Chapter 48

Tanvi was having a hard time keeping her professional cool. She’d screwed up badly. As the plane carrying Nick, Pilar, Emily, and her to Australia inched across the vastness of the Indian Ocean, she maintained her outward calm by analyzing her mistakes. If she kept her job, she would be able to learn from this.

She couldn’t decide if her conversation with Fenfang had been a mistake or not. There were too many questions she had no answers to. How much of what Fenfang said had been real? How much had been meant to gaslight her? Was Threnody really actively sabotaging Rosangela’s career? Were they really trying to recruit Tanvi herself or had that just been meant to cloud the issue?

She did know she had no intention of ever working for Threnody Ferrari-Stone. She’d made enough money and earned enough seniority that she could afford to retire comfortably today instead of accept an assignment there. A forty percent pension wasn’t great for staying around America or going back to London, but it would go a long way back in India.

She decided to write that whole conversation off as a wash until she had more information. If the conversation wasn’t a mistake, her first mistake - the one that had triggered all the others - was in how she’d dealt with Dennis.

As tired and brain fried as she’d been after a full day of keeping optimal, she never should have defaulted to her previous strategy with Dennis. She’d only been angling him away from Emily because Emily could be a good, longer-term distraction from Nick’s infatuation with Arwen. Once that bird had flown, she should have stopped encouraging Dennis to go on tour with Tiffany Patton as hard as she’d been. When he’d come to her to ask about flights to London, he’d been agitated and intoxicated. Tanvi knew any number of ways to defuse such a situation, but she’d elected not to use any of them and instead helped feed his sense of urgency. Even if he’d insisted on taking the first flight out, she could have quietly alerted Nick or Emily or Simon or all three to talk him down. Instead, she sat on the knowledge he’d left until asked about it, knowing he probably hadn’t told anyone he was leaving.

Of all the questionable judgments she’d made in her career, this was probably the worst. If Nick had asked her to treat Dennis the way she treated him, she would have been horrified. The tactics she’d used would be appropriate for an associate who posed a genuine risk to the client, not a friend whose only crime was getting to the girl first.

After she’d seen Dennis on his way, she’d gone to the rooms she shared with Rosangela to tell her about the conversation with Fenfang. Whatever it had really been about, Rosangela had a right to know it had happened. When she’d gotten to the room, Rosangela wasn’t there and her status was listed as “sequestered with client.” She was with Nick and Pilar for the second night in a row. Intellectually Tanvi knew this made sense and usually intellect was enough for her. But last night, she’d been tired, stressed out, and anxious. After a quick shower with her tablet and phone nearby, she’d laid on her bed reading about nothing in particular until she officially went off duty. Then she’d tried to go to sleep, but sleep had been intermittent and fitful. She eventually got up and went for a head-clearing swim.

Nothing she’d done between seeing Dennis off and seeing Emily had risen to the level of a mistake, but it had all contributed to operational degradation. Swimming long, slow laps, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head that she was losing her job to Rosangela. Tanvi had been working from the operating premise that Nick maintained a certain professional distance between them because he wasn’t comfortable mixing intimacy and authority. But it had taken Rosangela less than a week to make her way into his bed and Nick was sleeping with his in-house counsel. Clearly, the issue was with Tanvi herself.

The swim had calmed her down enough to get some perspective. Nick had almost certainly been open to sleeping with Rosangela because he wouldn’t have to work with her day-to-day and it made sense she would be back the next night when they were close to not seeing each other again for a while. And while Nick had acknowledged his personal relationship with Ainsley Davenport, he clearly wasn’t comfortable with it.

Once self-reassured, she could have gone back to bed and gotten a few hours of uninterrupted sleep before she had to come back on duty. Instead, Emily had found her.

At that point, misrepresenting her own understanding of Dennis’s actions had only been common sense. There wasn’t much point in having the moral flexibility of a great factotum if you were just going to break down and confess everything at the first opportunity. Beyond this obvious concession to necessity, her behavior with Emily at poolside had been without fault. Out of the context of Dennis, even sleeping with Emily hadn’t been operationally problematic. She wasn’t a factotum and it was exactly the kind of situation she’d tanked her factotum practicum in order to be able to address. SSCS had a strict policy that personal sexual favors from field agents were never a provided, billable service but a tacit understanding that they probably helped the bottom line.

