The Underwriting (34 page)

NICK

S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
10; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

American investors were proving more difficult than the Europeans. It was past midnight now, after a day of meetings in New York that had been full of serious questions about the long-term health of the app market, sparked with speculation that the entire thing was a bubble.

That was New York, though, Nick reminded himself. New York investors got caught up in things like revenue and profitability. They didn't recognize that the number of users was the new currency, and that once a company had that piece worked out, like Hook did, the rest was cake.

Todd was talking on the phone, his voice serious. “You know what'll happen if he does this. You have to talk him out of it.”

What's going on?
Nick mouthed to Todd, who held up a finger.

“Fuck you, Tom. I've got to go.” Todd hung up the phone. “Fuck!” he said to the car.

“What's going on?”

“Antony van Leeuwen's issuing a negative report.”

“What?”

“He's setting a price target of two dollars a share, and issuing it ahead of the IPO.”

“Two dollars?” Nick's chest tightened. “Is that a joke?”

“He's trying to get attention for himself,” Todd said. “It's bullshit.”

“Who told you?”

“My friend Tom. He runs a fund that just got the tip from Antony and is now thinking of taking a short position,” Todd said. “Fuck him—he's trying to build his career by fucking up my deal.”

“
Your
deal?” Nick's jaw dropped. “Todd, this is
my
company. If he puts out that report and people listen to him . . .” Nick blinked his eyes, his head spinning. Their target was twenty-six dollars. If the price went to two dollars, he wouldn't even have enough to pay back the loan he'd taken to exercise his options.

“They won't,” Todd said. “He's got nothing to back it up. Just his stupid conspiracy theory that location-based apps are going to go bust. The problem is that if guys like Tom take his side, it doesn't matter whether he's right or not. Which means we just have to do a better job convincing them of our view. Jesus fucking Christ, I do not need this.”

The car stopped at the hotel.

“I'm going back to the office,” Todd told the driver. He turned to Nick and took a deep breath. “Don't worry,” he said, calming his voice for Nick's benefit. “We'll figure this out.”

“You better,” Nick said angrily, getting out of the car and slamming the door behind him.

This couldn't possibly be happening. Two dollars a share? And a hedge fund shorting the stock? Nick wasn't having a good time anymore. The questions were intense and he was hungover from all the drinking and Tiffany still hadn't tried to make out with him and no one was “liking” his Instagram posts. He needed something he could control.

He spotted Juan in the lobby and grabbed the programmer's arm. “Can I talk to you?”

Juan frowned but followed him to a corner in the hotel bar.

“It's gone, right?” Nick said sternly.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what'?” Nick whispered angrily. “The third database.”

Juan looked down.

“You erased it, like I told you to do?” Nick said, getting angry again. How was he supposed to operate a company if his lead engineer didn't follow directions?

Juan shook his head. “I found something.”

“What?”

“Kelly Jacobson was on it when she died.”

Nick's throat tightened. That didn't matter. Lots of famous people were on Hook. “You've been looking up user information?”

Juan nodded.

“Do you have any idea what would happen if people found out that a Hook engineer is looking at individual users' information?” Nick's voice got angrier as he said the words. If Antony van Leeuwen was threatening a bad report on conspiracy theories, what would he say if he knew programmers were stalking users?

“I didn't know what to do,” Juan said. “I think Kelly—”

Nick could feel his chest start to constrict. He couldn't breathe. He'd taken out a loan. He'd launched a public reputation. He'd broken up with Grace. Juan's lips were moving, talking frantically, but Nick couldn't make out what he was saying.

“. . . and so I think Robby Goodman is . . .”

“You're fired,” Nick heard himself say.

Juan paused, his mouth ajar. “What?”

“You're fired,” Nick repeated more confidently, his nerves starting to resettle.

“What are you talking about?” Juan asked, as if Nick were crazy.

But Nick wasn't crazy. He was back in control, rebalanced, and the engineer's flippancy gave him even more certainty in his decision. “You signed a nondisclosure agreement, saying you'd keep the data you saw to yourself, which you violated when you showed Phil Dalton. That was strike one. Now you're violating user privacy by looking at their information.”

“Nick, I—”

“I can't have people like that working for me.”

“But what I found . . .” Juan's eyes were wide. “It means—”

“I'll have Tiffany book you a ticket back to California, and we'll pay you out through the end of the year. You can keep any options that you've exercised.”

“I haven't exercised any options.” Juan's face was white, panicked.

Nick lifted an eyebrow. “You're joking.”

“I was going to wait for the IPO and sell enough to . . .”

Nick shook his head, laughing in disbelief. “You should have been more responsible.”

“I—”

Nick looked down at the laptop case Juan was carrying and grabbed it. “I'll need that.”

“Are you seriously firing me?” Juan asked in disbelief.

Nick straightened his spine. This was good, actually. If Juan hadn't exercised, that meant two hundred million worth of shares back in the pot.

He stuck out his hand, remembering the etiquette he'd learned at Harvard Business School about how to behave when you fired people. “It's been a pleasure working with you, Juan. I'm sorry it had to end like this, but I wish you all the best.”

JUAN

S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
10; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

“Juan!” Neha called. “Juan, wait!” She grabbed his arm. “Juan, what's going on?”

Juan shook his head and kept walking, quickly, away from the hotel.

“Juan, stop! Where are you going?”

Juan didn't stop.

“What were you talking to Nick about? Did you tell him?” She scrambled to keep up.

“Yes,” he said.

“And? What'd he say?”

“He fired me.”

