Cumulus (16 page)

Tossing the towel to the floor, she examined herself in the mirror. Streaks of white and gray peppered her jet-black hair. Lines creased at the corners of her eyes. Her breasts were less firm than they once were, her muscles less defined. But despite all that, she knew she looked good for her age. Not as good as that young photographer, but still in the running.

Certainly, Huian was busy. The nature of her job leeched the meaning out of that word. But if she was truly honest with herself, that wasn’t the reason she hadn’t gone home last night.

She slithered into her underwear and donned slacks, blouse, and blazer. No. She hadn’t wanted to go home. Right now, home meant Vera. And Vera meant loss. Whether or not they might reconcile, Huian knew it would never be the same. There were certain things that were irrevocable. You might turn a new page, but you couldn’t backtrack.

Standing at the vanity, she paused before starting to apply makeup. Not today. She replaced the cosmetics, unused. There were times when appearances mattered, and there were times when you just had to be real.

She stepped out into her office and pulled the hidden door to the private bedroom shut. A tray sat on her desk with a bagel smothered in cream cheese and lox, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a velvety cappuccino. A handwritten note from Tom wished her good morning with a little smiley face.

The bagel was delicious, the flavors perfectly complemented by a sprinkling of capers and pepper. As she munched on her breakfast, she gazed out the window of her office. Intermittent clouds passed before the morning sun, softening the light shining on her fair city. The bay was calm and glassy. Cumulus employees wandered the campus pathways, getting ready to start their day. Remembering enjoying the same view yesterday afternoon, she was struck by how impervious the world was to the vagaries of human drama. People’s successes and failures, lives and deaths, were as nothing to the universe they inhabited. Just flickers in the ether. You had only one chance to make your mark.

“Ma’am?” Tom’s voice came over the sound system.

“Yes, Tom? Thank you for breakfast, by the way. It’s heavenly.”

“Of course, ma’am, my pleasure.”

“So, what’s up?”

“Ma’am, Karl asked to see you as soon as you were available. You needed the sleep so I didn’t wake you. But now that you’ve eaten, I figured you’d want to know.”

The best executive assistants knew you better than you knew yourself.

“Thanks,” she said. “Please let him know I’m ready to see him.”

Karl arrived ten minutes later. He looked tired, and she noticed he was wearing the same suit as the day before.

“Have you been up all night?”

He nodded. “Monitoring the protest from the command center,” he said.

“Here, take this,” she said, offering him the cappuccino.

“Thanks,” he said, sipping gratefully.

She raised her eyebrows. “Why did the protest keep you from bed?”

He closed his eyes for a brief moment, appearing to center himself. Opening them again, he said, “Most of the time, keeping the peace is pretty mundane. It’s about having a uniformed presence and striking the right balance in terms of enforcement so that people think twice before breaking the law. But sometimes, it gets out of hand. After a while, you start to see patterns. At first, you don’t even notice. It just triggers a response in where and how you focus your attention. Eventually, you become more and more sensitive to those little details that just don’t click.”

He set down the empty cappuccino cup.

“Normally,” he said, “protests run their course after a few hours. People get hungry, tired, cold, bored, whatever. They just sort of peter out. Sometimes they’ll go on longer than that, but they usually break up late at night once people realize they’re probably still going to have to go to work the next day. But last night, they didn’t go home. They piled a bunch of old mattresses and worn-out tires at the intersection of Market and
40
^th
Street and burned them.”

As he was talking, Huian increased the opacity on the windows and brought up the feed, giving Karl control. He immediately cycled to a view from a drone hovering a few hundred meters above the demonstration.

Huian sucked in a breath. The dancing flames seemed to fill the entire intersection. Toxic black smoke roiled and billowed up from the blaze. Throngs of people were packed tight on the streets around it. More seemed to be filtering in even as they spoke.

“The bonfire is so big, it’s melting the asphalt,” said Karl. “They keep throwing more fuel on it.”

He cycled through a variety of feeds. A man stood balanced on a sidewalk trash bin, giving some sort of rousing speech. Two dozen people were using spray paint and old cardboard boxes to make signs. A painfully cute toddler rode on his father’s shoulders. Along the outer edges of the crowd, dreadlocked men stood with shotguns and assault rifles hanging from their shoulders.

“Who are
they
?” asked Huian, pointing. “Where are the police?”

“You can see the police there.” He gestured off to the side, and she saw a group of police officers standing in front of their vehicles about a block away.

“They’re certainly keeping their distance.”

“They are,” he said. “I’ve been on the line with the chief of police and Mayor Gonzalez twice this morning already. They are not eager to engage with the crowd given their resource constraints. Those armed men are members of Frederick O’Livier’s organization. His group runs the Oakland Slums. Although they would never say as much, I get the distinct impression from the mayor that O’Livier may actually have more clout than he does. Their policy at the moment is live and let live. They’re hoping it will eventually just die down.”

“Wait, Frederick O’Livier? The guy who led the Warriors to the NBA Championships thirty years ago?” That had been one of the greatest postseasons ever played.

Karl nodded. “He transitioned from point guard to black-market mogul. To be fair to him, his men seem to be keeping things at least somewhat under control. They’ve been managing fuel additions to the fire so that it doesn’t spread to the surrounding buildings. They stopped a few kids who were trying to loot a convenience story on Adeline and have broken up a few fights.”

Looking closer, Huian saw that some of the armed men were actually wandering through the crowd handing out granola bars and bottled water. There was more going on here than met the eye. She needed to think, not just react. She needed to read between the lines.