But, she definitely shouldn’t have had sex with Emily King after sending Dennis away and lying about her own involvement. That was bad. That was drum-out-of-the-Service bad. If it ever came fully to light, she would lose not only her job, but the ability to ever be or work for an SSCS preferred vendor. Plenty of field agents retired with a sizable nest egg and a fifty percent or greater pension, but still made more money as PVs than they had in the Service.

At that point, she might as well go back to India and let her parents arrange a marriage for her. But even that would be tricky. Not only would Tanvi be banned from the PV list, her husband or any company her husband worked for would be banned as well. Preferred vendors would also be tacitly discouraged from doing business with her or her husband.

Her children would possibly be able to get on the PV list, but only after she was dead and buried. SSCS gave very generous severance packages - even to its disgraced former agents. That wasn’t true generosity. It was encouragement to never work again. Sex with Emily King had been good and pleasurable and life-affirming, but it hadn’t been worth all that.

Now she was on a plane with Emily and Nick and Nick had stepped into the curtained-off area in the back of the plane because Dennis had called. For all Tanvi knew, the two of them were even now discussing her duplicity in excruciating detail. To keep calm, she’d brought up a list of the largest companies in India that didn’t do business with SSCS or its PVs and started cross-referencing it to LinkedIn profiles of young executives who sounded unmarried. She still hadn’t come up with a really suitable candidate when Nick pulled the curtain back. “Tanvi, can I see you back here please?”

Tanvi went, a professional smile on her face and an equally professional spring in her step. It might have been the most cheerful-looking death march in history. In the back, Nick looked unhappy. She stood and waited for him to pass sentence.

“I just got off the phone with Dennis.” he said.

Tanvi tried to say something appropriate, but her mouth had gotten too dry. Fortunately, Nick seemed to take this as respectful waiting. He said. “I still really don’t understand why he took off like he did, but I have the idea he thinks it made perfect sense.”

This didn’t sound like Nick was passing sentence. Feeling a glimmer of hope, Tanvi grabbed a bottle of water, cracked it open, and drank before trying to speak. “What can I do to help?”

Nick nodded and stroked his chin, carefully considering his words before he spoke. “I’m concerned about his well-being. This came so out of left field ... Did you talk to him last night?”

Tanvi’s heart raced again. “Only to help him book his flight. We didn’t socialize.”

“Did he seem like he was on drugs?” Nick asked.

If Tanvi admitted how drunk Dennis had been, other more difficult questions would follow. “He may have been mildly intoxicated - not enough for me to question his ability to make his own decisions, though.”

“No, of course not.” Nick continued to rub his chin and finally said. “I am concerned about his drug use, though. I worry it’s contributed to his erratic behavior.”

Tanvi stood and waited, this time because she wanted to give Nick time to form his thoughts and not rush him with questions. Finally, he said. “I want to keep an eye on him, but he can’t know we’re keeping an eye on him. Is that something SSCS can provide?”

Like a man who’d been lost at sea, Tanvi was grateful to once again be on solid ground. But when she reached for her iPad to double check, she realized she’d left it in her other seat. To a field agent, this was the equivalent to walking into Carnegie Hall having accidentally forgotten to put any clothes on and being expected to sing an aria. She must be really rattled. Still, singing wouldn’t make her any more naked. She said. “Yes. We have a number of covert surveillance options available.”

Nick winced. “I hate the sound of that. I don’t want to put my friends under surveillance.”

Of course he did and of course he didn’t. Tanvi took a breath and said. “We can keep an eye on him without him knowing.”

“Good. My friends need to know they’re free to come and go as they please and not be surveilled.” Nick nodded. “I also need to modify the services he has access to while he’s on the road. He is an adult and he has a right to make his own decisions, but I don’t want to pay for the stupid ones. Tiffany is welcome to fly him wherever she wants, but we’re not flying him anywhere else. We’ll pay for ground transportation, but if he wants more than that, bring it to me first.”

Tanvi nodded and wished desperately for her iPad. She could keep lists in her head, but right now it was like exercising a muscle she hadn’t stretched. “All right.”

