The King

by Rick Soper

  To say that it blew up would be an understatement. The day the Stanford servers crashed was a testament to exactly how popular it was. The day after the crash, venture capitalists from Silicon Valley were beating down Billy’s door. All the things they were telling him about PushThrough’s potential were nothing compared to the reality it would become.

  Chapter 9

  From the first day that Russell Scott brought his daughter London home from the hospital, he spent every waking moment showering her with love and attention. From the outside, it was an obvious overreaction to the death of his wife, but Russell was alone: his parents had died when he was in college, and he’d never met Amber’s parents or even known if they were still alive. The only other relationships Russell had were his clients, and his relationship with them was professional, never personal.

  There was no one to tell him that every hiccup, cough, or soft bowel movement wasn’t a reason to run to the doctor. There was no one to tell him that he couldn’t watch her twenty-four hours a day. There was no one to tell him that he needed rest. There was no one to see the toll that being that attentive to her every need was taking on him, until he collapsed on the floor of the local grocery store, formula tumbling out of the basket as he fell.

  He had to watch the video of that fall in the hospital, with the psychologist. He watched himself pitch forward, his nose breaking as he hit the floor and blood pooling out around him as people rushed to his aid. Social Services had to be involved because he couldn’t care for London while he was in the hospital and there was no one else. The psychologist told him that he had a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by witnessing the death of his wife, and that it had manifested in an obsessive compulsion with his daughter. The psychologist told him that he needed treatment.

  At first, he nearly lost his mind from being separated from his daughter, but the doctors were able to talk him down, teach him that being around other people was a healthy thing, not just for him but for London, too. They told him that he needed to go back to work and find other things to fill his mind with, that being obsessed with London wasn’t healthy.

  Russell nodded and said he understood. He went along with the doctors’ advice. He went back to his office. He hired a nanny. He gave every indication to the outside world that he was coping, but inside he was a bundle of nerves every time he left London’s side.

  No matter how hard he tried, Russell could never get out from under the vision of the growing pool of blood, forming under the table in the delivery room. Amber’s terrified eyes, looking up at him as she died, haunted him. He wouldn’t let anything like that happen to his daughter. Not ever. No matter what it took.

  Chapter 10

  “Come on!” Stevens yelled, “It’s a simple question!”

  “Damn it!” Fitzpatrick yelled right back at him, “there isn’t an easy answer!”

  “The hell there isn’t! It’s your job to do a threat assessment on your clients. It’s your job to know who hates them and why! So don’t tell me you can’t answer the question ‘who did Billy Stone hurt!”

  Fitzpatrick bit down on his lip. FBI headquarters wasn’t his home turf, but he still had some fight in him. He clenched his fists. “All right,” he said. “You want the list? Here it is! Damn near everyone he came in contact with has a reason to be pissed off at him. The guy is a fucking prick!”

  Emory put a hand on Stevens’ shoulder to try and calm him. “Okay – common knowledge: the guy was a prick and nobody liked him. But you must have had some specific suspects that you watched out for.”

  Fitzpatrick hung his head in his hands as he rubbed his fingers across his face. “Look. Like I said, this guy was a nightmare of a client. If the board hadn’t given us a blank check to watch over him, I would have dropped him a long time ago. It’s just hard to say no to that kind of money.”

  “Suspects,” Stevens said flatly.

  Fitzpatrick raised his palms up in a gesture of surrender. “His employees hated him because he would storm through the office, yelling at them to finish projects, or telling them their work was crap, or just plain changing what he wanted them to do.”

  “Did he fire anyone?” Emory said. “Who had a big enough beef to come after him? To trap him?”

  Fitzpatrick shook his head. “No, that’s the one thing he never did – he never fired anyone. He rode their asses, he yelled...but nobody got fired.”

  “Why did they put up with that shit?” Stevens said. If he’d worked for Stone, he’d long since have smashed the little prick’s face in.

  “Money and fame.” Fitzpatrick said, looking at Emory, and then Stevens. “They were making money hand over fist and they were part of the fastest growing company on earth. People put up with a whole bunch of shit for that.”

  “So you really didn’t consider them a risk?” Stevens said.

  Fitzpatrick shrugged. “You never know when someone who’s treated like that is going to break.”

  “Did you consider them a risk?”

  “We always kept a man on him.”

  “Except when he was with girls?” Emory said.

  “Look.” Fitzpatrick held up his hands. “If you want to know about any of that you need to be talking to Tom Francis.”

  “Who’s that?” Stevens said.

  “He’s Stone’s PR guy. He handles Stone’s public persona, and along with that his female...situations.”

  “Situations?” Stevens glanced at Emory.

  Fitzpatrick pointed towards his chest. “We handle the physical threats. Francis handles public relations problems.”

  “Were there a lot of them?” Stevens said.

  Fitzpatrick sighed. “When you’re one of the richest men in the world, women have a tendency to throw themselves at you. Stone wasn’t a man to say no.”

