Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  After another round of protests—Darlene would be back soon, Alice might lie down again—Mrs. Patel stepped away to retrieve Alice’s coat. At the door, she paused. “I shouldn’t have called those other people.”

  Her tone was so forlorn that Alice was left to wonder: Might the woman have other motives, separate from Darlene’s interests, for wishing she would stay? She recalled her first glimpse of Mrs. Patel, before they’d spoken, when Alice had parked her car across the street and watched her carting out trash, standing on the snowy lawn alone.

  Perhaps Mrs. Patel had never believed the lies she’d told her, Alice thought. Perhaps, Mrs. Patel had always known her for precisely who she was: a woman who’d lost her way, a woman like herself.

  20

  The trees along the National Mall were red and gold. This D.C. trip had offered him, thought Charlie—whatever did or didn’t happen next—his first glimpse of a true autumn since his move to Palo Alto. He rolled down his taxi window to breathe in the bracing air. The cold felt familiar to him; it helped to still his nerves and clear his head.

  He hadn’t slept but a few minutes on the plane. His midnight flight had been delayed, and by the time he’d reached his hotel, close to morning, he was too excited to lie down. Anyway, sleep was something he’d learned to do without in the last weeks, while he was preparing for this meeting, his second one with In-Q-Tel’s vice president, Mike McCraw.

  Ten months before, back in 2002, McCraw had offered Charlie a lesson in how things worked in this town. He’d been around Washington awhile, it seemed, a man already well into his fifties, with a square face and the slicked-back, salt-and-pepper hair favored by politicians. His manner was cool and blunt: In-Q-Tel couldn’t invest a cent in Charlie’s project unless one of the intelligence agencies took an interest first—which wouldn’t happen without his providing the relevant introductions, which he wasn’t yet inclined to do. McCraw admitted he found Udi’s model intriguing, but he had also pointed out gaps in their proposal and concerns he knew would be raised in future meetings, meetings he meant to delay until Charlie could put on a better show.

  “To fix this will take money,” Charlie told him, but McCraw hadn’t been offering.

  “Go track down a rich uncle.”

  That exchange had taken place while Charlie was still living in New York. Not long after, he let go the lease on his beloved Riverside Drive apartment and boarded a plane bound for Palo Alto, planning his pitch and jotting notes in his in-flight magazine.

  The greatest intelligence failure of our time: entirely preventable. It was by now public knowledge that before 9/11, the government had been in possession of all the information needed to identify the hijackers. Agents had known Atta and his men all hailed from nations harboring terrorists and had arrived on temporary visas, trained here to fly airliners, and purchased one-way tickets, each for the same day. Had the defense department been able to rely on a system like the one Udi and his partners had devised, government staff could have cross-checked such data in seconds, foreseen the attacks, and taken steps to prevent them. “With your help,” Charlie planned to tell investors, a tragedy like this would never be permitted to occur again. Here was a chance to contribute to the most vital national interest, and, in the process, he would make clear, turn a considerable profit. It was also by now public knowledge that the Bush administration would be investing in technologies like this one, and contracts worth hundreds of millions would be up for grabs in the near future.

  Over the next months, Charlie delivered a similar speech forty times, to execs from every VC firm on Sand Hill Road—none of whom reacted the way Charlie had hoped. Though they shook their heads in sympathy for the 9/11 victims, that sympathy didn’t extend to the government. Bin Laden’s strike on innocents might have been evil, but it was Bush and his assaults on civil liberties that got them really heated.

  Have you read the Patriot Act? In the hands of this administration, big data means Big Brother.

  Charlie listened and assured these men and women he took such concerns to heart. That summer, he called a meeting with Udi and the two other software designers on the project. The four men sat down together: skinny Udi, all limbs and Adam’s apple; Doug Fincher, the eldest of their group, thirty and already bald; and Philip, the prodigy, an African American kid with bulbous hazel eyes. Surely with all the talent assembled in this room, Charlie announced, there must be some way to equip their software with solid privacy protections: the searches on their system should be targeted—no arbitrary fishing expeditions—and there should be audit trails to hold agents accountable and lockouts to control leaks of information.