Nick ran his hands over his hair. “I don’t think I could live with myself if Dennis drank himself to death on my dime. Can you keep an eye on his card for any large purchases of alcohol and let me know if they happen?”

“I can do that.” said Tanvi.

“All right. Also, let’s limit his access to cash. Keep it like an ATM - maximum of five hundred dollars a day, flag it if he seemed to be stockpiling. And ... can you personally review any large purchases for disturbing patterns?”

“I can do that.” said Tanvi.

“All right. Can we do all that and keep him from noticing?” Nick asked.

If she had her iPad, she could cross-reference Dennis’s existing spending patterns with the new restrictions, but as it was, she was having a hard enough time keeping the list of restrictions in her head and processing questions at the same time. “We should be able to - unless he tries to fly somewhere ... or purchase a large amount of alcohol at once. I’ll figure out some way to make it less obvious.”

Nick nodded again. “All right. What do you know about DMT?”

DMT? What the ever-living fuck was DMT? Was it a company? A medical condition? Dennis’s initials? How did anybody ever communicate without a reference database and why couldn’t Nick spell things out once in a while? “I’m sorry. I don’t recognize that acronym.”

Nick didn’t look surprised or shocked that she didn’t have an answer at her fingertips. “It’s the primary active ingredient in this tea Dennis has been talking incessantly about. It sounds ... physically harmless, but I have no idea what it does to the brain. I’ve done some preliminary research on it, but my drugs-bad perspective is going to skew everything I read. I’d like you to review the available information and give me your opinion, please.”

“Me personally or SSCS? We probably have an expert on staff already.” Tanvi said.

“You personally, please.” Nick said. “Nothing against Stone Stryker Concierge Service and their DMT experts, but I don’t know them. You, I know and trust.”

That hurt, but Tanvi had regained enough equilibrium not to let it show. “I’ll start that review now ... unless there’s anything else.”

“No. Thank you, Tanvi.” Nick said. As she turned to go, he added. “Just ... am I doing the right thing with Dennis? I’m his friend, not his keeper.”

It was a difficult moral question with a number of nuanced gray areas and, despite her protestations of being unqualified, Nick kept asking her to provide a moral compass. She couldn’t do that right now and keep everything else in her head. Actually doing what Nick asked was the most important thing. Helping him figure out the ethics of it would have to wait. She pasted on her professional smile again. “You’re doing the right thing, Nick. You’re a good friend.”

Simon was deep into cross-referencing metrics on a dozen investment firms, evaluating the efficacy of metrics to determine future performance, and filling in the gaps between his knowledge of theory and real world practice on the subject when Max stuck his head in the office door. “Good time?”

It was decidedly not a good time for any sort of interrupting. It was the point where the data formed a bubbling cloud of uncertainty and finding clarity was like trying to catch lightning on its way to the ground. One of the few nice things about being Simon Anderson was that, when he was in such a situation, people who knew him weren’t surprised when he told them to fuck off. Still, this was a new kinder, gentler Simon or some shit like that. He toned it down. “No. This is decidedly not a good time for anything you might have to say.”

“Oh.” Max looked around. “Are you planning on taking a break for dinner any time soon? I thought we could go out.”

“Again no.” said Simon. “I’m planning on working until I hammer this pile of questionable datapoints and marketing bullshit into something resembling the truth. That might take some time.”

“Oh.” Max persisted. “Uh, can you come find me when you’re done? I need your advice on something.”

Simon paused. Max asked his advice roughly once in never. Shelby asking his advice had been an anomaly. Two anomalies could signal a trend. He sighed and looked up from his work. “If I politely ask you to fuck off for an hour so I can come to a moderately less disastrous stopping point, is the offer of dinner still good?”

“Sure. I’m buying.” said Max.

“And by that, you mean you’re using your copy of the credit card I also have a copy of and which Nick ultimately pays for?” Simon asked.

“Yeah. But my way sounds better.” said Max. “You can cover the tip if you like.”

Simon looked up at him again. “I am now politely asking you to fuck off for an hour.”

