The Start-Up (9 page)

“Did you know that someone hacked into Gibly last week?”

“Not possible. The security is the best on the planet.” Ted didn’t flinch or show an ounce of concern.

Neither did T. J. “They hacked into the user database. The one where Gibly stores the web activity and physical movements of each unique user.”

“What are you talking about? Gibly doesn’t do that.”

“Want to bet?”

Ted’s amusement sank into annoyance. His son clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about and his presumptuousness was irritating.

Ted rolled his eyes, punched a number on speed dial and put the phone on speaker.

“Hello?” a man’s voice, thick with an Indian accent, answered.

Still looking at his son, Ted said into the phone, “Amit, this is Ted.

How are you doing today?”

Amit, the lead programmer for Gibly, sounded distracted. “Mr. Bristol!

I’m—I’m fine, sir,” he muttered. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Just have a quick question for you, Amit,” Ted said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Did someone hack into Gibly last week?” Amit was silent on the other end. Ted and T. J. could hear commotion in the background, the voices of programmers yelling at each other in panicked voices. T. J. grinned. Ted blinked, listening intently for some reassurance to come out of the speaker, then looked down at the phone.

“Amit? Amit, did you hear me?”

“Yes, sir. I heard you. We’re working on it. We’ve been up for the past four nights and, well, we’re—we’ll figure out who it was, sir, and we’ll get it patched.”

Ted stared at the phone, motionless, his eyes darting as his panic increased.

“Sir?” This time Amit was unnerved by the silence. “Everything … everything will be okay, sir. The whole team is working on it.”

“How could you not have told me this?” His disbelief had given way to anger. “What the fuck! Do you not realize that we’re about to close a deal?

That this whole thing could fucking fall apart if … ” He trailed off; it was too much to process. “I’m coming down there. Right now.” Ted hung up the phone so hard it almost fell off the desk and stood up. He reached for his briefcase.

T. J. remained seated, hands still neatly folded in his lap. “Would it help if I told you who did it?”

Ted stopped and looked at his son. He’d almost forgotten he was sitting there. His voice was shaking. “Yes, T. J. That would be helpful.”

“Will you get me the job at Fenway?”

Ted swallowed hard and tried to keep his voice steady. “Yes, T. J. I’ll call Tom and get you a place at Fenway.”

T. J. smiled. “Thank you. Her name is Amelia Dory. She’s a freshman at Stanford.”

“How the hell could a freshman at Stanford hack into the most sophisticated … ” Ted started to speak but the smug look on his son’s face stopped him. He knew his son was telling the truth.

Ted pulled out a notebook and said her name as he wrote it down.

“Amelia Dory. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

B
y the grace of God, Adam had been able to convince his RA to let him borrow her car for the evening. It was a 1999 Toyota Camry, which wasn’t exactly a match to Lisa’s Lexus
SUV
, but at least he didn’t have to show up for his date on a bike.

Adam had sent Lisa a Facebook message asking if she wanted to have dinner at Salamanca Tapas Bar downtown. He’d never been on a real date or, for that matter, to a real restaurant in Palo Alto, but he’d gotten a Groupon for sixty percent off weekday dining at Salamanca, and hoped that, even if it wasn’t quite as fancy as she was used to, it might be acceptable to Lisa. To his relief, she had agreed.

He’d pulled out his nicest pair of khakis and the button-down shirt he’d bought for his Stanford interview. The shirt was light blue and he wasn’t sure it totally matched the pants, but he thought the color accentuated his eyes and he figured his legs would be under the table during dinner anyway. He showered and shaved, stole hair gel from one of the cubbies in the hall bathroom, and looked at himself, satisfied, in the mirror. Until he realized he didn’t have proper shoes. What shoes do you wear with khakis?

He slipped on his Converse sneakers. They didn’t look too bad, and maybe she would think he was edgy?

He arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes early. When Lisa came through the door, looking like an angel in white jeans, heels, and a light-blue silk halter top, Adam smiled and stood up to greet his date. Lisa smiled back and gave him an unexpected hug. “We match!” she said, noticing their shirt colors, and he blushed.

The hostess sat them at a small candlelit table. Adam panicked when he opened the menu; he didn’t see a single thing that he could pronounce.

