He himself had read some economics. In fact he had read The Wealth of Nations, a book Jessamine had recommended, and he saw in Adam Smith a very Jewish form of Providence. What was the invisible hand Smith always spoke about, but the hand of God? What was a correction, but the Creator’s recalibration of the world? Had he studied physics in college, Helfgott might have learned that what goes up comes down. But the rabbi had not attended college, only seminary, where he learned that what comes down, must rise again. Applying this principle, he believed that what the markets destroyed they would, God willing, speedily restore, and this belief sustained him, as did the knowledge that he owned the Bialystok Center of Berkeley free and clear. Many years before, he had saved the life of a young man, an addict in the ashram occupying the building, and the boy’s grateful father had purchased the property and then sold it to the rabbi for a dollar. Now the young man was married, living in New Jersey, and a father himself! Such was the marvelous circularity of exchanges. Such, with God’s help, was the world’s hopeful trend, difficult in the short term, but in the long run beautiful.
Others were not so philosophical. When ISIS hit a new low of seventy—not seventy dollars, but seventy cents—Jonathan took the debasement personally. His high-flying company was about to be delisted, too small to register on the Nasdaq stock exchange. He knew that ISIS would come roaring back. He knew because he would make it happen. In the meantime—well, he hated meantimes.
Sleepless, he paced his Somerville apartment. His roommates had moved on, but Jonathan still lived there and he hated that too. He hated the stasis, the stalemate developing between him and Emily. Although he and Emily had set the date for their October wedding, they had not bought a house, nor had she left Veritech. She was rolling out a new product. She was setting up a research group for Alex—an unfathomable idea—rewarding Alex for his bad behavior. Twice, three times, she postponed her move east, and then she pushed the wedding off as well.
She said she missed him. At the end of every visit her eyes filled with tears—but she returned to California anyway, and somehow she remained patient. Where did this excessive patience come from? Did she still have reservations? She had told him in her sweet teacherly way that now she was ready—they were ready—to be engaged, but he had no idea what she meant by readiness. Waiting, taking time, becoming ready—this was the vocabulary women used to divert attention from what they wanted. And what did women want? The same thing men did—only slower.
What would it be like to live without this level of intense anticipation? Like ancient nobles he and Emily waged wars and signed treaties, convening privy councils in their separate conference rooms. What would it be like when Emily abdicated to live with him full-time? Would she? Could she?
Hard times. He kicked an empty soda can across the bare floor. Thirty million invested at Goldman Sachs seemed a paltry sum, a pittance, next to the hundreds of millions he had once possessed on paper. What Jonathan had was nothing next to what he wanted. Prisoner of his enormous expectations, he paced the floor, plotting to reclaim what might have been.
Friday when the markets closed, ISIS had climbed a penny to seventy-one cents. Then Jonathan called a company meeting in the newly renovated lobby. Over one hundred Cambridge employees sat on the gray carpet, while oldsters like Dave sat in swivel chairs, and Jonathan, Orion, Aldwin, and Jake stood together in the center, all four of them in town at once, like a rock band reuniting without instruments, four accustomed to mosh pits of celebration, now gazing out at anxious upturned faces.
Shakespeare’s Henry rallied his troops at Agincourt: If we are mark’d to die, we are enow / To do our country loss, and if to live, / the fewer men, the greater share of honour. At a later date, George Washington tried to mollify his mutinous men: … let me entreat you, Gentlemen, … to rely on the plighted faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress. Now Jonathan took the floor. “Okay, guys, listen up. There’s share price and there’s reality. Prices go up and they go down. There is a certain amount of randomness built into the system, a certain amount of envy and media shit, a certain amount of stuff happening in the market as a whole that for better or worse reflects on us. But the reality is our products, our services, and our customers. That’s what you have to wake up and think about every single day. Excellence, accountability, and the bottom line. We did not establish ISIS as some fly-by-night dot-com.”
“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 bo
ard 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.”
But he kissed her instead. Arms inside her unbuttoned coat, he found the gap between her skirt and soft wool sweater. She was so long and slender—sleek like the girl-women in his father’s poems, her breasts like buds under his fingers. She didn’t push him away. He felt the hollow inside her hip bone, and her shoulder blades were like folded wings.
“Don’t you want me to?” he whispered.