Max glanced at the wall clock. “I’ll be back at six thirty. That gives me a full hour of fucking off and ten minutes to walk wherever I fuck off to and back.”

Simon sighed and looked back down. “Thank you.”

An hour did not bring enlightenment, clarity, or even a particularly good stopping point. By six thirty, Simon could only take some small solace in the possibility that restarting tomorrow from scratch would give him a fresh perspective. He shut down his workspace and then sat at waited. At six forty-five, he called Max. “Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m still fucking off. It took longer than expected. And I thought you could use the time to think some more.” said Max.

“Thanks. In the last fifteen minutes, I discovered a fatal flaw in the Black-Scholes option pricing model that could destabilize the world economy.” said Simon dryly.

“I ... don’t know what any of that is.” said Max.

“I know. Sometimes my inside jokes are just for me.” said Simon. “Come feed me. I’m fucking hungry.”

“Yes, Audrey.” said Max. Simon didn’t get the reference, but recognized there must be one.

They walked to a steakhouse far enough from the Loft that they got some dark, suspicious looks for their obvious youth. Simon could see the maitre d’ weighing the pros and cons of seating them at the risk of having them dine and dash. As the man looked over his suit, Simon deliberately glanced at his watch. It wasn’t a Rolex or any of the big status brands, but it wasn’t a Swatch either. For that matter, it was a fucking watch. Combined with the suit, it should clearly signal that Simon wasn’t a typical teenager.

Visibly entranced by the shiny, the maitre d’ relented and led them to a table right by the kitchen door even though the restaurant was mostly empty. Simon debated asking for a table closer to the front door, but decided to save his bear-poking for a time when he wasn’t quite so hungry.

Max didn’t seem aware of the slight and focused on the menu. After they’d both ordered steaks, Simon asked. “Are you back on solid foods again?”

“Chicken breasts and brown rice are both solid foods.” Max pointed out, then went on. “I lost a lot of weight on the diet Raoul helped me set up, but I noticed when we were in Italy that I had a lot more energy with a little bit of red meat in me. I talked to Chesa about it and we worked out a diet that will focus on muscle building and core strength.”

“Who’s Chesa?” Simon asked. “Are you making friends with girls, Max? Arwen will be jealous.”

“Arwen let her fiance sleep with Pilar Rodriguez-Stone. I think her tolerance for jealousy has moved a bit recently.” said Max. “Chesa might be my personal trainer. She might be your personal trainer too. I’m going to ask Nick about hiring her to be the personal trainer for the whole Loft now that we have a real gym.”

“That seems a bit impersonal for a personal trainer.” Simon pointed out.

“Fine. Fitness director or something. It’s just a title.” said Max.

Simon considered lecturing Max on the importance of titles and the broader subject of socially-acceptable ball swinging. But with the waitstaff clearly eavesdropping to try to figure out who they were, he didn’t feel like showing the doves up his sleeve by rubbing their nose in the fact that they were basically a bunch of jackdaws tricked by a bright flash and a well-executed Windsor knot. Instead, he said. “So, what did you need my advice about?”

Max sighed and sat back. “I don’t know if I should fire Dale or not.”

“All right.” Simon made a show of pulling up his French-cuffed sleeves under his suit jacket. “First relevant question. Who’s Dale?”

“Currently my only employee.” said Max.

“Well, that establishes that there is at least a possibility of you firing him. If he weren’t your employee, this would be a really easy question.” said Simon. “What did he do that you consider a potential firing offense?”

“He spent sixty thousand dollars on reserved cloud instances and used them to mine jCoins while we were in Milan.” said Max.

“That’s ... going to take some drilling down to understand.” acknowledged Simon. “Other than ‘jCoins,’ I recognize all of those words, but not a lot of the how you put them together. We’ll start with the first part. Was he authorized to spend sixty thousand dollars of presumably Nick’s money?”

“He was, but I didn’t expect him to.” said Max. “Kind of in the same way that you or I are probably authorized to buy a car with Nick’s money if we wanted to, but we should probably ask him before we did.”

“We couldn’t buy a new car, but I grant that Nick’s sense of financial governance could use some fine-tuning.” said Simon.