Why hadn’t he looked beforehand to figure out what to order? At the bottom of the menu, there were a few “traditional Spanish rice dishes” listed. Okay, that sounded safe. Done. He closed the menu. “Look okay?” He smiled at Lisa.

“Yes! I love this place. I did a summer program in Madrid last year and absolutely fell in love with Spanish food.” Adam smiled widely. Phew!

The waiter approached and Lisa spoke with him in flawless Spanish, giggling lightly at something he said. Adam smiled, allowing the glory of being out with such a beautiful, intelligent girl make him feel like the luckiest guy alive.

The waiter turned to Adam. “And for you, sir?”

“I’ll have the pay-ella,” Adam said.

The waiter gave a knowing glance at Lisa and corrected Adam’s pronunciation. “The pi-yay-yah?”

Adam’s face turned beet red. “Uh, yes. Yes, the pi-yay-yah.” The waiter smiled at his improvement. Lisa reassured him. “Don’t worry; the Spaniards love making complicated words so they can mock us for mispronouncing them.”

Adam was grateful for her humility.

The dinner passed quickly, conversation never ceasing as Adam and Lisa talked about Stanford and Palo Alto and her favorite trips around the world. They talked about favorite TV shows and ice cream flavors and laughed at one another’s favorite jokes. The paella, it turned out, was delicious, and Lisa insisted they order the house-made flan so Adam could try. But when it came time to pay the bill, Adam confronted a new dilemma: how to slip the waiter the Groupon without Lisa seeing. To his relief, she excused herself to use the restroom and Adam hurriedly beckoned the waiter over.

“I have to get the manager to approve it,” he explained. “I’ll be right back.” He walked away just as Lisa returned to the table. Just in time, he thought.

But then the manager came over to their table, holding the Groupon in his hand. Adam felt his hands sweat. “Sir, this coupon—” The manager stopped when he noticed Lisa, “Lisa! Lisa, my dear, how are you?”

“Sergio! It’s so lovely to see you!” Lisa responded with a smile.

“How was everything tonight?”

Lisa grinned. “Oh, it was all wonderful, Sergio. This is Adam.” She gestured to Adam who reached out his hand to shake Sergio’s and started to stand up.

“No, no, don’t stand up. A friend of Lisa’s is a friend of mine. Marco, don’t worry about that bill; the meal is on me.” Adam couldn’t hide his surprise. “Oh, thank you so much,” he stammered.

Lisa smiled. “Thanks, Sergio. I can’t wait to tell Dad how wonderful everything was.”

“Yes, please do! I’ll leave you two to it. Have a lovely evening.” When he’d left the table, Lisa turned back to Adam. “Sorry about that. My dad owns the property and loaned Sergio the money to open the restaurant.”

“No, I’m sorry. I bet you’ve been here a thousand times. I didn’t mean to bring you somewhere your father invested in!”

“Honestly, Adam, it’s hard to find a place in this town that Dad isn’t somehow involved with. And I love this place. I would eat here every single night—if it meant hanging out with you.” She blushed. That came out a little too quickly and she worried it sounded too aggressive.

But Adam just smiled, his heart pounding, at a loss for words.

T
ed’s head was spinning as he walked into University Café. He’d had hundreds—maybe thousands—of meetings here, but never one like this. He’d used T. J.’s student account to find Amelia Dory’s phone number and had called her on the way to meet Amit, asking her to meet him at University Café as soon as possible to discuss what she’d found out about Gibly. To his surprise, she’d happily obliged and agreed to meet that evening.

In the meantime, he’d gone to Gibly headquarters and found Amit and the team in a state of panic. Everyone was typing away at computers, trying to figure out how someone had broken into the system. They could see that there had been a security breach but had no way of locating an IP address for the person who had done it. Ted didn’t tell them he knew the answer.

When he asked him about the database, Amit confessed it existed, but insisted it was only temporary; they’d just kept it to make sure the app was working. Temporary databases typically don’t last through one hundred million users however. Amit was hiding something. This made Ted a little nervous, but he decided that the less he knew about it, the better.

