Читать книгу Shimmer - Eric Barnes - Страница 6

At some point it would become clear that I was not well. The people who would see it first, they saw it and had no reason to care. The people who should have seen it next, they were in no state to notice. Yet somewhere, at some point, I would see it myself. Probably I could have seen it all along. But then, back then, I was not seeing anything very clearly at all.

I was Robbie Case, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and largest single shareholder of Core Communications, a new world company that had, in just thirty-six months, become the de facto highway for the nation’s critical financial information. Two-thirds of U.S. mortgage lenders, half of the insurance companies and three-quarters of the nation’s pension-processing centers passed information over the Core network. Aerospace, automotive, defense industries—all used our network to transfer their most important information.

And, as our salespeople were trained to say at this point in their pitch—pausing carefully, smiling slightly, leaning forward in their chairs as they lowered their voices just a bit—“Keep in mind that the statistics I’ve just given you are, already, a few hours old.”

Maybe, looking back, it was our offhand arrogance that I regret most.

We were not techies. We employed no geeks. Instead we were the work-obsessed.

Work has meaning. The money is secondary. Being here I find a kind of personal joy.

At least that’s what it felt like at Core. Because by the year 2007, Core had turned the tediously complex, the horribly mundane, the deathly boring into something so technically cutting-edge and so financially lucrative that potential new employees had to enter a lottery to be considered for a job. The press of all shapes and sizes had to wait—for months at a time—before they had the chance to do an “insider” story on us. And investors and banks undercut each other in the most inappropriate ways for a chance to place ever larger amounts of money with Core.

“We could announce the creation of electricity,” Whitley had once said to me, “and the investors would line up to hand us their cash.”

My father had founded this company as the Mainframe Supply Center Inc. in 1970. Operating from a small office in Northern California, he soon built it into a $26 million reseller of hardware supplies for mainframe computer users. “This company,” he had said to me when I was in my twenties, “is a small but highly profitable, third-party distributor of metal widgets and plastic doohickeys for a niche market of the computing industry.”

I mouthed the word doohickeys. I pictured the word widgets. Rarely had I heard my father use a silly word. And never had he used one in conjunction with his company.

He smiled and nodded back, mouthing doohickeys in sync with me. “It is no more or less than that,” he said.

Then, in 2004, just a few months after my father died and left the company to me, I bought into an invention. A system, really, of hardware and software and satellite uplinks and data protocols that allowed mainframe computers around the world to transfer information to other mainframes, or any other kind of computer, at heretofore unimaginable speeds. Our product, known simply as a Blue Box, did something that had previously existed only as theory and speculation—by pulling information from the mainframes at unthinkable speeds, the Blue Box freed up the mainframes to do, quite simply, even more work. It meant that companies faced with spending millions of dollars on mainframes and related servers could instead free up existing machines by spending just hundreds of thousands on Blue Boxes. The financial benefits were obvious, the productivity gains tremendous.

And, just as appealing to the freakishly obstinate tech people who inevitably had to agree to the use of our system, the Blue Box represented the impossible fulfillment of a long-standing, seemingly unattainable goal. Since the 1970s, companies, universities, independent entrepreneurs—all had been trying to do what we’d done. All had sought to pull information from mainframes at the speeds we’d attained. And all of them had failed.

The process had become known as drawing blood from a mainframe.

Once we introduced our system, I immediately refocused our handful of employees onto developing and marketing Blue Boxes worldwide. We began to sign up our first clients. New customers called us before we could call them. We increased our prices. Investors began to knock on the door of our New York office. We began to buy up those mainframe networking companies that we did not put out of business. We could not hire employees fast enough to support the people signing up for our service. We went public in a blur of up-beat newspaper articles and extended cable news features. We increased our customer base by a factor of ten. Then twenty.

Then thirty.

Then forty.

We did it all in three years.

And now, on that same Monday morning when I’d been floating out my office window, skimming across the rooftops of the cold Manhattan buildings around me, now Core was just ten weeks from hitting a record $21 billion in sales. We were four weeks from acquiring our one hundredth company. We were two days from hiring our five thousandth employee.

It seemed to every observer that we could not be stopped.

When he’d started the company, my father hadn’t ever set a goal of becoming rich. He had become quite wealthy nonetheless, and for him that had been a very nice benefit of doing good work, of satisfying his clients, of building a valued reputation in his industry.

At some point, though, the desire to make money for its own sake did overtake Core.

Except that, three years later, I still wasn’t sure if it was money that had ultimately driven my decisions. Because I’d spent almost none of the money I’d made. A near billionaire without second homes, sports teams, not even a car.

And so maybe it was something else that overtook me. A desire to grow, or face challenges, or find prominence.

Maybe.

There were two spreadsheets capturing the future of this company. One was a financial model showing a near unlimited growth in revenue, a moderate rise in overhead and expenses, a steadily increasing profit margin. Three hundred and ninety-two pages in length, it was the model I’d given to the first group of investors three years earlier. And it was the blueprint that still guided our daily operations and massive growth.

