Matt Richtel - The Cloud

Bullet point: It’s all feeling too complicated. What am I missing?

Bullet point: Alan Parsons was a drunk who used to work for Leviathan. He uncovered Leviathan’s plot and the connection to the death of Jill Gilkeson. He wanted to blackmail Leviathan. But he couldn’t put the whole thing together, couldn’t make all the pieces fit. So he came to me. He wanted me to follow the trail. He tried to email me but I didn’t respond or see his overture. Then he essentially used my innate curiosity and a woman named Faith to draw me in (???).

Bullet point: It’s all still feeling too complicated. Time to find out what I’m missing.

Bullet point: Bullseye, you know how much I hate to use a cliche like this: but, to repeat, if you’ve read this far, I’m probably no longer around. Send the police after Andrew Leviathan (see above). I don’t have a will. Let this serve as one. I’ve inherited some money from Polly. A lot of it. Keep a chunk for yourself and Samantha. Make sure to pay the taxes. Oh, and get yourself some season tickets to Where the Sun Don’t Shine. It’s good to occasionally go outside.

I open my email account and send the file to Bullseye as an attachment. In the body of the email, I beg him again not to open the email unless he hasn’t heard from me for three days. He’s likely to go along.

I close the laptop and remember a story I once heard about Palo Alto. Researchers parked a relatively new convertible by the side of the road here, leaving the top down. They did the same thing in a poor urban area on the East Coast. Within hours, the car on the East Coast had been stripped for parts by vandals. The car in Palo Alto went untouched for days, until it started to rain. Someone drove by, stopped and put the top up on the convertible.

I put Bullseye’s laptop on the floor of the booth where I’m sitting. Someone will pick it up and make sure it gets back to him.

I turn on my own laptop and my phone. I walk out the front of the cafe, inviting a modest chill. I take a seat on the patio, alone. I wait.

Twenty minutes later, he shows up. The shiny bald buzzard pulls up in his black car and parks across the street. He rolls down his passenger-side window and he looks at me, at least I gather in the dark, and I at him. He rolls up the window. I wait.

Ten minutes later, a Jaguar sedan pulls up in front of the cafe. The car is an older model, elegant but worn. Andrew Leviathan rolls down his passenger window. He smiles thinly. “Where are you parked?”

I point a half block away.

“Follow me.”

We wind up the Palo Alto hills. Leviathan in front, me, the buzzard. Eerily, like a funeral caravan. We take a right onto a dirt tributary, wind along the gravel road, through the increasingly dense trees, to a place well beyond help. I expect we’ll reach a house with a towering black gate, maybe a sentry, a moat or a stone statue. But when Leviathan slows, it’s at a rustic fence. With help from the headlights, I can see two retrievers rush to the gate, barking their approval at our arrival.

The ranch-style house spreads wide across the horizon, blocking a view of the bay behind it that I imagine makes it worth whatever Leviathan paid for this understated place, and whatever it took to amass the fortune.

He parks in a roundabout in front of the house, and lumbers out of the car. I, with just the slightest hesitation, do the same. The buzzard stays put. Leviathan nods his head to the right, where I see a stand-alone structure, maybe a home office or guest house, cut into a break in the trees. He starts walking toward it.

I look in the doorway and see Leviathan’s stunning wife, arms crossed, wearing a bathrobe and a grim look. I look down and away, as if embarrassed.

Leviathan disappears into the trees, heading toward the guesthouse.

I follow.

Boxy but distinct. The square edifice stands two stories, the gently sloped and white tile roof extending a foot over the edge of the house, like the brim of a sun hat. Separated by a grove of trees from the main house, accessible by an inlaid stone path, it also projects a less-rustic character, a home office maybe, with the emphasis on office, not home.

The nerve center of a dark plan.

Leviathan, still a few steps ahead of me, walking in silence, pulls open a heavy door and walks through it. I’m struck by the plodding character of his gait, and mine. The two of us head without relish toward an inevitable confrontation. It strikes me that I’m not the one already feeling defeated.

Inside the door, I’m greeted by Richard Nixon. His painting hangs on the wall to the right of a ponderously heavy wooden staircase that bisects the entryway. I can’t help but pause at the former president’s brooding visage, downturned eyes, holding a pen suspended over some document as he sits in the Oval Office.

“Hubris,” Leviathan mutters, halfway up the stairs. He plods upward. Then he says “on” and the upstairs lights ignite. I plod after him. I follow his path into a room directly across from the top of the stairs.

When through the door, I nearly lose my breath.

The view.

Through a window that stretches most of the length of the backside of the house, Silicon Valley materializes. I inhale the majestic view of an airplane at low altitude. In the foreground, the hills give way to the flatlands stretching from Burlingame to San Jose, and then the three spans leading to the East Bay and the rest of the world: the Dumbarton, San Mateo and Bay bridges. From the mind of Leviathan and a handful of true pioneers, semiconductors and software roll out from here across the Earth.

“God and his creation,” I say.

He pulls out a chair behind his antique desk and sits, his back to the view. He gestures with an open palm for me to sit on a worn cloth love seat that looks like he picked it up for free after reading an ad on Craigslist.

“That chair survived the bombings at Dresden.”

“Another reminder from history, like Nixon?”

“Overextension comes at a price.”

The love seat sits a few feet in front of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that line the walls. As I sit, I see the gun. It sits in the middle of the desk, where I might have expected a computer. The black handgun looks inert, small, a toy thing from a movie set.

“We could do a modified interview style.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I ask you a series of questions and then when you feel I’ve overstepped the boundaries, you shoot me.”

He grimaces. He’s not the sort of bad guy who seems to enjoy the role.

“You obviously discovered the Juggler. Tell me what you know and I’ll fill in the rest.”

I look at the gun again. I can’t help but flash on the night that Leviathan as a young man spent in the jail cell in the Eastern Bloc, anticipating his execution. He plotted with all his might to survive. By contrast, I’m going so quietly.

I could run, I suppose. I could yell “off” and command the lights to extinguish, then dive for the door. But run to what? How far would I get? They can track my movements. I knew what I was getting into when I drove here. I wonder if I’m destined to see Isaac and Polly on the other side of some spiritual barrier I’m not sure I believe exists.

“I wrote a file that will be widely distributed in the event of my disappearance. One way or another, the world will know about what you’ve done.”

“Maybe.”

I don’t understand and shake my head.

“You’re a great journalist, I mean that. But you vastly underestimate the ability of even modestly talented hackers to invade your devices, use them to do surveillance on you, control your digital output, and so forth. If you left a file to be distributed by email, I could probably kill or modify it.”