Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  Annie walked from the kitchen with a stainless steel bowl.

  “I despise calendars now. You know why? Because you have to wait a month to turn the page. It makes it feel like time never, ever passes. In the kitchen of the house where I was staying, there was a sweets calendar with pictures of these mouth-watering desserts, like something called the chocolate moat. August had vanilla-bean ice cream covered with sticky cherry sauce that looked like blood. It taunted me. I just couldn’t stand the idea that I only got to turn the calendar once every thirty days.”

  She sat on an oak coffee table in front of me.

  “I faked my death and I went into hiding.”

  She dipped a hot towel into the steaming bowl of water. I held back the shirt from my wound, and my breath, and she pressed a towel into it.

  “When I dove off the boat, I thought I was going to die for real. The water was freezing and bottomless and so dark. I swam underneath the boat. There was a mask and a tiny bottle of compressed air.”

  “A scuba tank?”

  “Just enough air for ten minutes. They told me to suck from the nozzle and then swim. Suck then swim. I could hear your voice. I was trying to block you out. If you all discovered me, I planned to drop the mask and air and say I fell overboard. But you didn’t. So I swam twenty yards away to a fishing buoy. It was the way we’d planned it. We’d programmed the boat’s autopilot to direct it near the buoy. Ten feet down, attached to the buoy’s cable, was a scuba tank, weighted down with a heavy anchor, and flippers.”

  I pictured the scene. Her friends standing on the boat, screaming. Me, in the water, scrambling frantically. How had I missed her?

  “It’s insane, Annie. I’m having a hell of a time seeing you trying something like this, let alone having it actually work.”

  She breathed deeply. I was testing her patience.

  “I had help. I worked for a month with a private instructor and a meditation coach. I took beta-blockers. And I got a real helping hand from a policeman.”

  She stood, stretched her arms, and sat down on the couch beside me. She put her hand over my wound.

  “Edward.”

  “Velarde? Officer Velarde?”

  She looked perplexed herself. “Yeah. How did you . . . ”

  “Is he still working for you, Annie?”

  She shook her head. God, no. “For them.”

  “Dave Elliott? Your dad?”

  She nodded.

  “Nat, please let me get through this. Everything will make sense. I’ve been waiting forever to tell you this.”

  She told me that she swam and floated by the buoy, hovering there, then surreptitiously climbed aboard Officer Ve- larde’s boat. Again, had they been discovered, they would have ditched the equipment and claimed he’d found and revived her.

  In the years after Annie’s death, I’d come to accept that there were parts of Annie that were more competitive and intense than I had internalized during our time together. But this was beyond anything I conceptualized.

  “No way,” I said flatly. “That’s not you.”

  She looked out toward the fireplace—like it was a million miles away.

  “You really don’t understand what was at stake.”

  50

  Can you imagine what would have happened to me in jail?” she said.

  I stared through her.

  Annie had faked her death and sequestered herself in France. I had to give her the benefit of the doubt. Didn’t I? There must have been a logical reason why she abandoned me.

  Something else. This Annie didn’t feel exactly like the old one. I couldn’t put my finger on it. This one seemed much more calculating.

  “This is the part where you tell me why you left me.”

  My curiosity and hurt had trumped my physical pain. I barely registered the fire shooting from my back and side.

  “Remember my dad put me in charge of Vestige Technologies? It made software used by big companies to organize and control all kinds of functions—like employee management, sales, and product tracking.”

  “That’s what you threw our lives away for.”

  She met my stare.

  “It had huge profit potential. Kindle Investment put eighty-five million into the company. That was just the initial investment.”

  A hefty sum. This was the heart of the dot-com frenzy, and the price of investing in start-up companies had gotten grossly inflated. But $85 million was unusually serious and it signified that the company’s founders believed they had a certain strategy. They must have promised themselves, or their limited partners, that they were going to take the company public and get all that dough back five times over. Glenn Kindle wasn’t the type of guy to invest money unless he had a really good idea how it would all turn out.

  Annie stood at the kitchen table, zipping up a suitcase she’d folded shirts into, then resting her hands on the bag, as if making a presentation to shareholders.

  “Several competitors were racing to go public. We had to beat them. This was a big test for me. We had a chance to succeed on a grander scale than my father could ever have dreamed.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I messed with the books. I didn’t just flat out make things up. I made our deals look . . . rosy. I made us look way more successful than we really were.”

  “I don’t believe it. You committed fraud. You cooked your books.”

  “Not just ours.”

  Something had clicked in Annie. She’d earlier been confessing, looking for me to understand, but now she was distant, and seemed to want to get this conversation out of the way. I recognized it from the past—a part of her that didn’t like to be challenged.

  She said Vestige had a competitor that threatened to beat it to the public markets. The company, like all dot-coms, had hired people at a furious pace. One of the new upper-management hires of the competitor had been a Vestige plant. The plant leaked reports to the press and the SEC suggesting his ostensible employer had been inflating revenue by including in its sales figures vague promises for future orders.

