feature real people. The ‘fakesters’ morphed into ‘fraudsters’, assembling fake pages with photos and other profile elements that looked fraudulently real, hence much harder to detect. Pages appeared for the founder himself.
“Eesh,” Natalie remembered wincing, when a friend pointed one out: “that can’t be good for his dating life.” Eventually, all the ‘fakesters’ and ‘fraudsters’ were whacked, but not before the in-crowd had moved on. Tumbleweeds blew through the previously vibrant forums of Friendster.

  So perhaps Dwayne Wisnold had reasons to be wary.

  “He wants to wait. To let sleeping dogs lie,” Nguyen said. “But there may be other ways of coming at this. Look Nat, I know I’m preaching to the choir on this one, but security at a shop like Clamor can’t just be about technical engineering. It has to be about social engineering. That’s the higher order bit. And that’s why we need you on board.”

  The higher order bit. It was a resolutely techie term, recognizing what her old employer had ultimately been forced to accept: that in the end, the security of a corporate entity came down to its people. That software worms, trojans and viruses were not the real threat. The real threats had stalked the physical corridors of their old company, in powerful, insidious ways. “It’s not like I couldn’t build a bot to try and deal with what we saw yesterday,” Nguyen was saying, “flagging relationships of attributes: age, price field, image maps –” but Natalie’s thoughts were elsewhere now.

  She cast her mind yet further back. The real problem – the one that launched her career – was exposed to have been the behavior of her old company’s hyper competitive, over-achieving staff. In the federal antitrust inquiry resulting from the late ‘90s ‘browser wars’, the browser team had effectively made the Department of Justice’s case for it: that they should be split off from the herd. Natalie could still remember a startled Connie Cheung, the local Komo 4 newscaster, delivering the shock news: that a Federal Judge had ruled her old company should be broken up.

  And yet, it took the necessary survival steps, including that of recasting Security entirely. Natalie was chosen to sit on a top secret, cross-divisional task force, where she first met Tom Nguyen. She found herself working with the most able lawyers, the most trusted members of the Human Resources department. She’d gained a reputation for her psychological assessments of situations – and an ability to bring people together. In 2003, while still in her late-twenties, she’d been named Vice President, Security. She liked to think of it as her old company’s recognition that security began and ended in the social realm. For that was a dictum straight out of her father’s playbook.

  “So whaddaya think?” Tom was pressing her. He had that same, single-minded look as in his old job, when about to ship new software.

  “I’ll need to think about it. I’m actually heading up to Seattle, to see the old gang.”

  “Oh yeah, who?”

  “Stacey, Melinda, –”

  “Is Melinda still taken?”

  “ ‘fraid so.”

  “Too bad. Well look, at least come visit the office while you’re here. We’re having an offsite meeting tomorrow, about all the new ‘n’ cool stuff we’ll be launching shortly. It’s not really an offsite, it’s at the Sunnyvale office – but it will be a Sunday, so we should get some stuff done. You really should come along.”

  “I need to fly to Seattle.”

  “Natalie!” and he gave her his finest doggy-dinner-bowl look. “Come along tomorrow.” And before she had chance to say ‘no’:

  “Hey, wanna go blading?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Going roller blading with Tom Nguyen was one thing, but staying at his apartment was quite another. Thankfully, the question didn’t arise. Tom informed Natalie that Clamor was now treating her trip as an official recruiting event, and paying for her room at the Keaton.

  She got back there by late evening. An enormous box of Ghiradelli chocolates lay at the foot of her bed. She put a ‘Shhhh’ sign on the door, slipped into her silk pj bottoms and favorite ribbed top, then treated herself to a night of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, lounging among the cool bed sheets while picking off the dark chocolate creams.

  She awoke early feeling sluggish. She meditated then went down to the stately lobby for a fresh orange juice, a large latte and a New York Times.

  “Miss Chevalier,” called out the concierge. “How are we today? Hertz has delivered a rental car, courtesy of your hosts.”

  She walked through the front entranceway. It was a glorious San Francisco day. A tram gave a mournful toot and ding ding as it whirred along California, half-a-block away. The Hertz car was a Ford Taurus Limited, but new and surprisingly solid feeling with its hefty three-and-a-half-liter engine and stitched leather seats.

  By mid morning, she was ready. As she reversed the Taurus out of its valet spot, an image magically appeared in the rearview mirror – a camera view from the rear of the vehicle. It vanished again as she swung forward onto Stockton. Nice. Once again, she was impressed by how they’d thought to take care of her needs while in town.

  She exited the city. A sign in garish motel neon flew past: ‘Yahoo! A Nice Place to Stay on the Web’. She passed the airport and, with the light Sunday traffic, was soon in the Valley.

