One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “Be careful what you offer,” she said. “But I guess you’d better let him in.”

  When the knock came, she opened the door. He was looking at the carpet.

  “The living room,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He laid his ratty overcoat over the back of the couch.

  “I need to tell you something that I shouldn’t,” he said.

  “If you shouldn’t do something, then don’t.”

  “How proficient is Margery with computers?”

  “That’s not telling me a damn thing,” she said, which set him to examining his knees.

  “I’m not doing very well,” he said.

  “Either tell me or don’t.”

  “There’s been a series of hostile incursions into the credit database,” he said.

  “God in heaven,” she said.

  “They think it was her.”

  “Ridiculous,” she said. “She makes me look like you.”

  “They’ve cut me out,” he said. “I think it’s because they believe I’m too close to you.”

  “What would make anybody think that?” she said.

  He began racing, talking about algorithms, wormholes, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

  “Slow down,” she said. “Begin at the beginning. How long have you known?”

  “The first incident was before Christmas,” he said. “But it was small.”

  “We need to notify our customers,” she said.

  “That’s what they are trying to avoid. We haven’t even told the Audit Committee.”

  “What were you thinking?” she said.

  Gunderman did not know what he had been thinking. Or rather, the problem wasn’t what he had been thinking. He had seen it the way she did all along. The trouble was that he had not acted, not forced the issue. He never did.

  “So far as we know,” he told her, “nobody outside the company has been affected.”

  “So far as you know,” she said.

  “I am 95 percent sure the hacker is inside D&D,” he said. Where had he pulled that number from?

  “I’m 95 percent sure this is a goddamned mess.”

  “They don’t want to tank the Gnomon deal,” he said.

  “And what will happen when it gets out that for months we’ve known that we have a cyberterrorist and have covered it up?”

  “That may be a little exaggerated,” he said, though once you started splitting mops in two, the increase could become explosive, like nuclear fission.

  “Exaggerated by how many percent?”

  “If we catch the guy, everything will be fine.”

  “And so you’re ganging up on somebody who doesn’t even know how to download a PDF file,” she said.

  “I have a different person in mind,” he said.

  “I need to start making calls to customers.”

  “Give me just a little time,” he said. “Please.”

  The next day Rosten was in his office having a sandwich and skimming a skeptical a newspaper article about Vladimir Putin’s increasingly autocratic ways. He was one of the few people from Fisherman’s Soviet dossiers that was still heard of. Rosten had written one of his narratives about him. The last thing he would ever have predicted then was that a man Fisherman considered a narcissist with nothing worth looking at would end up leading all of Russia.

  Suddenly Simons burst in, saying she knew all about the hacking and what she called a cover-up. She said it was all over the Dome, but Rosten knew that was a lie. Gunderman must have told her.

  She went on and on. Her responsibility to her customers. Her reputation for candor. Her integrity. Hers. That told you all you needed to know about motivation. He told her that her loyalty to her subordinate was admirable, but there was a greater loyalty she needed to remember. It was then that she threatened that if the company did not do the right thing, she would tell the world. He warned her of the consequences, first for D&D, but most pointedly for her. She walked out.

  Rosten told Joyce, and he ignited. She had been the one who had leaked to the newspaper, he said. She and that idiot Gunderman. You saved that man. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what a pair of demons. Rosten tried to remind him that neither was involved enough in the deal to have known the details that had appeared in the paper. “Get them out! Both of them!” Joyce shouted.

  Rosten responded in a voice barely more than a whisper. “If we move on her right now, she will be more likely to make good her threat,” he said. “Let’s button down the facts first.”

  “Get it fucking done!” said Joyce.

  “Greener found the smoking gun,” Chase announced at the team meeting late that afternoon.

  “Outstanding,” said Snow.

  “Thank God,” said Harms.

  Rosten wanted details. Greener walked him through the way Strand had done it. The code she had put into the system had allowed her to trigger the second attack the moment the story appeared.

  “So she was the leaker, too,” said Snow.

  “I’m afraid I can’t prove that yet,” said Greener.

  “Has to be,” said Snow.

  As everyone went way past the data, Rosten intervened to note that it was only necessary to prove that she was responsible for the hacking.

  “Kiss,” said Harms.

  “Pardon me?” said Snow.

  “Keep it simple, stupid,” said Harms.

  “I’ll shoot Strand as soon as we’re done here,” said Snow.

  “Let’s be sure we’ve pulled everything together first,” said Rosten. “Let me know when it’s tight.”

  “We need to document the chain of custody,” said Sebold.

  “Strand’s machine has never been out of Greener’s control since he took it from her office,” said Chase. He lifted his chin toward Greener, who took the cue and, with both hands, raised the laptop above his head as if it were the Stanley Cup.

  “Never let it out of my sight,” said Greener. “Even when I went to the men’s room.”

  “To paper the record?” said Sebold.

  Lawton assumed the thing was all wrapped up when Rosten called him into the office, closing the door behind him.

  “I want Greener’s work checked,” he said. “Do it yourself. I don’t want Gunderman anywhere near it.”

