With a Little Help (14 page)

"There's a Google office in Mexico, you know."

"Are you coming, Greg? We're going now."

"Laurie, what do you think of this?"

Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. "Maya showed me what Google knows about me. It's like there's a little me in there, a copy of me. Like I'm pinned down under a jar with a ball of ether. My parents left East Germany in '65 -- they used to tell me about the Stasi. They'd put everything about you in your file -- even unpatriotic jokes. Lately I've been feeling...watched. All the time. Like I can't live without leaving a trail. Like I'm throwing off a smog of data and it can't be gotten rid of."

"We're going now, Greg. Now. Are you coming?"

Greg looked at the dogs. "I've got some pesos left over," he said. "You take them. Be careful, OK?"

She looked like she was going to slug him. Then she softened and gave him a ferocious hug. "Be careful yourself," she whispered in his ear.

#

They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined it. Their knock was nothing like Maya's tentative, nervous thump. They went bang-bang-bang, confident, knowing that they had every right to be there and not caring who else came after them.

Two men. One stayed by the door and didn't say anything. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sports coat with a small stain on one lapel and a cloisonné American flag on the other. "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," he said, by way of introduction. "'Exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information.' Ten years for a first offense, ever since the PATRIOT Act extended it. I have it on the best of authority that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies. And oh, what will come out in the trial. All the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile."

Greg had been playing this scene out in his head for a week. He'd had all kinds of brave things to say, planned out in advance. He'd even written some down, to see how they looked. It had given him something to do while the knots in his stomach tightened, while he waited to hear from Maya.

"I'd like to call a lawyer," is all he managed. It came out in a whisper.

"You can do that," the man said. "But hear me out first."

Greg found his voice. "I'd like to see your badge."

The man's basset-hound face lit up as he hissed a laugh. "Oh, Greg, buddy. I'm not a cop. I work for --" He named the DC firm in Google's employ. The inventors of swiftboating. "You're a Googler. You're part of the family. We couldn't send the police after you without talking with you first. There's an offer I'd like to make."

Greg made coffee. It gave him something to do with his hands while he tried to find that bravery he'd been honing all week. "I'll go to the press," he said. "I've written this all up. I'll go straight to them."

The guy nodded as if thinking it over. "Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle's office in the morning and spill everything you need. They'd try to find a confirming source. They won't find it. Maybe you'll try to show them what your profile looks like today? Well, tell you what, it looks just like it looked the day you landed at SFO. Greg, buddy, why don't you hear me out before you start trying to figure out how to fight me? I'm in the win-win business. I'm in the business of figuring out how to get all parties what they need. I'm very good at it. You don't even want to know what I'm billing Google for this little tete-a-tete. By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first, takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?"

Greg watched in numb bemusement as the man took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. Then he poured the beans back out of the grinder and into Greg's colander and did things at the sink.

He was a little pudgy, and very pale. He needed a haircut -- had unruly curls at his neck. It made Greg relax, somehow. This guy had the social gracelessness of a nerd, felt like a real Googler, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee-grinder, too.

"We're drafting a team for Building 49 --"

"There is no building 49," Greg said, automatically.

"Yeah," the guy said, with a private little smile. "There's no Building 49. And we're putting together a team, with its own buginizer, to own googlecleaner. Maya's code wasn't very efficient. Every time someone runs it, it clobbers the whole farm. And it's got plenty of bugs. We've asked around and there's consensus on this. You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't matter what you knew if you were back inside --"

"No, I wouldn't," Greg said. "You're on crack."

"Hear me out. There's money involved. Good work, too. Smart colleagues. A direction for your life. A chance to participate in the political life of your country --"

Greg gave a bitter laugh. "Unbelievable," he said. "If you think I'm going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you're even crazier than I thought."

"Greg," he said, "Greg, you're right. That was dumb. No one is going to do that anymore. We're just going to -- clean things up a little. For some select people. You know what I mean, right? Every Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. You stand for office and they'll look at your kids, your brothers, your ex-girlfriends. Now that your search history is available to so many people, it won't be that hard to look into that too. Your Orkut network, your old Usenet messages, your searches, all of it." He loaded the cafetiere and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. He held out his hand and Greg got down two coffee mugs -- Google mugs, of course -- and passed them to him.

