He smiled, pulled his bike out of the rack, pushed up the kickstand, and pedaled off, trying to quell the uneasy feeling in his stomach. It was no use; whatever Mirabel had had to say about breakfast, he began to think he’d been wrong in agreeing to it. The flutters were getting worse. How much did they take off us last night? he thought. Did Tau underestimate? And by how much? Please, let me still have a company . . .
He was only about halfway down to Castle Scrooge when his phone started singing “Hail to the Chief.” Oh, God, Dev thought. Please, not now . . . But it kept on ringing.
He sighed, coasted to a halt and wheeled the bike off the path. The ringtone was getting louder and the tempo of the song less presidential every moment. He snapped the phone open. “Hi, Dad . . .”
“What the hell happened over there?” his father barked. “Can’t I even count on you to call me when you’re in trouble?”
Dev was torn between annoyance and affection. “Dad,” he said, “what exactly were you thinking about doing to help?”
“Now that’s a hell of a tone to be taking with your own father—”
“Dad, please.” He knew he was in one of those no- win situations now, and probably the best way out of it was to do what he did when he got into one of these with Mirabel: apologize. But with his dad, it ran against the grain—
“Exactly where are you this morning?” his dad said.
“Just about to find that out,” Dev said, gazing down the path as Omnitopia people started flooding into work. “Got a meeting with Jim in about ten minutes.”
“Well,” his dad said, gruff, “I can tell you where you are. Up a creek and in need of a paddle. The share price—”
“I had a briefing already this morning, Dad,” Dev said. “And I’m going to another one right now, with people I pay to do this. Now, if you really want the job that badly—”
His father sounded wounded. “Damn it, Dev, I’m just worried about you!”
He sighed. “Dad, we already have someone who does that. She does enough of it for both of you. How is Mom this morning?”
“She’s fine,” his dad said. “They changed her medication yesterday. It seems to be helping.”
“Good,” Dev said. “There’s some good news, anyway. Now, Dad, please listen. I’ve gotta get to this meeting. It’s going to be an impossible day. Please don’t make it any more impossible than it already is.”
His father sighed: one of those guilt-laden sighs that was also intended to load you up with guilt. “Tell your smart friend that I said to watch out for the short-sellers.”
Dev nodded wearily. “I’ll tell him that, Dad. Give Mom my love, okay? I’ll call her later.” He glanced at his watch. “Probably about ten, if you two didn’t get up too late.”
“No, she got to sleep at a good time last night. Slept the night through, too.”
It was the too occasional interjection like that that sometimes melted Dev’s heart with regret, and made him wonder why his relationship with his father was such a rocky road most of the time. Every now and then that image of his dad watching Bella in her sleep would come up. Dev had caught him at it, once or twice what he was young, and his father had always tried to cover it up, gruff and embarrassed.
“That’s good,” Dev said. “Give her my love, Dad.” A long pause; it was surprising how much effort it took him to say it. “Love you too—”
The click happened in his ear just as he was saying it. Dev looked at the phone and let out an exasperated sigh. Did he even hear that? If I call him back and say it again, will he think I’m cracking under the strain, or suicidal? And if I don’t call him back and say it, I’ll spend days wondering if he heard it at all—
Dev shook his head, then shoved the phone in his pocket. For a moment he just stood looking at the bike next to him, the morning unfolding around him. Something up in the top of one of the nearby palm trees rattled, sending a shower of last year’s palm nuts down. Dev glanced up at it. Rats, he thought. I really need to get the exterminators in again—talk to the grounds people, they’re not getting them in here often enough . . .
Mirabel would say I’m micromanaging again. But damn it, this is my home. All the home I’ve got.
And somebody broke in last night and tried to steal the family jewels . . .
Dev pushed the bike back out into the path. Just before he got back in the saddle, a splash of the low postdawn sunlight caught the three little gold crowns on the bike’s saddle post. I wonder how Stroopwaffel is doing? he thought as he climbed on and pedaled off again. Haven’t heard anything in a good while . . . Maybe at the launch. Stroop’s on the invite list, but I haven’t had time to check on the RSVPs. That was a task for some other time, when the world wasn’t crashing around his ears. The way it is now. His stomach began to flutter again.
He pulled up in front of the big circle of Castle Scrooge, shoved his bike into the space at the end of the curved rack, and went in. The building was one of the taller ones on this side of the campus, since almost all of Omnitopia’s North American financial and oversight staff were here, maybe a thousand people in this building, making it one of the more densely populated spaces in Omnitopia. It had a somewhat different feel to it than other communities in Omnitopia—more buttoned-down and terse than the more playful parts of the campus, and more like a standard office building, if a sleekly expensive and modern one. By Jim Margoulies’ diktat, Castle Scrooge’s counterparts in London and Tokyo mirrored this look and feel as a concession to the conservative sensibilities of the visiting investors and other fiduciary types who passed through its doors. Jim was no harsh taskmaster to his staff, but he insisted on having all of them and his establishment exude enough of a sense of fiscal responsibility that the investors wouldn’t get too freaked out.