  In September 2003, Charlie returned to Sand Hill Road to offer investors a new pledge: their system would defend the nation from both terrorists and from an overzealous government willing to trespass laws to stop them.

  Still, the millionaires of Menlo Park were unconvinced: for all their revolutionary optimism about technology, they proved to be cold skeptics about people. Privacy protections sounded nice enough, until the guys at the NSA found a way to circumvent them. Whatever Charlie’s intentions, the government would take the tools he gave them and continue to do what they’d been doing—trampling the Constitution in the name of some bogus war.

  Bogus war? Maybe, as far as justifications went, but it was also a very real war, Charlie thought. Missiles had struck Baghdad in March and since then, real men and women were risking their real necks; his technology could save their lives.

  While these young financiers sat there in their air-conditioned offices, playing video games and sipping bubble tea, kids like them were standing in blazing dusty heat trying not to get blown up. This was what Charlie felt like saying, each time he was thanked for coming in and told that the partners at “Who and What” weren’t quite ready to invest. Instead he shook their hands and smiled. No good would come from arguing; national security was an abstraction to these people, none of whom, he imagined, had a brother like his who’d ever donned a uniform—and might again.

  —

  It was while Charlie was settling down in Palo Alto that he’d gotten word from his mother that Luke was petitioning to reenlist. Two months earlier, Luke had filed an appeal with the air force board of corrections and he’d performed favorably at subsequent hearings. Despite the unpleasant events that marked the end of his service at Eielson, Charlie’s brother was determined to find a way to serve his country again.

  “I’ve got family in the service too,” Mike McCraw informed him, when Charlie phoned again, that October. “A nephew—you remind me of him, really: stubborn kid.”

  McCraw sounded considerably warmer than the last time they’d spoken. Recent history had done a great deal to improve his attitude toward Charlie and his partners: terror alerts hovered between high and elevated; the NSA had just put together a consortium on data analytics; Boeing and Booz Allen were competing over contracts worth almost three hundred million. All this inspired Charlie to be bolder with McCraw this time: “Enough stalling; you need to make those agency introductions for me now.”

  He’d get back to him, McCraw promised: a scant two hours later, he called again to schedule a next meeting for the end of November; there would be other people joining them, he said, though he hadn’t mentioned who, or from what government branch these people hailed. He’d only left Charlie with one piece of advice: “Come prepared.”

  —

  The meeting lasted just half an hour. It took place in McCraw’s Arlington office, a brief cab ride from Charlie’s hotel, past the National Mall and across the Potomac. The room was spare: a couch and a desk with a statue of an eagle perched at its edge; a screen had been set up for Charlie’s presentation. Two men were waiting with McCraw: one young with shiny skin and round glasses; the other older, with a high belly and bristly neck. They wore not black suits, as Charlie had imagined, but gray flannel ones, and introduced themselves as NSA agents, Price and Marshall, which had to be a joke. In the company of this pai
r, even the name Mike McCraw rang false.

  For the first twenty minutes, Charlie ran the prototype that Udi, Doug, and Phil had been toiling away at these last months: a simulated counterterrorism exercise, and a sharp demonstration of what their software could accomplish. After that, McCraw took over, speaking with his hands in his pockets, easy, chummy. A deal maker more than anything, someone who knew his role and its parameters: to negotiate between the men like Charlie, who created software he couldn’t understand, and the intelligence guys who let him understand only as much as they cared to, and not one jot more.

  Price and Marshall, said McCraw, would be working directly with Charlie from now on: “The agency will want to use its own people to set up and run the system, which means you’ll need to train them. We’ll also need to mix some of our employees in with yours. To observe.”

  “I hope you won’t have objections,” said Price or Marshall, whoever was the older of the two. Charlie’s gaze drifted for a moment to a row of photographs hung on the wall: McCraw shaking hands with various officials—George Tenet, Dick Cheney.

