But that morning, there had been a break-in at Building 1 — the highest-security spot on Anahata’s campus — prompting Gregor to dash out of the management meeting and make a beeline for the security office.
Footage from three a.m. showed a man dressed entirely in black sneaking across the Building 1 parking lot, hovering on tiptoe like a thuggish ballerina. He jumped behind a tree, rolled through the grass, and ended up at the building’s side entrance, where he pulled out an Anahata badge that had likely been swiped from a negligent engineer.
The man again raised the stolen badge to the access control reader, and for a second, the camera caught a shot of his face. He was Caucasian but looked more like a zebra, with black zigzags painted across his face.
Inside, he went past the molecular lab, the welding shop, the hard-hat zone, and the physical and intangible infrastructure teams, and then stopped in front of another office.
The man darted his flashlight around the room, splashing the walls with light. It was difficult to make out what he was doing, but from the shadows it seemed he had stopped in front of a desk and was pulling something out of his bag. The flashlight swung again. Suddenly, the scene was illuminated: The man was plugging a computer into a wall outlet.
“Galt!” Gregor gasped. This was nothing less than corporate espionage. The thief was going to plant something — maybe surveillance equipment or tampered data — then use it to gain access to all of Anahata’s network.
Then the thief sat down and put his feet up on the desk.
“Wait…what is he doing?” asked Gregor, crouching to put himself at eye level with the screen.
“Sir, after watching this many times, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is picking his nose,” said one of the guards, freezing the tape for a moment to show the faint outline of a finger moving toward the man’s face.
“What?” Gregor drew even closer, his face now just inches from the screen. He signaled to the guard to continue the footage.
The thief jumped up from the chair and turned off his flashlight. Within thirty seconds, he had crept out the back exit, barrel-rolled across the parking lot, unlocked a car, and driven off. One of the guards rewound the footage and froze it on the last full shot of the man’s face, little more than a black-and-white blur.
Although the security team had already watched the tape thirty times that morning, their collective adrenaline rose as they watched Gregor’s face for a reaction. They hadn’t seen this much excitement since an engineer’s pet boa had gotten loose on campus the previous month.
“Whose badge did he use to break in?” Gregor said finally.
The security head double-checked a pad of paper on the desk. “Someone named Roni Herman, who works in Building 7. As of yesterday, Roni Herman’s badge was cleared for access to Building 1. The perpetrator was probably tracking Roni the whole time, somehow got hold of his badge, and then got access to both buildings. This was probably the result of months of tracking and shadowing his movements. Should we call the police?”
Gregor stared at the face frozen on the screen, a black zigzag casting a lightning bolt from the man’s forehead to his neck. “Idiot,” he muttered, staring at Roni’s face on the screen.
Gregor stood.
“Idiots,” he said loudly, looking at the security team. “There is no need to call anyone.”
He turned on his heel and clomped out the door.
The security team looked at each other and shrugged.
“Man, I will never understand engineers,” said one, shaking his head before switching his attention to the cameras trained on the well-endowed girls in the customer support department.
N iels began each day with a run. The Northern California air was just crisp enough to feel clean and pure, and the occasional headwind produced a surmountable challenge — the kind of easy and achievable goal-setting that Niels liked for warming up to his workday. He followed his workout with a long shower, the rainforest setting gently splattering purified water on his head while a speaker piped in a soothing recording of a woman’s voice appraising each inch of his body.
Your muscles are so big.
Your abs are very flat.
Your Adam’s apple is prominent but tasteful.
But that morning, Niels could focus only on Gregor Guntlag. The overly German German had hated him since day one and seemed intent on turning Bobby against him.
Bobby and Gregor were both nutjobs as far as Niels was concerned, but he was used to working with crazies. Fifteen years of working in the Valley and he had never worked for a CEO or founder who wasn’t a sociopath or narcissist. They thought the world’s problems existed in part to keep them intellectually stimulated, and that all those problems — malaria, corruption, congressional deadlock, death, you name it — could be solved by technologists. Their lack of focus was confused for genius. One moment they would be asking the entire company to dramatically change course, and the next moment they’d be giving equal attention to the color of the lampshades in the lobby. And despite their staunch atheism, they all believed their success was somehow mythically predestined.
It was an absurd worldview, but one that Niels admired for its selfishness. Managing and manipulating these egomaniacs was an art he felt he had perfected.
With persistence and patience, Niels had worked on Bobby for six years, helping him understand that Anahata needed money to be successful and that Niels was the best lever he had to produce it in large quantities. As a result, Bobby generally left him alone. Gregor, on the other hand, had been less susceptible to Niels’ charm. He did everything he could to sabotage Niels, always playing the contrarian in any management meeting and sending out his engineering lackeys to turn off a sales production task here and there. It was nothing sufficiently significant to warrant an outcry to Bobby, but just enough to annoy Niels and make clear that Gregor and his foot soldiers were behind the job.
So Niels was surprised by the peace offering that had appeared the previous night in the form of a blue chat bubble on his phone — a chat message asking Gregor to come over to “work things out and bury the hatchet.”