Or at least no more freaked out than they are this morning, Dev thought. He headed under Castle Scrooge’s stucco archway. Through it was a circular garden plaza similar to the one inside Castle Dev, though smaller and feeling somehow more protected: the architect had somehow managed to produce the effect that the surrounding roundtower walls were leaning in around you, possibly because all the inner walls were of glass.
Dev headed around to the right where a door led to the ground floor level, waved at the guard there, and bounded up the stairs, trying to expend a little extra energy so as to control the fluttering in his stomach. I really should’ve taken an antacid before I came over here, he thought. Those damn marshmallows in that cereal, never again. . . .
The stairs switched back at a broad landing. The next flight brought him up to the second floor, where the circle stretched around and away from him on either side. From here Dev could look straight across to the far side of the circle, out through the floor- to-ceiling glass skin, and see the wide double doors of Jim’s office suite, with people going in and out of them in a hurry. He swallowed and headed to the right around the curve.
Halfway around the circle he met Jim’s executive secretary, Helga, a broad, brunette, smiling woman of the reassuringly motherly type, carrying a sheaf of folders. “Morning, Helga,” Dev said. “What mood’s the boss in today?”
She gave Dev a warning look. “Not the best, Dev,” she said. “Not the worst I’ve ever seen him—but the markets aren’t taking last night’s little escapade very well. He’s been on TV three times already this morning, so you can imagine . . .”
“Oh, God,” Dev said. It wasn’t just the television appearances; it was also the fact that Jim was allergic to pancake makeup. He would be stoking up on antihistamines even now. “Great, well, I’d better go get it over with . . .”
“For certain values of ‘over,’ ” Helga said. She continued on her way.
Dev kept on around the circle until he came to the open double doors. They were paired slabs of clear glass, rolled sideways for the moment over the electively frosted glass of the inner walls of Jim’s main office, which reached around a quarter of the circle on this level. Dev went in the front door, saw no one
manning Helga’s desk for the moment, and went on to the left and around to the more private, completely frosted-glass area that screened Jim’s desk at the moment. That screening itself was not a great sign, as Jim normally left his glass clear when business was proceeding as usual: he didn’t blank it until he was feeling stressed. And there were bright lights in there. He actually let them into his office to shoot? Dev thought. That’s unusual. After all, there was a teleconferencing and video management suite a little farther around the Ring.
Dev sighed, knocked on the door. It slid open in front of him.
There was only one desk in Jim’s private office, unusual for a man who had about six of them in his virtual space, every one piled high with work and business from different parts of the Omnitopian economy. The real-world desk was ebony plate glass, with a four foot wide computer desktop embedded in it. Behind the desk sat Jim, leaning over the desktop on his elbows and glaring at it balefully. He had his jacket off, and there was a napkin stuck in his shirt collar to protect it from the pancake makeup.
“Late breakfast?” Dev said.
Jim glanced up at him, gestured at the chair beside him on his side of the desk. “Breakfast?” he said. “I’ll have that tomorrow.”
“Mirabel would lecture you about your blood sugar . . .” Dev said as he came around, and the door slid shut behind him. “What’s with the lights? Who was in here?”
“MSNBC,” Jim said. “Their morning lady.”
“Not a good interview, I take it,” Dev said. He looked at the desktop, which was covered with jittering graphs—the live goings-on of some ten or fifteen stock markets around the world, each window popping up to the fore as it saw some piece of action that Jim had wanted to be alerted about.
“Not the best, no,” Jim said, and sighed. “I wanted to catch you before your morning appointments kicked in. Especially the Time journalist.”
“Oh?”
Jim pushed back from the desk a little. “She’s been a busy little bee,” he said.
“Too many uncomfortable questions?”
“Not in so many words. But Tau’s people tell me that some of the questions she’s been asking staff have been interesting.”
“About the attack?”
“Yes, and other matters,” Jim said. “Security-based stuff. In particular, some people who were instructed to do so have fed her some disinformation so that we can see where it pops up. But it’s not material that would make good reading in Time, at least in terms of consumer interest.”
“Okay,” Dev said. “So I should do what about this?”
“Just know about it. She’s going to want to know what part you played in the response to the attack yesterday. Keep it general. In particular, she knows about your ‘rescue.’ She’s been told you were put in that particular virtual spot on purpose, to draw the attack that way.”
“She’ll be suspecting I wasn’t, though,” Dev said.
“I don’t see how she couldn’t be,” Jim said. “Anyway, Tau asked me to tell you please not to screw up the company backstory with one of your I-Cannot-Tell-A-Lie moments, as he has reasons for wanting to keep that story in place at the moment.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“Asleep,” Jim said. “For a few hours, anyway. For a hacker, he’s not the best in the world at staying up all night anymore.” Jim grinned at that.
Dev laughed softly. “All right. Did he tell you about this bait- and-switch plan the shuntspace security people have put forward?”
“He did. I would have asked you about it next if you didn’t bring it up, which once again just goes to prove how great minds think alike.”
“And?”
“I approve the financial part of it. It’s an acceptable risk, and I agree that if it works we should be able to make a lot back later. Maybe more than they think. So I told Tau it’s a go, and he told them. They’ve been prepping it ever since.”
