Chapter 19
Jack and Lee had fallen very easily into the habit of a long phone call each day. She was sixteen hours ahead. He would call her each night at 9:30, lunch time for her, for a half hour, before he fell asleep so her voice was the last thing he would hear. She would call him at 0700 each morning his time, 2300 her time, so his voice would be the last thing she heard before she slept. On that first call she had promised she would find a way to get to the States within a few days. There was an airline strike and then the typhoon and then mechanical failure. He wanted to pick her up and carry her around.
Buy ReWire today on Amazon for only $3.99
They were right outside the hospital when his phone rang with John Barry’s James Bond theme.
“Ni Hao!” he said smiling.
“And hello to you, my lovely man. Listen to me calling you my lovely man. I am going to scare you away, aren’t I?”
“Not possible. Which airport?” He could hear flights and customs and immigration announcements in the background.
“Sek Si! Jhew Lun Dou! I am in your wonderful San Francisco Airport. I am sure it will take an hour to get through customs. Will you please come get me?”
“I am on my way!”
Dvora asked, “I assume from that silly grin on your face, the call is from your new hottie?”
“Yessum!” he said with what he knew was a shit-eating grin. “I am going to grab a cab and pick her up at the airport.”
“I will watch Meghan get well some more. Have fun.”
The cab headed out to hit 101 down to the airport. They were an hour early for the thick of rush hour. The trip south would take twenty-five minutes, barring a wreck. By the time he picked Lee up it would be bumper-to-bumper and stop more than go for nearly an hour back the other way. If he were on his own he would have done BART and people watched. The cab ride back would give him time to cuddle with his baby and play catch up.
It felt like he and Lee had been together for years. In many ways, they had been. Lee told him she knew she was too young and he wasn’t even ready when they first met. When he married that fucking gold-digging bitch as Lee so enthusiastically described his ex-wife, she said her heart broke. The marriage finished breaking his. Some hearts must be broken before they can open. His was one of them.
Jack wanted to think about Lee. He wanted to think about the way her hair smelled and how her neck tasted of sweet salt when they made love. He wanted to think about the way her eyes seemed to turn to liquid, brown gold sometimes. The way her eyes would draw him in. Instead he used the time in the cab to think about market gyrations in the abstract and ReWire in particular. He thought about insider trading. There was a ton of short interest in the stock. Was it too much? Who knew?
Shorting stocks was a simple idea, but tough for laypeople to get. You “borrowed” stock and sold it. If the stock price went down, you replaced the stock with stock you bought at a lower price. If you guessed wrong and the stock went up, you had to replace the stock at a higher price.
People wondered how he had guessed right on the tech stock bubble. The regulators figured his guesses were too good and suspended him. He explained his reasoning. They didn’t buy it. He heard a radio interview with a man, not an investment professional, but a day trader, whatever that was. This man said he was borrowing money on his house to day trade. Because of the way the market was going the man said he couldn’t afford to miss out on the gains. The so-called financial journalist who was interviewing him was just “Yeah, okay, uh huh.”
Then the same press invented “burn rate” to describe how fast a recently public company spent the money they raised selling stock. The signs and portents had been there. Jack knew the end of the bubble was near. He rolled the dice and bought puts. What was he going to do, tell the regulators that he could see the future sometimes? How could he tell them he could feel the fear and anger when tens of thousands of investors in the Bay started to bail on the bubble? How could he explain that their fear and panic was a palpable wave over the City and even worse in Silicon Valley? He felt their fear and bought puts. He became middling wealthy very quickly.
Jack felt pain in his hands. He had clenched his fists so hard he almost pierced the skin on his palms with his nails. He was thinking about ReWire so he wouldn’t think about his sister. Meghan had saved his life. He was an adolescent when she was born. Mom sobered up when she found out she was pregnant and stayed dry for almost two years. Pop stopped gambling for eleven months.
By the time Meghan was born Jack already had a couple major run-ins with John Law. Without Meghan to care about, to keep safe, he would have probably killed somebody in a fight. Or been shot or stabbed. His probation officer “suggested” he try Judo. His anger and strength and size had been too much for all his partners, even before any training. The Sensei had stopped him from sparring with the others and taken him to the middle of the mat. Jack had worried he would break the old man. He was a big old man, but he was in his sixties even then.