  “Chase will go ballistic,” said Lawton, “not to mention Joyce.”

  “I had Greener make a copy of Strand’s hard drive for safekeeping,” said Rosten. “Sebold has it. I’ve told him to give it to you. Chase won’t know.”

  “Until he does,” said Lawton. “What is it I’m looking for?”

  “Anything that could come back and bite us.”

  “Gunderman is the one I’d trust.”

  “He’s a talker,” said Rosten.

  “Is he in trouble?” said Lawton.

  “One thing at a time,” said Rosten.

  “I never do this sort of thing. I shouldn’t have told her, and I knew it.”

  “But there was a reason you did.”

  “And now she’s threatening to tell the world.”

  “Some people say that our intuition gives us our purest moral knowledge.”

  “I am not into Zen. I’m all logic.”

  “Fortunately, you aren’t.”

  “I believed that she was right.”

  “Good.”

  “But that’s all tied up with how I feel when I’m with her. You can see what a mess it is.”

  “I think we are doing very well here.”

  When Donna saw that the call was from him, she put on a face to protect the children. She need not have. His voice was song. They couldn’t hear him, but when they saw her smile, they brightened. Everything had modulated, minor to major.

  He said he had gotten some good news. He did not say what.

  “Let’s celebrate,” she said.

  “Why don’t we just relax at home?” he said. “Give Mrs. Yu the night. We’ll order pizza.”

  “Pizza,” she laughed.

/>   The boys clapped.

  “We’ll watch some TV,” he said.

  “Celebration,” she said. “That’s what I meant.”

  8

  Double-parked beer trucks as big as semis made a lacquered wall along Clark Street. The Cubs were in Arizona, so the diner had plenty of tables. Two police officers in Kevlar vests sat in one booth. A big guy covered with tattoos and a sixty-something gentleman in a burgundy sweater and white shirt were in another. Someone in a shabby jacket hunched over a plate of eggs at the counter. This was not a D&D kind of place, which was probably why Lawton had chosen it.

  Poole had ordered Gunderman to take some time off. Poole said it was his idea, but Gunderman knew Rosten was behind it. They wanted him out of the way while they took down Margery Strand. He had no idea why Lawton had called him for lunch, let alone at such an odd place, but it was a relief to get out of the empty house. Anything was better than sitting there with nothing to do but think.

  The sun flashed off the tin cladding behind a grill that reminded him of Hal’s Burgers next to his high school. He used to sit at the counter with the guy from the Music Mart, the TV repairman from Ekhard Electric, the gentleman from the jewelry store with a lens on a cord around his neck and dandruff on the shoulders of his black suit jacket. They would all be old men now; he had heard that Hal had died.

  A skinny waitress came quickly with a cup in one hand, a pot in the other, and a menu tucked under her arm.

  “Coffee do you, honey?” she said.

  “I’m meeting somebody,” he said.

  “Always pays to be awake,” she said, pouring, “so they can’t sneak up on you.”

  Gunderman turned the heavy beige mug by its rim. At Hal’s he would sometimes order hot chocolate just to be able to contemplate the steam the way the others did. The coffee was strong and just short of scalding. The waitress reappeared.

  “See anything you like, honey?” she said.

  She was a two-variable equation of the first degree, all angles and no curves, with tetrahedrons under her T-shirt.

  “Think I’ll wait until the other party arrives,” he said.

  “Wink when the party starts.”

  He could not remember ever winking at a woman. He could not even imagine one winking back.

  “Traveling on a beam of light?” said Lawton, sliding into the booth. “You were looking straight at me, but I couldn’t get your attention. Where in the universe were you?”

  “Trying to figure that out, I guess,” Gunderman said. He squared one of the menus on the rounded rectangle of Formica then slid it across. “How about you? You all right?”

  “With you out on waivers and the Strand thing, what do you think?”

  “I mean physically,” said Gunderman.

  Lawton put the laminated menu off to the side near the window. The light showed the greasy smudges.

  “I have a copy of Strand’s hard drive with the bad code on it,” he said. “Rosten told me to keep you away from it. So I’ve been fooling with it and accomplishing nothing.” He bent to his briefcase and took the device out.

  “I hope you’ve thought about your medical insurance,” Gunderman said.

  “If you don’t find anything, I never gave it to you,” said Lawton. “If you do, well, we’ll just have to figure what to do then.”

  Gunderman picked the external hard drive off the Formica.

  “I do know what to do with this,” Gunderman said.

  “I knew you would,” said Lawton.

  Rosten had just come back from another difficult conversation with Joyce. Lawton wanted more time, but Joyce wasn’t having any of that. He ordered Rosten to move against Strand. Now. As Rosten stood staring out his office window, he heard something behind him. Harms was so close that he turned right into her. Anyone seeing them might have thought the hug she gave him was innocent. But her hair against his cheek was a skein of nerve cells entangling his. He drew back.

  “What’s this about?” he said.

  “It’s hello,” she said, still so close he could taste her breath.

  Let it be business. Problem and resolution. He put the table between them and sat.