"We're going to do for our friends just what Maya did for you. Just give them a little cleanup. Preserve their privacy. That's all -- I promise you, that's all."

Greg sipped the coffee, but didn't taste it. "And whichever candidates you
don't
clean --"

"Yeah," the guy said. "Yeah, you're right. It'll be tough for them."

"You can go now," Greg said.

"Oh, Greg," the guy said. He plucked his jacket off his chair-back and shrugged it on, felt in the inside pocket and produced a small stack of paper, folded into quarters. He smoothed it out and put it on the table.

Greg looked quickly and saw the rows of results he'd seen on the DHS man's screen, back at the airport, when this all started. "I don't care," he said. "Tell the world about my search history. Go ahead. In five years, everyone will have had their search history ruptured. We'll all be guilty."

"It's not your history," the man said. He divided the stack into two piles, and pointed to names on the top sheet of each. One was Maya's. The other was a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to for the last three elections.

"You get five weeks' vacation a year. You can go to Cabo for the SCUBA. The options package is very generous, too."

The man sat down and drank some coffee. Greg tried some more of his own. It didn't taste so bad. It was, in fact, more delicious than anything that had ever come out of his kitchen. The man knew what he was doing.

The best years of Greg's life had been spent at Google. Smart people. Amazing work environment. Wonderful technology. Nothing in the world like it. When you worked at G, you had the best model train set in the universe to play with. Organizing all of human knowledge.

"You can pick your team, of course," the man said.

Greg poured himself another cup of delicious coffee.

#

The new Congress took eleven working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and the NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of its intelligence and analysis work to private contractors.

Theoretically, the contracts were open to a competitive bidding process, but within the secure group at Google, in building 49, there was no question of who would win those contracts. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet that they would have caught them -- governments just aren't equipped to Do Search Right.

Greg looked himself in the eye that morning as he shaved -- the security minders didn't like hacker-stubble, and they weren't shy about telling you so -- and realized that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent in the US government.

How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted spook?

He had himself convinced by the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike-racks. He stopped for an organic smoothie on the way to his desk, then sat down and sipped.

The rumpled man hadn't been to the G since Greg went back to work, but it often felt like his influence was all around them in building 49. He wasn't any less rumpled today -- he could have been wrapped in saran-wrap on the day he brought Greg back to work and refrigerated for all that he hadn't changed a hair.

"Hi, Greg," he said, sliding into the chair next to his. His podmates stood up in unison and left the room.

"Just tell me what it is," Greg said. "Just spit it out. You want me to pwn NORAD and start World War III, right?"

"Nothing so obvious," the man said, patting his shoulder. "Just a little search-job."

"Yeah?"

"There's a person we want to find. A person who's left the country, apparently headed for Mexico. She knows certain things that are, as of today, classified. She needs to be briefed on her new responsibilities."

Greg stood up. "I'm not going to find Maya for you." He pulled on his jacket.

"There are plenty of people here who will. It's up to you, though. You can work here with her, being productive, or you can find out just how rotten life can get -- while she works here, being productive with your co-workers."

Greg stared at him, his hands balled into fists.

"Come on," the rumpled man said. "Greg, we both know how this goes. When you said yes to me in your kitchen, you lost the option of saying no. It's not so bad, is it? Who would you rather have doing the nation's intelligence: you and your pals here in the Valley, or a bunch of straight-edge code-grinders in Virginia?"

Greg turned on his heel and left. He made it all the way to the parking lot before he stopped and kicked a wall so hard he felt something give way in his foot.

Then he limped back to his desk, hung his jacket on his chair, and logged back in.

#

It was a week later when his key-card failed to open the door to Building 49. The idiot red LED shone at him every time he swiped it. He swiped it and swiped it. Any other building and there'd be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

"Greg, can I see you, please?"

The rumpled man hadn't shaved in a couple of days. He put an arm around Greg's shoulders and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It was the same cologne that his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn't remember his name. Juan-Carlos? Juan-Luis?

The man's arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the kitchen's herb garden. "We're giving you a couple of days off," he said.

Greg felt a cold premonition that sank all the way to his balls. "Why?" Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?

"It's Maya." The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless basset-hound gaze. "It's Maya. Killed herself. In Guatemala. I'm sorry, Greg."

Greg seemed to hurtle away from himself, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, looking down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say, "I don't need any time off. I'm OK."

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.