The Hunt (17 page)

Peter and I managed to get ourselves washed and dressed and into a hybrid by half past eight.

Fighting traffic across the city was almost as difficult as it had been to fight off Susan’s offers of juice, cereal, toast, English muffins, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, poached eggs and sausage, but it was less stressful because it wasn’t necessary to be polite to the traffic. Of course, Peter being Peter, he was polite anyway. Except he couldn’t stop humming.

“What are you humming?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Whatever my dad had on the stereo last night. I can’t get it out of my head.”

We made a pathetic pair: I still had “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat,” playing on in an endless mental loop and Peter was humming jazz. Caro probably loved jazz, I thought—all normal people did. To me it was the musical equivalent of Camilla Gergen’s voice but less pleasant. And neither Peter’s humming nor Rice-a-Roni were doing much for my mental state.

My crankiness had not abated since yesterday; if anything, it was gathering force, and it didn’t help that to my various withdrawal and fitness-induced woes was added a fierce craving for pilaf.

It took more than half an hour to get from Pacific Heights to the hotel, a drive that had taken less than fifteen minutes when we’d made it in the opposite direction at one that morning.

Gustav and Ray were gone, replaced by the day-shift staff, but Luisa and Abigail were waiting for us.

“Where’s Ben?” I asked as they slid into the backseat.

“Do I look like Ben’s keeper?” snapped Luisa, quickly putting to rest any hopes that her mood had improved overnight. At least I could be confident she was keeping up her end of the dare.

This was the only reason I refrained from remarking on Abigail’s clothes, which were different than what she’d been wearing the previous night but also looked suspiciously like an outfit I’d recently seen on Luisa.

“Ben said he had a few things he wanted to follow up on here in the city,” supplied Abigail before embarking on a detailed discussion with Peter of which route to take. Apparently the 101

was more direct but the 280 more scenic.

My brain was still working too slowly to wonder what, exactly, Ben was following up on or if it
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was related in any way to what he’d been doing while Luisa and Abigail had been dining à deux the previous evening. Nor did I pay attention to the route Peter ultimately decided upon, as I never paid attention to directions when I wasn’t driving. Whichever highway we ended up on was choked with cars in both directions, including an astonishing number of hybrids. I’d seen a handful of them in Manhattan, and even a few hybrid taxis, but here we were surrounded.

As we meandered south in stop-and-go traffic, Peter and I filled in Luisa and Abigail on the text of the file he’d decrypted, showing them a printout of the e-mail, and together we discussed the ways in which the various dots might connect.

“Let me make sure I understand,” said Luisa in a way that really suggested she was having difficulty understanding how she’d found herself involved in this whole mess in the first place.

“To start with, there’s Marxist Santa, who’s trying to throw a wrench into the Igobe IPO by leading all of the investment bankers who might handle the IPO on a scavenger hunt.”

“It’s not the most direct way to go about things, but I can’t figure out why else he’d be targeting the people he’s been targeting,” I said.

“And we’re sure that Marxist Santa has inside access to Igobe?” asked Abigail.

“How else would he know which bankers to target?” I said.

“And then there’s the hacker, Petite Fleur, who also wants to bring Igobe down by compromising its technology,” said Peter.

“So Petite Fleur is second. And then there’s the third person we know Hilary’s met with at least once, presumably about her Igobe article, and who also has a soft spot for Karl Marx,” Luisa said.

“Which suggests that the third person from Hilary’s e-mail could be the same as the first person, Marxist Santa,” I concluded. “And maybe Marxist Santa knows what Petite Fleur is up to, and that’s what he’s promising Hilary will be the ‘story of the century.’ Or maybe Marxist Santa and Petite Fleur are one and the same.”

“Obviously,” said Luisa dryly. I had to admit, I was pretty confused myself.

“Is it possible that this person—or persons—kidnapped Hilary?” asked Abigail.

I thought about that. “I guess it’s not impossible, but Hilary’s on his side. Or their side.”

“And which side is that?” asked Luisa.

“The side that’s standing in the way of the people who would benefit from an Igobe IPO.