The other spreadsheet I kept hidden, buried deep in a private folder on the hard drive of my computer. It was password protected. It was key encrypted. It was filled with forty pages of fairly meaningless numbers—some personal expenses, a handful of stock investments. But this same file held a hidden, eight-hundred-page spreadsheet. And in those eight hundred pages were the details of the collapse I’d set in motion. There were the descriptions of secret networking, the records of borrowed satellite time, connections between shadow companies funneling money among offshore accounts, locations of hundreds of mainframes and servers hidden quite publicly in buildings and warehouses worldwide. There were procedures showing how no one’s job was what it seemed to be, each employee helping with the spreading of secrets—and each employee unaware of what he or she was really doing. System administrators performing a routine installation on a client’s mainframe in Tulsa were in fact connecting the client to secret mainframes in Budapest or Malaysia. Accountants approving the budgets of a newly acquired production facility were in fact hiding the costs of leased satellite time. Marketing assistants hyping the effectiveness of the great Core Blue Boxes were in fact distracting everyone—the clients, the shareholders, the stock analysts, and the employees themselves—from the true failings of our product.

Maybe most important of all, in laying out the details of a hidden operation only I understood, the spreadsheet also showed how the original model used to launch Core Communications had not just been incorrect, it hadn’t simply been a grand and complicated mistake. Instead the hidden document showed how the original spreadsheet and the company it described had, from the beginning, formed an extremely intricate, carefully crafted lie.

The system would fail. I’d known it from the beginning.

I didn’t know when it would happen. And so all I could do, every day, every night, was work to keep the company alive.

Monday at nine, and the office was in motion. Chairs being rolled into conference rooms for overcrowded staff meetings, voices calling out across walkways and workstation walls, people running down open stairways as the white light from windows all around us shifted from floor to wall to desk to door.

And I was moving too. From the senior staff meeting that had started my day, to the list of e-mails building up on my computer, to a financial overview meeting in a conference room on the nineteenth floor. Walking now with Cliff beside me, from the finance meeting back to my office, crossing through Accounting, and my movement seemed to slow amid the long steel rows of low black file cabinets.

Cliff held three checks totaling over $8 million. In his other hand, he held a large donut covered in an unnaturally blue frosting.

I nodded toward the checks. “Don’t we have proper procedures for handling checks such as those?” I asked him.

“Actually,” he said, smiling as he delicately shook loose frosting from the donut, quietly leading to a punch line we both knew he’d deliver, “this is the proper procedure.”

I tapped on a file cabinet. We turned down another aisle.

Core operated from a building that had long been used by a series of quasi-legal sweatshops. The ceilings were high, the walls were filled with tall, multipaned windows, black ceiling fans and silver air-conditioning ducts hung high over everyone’s heads. Every floor and room was lit by a mix of floor lamps, desk lamps, and track lights hanging among the exposed ducts and spinning fans. All of it combined with the light from the multipaned windows to cast shadows and streaks of white across the desks, workstations, open meeting spaces and wide walkways covering every floor of the building, the light itself frequently caught in the steel and glass partitions separating rooms and work areas, so that now, as I walked with Cliff, even the stoic and conservative white-shirted CPAs spread around us in Accounting were cast in an almost brooding, anxious light.

It was all I could do to not start floating again.

“And maybe,” Cliff started to say, pausing to swallow the last bite of his donut, stopping in a hallway before turning away from me toward his office. “Maybe,” he said slowly, his lips tinged blackish blue from the donut’s smooth frosting, “what I really meant was a Caesar salad.”

Cliff was a man of TV trivia and detailed balance sheets, the forty-year-old arts major with a gift for numbers and finance. Even for me, this fed into the uncertainty over which food Cliff really was. Because Cliff was without question the salad among us, but exactly what kind of salad might never be determined.

To my office and the two hundred e-mails waiting from the morning. Sixteen voice mails. Ten handwritten messages taken by my assistant. The messages in all their forms came from bankers, lawyers, outside sales representatives who’d found their way up to me, analysts from six large mutual funds in Boston and New York, employees from all departments and levels of the company, my life insurance agent, my dry cleaner, a man trying to sell me long distance for my home. It was a twisting kaleidoscope of requests, comments, complaints and chatter.

Twenty minutes and I’d responded to or deleted half of the messages. Quick conversations and short e-mails.

Yes.

Today.

Let me find out.

Talk to Julie, but sounds fine to me.

Unfortunately, no. Which I hate to say. But that’s my only conclusion.

Thanks, but no.

Thanks, but no.

It’s a tax issue.

He’s got it wrong.

Great news.

Yes.

If you think so, then yes.

Unreal.

No.

No.

Thanks, but no.

