Shimmer (20 page)

I wanted to nod. I thought about agreeing, about simply saying,
Yes.
But in a moment, I found myself asking, “Don't you believe what I said?”

Whitley nodded slowly, smiling barely, a vision so kid-like in its uncertainty. “I have to, Robbie. It's what gets me through each moment.”

I nodded.

“A favor,” she said then, “a favor for me.” And I saw her smiling past me, like a kid again, holding back. Holding something back. “Tell me you believe what you said.”

I stood. I nodded. “Of course I do,” I said. “I believe it completely.”

It was three o'clock when I remembered Eugene and the blackmail. I found Whitley near the DMZ, saying, “Eugene. We need to pay off Eugene. And we need to do it today.”

After we'd managed to gather most of the key SWAT-team members into a free conference room, I told the group that we needed to pay off Eugene immediately.

“Even when we restore the network,” I said, “we'll have a nightmare of rumors to address. Word will get out that something happened here. Something bad. We don't need Eugene causing trouble in the middle of that.”

“How much?” Cliff asked.

I waited. Thinking through the numbers. I said finally, “Ten million more than the maximum in the scenario.”

Julie was motionless. Perry smiled sickly. Whitley nodded slowly. Cliff had pushed himself away from the table, head now bowed over his knees. I thought he might begin to cry. Although I saw that, on the floor between his feet, he was managing to push keys on his small calculator.

Trauma aside, no one disagreed.

I called Eugene from my phone, standing at the end of the conference room, looking out toward New Jersey, toward the Hudson River, toward streets not far from this building. On the windowsill in front of me was a set of final documents spelling out the terms of our purchase of Eugene's journal. Two hundred pages pulled together by our legal team in the twenty-four hours since Eugene had first called. It was codified blackmail, really. Clear-cut, well-defined and made legal by these pages.

“Eighty-five million,” I said to Eugene. “But only if you agree by midnight tonight.”

“You are not the one who's here to negotiate,” Eugene said.

“I don't have time for this,” I said. “And so I am making you a very lucrative offer.”

“With a catch,” he said. “There has to be a catch.”

“You have to agree not to offer to sell us, or anyone, a journal again,” I said. “Essentially, that's it.”

“I don't believe you,” he said.

“It's formalized blackmail, Eugene. Legal, contractual, very straightforward.”

“Are you taping this call?”

“Sign the documents I'm going to send you, Eugene. Take the money. And walk away.”

“And if I wait till tomorrow?” he asked. “Or the next day?”

“Then don't bother calling me back.”

And I hung up the phone.

The group around me was quiet. Cliff seemed frozen over his knees. Whitley had stood, pacing near the window. Julie held a pen so tightly in her fingers, the body of it bent, and it seemed that the slightest motion would break it in half. In a moment, she said what the rest were clearly thinking. “I'm not sure that's a threat you can carry out.”

It was Perry who turned to her, just his neck moving, his body so still. “I don't think Robbie's got any choice.”

Five o'clock, and my cell phone rang. And finally I saw it, the name
Trevor,
displayed on the screen. I told myself not to answer. All day I'd been waiting for him to call. I knew I shouldn't talk to him. Knew the kinds of things he would say. And yet I'd answered already. Pushing a button, saying, “Yes, Trevor,” into the phone. Because I needed to answer. I had to answer Trevor.

“Tell me you've at least hidden your money under your mattress,” he said, “because it looks like judgment day is here.”

And I could see the smile. The wide and thin grin on his sharp face. I could see him drinking in some tall, easy bar in a distant hotel. Or wandering through his suite in a huge and bright metropolis, near the headquarters of another conglomerate, this just another client he'd sold. And I was angry.

“How did you find out?” I asked. I walked down a hall, stepping into a dark break room, and as I spoke I could feel my tongue in my mouth for what seemed like the first time in my entire life. My teeth, each ridge on my tongue, and I started to wonder when I had last slept.

“People tell me things, Robbie. I do know other people in the company.”

“Are you out celebrating yet?” I asked, stepping farther into the break room, toward a narrow window looking out on three bright buildings nearby. “You'll be able to move on to something else if this fails. Cash your checks. A very rich man.”

And for a moment I remembered my feeling of wanting to see Trevor here. That feeling I'd had in the seconds before Leonard had reset the entire network. That wish, a somehow generous but undefined wish that Trevor could be a part of this, that he could be my friend. Now that feeling was gone. Erased in the moment when I heard his voice. When he stepped in on me again. When, simply, he became real, the problem cousin I had always known him to be.

“I want Core to continue, Robbie,” he said, and his voice was slightly quieter.

“Then why did you call? To offer your help?”

“I'm not sure why I called.”

“I am, Trevor. You called to enjoy this moment. You called because I am powerless. Weak. You could smell it from wherever the fuck you are.”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

“I would believe you,” I said. “I really would. If it weren't for the fact that you're lying to me.”

“I'm not lying,” he said, pausing, waiting it seemed. Pausing another moment. Awkwardly. For Trevor, it was awkward. “I just called,” he finally said. “I think I just wish I were there.”

“Stop it,” I said, leaning forward, one hand touching the window-sill, my forehead pressed lightly against the glass, saying it again, saying, “Stop it,” nearly whispering. “Stop it. You wish you were here? Why? So you could watch and laugh and sit off to the side counting the money you'll have made when all this collapses? Stop it, Trevor, because I don't need this from you.”