  Stevens frowned. “How did it play out?”

  “After, they would come back, threatening to call him a pig in public – to kick up a shit storm. Francis would handle it.”

  Stevens looked at Emory. “Handle how?”

  “Not my line.”

  The door opened suddenly, revealing Agent Emily Sarah, catching her breath as if she had been running, a sheaf of papers in her hand. “We got it,” she said. “The IP address.”

  Chapter 11

  “Venture Capitalists” translated into piles of cash flying at Billy very quickly, but he never had a chance to enjoy it, because he needed to live up to the expectations that the cash represented. That meant that he went from spending all his time in a darkened dorm room, writing code, to a much larger, darkened office with bigger, faster, better computers where he spent all his time...writing code.

  Billy knew computers, but he had no idea how to run a company. His first hire was Josh Bond, the one friend he’d kept from Stanford, who turned around and found Bill Johnson – who had years of corporate experience at IBM. Between the two of them, they were able to set up the infrastructure that Billy needed to take PushThrough global. They hired up-and-coming programmers, they bought the servers they needed, and they made the advertising connections that would turn a massive flow of funds into a company that blossomed.

  Billy had no idea what was happening outside of his office. He had no idea how the outside world saw him. His only concern day-to-day was improving the program. He’d work for days at a time writing code without sleeping. He’d obsess over features, and yell at the other programmers until they were able to push him in the right direction. The code of the other programmers was never good enough, so Billy rewrote it, again and again and again.

  Josh had rented a massive apartment for Billy, a stone’s throw from the office, with a view that overlooked the San Francisco Bay, but Billy would only go there long enough to collapse at night, until a new idea woke him up and he went rushing back to the office. He had a brand new Mercedes but he’d never gotten his license.

  The entire idea behind PushThrough was to push people together so they could make connections, and Billy w
orked at a feverish pace to facilitate those connections. But in doing everything at every level to make PushThrough work, he was unable to make any connections, himself. Until the IPO.

  The Initial Public Offering of stock in PushThrough required Billy to do something that he was very uncomfortable with: public speaking. Billy struggled to talk to individuals, let alone rooms packed with potential investors, constantly picking through company financials that Billy had no clue about. PushThrough had hit a brick wall in terms of capacity, and if they wanted to make the jump to the next level they needed the influx of cash that an IPO would bring in.

  Josh Bond and Bill Johnson brought in Tom Francis from The Agency, a top- notch public relations firm, to work with Billy on making presentations. At first, Billy ducked his meetings with Francis to write code. Eventually, Francis had Billy abducted by Blake Fitzpatrick.

  The abduction scared Billy half to death: a hood was thrown over his head, he was tied up, and driven blind to The Agency offices. The shock of it woke him up to what could happen to someone in his position. He had Josh hire Black Hawk, and started listening to Tom Francis.

  “This was extreme,” Tom had said when the hood was pulled off Billy’s head. “I get that. But you needed to understand – really understand – the importance of what you’re about to do.”

  Billy was shaking. “Did you really have to do this?”

  “You were avoiding me,” Francis said.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “You’re the only person who can.”

  Billy shook his head. “I don’t see–”

  “Do you even know what a mythological creature you’ve become?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me show you…” Francis threw article after article onto the conference room screen, each one talking about Billy as if he were a wonder child – the second coming of Steve Jobs – a mystery, an enigma that no one knew anything about. “Most of what you see here,” Francis said, “are articles that we here at The Agency floated out to the general public as a run up to you coming out of your digital cave and introducing yourself to the world.”

  The thought of the world knowing who he was unnerved him. When he thought about being known, he thought about being bullied.

  “Stop!”

  “What?”

  Francis looked right into his eyes. “I can see the thoughts running through your head. The self-doubt. The uncertainty. The fear.”

  “I just don’t–”

  “You have to look at this as the opportunity it is!”

  “What?”

  Francis smiled. “This is your opportunity to be anybody you want to be! Spending years cooped up in your office, not seeing anybody has left the world wondering who you are, and that mystery has created anticipation for the moment when you walk out in front of the cameras. We can use that spotlight – you can use that spotlight – to remake yourself into a brand new person!”

  Part of Billy wanted to say that he liked the person he was, but even he wasn’t sure he believed that. “Well…” he said slowly. “What did you have in mind?”

  Francis grinned, and as he described his vision for who Billy could be, Billy found himself grinning right back.

  Chapter 12

  Social Services is one of the most overworked and underserved branches of the government, so making them believe that he’d reformed his obsessive ways was a fairly simple task for Russell Scott. After a few, in-home visits, some talks with the nanny, and a final chat with the psychologist, Russell was left alone to be with his daughter as he pleased.

