The Devil's Analyst (5 page)

She had so many questions. “What exactly happened at the camp? Why are you worried? What haven’t you told me? I’ve always felt you never really liked Josh.”

“That’s not it.”

“Then tell me what is bothering you.”

After a dozen years of marriage, Cynthia realized that her husband needed to run through his own complicated mental calculus of pros and cons. She would just need to wait to hear his conclusion.

“Do you remember when we talked about the computer malware we encountered during the Y2K countdown?” he finally said.

“Of course. You nearly destroyed Danny’s New Year’s dinner talking about it.”

“I let the topic go that day, but it’s still worrying me.”

“Why? I don’t remember Josh being concerned.” Josh and her husband were two completely opposing kinds of thinkers—one was a man of emotions who made all his decisions with total ease and confidence, and the other was steeped in analysis and synthesis. No decision came quick or easy to Chip.

Still, Cynthia never doubted that Chip was the right kind of person for her. No matter what happened, she would know that every step Chip took was carefully thought through as to the risks and opportunities. Whatever the outcome, good or bad, Cynthia would never face any consequence with regrets because she would be confident that Chip’s decision was the best-reasoned one that could possibly be made.

“You think more carefully than Josh. So at least tell me what you haven’t told him. Because you haven’t told him everything, have you?”

Chip set his napkin on the table and prepared to stand. “He wouldn’t pay attention to me.”

“I will, so tell me,” Cynthia said, and then waited.

Chip gave the slightest nod of acknowledgement. “You win,” he said. He sat down again.

“Here’s what I know. While in the data center on New Year’s Eve, something activated a type of malware within our software. Once alive, it began to destroy the database underlying Josh and Danny’s company. Luckily we detected the problem almost immediately, stopped it, and restored the data. Nothing was lost. Everyone was happy. It was easy to say it was just a hacker’s prank.

“But I can’t buy such a simple explanation. It doesn’t make sense. The code wasn’t malicious or juvenile enough to fit a hacker’s profile. There has to be some larger purpose. So I made my guys go back in and do a post mortem. And they found something more, just like I thought they would. But now it makes even less sense.”

Chip stood once again and paced nervously. Stopping by the window, he stared out at the drifts. Cynthia instinctively rose to be nearer him and placed her hand on his forearm. Through the shirt’s fabric she felt his tension. “What did they find?”

“It wasn’t what you’d expect. The program was moving files over the net to some server farm in California, and then those files were sent back—but not before they were modified. The files were stripped out, moved, transformed, sent back, and stored in a cache. If we hadn’t interrupted the process, the entire database belonging to Premios might have appeared untouched on the surface, but in reality it would have been changed. We would never have known. Only because we noticed the deletion of files at an early state did we stop the transformation.”

“What was being changed?”

“We don’t know Josh’s business well enough to be certain, but oddly it doesn’t seem as though any of the changes were significant.”

“But then why make the changes?”

“Who knows? Maybe it was a test run for something. I have no idea.”

Cynthia didn’t know what to do with this added information. Finally she spoke.

“Well, what did Josh say when you told him?”

“I haven’t told him.”

“But why not?”

“You know him. He’ll simply dismiss it. Especially at this point in time. He’s about to go on a financial roadshow to prep the company for an initial stock offering. He doesn’t want anything to interrupt that, particularly something that he’s already dismissed as a random hack.”

Cynthia was not about to let go. “Then tell Danny.”

“Really? Danny? I know he’s been your friend since high school. But he knows nothing about business or computing. He’ll just follow Josh’s lead.”

“You can’t ignore this.” Cynthia said, not because it might involve a question of what was moral or right, but because she knew that Chip’s mind could never let this mystery go.

“I’m not. I’m flying to California tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’ll find this mysterious server farm, flush out the hackers, and bring Josh the proof he needs—wrapped up in a bow. Someone is trying to destroy his business. And I’m not going to let them.”

Danny walked across
the office floor. Orleans was at his side. He passed Kenosha’s desk. Neither Orleans nor Josh could explain their startled look when he told them about the tracks outside the basement. Danny wished he could escape Orleans’ purview long enough to trade ideas with Kenosha.

Earlier that day when Kenosha drove Danny into the office after their morning coffee, they speculated as to why someone might break into the house. For some reason, Danny avoided mentioning the attack on the company’s database on New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Kenosha; he wasn’t certain he trusted his own instincts as to what mattered.