And for a moment, in my anger and in the exhaustion I could feel in my eyes and through my body, in all that, I noticed a restaurant down on the street. On the first floor of one of the buildings in front of me. Hundreds of feet away. And I thought about how I used to have lunch there. How many weeks had it been, months, since I'd had lunch there?

“When it does fail, Trevor,” I said quietly, turning my head, pressing it forward, now wanting to see the front door of that restaurant, to see the menu in the window, the three best tables, all facing out on the street, “when this company does fail, Trevor, today or in the future, when it does I'm going to come and shoot you in the head, Trevor. I'm going to shoot you dead.”

He didn't respond for a moment. “You don't mean that,” he said lightly.

“I don't, no, you're right, you're completely right, but that is how I feel, Trevor, that is all I want right now. I want you dead.”

I pressed closer to the window, forehead against the glass, but couldn't see the restaurant any better. The menu. The tables.

Trevor's voice was suddenly very small in my ear. “All I said was that I wish I were there.”

“Unless you can fly to New York in the next twenty minutes,” I said into the phone, “and rebuild the entire Core network, including reconnecting it to the shadow network I've spent three years building and maintaining, then no, you don't need to be here.”

“I'd just like to see,” he said.

“See the whole thing fail? Oh, it'll be beautiful, Trevor. A celebration.”

“No,” he said. “That's not what I want. I guess I can't say it.” He paused for a moment. The phone went quiet. “Is everyone really there?” he asked now. “Someone told me there are hundreds of people there. I'm sorry I called, Robbie. Really. Just tell me. Is everyone really there?”

And now I found myself closing my eyes, leaning back against the counter, wishing I hadn't answered Trevor's call. Wishing I had just stayed in the fray of rebuilding the network, of talking to the board, of meeting with the senior staff. Wishing I'd stayed in those places that had become so safe for me. Known and controlled. Not just today. But every day. Safety in the well-defined chaos and blurring, indistinct sounds and constant forward movement of every day at this place. Safety, which was so unlike these circling conversations with Trevor. Conversations where I went from anger to something else. Hearing his voice, like his kid's voice, Trevor my cousin talking to me from the top bunk, leaving me now feeling something like sadness.

“Stop, Trevor, all right?” I said, wanting my voice to be louder. “Just stop,” I said, feeling something like regret.

“I'm in Renton,” he said. “Or maybe Burien. Near Seattle. I'm near the airport, I do know that.”

“Trevor,” I said.

“Meeting with an airline tomorrow,” he said. “Then to Tokyo. Then Singapore. I'll call you from there.”

I was staring out the window. “And you haven't slept,” I said.

“Actually, I just woke up. I couldn't even remember where I was. Not till I just said the words to you.”

“Trevor, what do you want? Really. From me. From any of this.”

“I think I'd been asleep for a few hours,” he said.

I was speaking very quietly now. Slowly. Eyes open. Staring up, past the buildings, past the rooftops. Seeing some break in the sky. Blue, and passing clouds. “And how long had you been awake before that, Trevor?”

“Days.”

“How many?”

“A few.”

“More than two?”

“Probably.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was selling,” he said, and I knew now that Trevor was in a dark room outside a city, sitting in modular furniture in another hotel near another airport, near some shopping center with its familiar stretch of brightly lit stores, the best room he could get but as faceless and gray as the rest he'd stayed in that week and month, Trevor leaning forward now, on the phone, eyes closed, calling to see what was happening. What would happen.

“Some woman came up to me in an airport yesterday and told me she was my mother,” Trevor said, voice near the phone but seeming not to listen again.

“How did it feel to be me?” I asked, knowing the woman had confused Trevor with me, having seen us both in an article or on the news.

“Fine,” he said.

“Why don't you sleep?” I asked.

He didn't answer for a moment. “I don't know, Robbie.”

“We think Regence might have done this,” I said.

“Probably they did,” he said.

“I just updated the board,” I said quietly.

“I'm glad I don't do that,” he said.

“I'm sure they're glad too,” I said, smiling some.

“When you tell me about talking to the board,” he said, speaking away from the phone, “I almost feel bad for you.”

I touched the window. I pressed so hard with my fingers. “All this is getting to be more than I can take,” I said.

“I know,” he said quietly.

“Do you? Can I believe you?”

“I guess you can't,” he said.

“I guess not.”

“I hope the network comes back up,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“I'll call you from Singapore,” he said.

“Call me from Tokyo.”

“I will,” he said.

“Good-bye.”

Eleven at night, and Leonard was standing in the doorway of a conference room. “I think we're ready,” he said to Whitley and me.

His tone was so pleasant I would have followed him anywhere. His motions so calm that, for a moment, I forgot what we were about to do.

But as Whitley and I followed him toward the DMZ, the weight and risk of the situation did come back to me. We were about to restart the system using a network strung together on the fly, laid out in the hallways and conference rooms, pieced together by techs still checking their pencil-drawn diagrams. As Whitley and I walked behind the dense, wide figure of Leonard, it seemed that all of the twelve hundred employees who'd come in that day had made their way to the eleventh floor, all crowded into the hallways and workspaces near the DMZ. And now they parted slowly, letting Leonard pass. Whitley and I were just followers at this point. Privileged bystanders tagging along in Leonard's biggest shadow.

“Given the obvious time constraints,” Leonard was saying, speaking over his shoulder as he led Whitley and me through the still-forming path, “I haven't had a chance to tell you about all the specific hazards associated with what we're about to do. I suppose it's a bit of an understatement to say we've never done this before. And again, given the time frame, it's been hard to take all the precautions we'd like.”