Jack had lunged for a single leg and gone to sleep. Then he bullrushed the old man and flew through the air and landed so hard it took him seconds to catch his breath. He tried harder and harder and got his ass whipped repeatedly. Finally, he was in a hold on his elbow, knowing it was going to break any minute, but knowing he almost had the old man when the old man said, “Please stop before I break your arm.”
There was something in the old man’s voice, a sadness mixed with something Jack hadn’t heard much from other men, certainly not Pops-concern. Jack stopped. He hadn’t known it, but the old man had been the heavyweight grand master US champion. He took Jack under his wing, in some ways becoming the father that his father could never be. Sensei gave him focus.
The cabbie locked up his brakes to avoid a four-lane change by an Asian man driving a spec with a small rental sticker on the bumper. The cabbie cut off two cars pulling into the only space on the curb at international drop off. He paid the man to circle for a while.
He loved airports. They were full of hope. SFO was getting better, but still way down his list. He stood at the arrival gate and checked the status of Lee’s flight. She would use every trick to cut through red tape, but her flight was still in customs.
He watched a little girl, no more than four or five, duck under the tape and run shouting “Grandma!” “Grandma!” Most everyone smiled, even the people exiting customs who were so jet-lagged they were as useful as crack addicts. Travel makes you stupid.
Cathay Pacific was based in Hong Kong. Jack was pretty sure Lee’s family owned points in the airline. How much they owned was hard to tell because accounting principles outside the US were creative at best. Add that to the fact that the way her family protected secrets made the CIA seem like a PR department. No, wait; the CIA was a PR department. Maybe the way the NSA kept secrets? No, that was a terrible analogy. He glanced up at the monitor again and then looked back toward the gate. His sweetheart walked through.
How could anyone put in a full day’s work, get off a twelve-hour flight after having lost fourteen hours, and looked like she’d just stepped out of the shower?
Lee grabbed his hand and pulled him along until they were out of the way of the heaviest foot traffic. She hugged him and held him before pushing him away, holding on to both of his hands and looking up into his eyes. She looked out through tears with a smile that came and went.
“I’m so sorry it took me so long. I know now I should have found a way to come sooner. I didn’t mean to…”
He put a finger to her lips. He looked down into those eyes, flecks of gold swimming in the warm brown and said, “Don’t be sorry, my sweetheart. You are here and I want you to be here and…” He stopped himself from saying, “I love you.” Neither had said the “L” word, both of them worried about scaring the other off, he thought, thinking it was too soon.
Lee said, “I am going to say it.” He waited until she started and said, “I love you,” along with her. They were such saps.
They were in the cab on their way back to the City, when he realized that they didn’t have a place to stay. His house in Tiburon was too far from the hospital and right in the middle of a remodel. And, the place had felt so empty lately. He knew it wouldn’t feel empty with Lee in it, but not yet.
“I just realized we don’t have a place to stay. My stuff is still at the Mark. Let me call and see if they can get us a room.”
Lee said, “I knew you liked the Mark and that it was close to the hospital. My people have already reserved a suite for us.” She asked with a touch of anxiety that was damn cute, “Would you stay with me?”
“Yes!” They talked in lover’s shorthand and finished each other’s sentences. Mostly they sat with goofy grins staring into each other’s eyes. He liked it. A lot.
The manager at the Mark left a note, apologizing for not greeting them personally, and expressing his concern for Meghan. The manager had been up all night for the last two nights talking to a long-term customer whose life expectancy had suddenly been diagnosed as short-term. His new assistant manager greeted them.
She saw Jack reading her nametag. “Yes, Suzie Quan, for real. Parents!” she said, shaking her head.
“I am so sorry about Ms. McDonald. Jon said to give you anything you asked for. Our security staff is scheduled to sweep the room soon, and we have you on our anonymous list, is that right?”
Lee said, “Yes, I certainly don’t want news-vultures hounding him at a time like this.”
Suzie led them around the corner to the elevator and stayed with them to make sure they were satisfied with the room. She showed them all the basic smart room features, heat, light, music, security and then took the smart room manual out of a drawer in the desk and handed it to Lee.