  Instead of sitting down herself, she passed behind him and slid her hand across his shoulders. He was sure she could feel the tremor under the cloth.

  “I’m worried Sara will go public,” he said.

  “Then position yourself,” she said. “The board sees you as Joyce’s natural successor.”

  “I stand with him,” he said.

  “Play it right and you can stand wherever you want,” she said. “And I can stand with you.”

  “In a room with a view?” he said.

  “A room at the top.”

  “I just told him we had to come clean with the board,” he said.

  “What did he say?”

  “That I was out of my depth.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “You placed yourself on record advocating the prudent path,” she said. “I assume you’ll memorialize it.”

  “It wasn’t positioning,” he said.

  The pressure of her hand lifted.

  “Sometimes I don’t think you even want what you could have,” she said.

  “You have to be as worried as I am.”

  “I don’t see much risk in this for me.”

  “The institution, I mean, a hundred years of history.”

  “History is after I’m gone,” she said.

  They only notified Simons after they had pulled Strand in and formally accused her. Simons got a call from Snow’s admin, Taleisha, summoning her. When she got to Snow’s office, the admin greeted her with a recorded smile.

  “You can’t be comfortable with what’s happening,” Simons said. “I mean the racial aspect.”

  “I call people to meetings,” Taleisha said. “They come and they go.”

  Snow was not interested in listening to Sara’s objections. This was just some kind of Inhuman Resources formality, the reading of the verdict.

  “You can’t protect her this time,” Snow said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “She’s my responsibility.”

  “You’d better pray that she’s not.”

  After Harms left, Rosten pulled down the Cantos and found the passage he was looking for:

  in war time we want men of ability

  in peace we want also character

  In wartime, character caused you to hesitate, second-guess the man in command. It could get people killed. There were seven times seven types of ambiguity, but at times like this, one plus one equaled one. That is what loyalty meant.

  He left his desk, walked down the hall, and asked Marcia if Joyce was still free.

  “For you,” Marcia said.

  He stuck his head in the door. Silence was as close to permission as he could expect. He centered himself in front of the desk.

  “I’m with you,” he said.

  “Good to know,” said Joyce.

  “I mean about disclosure,” said Rosten. “Everything stays inside the Dome.”

  “I assumed you had gotten the message,” said Joyce.

  From Snow’s office Simons went to her own and punched out a short letter to the Union League Club. She printed it and put a stamp from her personal stock on the envelope. On the way out of the Dome she dropped the letter in the slot by the elevators. When she reached the Standard Club, she recognized the man standing at the desk in the lobby, but he did not recognize her. She had not been back since her father had died.

  “May I help you?” he said.

  “I need to talk to somebody about becoming a member,” she said.

  When Gnomon failed to respond to Joyce’s conciliatory letter after the Wall Street Journal article, Rosten had come to believe the deal was dead. So had everyone else on the Secret Committee, though Joyce had clearly not given up. Then suddenly one morning a very encouraging message arrived from Gnomon’s chairman. Nominally it was also on Nyström�
��s behalf, but nobody believed that. Joyce acted as though he had expected this turn of events all along.

  “We think it would be useful to get Day and Domes’s perspective on what symbiosis would be possible in a potential relationship,” the letter said.

  Joyce shook his head. “Business isn’t about bees and flowers helping one another,” he said. “It’s about the physics of very large, heavy things in motion.” Nonetheless, when Rosten and Harms drafted a presentation to make to the Gnomon board, they used the word symbiosis more than once, and Joyce did not remove it.

  Things moved very quickly. It was wheels-up at midnight for an early-morning meeting in Silicon Valley. Gnomon’s chairman greeted the D&D team at the door of a splendid conference room in the offices of Gnomon’s outside counsel. It had an onyx conference table and earth-tone walls. The dress code was bespoke casual. The chairman’s French cuffs were linkless, press-folded and loose.

  He introduced two other board members, not mentioning that they constituted a committee that had taken control. He did not have to. He concluded by expressing apologies for the inconvenience of the trip, the drop-everything urgency.

  “We like urgency,” said Joyce.

  The chairman turned the floor over to Nyström, who presented an overview of Gnomon so brief that somebody had obviously truncated it. Then the chairman invited Joyce to take as much time as he needed.

  A future was sketched. Like all serious acts of business imagination, it was plausible, even compelling, and most certainly in its details wrong. The Gnomon group had the social grace not to make a point of this. The presentation moved on to the symbiosis that could develop between vast and growing stores of data and compelling, innovative, and rapidly evolving analytic tools that would permit customers to mine and refine it. Rosten thought Joyce overstated the importance of Gnomon’s contribution, but this was the stage for flattery. The hard truth about what things are worth comes only at the end of negotiations. Examples of symbiosis were given. Questions were asked and answered, the responses as spotless as the crystal glasses clustered around the stylish bottles of water that sat at intervals along the table.

  “Symbiosis can be achieved by contract, of course,” Nyström interjected at one point. “After all, the butterfly is not the flower it pollinates.”

  “Very poetic, Niko,” Joyce said.