Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  The look on Moss’s face hinted that he did not. “Gil Sedaka, Wendy’s chief of staff, asked if they could have another day. And he mentioned, of course, that you and she will need to talk to face-to-face, if it gets that far.”

  So the candidate and his potential nominee would need to meet, just the two of them, before entering into such a peculiar union. There would be questions. And a selling job. And promises, for what they were worth.

  “No shit!” Traynor said, but he was smiling when he said it. “Fair enough. But I need to know she’s a yes before I get in a room with her—even if I decide at the last minute not to offer it to her.”

  “Of course,” Moss said, knowing he would now have to lie to Upton’s people. Wendy would never agree to the job before sitting down with Traynor first.

  “So what’s the holdup, Stir? You think she’s playing me? You think there’s anything to these rumors? That she’s on the GOP short list, too?”

  “I’m still checking that,” Moss said.

  He’d picked up that rumor only yesterday. Moss’s sources on the hard right of the GOP were pretty poor now. There was a time, not so long ago, when a single phone call would have gotten him anything he needed to know from the GOP at this early stage in the race. Republican consultants he knew who would share information as Moss would with them, as a matter of professional courtesy. Not anymore. The hard right of the GOP barely spoke to the middle of its own party—let alone a Democrat.

  “I don’t think Wendy would play that game, playing your offer against another,” Moss said. “That’s not her.” Moss had begun to like Upton the more they vetted her.

  Traynor gave Moss a skeptical look. “Falling in love again, Marlene?” It was a line Traynor used a lot, mocking the old Marlene Dietrich song.

  “Yes, David.” Moss countered. “We’re all falling in love with her. That’s why you’re considering her.”

  “Fuck that!” Traynor said, trying to sound outraged at the thought that he would become emotionally attached. “I’m only interested if she can help me win. A pure, cold, cynical calculation. Only kind I make.”

  Moss smiled. He’d signed on with Traynor reluctantly at first, but he had come to think there was something extraordinary about the man. “I’m beginning to worry you’re not as good a liar as I thought you were,” Moss said.

  “Then we’re both screwed,” Traynor said. “Call her again, Stir. I mean tonight, and put some fucking heat into it. I want an answer by tomorrow morning. Find out what the dithering’s all about. I heard she’s hired Rena and Brooks to do a quick scrub on her. Which is a good sign, unless they found something.”

  Traynor had loosened his tie and kicked off his shoes and was settling into an armchair.

  “I need to know by tomorrow if she’s in,” he said. “So time’s up. And if she is, I want to meet with her on Sunday. That is, unless our scrub comes up with some red flag. And if she dithers longer, we pull the plug. Make sure she fucking knows that.”

  Moss nodded. They had done an initial scrub of Upton themselves, of course, and it had come up clean, but Traynor had insisted they keep digging. There really is no end to this business. You dig, and if you find nothing, you dig more. Traynor had his own computer digger, a man named Jimmy Collins, on it. Jimmy could lift just about any snotty email you ever sent or any embarrassing website you ever visited. Jimmy Collins was some serious shit, and he and Traynor had done a lot of business together, just the two of them, that no one knew about. He and Jimmy Collins liked to tell each other they might have to share a cell someday, but that was bullshit. Jimmy would take the rap. Any rap.

  “I don’t want Little Miss Virtue to turn out to be a closeted weirdo,” Traynor said. “In this campaign, I play the weirdo. She provides the virtue. Got that?”

  Moss was making a gesture with his fingers as if he were trying to remember who was the virtuous one and who was the weirdo.

  “Now get the hell out of here, both of you. I want to call my wife, and not have you two guys discover that she should be president instead of me.”

  Moss tried for a look that said he already knew that.

  Day Six

  Saturday

  February 29

  Forty-One

  Washington, D.C.

  Rena got back to Washington around 10 P.M. At the office he found everyone still working.

  They spent the rest of the night learning everything they could about the man behind Valerian Investments, Wilson Gerard, the man they now believed wanted to destroy Wendy Upton.

  Just after sunrise, too exhausted for more, everyone but Walt Smolonsky, still in Tucson, wandered to Bluestone Lane, a favorite West End breakfast place, all glass and natural light.

  Sitting at small tables pushed together, Randi Brooks read from the Grid on her laptop, telling the story of shadowy financier Wilson Gerard.

  “The most powerful person in America no one has ever heard of,” she began. She was summarizing in a single narrative what they all researched overnight in separate parts. “By return on investment, he is the most successful hedge fund investor and venture capitalist in the United States. Maybe the world.”

  Gerard, now fifty-nine, had grown up a bright square peg in the round hole of a struggling southern Illinois agricultural family, she explained. He was shy and intense, gifted at math and computers, and interested in philosophy. His parents worried about his making friends and having a normal life. They were relieved when he discovered competitive chess and later debate team.

  Then came an event that seemed even now to drive Gerard.

