Cumulus (23 page)

Karl and Huian glanced at each other.

“You don’t seem to understand what’s going on here,” said Huian. “You’re going to release Lilly, and Karl is going to take you into custody.”

Graham smiled blandly. Time to drop the bomb. “If you do not follow my instructions to the letter, I will release a package of information that will make WikiLeaks look like child’s play. VIP sex tapes recorded via their Cumulus devices. Don’t worry—I’ve got a good mix of politicians, business leaders, religious authorities, and celebrities. Cumulus source code and terabytes of trade secrets. Once it’s out there, there’s no going back. The names, addresses, and financial, employment, and medical records of every single employee. You might be facing quite a bit of talent flight after that. Your entire
M&A
deal history and communications, thanks to Richard.” He shook his head. “You really should be nicer to people, you know. Vera’s and your entire set of case files with Dr. Corvel. His unfortunate stash of child porn, and transcripts of how he intentionally sabotaged your marriage on my orders. I must say, there’s some seriously personal stuff in there. Your parents really should have been more interested in you and less obsessed with the glory they left behind in Jakarta. You should have been more considerate of Vera, though. Just because she’s not consumed by projects like you are, she doesn’t deserve to be ignored. Oh, even Martín’s daughter enjoying a collegiate threesome, and how he played both his own board and Cumulus.” His smile sharpened. “Last but not least, full recordings of every single operation I’ve ever run for Cumulus. The Ghost Program stopped Cumulus from recording me, but I always traveled with a camera and have the entire history stored on off-network hard drives. The intrigue will be scintillating. It was just an insurance policy, and now I’m glad I’ve been paying my premiums. Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, Cumulus will be destroyed beyond any hope of resuscitation, and you’ll go to prison as a collaborator.”

Huian swayed on her feet and then slowly lowered herself to her knees, placing both palms onto the floor to steady herself. A thousand-mile stare dowsed the fire in her eyes. Her breath came in short gasps. She pressed her forehead onto the cold concrete, and her entire body trembled like a leaf in an autumn breeze.

Karl looked down at her in concern and confusion. Then his attention snapped back to Graham. “Save your testimony for the prosecutors,” said Karl. “Drop the weapon and step away from her, or I swear to God I’ll double-tap you in the head.”

Graham winked. “You might want to ask your boss before doing that,” he said. “If I fail to check in for three days in a row, the package automatically sends itself to every major news outlet. My death would seriously hamper my ability to prevent this unfortunate occurrence. You know how leaks can be.”

Trap sprung.

An invisible weight lifted from Graham’s shoulders. It was such a relief to close the loop on his plans. This wasn’t how he had envisioned it culminating, but life always threw curve balls. Now that it was all out in the open, he wouldn’t have to dance around Huian anymore. The legendary executive was shivering where she knelt on the floor. She was nothing but his puppet now. Lilly had exposed him. It was too late to fix that. His former masters at the Agency and anyone who actually knew him would recognize his face. He was already iterating the plan. He couldn’t frame someone else for Sara’s murder. He’d have to manufacture a motive and fake his own death. Then he would retreat into the shadows and become a hard target, directing Cumulus from afar.

Huian raised her head from the floor. Silent tears streamed down her face. Her lips were a thin line. She looked ten years older.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was hollow, bereft of feeling.

“I told you what I want. We’ll start with that list and go from there.”

Her face contorted in a flash of rage that she immediately suppressed. “No,” she said. “That’s bullshit. That’s logistics.” She spat on the concrete next to her and wiped the tears from her cheeks with a sleeve. “You’ve murdered, blackmailed, and manipulated every single human you’ve encountered just to hijack my company. You started a civil war in the streets of Oakland. You’re about to torture an innocent person to death. You’ve sacrificed your own humanity and gone to unimaginable lengths to engineer this… this spectacle of horrors. Why? What do you
want
? What could possibly be worth this?”

Graham opened his mouth but nothing came out. He was… empty.

What
did
he want? The question flitted through his head like a sparrow in an auditorium that couldn’t find a place to perch.
The first rule of espionage was to find leverage over your boss.
The intricacies of following that line to its logical extreme had demanded his full attention. He had never allowed himself the opportunity to consider what might happen if he actually succeeded. The Agency’s labyrinthine bureaucracy had made the answer self-evident. Success earned you a new boss higher up the totem pole, and you immediately got back to business. Even the director had to follow the president’s orders. Granddad and his surviving colleagues had always bitched about the onion of federal red tape. That was one of the reasons Graham had made his move to Silicon Valley. The lack of red tape here had made his coup that much more effective. In one fell swoop, he had just crowned himself a dark prince of the internet.

But instead of the expected satisfaction of fulfilled ambition, unadulterated terror flooded through him. His tongue felt sticky and dry in his mouth. His arm throbbed. His heart threatened to burst from his chest. Now that he finally had it in his grasp, he had no idea whatsoever what to do with this newfound power. There was too much uncertainty. There were too many factors to consider. Without a compass, how could he direct his prize? Any action he took would expose Cumulus and himself to a nearly infinite array of risk factors. And inaction was action. It was paralyzing. It transformed life into a halting problem with no solution. Every move cascaded into unseen contingencies born of interaction effects.

Granddad had always served a cause higher than himself. At the end of the day, that’s why he grumbled about idiot politicians, but still believed American democracy was worth defending. However critical, he was never cynical. Graham had idolized him. Only now did he know why. Service was ennobling, not demeaning. Granddad wasn’t a prince. He was an agent.

And Graham was too.