The blatant illegality notwithstanding, if anyone found out that an eighteen-year-old hacked into Gibly, the deal would be off and his reputation would be finished. He had to shut her up somehow.

Sitting at the corner table where Amelia had said she’d be was a slender teenager with long brown hair and glasses. She tapped her foot anxiously, watching the television over the bar. Upon seeing her, Ted let out a sigh of relief. There was no way this fidgety little girl—she couldn’t weigh more than 110 pounds—could be the threat that brought him down. He felt his confidence coming back for the first time since his conversation with T. J.

“Amelia?” he asked as he walked up to the table, sticking out his hand.

“Ted Bristol. Thank you for meeting me on such short notice.” Amelia jumped, startled, when he said her name. “Oh, hi, Mr. Bristol.

Yes, of course. No problem. I really want to—” Ted put his hand up to cut her off. “We have all night,” he said as he sat down across from her and motioned for the waiter. “Have you eaten dinner?

Would you like to order anything? I’m going to have a little something.”

“Oh, sure.” Amelia hadn’t expected such an offer; she had thought she was in trouble.

Ted ordered eggplant Parmesan. Flustered, Amelia said she’d have the same.

“Do you want wine?” he asked her.

Amelia was stunned. Didn’t he know she was eighteen? “No thanks,” she answered quickly. “I’ll just have a Coke.”

“Suit yourself.” Ted smiled. “I’ll take a glass of the cab. Thanks, Martin,” he always made a point to pay attention to waiters’ nametags and address them in the first-person.

“So, Amelia,” he said, crossing his hands on the table. “Do you mind telling me a little about what you found on Gibly?”

“Well, first I want to say I’m sorry for breaking in. I really didn’t mean to. “No need to apologize. On the contrary, you’ve helped us realize a flaw in our security, which our team is addressing as we speak.” He was buttering her up, making her feel comfortable.

Amelia let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s great. How did you find out, though?”

“Not important, Amelia. What is important is that I understand what you saw once you were in.” Ted smiled again.

Amelia didn’t think how he found out was exactly “not important”

—she was certain she’d covered all her tracks—but for now she knew that making sure Ted knew what was going on with the website was more important.

“Well, I found the database where Gibly is storing all of its users’

information. Billions and billions of cells recording the web movements and physical locations of every person using Gibly. It’s insane. I mean, that’s, like, totally unethical if not illegal, right? It’s a complete infraction of users’ privacy.”

Ted kept the same neutral smile. “Well, yes, I suppose it would be, if it existed. Did you see anything else?”

“Well, then I started thinking that maybe that was why the company had sold for so much. I mean, it’s illegal, but that kind of information would also be insanely valuable to everyone from advertisers to terrorists.

So, I tracked Lloyds’ accounts.” She stopped, not sure she should have admitted that.

“It’s okay, Amelia. I’m not going to tell anyone.” Reassured, she went on. “So, I tracked Lloyd’s, and they’ve been receiving ten-million-dollar payments every month from someone named
VIPER
.”

Ted took a moment to consider this, but quickly chose to ignore it.

What Lloyd’s did was not his problem. His problem was the possibility of this being discovered and his reputation being destroyed.

He took a sip of his wine. “Amelia, I want to reassure you that the database was temporary, just something the engineering team did to make sure that the applications we were putting out were working on different browsers and in different network areas. Last week, when you got into the system, the team was actually disabling everything. In fact, that might be why you were able to get in; the security wall was probably compromised when they were reprogramming. Because of you, though, we’re re-patching that, too.”

Amelia stared at Ted. That didn’t make sense, and he knew it as well as she did.

The food arrived and Ted picked up his fork and knife to cut a piece of eggplant. “So I want you to know that it’s all being taken care of. Okay?

But I need a favor from you.”

He casually took a bite of his eggplant. “I need you to promise me that you won’t say anything about this. To anyone.” Amelia looked down at her food. She twisted a few noodles around her fork.“And to thank you for your discretion,” he went on, “I want to offer you a payment of ten thousand dollars.” Amelia put her fork down. She was no longer hungry. “You want to pay me?”

“Consider it a consulting fee for helping us increase our security. Your getting in has saved us a lot of potential trouble down the road; we’ll be much stronger now with the new security patches.”