The Cloud ni-3

by Matt Richtel

  I’m trying to make sense of any of it. Andrew builds his school just a few months after Kathryn Gilkeson, his administrator’s daughter, walks into the street and gets killed. Sounds innocuous enough. He found a cause, became wildly acclaimed for it-big deal, right? So why the dead man from the subway, and the bizarre Chinese connection, and the weirdo reality-show contestant? Why won’t my brain work? Why can’t I piece any of this together? Does it fit together?

  And Jesus, that girl, that poor, poor Kathryn, who impulsively ran into the street and turned her mother into a shell.

  I look up and out the window.

  Then I see it. Or, rather, him.

  Across the street, on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, stands a boy. He wears overalls and a jockey cap.

  Not just any boy. It’s not possible.

  He takes a step toward the street.

  “No!”

  I scramble to my feet. It cannot be. I’m at the doorway of the cafe. I’m on the sidewalk. The boy takes a tentative step off the sidewalk, into the street. Not just any boy.

  “Isaac!”

  A car comes screaming from the right. It’s heading toward my son.

  I sprint across the street. I fly. I’m practically in midair, my feet only touching the ground, my vision narrowed to a point, head screaming. I hurl myself in the path of the car; it screeches, swerves. I lope and gasp toward Isaac. I scoop him up with one arm.

  He screams.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I cradle him. I look into his face. I see blue eyes filled with terror, quivering lips, the round heaving nostrils filling with snot bubbles. Tender features, innocent and beautiful, but not ones I recognize.

  “Henry. Henry. Come here. Come to Mamma.”

  It’s a quavering voice pushing the limits of the vocal cord, a protective lioness poised to pounce.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she accuses me.

  “He. .” I start, then pause, then see Faith approach, quickly, darting from across the street.

  “Your son looked like he was going to walk into the street,” Faith says to the boy’s mother.

  “I had him under control.”

  Faith takes my hand and leads me away. Before we reach the car, I withdraw from her, willing myself for objectivity and clarity, about her, about everything.

  30

  I slip into the driver’s seat and coax the keys from Faith.

  “It’s off-limits.”

  “What’s off-limits?”

  I don’t answer as I take a left from El Camino Real onto University, a swanky commercial strip. Here, entrepreneurs with full hearts sketch business plans to fill garages first with start-ups and then with BMWs those start-ups eventually afford. Back-of-the-napkin central.

  The energy here is so vibrant and so enervating. The entrepreneurs reject propositions that aren’t “game changers” or aren’t “fundamentally disruptive,” then turn ones and zeroes into dollar signs, then, upon realizing their dreams, settle into a stifling and predictable suburban lifestyle; they raise children who can feel like failures if they don’t take full advantage of the advantages. At the main high school in Los Altos, there was a suicide and two copycats by accomplished students, all heading to the best colleges. Now I remember. When their peers were asked why, they responded: every time we accomplish something it feels mostly like a doorway to the next test.

  “What’s off-limits, Nat?”

  “Isaac. My family, such as it is.”

  “Okay, but. .”

  “No.”

  “We already talked about him.” Muttered.

  I assume she is referring to the idea that we, apparently, spoke about Isaac during the blur that was last night. No more-no more blur, no more offhand or concussion-fueled personal revelations, the information exchange now goes in only one direction. I’m laser-focused, I tell myself. I’m in total control of the only thing I’ve ever been halfway decent at, pulling up rocks people don’t want unearthed. My personal rocks will remain entrenched.

  “That’s him.” I gesture with a nod.

  “Isaac?”

  “Andrew Leviathan.”

  He sits at a table in the sun at a corner cafe. As we pass, he sips a drink and flips newspaper pages.

  I take a right on Cowper and pull into a parking spot.

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “No.” Faith’s arms are crossed. “Do you remember hearing about Timothy and the music triangle?”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. With a locked stare, she reminds me that Timothy is her nephew and that she and I had discussed him briefly last night.

  “I told you about the argument he got into with a music teacher who said Timmy wouldn’t stop hitting the triangle. He’s got Asperger’s. They know that. The teacher grabbed him by the arm and shook him.”

  “I remember.” I don’t, mostly.

  “To Timmy, that kind of discipline comes out of the blue. So I went to the school, to the teacher’s office and I took her by the arm to show her what it feels like to be physically handled when we don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “And so you’re not willing to wait fifteen minutes?”

  “I’m here to protect myself and my family, not because you’re a great lover. If you want me to keep waiting for you then you need to start telling me what’s going on in these mystery meetings.”

  “You’re after information.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’ll tell you about my meetings and you tell me more about Alan Parsons, and about whoever keeps calling you on your phone, and what is motivating you to stay so close to an investigation that seems to be making your life more dangerous, not less.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  I open the car door.

  “Nathaniel.” She forces me to catch her eye. “Even with a head wound, you are, in fact, a really great lover.”

  The main thing that this brunette is fucking is my head.