  “This was the dirty pool of the dot-com era, the thing you don’t read about,” she said. “Venture capitalists were taking potshots at each other’s companies—in the press, to the major underwriters like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Not at first, when all the boats were rising. But when things looked like they were slowing down, we were all desperate not to miss the chance to go public. Everyone was playing rough. We played rougher.”

  Glenn Kindle’s twist was hiring a spy.

  It was successful—almost too much so, she said. The press was looking for examples of inflated business models to prove this was another Tulip Frenzy. So was the SEC. The competitor’s public offering stalled, becoming one of the chunks of evidence that drove the whole market down in June 2001. But the desperate ploy also caused renewed scrutiny of the market overall, and at the companies in Vestige’s sector in particular.

  “We undid ourselves too.” She smirked.

  I stood and walked to the window. I parted the curtains. The parking lot was empty, except for my Explorer, a beat-up blue VW bus, and a big American car. I took a chance. I chuckled.

  “Someone’s screwed.”

  “Who? What?”

  I paused, buying time, staring out the window.

  “What is it, Nat?”

  “Poor sucker locked himself out of his Oldsmobile. Or he’s trying to steal it.”

  Annie’s eyes narrowed and she headed to the window. I intercepted her and gave her a hug, holding her tight. She resisted, then reciprocated. “Oh, Nat.” She pushed away and walked to the window. There was nothing to see. I told her he’d taken something from the seat of the car and must have wandered off. She grabbed her keys and wallet. “I’ll be right back.”

  I unzipped her suitcase. Shirts, a cosmetic kit, nothing much of interest. Except in a side pocket. A piece of paper. It was a receipt from a houseboat rental. The Monkey. Located in Slip 47, Callville Bay Marina, L
ake Mead. I zipped the suitcase just in time.

  “What did he look like?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “There has to be something you’re not telling me, Annie. What you’re describing doesn’t conform to anything you are. My hunch is that you’re protecting someone—maybe your dad. I can’t see how or why you’d do that at this point. You have to let that go. I’m not even talking about us at this point. I’m talking about you.”

  “I really need an ally right now, Nathaniel. More than I’ve ever needed one. I need you to stay strong, to trust me for a little bit longer.”

  “You’re asking me to trust you but everything you’re telling me raises more questions.”

  She inhaled deeply, absorbing the blow.

  “Like I said, the stakes got out of control.” She sounded like she might shut down.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded, palms open.

  She said that just before the public markets faltered, Vestige had attracted a new round of high-powered investors. They put $100 million more into the company. They did so based on fraudulent projections and the promise the company would soon go public. Then the sector, the company, and the market started to flounder. It wasn’t meeting any of its early projections. The investors could see what was happening.

  “We told them that the entire technology economy was collapsing,” she said. “The same thing happened to a thousand companies, including some huge ones, like Cisco and Intel.”

  She said it might have just been another failed dot-com, but there was a difference: Glenn Kindle was a lead investor, one of the founders of Silicon Valley, and one of its most respected venture capitalists. He was worth close to $1 billion.

  “A man came up to my father in a Starbucks.”

  “What man?”

  “An investment banker. He’d been involved in Vestige and suspected foul play. He threatened to go to the newspapers and the police.”

  “Blackmail.”

  She nodded. “I always hated Starbucks.”

  I’d been so caught up I hadn’t noticed her demeanor. Hers was a face consumed with defeat; the veneer had softened. She wasn’t the investment banker anymore, just a woman—a young woman.

  “So your father was behind the whole thing. He made you cook the books.” I felt the urge to protect Annie from her father. I was the savior. She stood and stepped back from me.

  “No. It was me,” she said. “Don’t you see what I’m capable of? Even now you don’t see? It really is remarkable.”

  “What?”

  “My father told me not to inflate Vestige’s earnings,” she said. The conversation wasn’t tracking, but I went with it.

  She said her father tacitly understood what she’d done. Glenn Kindle knew there could be serious legal fallout. He wasn’t worried about getting sued or jailed himself, since the sophisticated way he’d invested in the company protected him from prosecutors and regulators, but apparently it didn’t insulate him from a blackmail demand of $50 million. Her father was worried about his reputation, and his daughter.

  “My father felt his paternal instincts. In all its forms—the good, bad, and paranoid.

  “He wanted to protect me. But he also saw paying the blackmail as a way to have something to hold over my head. I would have been beholden to him forever.”

  “So he paid it,” I said dryly.

  “Then matters got far worse.”

  As I watched her, I realized I was biting the inside of my cheek. I put my hand to my side and ran it over the shirt. The gash there didn’t matter anymore. Annie took a wisp of her hair and curled it behind her ear. I used to love when she did that. She sighed.

  “Dave threatened the investment banker.”

  “Dave Elliott.”

  She nodded.

  “Threatened to kill the banker?”

  “Worse, in a way. He amassed a dossier on the banker. He had his own secrets, nothing big. But the kinds of things that ruin families. Dave also picked the banker’s son up at school, just to let him know the lengths he’d go to.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “When I found out, I freaked out. I begged him to stop.”

  “Did your father know?”

