Shimmer (2 page)

“Cliff's,” she answered. “But the real concern is the last-minute changeover of outdated networking.”

“Yet when it's done you'll write your sexcapade,” Cliff said.

Julie leaned toward Cliff. She smiled wide. She said quietly, “Fiction to be read with one hand. An underappreciated genre.”

Cliff shook his head seriously. “You can't say
genre
in a meeting.”

Cliff really did seem like some sort of salad. Leonard really was pudding on the verge of becoming mousse. Julie was unquestionably the smoothest, purest cream. Whitley was nothing if not well-done beef.

What food am I?

I floated toward the high, dim ceiling. The sunrise was spreading from the sky to the shore to our windows and walls. Like always, the sun seemed to offer the only light in the building.

“He's disarming and confident,” Whitley said.

“He's focused and sure,” Cliff said.

They were talking about me. It's not that they'd realized I had floated away—the senior staff had long enjoyed addressing me as if I were not there, once again deflating the unreal aura surrounding me inside and outside the company.

“He's energized and engaged,” Julie said.

“Our confidence in his leadership grows every minute,” Cliff said.

“He's salmon cooked rare over an open fire,” Whitley said, and the rest paused. Pictured it. Then all began to nod.

I smiled. I thanked them. After a moment, I stood to leave.

Once more I remembered that I would bankrupt them all. Cliff with his six kids. Julie with her newborn. Whitley, who'd just turned down top jobs at the largest software and telecom companies in the world. Leonard, whose father had been with my father, back when the company had employed just thirty people. All four of them with their homes and families and futures leveraged completely against their share of the company's stock. Like hundreds of people throughout the company, these four would be left with nothing.

And although I'd never wanted it to be this way, I was set to walk away with millions.

At some point it would become clear that I was not well. The people who would see it first, they saw it and had no reason to care. The people who should have seen it next, they were in no state to notice. Yet somewhere, at some point, I would see it myself. Probably I could have seen it all along. But then, back then, I was not seeing anything very clearly at all.

I was Robbie Case, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and largest single shareholder of Core Communications, a new world company that had, in just thirty-six months, become the de facto highway for the nation's critical financial information. Two-thirds of U.S. mortgage lenders, half of the insurance companies and three-quarters of the nation's pension-processing centers passed information over the Core network. Aerospace, automotive, defense industries—all used our network to transfer their most important information.

And, as our salespeople were trained to say at this point in their pitch—pausing carefully, smiling slightly, leaning forward in their chairs
as they lowered their voices just a bit—“Keep in mind that the statistics I've just given you are, already, a few hours old.”

Maybe, looking back, it was our offhand arrogance that I regret most.

We were not techies. We employed no geeks. Instead we were the work-obsessed.

Work has meaning. The money is secondary. Being here I find a kind of personal joy.

At least that's what it felt like at Core. Because by the year 2007, Core had turned the tediously complex, the horribly mundane, the deathly boring into something so technically cutting-edge and so financially lucrative that potential new employees had to enter a lottery to be considered for a job. The press of all shapes and sizes had to wait—for months at a time—before they had the chance to do an “insider” story on us. And investors and banks undercut each other in the most inappropriate ways for a chance to place ever larger amounts of money with Core.

“We could announce the creation of electricity,” Whitley had once said to me, “and the investors would line up to hand us their cash.”

My father had founded this company as the Mainframe Supply Center Inc. in 1970. Operating from a small office in Northern California, he soon built it into a $26 million reseller of hardware supplies for mainframe computer users. “This company,” he had said to me when I was in my twenties, “is a small but highly profitable, third-party distributor of metal widgets and plastic doohickeys for a niche market of the computing industry.”

I mouthed the word
doohickeys.
I pictured the word
widgets.
Rarely had I heard my father use a silly word. And never had he used one in conjunction with his company.

He smiled and nodded back, mouthing
doohickeys
in sync with me. “It is no more or less than that,” he said.

Then, in 2004, just a few months after my father died and left the company to me, I bought into an invention. A system, really, of hardware and software and satellite uplinks and data protocols that allowed
mainframe computers around the world to transfer information to other mainframes, or any other kind of computer, at heretofore unimaginable speeds. Our product, known simply as a Blue Box, did something that had previously existed only as theory and speculation—by pulling information from the mainframes at unthinkable speeds, the Blue Box freed up the mainframes to do, quite simply, even more work. It meant that companies faced with spending millions of dollars on mainframes and related servers could instead free up existing machines by spending just hundreds of thousands on Blue Boxes. The financial benefits were obvious, the productivity gains tremendous.

And, just as appealing to the freakishly obstinate tech people who inevitably had to agree to the use of our system, the Blue Box represented the impossible fulfillment of a long-standing, seemingly unattainable goal. Since the 1970s, companies, universities, independent entrepreneurs—all had been trying to do what we'd done. All had sought to pull information from mainframes at the speeds we'd attained. And all of them had failed.

The process had become known as drawing blood from a mainframe.

Once we introduced our system, I immediately refocused our handful of employees onto developing and marketing Blue Boxes worldwide. We began to sign up our first clients. New customers called us before we could call them. We increased our prices. Investors began to knock on the door of our New York office. We began to buy up those mainframe networking companies that we did not put out of business. We could not hire employees fast enough to support the people signing up for our service. We went public in a blur of up-beat newspaper articles and extended cable news features. We increased our customer base by a factor of ten. Then twenty.

Then thirty.

Then forty.

We did it all in three years.

