Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  Leib shrugged. ‘That’s what you say. Doesn’t mean that’s what they believe.’

  ‘Well, that’s only damaging if we eventually choose to IPO,’ said Andrei pointedly.

  ‘True. It also means that, right now, attention out there is being diverted from the business and all the great things you’re doing to this question. That’s not good for growth.’

  ‘Growth in Fishbowl is viral,’ said Andrei. ‘It’s always been viral. Doesn’t matter what a bunch of puffed-up analysts say.’

  Leib threw up his hands. ‘You know what, Andrei? I don’t care any more. I’m sick of arguing about it. I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t think the timing will be as good again for another five years. We’ve been talking about it so long I think now you’ve only got six months, twelve months tops, to get it done. After that, you never know what the appetite of the market will be. You might only get eighty per cent of what you’ll get today.’

  If it hadn’t been for Leib’s comment about an IPO giving his vision a platform, Andrei would have told him that he didn’t care. Andrei didn’t know if it was just another argument Leib was using to help unlock the fortune he had locked up in Fishbowl, but even if it was, he couldn’t help feeling that Leib was probably right. If you really wanted to change the world, if you really wanted to be a player, at some point you had to step out of the shadows and present yourself publicly to the scrutiny of your critics and your peers. That would buy you a level of respect and credibility that you would just never have as the leader of a private company.

  But wasn’t Fishbowl changing the world anyway – not through what he said, but through what it did? And wasn’t that more important than anything he could say? The financial side of the IPO didn’t interest him at all. Did he really want to take on the responsibilities and scrutiny that came from leading a public company? It was the status, the platform, that resonated with him. But did he really need it to help make his vision of the world a reality?

  As with so many of the big choices he had had to make recently, Andrei procrastinated. Decisions seemed to have been easier in the past, when the stakes had been so much lower. On this one, one set of arguments balanced the other, and he couldn’t decide.

  39

  DIANE MCKENRICK HAD given up her presidential ambitions – or so she told herself. Despite the debacle over the Denver bombings, she had retained her Senate seat when the time had come to fight for it again five years later. But her best shot at the presidency, the natural point in the arc of her career, had been back then or during the electoral cycle that followed. However, with a Republican incumbent running for re-election at the following cycle and no appetite within the party for a challenge, she had sat that one out. The upcoming nomination would be wide open, but now she was too old – or so she told herself. The light burns hard in some people, and they don’t understand it’s all over until they’re on their last flight home from Washington and have to face the fact that they don’t have a return ticket. Sometimes a voice in her whispered that if she did win the presidency at the next election, she would still be only seventy-two when running for a second term. Ronald Reagan had been seventy-three.

  Fishbowl. The name haunted her, the more so for its puerility, as if some little child from which she should easily have been able to defend herself kept poking her in the eye with a stick. She still didn’t understand exactly how Andrei Koss and his minions had managed to trump her argument after Denver, when the dangers of unregulated social networking had been so clearly manifest. Who had had right on their side – she or the Denver murderers? Somehow the liberal-internet complex, as she called it, had managed to divert attention from that question to a bunch of civil liberty side issues that in her opinion didn’t amount to squat in comparison with what the Denver bombers had done.

  And now this. It was as if he was thumbing his nose at her, at the government, and the whole country. Look at me! I’m Andrei Koss and I can do what I like and watch me make a hundred billion dollars into the bargain!

  As Chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, McKenrick had seen the FBI report that went to the attorney general. She listened to the debate that was rustling through the undergrowth of the security establishment: Containment vs Control. The Containers said that as long as nothing could be legally done about Fishbowl, as long as its program and its application violated no statutes, the best that could be done was to keep Koss in line with a combination of dialogue and threat, making it clear to him that the Department of Justice would come down on him like a ton of bricks if he made the wrong move. The Controllers said that waiting until he made the wrong move was waiting until it was too late, and something needed to be done now to make it impossible for him to make that move in the first place.

  McKenrick tried hard to distinguish the resentment that still festered within her towards Fishbowl from her genuine security concerns about its latest program. Resentment, she knew, wasn’t a sound basis for political action. Was this new program as dangerous as it seemed? If she understood it correctly, it gave enormous powers of influence to whoever controlled it. If it could sell products to people by making them think it was the guy next door, it could sell political ideologies as well. It could sell propaganda, misinformation, indoctrination. It could sell Denver-style terrorism, jihadist terrorism and any of the other terrorisms that haunted McKenrick’s nightmares.

  Or could it? The senator wasn’t sure she did understand it properly, so she told her chief of staff to find someone who could explain to her what this thing was about. The chief of staff arranged for a briefing from James Monk, who confirmed her fears. He was squarely on the Control side of the debate, although he didn’t know what action could be taken. But he was sure that something more was needed than to keep an eye on Andrei Koss and hope he acted like a good guy – which was, he thought, in light of the threat, not quite enough.