“No,” she said longingly, “not at all.”
“Not at all! Don’t overstate your case.”
“It’s a good case,” said Sorel. “It’s a strong case.”
“A Lockbox?”
“Right. Except that you can’t hack your way inside.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said, but even as he released her, even as he watched her unlock her door, he longed to solve this puzzle, and find a way to her encrypted heart.
20
When the market sank, Bruno sent an e-mail about riding out the storm. Emily kept working without complaint, but a little furrow appeared between her eyes, a subtle wrinkle, not a worry line, but a mark of concentration. The stock price fell to forty on Tuesday, then to thirty-three on Wednesday, and finally hit a new low of sixteen on Thursday, and everyone was shocked, because there was no good reason for the steep decline, and yet the price was falling all the same.
On the upswing, every Veritech employee felt masterful. Now those masters felt like leaves tossed in unexpected storms. Laura read Winnie-the-Pooh at bedtime to her children in her unfinished house, and as she read about Pooh’s tumble through the branches of the oak tree, she held the baby, Katie, in her lap, and she thought: This is exactly what it’s like to lose half your net worth in three days.
“Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet onto the branch below him.
“If only I hadn’t—” he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch.
“You see what I meant to do …”
“Of course it was rather—” he admitted as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches….
“More!” demanded Meghan from the bottom bunk.
And Justin sat up in the top bunk and said, “Why are you stopping, Mommy?”
And Katie pulled Laura’s hair.
But Laura could not help pausing to consider how well A. A. Milne described the falling sensation, the surprise and sudden thumps as one lost economic altitude, and began to wonder whether renovating in Los Altos was such a good idea, and then, whether private school made sense, and finally, whether leasing a car might be more prudent than paying cash.
Kevin told Laura, “We can’t panic. It would be terrible to sell all the stock we have left.”
“What do you mean, ‘the stock we have left’?” Laura asked him.
“We lost some,” he admitted as he helped her hook up the rolling dishwasher to the sink in their temporary kitchen.
“How do you lose stock?” Laura asked him.
He didn’t answer immediately.
“Kevin?”
“I borrowed on margin to pay the contractor,” he said.
“You what?”
“I didn’t want to sell, because I knew Veritech was going back up.”
She turned on him. “Can you hear what’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “Can you even hear?”
“I guessed wrong,” Kevin said.
“No, that’s not what I meant, Kevin James Miller. What’s wrong is that you didn’t ask me. What were you thinking, borrowing against my stock?”
“It was our stock. And I’m sorry, Laura.”
“I earned it,” she declared. “It was mine, and, yes, I made it ours. But it was never yours to do what you wanted. It was never yours to decide about without consulting me.”
“You never showed any interest in handli
ng the money,” Kevin pointed out.
She had never been so angry. “You never asked.”
“Do you think you could have given me better advice? Whenever I asked about investments in the past, you trusted my judgment.”
Laura stood before him in their plywood makeshift kitchen, and she said, “Maybe I have a little more sense than you do. Or if I don’t, then maybe we’d make our mistakes together.”
“We’ve still got stock,” he soothed her. “Up ’til now, we’ve been very, very lucky.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you ever gamble with my hard-earned luck again.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Because if you do, I’ll leave you,” she warned him, and she was half serious. “I’ll take the children and start a company of my own.”
He wasn’t sure quite how to take this. She had a sweet, soft voice; a patient, forgiving nature. She played the flute. “I always said you could start a bakery.” He tried to steer the conversation back to calmer waters. “You could sell your lemon—”
“I could sell truth serum,” she told him.
“Laura! I keep telling you—I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think I’d care?”
She cared enormously. Everybody did, but like all watched pots, the market would not boil.
At this moment George chose to buy. He bought Cisco at bargain-basement prices. He purchased IBM and Apple. And he paid cash for Tom McClintock’s cookbooks. He wrote a check for just under half a million dollars, exactly the money Sandra needed for her daughter’s legal fight.
Clever George. He knew the books were worth much more, and he unpacked them with guilt and pleasure, turning pages with sumptuous color plates, unfolding the collector’s notes, strange and brittle as pressed flowers. What rare and secret treasures, historical and also private. Not just a collection, but a reliquary. George had pulled off a bibliophile’s Louisiana Purchase, or rather, Jess had pulled off the deal for him.