As Danny walked by her desk, Kenosha looked up and gave a quick wave. Her hand moved in a stylized motion to indicate the importance of her phone call. Whoever was on the other end, Danny was certain that Kenosha was reeling the writer into covering the story she was pitching. Like everyone at Premios, Kenosha was very good at her job.

Orleans’ desk sat in the corner diagonal from Josh’s. Except for the conference space bordered by slightly wavy glass in the middle of the space, the floor held no interior walls. The high ceilings were painted white; banks of massive windows stretched along every wall. This bright and noisy top floor offered no hidden corners. Josh liked to joke that Orleans and he could keep an eye on everyone. Maybe that’s the way the digital world liked to work, but Danny felt he wouldn’t last a day in such a madhouse.

But Josh was wrong about one thing: a person couldn’t see everywhere. The translucent glass conference room in the middle interrupted the sightlines. Individually, Josh or Orleans could see only half the floor from their respective desks. Playing big brother would require them to work together. Of course, that wasn’t needed. The staff held enormous freedom to work however they wished, from clocking odd hours or telecommuting from home to even spending the day on the small balcony that graced the front of the building. With a kitchen that always overflowed with catered food and a game space with foosball and Ping-Pong, the Premios office was more frat house than a place of business.

“Take a seat,” Orleans said. Although she normally used a stand-up desk, she maintained a seating area with two overstuffed chairs that faced one other. “Josh asked me to walk you through the financing stages for Premios. To really understand the company, we should start with the money. If nothing else, you should understand what you own and what belongs to everyone else.”

Money wasn’t what interested Danny. Especially after Orleans and Josh both ignored his claim moments earlier that someone was after the company’s data. He still thought the two were hiding something, even though he didn’t know what questions to ask.

In Wisconsin, when Danny made his New Year’s resolution, he never anticipated that the result would be Orleans walking him through a bean-counting exercise. Seeking an escape from her earnestness, he looked for Josh, hoping to catch his eye. His eyes stopped on the center conference room. With the weird wavy glass breaking up the sightlines, it was hard to be certain but it looked like Josh was in the room meeting with someone.

Suddenly nothing made sense. Even through the blur of the glass, he recognized the second person. Only one man could have that thin frame, dark hair and scruffy beard. Jesus Lopez! What was his old writing teacher from USC doing here? He didn’t belong in this office. Josh would never allow it.

Lopez was a great teacher
, but Danny detested him. Even when the man made Danny yearn to do more than he ever thought possible, the man scared him. He forced a life into Danny’s words that startled him. It was as though Lopez transformed Danny into a god because suddenly Danny could imagine worlds into reality, but at the same time Lopez made him believe in the existence of pure evil.

As a student, Danny admired this teacher until the moment he read one of Lopez’s novels. The man’s books were dark and forbidding. Lopez’s prose forced the reader to crawl through sickening muck and to encounter disgusting characters. After reading two of them, Danny never again saw Lopez in the same heroic light. Danny held the opinion that there was a kernel of his crazed scenes in the real Lopez—and he never wanted to meet that person.

Signing up for Jesus Lopez’s creative writing course was almost an accident. While many students enrolled in the writing program at the University solely because of Lopez, Danny had a different story. He had never even heard of the writer. Only when he was enrolled and began to hear others talk about the man’s charisma in the classroom did he seek a place in the man’s class.

Even once he was in the class, he was at first too lazy to ferret out the man’s works. Only as his reverence grew for Lopez as an instructor did Danny decide to buy a copy of the professor’s first novella,
Beautifully Incomplete
, about a young man obsessed with amputees. Told in first person, the narrator was driven by a twisted love that compelled him to make the woman he loved more beautiful by amputating her legs. Sickened by the theme, Danny insisted to Josh that he would drop the class. But Josh wouldn’t let him take that easy out, and reminded Danny that Jesus Lopez was considered one of the stars of the faculty.

“There has to be more to him than your first reaction,” Josh maintained. “Find out what you can learn from him.”

As usual, Josh was right. The following semester Danny took the advanced seminar from Lopez as well. Somehow, the teacher pulled from him unexpected observations. With Lopez as his catalyst, Danny discovered a joy in writing that nothing else in life, except for Josh, had yet given him. In some way, Lopez proved to be good for him, and so he found ways to avoid thinking about the man’s fevered imaginings. He isolated the man as much as possible to his role as a teacher, avoiding any delving into his life.

Instead Danny focused on Lopez’s spirit of energy. There was a forbidden essence to Lopez that attracted him like a moth to the flame. Lopez’s energy and purpose seemed electric.

