The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  It’s like I know something so important but I can’t remember what it is. It’s in that void inside my head, surrounded by strange colors.

  I close my eyes. I picture a rat. It’s this pudgy gray fellow with a long rat tail and pink around the eyes. On its head, it wears electrodes. I saw it when doing a story about memory research at the University of California at San Francisco. The researchers measured electrical activity in the brains of rats. They were watching new neurons form and travel to different parts of the brain. The researchers discovered that when rats have new experiences, they can only encode long-term memories—the only way those new neurons travel to the rest of the brain—during substantial periods of downtime. It was both a revelation and a confirmation of the obvious: when a brain doesn’t rest, it doesn’t have time to record memories.

  I need to rest. Have I been chasing ghosts and irrelevancies at the expense of remembering something critical?

  It feels like my brain flickers on and off, like Wi-Fi or bars on a phone.

  Do I know some truth and can’t remember it? What is it? A connection between Andrew Leviathan and Sandy Vello and a little girl who walked into traffic, and PRISM and a God drug, and Faith?

  Is my chase leading me to truth?

  Or is it obscuring truth by denying me downtime to record my own memories, my own truth?

  Or, as Bullseye and the Witch suggest: Is chasing what heals me? Is this all nonsense, cooked up by a concussed brain?

  I sit up. I look at the newly arrived car, a late-model pickup, its brake lights still gleaming. Two men sit in the front seat conferring.

  I don’t have the answers. Sandy Vello has some of them, at least.

  I look back at the web site with the address of the registrant for WildPhotos, Clyde’s address, presumably. There’s a phone number. I dial it.

  At the first ring, someone answers. “Hello, Clyde?”

  I catch my breath. It’s Sandy’s voice.

  I hang up.

  I put the car in drive.

  38

  After a twenty-minute drive south on a darkened Highway 280, I glide past the Farm Hill Road exit, which leads to the residence of a former Marine and reality-TV wannabe. Before I stop there, I’ve got more traps to lay.

  I drive five miles farther south to Sand Hill Road, the exit for Palo Alto, feeling the property values rise with each tick of the odometer. I pull off the highway, pull out my own laptop, and cruise around the tree-shrouded office complexes just off the highway. I stop every few offices to see if I can find an unsecured Wi-Fi access point. I find one outside Mercurial Ventures, which, nearly makes me smile; it seems like a refreshingly frank name for an investment firm throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into the wildly swinging tech market.

  From my wallet, I pull out the yellow Post-it note I’d been handed by Bullseye. It contains the home address for the Chinese hacker. He lives in a tree-lined area of Palo Alto once catering to Stanford scholars called “Professorville.” I call up his address on a map. I have no intention of going there. But I hope someone thinks I intend to—maybe the shiny bald buzzard or the stout pyromaniac, or whoever is monitoring my computer activity. I pause on the map in hopes of letting the image sink in with whichever miscreant is watching over my shoulder. I close the browser but leave the computer on to let the additional misdirection set in.

  I want to close my eyes, but find myself looking at the surrounding venture-capital firms, struck with another question. I pull out Bullseye’s laptop, open it, search for Andrew’s former business partner Gils Simons. I get a mountain of hits. He’s celebrated as the canny operational guy who knows how to turn cutting-edge technology into gold. It’s no small trick, by the way; there are countless stories in these parts of savvy engineers who came first to the idea of online auction sites, or Internet search engines or online booksellers, but got crushed by eBay, Google and Amazon because those companies coupled the technology with business smarts.

  From his bio on Wikipedia, I learn that Gils grew up outside Normandy, attended the Sorbonne, dropped out, came to the United States, paired up with Andrew Leviathan in the early 1980s as Co-employee Number One of Leviathan Ventures, left the company in the late nineties to pursue his investment interests, and likes sailing and climbing. There is no reference to the China-U.S. High-Tech Alliance.