It was a shocking olive branch from Anahata’s head engineer, and in retrospect, Niels realized he should have taken a screenshot of their exchange. Unfortunately, since Anahata chats were not stored (the result of Gregor and Bobby’s joint paranoia about government surveillance), this historic exchange of civilities would have no record.
After an evening spent trying to discern Gregor’s motives, Niels had finally replied that, yes, of course he’d be happy to talk. But the whole thing smelled fishy. Perhaps Gregor wanted something that belonged to sales. If that was the case, it meant that Niels had already achieved Master Negotiator Rule #1: Always have the upper hand. (Viewing even the most casual encounters as an opportunity for personal gain was key to Niel’s life philosophy. An ex-girlfriend had once accused him of dealing with their relationship like a business negotiation. Niels said he didn’t understand how she could possibly think that anything in life was not a negotiation. He came away triumphant, although the woman did break up with him shortly thereafter.)
Niels was confident he could work the meeting to his advantage. In fact, this could be the opening he needed to get Gregor to agree to put ads on Moodify bracelets.
In any other company, the management team would have salivated over the Moodify bracelets, with one billion dollars in projected profit in the first year alone. But not Gregor Guntlag, whose perennial argument against anything Niels wanted was that it wouldn’t be good for Anahata users. Niels believed that not giving people advertisements was bad. If they didn’t know something existed, how could they know they needed it? Only advertising could tell people what they needed to need.
Typically, Bobby hadn’t even listened to the discussion. He caught just the tail end of Gregor’s rebuttal and seemed to defer the decision indefinitely with a wave of his hands. If you asked Niels, Bobby gave his head engineer far
too much rope. Gregor was holding the company back from billions of additional revenue. And what did he do to make up for it? As far as Niels could tell, Gregor was simply there to execute Bobby’s big ideas. All of Gregor’s own projects had been massive failures. He was good at implementation but had no vision of his own.
Niels stepped out of the shower and surveyed himself in the bathroom mirror. He was forty-two but didn’t show a single gray hair or wrinkle. By almost any measure, he was the picture of excellence in aging. He gave a quick, indulgent flex of his muscle and a flash of bleached teeth. He remembered that the Anahata employee he banged a few weeks back had commented on his nice smile. He racked his brain for a split second, trying to remember her name. She was that sexy hippie receptionist who kept asking him for career advice as he tried to take her clothes off. Janine. Jane. Jennie. It didn’t matter. It was probably a bit stupid to hit on someone who worked at Anahata, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. He always could have her fired if things got uncomfortable. So far, he hadn’t even run into her on campus.
Niels threw on his favorite Prada slacks — the ones he wore to close a deal — and finished getting dressed for work. He took a final look in the mirror and flashed his teeth. Never underestimate the power of a killer grin.
M aster Negotiator Rule #36: Arriving a few minutes late to a meeting communicates dominance. You will wait for me. Punctuality is for the meek.
And so, despite having changed his outfit three times — should he go business casual? slouchy engineer? weekend triathlete? — then having spent two hours circling Gregor’s neighborhood, Niels made sure not to appear at Gregor’s doorstep even a minute early.
Three minutes after the appointed time, Niels arrived at the address and did a double take. He checked the house number again: 414 Tuscany Drive. This was it.
Before him was an immense silver gate — the kind of gate that only the truly rich, and truly paranoid, possessed.
Niels pushed a button on the intercom. Someone picked up, but instead of a “hello” there was simply a buzzing sound, followed by the slow opening of the gate, revealing a long driveway abutted by row after row of towering pines.
On some level, it made sense to Niels that Gregor would live in the wealthiest neighborhood in Atherton, itself the wealthiest city in the Valley. He was, after all, one of the earliest employees at Anahata and had made billions of dollars when the company went public. But Gregor was also the man who wore faded decades-old shirts every day, ate the same bland lentils at every lunch, and drove a beat-up Jeep to work. Niels had assumed he’d eschew a fancy house and live in austerity in a small condo in crime-ridden East Palo Alto, or perhaps an inconspicuous cottage in the slightly smelly, middle-class part of Mountain View. Anything but the estate that was emerging before Niels’ eyes — a sprawling mansion the style of which Niels could only describe as nouveau-chateau, and whose inhabitants Niels would ordinarily assume to be a transplanted Texas blonde and her bejeweled poodle.
The house was ostentation at its American best, its climbing spires and ornate Mediterranean palacio flourishes the odd manifestation of new money’s dream of old Europe. At the end of the driveway was a large marble fountain — six white swans spouting water onto a central lily pad. Rising up behind the fountain was a large marble staircase that led to the front door. Two long, peach-colored wings branched out from the entrance, each ending in a tall, Rapunzel-like tower.
Gregor was waiting for him at the top of the marble steps, dressed in his typical uniform of white T-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots. In his hand he held two beers, one of which was immediately thrust at Niels, as if Gregor was following a textbook instruction on how to relate to American men. The beer was warm, likely pulled from the pantry just minutes before. Even if this was all just a plot to get something out of him, at least the guy was making an effort. And in any case, it was kind of fun to witness Gregor’s visible discomfort in his role as host.