  “It’s for the national good, right?” he heard himself say. “Aren’t we all on the same side?”

  Handshakes were exchanged; McCraw would have their lawyers draw up papers. On the way out, McCraw spoke of the future, of the company whose existence Charlie hadn’t dared believe in until then.

  “You’ll need a name—you got something in mind?”

  He did: some weeks ago he’d mentioned his idea to Udi, an apt name for their system; three data streams analyzed at once, three races run by one machine.

  “Triathlon.”

  —

  As soon as Charlie returned to his hotel, he dialed Udi back in California. He knew that Udi had been catching flak lately for choosing him to represent them to investors, that others, including Doug Fincher, had been proposing they replace him. But however short his attention span, Udi proved enduringly loyal—he’d even passed on the news that Terrance Welch had been in touch with Doug two weeks before, suggesting that Charlie wasn’t in a position to raise the capital that they required. “With Charlie out, we might have a conversation,” Welch had offered. Charlie wasn’t sure himself if Welch was sincerely interested in their project or was just intent on doing damage to him personally, but his opinion didn’t matter; Udi’s and Doug’s did.

  “I know what Welch is and what you are,” Udi had assured him, as Charlie had assured him he would get them the results that they deserved:

  “You won’t regret your faith in me.”

  It was with great relief, then, that Charlie relayed his news: “We got it. Five million up front. Office, salaries, a staff of the best programmers: tell Doug and the other guys; it’s all possible now.”

  Charlie’s next call was to Welch, a few simple words left on his voice mail: “Nice try, you old fuck.”

  As soon as he’d hung up he dialed Roger, whom he meant to make an official partner in their company once he could offer him a salary comparable to what his firm was paying.

  “You’re in,” he told him. “It’s a done deal. They’re working up the term sheet.”

  “You’ll want my input—”

  “Ultimately, sure. But could you stop talking like a lawyer? This is huge. A life changer. You’re not excited?”

  “I am. For you.”

  “For us.”

  Roger made no reply. This was not the first time Charlie had endured such silences; they’d been Roger’s standard response to his recent complaints about the tone on Sand Hill Road. Roger, he’d discovered, shared in the misgivings about the current administration, especially on matters of defense.

  “Look, I realize this isn’t your ideal outcome. But In-Q-Tel’s involvement won’t affect your side of things.” To insulate Roger from any dealings with the DOD, Charlie had proposed he be in charge of their private-sector clients. Their software had applications in a variety of industries; they could offer antifraud protection to insurance companies and banks, or develop research tools for pharmaceutical companies or investment firms.

  “This money is only so we can get off the ground. Once we are, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish.”

  We he kept insisting, though the one time Roger used that pronoun, it was in reference to Jasmine and himself.

  “We just need a little more time to mull it over, the implications. I’m partner-track; Jasmine has her residency at Northwestern Memorial.”

  Of course what Charlie was proposing was a big adjustment for Roger, and for Jasmine, especially: moving out west from Chicago, away from friends, colleagues, and Jasmine’s family. Probably, thought Charlie, if Jasmine had believed he might actually raise the millions he was seeking, she would never have let Roger agree to join him if he did.

  He got off the phone with Roger, finally, reminding himself that his friend could be relied on for many things, but unbridled enthusiasm was not one of them. For that, Charlie would have better luck calling his mother, but if he did, he ran the risk that she would pass the news on to his father, who would inevitably say something bitter or belittling to spoil his mood.

  His thoughts turned to Melissa. They’d been dating for two months; he’d met her at the offices of one of the investors that he’d courted. Smart, capable, attractive—she was precisely the kind of woman he should be nuts over, and yet their affair had been plodding along. He worked hard and she worked hard, and neither took offense if nearly every dinner, movie, or fuck they found time for was prefaced by the words: I’ve got a meeting close by earlier, I’ll be in the neighborhood.