  His father, Paul, owned an agricultural company, Gerard Farm Services, which sold seed, feed, and farm equipment. While Wilson was in high school, Gerard Farm Services began to struggle. Paul Gerard fell behind on his debts, especially his taxes. Three months after seeing his son off to Stanford University on full scholarship, Paul Gerard walked down to the root cellar of their home, rigged a shotgun with a makeshift pulley, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  “In this one interview I found,” Ang Liu added when Brooks got to this part, “Gerard described himself as being devastated by his father’s suicide and wondered if his mother would survive. But he said he almost never went back to Illinois to see her again. He was too swept up, he said, by the new world of computing opening up to him. This was Stanford in the early 1980s.”

  Rena imagined a socially awkward boy, distant from his mother, confused by his father’s suicide, angered by the impact of government taxes and banks, finding his tribe at the dawn of the digital age in California, and throwing himself into it.

  “He stayed at Stanford for the next twelve years,” Brooks said, “getting his bachelor’s degree, Ph.D., and then an M.B.A. The Valley was just beginning to explode. He was a little younger than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, four years—not quite part of the generation of technology entrepreneurs who dropped out of college to begin to commercialize personal computing and the Internet.”

  “By his own accounting—at least back when he was still open about it,” added Liu, “he was more driven by money than Jobs and Gates were. He didn’t want to be a financial failure like his father. And he was interested in how tech would change the world more than he was in the tech itself.”

  Liu was beginning to open up more to the team and assert herself, Rena thought. He was pleased, and he knew Brooks was as well.

  Gerard’s first great business vision, Brooks explained, was to create computer algorithms that would eliminate human emotion in investing.

  “He was still finishing his Ph.D. He studied what happened in the first few moments of trading, when a stock began to move up or down. He saw discernible patterns in how stocks behaved in those first seconds, patterns he believed would become even more prevalent as more trading was computerized. He believed you could make reliable profits in those initial seconds if you executed rapid trades in and out of a stock. He called these microtransactions.”

  “I don’
t follow,” said Jonathan Robinson, who was a political guy, not a lawyer or a computer wizard.

  “If you executed such microtransactions often enough, in enough different stocks each day, you could make money without ever having to master the mysteries of any one company or any industry,” Brooks said. “Gerard thought most brokerage firms were bullshitting when they said their brokers understood a given industry or stock. But algorithms could predict the first few seconds of a stock if the initial trade was up or down—whatever the industry. And the risk of any one position in microtrading was so small—since you held that stock for such a short amount of time—it didn’t matter if occasionally you were wrong.”

  No one at the Wall Street firm where he worked was interested in his algorithm, Brooks said. His philosophy repudiated everything the brokerage firm stood for—the myth that it was their brokers’ expertise that mattered.

  Gerard soon left, taking with him three large clients who were intrigued by his idea, and founded Valerian Investments. It had no retail customers, a handful of brokers, and limited itself to accounts worth ten million dollars or more.

  “In ten years, between 1995 and 2005, Valerian came out of nowhere to become the most successful investment company in the United States as measured by return on its investments,” Brooks said. “By 2000, one hundred percent of its trading was algorithmic, more than half of that in these microtransactions, which lasted only a few seconds.” She scanned the Grid a bit more. “Christ on a bike. By 2016, Valerian was the largest investment firm in America measured by assets under control, and the most profitable by gross income. And I’d never heard of the fucking company until yesterday.”

  “Because it has no retail clients,” said Ellen Wiley, “no retail offices, and doesn’t advertise.”

  “Then he started using profits from the Valerian hedge fund to become a venture capitalist investing in start-ups,” Brooks said. “That’s when he got really rich. He named his venture capital firm GFS, in honor of his father’s failed agricultural supply company. Their first stake was in a something called E-Pay, which was trying to make Internet purchases easier.”

  “He’d become a radical libertarian by then,” Wiley added, recalling this part, which she had researched. “He was suspicious of government and wanted to establish a virtual currency that was untraceable by taxing authorities—a precurser to Bitcoin. But E-Pay was gaining momentum in late 2001, just when al-Qaeda attacked the United States. The notion of an e-commerce currency largely untraceable by government seemed a way to finance terrorism. His partners worried the government would shut them down. So they made E-Pay into a more conventional way of paying online—basically just a secure method linking retailers with customers’ bank accounts.”

  “When E-Pay was bought by the second-largest Web retailer in 2004, Gerard went from being a multimillionaire to a billionaire,” Brooks said. “And now he had two major businesses—an algorithmic microtrading firm on Wall Street and an online payment service. But his third investment would be his most successful.”

  A year after launching E-Pay, Gerard became the first outside investor in Y’all Post, the social media platform company that started on college campuses and was now the third-biggest company in the world. In exchange for a half million dollars, Gerard got a 5 percent stake. “When Y’all Post went public in 2007, Gerard’s investment was valued at four billion dollars, half of which he cashed out on the first day.”

  GFS since then had invested in a number of start-ups, some of them increasingly exotic. Two were dedicated to slowing the aging process, one of them based on changing people’s DNA, another on the idea people could live decades longer by ingesting a derivative of their own urine.

  Gerard was now worth fifty billion dollars and spent a good deal of his time on his biggest new investment, Brooks explained, something called Frontir Corp.

  “I researched this,” said Lupsa. “It sounds a little like 1984.”

