by Sadie Hayes
“Did T.J. say how many approval steps there are?” Amelia asked out loud.
Patty jumped in her chair, where she was reading a Vanity Fair article on her iPad in an attempt to pass the time calmly. “I’ll call him.” She jumped at the opportunity to be useful.
“Never mind,” Amelia said, finding the answer.
“What’d you find?”
“The new app is currently under review by a team in Mumbai. It’s on step four of six in the Apple system. It looks like most apps have gotten through the last two approval steps in less than a day.”
“Does it matter?” Dawson pointed out. “You should focus on fixing the code, not on the timer. It’s irrelevant. You either fix it in time or you don’t.”
Amelia said softly, “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are two ways to fix the code. But one takes longer than the other.”
“Do the faster one,” Dawson exclaimed, dumbfounded.
“The faster way is to put a lethal corruption on top of the bad code, so that it doesn’t work at all.”
“So do that,” he said, and then added, “Am I missing something? I don’t understand the problem.”
“If that happens, Apple will reject it, flag it, and then put Doreye under review. The company could lose its status as an app publisher, and Apple may freeze every Doreye app from every smartphone,” she explained. “The company will be finished, and Adam will get blamed.”
“You can’t seriously be trying to protect Adam right now.” Dawson’s jaw dropped.
Patty’s face was pale and she glanced from Amelia to Dawson, trying to find a way to help. “What’s the alternative?” she asked Amelia.
“To go back and undo the new code. And add something simple so Apple can justify the update submission.”
“I’m sorry, wasn’t your entire point in all this to get control of Doreye again?” Dawson couldn’t let the first point go. “And wouldn’t the fact that Doreye released bad code under Adam’s direction give investors a perfectly valid reason to fire him and reinstate you?”
Amelia shook her head. “That’s cheating. That’s not how I want to play.”
Dawson stood up from his chair. “You have got to be kidding me!” he shouted. “Are you seriously going to be self-righteous now? After everything you’ve found? Look at where being a good guy has gotten you, Amelia.” He gestured around the musty house. “Quit being so naïve.”
Amelia’s head didn’t move, but her lower eyelids tightened into a squint at Dawson. She studied him and her mind raced through her childhood and the past year and who he was and who she wanted to be.
“Patty.” She finally spoke, turning to her friend. “You speak French, right?”
Patty nodded. “Why?”
“The next person to approve is a man named Laurent Solanet, based in Paris.” Amelia wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to Patty. “Think you can distract him? I need at least a day to undo the bad code. If there’s a way to keep him from getting to it today, we should be okay.”
“I’m on it.” Patty took the paper and went into the next room.
Amelia turned back to her computer.
“This is unbelievable.” Dawson couldn’t let up. “Do I need to remind you that if this app goes out, it’s an act of terrorism? That’s worse shit than I ever did! You don’t pull this off, your precious little company is going to be destroyed, right after the man who’s spent the past year trying to screw you over runs away with all the profit?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, you don’t need to remind me,” she said simply.
“Listen, Amelia.” He’d stood from his chair and was at her side, towering over her, his jaw set. “I came all the way out here to help you. I broke my parole and did a lot of illegal things. Not to mention all the illegal things you’ve done. And now you’ve got an easy fix and you’re risking it for both of us to save the brother that betrayed you?”
“What do you want?” Amelia asked without emotion.
“My job here is done, Amelia. I didn’t come out here with you because I wanted whatever percent of your company you promised me. I came out here because after a few years in jail it sounded like real excitement. And, while we’re being honest”—Dawson’s voice kept rising—“because after my actions landed you in juvie, maybe I felt like I owed you something. Maybe I thought I could be a good person and help the girl that was supposed to be my daughter.”
“I know,” Amelia coolly replied. “I know that’s why you came.”
She could see his face flush at the admission and her validation of it.
“But now if this blows up and I don’t get back to Indiana to meet with my parole officer … I go back to jail.”
“You aren’t going back to jail,” she said. “And your parole officer isn’t checking up on you anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
Amelia turned to her computer and pulled up the U.S. Correctional Facility database. She typed in Dawson’s Social Security number and a screen appeared with a simple phrase:
No criminal offenses.
No misdemeanor offenses other than minor traffic violations.
“I cleared your record,” she answered. “I’m letting you start your life again. Although I left your parking tickets on file. It didn’t seem totally credible otherwise.”
Dawson stared at the screen and then at Amelia, his brows lifted in disbelief. “You did?”
“You deserve another chance,” she said. “I guess I think everyone does.”
Dawson swallowed and stuck out his hand to shake hers. “Thank you,” he said with meaning, his eyes glassy.
“You’re welcome,” Amelia answered. “You would have been a really good dad, you know,” she said, meaning it. “Now will you please let me get back to programming?”
Dawson laughed and nodded.
Amelia turned back to her computer and started typing furiously, her mind entering the trance of programming she loved most.
65
Full Circle
“Hey,” Arjun’s voice said through the phone.
“What’s up?” Adam asked, trying to sound casual and wondering whether he shouldn’t have picked up on the first ring and if that was the tone he was aiming for.