Namely, Iggie and Alex Cutler,” I said, trying to sound less confused than I felt.

“It would be good to know when and where ‘same time’ and ‘same place’ are supposed to be,”

mused Abigail. “Did Hilary tell any of you where she’d been in the days leading up to the party?”

She might have, I thought guiltily, but I’d been so wrapped up in proving my normality I hadn’t paid much attention.

“I only remember her mentioning she’d been doing research,” said Luisa. “I don’t think she told me where, and I didn’t ask.”

“Ben might know,” suggested Peter.

Ben hadn’t seemed to know much of anything thus far, but maybe he’d come through on this.

“We should call him. Do you know if he’s still at the hotel—” I started to ask.

But then I had another idea, and it was nothing short of brilliant. “I think I may be a genius.”

“Rachel, you are many things, but you are not a genius,” said Luisa.

I chalked this up to nicotine withdrawal and let it go. “Hilary left a pile of receipts in her room.

Maybe one of the receipts is from where she met the person from the e-mail.”

“So we could put together where Hilary was and when she was there from the receipts?” asked Peter.

“Exactly. Then we can meet up at the same time and same place with the person who sent the e-mail, and he might be able to help us locate Hilary. And maybe we can also find out if he is, in fact, Marxist Santa and what he thinks the story of the century is.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said. Of course, Peter would be enthusiastic about anything that didn’t
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incriminate his old frat buddy, but even Abigail, who hadn’t spent the better part of a year convincing herself she was in love with me, agreed it was a great idea, and she chimed in to say so. To my credit, I did not turn around to say “so there” to Luisa in the backseat.

“Let’s call Ben right now,” I said. “Maybe he can start piecing together Hilary’s trail, and if we don’t have any luck with Iggie or Alex, we can pick up from there.”

“Fine,” said Luisa, “I’ll call Ben and run it by him.” This was as close as I was going to get to an admission from her that my idea was a good one. She reached Ben on his cell phone and spoke to him briefly, explaining about the e-mail and the receipts.

“Well?” I asked when she’d completed her call.

“He says he’ll get on it in a bit,” she replied.

“Did he think it was brilliant?” I asked. “I bet he thought it was brilliant.”

“Stop fishing for compliments.”

“How was that fishing for compliments?”

“Please.”

“I wasn’t fishing. I was simply asking what Ben said.”

She harrumphed in response.

“Did you just harrumph at me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. And you started it.”

“I did not start it. You started it.”

“What precisely did I start, Rachel?”

“You know what you started—”

“AARGHH!” This was from Peter, not Luisa. Horns blared as he cut across three lanes of traffic and pulled onto the highway’s shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” asked Luisa, alarmed.

“Are you okay?” I asked as he jammed the car into Park.

“I am fine,” he said between clenched teeth. “The two of you, however, are not. You’ve been at each other’s throats since we got in the car. In fact, you’ve been at each other’s throats since yesterday. Either stop the bickering now, or you’re going to get out and walk, and I won’t care if you go through a case of soda and a carton of cigarettes on the way.”

“We can’t do that,” I pointed out. “We were dared, and we don’t want to be wusses.”

“Then don’t be wusses. But the choice is the same. Which is it going to be? Ride and behave, or walk and bicker?”

“We weren’t bickering,” said Luisa. “Do you think we were bickering, Rachel?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But who knew that putting Peter behind the wheel would turn him into such a dad?”

19

O nly Abigail’s calm mediation, Luisa’s and my promises that we’d try to act like reasonable adults and the suggestion that we make a quick detour to pick up some nicotine gum convinced Peter it would be safe to get back on the road. I’d never seen him throw a tantrum before, even one as relatively mild as his had been. A perverse part of me enjoyed learning what it to took to push him over the edge, but I knew better than to tell him that.

Fortunately, we didn’t have much farther to go. Signs started popping up for Redwood City and Atherton, followed by Menlo Park and Palo Alto. We were going a couple of towns south of Palo Alto to Santa Clara, just past the “Googleplex” in Mountain View and Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters. Sunnyvale was part of Silicon Valley, so the vale was legitimate, and the weather here was definitely sunnier than in San Francisco, but it seemed to me that only a person who either had something to hide or a reckless need to tempt fate would name a place Sunnyvale.