  Wikipedia lists Gils’s current investment firm as Alps Partners. I visit the web site to find an image of a snowcapped mountain and little substance. A blasé formulaic section describes the firm’s determination to find “break-out” companies and market-moving ideas with international potential. Same old blah-blah investment rhetoric. I look down the list of his strategic investment partners. One is Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google. He’s got a hit on his hands. The other is Trans-Pacific Limited Partners, described merely as a leading Chinese investment firm.

  There’s a contact link. I click on it and am surprised to find an email address: GSimons@Alpspartners.com. I noodle my missive only briefly before writing: “My name is Nat Idle. We sat across from each other at the luncheon at MacArthur Park. I’m interested in writing about your latest venture. Want to meet and discuss?”

  I leave my phone number. It’s cryptic enough to suggest much more knowledge on my part than I’ve actually got and, as a result, perhaps lure him into a conversation. It’s meaningless enough that, should Gils have no involvement in whatever it is I’m chasing, I can easily explain the note away by saying I wanted to learn about his latest business dealings.

  I search for information about the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center and the learning annex. Various wire news reports repeat what I heard on the radio: pretty much nothing of value. I look at some of the history of the place. When it was rebuilt in the late 1990s, it was intended by county authorities to be a model of modern rehabilitation. Huge cost overruns ensued. So the learning annex got privatized into a place where the county pays monthly fees for learning classes, supplies, volunteers, but far less than it would pay to take care of the entire building and pay the mortgage on it. It’s a classic taxpayer abdication but one that has gotten kudos from around the country, particularly from economists and right-wing think tanks. Through all kinds of classes, the learning annex has taught youngsters basic employment skills, including short-order and pastry cooking, maintenance of things like air conditioners and furnaces, “manners,” email etiquette, computing.

  Computing.

  I search on this specific area. I’m looking for connections to PRISM and Sandy Vello to something called the Juggler. I find little. There’s a brief mention in a filing from a year earlier to the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco of a pilot project at the facility aimed at teaching residents the latest media techniques. It is passed unanimously without comment.

  A handful of searches about the learning center gives oblique notifications of other partnerships offered and accepted. From what I can gather: a major coffee chain has contributed espresso machines to teach both coffee making and maintenance of the fragile devices; tutors in computer support give technical certificates for learning the ins and outs of Windows software; a medical conglomerate has donated an old-generation magnetic resonance machine so teens can learn to be medical assistants.

  It’s all both heartening, I guess, and self-serving by the private partners, who develop brand-specific line workers. The tech-savvy lower classes of the next century.

  I look at the clock. Nearly thirty minutes have passed since I parked here. It’s just before nine. I close and turn off both laptops and start the Audi. Moments later, I speed onto Highway 280, and after five minutes more, exit again, this time on Farm Hill Road. The directions on Bullseye’s computer guide me up a steep, narrow road that climbs a Silicon Valley hillside. On some of these hillsides reside the swankiest estates, $3.5 million at a minimum. Not this one. Smaller houses, fixer-uppers needing serious cosmetic surgery at a minimum. I drive by one ranch-style house that has been expanded on one si
de with a room-sized tent, the kind that might accommodate a wedding party. Here the houses are bargain-basement, costing only around $1.5 million but, to fit in, need a complete overhaul and requiring BYOA—bring your own architect.

  Clyde Robichaux’s house looks like it belongs in that bargain-basement bin, maybe at the bottom. It’s a narrow three-story house, a fixer-upper that feels perched almost precariously upon the ground-floor garage. A wooden-slatted staircase, also shrouded in darkness, extends up the right side of the house to the entrances on the second and third stories.

  It’s poorly lit, but for what looks like dancing orange flames projecting in a surreal fashion from the picture window on the top floor. Someone is home and they’ve got the fireplace working.

  I roll slowly by the house on the single-lane gravel road, which is rutted, sloping upward to the right, entering an area even denser with trees, the opening scene of a children’s book about the secret lair of bears. To my right, a sharp drop-off into a shallow gulley, protected by a thick line of firs. To my left, I’m hugging a steep hillside thatched with foliage and thick-stumped eucalyptus trees protruding at a slight angle.

