Cumulus (15 page)

I apologize if this is a little forward
.
But I think you’ve got a killer sense of style.
Lilly shivered despite herself. It was hard to believe she had been so close to him. She had wanted more than anything to disappear, terrified that he’d hear her pounding heart. But the waiting Fleet had whisked him away.

She shook herself. Henok needed these. She reached up and released each photo from the clips securing it to the string, carefully sliding each one into the manila envelope. Her little darkroom was an incongruous place for these graphic images. Its tubs, strings, and chemical baths were more accustomed to smiling bridal parties.

As she sealed the envelope, she considered the irony of her professional ambitions made real. For years, she had been saving to finance her dream of covering foreign conflicts. Violence abroad seemed somehow exotic. Correspondents could approach close enough to take a picture while still remaining emotionally apart. Now, Frederick was financing her to cover a conflict that was far too close to home.

In her many daydreams, she had never flinched from doing what needed doing, no matter the circumstances.

The Fleet delivered her to the Compound in less than ten minutes. On her way home earlier that day, she had checked her account to discover that Frederick had transferred in
$25,000
to cover expenses. That was more money than she had ever made on a project. Hell, that was almost as much money as she made a year. So she took a Fleet instead of risking getting mugged while riding her bike at night. It wasn’t worth losing the pictures.

The guards waved her in without hassle. The dogs recognized her scent this time, and she walked from the gate to the door sans escort. Floodlights illuminated the streets and sidewalks around the warehouse, but left the building in shadow. The pit bulls shouldered each other out of the way to sniff and lick at her hands. She ruffled the fur on the head of the one that was smaller and somehow sadder than the others.

Even though it was late in the evening, the interior of the Compound still hummed with activity. The soundtrack had transitioned to blues. Lilly wound her way back through the maze of subsections to find Henok. The glow of his monitors set his face awash in blue. He had on a big pair of headphones, and was completely absorbed in his work. She walked around behind him and saw a simple text document on the center display with web mock-ups previewing the final version in various formats on the side displays.

He twitched when she tapped him on the shoulder. He peeled off the headphones, and she could hear a peal of thunder emanate from them.

“You some kind of ninja?” he asked. “I almost peed my pants.”

“What are you listening to?”

He smiled sheepishly. “I actually don’t like music.” He waved a hand to indicate the harmonica solo on the building’s speaker system. “It distracts me. So I listen to nature sounds to drown it out.” He raised his eyebrows. “You have ’em?”

She nodded and pulled the manila envelope from her jacket, handing it to him.

He accepted it and opened the seal carefully, almost reverently. Clearing a space on the desk, he removed each twenty-eight-by-thirty-six-centimeter photo, and arranged them in a grid. Lilly watched curiously as he stood and leaned close to inspect every individual shot. Then he stepped back and looked at the grid from afar. Returning to the table, he started rearranging the photos into various orders and combinations. Occasionally, he’d cock his head to the side and squint at them, mumbling to himself. Then he would shuffle them again. He went through a few iterations.

Finally, he rapped his knuckles on the table and let out a long low whistle.

“Sara was right,” he said turning to appraise Lilly. “Your talent is wasted on weddings. I’ve worked with many photojournalists over the years, and these shots are Pulitzer-quality.”

Lilly was taken aback. Then she recovered enough to realize he must be messing with her. “Screw you,” she said, anger rising. “It’s not like I had time to set up the composition. I was scared shitless and trying to get angles on the guy’s face, not building a portfolio.”

A confused expression flashed across Henok’s face and then settled into something sterner than she had yet seen. “I’m serious,” he said. “These are incredibly powerful pictures. They will make a splash. And I’ve worked in media for long enough to know not to try to predict stuff like that.”

A blush rose to Lilly’s cheeks, and words failed her. The anger faded, and despite everything, pride stirred within her. Nobody had ever said anything like that about her work.

“Alright,” said Henok, all enthusiasm now. “Let’s scan these bad boys and take the world by storm.”

He scooped up the photos, and dashed over to a corner of his work area to feed them into the scanner.

Meanwhile, Lilly put her hands on the back of his chair and peered at the screen. This was the story Henok had been working on all day. It was long, and would probably take a half hour to read in full. Right away, the narrative gripped her. The first sentence drew her in, and the first paragraph hooked her completely. Henok was good at his job.

The article wove various threads together. Sara’s personal and professional history. Her various high-profile cases targeting corporate bad actors and government corruption. Her pro bono work defending Slummers, and her long involvement in the West Oakland community. A condensed history of poverty and crisis in the Slums juxtaposed against the urban segregation and private social services in the Green Zone. The flimsy details of the case, and the sorely lacking efforts of local law enforcement. The improbability of traditional motives and local suspects. The burgeoning protest congregating on the streets.

“Damnit,” said Henok over by the scanner. “What the hell is wrong with this thing?”

The question sounded rhetorical, so Lilly ignored him and returned to the story. Details from the case Sara had been building against Cumulus and the existential threat it might have posed to the company. The history of Cumulus, its sometimes predatory legal tactics, the appeal of its promise, and the sad reality for people not able to pay for inclusion in its service bundle.

Lilly’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the back of the chair. What had she just read? She scanned back through the paragraph, confusion and disbelief making her doubt herself. But it was there, just as she had thought. Huian Li. The article described how she had founded Cumulus two decades before and built it into the tech giant it was today. It told the story of her Chinese Indonesian parents fleeing Jakarta when a local political faction moved against their family and how they had raised their daughter in Palo Alto. It even described her passion for basketball.