  “You tell it, then,” Brooks said, pushing the laptop to him. “I’m not sure I follow it.”

  “Basically, it matches people’s online personal data with government information about them—along with data about their location and behavior.”

  “What the fuck?” said Robinson. “That’s Big Brother, from the big antigovernment libertarian!”

  “Pretty much. And Frontir has been winning contracts from government agencies and police forces to predict who might commit crimes or become terrorists.”

  “This is scary,” Robinson said.

  “And largely unknown. Still private. But growing rapidly. Some people think it could be more profitable than his investment firm.”

  “The more I learn about what is going on out there, the worse it is,” Robinson said. “And we’re the swamp? No, we’re the dupes.”

  Forty-Two

  “What about his politics?” asked Rena. He hadn’t spoken until now.

  “In his early days, he was something of a public philosopher on technology and society, writing long essays in obscure but respected libertarian-leaning blogs.” It was Brooks answering, but Ang Liu was nodding her head. “He gave long interviews and considered writing a book,” Brooks went on. “About ten years ago he became suddenly very secretive, perhaps to the point of paranoia.”

  “Around the time he got active trying to reshape American politics,” Ellen Wiley added from behind a mug of green tea.

  “What were those early ideas?” Rena asked.

  “I’d say radically libertarian. With some nuance,” said Brooks.

  Rena said, “What’s that mean?”

  “When he got to college, he believed deeply in the idea of the individual as supreme, strongly influenced by the writer Ayn Rand. He has a first edition of Atlas Shrugged in a display case in his living room.”

  Robinson was rolling his eyes. “Great, a fascist with a superman complex.”

  Wiley was holding her hands out so Brooks might pass the laptop over. “This was the part I was researching.” Taking the computer, she began to summarize. “His ideas shifted some. In college, he was deeply influenced by a philosophy professor named Raoul Picard, who developed a theory he called Mass Social Influence. Picard’s theory is that people are deeply socialized by group pressures. This explains things like fashion trends, changes in hairstyles, why we buy cars that all look alike—most marketing and the formation of markets and consumer psychology. It was this realization of the power of mass social influence, Wilson Gerard wrote before he became so reclusive, that made him believe social media platforms like Y’all Post, where people want to “be connected,” had a big future in the market. Unlike his fellow Y’all Post board members, Gerard was not idealistic about what this would bring about in the world. He thought the social benefit of Y’all Post would be trivial. He just thought it would be a huge success financially and thus a major platform for collecting data and selling advertising.”

  The food had come now, and they were making their way through bacon and eggs, pancakes and waffles. Rena, always careful, was eating oatmeal. Wiley tried to decipher Gerard’s political philosophy.

  “After he stopped writing about his ideas, he became harder to track. But he let his hair down a bit in 2010, in one last essay. He talked about the two great dialectics in Western society. One is a tension between freedom and collectivism. He sees this playing out as a struggle between technology on one side and the political restrictions in the form of government regulations on the other. Society wants to control what progress technology can make. So we have speed limits and financial regulations and the like.”

  The group was quiet.

  “The second great tension he sees is between the individual and the mass. Most great things happen, Gerard believes, when individuals are driven to change the world through ideas, visions, and technology, and are left alone. At the same time, people, by their nature, want to conform, want to be part of society, of groups, want the same cars their friends have and granite countertops and other things that Ge
rard says have no real meaning. But Gerard recognizes the power of this socialization. It’s what powers markets and the economy.”

  “I still don’t understand his politics,” Robinson said.

  “There isn’t a lot about politics per se, at least not on the record,” said Wiley. “We really had to stitch this together from fragments. But the fragments form a pattern.” She took a small bite of scrambled egg and swallowed before going on. “He told one interviewer, for a fairly obscure publication called Libertarian Review, that he thinks society is upside down.”

  “How?” asked Rena.

  “Government helps weak people get strong and makes strong people weaker by taking their money away and inhibiting their creativity. He said he understood why that occurred. He attributed it to mass psychology and socialization—one of the great forces in society. But he thinks that mass psychology inhibits society by inhibiting creativity. That’s why he thinks society is upside down.”

  “What?” said Robinson. “I don’t think I follow this.”

  “An enlightened society would recognize it was better to unleash the creativity of the few for the betterment of the many. Self-interest properly understood would recognize the benefit of what Gerard called ‘unfettered capitalism.’ He called his own philosophy ‘economic libertarianism.’”

  “Simply put,” Wiley said, “it means leave the rich alone so they can be entrepreneurs. Eventually the rest of us will benefit. Not limited government. Almost no government at all. Basically, limit government to public safety.”

  Wiley handed the laptop back to Brooks. “He was extremely vocal when he was young,” she said. “Then he became enraged that people were misunderstanding him and mocking him.”

  Brooks scanned further: “After 2005, he no longer gave interviews or speeches or wrote anything. There are mostly bits in articles quoting people who know him or worked with him. One longtime colleague said Gerard argued that blacks in America were better off before the civil rights bill in the 1960s, which created a culture of dependence among African Americans and led to drugs and urban ghettos.”