Nine-thirty, and I was passing through meetings between teams from R&D, Strategic Planning, Technical Development, Production, Operations, Customer Service and Tech Support. Most Mondays I made brief, unannounced appearances at a handful of staff meetings. I nodded and smiled at group VPs, section managers, entry-level employees still learning to use their voice mail. I shook hands. I dispensed Hello s. I asked for the names of the many people I had never met. I told them to go about their business as usual, leaning against a high window or a green glass wall, sometimes sitting down in a corner next to a group of latecomers to the meeting, knowing I needed to sit silent, motionless, fading from the minds of the attendees around me, and hopefully they’d begin to sit back in their chairs or stand up to talk as if I weren’t there, some of them flicking bits of paper at their neighbors, others doodling in their planners or swearing at the person writing too small on the whiteboard, and I watched as the group followed a sometimes well-designed, sometimes undefined path toward decision, compromise, acquiescence and assent.

“If the Germans can come through, then yes,” said a financial analyst in one meeting.

“Not that I’m skeptical, but can we see it on a Pert chart?” said a programmer in another.

“Ergo, I give to you six months of research,” said a marketing assistant.

“Beneath my clothing, I, like you, am naked,” said a trainer from Tech Support.

This was not a normal company.

By eleven A.M., two business reporters were following me across the sixteenth floor. It was a puff-piece interview arranged by our Public Relations department, which had spent the last three years pitting the business papers against TV, cable against the networks and the networks against the newsmagazines in order to keep the name of Core Communications and Robbie Case, its poster-boy CEO, in every possible media outlet.

“This kind of growth is what we always said we wanted,” I told one of the reporters as we walked down a hall toward Strategic Planning, where I would pass them back to our PR group. “Still, anyone who tells you they’re ready for this is, I think, lying.”

It was one of my standard lines.

“By your saying that,” one reporter asked, “couldn’t you drive your stock price down three, four, even five dollars?”

I shrugged. I smiled slightly at him. “But I’ve got other things to tell you that will drive it up by ten.”

Who is this person I have become?

Passing through the home of one of the main marketing groups, the reporters scribbling eagerly as they heard hip-hop music rolling across the tops of workstation walls. These were the product development people, ad-agency refugees now creating taglines and branding campaigns not just for our famed Blue Boxes but also for a wide range of new products and services unrelated to Blue Boxes. Whitley in black in the center of a group of eight, for a moment dancing with her hands toward the ceiling, silver bracelet on each wrist caught for a second in the light, her black suit coat unbuttoned, her still face now smiling as her sharp hair fell to the sides, the group around her laughing in sudden surprise, clapping for the boss who in that motion had revealed herself as a onetime club kid turned Chief Operating Officer.

“Stop that dancing,” I said loudly, standing back from the group, the appropriately benign comments of the passing CEO, a scene tailored on the fly to the trailing business press.

“No rock and roll,” Whitley yelled back. “No swear words. No long hair. No smoking. No laughing. No thinking. No fun.”

Leaving the reporters with one of Whitley’s press people.

Walking again, usually with a group, rarely alone—informal meetings made faster if we did not sit down. Walking and discussing any range of issues as we passed through the divisions of the company, the meeting participants sometimes scheduling their walks with me ahead of time, sometimes intercepting me in stairways or elevators or tracking me down on my cell phone, and all of it was okay if we did not stop, if we kept walking, talking fast, never bogging down in one issue, all of this time—my time of walking and meeting—all of it scheduled, in advance and down to the minute, by my assistant on twenty.

Always in my life as CEO of Core Communications, there was merely the appearance of spontaneity.

Picking up Julie for a discussion of production issues at two European facilities.

Passing people in suits, people in jeans, people in shirts that crossed the line from earth-tone casual to weekend camouflage.

Seeing bright computer monitors reflecting off glass walls and young faces.

Glancing into a makeshift bunkhouse in the middle of fifteen, a onetime conference room now lined with small beds and padded cots, all used for late-day naps or overnight stays.

Reading a list of the animal names we gave to our computers, the tree names we used for our servers, the former republics, capitals and other landmarks of the Soviet empire that we gave to our many conference rooms.

There was an overriding if obscure logic to our company, one formed so chaotically out of the disparate rhythms of so many different people.

One hundred new e-mails by noon.

Four women entering a conference room named Turkmenistan, and all of them wearing green.

Walking again, now talking with Cliff as we passed through a new, still uninhabited area, one of the building’s recently built-out sections that were collectively known as the Unoccupied Territories. Turning a corner and expecting to find people but only seeing more empty desks, empty chairs, the clean delineation of steel and glass partitions. All of it untouched, all of it quiet, all of it ready for the next wave of workers. Most Unoccupied Territories sat unused for just a few weeks. But sometimes, if we misjudged the scope or type of the next big staffing need, the areas remained unassigned for as much as two or three months, months when the spaces would be used as wrestling death pits for high-strung programmers, as sleeping quarters for accountants trying to close the quarterly financials, as extra workspace for squatters from all areas of the company, all of them needing more room.

Into a scheduled lunch meeting where I reviewed reports on the roll-out of a wide range of new products and services, each meant to broaden our product lines, expand our revenue base and diminish our dependence on sales of Blue Boxes. Already we sold over a hundred products and services in addition to the Blue Boxes. Together they accounted for less than two percent of company sales. Certainly not enough revenue to support the current operations and growth of Core Communications. Barely enough to cover the R&D money we continued to put into other new ideas.