“What?” Neha stopped. Juan walked another step, then he stopped, too, closing his eyes and feeling his chest rise and fall. “Nick fired you?” Neha repeated softly.

Juan let his head drop. “Shit, Neha.”

The community center would never happen now. His mother wouldn't get her new house. And who else would hire him? Nick would get rich and Todd would get rich and all those guys in suits in the meetings would get even richer and he would go back to being nothing, like Neha said. They'd won.

Neha caught up and stood in front of him, looking straight into his eyes. “What are you going to do?” she asked softly.

“Can you get me onto one of L.Cecil's computers?” he asked. “Nick took mine.”

She nodded.

Neha used her security badge and passed it back to him while she checked the elevators to make sure no one was there.

“Only employees are allowed up here,” she explained.

“I don't want you to get in trouble.”

She shrugged. “Let's not think about it.”

The elevator doors opened and Neha led him to a corner conference room. Beau and another analyst were at their computers, but neither noticed. She pulled her laptop out of her bag and logged in, then passed it over to him.

Juan sat forward and started typing. Neha sat by his side at the desk while he worked, hacking through layers and layers of code to figure out where the corruption in the mystery user's profile had happened.

“This doesn't make any sense,” Juan said after half an hour.

“What?”

“Kelly never matched this user,” he said, squinting at the screen. “But he was able to see her full profile anyway,” he said. “That's not supposed to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

Juan stopped, remembering Neha hadn't used Hook since the first version. “The way it normally works is the app gives you people nearby and you ‘match' who you like, and if they match you back then you can communicate with them. You can search for people to see their ratings, but you can't see their full profile, or their location, unless they allow it by matching you.”

Juan looked more closely at the screen and went on, “But the system thinks they matched at midnight, even though there was no communication from Kelly's device.” He looked back at Neha. “I think it was manually entered,” he concluded. “I think someone hacked in so they could find out where she was.”

Neha's face went white and she sat forward. “Find out who.”

Juan kept typing. Neha's phone rang but she ignored it. It rang again and she left the room to answer it.

He sat back and stared at the screen: why couldn't he figure this out?
Think!
he screamed at his brain.

SYSTEM SHUTTING DOWN.

Juan sat forward: what had he done? He felt his heart rate speed as he tapped the keys to stop the reboot, but the screen went black. He felt the panic rise as he pressed the restart button again and again.

At last the familiar bell of the computer starting sounded and he waited for the Hook database to reload, still holding his breath. He exhaled, everything was still there. He navigated back to Kelly and her matches. But this time when he clicked to the corrupted profile of the user that matched her on March 6, he found an IP address and his heart caught again: how had he not seen that before?

If he could figure out who owned that IP address, he could figure out who set up the account. He hacked into several banks' servers and felt his head go light when he found an account with an IP address that matched his mystery user. He scrolled to the name registered to the bank's account:
Jorge Menendez.

He went back to the Hook database and typed in Jorge's name, then backed into the IP address for his uncorrupted account: it was the same. He clicked on Jorge's history. A list of matches loaded, until they stopped where March 6 would have been:
PATH CORRUPTED
.

He'd found his guy.

“Did you find it?” Neha asked, returning to the room.

“Wait,” Juan said, his heart starting to panic as he read Jorge's other matches: they were all in East Palo Alto.

He Googled Jorge Menendez. His mug shot came up on the screen, a young, round face with worn brown eyes. Juan read the public criminal record:

NAME:
JORGE MENENDEZ

AGE:
26

OFFENSES:
DRUG POSSESSION (3/14/03); DRUG POSSESSION (10/12/07)

RESIDENCE:
EAST PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

Juan stared at the screen, his hands hovering over the keys.

“What?” Neha sat up, noticing his stillness. “What did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said, clicking to another screen.

“What did you find?” she asked, leaning over him. He forced her away. “Nothing,” he said. “The file's corrupted, I can't see anything.”

She sat back in her chair. “You're lying.”

“No I'm not,” he lied. “It's ruined. I can't do it.”

“What did you find?” she repeated.

“I told you, there's nothing there. Whoever this guy is, he's smarter than me.”

“Bullshit,” she spat.

“What the fuck are you two doing in here?” Todd Kent was at the door, his face red. “Jesus fucking Christ, has everyone lost their minds? Get to work, Neha. And where the fuck is Tara?”

Juan's blood froze. He expected Todd to say something about him being there, but he didn't, storming off instead.

Neha didn't move, she just kept her eyes on him.

“What?” Juan snapped.

She shook her head, disappointed, and stood up to leave.

She left the room and Juan sat alone with the computer. He'd never met Jorge Menendez, but he knew of him: he wasn't a bad guy. He was just a guy from East Palo Alto who'd never gotten any breaks, who'd joined a gang because he didn't have any other community and started dealing drugs because he didn't have any other options. Even if they didn't pin him with the murder, if he got one more possession charge they'd lock him away.

But the media
would
pin him for the murder. People would freak. They'd put up walls blocking East Palo Alto from regular Palo Alto, and the rich families that hired Juan's mom to clean their mansions would start looking at her even more suspiciously than they already did. And he wouldn't be able to do anything to protect her, not now that he was a has-been engineer fired for violating user privacy.

He shut the laptop with calm certainty that he was doing the right thing and took the elevator down to the street, eerily aware of the quiet as he walked back to the hotel. Even though he'd left to try to be something else, it was clearer now more than ever before that this new world was not his people: East Palo Alto was his people.

The least he could do was keep their secrets safe.

TARA

S
UNDAY
, M
AY
11; B
OSTON
, M
ASSACHUSETTS