“Wait. Now I have the word combination problem.” said Max. “Start from the beginning: Why do you say we couldn’t buy a new car? Does Nick want us to buy used cars?”

“No, but if we were min-maxing the system, that might be an unanticipated side effect of the service agreement SSCS applies to our purchases. One clause of that agreement says that any single purchase of five thousand dollars or greater triggers remediation. So, if you tried to buy a new car with Nick’s money, the car dealer would call Tanvi and ask if it was okay and Tanvi would presumably ask Nick who would probably say yes anyway. But, you wouldn’t be able to surprise Nick by driving up in your shiny new Ferrari that he’d paid for.”

“I was looking at a Lexus, actually.” said Max. “Questions.”

“Hit me.” said Simon.

“First, how and why do you know what Nick’s service agreement with SSCS says?” asked Max.

“How is because we’re all welcome to read that particular service agreement any time we want. The answer to why is tripartite.” said Simon.

“I don’t know that word.” said Max as the waiter brought their drinks.

“It means that the answer comes in three parts.” said Simon. “The first part of the reason I read it is because Nick asked me to look over his entire operating agreement with SSCS for any obvious abuses or overcharges. The second part was to determine exactly what I could get away with. And the third part was to determine what other people could get away with.”

“Okay. More whys.” said Max. “Why did Nick want you to look over his contract with SSCS and why were you interested in what other people could get away with? I understand why you’d want to know what you could get away with.”

Simon doubted Max knew all the reasons he wanted to know what he could get away with, but he let that one slide. “Nick asked me to audit his operating agreements because I am his official suspicious bastard. Anything he doesn’t feel he’s sufficiently cynical about, he punts to my desk. I drill down into the details and tell him all the ways people could use the document he’s considering signing to fuck him.”

“That makes a lot of sense ... except the part where you suddenly understand the language of contracts.” said Max.

“The language of contracts is English ... except where it’s Latin. But it’s mostly English. It largely follows the rules and semantics of spoken English. You start at the top left corner of a page and work your way down to the bottom right. Whenever you find something you don’t understand, you look it up.” said Simon. “Sometimes, looking it up really means paying someone who understands it to explain it to you - or not paying them as the case may be.”

“People do give us a lot of free stuff. Don’t they?” Max asked.

“Yes, but in this case, I was thinking of Ainsley’s contract as in-house counsel. The first one she handed me was four hundred pages long. I told her she was going to have to explain it until I understood it. The next revision was forty-two pages.” said Simon.

“You let Ainsley explain Ainsley’s contract to you?” Max asked. “That’s very trusting.”

“No need to be insulting.” said Simon. “After she explained it, I paid someone from Black and Stringer who would much rather she not be our in-house counsel to do the same thing, then I looked at the deltas.”

Max sat back. “Christ, you really are an evil genius. Aren’t you?”

Simon would never show how pleased he was to be recognized, but he acknowledged the compliment. “I am, but I’m trying out using my evil powers for good to see how it feels.”

“And how does it feel?” Max asked.

“Undecided. But, I’ll keep trying it for a while so that, when I go back to evil, no one will see it coming.” said Simon.

“Very evil of you.” said Max. “I guess in your role of suspicious bastard, you have to be suspicious of us too?”

“‘Us’ as in Nick’s inner circle?” Simon asked, then shook his head. “No - not really. I don’t think Nick would welcome any suspicions I might have about us and I don’t really think about it much. Nick wants us to take advantage of his generosity way more than we have been. And it’s going to be like pulling teeth to get us that far.”

“So, why worry what we can get away with?” Max asked.

“Ah, that’s not about us. That’s about Shelby ... and to a lesser degree, Alexis, Cat, and Lev’s cousin Rifkeh. Nick extended the service agreement to include them while we were away. And Shelby’s already shown a propensity to communicate with her father through his wallet. I wanted to know how loudly she could do that before we left.” Simon said. “It turned out she could only do nominal damage even if she convinced everyone to go along with it. And they only spent like twenty thousand dollars the whole time.”

“Twenty thousand dollars is ‘nominal damage?’” Max asked, surprised.

