Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“Yeah!” the programmers cheered.

“We established ISIS for the long haul, and we will be here for the long haul.”

“YEAH!” they cheered louder.

“You guys are not involved in a low-rent operation.”

“No kidding,” Aldwin said under his breath. The lease on the Kendall Square building cost almost two million a month, and he was looking for cheaper space.

“Stand up,” Jonathan ordered his people. “Everybody stand up.” Programmers and secretaries, marketing team and legal counsel all scrambled to their feet and scrummed together around their bold, ruddy-faced captain. “You guys are not geeks for hire,” Jonathan announced. “You didn’t come looking for a quick buck. You came to build something. You came to change the way the world does business . You guys are the best.”

“Whoooo!”

“You kick ass!” Jonathan shouted.

“Yesss!”

“You guys are animals!” This last unleashed such a frenzy that Jonathan couldn’t see Sorel pushing through the crowd. She had been on shift in the control center. And because everyone else was at the meeting, she alone, gazing at the bank of monitors, had seen the first signs of trouble in the ISIS security network. A single white dot representing a data center in Shanghai turned emergency red.

“Security breach!” Sorel cried, but even as she spoke, another dot turned red as well, and then all the dots around it until, like a plague, hundreds of white points all across the digital Earth broke out in red, a contagion spreading through thousands of ISIS data centers from Beijing to Baltimore.

She worked her way through the crowd, but she could not get close to the front. Only Orion saw her. He caught her eye and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

She shouted, “Lockbox is down. Lockbox is broken.” But the screams and cheers continued, drowning her out, resolving into call and response.

“Who’s the best?” Jonathan shouted.

“We’re the best!”

“Who’s the rest?”

“Fuck the rest!”

Orion pushed his way to Jonathan. He told Jonathan softly, underneath the rising noise of the crowd, “Lockbox is broken.”

Jonathan didn’t hear him.

Orion cupped his hands and repeated directly into Jonathan’s ear, “Lockbox is broken.”

The blood drained from Jonathan’s face. His jaw tightened. He held up his hand for quiet and the roar died down. “All right!” he said. His voice was grim, but only Orion and Sorel knew why. The others heard grim satisfaction as he bellowed, “Back to work!”

What new hell was this? Hackers had targeted Lockbox and found the tiny chinks Orion had identified long ago. Those chinks were now fissures compromising the security system. Alarms were sounding all through ISIS as programmers, product testers, and Customer Care struggled to make Lockbox safe again. Clients were panicking, and every hour, the public-relations crisis grew.

For two days and two nights, the ISIS team struggled to make Lockbox right. Projects went on hold. Travel plans were canceled. A programmer sat at every computer, a Customer Care counselor manned every phone. The tide of empty soda cans was rising.

Orion and the Lockbox team were working as fast as they could, but the break was bad, and the news spread everywhere, from The Wall Street Journal to The Motley Fool . At the end of the second night, Dave broke precedent and made an executive decision. ISIS was recalling Lockbox. All Lockbox customers were being upgraded automatically for no charge to ChainLinx.

“No!” Jonathan cried out at the emergency board meeting. Even now he hated to admit that Lockbox was flawed.

“We’ve almost got it up again,” said Jake.

But Dave shook his head, as if to say, Boys, boys. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to look at the big picture. You have to think about our customers, our reputation, and our weakening position. We aren’t talking about saving Lockbox anymore. We’re talking about saving ISIS.”

Exhausted, Orion rested his head on his arms right there on the table. Bitterly, he thought of the old fights. If Jonathan had listened to him … If Jonathan had not been in such a rush … He looked up at Jonathan across the table. What were the chances that Jonathan would apologize? What were the chances he would show the slightest regret?

Nil. Jonathan didn’t even glance at Orion as he swept out of the glass-walled conference room.

But there was no point thinking about that now, when there was so much to do. There was the conversion of every Lockbox account to ChainLinx. There were phone calls. There were press releases. All through the hallways, up and down the stairwells, ISIS hummed with new activity. Even as the programmers gave up their nighttime vigil, the morning reinforcements arrived. Support staff trooped into the building with their cups of coffee, and Mel Millstein showed up at the quaint hour of nine. As Orion walked out into the hall and headed downstairs, he felt relief. The worst had happened, Lockbox was history. Now ISIS could rebuild. His resentment faded, and he felt pride instead, a strange pride at this resilient organism, this company of so many different parts and people—a society of its own, a world unto itself, a little planet against the hostile universe. He knew how Jonathan felt. Let the markets fall, let the siege begin, ISIS would outlast all comers, hackers, analysts, and doubters. Jonathan’s faith never wavered, and Orion began to feel partisan too.

“He’s very sure of himself, isn’t he?” Sorel said of Jonathan.

Orion was giving her a lift on his bicycle. She perched on the seat and he walked the bike, one hand on the frame, the other on the handlebars. Gently he wheeled her along, as a knight might lead a maiden on a palfrey.

“Well, he has a right to be,” Orion said.

“Are you defending his mistake?” The afternoon was sunny and might have been warm, if not for the brisk March wind that blew her skirt over her knees. She was wearing her long loose coat, and the black satin lining showed at the bottom, because her hem was down. She’d strapped on her guitar like a backpack. Her red-gold hair spilled over her shoulders. “He’s insufferable.”

“He gets results.”

“Not in this market.”

“If anyone can get the job done, it’s Jonathan,” Orion said.

“Oh, please! You sound like his henchman.”

“His henchman? No.”

She wondered, “Are you succumbing to some sort of Stockholm syndrome where you start identifying with your oppressor?”

“How is Jonathan my oppressor?” Orion protested. “He’s my colleague—and my old friend.”

She looked down on him for that. He could see the expression on her face, a kind of disdain coming over her. In her mind, Jonathan was the enemy.

“What’s wrong with working with people?” he asked defensively.

“Hmm. I liked you better before when you were more … disaffected. You were more original then.”

They were walking through Cambridgeport, where the streets were down to their last piles of ash-gray snow. The trees were bare, but the clapboard houses colorful, painted purple with teal trim, or ochre and bloodred, or lavender, or puce, and the yards were filled with art as well as cars—scrap-metal cats and penguins—ceramic pots bristling with fierce crocuses. They had been working day and night, troubleshooting ChainLinx to take on the massive new customer load.

“What day is it?” Orion asked as they arrived at her place.

“Monday,” she said. “No, I think Tuesday.”

Molly was on call. “I wish I could … come in.”

She shook her head. “Thanks for the lift.” She hopped off the bicycle in front of her ramshackle worker’s cottage. She’d done some work on it, but the house was still a work in progress. Wood supports propped up the porch. “Go home to bed.”