  The name had once conjured up things fertile and mysterious but that day it didn’t even look like a valley to her. It was flat and sun parched and it dissolved into bright haze as she searched fruitlessly towards the horizon. Silicon Valley would often be twenty degrees warmer than the fog-prone city. Here and there, a steel-framed, mirror-glassed building erupted from the tawny scrub, marking some start-up’s ascension to stock market success. Natalie suddenly couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live there. Perhaps for the reduced distractions from its infamous seven-day workweeks?

  The Clamor office was a white, four story building on the nondescript outskirts of Sunnyvale. From the street, she could just make out the discrete logo next to a smoked glass entranceway. The cars in the parking lot were equally forgettable: an old Honda Civic, an older Ford Taurus … her Hertz rental car would fit right on in. Slightly off to the side was a pale-blue, modern Beetle. You would never have guessed that the owners would soon be worth as much as a small country’s GDP. Would the parking lot look any different post-IPO? Probably not. There would be the odd Audi or Volvo, but nothing more flashy. It was such an odd game of appearances, she reflected: ‘For bankers, for VCs, it’s about the money. For us it’s about so much more.’ Yet what if someone tried to take all that money away? It was just a different kind of religion, Natalie concluded – for which she was attending her first Sunday service in a while.

  She parked and walked towards the main doorway, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair and scrutinizing the entry arrangements: simple key card access, no guard. Through the smoked glass, she could make out Tom Nguyen coming towards her. He’d probably been there since dawn, if not all night. The door sucked open: “How’re the thighs holding up?” he greeted her with a grin.

  “Huh? Oh, the roller blading – fine thanks.”

  The lobby was dark, functional and heavily air-conditioned. Behind Tom was an un-staffed reception desk bearing the company’s logo. No sign of a weekend crisis following the Friday investor debacle. Rather, it looked like there’d been a college party meantime, with paper plates and cans of Bud Lite covering the low tables of the lobby seating area.

  Having adjusting to the light, she looked again at Tom. His hair was gelled slick, making him look closer to 25 than 35. A chain hung round his neck, disappearing into a white T-shirt. Over it he wore another, darker one featuring a gold elephant and something written below in Asian characters.

  “What does your T-shirt say?” she asked.

  “ ‘I don’t remember’.”

  “Very good,” and she laughed.

  “I guess elephants forget sometimes,” he said, thumping his sternum, where the golden animal glistened. He looked like he’d been working out. Surprisingly toned. “People always ask,” he added. “It’s my counter-personality test: anyone who thinks I’d put on a T-shirt without knowing what it says hasn’t got me figured me out so well!”

  “There you go,” and Natalie
laughed again.

  “Come on through and meet everyone.”

  He opened a side door into a long conference room.

  The room faced back onto the bright parking lot. But the blinds were drawn, filtering the light into disorientating patterns. It felt like first day of school all over again. People sat spread out along each side of the elongated oval table, down the middle of which stood bottled drinks, coffee cups and plates of cookies. Most people had their laptops already open. Each head turned towards her. She struggled to keep up as Nguyen rattled off the names of a product manager and three technical program managers nearest the door. At the farther end sat the top team, whom Natalie had seen on stage two days prior. They stood up in turn: Mike Marantz, tousle-haired and red-eyed, in a crumpled pair of khaki chinos. Yuri Malovich, sallow and intense, in puma sneakers, drainpipe jeans and an old Atari T-shirt draping his wiry torso. Natalie couldn’t tell whether his top was deliberately vintage or had been lurking in his wardrobe forever. Furthest along, on the near side, was someone Natalie hadn’t encountered before: a petite Asian woman perhaps in her early twenties, extending her hand:

  “Hi, I’m Nancy Wu,” the woman said. “The Chief Connectedness Officer.”

  “Nancy? Natalie. Nice to meet you.”

  Nancy’s mouth smiled but her eyes remained female-evaluative. Probably just like my own, Natalie chastised herself. Nancy was arrestingly pretty, with tumbling dark hair streaked cherry-red, porcelain fine skin and glistening eyes. She was in a dark blue polka dot dress above the knee, over which she wore a damson-colored cardigan. The girlish look was contradicted by her boots, sleek black, accentuating her athletic calves. But it was the heels that made the point. Beside them sat a bug-eyed pug, with matching polka-dot kerchief.

  “That’s Minerva,” Nancy said, smiling. The dog looked terrified.

  Nguyen guided Natalie on to the head of the table, where slouched Dwayne Wisnold, his faded denim shirt leaching the color from his face.