  Diane McKenrick thought it wasn’t enough either. Well, the Chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs did have certain powers at her disposal. For a start, she could hold investigative hearings. She could get Andrei Koss and others like him and drag them into the light, put them on oath and force them to expose what they were doing to the whole world. And then … McKenrick didn’t know exactly how things would play out then, which was the problem. She didn’t expect to uncover illegality, only irresponsibility. But somehow she felt that if people could see that irresponsibility – irresponsibility that verged on immorality – and if she could tie it to the obscene wealth that people like Koss seemed to be able to accumulate, it might generate a wave of revulsion that would rise and swell and drive away the smugness with which she imagined Andrei Koss went about his business in the world. He had marched against her for freedom, which apparently she had been attacking; well, now others could turn on him. No freedom without responsibility. That’s what she would say.

  Opinion amongst the other senators on the committee was divided. They straddled both sides of the Contain vs Control debate, but even those who were on McKenrick’s side were wary of associating themselves too closely with her on this. Her last foray against her so-called liberal-internet complex had hardly been an unadulterated success, and they questioned the wisdom of helping her have a second tilt. They questioned her motives. Was it a quest for payback? Was it going to be more successful than last time? McKenrick had to work on them, all the time asking herself the same questions.

  The president, with whom she discussed the matter, said that his hands were tied. There was very little he could do unless Andrei Koss took a step that was either criminal or at the very least constituted a material threat to national security. He didn’t oppose her plan to hold hearings into the matter, although he doubted they would accomplish a great deal.

  That was the concern that kept niggling at her, preventing her from making up her mind. She was sure that to force Koss, under oath, to divulge what he had done would be a good thing. She was
sure he would squirm and wriggle, and from her personal perspective that would give her a great deal of satisfaction. But if what he was doing was legal – and everyone said it was – she wasn’t sure just how high, if at all, the wave of revulsion would rise. And if there was no wave of revulsion, the hearings would achieve very little.

  She considered it at length with her most senior staffers. Best case, they thought, Koss would say something careless that showed up the danger of the power he had accumulated or which cast doubt on his fitness to hold it. He might say something that would enable her to draw connections to the Democratic Party or foreign governments or other shady entities. Any of this might be enough to turn the spotlight on the security threat that Fishbowl now posed and force Congress to take notice or possibly, in the very best case, set off the wave of public and legislative revulsion that would force Koss to withdraw the program altogether. And worst case? Worst case, Koss would hold up under questioning and the hearings would be a damp squib.

  She didn’t think that was such a bad downside compared to the upside, as long as they didn’t build the hearings up too much, or set them up so anything short of an admission by Koss that he was an agent of the Chinese government would be seen as a failure. She wouldn’t make the same mistake she had made last time. This time, she would start off low key, at least until Koss said something, and take it from there.

  One of her staffers pointed out that Fishbowl was thought to be readying itself for an IPO and, in that context, being involved in a Senate hearing, even if it revealed nothing, could be damaging. The mere sight of Koss being sworn in before a Senate committee would make him look as if he had something to hide and might knock quite a few billion off the hundred billion the company was reputed to be worth. Other things aside, McKenrick liked the sound of that. While she had been careful to ensure that the motive for the hearings, if she chose to hold them, wasn’t revenge, she couldn’t deny that putting a spanner in Andrei Koss’s works, even if she achieved nothing else, would give her a modicum of satisfaction.

  She got support from Monk when she called him to ask if he thought that committee hearings might be useful. Bring it out in the open, he told her. Get the Bureau a mandate to do something.

  But she would be the one taking the risk, wouldn’t she? Not the FBI. How foolish would she look if the hearings yielded nothing? Even if she didn’t build them up? The picture and the words on the front page of the New York Times the morning after the Denver marches still haunted her. Her Ceausescu moment. She was determined never to have another one of those.

  But didn’t she have a responsibility to do it? Set aside the personal aspect and the prospect of hitting Fishbowl just before its IPO. When McKenrick was honest with herself, she knew that very little that she had done in her eleven years on the Senate committee could really be said to have made a difference. Most of the committee’s time was spent scrutinizing what other people were doing, and if the committee found mistakes, it was almost always after the damage was done and the intelligence chiefs had already acted. Here was a chance to do something active, to lead. The security chiefs were asking her do to it. She wanted to do it. For the sake of her country, didn’t she have to do it?

  But she might fail. Andrei Koss might manage to humiliate her again. Time and again she thought, why take the risk? Then a voice inside her would say: ‘But you might succeed.’ And then what? She couldn’t help wondering. Was she really too old?

  After all, Ronald Reagan had been seventy-three when he ran for his second term, and she would be only seventy-two …

  40

  THE REPORT THAT broke the impasse inside Fishbowl made its first appearance on the Wall Street Journal website. It claimed that Wall Street sources had confirmed that Andrei Koss had finally decided on Fishbowl’s IPO and had appointed J.P. Morgan to lead the offering. It also gave the date of the IPO as July 12, a little over four months away.

  Within an hour of the report going up, it was all over the media. The Fishbowl press office was besieged with calls seeking confirmation.

  Chris rang from LA. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Andrei.