If the garish exterior of Gregor’s palace had thrown Niels’ preconceptions, the interior only reaffirmed them. Once inside, Niels could see nothing in the house beyond white walls and a single overhead light in each room. The few windows in existence were so high up from the floor that they reminded Niels of a cathedral…or a prison. There was no artwork, no photographs, no sign of a woman, pet, plant, or any possible sign of life.
“You’re not one for decorating, are you?” said Niels, turning to Gregor with a smile designed to communicate friendliness.
“I like simplicity,” Gregor said. “I don’t really like…things.” The word lingered in the air between them.
“Except for an enormous house,” Niels smirked.
“I only bought a large house so as to have a strong fortress in the event of an anthropogenic risk,” Gregor replied.
“An anthropo-what?”
“Hostile artificial intelligence, nuclear holocaust, fossil energy exhaustion, the collapse of everything.”
“Ha ha…oh…”
Niels stifled his laugh; Gregor wasn’t kidding. The engineer’s face was as smooth as his walls, giving up nothing. He seemed to be staring at an imaginary spot just past Niels’ shoulder, avoiding eye contact.
“You like wine,” Gregor said.
“I do.”
“Fischer said you took him on a wine tasting in Napa a few years ago.”
“I didn’t know you liked wine,” Niels said. “I would’ve invited you along.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “And if you had, I would have said no. We aren’t friends.”
Niels coughed. Being a salesman, he wasn’t used to such direct displays of honesty.
Gregor’s eyes briefly flicked away from the wall, settling on Niels’ shoulders. “Do you want to see my wine cellar?”
Gregor led him down a white hall and through a massive, empty kitchen, at the far end of which was a wide, floor-to-ceiling steel door. Gregor pushed a button, and the door slowly slid into the wall, revealing a flight of stairs leading into darkness. In the seconds before their descent, Niels recalled an article he once read in a tech magazine, in which a successful Valley engineer kept a dungeon underneath his home, holding secret orgies while his nuclear family, clothed in matching pastel cottons, lived happily and unknowingly in the rooms upstairs.
But when Gregor turned on the lights, the illuminated space below revealed nothing more than a simple wine cellar, with row after row of bottle racks, and in the center, two chairs and a wooden table. Atop the table was a decanter filled with wine, and next to it, an empty bottle.
Instead of a toast, Gregor spent thirty minutes detailing each wine purchase in length: how much it had cost, what was said about the vintage, and when he was planning to open a particular bottle. He had built an elaborate wine management system that scanned the bottle’s label, then input each detail — including age, composition, and position in the wine cellar — into an algorithm that determined the ideal “drink date.” When the date approached, Gregor was sent a notification at two-week, one-week, day-of, and then hourly intervals, alerting him of the impending deadline.
“One time I received a notification while on a course of antibiotics,” said Gregor, leaning in just slightly and lowering his voice. “I had this bottle I needed to drink and was worried it was going to go bad. I had to save it until I was well again. It was very upsetting.”
“You don’t have to drink the bottle right that very same day. It’s not like milk.”
“But then I would get no benefit from such a complex system,” Gregor said.
He grabbed the bottle of wine from the wooden table and passed it to Niels, who let out a low whistle of appreciation. It was a Chateau Margaux — the holy grail of red wine. Niels couldn’t help but grin. He was going to crush his enemy at the negotiating table while trying one of the world’s most highly regarded wines.
Niels believed that learning to appreciate wine was an apprenticeship akin to golf — a
t first difficult to acquire, but then indispensable for business and generally agreeable as a pastime. And he had, in fact, come to love the taste of it. Chateau Margaux was a real bragging right, and he had never held its deep ruby on his tongue.
Niels sat down on an uncomfortable wooden chair. One of the spindles was split in the middle, and the raw edge pushed into his spine. He suspected Gregor had never been inside a home furnishings store in his life, that he didn’t see the inconsistency in offering up one of the world’s most expensive wines in such a dank and uncomfortable setting. For all his engineering brilliance, Gregor would never even have made it past the sales team’s entry-level “Hospitality & Negotiation” training course.
Gregor poured the wine from the decanter and handed a glass to Niels. The men studied the wine and took in the aroma, each eying the other over his glass.
But the deep tones of the Chateau Margaux transformed them. Niels loosened his tie, Gregor slouched just slightly in his chair. It was an exceptional wine. And after they took their first sip, Niels had the sudden realization that this was the first nondisagreeable experience the two had shared since Niels joined Anahata six years earlier. Gregor even tried to offer a slight smile, pushing it onto his face as though it were a heavy wooden beam. But at least he was trying.
Niels did not say a word — Master Negotiator Rule #33: Approach silence like a battlefield. He who speaks first shows his hand.
Niels sipped his wine slowly but decisively. He imagined his Adam’s apple bulging then receding, like a heaving warrior ready to break through enemy lines. A warrior with rippling abs and a weathered loincloth that barely covered his forceful manhood. He could crush this wine glass with just a slight clenching of his fingers. It would shatter at his feet, taking with it all of Gregor’s dreams and —
“Do you read any philosophy?” Gregor asked.
The Big Disruption Page 10