And nowhere near enough money to head off the bankruptcy I had forecast on the spreadsheet model hidden on my computer.

But I kept putting money into new products. New services. Anything that helped keep the company afloat.

Because always it was there, the need to find a way.

Somehow, Robbie. Somehow. Keep the company alive.

Whitley called me on my cell phone as I crossed fifteen with two VPs from Japan. “Come up to seventeen,” she said rapidly, her voice bursting with the poorly restrained exuberance of an overachieving child. “Security’s about to bust a rogue section in Marketing.”

I made my way to seventeen just in time, finding Whitley standing at the edge of a workgroup of almost twenty desks, workstations and shared meeting spaces. The two of us were semihidden from the group, standing behind a steel partition with a manager from Corporate Security. Everything in the group seemed normal—the noise of keyboards, phones and talking coworkers rising and falling beneath the lights all around us. There did not appear to be a security problem, let alone a security action in progress. But then I noticed the odd number of white-shirted messengers and office services assistants who were wandering along various walkways near and within the group.

Plainclothes security officers, each moving into position, preparing to break up what we called a rogue section.

What made a group a rogue section was a careful if unexpected mix of creativity, subversion and pointlessness. They were discovered from time to time. The group in front of us, Whitley whispered to me, had spent four months generating elaborate—albeit fake—project plans detailing the creation and marketing of a new translation of the Old Testament. Complete with detailed biblical justifications, historical timelines, annotated budgets, slide shows and legal documentation, the entire group had been working late into the night, week after week.

It was not at all clear why.

I’d never seen a rogue section get broken up before. It was a little like watching a shoplifter being arrested. An increasing number of plainclothes store personnel nonchalantly moved into aisle nine of the supermarket, working their way down the stacks of canned soup, seeming to study the relative merit of one brand over another, all the while closing in on a young man with two beers shoved into his pants.

Except, in this case, the computers of four marketing coordinators near the west side of the group suddenly went dark as the ten or more messengers and office services assistants hovering nearby all pulled security badges from their pockets, quickly moving in on the four workers, asking them to stand, asking them to please cooperate with this investigation.

“There’s definitely a very Gestapo-like quality to this,” I said to Whitley, watching as security officers escorted the employees away while a specially trained team of tech support reps began to go through desks, file cabinets and the now reactivated computers of the rogue section.

“Which,” Whitley said, “secretly increases the thrill for me.”

Whitley was the day-to-day manager of the entire company, the trusted adviser to me and all the senior staff, the implementer of each phase of our expansion. But she was also someone who found an only poorly suppressed pleasure in tracking the activities of our rogue sections. Whitley oversaw the task force investigating the rogue sections and—more importantly—other far more serious security threats from industry spies and outside hackers. It was a task force comprised of fifteen security officers, twelve system administrators, two reformed hackers, three industrial psychologists, four financial auditors, three lawyers, four members of the R&D department, a former FBI investigator and Leonard, the head of the company’s Technical Development Group. They shadowed suspect e-mails, tapped problem phone calls, reviewed inexplicable documents and project plans and—when necessary—attempted to infiltrate a rogue section.

The group was officially named the Subversives & Intrusions Task Force. However, they were known to most everyone as the Core SWAT team.

“SWAT was a compromise name,” Whitley always liked to recall. “Some members wanted to be known as Army Rangers, others wanted the Coast Guard. Personally, I lobbied hard for calling us the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

Responsibility for something like the SWAT team—and the rogue sections—was something I would have given only to Whitley. I’d hired Whitley when the company had hit sixty employees, all of whom were madly chasing the plan I’d laid out—domination of the high-speed mainframe networking industry through a fanatical commitment to drawing blood from mainframes around the country and the world. However, as devoted and well-intentioned as we tried to be, as revolutionary as our Blue Boxes were, none of us had a clue how to work together effectively. Departments didn’t communicate, managers didn’t coordinate, and so despite the best efforts of the best people, we were making only very slow progress.

Whitley made us communicate.

Whitley made us coordinate.

Whitley made us make progress.

She was one of those people who, in everyone she touched, instilled a sense of benevolent fear. She smiled, she was kind, she understood. And she made people fear any possibility of not doing their best.

“You’ll get it done,” she would say, nodding, hard shoulders dropping just slightly as she spoke. “I don’t know how, but you will.”

And so, throughout the company, in any department, any division, Whitley was the only person who ever really told me no. Julie, Cliff and Leonard sometimes laughed off my suggestions, vice presidents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as I relayed an idea, the board of directors periodically moved to put one of my initiatives under “extended review.”

But only Whitley told me no.

In the past three years Whitley and her SWAT team had, without realizing it, come closer and closer to various parts of my lie. Rogue sections, outside hackers, industry spies—all had caused security problems for the company. Each incident had led to an even deeper investigation of Core’s operations, a greater expansion of Whitley’s SWAT team, new security measures for Leonard and his technical staff. And all of that made my lie more difficult to sustain. SWAT pressing closer to the hidden satellites, the secret servers, the increasing flow of un-tracked money.