  In the half second between the moment that I reach Andrew Leviathan and he looks up to greet me, I realize I have absolutely no plan.

  “Nathaniel.” He seems unsurprised and to slightly recoil, the Palo Alto Daily News open on his table.

  “I figured you for an iPad.”

  “Too much of that stuff will burn out your brain. What happened to your eye?”

  “Fell down the stairs.”

  He blinks, furrows his brow, purses his lips-the pantheon of mildly disbelieving facial expressions. He wears a stark white-collared polo shirt that shows biceps I’m guessing were sculpted by a personal trainer.

  “You want to grab a coffee?”

  I shake my head. I pull out a chair, seeking conversational footing.

  “I was mugged. Maybe someone heard I won the journalism award and figured I was carrying a bunch of cash.”

  “Mugged? C’mon.”

  I tell him the truth; I got slugged in Chinatown.

  “Just a random attack?”

  “I’m being followed.”

  He looks at me, then around us. It’s a natural reaction, and I follow his gaze. Parked cars line the street. None of them a black Mercedes.

  “You’re being followed now?”

  I shake my head. “Earlier, last night. By someone who was at your awards luncheon.”

  He takes me in.

  I tell him there was a man sitting at one of the front tables at the lunch. He stuck in my memory because he had a shiny bald head and an interesting, elongated walk. I explain that I noticed him twice outside my office, and then he followed me in a black Mercedes.

  “How can I help, Nathaniel?” He must be used to getting all manner of weird questions from people who work for him and think he has the power to change their lives.

  I tell him that I’d like to get a list of attendees, particularly anyone whose name he doesn’t recognize.

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.” Before I can respond, he adds that he’ll look into it. I doub
t he’ll be much help, but it’s not really, or exclusively, what I’m looking for in this meeting. I’m here to look into his eyes.

  “Andrew, to your knowledge was there anyone at the lunch associated with ties to the Chinese government or any Chinese investor groups?”

  He tilts his head.

  “I ran into a guy the other day named Alan Parsons. He wanted me to look into a story about some interesting technology coming out of China. I wonder if it’s connected to the guy who is following me.”

  I’m mostly making this up or experimenting with logic. Andrew’s pupils constrict slightly, indecipherable.

  “So some guy that wants to see what reporting you’re up to follows you into an awards banquet? Why not wait outside?”

  “Maybe he heard they were serving salmon.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I’m not sure why I stepped on my own interrogation with a bad joke. Maybe I’m not asking a fair question, about how someone with ill intent could get into the lunch. After all, it was essentially open. It even served as easy hunting grounds for the rotund process server who chased me down to let me know I somehow owe back taxes.

  Andrew shrugs. “Can you tell me more about the story you’re doing?”

  “I wish.” I laugh, mostly genuinely. “This is one of those backward stories.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Someone seems really upset at the idea of me learning something. I’m working backward from that point. The theory being that the more someone doesn’t want you to know something, the potentially more interesting it is.”

  “But you don’t know what something you’re looking for?”

  I let his question linger, then hear a buzzing. From a pocket, Andrew extracts a BlackBerry, looks at the screen, pauses, gives his device the thousand-yard stare. Is he thinking how to respond or using the opportunity to strategize about our conversation? He taps something back.

  I have a sudden visceral reaction that I don’t want to overplay my hand, not yet. I’m deciding not to broach the issue of the dead girl and his charitable work with the schools, or Sandy Vello. I need some cards for future conversations with Andrew, and I’m feeling at this point there will be more. I’ve got him engaged, curious, even if he’s playing me too.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  I realize I’ve been floating, mind wandering, my gaze resting on a newspaper rack.

  “Dandy.”

  He nods, lips pursed. “Off the record. Okay?”

  I nod.

  “You ever have your arms lifted behind your back?”

  I shake my head.

  “The first night when I was in prison, in Romania, two beefcakes spent the night pulling my arms over my head, proving their mettle by trying to tear off the scrawny arms of a computer geek.”

  “That’s off the record?”

  “I pissed myself. I was delirious with pain.” He clears his throat. “I had this plan to break out by getting help from one of the guards by promising I’d hack into a bank and wire his family a hundred thousand dollars. But the problem was that I got so delirious I couldn’t tell which guard was most likely to go for it. The question was, Which guard would show pity on me and which would more likely turn me in for a slightly larger apartment with a river view?”

  “How’d you figure it out?”

  “You know how computers make decisions?”

  I shake my head.

  “Simple math. Probabilities. Sure, the fancy ones, like Deep Blue, mix in some algorithms that calculate, if you will, the unpredictability of a human behavior. They factor for chaos. But it’s still ultimately about the numbers. What is the best probability of effecting a certain outcome?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know how children make decisions?”

  I feel suddenly warm. Don’t talk, Nat, let him ramble.