“Twenty thousand dollars in ‘considerable restraint.’” corrected Simon. “Realistically, they could have spent two million before any of Nick’s triggers kicked - maybe twice that if they’d been actively malicious. That sounds like a lot, but if it taught Nick the value of careful governance, it would have been worth it.”

“We are way off topic here. Aren’t we?” Max asked.

“We’re still trying to establish if Dale should be fired for how much money he spent even though he was authorized to spend it.” Simon reminded him.

“Oh, yeah. Probably not.” said Max.

Simon resisted the urge to leap across the table and choke Max for wasting their time. It wasn’t an overpowering urge and it would probably be a largely symbolic choking, but he certainly could have left the unnecessary detail out. “Fine. Tell me what he did that you’re considering firing him for.”

“He bought a lot of reserved cloud instances and used...” Max started.

“Stop.” Simon held up a hand. “Explain ‘reserved cloud instances.’”

“That’s complicated ... and pretty technical.” said Max.

“I figured it would be.” said Simon. “Give me a simple piece of it first.”

Max considered that as their meals came out, then said. “Well, you know what the cloud is, right?”

“Yes. It’s a distribution medium for famous women who want us to see them naked, but want to pretend they don’t want us to see them naked.” said Simon.

“Uh, sorry. What?” Max asked.

“The cloud is a place on the Internet where naive young actresses put naked pictures of themselves and subsequently act surprised that there are naked pictures of them on the Internet.” said Simon.

“Yeah, no.” said Max. “I’ll go simpler. Do you know there’s more to the Internet than the World Wide Web?”

“I do, but let’s assume I don’t.” said Simon.

“All right. The Internet includes all the parts of the World Wide Web and other services the public can access, but it also includes a much bigger part that’s private and walled in - like your email.” said Max.

“Our email is on the web.” said Simon.

“Not exactly.” said Max. “Or it is, but it’s not on the public part of the web.”

“Is it on the dark web?” Simon prompted, already knowing the answer.

“No. I’m explaining this badly.” said Max. “Let me start again. Some resources on the Internet are public and some are private. The private ones are protected by a lot of technology to keep anyone who doesn’t have the right credentials from accessing them. Your email client is on the web. Anyone who goes to gmail.com can see at least part of the client, but they can’t see your personal inbox because they don’t know your login and password. The cloud is all private and it’s really well secured. Are we clear so far?”

“I don’t know.” Simon cut into his steak. “Do we have time to explain how the naked pictures got from the really well-secured cloud to the public side of the Internet?”

“You’re talking about the fappening?” said Max. “It’s not really germane to the question at hand, though.”

“Briefly, then. I’m curious.” said Simon.

“People who save pictures from their phone to the cloud aren’t really using the cloud. They’re using a consumer product that uses the cloud. Consumer products are a lot less secure than the cloud itself because they need to be accessed by all kinds of people including technophobes. You can’t expect them to do anything but type in their password once in a while and even then, you have to have a way to retrieve a lost password. It’s like getting money from an armored car into a bank by asking the customers to carry it in themselves and assuming anybody with a checkbook must be a customer.” said Max. “The hackers who got a hold of the photos basically got a lot of naive actresses to hand over their checkbooks by convincing the victims they worked for the bank. It’s a rough analogy, but it’s close to what happened.”

“So, the victims handed over their passwords to the hackers who used the passwords to log into the consumer service and download the pictures?” Simon asked.

“Okay. I guess it’s a good analogy. That’s exactly what happened.” said Max.

“Unless it was all a publicity stunt.” said Simon.

“It clearly wasn’t a publicity stunt. Did you see those pictures?” Max asked.

“No.” Simon lied. “Did you?”

“I did and you’re full of shit. We talked about it at the time.” said Max. “Or you talked about them and I pretended to be uninterested.”

“Okay. I may have seen some of them after accidentally stumbling across them in an exhaustive Google search, but I shouldn’t have looked at them and neither should you.” said Simon. “But, you’re right. If they’d wanted to leak naked pictures of themselves, they’d have taken better pictures.”

“Right and ... wait. Did you just say we shouldn’t have looked at them?” Max asked.

Simon sighed. “Yeah. And before you ask, it didn’t bother me at all at the time. I didn’t really think they were leaked on purpose, but I didn’t really care. That was wrong.”