My own secret police, unintentionally hunting me down.

On bad days I pictured myself walking into my office to find Whit-ley and her SWAT team at my computer, studying the secrets of my spreadsheet model.

And what they could find was almost unimaginable. My lie, grown terribly large and impossibly complex in the three years since it had begun. A high-tech fraud made up of a thousand interdependent deceptions. The people who worked here, the companies we acquired, the stock we sold—all of it was an unseen disease. A cancer, really, spread silently through this company and still, every day, infecting and reinfecting each department, each system, each person who was here.

When it did finally kill us, it would do so suddenly. Completely. The computers would stop working. The mainframes would shut down. The satellites might as well fall from the sky. And no one—not SWAT, not Whitley—would be able to decipher what exactly had happened.

Paper sorted, paper printed, paper copied, paper piled, paper flowing toward destinations unseen and unknown, paper sitting untouched in tall piles on bright tables, sitting dusty and still on high shelves along the wall. Paper bound, paper clipped, paper stapled and stacked and filed and sent and all of it reflecting white as it shot quietly from copiers and printers, or landing heavily as it was moved from desk to file, from file to binder, from binder to conference room. Paper was the breath, it seemed, the air we inhaled, then released.

“Core Communications,” I heard someone behind me say, “owns approximately two thousand six hundred and twenty-eight white-boards.”

Walking with the head of Human Resources, finding myself in the middle of an afternoon basketball game in the wide walkways on fourteen, the Lady Gunslingers of PR favored by ten over the Warlords of Admin. It was one of multiple events in an endless and informal buildingwide Olympics—Nerf basketball, laser tag, yo-yo face-offs, darts, pool, air hockey, marbles, video games of all sorts and kinds, poker, chess, D&D, cubicle badminton, Wiffle-bat baseball, chair races, Yahtzee!, Scrabble, checkers, elevator bingo, untold betting pools devoted to elections, births, sports and office romances, periodic foot races around the auditorium on two, broom-and-tape-roll shuffle-board, Frisbee, full-contact rollerball, Magic: The Gathering, tag-team wrestling, Sumo wrestling, paper-airplane competitions based on an arcane Italian formula gauging distance, speed and altitude, and six separate putt-putt courses, each with a rating of novice, pro or addict, that were spread through offices, workspaces, hallways and conference rooms to form a total of one hundred and eight holes of golf.

“Foul!” someone yelled, throwing their hands in the air.

As with every other group in Core Communications, the people playing basketball were not only some of the most productive people in the company, they were also the most productive workers in their professions. Outsiders never believed it. Even the board found it hard to understand. But despite the games and jokes and constant digressions, Core was one of the most productive and efficient companies in the world.

I played five minutes of basketball with the Warlords of Admin. I managed to contribute two assists and a foul shot but had three jump shots blocked by a fanatical Bulgarian intern—a lightning-quick woman with a twelve-inch vertical leap and no idea I was the owner of the company, the building and the court she so freely dominated.

It was, for me, an unlikely but welcome moment of anonymity and untainted employee contact, even as other people stood around us, watching their CEO run the court.

Walking with two financial analysts, each updating me on fluctuations in various European stock markets, the meeting soon carrying us from the eighteenth to the eleventh floor, Worldwide Network Operations, where sci-fi marathons met the complete works of Nietzsche, where junior programmers in tuxedo T-shirts worked alongside engineering PhDs and tired dropouts from Cal Tech.

Picking up Julie, the two of us walking across thirteen, a floor with a particularly large number of windows, the rooms cast in shadows from the windows around us, rooms sometimes angular, sometimes round, sometimes softened into shapelessness as the light reflected off the steel and the glass and the ducts in the ceiling.

“I’ve got a meeting with the blind,” Julie was saying, “then a review of new day care policies on the Korean peninsula.”

Julie was our goodness. Our corporate soul. It was her staff that led tours of inner-city schoolkids through the office, her staff that cost-justified employee day care worldwide, her staff that spearheaded blood drives, canned food collections, volunteer teams for neighborhood soup kitchens. She did this while overseeing the production of all Blue Boxes and hardware in over fifty facilities around the globe. Did this quietly, without once asking for praise or recognition. Did this without seeming soft or maternal. In another age, men in gray suits would have called her a kind den mother. Cliff once jokingly referred to her as dear and she turned to him and hit him, hard, in the arm. He could not rotate his shoulder for more than a week.

Yet even more than her strength and temper, what probably most prevented the senior staff from calling her dear or maternal was Julie’s endless appetite for discussions about sex.

“The head of production from that Korean company we just bought reminds me of an aging leopard,” she said to me now. “A sleepy, languid man who rises only to breed.”

I nodded. Waiting. Sure something more would come.

“He’s taking early retirement tomorrow,” she said. “He agreed with my suggestion today.”

She nodded. She turned and was gone.

One hundred and fifty e-mails by three. Suggestions from staff members. Requests from board members. Favors to be returned. Thanks to be given.

Another group of four, all in green, this time near the elevators. Already today I’d seen an oddly large number of people in green.