“Fine.” Dev let out a breath, nodded at the desktop. “What’s the story on this?
Jim pushed back, staring at the jittering graphs for a moment, then met Dev’s eyes, and Dev was suddenly struck by how pale Jim looked, makeup or no makeup. “It’s not good,” Jim said. “While we’re talking about playing historical roles, or not playing them, I’ve been doing the Little Dutch Boy all morning—the goal being to avoid being mistaken for something out of A Night to Remember.”
“That bad,” Dev said.
Jim sighed. “They got something like sixty-five million bucks out of us last night.”
Dev sucked in a long breath.
“And it will be worse today,” Jim said. “Far worse. Analysis in how the miscreants did it is far along, but everyone agrees that’s unlikely to affect the next attack. As far as media goes, I’ve been stressing our huge sloshing ocean of available liquidity. But even that is only so deep, and the stock is diving everywhere. Until we actually roll out, we’ve got nothing to push the stock up again . . . and the next attack is going to weaken us further.”
Dev let the long breath out. “Should I sell my car?”
Jim’s smile went lopsided. “Maybe not. But if the bad guys pull two or three times as much again out of us today or tonight, as I think is most likely the goal—and if borrowing to cover ourselves isn’t an option, as even short-term loan money isn’t as easy to access as it used to be—then Chapter 11 becomes a possibility. There’s only so much loss of liquidity the SEC will let us get away with before shutting us down for an investigation.”
“Even if I cash in my personal assets to back us up?” Dev asked.
Slowly Jim nodded. “I was factoring that in.”
Dev swallowed. One of the dangers of being the seventh richest man in the world was that you started believing you were immune to this kind of thing. Then the universe did something to surprise you, and you learned better.
“All right,” Dev said. “Let’s see how it goes. You have a few emergency plans in the shot locker already, if I know you—”
Jim nodded again. “And I can always sell my car too . . .”
Dev looked at his best friend and raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said. “We can take public transport for a while if we have to.”
They sat quietly for a moment. “You need me to appear on any of these money shows?” Dev said.
Jim shook his head. “No, they’d take that as a sign that something was seriously wrong.”
Dev laughed. “And it’s not?”
“You know what I mean,” Jim said. “No, you just carry on as usual. In fact, that was Tau’s message to you for today. Carry on as if the rollout is your main business, stay out of the code levels until you’re sent for, and act normal. Or what passes for normal with you.”
“That sounds like Tau,” Dev said.
“I would have used the same phrasing,” Jim said. “So go do your thing. In particular, I hear you have to go eat some ice cream.”
Dev’s stomach flip-flopped harder than ever. “Oh, God. Have you got any antacid?”
Jim reached down under the desk and handed Dev a half- full bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “This works better.”
“Boy, are you a hard case,” Dev said, unscrewing the cap. “Right out of the bottle? Is there rehab for Pepto heads?”
“Company medical will handle it, if there is. Assuming we still have a company at the end of the day . . .”
“Cheers,” Dev said, and drank a hefty swig of the stuff. After a moment he handed the bottle back and said, “I will be sent for, I take it?”
“When you’re needed, absolutely,” Jim said. “Tau told me that you get better results with an army by withholding the presence of the general until the worst possible moment. He says that if Napoleon had ever learned not to grandstand, we’d all be speaking French right now.”
“The benefits of a continental education,” Dev said, standing up.
Someone tapped on the door. Jim touched his desk. The door slid open.
Helga was standing there. “Jim, I didn’
t want to disturb you while you were with Dev—”
“It’s okay, Helga,” Dev said. “We’re done.”
She nodded. “I had a call from Alain over in Tau’s office. He says, ‘Tell them the second wave has started.’ ”
Dev gulped. Jim nodded, got up, pulled the napkin out of his collar. “Are the Bloomberg people ready for me?”
“They were late getting in, but they’re down in the suite and they’ll be ready in five minutes.”
“Thanks.”
Helga vanished. Jim and Dev headed for the door. “So just remember,” Jim said, “it’s all under control. We’ll take care of everything. All you have to do is act normal. Okay?”
Dev nodded. Jim patted him on the shoulder and turned right, heading for the teleconferencing suite and singing softly under his breath, “We’ll meet againnnn . . . don’t know where, don’t know whennnn. . . .”
Dev gulped again and headed for the stairs.
ELEVEN
DEV HEADED OUT ACROSS THE CAMPUS on the bike feeling strangely hollow inside, like someone who’d been to the doctor and told that he had cancer . . . and then in the next breath had been told that there was nothing he could do, but also not to worry.
It was useless. But the least I can do, he thought as he rode, is keep myself under control while they fight my fight. First things first—
He rode back to Castle Dev and parked the black bike in the last spot at the end of the rack. There were now twice as many bikes on site as there had been when he’d left, scattered on the lawn, parked on the pathway, and leaning against the inside of the arch. People were heading in and out at speed, too busy even to talk to him—which was alarming by itself. Never mind, he thought. Too much to do today. Get a grip and let’s get on with it.