And now, on that same Monday morning when I'd been floating out my office window, skimming across the rooftops of the cold Manhattan
buildings around me, now Core was just ten weeks from hitting a record $21 billion in sales. We were four weeks from acquiring our one hundredth company. We were two days from hiring our five thousandth employee.

It seemed to every observer that we could not be stopped.

When he'd started the company, my father hadn't ever set a goal of becoming rich. He had become quite wealthy nonetheless, and for him that had been a very nice benefit of doing good work, of satisfying his clients, of building a valued reputation in his industry.

At some point, though, the desire to make money for its own sake did overtake Core.

Except that, three years later, I still wasn't sure if it was money that had ultimately driven my decisions. Because I'd spent almost none of the money I'd made. A near billionaire without second homes, sports teams, not even a car.

And so maybe it was something else that overtook me. A desire to grow, or face challenges, or find prominence.

Maybe.

There were two spreadsheets capturing the future of this company. One was a financial model showing a near unlimited growth in revenue, a moderate rise in overhead and expenses, a steadily increasing profit margin. Three hundred and ninety-two pages in length, it was the model I'd given to the first group of investors three years earlier. And it was the blueprint that still guided our daily operations and massive growth.

The other spreadsheet I kept hidden, buried deep in a private folder on the hard drive of my computer. It was password protected. It was key encrypted. It was filled with forty pages of fairly meaningless numbers—some personal expenses, a handful of stock investments. But this same file held a hidden, eight-hundred-page spreadsheet. And in those eight hundred pages were the details of the collapse I'd set in motion. There were the descriptions of secret networking, the records of borrowed satellite time, connections between shadow companies funneling money among offshore accounts, locations of hundreds of mainframes and
servers hidden quite publicly in buildings and warehouses worldwide. There were procedures showing how no one's job was what it seemed to be, each employee helping with the spreading of secrets—and each employee unaware of what he or she was really doing. System administrators performing a routine installation on a client's mainframe in Tulsa were in fact connecting the client to secret mainframes in Budapest or Malaysia. Accountants approving the budgets of a newly acquired production facility were in fact hiding the costs of leased satellite time. Marketing assistants hyping the effectiveness of the great Core Blue Boxes were in fact distracting everyone—the clients, the shareholders, the stock analysts, and the employees themselves—from the true failings of our product.

Maybe most important of all, in laying out the details of a hidden operation only I understood, the spreadsheet also showed how the original model used to launch Core Communications had not just been incorrect, it hadn't simply been a grand and complicated mistake. Instead the hidden document showed how the original spreadsheet and the company it described had, from the beginning, formed an extremely intricate, carefully crafted lie.

The system would fail. I'd known it from the beginning.

I didn't know when it would happen. And so all I could do, every day, every night, was work to keep the company alive.

Monday at nine, and the office was in motion. Chairs being rolled into conference rooms for overcrowded staff meetings, voices calling out across walkways and workstation walls, people running down open stairways as the white light from windows all around us shifted from floor to wall to desk to door.

And I was moving too. From the senior staff meeting that had started my day, to the list of e-mails building up on my computer, to a financial overview meeting in a conference room on the nineteenth floor. Walking now with Cliff beside me, from the finance meeting
back to my office, crossing through Accounting, and my movement seemed to slow amid the long steel rows of low black file cabinets.

Cliff held three checks totaling over $8 million. In his other hand, he held a large donut covered in an unnaturally blue frosting.

I nodded toward the checks. “Don't we have proper procedures for handling checks such as those?” I asked him.

“Actually,” he said, smiling as he delicately shook loose frosting from the donut, quietly leading to a punch line we both knew he'd deliver, “this is the proper procedure.”

I tapped on a file cabinet. We turned down another aisle.

Core operated from a building that had long been used by a series of quasi-legal sweatshops. The ceilings were high, the walls were filled with tall, multipaned windows, black ceiling fans and silver air-conditioning ducts hung high over everyone's heads. Every floor and room was lit by a mix of floor lamps, desk lamps, and track lights hanging among the exposed ducts and spinning fans. All of it combined with the light from the multipaned windows to cast shadows and streaks of white across the desks, workstations, open meeting spaces and wide walkways covering every floor of the building, the light itself frequently caught in the steel and glass partitions separating rooms and work areas, so that now, as I walked with Cliff, even the stoic and conservative white-shirted CPAs spread around us in Accounting were cast in an almost brooding, anxious light.

It was all I could do to not start floating again.

“And maybe,” Cliff started to say, pausing to swallow the last bite of his donut, stopping in a hallway before turning away from me toward his office. “Maybe,” he said slowly, his lips tinged blackish blue from the donut's smooth frosting, “what I really meant was a Caesar salad.”

Cliff was a man of TV trivia and detailed balance sheets, the forty-year-old arts major with a gift for numbers and finance. Even for me, this fed into the uncertainty over which food Cliff really was. Because Cliff was without question the salad among us, but exactly what kind of salad might never be determined.

To my office and the two hundred e-mails waiting from the morning. Sixteen voice mails. Ten handwritten messages taken by my assistant. The messages in all their forms came from bankers, lawyers, outside sales representatives who'd found their way up to me, analysts from six large mutual funds in Boston and New York, employees from all departments and levels of the company, my life insurance agent, my dry cleaner, a man trying to sell me long distance for my home. It was a twisting kaleidoscope of requests, comments, complaints and chatter.

Twenty minutes and I'd responded to or deleted half of the messages. Quick conversations and short e-mails.

Yes.

Today.

Let me find out.

Talk to Julie, but sounds fine to me.

Unfortunately, no. Which I hate to say. But that's my only conclusion.

Thanks, but no.

Thanks, but no.