People saying Hello to me as they moved out of the way of another of my walking meetings, some people even whispering, a few even pointing, sometimes a group slowly spreading apart, graciously and with unintended formality, making way for their CEO.

“I’m not royalty,” I’d once said to Whitley.

“It’s not your choice,” she’d replied. “They’ve made of you what they want to believe. And they want to believe you are not like them.”

The steady sound of the ventilation system, metallic and barely audible below and between the noise of so many people in motion.

Shadows in my office I’d never noticed before.

Six hours’ sleep in the past three days.

A memory of Julie with her head on her desk after lunch, the five-minute nap of the exhausted executive vice president of worldwide production.

The spreadsheet, eight hundred pages, open on my screen. For a few minutes only. Updating the model. Incorporating new purchases of secret mainframes. Adding recent leases for yet more satellite time. Tying in the hidden cash I ran daily through acquired companies. Removing now defunct shell corporations through which I bought and sold equipment. Moving assets to newly formed shells based in Bermuda and the Caymans.

“Timeless,” I heard a woman’s voice say from outside my office, the words drifting to me through the noise on twenty, through the noise in my office, through the noise coming in from the city now caught in the windows around me. “Placeless,” the voice said. “Godless. Sourceless.”

Not till four that afternoon did I realize it was all the members of the company’s Tech Support, Network Administration and Software Development groups who were wearing green.

“I like your shirt,” I now told Leonard, the head of those groups.

“Thanks,” he said with a pleasant nod, but offering no explanation as to why his shirt matched his pants, his pants matched his sneakers, his sneakers matched his socks. “As expected,” he said, “the equipment will total two hundred twenty-nine million dollars over a three-year period.”

Somehow I hadn’t noticed Leonard’s green ensemble at our senior staff meeting that morning, or in any of our interactions earlier in the day. Maybe that’s because Leonard was one of those big people, not fat or overweight, but big in a way that was startling every time I saw him, an unexpected amount of space suddenly occupied anytime he entered the room. Big hands, big eyes, big features, big motions. He had the largest fingers I had ever seen. His size tended to overwhelm whatever it was that he wore.

But now I saw that he was all in green. I wondered if maybe he’d changed clothes at some point, inexplicably donning a costume for the fading light of the afternoon.

Unlikely.

Cliff, sitting next to me now, nodding and taking notes, hadn’t seemed to notice the green. Or maybe he didn’t care. With numbers in front of him, calculator at his fingers, Cliff became a living computer, a machine purely focused on absorbing, processing and refining the information presented to him. In those moments he had no ability to register anything else.

All day, though, I’d been seeing the tech people in green—a gangly system administrator typing frantically on a marketing executive’s locked-up computer, a near teenaged girl changing toner in a brightly glowing copier, three Chinese programmers in a heated debate as they reported to Whitley about security threats from Indonesia. Some were in olive-green pants, some were in forest-green shirts or light-green shoes, one was in a dark-green hat.

There were no secret handshakes as they passed each other, no furtive hand signals, not even a shared smile. They simply all wore green.

“Leonard,” I said, “you’re wearing all green.”

He glanced up, nodded, said, “NT, XP, 2000, UNIX.” It was as if he’d launched into some high-tech haiku. In fact he was listing a range of computer systems in use at a number of our newly acquired companies. “Multiple flavors on the UNIX side,” he said. “Irix, Linux, lots of Solaris. And of course that’s in addition to every mainframe platform known to this planet.” He sighed heavily. “So many platforms, so many skills.”

Cliff nodded carefully. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.

Located on the ninth through twelfth floors, the tech group formed four floors of highly rambunctious but remarkably good-natured individuals. They hacked into each other’s computers, they organized floorwide competitions in various Web-based role-playing games, they logged into the computers that operated the building’s air-conditioning system in order to raise the temperature in rival programming groups by ten, then twenty degrees.

As I watched Leonard’s thick fingers trace absently along the sharp edges of the papers in his lap, I wondered for a moment if any of the industry spies or bored college students trying to hack into our systems were themselves sitting at their computers dressed entirely in green.

“Green,” I said, to no one in particular it seemed. “All green.”

“Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange,” Leonard said, turning a page, then continuing. “Java, C, VB, Korn. So many skills . . .” he said, and let the sentence trail off.

Cliff looked up. “The real cost is personnel, yes?”

Leonard nodded quickly. “The real cost is personnel, but there’s a notch up in training.”

Cliff tapped on his calculator. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.

And really, I did know. I knew exactly what Leonard meant. I understood everything he and Cliff were saying. In Technical Development, in Strategic Planning, in Sales and R&D, everywhere I knew the workflows, I knew the org charts, I knew the software tools, I knew the strategies for the best communication and support. I knew what markets we were in, what markets we wanted. I knew the product lines and the version changes and the roll-out schedules and the launches.

In the night, when I did sleep, these were the things that drifted through my dreams.