  “I doubt it. Tough as he is, he never would have the stomach for something like that.”

  “Stomach. You make it sound like . . . ”

  “Dave was his designated wild man. An assassin in a suit.”

  She said Dave felt he was just sending the banker a message: We can make your life miserable. It also was a negotiation. The banker settled for $100,000.

  “Pocket change,” Annie said. She walked toward me, reached out, and took my hand again. Casually—like it was something to play with while she talked.

  “But it didn’t make the problem go away. The SEC and IRS planned to investigate. If they’d dug deeply enough, they might have discovered the extent of the problem. It would have been a big feather to tear down Kindle Investment Partners. But we made sure they couldn’t pursue the case.”

  After a pause, she added, “A key suspect died in a tragic boating accident.”

  If the words had come out of her father’s mouth, I was sure they would have sounded like gloating. Annie just sounded sad. Resigned.

  “I had no choice but to disappear. If the government had caught us cheating investors, undoing a competitor, and kidnapping a child to cover it up, I would have become the poster child of dot-com excess. I would have gone away forever—and you . . . ”

  “What, Annie?”

  “You would have seen what a horrible person I am.”

  I was struck by a thought. It wasn’t: Oh, poor Annie. It wasn’t sympathy. It was: Finally. Where had those tears been when she was describing the grand deceit? Perhaps I should have comforted Annie, but I could only look at her in silence.

  “Who was the banker—the one that threatened you and your father?”

  She picked up the duffel bag she’d just packed. Was she going somewhere?

  “His name was Simon Anderson.”

  For the better part of ten hours, I’d been free of the headache that had held sway over me since the café exploded. It returned. I put my hand on the chair to steady myself.

  “Annie. Did you . . . were you trying to kill . . . ” I found my voice, but not my emotions, or a singular one. The alchemy was devastation and loss, cut with confusion and still hope. “What were you doing at the café? When it exploded?”

  She put her hand on my arm.

  “You figured out what they were doing,” I said. “You tried to stop them. But it was too late. I need you to tell me you didn’t know all those people were going to die. And the rats. You love animals, even rodents. You would never have done those experiments.”

  Annie cleared her throat. “My father. My father. My father. I know I have a lot more to explain. We’ve been working behind the scenes to make things right.”

  We.

  As if on cue, there came a knock on the door, and a voice, yelling, as if through clenched teeth.

  “Tara,” the voice said. “It’s me.”

  “Coming, Cindy,” Annie said. “I’m coming.”

  Annie let go of my arm. I didn’t bother to follow. Revelation had become paralysis. At the door stood the blonde angel.

  “You’re out of time, Tara. You’ve got to go.”

  51

  Angels don’t fly. They drive minivans.

  When the door opened, I recognized the face. The blonde angel, the woman with a tight bun of hair and a handgun who’d broken into my torture session and taken out two powerful cops. Now she wore jeans and a leather jacket.

  “The meeting is in three hours,” she told Annie.

  She looked up at me.

  “Nathaniel, you’ve met Cynthia. She calls me Tara. For the sake of discretion,” Annie said. “Cynthia works for me. She is assistant, friend, advance man, and bodyguard. She helps me live a very, very careful life. When I can’t be somewhere, she is my eyes and ears.”
>
  “And photographer,” I said. “At the café, right?”

  Cynthia didn’t say anything. But I realized I’d seen her in the aftermath of the café explosion, I’d caught her taking my picture a bit too intently. She said she’d been a freelancer.

  “Turtle, where is the laptop?”

  Andy’s laptop. She’d expressly asked me to bring it.

  “It was in his car,” the blonde angel said. “I put it in the van.”

  Cynthia had unlocked the car I’d driven and taken the laptop. Evidently I was not a sovereign nation. I glowered at her.

  Annie held a hand out to Cynthia, as if to say: Slow down. “Give us a second.”

  She moved to close the door, but Cynthia put her hand on it and said, “What about the other one?”

  Annie looked at me, then back at Cynthia.

  “Bring her here.”

  When Annie turned around to face me square on I realized where I’d seen her before. The police station. The photo I’d been shown by Lieutenant Aravelo. The grainy, indiscernible shot of the blonde woman.

  “They have your picture,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You came to save everyone at the café. You found out what your father and Elliott were doing and you decided to stop them. But it was too late and you could only save me. Is that what happened? That would be very good to know just about now.”

  I was teetering again. This time from something deeper than exhaustion, or a disease picked up from my laptop computer, or even uncertainty about Annie’s motives. This bordered on certainty. This felt like outright betrayal. This was the possibility that Annie had turned into someone dark.

  She dropped her duffel bag to the ground. She brought her hands together—as if asking a child not to act up again in school.

  “You’ve got to stay here, Nat. You’ve got to trust me. Please. I have a plan. I can expose this, and my father, and make everything right.”

  Like that, my perspective changed. Annie wasn’t in charge. She was fighting demons, and her dad, and she needed my help. Whatever she’d done, she loved me, and needed me. Glenn—he was the epicenter of the problem. Fatigue eating away at clarity.