Spurred on by this man he both admired and detested, Danny started his ‘zine and then his blog. It was the start of a life that led to this moment on the twelfth story of a 1920s building in downtown Los Angeles, where a twenty-first century business was being birthed.

Other than Jesus, only one other person in Danny’s life—and it wasn’t Josh—had ever sparked such a strong reaction. Danny had been sixteen, during the summer before he met Josh, when his dad arranged for him to work a summer job at a fancy resort several miles south of Thread. The staff was largely teenagers and college-age students, where everyone lived on the grounds for the summer. Breakfast and dinner were included as part of the resort fee for most guests, and Danny was a dishwasher in the hotel’s kitchen.

On the first day, one of the other kitchen staff taught him how to operate the dishwasher. Oliver was tall, broad chested, Italian, and from Chicago. Since it was his second season working there, he knew his way around the resort. The man planned on attending the University of Chicago that fall.

Oliver had dark hair on his arms, and the muscles of the forearm were well defined. His fingers were long with ragged nails, but the hands made Danny think of a statue he had once seen called David. Danny, who never really noticed a man’s hands before, suddenly wanted those particular fingers to touch him, and the realization scared him. Because he couldn’t stop looking at the hand on that first day they worked together, Danny didn’t even raise his eyes to look into Oliver’s face. He could barely recall the lesson on the dishwasher’s controls.

Some people had that kind of impact—Lopez, Oliver, Josh. They couldn’t be forgotten.

Danny knew the shadow in the room belonged to Lopez. No matter how obscure the glass or unexpected the circumstances, such people were always immediately recognized. As Josh escorted his guest out of the Premios conference room, Danny watched, certain it was Lopez even though the conference area glass kept the guest somewhat obscured. The men exited to the elevator lobby.

Danny turned to Orleans who was pulling presentations from her files. “Why is Jesus Lopez here?” he asked.

“The novelist. That Jesus Lopez?” she replied, looking at him oddly.

“Yes. He just left that conference room with Josh.”

“I don’t think so. Josh was scheduled to meet with an investment banker. It must have been someone who looked similar.”

Usually, Danny thought of Orleans as an expert liar. He lost too many poker games to her over the years. But at that moment he was quite certain she was lying for the second time that day—even though he couldn’t think of one reason she would need to do so.

INTERLUDE

Session Three

We’re still talking
about Danny. I get it. If that’s the subject matter that I think is so important, then that’s where you want to focus. Just remember I’m the one paying the bill. We should be talking about what I think is important, not what gets you off.

So you asked what makes me so interested in the guy. I used to think I wanted to figure out if Danny was good or evil. Sure, on one hand, it’s obvious he’s a good guy. Some might call him a little goody two-shoes. That’s what everyone thinks. But I’ve always wondered if that was just a mask for something deeper. Did you ever think what it would take to push a person like him over the edge and see where the true self lies? Isn’t everyone a bit like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Think about it. Two sides to every coin. It’s intriguing. At least to me.

When I think of Danny, I think of all those opposites. Good versus evil. Weak, not strong. Happy or sad. Forward instead of backward. There’s a million of them. I think with Danny I just found my metaphor for all mankind. It’s contradictions that make us all tick. That’s my mantra.

You say I’m getting off subject? I don’t think so. Can’t you see how Danny is at the heart of everything I do and everything I think about? If you want to understand me, then you have to understand Danny. So play along. Do your job.

At the end of the day, I decided the best pair of words to describe Danny are just two. Hope. Despair. Which emotion wins out? Both fight deep within him.

Despair runs strong within his family. His mother killed herself when Danny was only thirteen. No one knew anything was wrong. She wasn’t sick. Everyone thought she loved both her husband and son. Can you imagine the kind of despair that drives a woman to leave her only son forever without saying good-bye? No note. All she handed the kid was a mystery. Now that’s despair.

Wouldn’t it be a nice twist of storytelling if I could say his dad represented the opposing force of hope? But nothing is ever that simple or neat. The man’s okay now, but in the years after his wife’s suicide, he rambled around like a lost soul.

So did Danny find hope? I guess he made it for himself.

Can’t you see why I find that so worthy of my attention? The kid manages to eke out a happy life from the crap dealt him—and he’s fine with it. Most people want more.

But I think his hope is just a mask. I smell the despair that’s still deep within him. Apply a little bit of pressure consistently . . . why, I bet he’ll snap to the other side. Just like that.

Proving the paradox of Danny. That’s what keeps me going.