“Good news.” Arjun’s voice was cheerful. “Apple approved the update!”
Adam’s heart sank into his stomach and his forehead dropped to his desk with a thud. He stared at the carpet, noticing a loop of wool that had pulled up from the others. The contemplation of anything beyond that carpet suddenly felt beyond his grasp.
“Hello? Adam?” the voice said in the phone.
“Yeah,” Adam’s voice answered in a daze, “I’m here.”
“Dude, are you okay?”
“Hmph,” Adam grunted, immobile, his stomach churning with nausea. The app had been approved. Should he face the feds directly or try to run?
“Are you sure? Because there’s something else,” Adam heard Arjun say.
He pushed himself up and leaned forward on his elbows, supporting his heavy head in his hand, clicking the phone to speaker and throwing it on the desk. “What is it?” He braced himself, hot tears pushing under his eyeballs.
“Well, it’s the code.”
Adam winced.
“I was looking through the report from Apple, and all their comments were about the addition of code that lets you opt into a friend-finding tracker. It didn’t say anything about the new line that saves information for the database.”
Adam wasn’t listening to Arjun’s words, thinking instead about how much user data was currently being tracked and stored and probably already milled by crazy bad guys.
“At first I thought maybe they’d sent us the wrong report, but then I called this guy in France in charge of the approval, and he showed me what he was looking at, and”—he hesitated—“Adam, it’s not the same code we submitted.�
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He was thinking about jail and about his name on the front of magazines as the villain of Internet security, the one who had started the unraveling of the world’s trust in Silicon Valley. Would he end up in white-collar prison or go to Gitmo?
“Did you hear me?” Arjun asked. “Adam, what Apple approved isn’t what we submitted.”
“What?” Adam finally registered the statement and sat up in his chair, lifting the phone back up to his ear. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean, just that what I’m looking at has nothing to do with preserving user data. The database is completely gone. All the code we’ve been working on … the code you gave us to follow from Violet … It simply isn’t here.”
Adam felt the blood rush back to his face. “You mean Apple didn’t approve the code that tracked user data?”
“I mean they never even got it to approve. All they approved is this new opt-in GPS friend finder. The same thing you’ve got on your iPhone now, just a lot faster and easier to use. It’s actually really gorgeous code—I wish I could claim that I’d done it.”
Adam felt a lump drop through his throat and into his stomach. “Arjun, I gotta go.”
“But I want to figure out—”
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out. Just take the weekend off, okay? You deserve it.”
Adam hung up the iPhone and laid it flat in front of him. He tapped his contacts folder and slowly, deliberately, scrolled to Amelia’s number.
He took a deep breath and composed a text message, but he couldn’t bring himself to send it. He sat up and let his heart return to its regular rhythm. He needed to get some air.
* * *
Adam’s right knee ached. It felt like bone was rubbing against bone in the joint socket, but he didn’t care. He kept running, starting his second loop of campus drive.
He was relieved, of course, that the code had been fixed before Doreye became a party to whomever it was Violet arranged on the other end of the deal. There was a little voice in his head that, half-convincingly, pointed out that he didn’t necessarily know the buyer was VIPER. Even if Violet was a criminal—which was yet to be proven—it didn’t necessarily mean this deal was criminal.
But even Adam knew better than to be defensive at a time like this, and forced the voice out of his mind.
What he could not force out of his mind, and what he chose instead to try to figure out by running, was an undeniable frustration that it had been Amelia who had, again, bailed him out.
He didn’t know the details, but he knew enough: Amelia figured out Violet’s sketchy past and hacked into Apple to save the day. She’d disappeared and dropped out of the spring quarter only to return to save him, and hadn’t even bothered to call to let him know.
Not that he would have answered.
And that, really, was what made it all so bad, wasn’t it? That he’d bought so much into his own hype, gotten so caught up in his obsession to succeed without his sister, Amelia, that he couldn’t see the obvious mistakes in front of him, or hear the voices of reason trying to get through.
The sun was setting and the road was dark as he jogged past the driving range and turned onto Junipero Serra Boulevard. Cars passed, blinding him with their headlights. What if one of these cars hit me? his inner voice whispered. Would anyone notice? Would the world be any worse off?
He ran faster to get past the stretch with the cars and back onto campus. He came up to the SAE house but didn’t stop: There was more to think about.
“Mind if I join you?” a man in a gray sweatsuit appeared at his side.
Adam jumped in surprise and made a face he hoped the man didn’t see. “Sure,” he mumbled, not sure how to say no despite how much he wanted to be alone.
“Great night for a jog, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” Adam said curtly.
“California’s great for that. Don’t get much weather like this in Indiana.”
Adam’s feet skidded to a stop. He knew that voice. The man stopped, too, and faced him, pushing the hood of his sweatshirt back with a grin.
“Hope I didn’t scare you too bad. It was always a secret hope of mine we’d be able to run together. You know, father-and-son like.”
“What are you doing here?” Adam demanded, panting to catch his breath while his adrenaline pumped at the sight of Michael Dawson.