Dread gave Graham a sudden sense of clarity. In just the last five minutes, he had believed with complete certainty that Lilly had been surveilling him, first on the Agency’s orders and then on Huian’s orders, before realizing how preposterous it all was. His own mind was oscillating like a metronome between fantastical extremes. Ever since leaving the Agency, he had enmeshed himself in a byzantine lattice of rationalization that was starting to collapse.
Here in San Francisco, he was a wolf among lambs.
It had been too easy for a reason. He wasn’t embedded in some kind of overseas insurgency. He was manipulating American civilians. They were
supposed
to be lambs. That was the whole point. He had been subverting the way of life he had sworn to protect. An oath he had betrayed out of juvenile disappointment that the world hadn’t lived up to his expectations.

He looked at the goose bumps along the pale line of Lilly’s naked neck. He had murdered a lawyer who had dedicated her career to fighting corporate corruption. He had threatened children and blackmailed without restraint. He had destroyed relationships and interfered with geopolitics for private gain. He had hijacked America’s most prominent company and crippled its founder. He had turned Oakland into an urban war zone. He had been about to torture a photographer to satisfy his own paranoid sense of vengeance. Not an enemy soldier or double agent. A curious photographer.

He snorted and Karl twitched. Without any counterintelligence training, Lilly had broken his cover wide open despite his years of covert operations and impossibly high digital defenses. Hubris made power a self-limiting function.

The trap he had built wasn’t for Huian. It was for himself. The barefoot boy with the binoculars rose from the ashes of memory.

Graham raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

38

THE SHOT RANG
through the desolate expanse of the empty warehouse, echoing Huian’s shattered life.

She and Karl sprinted forward. She went straight to Lilly, kneeling in front of her chair.

“Are you okay?” Huian raised her voice. The gun had gone off less than a meter from Lilly, and her ears must be ringing. There were no bruises or burn marks on her exposed upper body.

Lilly nodded, eyes wild and cheeks wet. “Yeah,” she said. “He didn’t have time to actually… do anything to me. What happened?” She craned her neck to peer back over her shoulder.

Karl looked up at Huian from where he knelt by Graham’s body. “He’s dead,” he said. “The man knew how to shoot to kill.”

Huian tried to absorb what she had learned in the last few minutes. Groovy jazz piano scales danced in her memory. Thick brown hair tumbling over the shoulders of a baby-blue summer dress. The smell of citrus and wet earth.
Honey, there’s no easy way to say this. I want a divorce.
Graham had driven a wedge between her and Vera, prying them apart so he could isolate and manipulate Huian. Her mind recoiled from even thinking about it. Their divorce had been a masterful move in a game where they were all his pawns. She had never felt so… violated.

Anger flared, and she swiped at the tears she couldn’t stop from falling. She needed to keep the emotional turmoil raging inside her under control. Situations like this didn’t allow for margins of error.

“Check in with your staff,” she said to Karl. “We need an update on the protest. We can deal with this mess later. Oh, and give me your knife.”

He gestured acknowledgment, tossed her a multitool, and stepped away.

She flicked out a serrated blade and sawed through the plastic zip ties that bound Lilly to the chair. Then she helped her remove the electrodes and wipe the gel away with a fragment of the destroyed T-shirt. Lilly was shivering in the chill of the warehouse. Shrugging the flight jacket off her shoulders, Huian helped Lilly into it, and then zipped up the front. Luckily, he hadn’t removed or destroyed her pants or shoes.

Lilly exhaled slowly. “Who was he?” She stared at the body lying in a pool of rapidly congealing blood. The bullet had opened a ragged hole in the right side of Graham’s jaw and exited via the back-left side of his skull. His eyes were open and vacant.

The words hung in the air for a moment.

“His name was Graham Chandler,” said Huian. He hadn’t looked like much when he had first ventured into her office. Yet another corporate flunky hoping to add Cumulus to his résumé. But then he revealed he had duped their entire recruiting team, and his very presence in her office proved that Cumulus needed his talents. Huian had built the company from the ground up. Digging ditches required gumption that senior managers often forgot or had never learned in the first place. She’d respected Graham’s approach, and since that day, he had earned more and more of her trust and time. Until today. She sighed. “He worked for me. Or, at least, he was supposed to. It turns out he was only ever working for himself.”

“He killed Sara,” said Lilly. It was a statement, not a question.

Take care of them.
If only real life had do-overs. Huian was just as responsible for Sara’s death as Graham was.

“Ma’am,” Karl had his hand over his phone. “The governor is at our headquarters. He’s demanding to see you immediately. The White House has aides waiting on the line, and half the company is trying to get ahold of you. The
FBI
has a team of investigators throwing warrants at my personnel. The National Guard is deploying and should have the fighting under control within the next few hours. We need to go.”

They ducked under the partially open steel door. The morning sunlight was blinding after the gloom of the warehouse. Weeds sprang up from cracks in the sidewalk. Tendrils of evaporating dew rose from the asphalt as the street began to warm. A few blocks away, a flock of seagulls circled over the bay. The tranquility of the scene belied the catastrophe Graham had wrought. Looking east, Huian saw smoke billowing into the blue skies over Oakland.

Everything she had worked for was going up in flames. Huian had devoted her life to building Cumulus. Vera had been right. It was the center of her world. All her relationships, all her ideas, all her fears were forever enmeshed in the company. Now, her darkest unspoken nightmare had come to fruition. Her dream had been subverted. Her baby would be taken away from her. Graham had made good on every promise he had ever made to her. He had fixed the China problem. He’d secured the mission-critical competitive intelligence she needed. He’d excavated skeletons in the closets of potential hires and kept her abreast of internal power struggles. Now, she wondered how much of that had been manufactured. The only thing she knew for sure was that she couldn’t afford to ignore his final promise.

It would shape the rest of her life.