  “Their frontal lobes aren’t developed yet. So they can’t make long-term calculations. They don’t think in terms of goals or priorities, certainly not numbers. They react to primitive emotions, like what interests them on a sensory level, or what seems like a safe or trustworthy situation.” He pauses. “Or person. So as I’m sitting in my own piss, I tried to set aside a lifetime trying to think like a supercomputer and tried to think like a baby. I asked myself, which man feels to me like he’d be the best dad? Which would feel most comfortable for me to turn to were I his child?”

  “And?”

  “And I chose the other guy. I figured the guy most likely to care for his family would take the apartment with the river view. The other guy would see the situation more coldly.”

  He doesn’t finish the story. History has shown he chose the right guy.

  He stands. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

  I let his allegory wash over me.

  “Especially if you’re delirious.” I give voice to his apparent lesson. “You think I’m delirious?”

  He smiles, all white teeth and trust, charisma incarnate, the friendly genius, the omnipotent, warning me that things don’t seem right with me.

  “You’re an investigative journalist. Isn’t delirium an occupational hazard?”

  He extends his hand. We shake, firm, but he avoids eye contact.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he says.

  Back at the car, I find a parking ticket on the windshield and Faith asleep in the passenger seat. A ribbon of brown hair cascades across her face, moving slightly with each exhale.

  I gently open the driver’s seat door; she stirs but doesn’t wake up. In the cup holder, I spy her cell phone. At this point, all’s fair; with one eye on sleeping beauty, I lift her phone to explore her recent communications.

  31

  I scroll through the recent calls. What stands out are the calls from “Carl_L,” including two last night after midnight. There also are two calls this morning from Mission Day School. If memory serves, it’s the school her nephew attends.

  Faith stirs. I lower the phone. She settles back down, and I lift the device again. I check her voice mails. She’s cleared all but one-from last night from “Carl_L.” I lower the phone’s volume, and hit play on the voice mail.

  A male voice says: “Stop playing around, Faith. You’re running out of time.” The caller hangs up.

  I play it again. I can’t gauge how stern the warning sounds. The hostility of the words, and their brevity, suggest something very threatening, but the voice sounds plaintive, even desperate.

  Faith stirs, and rolls toward me, curling into a quasi-fetal position. I feel an intense urge to close my eyes, put my head next to her, wake up on an island.

  What or who is haunting you, Faith? Who are you? Why are you running out of time? To do what?

  I put down her phone but leave it open. I reach for my phone and into it copy the number for “Carl_L” and hit send to initiate a call, then quickly end it. I close Faith’s phone.

  I reach into my wallet. I pull out the number for a different phone-the one I’d placed on the windshield of the Mercedes while it was parked in Chinatown.

  In the compartment on the driver’s-side door, I find some old earbuds among the compact discs. I plug them into my phone.

  I start the car, drive ten minutes up University Avenue until I wind myself back to Highway 280. At the on ramp, I pause at a yield sign and punch into my phone the number for Buzzard Bill. I roll onto the highway and hit send.

  The phone rings and rings. I end the call and hit redial.

  It barely rings once when someone picks up. A voice says: “How was Peet’s?”

  The cafe where I met Andrew.

  “Fine, but their French roast has too much aftertaste.”

  “You didn’t order coffee.”

  “You were there?”

  “We’re everywhere.”

  We.

  I look in the rearview mirror. I’m sloping up a hill just past the exit for Atherton, struck by how rural this area can suddenly become. City an
d suburb one second, endless stretches of Golden State the next. Here, peaceful terrain and powerful sports cars.

  I see only one car in the distance but can’t make it out. To the right of the highway, there’s a sharp drop-off that levels off, then widens into a meadow green with tall grass, and then the green terrain begins a gradual climb into the foothills. To my left, a steep ravine covered with bushy green heritage trees opens onto the northbound highway. Peaceful indeed, but if I had to make a quick maneuver on this stretch, I could easily torpedo off the edge.

  “Who are you?”

  “Like you want my name and stuff?”

  “Bill, right? I’ll settle for what you want and why you’re following me.”

  “I want you to make sure to get some rest.”

  “Buy me a pillow.”

  “You really have no idea, do you?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “You’re not seeing things clearly.”

  “Come out in the open and things will get clearer.”

  “Okay.”

  I check the rearview mirror. The car behind me is gaining. Faith sleeps. I’m nearing the crest of the hill. “Do you work with Alan Parsons?” With a toe tap, I push the car from sixty-five to seventy.

  “No. But I liked his style.”

  “Liked?”

  “As you know, he’s deceased.”

  I cruise into a shallow dip that curves right and then begins a long slope upward. The car in my rearview mirror is a sports car, maybe a Ferrari, exploding over the hill, then passing me with ease to my left.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But he discovered something. He stumbled onto some information. He wanted to give it to me, or maybe he gave it to me. It’s information you don’t want me to know or make public.”

  “It doesn’t take an award-winning journalist to figure that out.”

  “What does he want me to know?”

  “That’s your job. Not mine.”