“I was helping Amelia with a few things,” Dawson explained. “But that’s not important now. Point is, I couldn’t leave California without saying hello to you, too.”
“I assure you, it wasn’t necessary.” Adam’s face searched Dawson’s in the dark: Was he serious? Had he really been working with Amelia?
“Still, it didn’t seem fair to help one twin without helping the other.” He pulled a brown manila envelope from behind his back, where he’d had it tucked into the band of his shorts. “Sorry it’s a bit sweaty: You run faster than I expected.”
Adam looked at the envelope but made no move to accept it.
“Oh, come on. Take the damn thing,” his former foster father urged, grabbing his hand and putting the envelope into it. “I owe it to you.”
“Amelia’d never use what’s in here. But men find more relief in revenge than kindness.”
Adam didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t.
“Good luck to you, son.” Dawson reached out his hand, but when Adam left it hanging, he gripped his shoulder affectionately before jogging off.
Adam looked at the envelope in his hand for a solid minute before turning and walking back to SAE. He put the envelope on his desk and went to dinner. He came back to his room and logged in to his Netflix account and watched three episodes of Arrested Development, intermittently glancing at the envelope as if to see if it had moved.
He opened his history textbook and looked at the syllabus and closed it again when he discovered how far behind he was.
He logged in to Facebook and opened his friend requests and deleted the spam requests from people whose names were in non-Roman-alphabet languages. Except the ones from hot women, which he accepted. Just because he couldn’t read their names didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate their beauty. Especially now that Violet was gone. Or had never really been there.
Finally, at 12:32 A.M., Adam picked up the envelope and brought it to his bed. What was he so afraid of? It was probably all stuff he knew already.
He opened the seal and pulled out a thin stack of papers. On top was a photo of Violet and Ted, in a restaurant. Adam’s chest burned. He put down the stack and went into his roommate’s room, where he found a bottle of vodka and poured himself a generous glass before returning to his bed.
He read through years of legal documents and receipts, covered with Post-it notes and highlighted by Michael Dawson to indicate what was important for Adam to know. The first documents, from two years earlier, were about Gibly. Adam couldn’t make sense of why Dawson gave him this information until he saw that a contract regarding Gibly’s user data was signed by Ted Bristol and countersigned by Violet Weatherford. Soon it all came into focus: It was Violet who had Ted create the secret Gibly database for VIPER. It was Violet who convinced Ted Bristol to do so by promising a highly priced acquisition of Gibly that would solidify Ted Bristol’s reputation in Silicon Valley lore.
And then, shortly after the Gibly deal fell apart, the Gibly documents stopped and Adam found e-mails between Ted, Violet, and Ted’s accountant, Stuart Chen.
Adam felt like throwing up—not from the vodka he was liberally drinking but from the reality of what his life had become. Ted hired Violet as a consultant to help him with “new acquisitions” and “business development” involving Doreye. This was last summer, before Hawaii, before RemoteX, and before Adam and Violet’s “relationship.” They’d been manipulating Adam all along. Adam going to PKC for funding, Adam firing Amelia, Adam falling for Violet, Adam selling the data—it was all part of Ted’s plan.
Why did Dawson give me this? Adam wondered as he continued thr
ough the folder. It felt like cruel flagellation, nothing else. And it didn’t accomplish anything except confirming for the thousandth time that Adam was more of a loser than he’d ever thought humanly possible.
He flipped through the remaining pages. E-mail after e-mail exchange about “Adam Dory” that made him more and more sick. He could take some cold comfort in the fact that Violet was in jail, but Ted? Ted was getting off, and it made Adam furious.
He shook his head in disgust and reached for the envelope to put the papers back. But when he did, a smaller envelope fell out of the larger one. He slowly opened it. There were three sheets of paper, showing Ted Bristol’s holdings in Gibly, an increase in those holdings with a different date, and a note outlining how Ted used all his assets to purchase shares from his venture partners before the announcement of a major event.
“This is called insider trading,” was scribbled across a Post-it note found on the last page, in Dawson’s handwriting.
Adam held the papers in his hand and looked out the window, where the setting moon was suspended above a palm tree, silhouetted by the dawn light.
The warm sensation of real, rightful purpose spread through his veins. He pulled his MacBook onto his lap and did a Google search for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He found a link titled “Report suspicious activity,” and clicked to open a blank e-mail. He scanned the evidence Dawson gave him into his computer. His hands were shaking as he typed out Ted Bristol’s illegal maneuvers and prepared to hit “Send.”
His cursor hovered over the button, but his brain focused on Lisa. If he did this—if he sent this report and she found out—it was over. Really, really, no-going-back-to-the-way-things-were over.
He moved his cursor to shut the browser, closed his laptop, and turned out the light, slamming his face into the pillow. So what if he didn’t have his sister’s courage? Maybe relationships were more important than always being right.
He turned on his iPhone and opened the message app to the text he had previously composed to Amelia.
He took a deep breath and hit “Send.”
“Thank you,” it said.