  But he still had to work. There was just no getting around it. He didn’t try to grow his business, didn’t try to get new clients, and he did the bare minimum for his existing ones, but more work kept rolling in. He decided to make the jump to working from home. He closed down his office and moved everything into his house. He remodeled a room downstairs for client meetings and just like that, he could spend his days with London. The nanny was there during business hours, but just knowing that she was in the other room was enough to calm his ever-present anxiety about her safety.

  And then she started school. For the first few weeks he couldn’t stop himself from sitting in his car, watching the school from across the street to make sure she was okay. He only stopped because a concerned parent reported him to the police, followed by another round of explanations, trips to the psychologist and visits from social services.

  The threat of her being taken away because of his obsession was enough to convince him to do a better job of hiding it, but in the end it was London herself who finally got him to back off. One day after school when he was trying to play with her, she looked up at him with her mother’s, bright green eyes and said, “Daddy...go away!”

  “What?” He struggled to keep the smile on his face from faltering.

  “I want to play by myself!”

  There was no maliciousness behind the statement: just a child stating what was on her mind, but it reminded Russell so much of Amber, who’d sometimes said the same thing – when she wanted to let her free spirit fly, she’d said. In that moment of recognition, he remembered what the psychologist had told him in one of his sessions. You have to let go. You have to let kids be, on their own. They need to have that feeling of independence. They need that freedom to let their imaginations run free. Kids need the space to be kids. Suddenly, it made sense.

  It was the shock he needed to back off, to let London have some room. His anxiety over her safety never completely went away, but he managed to get into a mindset that allowed him to let her be a kid, to let her have some fun. He still tried to be constantly available, to give her everything she wanted, to answer any questions she had, to read to her – when she wanted him to – and watch cartoons with her. But he backed up far enough to give her a little freedom.

  Chapter 13

  The FBI Swat Team had the house surrounded and they were waiting for word to break down the door, but looking at it, Stevens was having a hard time deciding why they were there. Yes, the IP trail connected to the Craigslist ad for the handyman and the escort service had led them to this address in the Georgetown suburbs, but the building in front of him looked abandoned. Outside, it looked cared for: the lawn cut, the windows washed...someone had been taking in the advertisements and picking up the mail, but other than that it looked dead, like the man who supposedly owned it.

  Everything that came back on Don Fellows was wrong. There was a death certificate on file, but his bank and brokerage accounts were still open. His bills were all current. His taxes were paid for. But he’d been dead for over a year. Evidence said that someone else was in the house. That Stone could be captive in the basement. But Stevens knew something was wrong, and even as he gave the signal to hit the door he knew that they weren’t going to find anything – least of all Stone.

  The Swat team moved forward, Stevens following close behind. They lined up next to the windows and doors of the small house. Stevens looked in the window next to the door – no furniture, no television – nothing, other than the curtains on the windows. Stevens looked at the Swat commander, held up three fingers, then two, then one, and the battering rams smashed through the front and back doors at the same moment, and men streamed into the house.

  Stevens pushed through with the wave of men in black. The Swat team was swinging guns from left to right in front of them, moving from empty room to empty room, clearing the house until they found the doorway down to the basement. Stevens gave them the okay to hit that door and they slammed through it and went down the stairs single file, Stevens following closely behind.

  The house was empty except for a single chair, sitting in front of a foldout card table with a laptop on top of it that had a cable modem for internet access. The table was in the back corner of the basement, in a place where it could be accessed away from prying eyes. Emily Sarah, who had followed along behind Stevens, immediately dropped down at the computer and started
working her way through various screens, the sound of her tapping fingers muted by rubber gloves.

  “This is it,” she said, after a few minutes.

  “What can you tell me?”

  “It’s a ghost.”

  “Meaning?”

  She shook her head as she worked the keys. “It means that this is the contact computer – the messages were sent from here – but someone was using it remotely.”

  “Were there any encryption programs? Security measures in place to keep you out of that computer?”

  She shook her head. “Nope, it was like this was supposed to be found.”

  Stevens looked over at Emory Thompson, watching them from the stairs, and then down at his watch; it had been just over four hours since Billy Stone had been taken. “This computer, this house – this trail – were all left here for us.”

  Emory came down the stairs and stood next to them. “But why?”

  “To kill time,” Stevens said. “To kill our time.”

  “Damn it,” Emory said.

  “The question is,” Stevens said, “what’s been happening, while we’ve been chasing our tails.”

  Sarah stopped tapping on the keyboard and looked up at him. “What do you think he’s doing?” she said.

  “Something bad.” Stevens headed for the stairs.

  “What’s next?” Emory said.

  Stevens paused, and nodded at the computer. “I’m not going to be led around by that thing – hell, you guys don’t need me to follow that trail.” He headed up the stairs. “It’s time to start making some people uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s time to get some answers.”

  Chapter 14

  Tom Francis had laid out his goals for Billy that day. “I am going to change you,” he’d said, “from the enigmatic, mysterious genius behind PushThrough to a proud, confident Internet King who rules over all he surveys!”