I leaned back in my chair, absently touching the thin, straight edge of Leonard’s desk. Everything in Leonard’s office was set at right angles to the walls. As always, this had a calming effect on me. His four computers, his five monitors, his multiple stacks of status reports, software documentation, heavy reference books, even the requisite collection of sci-fi trading cards—not only was each item squared to the desk or table on which it rested, but Leonard had clearly gone so far as to bar the public display of any rounded items in his office. Leonard’s office—Leonard himself—gave me a sense of order and uniformity, not just among the physical objects within my reach but within the very structure of the universe around us.

“Corel, Claris, even Quattro, even Symphony,” Leonard said, sighing again. “In this there will be no diversity. We go to the one place. We go to the big boy.”

Cliff nodded quickly. I nodded again. I said once more, “Leonard, you’re wearing all green.”

He looked up from his notes. In a moment, he nodded, flat tongue wetting his wide lower lip, his whole presence seeming to prepare itself for an extended response. “Yes,” Leonard said, “I am.”

He nodded again, Cliff asked for costs, Leonard gave him answers, I glanced toward New Jersey and smiled. Leonard’s sincerity, the pure earnestness he brought to his work, to this life, it could make him impenetrable.

“Forty-four K, thirty-two K, an even hundred,” Leonard said.

“Was there a memo?” I asked. “Or an e-mail?”

“What’s that?” Leonard asked.

“How did everyone know to wear green?”

He paused, letting his head fall to the side, confused. Then he nodded. “Right. Yes. I see. Green. No. It’s the first of the month. On the first of the month, we’ve all decided to wear green.”

Cliff asked for supporting detail. Leonard handed us articles, budgets and comparative charts. It was thirty seconds before I had to smile again, looking out the window once more, realizing that Leonard still hadn’t really told me why they were wearing green.

“Spread the main software over three months,” Leonard was saying now. “Schedule the attached hardware over five.”

Cliff nodded. I nodded. Leonard picked up another report.

I could see that even his watch band was green.

A joke that just couldn’t be shared with the CEO. Or, more likely, a decision that Leonard—a young man completely lacking in even the most basic awareness of irony—simply could not find a way to explain.

“Impact, Freehand, Composer, Paint,” Leonard said.

“We go to the big boy?” Cliff asked.

Leonard and I both shook our heads. “We change,” I said, answering the question. “But it’s not to the big boy.”

Leonard nodded quickly, flipped me a thumbs-up. He placed the completed reports at right angles to his desktop.

In his first year as head of technology for Core, Leonard told me he’d taken business cards to his high school reunion and passed them out to all the people he had never known.

And now he was starting onto another list, Leonard with his deep, almost mystical ability to bend, shape, start and even stop the world of Core Communications. And so I sat taking in everything he said. Just as I’d absorbed every report, every plan, every budget and forecast I’d seen in the past three years. Every cost for every department. Every idea from each meeting. Sometimes even every responsibility and goal for each person in a room.

I took everything in. I remembered it all.

Because really this company was my whole life.

Nearing the end of the day. Holding an impromptu meeting with Julie in the mailroom. Staffed by eager, always well-meaning recent immigrants to the city, the mailroom was centered around a series of six huge copiers—six remarkably complex machines with smoothly harmonic noises, rapidly blinking indicator lights, brightly mirrored interior surfaces.

The paper so crisp, the sound an unwavering heartbeat of order and routine.

For years I’d used the mail room for meetings with Julie. Like me, she felt a deep and inexplicable comfort in being in the presence of the highly synchronized noise, light and human movement. This time, as always, the two of us left our meeting rejuvenated and ready, our ears still echoing with the densely orchestrated motions and sound.

Moving across ten with my assistant now, who took a moment to point at one of the oversized workspaces the company built for supervisors and managers. “Another owner-financed double-wide,” he said.

I squinted. Not understanding.

“You know,” he said with something like surprise. “The joke goes, ‘Did you hear about Sara? She got that promotion to section manager—and, best of all, she done got herself an owner-financed double-wide!’”

I made a mental note. We moved to eleven. My assistant continued with a list of Whitley’s plans to conduct security reviews of all backup systems in our Asian offices.

My lie, ever present, brought to the surface for a moment, once more my mind searching for ways to dodge the constant reviews and investigations that Whitley and her SWAT team were conducting.

Walking with Cliff, his thumbs twitching rapidly as we discussed the turnover rates of our German accounts receivable. We turned a corner, and a man bearing the telltale distant stare of a sleepless programmer came up to me, cutting off Cliff as he looked me in the eyes and said, “Here’s a question you can answer—if I reinstall the service pack on the Japanese Maple in Nicaragua, will I lose all config changes to my ODBC connections?”

I stared back at his heavy, glassy eyes. Clearly he’d confused me with someone else. But I started to speak.

He raised a hand. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “Obviously, I’ve just answered my own question.”

And he was gone.

And I would never see him again.

And actually I had known the answer.

Walking with Whitley once more, finding her on seventeen, Public Relations, bright-faced young professionals and darkly clothed cynics all breaking plans into parts, offering a simple spin to define the chaos, trying in all things to spread the word, the good doings and best efforts, of Core Communications.

Three hundred e-mails.