We pulled off the highway just before ten, letting Abigail guide us the few remaining miles. The buildings we passed looked like those in any recently built American office park, but the signs
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out front bore the sort of playful names specific to start-ups run by people barely out of their teens, and the cars in the parking lots indicated which buildings’ inhabitants had already struck Internet gold and which were still toiling away in the hopes of a future payoff. Igobe’s pre-IPO

parking lot held more of the latter type, but there was a gleaming black Lamborghini parked in a reserved space in the first row.

“Looks like the Igster’s in the house,” said Peter, pointing out its vanity plate, IGSTER1, as he steered into a nearby slot reserved for visitors.

“And it looks like his employees are being alienated from the fruits of their labors,” said Luisa, observing the lesser cars in the lot and chewing furiously on a wad of Nicorette. As a general rule, she considered gum tacky, but she’d been willing to make an exception for the sake of Peter’s nerves, and her mood had made a dramatic turn for the better once she unwrapped the first piece. It was too bad there wasn’t a gum replacement for Diet Coke.

“Iggie’s been having a hard time holding on to talent,” Abigail told us as we left the car and headed toward the entrance. “A lot of start-ups around here don’t pay much, but they are generous with stock options, so if the company does well and goes public, the options can be worth a lot. There are more than a few janitors and mail clerks who’ve made millions that way.

Iggie’s tightfisted with everyone but himself, and he’s been stingy not only with salaries but with the options, too. It’s making it difficult for him to hire the best people, which is one reason why Igobe’s still using Leo’s original software designs, but it’s going to be a problem when he needs to start work on the next generation’s software release and updates.”

Yet another thing it was good to know before I committed my firm to handling the Igobe IPO.

The more I heard, the more I wondered if it would make sense to cancel tomorrow’s meeting altogether, whether Iggie was a kidnaper or not.

In front of the building, purple flowers planted in a circle of green grass spelled out Igobe’s name in its trademark bubble letters. It was hard to imagine Winslow, Brown with such a logo, much less spelling it out in tulips—the firm generally stuck to a dignified sans serif font that didn’t require watering—but Silicon Valley culture had little in common with that of a white-shoe New York investment bank, save a fascination with money. Once the automatic glass doors of the entranceway slid apart with a muted swoosh, the differences became all the more striking. We stepped right into a vast open-plan work space that looked as if it had been lifted whole from a satire of dot-com era excesses. Twenty-somethings dressed in geek-hipster chic zipped around on scooters, while others flopped on brightly colored beanbag chairs or chatted in front of glass-fronted refrigerators stocked with an array of designer beverages. The decorator who had outfitted Winslow, Brown’s headquarters in dark paneling, Persian rugs, and wing chairs would have fled, shrieking in terror, if the scene hadn’t given him a coronary first.

Only one other person besides us didn’t seem to fit right in, but she wouldn’t have fit in at Winslow, Brown, either. Across the expanse of carefully distressed polished concrete sat a reception desk made from molded purple plastic, and behind the desk and its collection of lava lamps sat an older woman with frizzy gray hair, red-framed glasses and a purple visor stitched with the Igobe logo. Even though she was of average weight, she was wearing a muumuu patterned in a neon-shaded floral print that made me think with newly discovered affection of the pink dress hanging in the closet back at the Forrests’ house.

“Just shoot me now,” said Abigail, freezing inside the entrance.

“What’s wrong?” asked Peter.

“I can’t believe it. She’s still here.”

“Who’s still where?” asked Luisa.

But before she could respond, the woman behind the desk emitted a noise that sounded like a curdled yodel and would have put Camilla Gergen to shame. “Yoo-hoo! Biggie!”

Abigail blanched, something I’d thought only happened in books. “Twice in twelve hours,” she muttered, and for a moment I thought she was going to retreat back through the sliding-glass doors. But then she squared her shoulders and strode forward.

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“Hello, Phyllis,” she said politely. “I didn’t realize you were still working here.”