  ‘What are you going to say?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘We’re going to have to say something.’

  ‘I know,’ said Andrei. ‘For a start, I’m going to get Alan to call the Journal and complain.’

  ‘If Alan calls, they’re going to tell him it’s true. If he says it’s not, we’re issuing a denial. Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Andrei, think about it,’ said Chris. ‘If you deny it, forget the IPO, at least for the next year. You can’t deny today and then turn around in a month and say we’re going ahead. The market will see you as either indecisive or an outright liar. You don’t want them seeing you as either when you’re about to go to IPO.’

  ‘We’ll say it was speculation.’

  ‘No, it’s too specific. It’s got the name of the bank, it’s got the date of the launch. It’s going to look like this was all set and now you’ve changed your mind. People are going to think something’s wrong with the business. That something’s happened and now you’re reneging.’

  ‘I’m calling Bob.’

  ‘Call Bob. He’ll say the same thing.’

  Leib did.

  The report put Andrei in a bind. He would have to come out and say what he actually intended to do.

  Andrei told Alan Mendes, Fishbowl’s head of communications, to hold off the press as best he could. That night, Sandy Gross told him to go for it, as she had been telling him for the past few months. She was actually glad it had happened. He had been bounced into it, but now he would be forced to make a decision. He should do it now or announce that Fishbowl was never going to do to an IPO and put the idea away for ever.

  Once again, the seemingly unending IPO saga got Sandy thinking about her own situation with Andrei.

  Andrei sat up virtually the whole night pondering the decision he had to make. Sandy’s remark that he should be glad that someone had done it stuck with him. Someone had done it, and they must have known the effect their action was going to have. But, right then, the question of who that was was a distraction. He had to decide, one way or another.

  There were no new arguments to consider. It was the same old set of pros and cons jostling in his mind.

  Chris caught the six o’clock flight from LA the next morning and was in the office before Andrei. He started giving Andrei the usual arguments for doing the IPO. Andrei didn’t want to hear them again. ‘Let me know when Bob’s here,’ he said, and walked off to kill some time with the guys in Los Alamos.

  Leib arrived and they got together in Andrei’s office.

  ‘Well?’ said Leib.

  Andrei was silent for a moment. He looked at each of the two men. ‘All right, let’s do it.’

  Chris whooped, fist punching the air.

  Andrei didn’t crack a smile.

  ‘It’s a yes?’ said Bob.

  ‘It’s a yes.’

  Leib shook Andrei’s hand. ‘That’s a good call, Andrei.’

  Andrei shrugged. Then he glanced at Chris. ‘I’m not doing it with J.P. Morgan.’

  ‘Andrei,’ said Chris, ‘Billy’s done a whole bunch of work on this and—’

  ‘I don’t like them.’

  ‘He says that if we talk about licensing the palotl program to other websites for advertising, we’ll add a fifty per cent premium to the value we achieve.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about licensing it. I’ve told you before. Is that what you’ve been telling them? That we’re going to license it?’

  ‘Andrei, they’re good to go.’

  ‘Is that what you told them? Is it?’

  ‘It’s an IPO, Andrei! They’re doing what any banker does. They’re looking for the angles.’

  ‘I said I don’t like them.’

  ‘You hardly know them.’

  Andrei didn’t
respond to that. For some reason, he didn’t want to give Chris the satisfaction of using J.P. Morgan.

  ‘Andrei, listen—’

  ‘OK, Andrei,’ said Leib. ‘It doesn’t need to be J.P. Morgan. Who do you want to go with?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Let’s get them back in.’

  ‘Then at least let J.P. Morgan pitch again,’ said Chris.

  ‘I’m done with them. OK, Chris?’

  ‘How am I going to tell Billy?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less. As I said, I’m done with them. I don’t even want them in the syndicate. Now let’s get Alan in here so we can draft a statement and get it out.’ Andrei glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got a meeting in Los Alamos. Get someone to come get me when there’s a statement to look at.’

  He headed out. Chris followed him.

  ‘Andrei,’ he said as they walked, ‘what’s this thing about not liking J.P. Morgan?’

  ‘What do you care?’ demanded Andrei.

  ‘Billy Larkin’s a good guy. He’ll do a good job.’

  ‘They’re all the same, Chris.’ Andrei stopped. He faced Chris directly. ‘Let me ask you something. Did you leak that report in the Journal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did your friend Billy leak it?’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Andrei watched him. He was sure that Chris was lying to him. He was sure that Chris or Billy or someone connected to him had leaked the item to force the issue.

  ‘I swear to you,’ said Chris, ‘if someone leaked this, I know nothing about it. And if it was Billy or one of his guys, then absolutely you couldn’t trust them with handling the IPO. But let’s at least let them—’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Andrei. He looked around. They were standing near a gaggle of desks, thrown together without any obvious pattern of arrangement – as was the Fishbowl way – and the programmers who occupied the desks were watching them. He turned back to Chris. ‘Billy’s out. J.P. Morgan’s out. OK? I’m not talking to them. Get on the phone and tell him.’