  I wince with each squirt of gravel popping beneath my tires, announcing my whereabouts. It is so quiet. What the houses here lack in modernity, they make up for in acreage; I still haven’t passed another residence when, thirty feet ahead, I see the road widen slightly on my left, sufficient to create room for a car parked tightly against the hillside.

  I recognize the car. It’s a red BMW M3, one of the sleekest cars on the road, one Polly once dreamed of having. This one belongs to Sandy Vello. I saw her climb into it at the learning annex where I first realized that, no, Sandy Vello is not dead. From the presence of her car, I’m guessing she’s still not dead. I’m guessing she’s upstairs. Maybe protected by a Marine.

  39

  Another thirty feet ahead, a small driveway appears on the right, protected by a rickety metal gate and a sign: “Private Property.” Ideal.

  I put the car in park, slip out of the driver’s seat and walk to the gate, hearing the small loose stones beneath my feet. The thick metal gate swings open with a creak, cool and damp in my hands. Beyond it, the road doglegs right so that I can’t see what house lies in the pitch black.

  I drive through the gates and park to the far right, tires nearly teetering into another gulley. I kill the lights. I shut the door gently, acutely aware of every sound amid the crickets. I’m cold, not from the air, which I’m guessing is not much below 60 degrees, but from something deep inside. I trudge between two trees, slide into the gulley, and then walk up the other side. I can see the house lights but discern nothing further, obscured by half a football field of distance, rolling terrain, and a phalanx of trees.

  My phone buzzes, and I jump. I pull the device from my pocket and look at the screen. It’s a reminder that I’ve got an upcoming appointment. With Wilma. It takes a second to picture her, the straight black hair, prematurely aged hands, posture like a long-legged insect with her legs folded beneath her. There’s a note with the calendar: “Do homework for Wed meeting with Wilma.”

  Homework. Homework? Am I supposed to be preparing questions? What story am I working on with Wilma?

  On the phone’s calendar, I see that I’ve got another appointment, for tomorrow. “Tax evasion hearing, civic center courthouse, 4 p.m.” I have to think hard to picture the portly server who, after the awards luncheon, handed a letter requiring my presence at a hearing alleging tax irregularities. I wonder why I’ve written tax “evasion” hearing. Did I evade taxes? Or was that shorthand?

  I also remember the letter stating that if I didn’t show for the hearing I could face criminal penalty.

  I’ve got more immediate issues.

  On the touch screen, I tap the number for Sandy Vello. It rings twice, then goes to her voice mail. I leave a message. “It’s Nat Idle. Are you okay? That was so strange today.”

  I wait for her to listen to it. I guess I want to set up an alibi, for her not to suspect me, just in case. I turn off my phone, and am struck with wonder that I didn’t do it earlier. If the buzzard or the kidnapper is following my movements on the computer, he’s probably also doing it—even more easily—by triangulating the signals on my cell phone.

  I consider my options. I can walk to the narrow house, hope that Sandy happens to come to the door, not chaperoned by her reality-TV buddy and former Marine, and that she’s forthcoming with her spirited files and other secrets.

  I’m struck by a better option. I start running.

  Moments later, I’m standing in front of Sandy’s BMW. I peer through the window. Or try to. It’s black dark, forest dark, a sliver of moonlight barely cutting through an opening in the branches extending over the road. It’s just enough to let me make out two boxes in the backseat, and to see they are empty. No files here. In the trunk, maybe. But I doubt it.

  On the hillside next to the car, I rummage through the soil with my hands. I feel for a rock, baseball-sized. Too small. I reach for another. It’s jagged and oval, bumpy, like the moon or the surface of the brain. I raise it. I slam it against the windshield. It doesn’t crack. It rolls off the front of the car. I pick it up again. I close my eyes and I picture Polly. She’s telling me that she loves me and that everything will be okay. Her eyes look so tired, crow’s-feet in the corners, watery. She wears a blue gown, resplendent even in the hours before she gives birth. Even with our split imminent and my visions of nuclear-family bliss dashed.

