Christopher Reich - The First Billion

“Calm down, Roy. If you’re so worried about Mr. Luca, give him a call on the telephone. Tell him to lock his front door. I would, on the other hand, enjoy speaking with Mr. Luca about where in God’s name he’s been getting our confidential information. Book us first thing in the morning.”

“You don’t think he needs protection?”

“No, Roy, I do not. Now off you go. Book us those seats for tomorrow.”

DiGenovese shifted in his chair, and Dodson could see he was using all that Ranger discipline of his to keep from arguing. The Army’s fine training won out over DiGenovese’s impetuous Sicilian blood, and after a few seconds he complied. “Yessir. I’ll get back to you about the times.”

“Good man,” said Dodson, beaming. “What’s that you always say when things are going well?”

“Drive on, Airborne.”

“Yes, yes. Well then, ‘Drive on, Airborne.’”

Cate Magnus held the Nokia cell phone close to her ear, clicking the volume higher so she could hear the man’s voice over the earsplitting whine of a jacksaw.

“It’s just not what we want this week,” Jimmy Murphy was saying. “Metrics are so dry. Your readers don’t give a fiddler’s fart whether Yahoo! gets two million hits a day or two billion. And they care even less what exactly constitutes ‘a hit’ on a website. This isn’t a scientific review here. You’re supposed to liven up the rag, not dull it down.”

“It’s not the methodology I’m interested in, Jimmy,” she retorted, pacing the length of her bedroom. “It’s the way you can cheat on these things. Use one method and it looks like five hundred users a day are logging onto your site; use another and it’s more like five thousand. The whole thing stinks. I mean, who are you supposed to trust?”

“Good question, Cate. Tell you what: Let’s leave that question until next month. Give me something lively, something dishy.”

Cate lowered the phone from her ear and mouthed a very nasty word in Mr. Jimmy Murphy’s general direction. Murphy was the features editor at the Financial Journal, a rail-thin, choleric Kansan who took it as part of his job description to be permanently dissatisfied with his writers’ offerings. More and more, he was pushing the column away from the serious fare she favored—namely, an examination of the personal and societal ramifications wrought by a once-in-a-century upheaval in technology—toward dishy, prurient pieces on the lifestyles of the sick and famous. It was partly her mistake. A year ago, she’d written a piece on young women who worked for a certain gentlemen’s club in San Mateo that catered to the wild and wildly expensive whims of the valley’s glitterati, such as they were. One of the girls she’d interviewed had talked about the habits of one of her regulars, a nationally known Internet exec who liked to do weird things with whipped cream, motherboards, and electrodes on his nipples.

Or there was the time Murphy had sent her to Bangalore, India, to check out the booming matchmaking market for up-and-coming high-tech wizards. It was the Indian women who paid for introductions to men, and the depth of questioning they had to endure approached the ridiculous. “How would you propose to cure your husband’s impotence?” “What family remedies can you offer for baldness?” “Would you object to your husband’s taking a mistress? Two mistresses?” and her favorite, “What is the proper serving temperature of chicken tika-tika? In Celsius and Fahrenheit, please.”

It wasn’t lost on her that 90 percent of the Journal’s readers were men.

This week’s “Gold Rush” dealt with a more serious topic: the internecine warfare going on among competing firms in the field of metrics. “Metrics,” as related to the Internet, involved defining precise methodologies to measure usage of the World Wide Web, or more important these days, providing objective information as to exactly how many visitors clicked onto specific websites.

Now that the bloom was off the rose and the new economy was looking a little long in the tooth, metrics had assumed a new importance. Acquisition had replaced IPOs as the prevalent exit strategy for start-ups, and the price a company could demand was directly correlated to the number of hits its website received. Each company in the metrics game claimed to offer the sole, incontrovertible means of measuring a site’s popularity. The only hard part for the client was finding the boys who’d put you at the top of the list, and Cate was sure that a little extra vig would better your final score.

“Look, Jimmy,” she started again, wincing at the syrupy sound of her voice. “Maybe the piece is a little heavy on the number crunching. Let me talk to rewrite; I’ll soften it up, give it a little more color.”

Cate was frustrated. She’d finally come up with a story that allowed her to put into practice some of the financial carpentry she’d picked up at Wharton, and no one gave a damn.

“You’re not listening to me,” carped Murphy. “Where are those personal items we so loved? Remember last year when you followed a Range Rover into and out of a shop six times in three months? We had letters for a year wondering what happened to that lemon—some nut even wanted to buy it. Hey, hey, here’s an idea! Hot off the wire. Why not give me something about the house. How does a savvy reporter knee-deep in tech hoopla deal with the down-and-dirty world of home renovation? Give me a thousand words on pouring a new slab. How do they do that, anyway, without having to tear down the house?”

“Noisily,” Cate answered, putting a finger to her ear to drown out an eager jackhammer. “Very noisily. Listen, Jimmy, I want you to run my piece as is. Give me metrics this week and I’ll give you whatever you want next Friday. Come on, Murph. A favor.”

“A favor?” Jimmy Murphy’s voice cracked, and she could picture him at his desk, hurriedly figuring the angles. No doubt he was wearing one of his bright red dress shirts with a collar two sizes too big for his scrawny neck. “Deal,” he said, finally. “I’ll get back to you on a subject. Maybe we can find out what Jim Clark’s doing these days. Whatever happened to that boat of his? Maybe you could track it down, go for a sail.”

Cate sighed. That was someone else’s story. A real writer. Someone who possessed the wherewithal to write a book. “Sure thing, Jimmy. See you.”

Collapsing onto her unmade bed, Cate put down the phone while shaking her head. Thank goodness, she’d convinced him to run the column. Time was precious. Even the smallest skirmishes counted as battles. She was mustering her troops, marshaling her evidence for the final assault. Rolling over onto her stomach, she pulled the top sheet off her bed, then the fitted cover. Slipping a hand down the side of the mattress, she found a horizontal indentation, and dug her hand into it until her fingers touched a sheaf of papers. Still there, she confirmed, awarding herself a contented smile. Not the most imaginative of hiding places, but for a girl who’d passed up spy school, not bad.

After replacing the sheets, she made the bed. The room looked better now, friendlier. Her armoire wasn’t drunk, just a little tipsy. The desk Jett Gavallan had built for her beamed with memories of their time together. The furniture was a little too “shabby-chic” for her taste, but it would have to do. The furniture, the bedroom, the house, all of it was cover. A mask she’d put on eight years ago.

Her eyes drifted back to the desk, and she thought of Jett. Jett, her erstwhile love. Jett, her weathered Boy Scout. Jett, her pigheaded ex who refused to blink his eyes at the lights of an oncoming train.

Until seeing him last night, she’d thought her loyalties decided upon, her duties sworn. But five minutes in his presence had weakened her resolve. She wondered how much more she could tell him about Mercury before he’d finally accept her words as the truth. How much before she revealed too much about herself.