“The crowd is much, much bigger than yesterday,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said. “When night fell, we estimate there were five thousand protesters. As of this morning, there are approximately sixty-seven thousand people.” He adjusted the feed to show a satellite view. She could see highlighted routes leading from all the Slums around the Bay Area that came together at the intersection. “The bonfire is the eye of the storm. At
7:15
this morning, we detected a dramatic uptick in the rate of influx of people. It went from a linear function to an exponential curve. My analysts expect that within the hour, there will be more than one hundred thousand people on the streets.”

“Why? What triggered the change?”

Karl shifted on his feet, and Huian realized he was uncomfortable. “Ma’am, it seems to correlate with a provocative blog that posted at
7
a.m. Social channels are on fire with outraged chatter.”

“Ma’am?” Tom’s voice came over the intercom. “I have Chandra here. She’s demanding to see you right away.”

Chandra Patel was Cumulus’s head of public relations. Huian shot a look at Karl and he shrugged.

“Send her in,” she said.

The door opened immediately, and Chandra stalked into the office like a corporate lioness, black eyes ablaze against the smooth mahogany skin of her face. She didn’t even bother to acknowledge Karl.

Chandra placed her hands on her hips. “We need to issue a statement,” she said with enough voltage behind her words to kill. “And put this thing to rest before it gets
really
out of hand.”

Huian raised her palms. “I’m still catching up,” she said. “Bring me up to speed, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

Chandra looked at her incredulously for a moment and then composed herself.

“
This
,” she said, bringing up an internet page on the display. It was plain text against a white background, no graphics, menu, or any kind of user interface. Just words.

Huian began to read.

29

“WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON HERE?”
Frederick stood behind his reclaimed wood conference table, flanked by restless lieutenants.

Lilly stood opposite him with Henok and Penelope, the middle-aged woman in the denim jumpsuit from the day before, who turned out to be Frederick’s computer science chief. The screens around the sides of the room displayed views from the protest, status reports from field commanders, and live satellite maps of the area.

Lilly briefed him on their experiments with the scanner and camera, laying the print photos of the man out on the table. Then she turned to Penelope.

“At first, we thought it must be user error or a simple bug,” said the older woman. “That’s what stuff like this almost always boils down to. But nobody on my team could figure out what was wrong. Then Danny pulled out an ancient iMac that isn’t networked. We disconnected the scanners and hardwired them to the iMac. It worked perfectly. We could even print them as long as the printer was also disconnected from the network. Then we connected the iMac to the network and emailed the photos to ourselves. The emails failed to deliver. That’s when we started getting suspicious. Just like everyone else, we connect to the internet via Bandwidth and all of our files are hosted on Backend. Bandwidth and Backend are both Cumulus companies. Our other computers and phones are all Cumulus as well, of course.”

“Basically, whenever these photos touch the Cumulus ecosystem, they disappear,” said Lilly, gesturing at the pictures on the table.

“And because the Cumulus ecosystem represents so much of the digital world, they are essentially invisible to all connected devices,” said Henok.

Penelope nodded. “Danny also has that Cumulus admin exploit we’ve been hoarding. A friend of a friend scored it off a network administrator there in return for half a kilo of coke. I went ahead and used it. We tapped the Cumulus drone and satellite feeds, and Lilly showed us where and when to look. For example, we know the perp exited Sara’s house through the back door and then exited to the street via the side yard. Then we have his path and approximate itinerary for the rest of the morning until he left Lilly. We can just scroll back to the right date and location, and start tracking him from there. Should be easy, right?”

Frederick rubbed his temples. “Your question implies it won’t be.”

“Check it out.” Penelope turned and brought up a top-down image of Sara’s house with a time stamp at the bottom showing it was the previous morning. A green Land Rover drove up the street and parked in the driveway.

“That’s me,” said Lilly.

On-screen, Lilly exited the truck and climbed the front steps, coffees in hand. A minute passed.

“Around now is when I saw him through the living room window and took this picture.” Lilly indicated the photo on the table.

“But nobody’s there,” said Frederick, his frown deepening.

He was right. On screen, nothing changed until Lilly exited through the back door and dashed around the side of the house, slowing to a walk as she reached the sidewalk. She turned at the corner of the block.

“That’s where I saw him again,” she said and pointed to the next photo. Penelope fast-forwarded through time. On screen, Lilly made her way toward the West Oakland BART Station, apparently alone. Then she ducked behind a dumpster, occasionally peeking around it to snap a picture. “He was getting coffee from that street vendor,” she said, holding up the next photo.

But on screen, the street vendor was alone. He just stood there stirring his pot and waiting for customers. Eventually, Lilly stepped out from behind the dumpster and hurried to the entrance of the West Oakland BART Station.

Penelope switched the feed to the North Berkeley Green Zone, and then played it forward through time. Lilly exited the BART station, passed the Security officers, and walked for a few blocks until she sat on a bench opposite the coffee shop. Lilly narrated for Frederick, and indicated the relevant photos she had taken along the way. Then she got up from the bench and walked a few more blocks before finding her hiding place behind the bougainvillea bushes. Other pedestrians made their way up the streets, but the man she was following was conspicuous only by his total absence.

I apologize if this is a little forward. But I think you’ve got a killer sense of style.
According to the video surveillance, he had never entered or exited Dr. Corvel’s office. He had never approached Lilly. No Fleet had ever pulled up beside her to whisk him away.