  I slam the rock down on the window.

  The thick glass cracks in the zigzag shape of a fault line. The car alarm splits the night air. My ears ringing, I sprint into the trees across the road, impulsive, like a little girl running into the street, about to be crushed by a Volvo.

  My whole plan is that impulsive. Nothing this risky could be well thought out. Or maybe it’s just deliberately stupid. I’m willing to risk everything to find out what I’m chasing.

  My hope is to draw out Sandy, or maybe the Marine—somehow get Sandy alone, and discover files she may have taken into the house.

  I hear a voice on the stairs. It’s Sandy. I can’t make out her words. She appears, striding down the steps, a phone to her ear.

  “I can handle myself, Clyde,” she says. She pockets her phone. She walks purposefully down the stairs.

  I don’t have much time.

  40

  Sandy turns back into the house, and disappears. I wait. Less than two minutes later, she returns. She’s cradling a long, thin object in her arms, walking with purpose, confidence. Near the bottom of the stairs, she pauses. Starved of light and clear vision, she must be trying to use her sense of hearing to determine what dark forces lurk in the trees. But the wailing car alarm owns the night, and would mask the sound of feet on fallen leaves.

  I can now discern that she cradles a shotgun. She shifts it into her left arm. She wears running tights and windbreaker. With her right hand, she reaches into its pocket and withdraws something. Keys, maybe. The car alarm continues to wail. If she wants to turn the sound off, she’s going to have to get closer, even using a remote. Shotgun held in front of her, she walks down the gravel path.

  I squeeze against a tree not fifty feet from her. I feel pain sting my left shoulder, at the edge of my chest. And an image floods my brain: Faith astride me, fingernails digging into my skin, right where the bark’s digging.

  She collapses on me, and whispers, “Catharsis.”

  “What do you mean, Faith?” I remember asking her.

  “I’m moving on.”

  “From what?”

  She looks away. “Post-coital interrogation. You’re kinky.”

  “What are you moving away from?”

  “A lie. Are you moving on from yours?”

  The memory turns static, fades out. What lie is Faith moving away from? I look up to see Sandy move cautiously through a bend in the road. In just a moment, she’ll be far enough away that I can make my move. I hold
my breath and I wonder why I can’t stop thinking about Faith, and what she meant, and whether she’s safe, and then I’m cursing my own brain, such as it is.

  Research suggests that people who are capable of great focus, like great athletes, tend to have thicker myelin sheaths, a coating on their neurons. So they’re less distracted by extraneous information. I wonder, knowing it’s totally impossible, if my sheaths, such as they are, suffered when I hit my head—first at the subway station, then against a sledgehammer fist in Chinatown.

  Focus, Nat. Sandy disappears around the corner.

  I run across the gravel road. I hug the door of the garage, then find myself at the base of the stairs. I glance into the darkness. I hear the blaring car alarm in the distance as I look up the steep concrete stairs, many of them, leading to glass-door entrances on two floors. I sprint up.

  I reach the first glass-door entrance. Inside, it’s dark. I try the handle. In the darkness, inside, I see a nondescript baby’s face. It’s an illusion, I know. I blink and it’s gone. So much to lose. I open the door. I peer inside. I can make out a small room, fitness equipment—a home gymnasium, smelling of disinfectant. Not what I’m looking for.

  The car alarm goes dead. It’s momentarily dead quiet before I hear the crickets. Not much time.

  I sprint up another dozen stairs to the top floor. Inside is bathed in light, a wide-open floor plan. To the right, a kitchen. Folksy, tidy, from another era. An upright toaster, polished to the point of gleaming, sitting on a seventies-style Formica counter. The counter divides the kitchen from a dining room, with an ice-clear chandelier and flame-shaped lights hung low over an empty table. A floor of outdated tile in the dining room gives way to a single step down and fluffy beige carpeting of the family room. Sleek couch covered by a blanket, glass coffee table, worn leather recliner.