Lilly tried to control her breathing. There couldn’t be that many women named Huian with mansions in the Bay Area. Fewer still who might build a subterranean basketball court into their basement. Those intense eyes stared down Lilly through the veil of memory.
Uncuff her or I’ll have your damn badge
. No wonder those Security thugs had obeyed her. She was their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.

Lilly snatched up her phone and did an image search for Huian Li. Sure enough, there was the woman from the night before. But instead of a sweat-stained oversized T-shirt, she was dressed in impeccable business attire, and speaking to a room full of reporters. There she was again on the front page of
Wired
. Scrolling down, Lilly saw she had been featured by most major publications numerous times. She was the archetypal techno-industrialist.
You don’t know?
That’s how Huian had responded when Lilly asked her name. Then that shadow of a smile had flashed across her face.
I’m Huian. Pleased to meet you.
The CEO of Cumulus had mixed her a damn cocktail, and Lilly hadn’t even realized it.

“Out of the way.” Henok nudged her aside. “Something’s wrong with the stupid scanner. I got the photo of the crime scene, but then it stopped working once I tried to do the ones of the perp. Next time, use a digital camera, okay? That way we can skip these shenanigans.”

Lilly tried to recover her composure while Henok played with various settings on the screen.

“You’d think that people would have figured out by now how to make these things just work like they’re supposed to,” said Henok, frustration brimming in his tone. “Scanners, teleconference systems—why does the simplest shit always break first?”

She made a noncommittal grunt, supporting his assessment of technology’s tendency to fail right when you needed it most. Internally, she was still trying to parse her new discovery. She had trespassed on the property of Cumulus’s founder just to take a few sunset pictures. It was damn lucky Huian had taken pity on her. If those Security guys had driven off with her in the back of one of their
SUV
s, she probably would have ended up in a ditch.

Henok growled. “This thing is broken,” he said.

“Don’t you guys have other scanners?”

“We do,” he said. “But they’re halfway across the building in the hacker section.” Getting up from his chair, he collected the photos that had failed to scan and started off along a pathway.

“Come on,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. She followed.

The hacker section was a jungle of widescreen displays, bundles of brightly colored cables, and scattered pieces of electronic debris. It was much bigger than the area where Henok worked—almost twenty people sat writing code, monitoring releases, and reviewing patches.

“This is quite an operation,” said Lilly.

“Software is just as important for us as for any other kind of organization,” said Henok. “It’s become a core competency by necessity.”

They found three scanners lined up on a small table in the corner. They didn’t look like they got much use. Henok fed in the photos and initiated the scan, keying it to save the results to his account. The scan completed.

“Alright,” he said, pulling up his account to check the file on his phone. “Second time’s the—shit!” He face contorted in frustration. “What the fuck? This one’s not working either. It just throws up an error message.”

He moved on to the next scanner. Same result. Then the final scanner. Same result.

A vivid memory flashed through Lilly’s mind. A tired old woman’s face staring out from a brick wall.

“Try your phone,” she said. It was still nascent but there was definitely something wrong here.

“Huh?”

“Try your phone. Just use the camera to take an image of the physical photo, and you can upload that to your blog.”

Henok frowned but seemed to concede that this might work. He whipped a phone from his pocket, peeled the duct tape off the camera, lined up the picture of the man looking over his shoulder at the retreating jogger, and took a picture. Lilly held her breath.

“God
damn
it,” he said. “Now my phone isn’t working either.”

An idea was unfurling in her mind. “Do you have a wallet on you?”

He looked up, confused. “Sure,” he said.

“Give it to me.” She held out a hand.

“So you’re going to remedy the situation by robbing me blind.” But his tone was self-consciously petulant. He placed a worn leather wallet in her hand.

She removed his
ID
and placed it on the first scanner. “Is this still set up to save to your account?”

“Yeah, I haven’t reset it yet,” he said. “But it doesn’t work. What are you trying to do?”

She ran the scan.

“Did it work?”

He made a face like he was indulging a small child. But then his expression crumbled into confusion. “What the hell?”

“Did it work or not?”

“Yeah, it saved no problem. No error.”

She replaced the photo of the man and ran a scan.

“Did it work?”

He frowned. “Nope.”

“Give me the phone.”

He handed it over. She snapped a picture of the license.

“No error,” she reported.

Then she snapped a picture of the photo of the man.

“Error.” She looked up at Henok and found him staring back at her. “When I was following him, I ran out of film,” she said. “Naturally, I tried with my phone, but I got the same error message and the pictures I took wouldn’t save. When I tried the phone camera later on something else, it worked fine.”

His eyes seemed to focus on a point a thousand miles away.

“Something is deeply, deeply fucked,” he said.

“I am inclined to agree.”

28

HUIAN TOWELED OFF HER HAIR.
Steam rose from her naked skin. She liked her showers scalding. She had worked late, and ultimately decided to spend the night at the office. Cumulus headquarters was designed with such eventualities in mind. A private bedroom with full bathroom abutted her office. Freshly pressed clothes hung ready for her in the closet.

As CEO, she was in a permanent state of catch-up. There were always a dozen things that required her attention. No matter how effectively she delegated, new problems emerged. The faster they grew, the thornier the problems became. Lately, she had begun to doubt some of the members of her executive team. Graham had even let her know that Karl had been quietly approached with other job offers. He hadn’t yet accepted any, of course. But it forced Huian to consider how fleeting the world could be. One day, you had the best team in the world. The next, they might scatter like so many dandelion seeds. One day, you were married. The next, your spouse left you. Richard had been the latest to go, but he wouldn’t be the last.