“I think the room is a little too smart. If you run into any glitches, page me and I’ll come dial it in for you.”
Suzy Quan made sure the big, white, fluffy bathrobes were hanging where they were supposed to be on the inside doors of the bathrooms. She glanced at the snack tray, and when she thought they weren’t looking, pushed the fruit through the stretch wrap, checking for freshness and then smoothed the plastic. His luggage arrived just as she was leaving. Suzie insisted upon making sure everything was put away, then, waving and smiling, left them on their own.
As Lee ducked into the bathroom, he checked voicemail. Eight more people had returned the quick calls he’d made from the hospital about the stocks. He couldn’t afford to leave the questions he wanted answered on voice mail or with an assistant, so he got no answers. When he checked ReWire’s price, it was up more that its moving average. Volume was fifty percent above its daily average. He would have to wait until tomorrow to check on short interest.
Alice Stewart was in Seattle checking on a fleet of five retiring ferries. The plan was to trade them straight across to an Indian firm for programming. He and four of the other partners had thrown $20K at a Google pay-per-click campaign to check out market potential for a software program. The hits and requests for information showed tremendous short-term potential. As long as they could buy ten thousand hours of expert code writing in the next two months they would get a jump on the big boys. If the IPO market came back they would take the idea public and sell out to one of the players.
His cell phone showed great signal and the connection was still terrible. Alice was as security conscious as Bob and encrypted everything.
Alice asked, “How is Meghan?”
“Better, steady, but a long way from conscious.”
“Cool, give her a big hug from me. Hold on.”
“Alice, you’re not driving that thing, are you?”
She didn’t answer. He had switched to a wired-headphone for security and nearly broke it pulling it out of his ear as a rock riff blasted out of the ship’s horn.
“You’ve got to get one of these for the commute! They are way cool. You ought to see the little boats get out of the way! I’m betting Billy Jo could figure a way for us to write off most of it!” He heard an attempt at Beethoven’s Fifth on the ship’s horn.
Alice said, “On the stocks, I’m looking, but not seeing. I have one more favor to call in. I’m catching the red-eye and will know either way by noon tomorrow. How’s your end going?” She helped herself to another pull on the ship’s horn.
“I’ve moved into a suite at the Mark. So far there are no developments.”
Just as she hung up there was a knock at the door. He opened the door to find a young man with the hotel’s security staff uniform and a nametag that said, “Tim.” Tim looked like an MMA fighter should look, but made polite eye contact, plugged his laptop into the data jack and changed a few settings. He then plugged his cell into the laptop and punched in a ton of numbers.
Tim waited for thirty seconds or so and then had a conversation on the speaker that was mostly, “huh?” followed by “yeah,” “no,” “yes,” and ended in “thanks.” He stood up, stretched his back and said. “That’s it, Sir. Your room is as clean as I can make it. I would still suggest doing everything encrypted, even on your cell.”
Jack had just sat down on the couch when there was another knock on the door. He opened the door to find room service.
“I have the bottle of Prosecco you ordered, Sir.”
He started to close the door saying, “I ordered no Prosecco.”
The young man, “Sam,” according to his name tag said, “Excuse me, Sir, but I’m new and I’ve already messed up once today. Could I please use your phone to check with room service?”
He let Sam in and fought off the urge to smother another one of the blueberry scones in butter while Sam made his call. He wandered back over in time to hear Sam say, “The Ambassador Suite! Okay, okay, I’m on my way.” Sam stood up, apologized for the interruption and left.
He called the office, thinking he was going to be able to make the weekly briefing in person for a change. Mike was duty officer, answering from his cabin in the Trinity Alps.
“Hey, Mike. May I speak to Billy Jo?”
“Mr. McDonald, I was so sorry to hear about your sister. If there is anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m afraid Ms. Harding is not available at the moment. May I connect you with Ms. Harding’s voice mail?”
Jack stared down at the phone in his hand. Mike had given him the danger signal by addressing him formally. By speaking to him formally, addressing Billy Jo formally and letting him know she was unavailable, Mike told him that the danger was on his end. Jack was calling the office from an area where electronic communication was being captured. Sam from room service had just bugged the fucking phone..