Thirty more reports waiting on my desk for review.

Four holes of putt-putt with two novice players from Finance.

The ventilation system turning on, purring above us, Whitley and I hearing it for the second time that day, when usually it blew silently above the swirling noise of people, computers, phones and copiers.

Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange. Software. Satellites. A marketing push into Asia.

Nineteen, and I was alone, passing through another of the Unoccupied Territories. And this time stopping. Standing still for a moment. Seeing the walls freshly painted, feeling my feet pressing easily into the untouched carpet, looking at the desk chairs still wrapped in paper and plastic. Standing alone in this area, untouched and pristine. In some deepest way pure. And all of it waiting. Waiting for more.

Every day there was more.

My ears seemed to ring. I felt short of breath. I could see the whole day, blinking once, it was there and gone and somehow with me forever, each part disconnected, the all of it forming a solid, bright whole.

It was eight o’clock.

And at two in the morning, she came into my office. Like many nights, though not all. A short e-mail sent at one. A brief call back to me at two.

A woman in a black suit walked into the room.

She followed me upstairs to my apartment on the twenty-first floor.

A black suit, black hair. The edge of her smooth white bra just visible as she stepped close.

All my life I hadn’t slept much, even when I was a child. I can remember whole nights when I was six or five or even four and I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Now, at thirty-five, instead of lying awake, I spent my nights in my office, there from nine till two, spreadsheet open on my computer, feeding more information into my secret model.

Now I was here, though. In my apartment. Six tall rooms cast in the gray light and dark shadows of lamps placed two or three or four to a room. A kitchen I didn’t use, a bed I could not find sleep in, wide windows onto the city, in every room, those windows. It seems now that I lived in those windows, raised from the wooden floors, suspended in the glass between building and city.

This black suit in front of me. The black hair long and a face beautiful and indistinct, only dark eyes, a mouth, chin, the neck and shoulders and arms and legs. The edge of that bra. The two-color silhouette of a woman in front of me.

Always somehow they were the same. Darkly perfect, quietly fit, seemingly kind, seemingly happy. This woman with the dark hair, thick, pulled lightly into a tie at the base of her neck, standing in front of me in a fine wool suit, low and simple shoes, as if she’d been pulled from a board meeting or presentation. But really she was a total stranger to me. Even the women I’d seen five or ten times in the last two years, all were strangers even if they’d been sent to me before. Because there was no banter, there were no questions, no anxious answers.

A few instructions maybe. Sometimes a guiding word.

But really I preferred no talking at all.

I did not do drugs. I did not gamble, did not even spend the money I was paid. This was my vice, dark music and gin, a woman escorted to me by my bodyguard.

There were no dim fantasies, no perversions or abuse. There was only nameless sex, steady closeness, the just quiet sounds of clothes coming off. Her participation imagined or faked, I didn’t know and didn’t care, because in all this there was acting, some play in the dark with shadows and silence, an agreed-upon game with simple rules and clear roles, much of it no different than the circling rhythms of Monday meetings or hallway games, all of us playing, all of us paid, everyone trying to leave behind each moment and role at the end of the day.

I came inside her.

Three offices to open in England and Ireland. Eight acquisitions in Taiwan and Korea. Cash soon shifting from Chicago to Omaha.

Five thousand, two thousand, six million, seven.

Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange.

Messages, rogue sections, another meeting, another floor.

Every day was the same. For three years, I’d spent each day keeping the company on track toward its demise, adding pressure by the hour, all the while trying to find a way out of the trap I’d created.

This is what it meant to live a lie.

I came inside her again.

They do not have any kind of disease. They are not criminals. They are not forced into what they do. They were simply delivered to an anonymous apartment.

In New York, with enough money, you can buy anything.

These things were important to me. Because this was about the absence of any risks or possibilities or needs or cautions. This was only about the touching, the sounds and sex.

No cash exchange. No late-night cigarette as she or I broke the spell. No shared insights into her childhood or upbringing, no sharing of my weaknesses, wants and faults. It was over and she would leave and then I would finally sleep.

Masturbation on a credit card in a penthouse apartment.

And so at four in the morning on this Monday night, I did sleep. Lying on the sofa back in my office, the best place I’d found. The glow of the city, the distant glare from the waterfront over in New Jersey, all reflecting in on my high ceiling and I would sleep a few hours, till the sun came up, my mind moving through meetings and plans and expenses, finding details, concepts, tasks big and small.

In two months revenue would cross $21 billion a year.

At some point, any point, we’d be bankrupt and done.

I’d managed to keep us alive another day.

And I would sleep in that state, listing and racing and listing more, and maybe once, maybe not, would I think about the woman who’d visited me that night, maybe picturing her face, more likely her hair or clothes, some remnant memory of pleasure and silence, some memory just marked by a disconnected guilt, and now I’d be awake, never sure how much I had really slept, now only staring out the window at the morning turning gold and white and a deep, deep blue, Tuesday, and I was floating, legs quietly pulled up to my chest, so silly, so obvious, but floating, flying, out the window, and toward the sky.