  Maybe tonight was the opportunity he needed: a moment for a grand gesture.

  “I want you here with me,” he told her over the phone. “I’ll get us a room at the best hotel; take the next flight and I’ll pay. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “Charlie,” she reminded him, “it’s ten o’clock on a Tuesday.”

  “Planes fly on Tuesdays.”

  “I have work tomorrow.”

  “Call in sick.”

  “I can’t, I have stuff to do. In fact, I’m in the middle of something right now.”

  She wasn’t enticed; instead, he sensed irritation in her voice. Two months and he’d offered her nothing but takeout and cable and now she was expected to drop everything just because he wanted a witness to his accomplishment.

  “Fine, we’ll celebrate when I get back. At your convenience.”

  “We’ll do that. And Charlie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Congratulations.”

  —

  At eight o’clock Charlie went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a steak that came out dry, a side of fries and spinach, and a chocolate soufflé, which he finished, although the cocoa was chalky and he’d lost his appetite. Toward the conclusion of the meal, the waiter came over to inquire whether he was Mr. Flournoy from room 9F. “I have some champagne ordered for you: a gift from Roger Waldman.”

  Champagne: just like Roger had given him their sophomore year, when Charlie lost his bid for Undergraduate Council—the same perfect, crystal fall day that Georgia Calvin came jogging up a Fresh Pond path to sit beside him on a blanket in the grass.

  Ancient history for him, but reliable Roger was still the same man, stuck: still with the same plain girl and safe ambitions, the same unwillingness to skip out on routine, take a risk, have some fun—still offering the same hokey token of celebration—just a better vintage now.

  The waiter left to bring the bottle and a bucket of ice: before he’d popped the cork, Charlie stopped him. Livelier, he decided, to drink among the crowd up at the bar. The place was bustling—a popular after-work hangout, from the looks of it, frequented by men similar to those he’d met earlier: slicked hair and suited, the most relaxed of them in blazers and pressed pants. The women matched them, in their fitted skirts and heels; Washington was an ordered, cliquish place, those of a common stripe predictably where they ought to be. Even seeking sex seemed a regi
mented business. People in this town respected hierarchy and were drawn to power, in rather obvious manifestations.

  Charlie came to stand beside a brunette in a low-cut blouse and red lipstick; her long hair was blow-dried smooth. While he was thinking what to say, she was the one to address him first, observing that the bottle being opened for him was a good one.

  He offered her a glass, as he imagined was the thing to do in such a case. Drinking with strange women in bars—this, Charlie felt, was behavior for a different man, the sort he’d served as a busboy at the Palm, men who flew in helicopters over traffic to make their dinner reservations, who felt entitled to skip the ordinary hassles and indulge in rarefied amusements. But next to this woman—Bethany was her name—and after the morning’s improbable success, he could almost pretend he’d become one of them, while she was all the many women they attracted. He noted the same set of expressions he’d observed as a kid: shifting between greedy and coy.

  “And what do you do, Charlie?”

  “I’m in technology, or security, whatever you prefer to call it.”

  “Either sounds good.”

  After their first drink, she was the one to maneuver their exit, starting with complaints about the noise and then a draught coming from the door. When they left for the lobby, she was holding the champagne bottle by the neck; his hand grazed her waist as they started together for the elevator.

  On the ride up to his room, he began to feel his nausea; the meal had been too heavy, and his beers at dinner didn’t sit well with the champagne. In the sharper light of his hotel room, the woman’s skin looked overpowdered; her bra was push-up, a pendant nestled in the cleavage. Crude seductions; he ought to be beyond them, would do better asking her to leave and calling Melissa to apologize instead. Maybe he and Melissa could become a proper couple, if he were to make an effort, take his romantic cues from Roger, whose relationship with Jasmine had lasted all these years. Already Roger and Jasmine were engaged; already they were talking about starting a family. He ought not ask his old friend to upset his life for his sake; he supposed he knew that Roger wouldn’t do it, anyhow.