The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (6 page)

“You all OK?” she asked, slipping into deep southern.

“Fine!”
Fahn
, they said. “So good to see you!”

There was moment’s pause. “OK. I’ll get the drinks. What’ll you all have?”

“Better make it wine – a chard,” Melinda said.

“Me too,” said Stacey.

Natalie strode over to the bar, noticing her friends sink back into deep conversation. A man dressed in black with lively grey eyes turned to her: “Hey, could I get a female perspective on something?”

“No!” she said. She didn’t want to be hit on, but she surprised herself with the force of her rebuff. “I mean, not now. Sorry, I’m just here with my friends.”

His hands shot up in a ‘that’s cool’ gesture.

As she brought the drinks back, they looked up at her – with concern, again. After all the day’s events, she felt slightly light-headed. What
was
going on?

“You all sure everything’s OK?” she asked again, quite tense now. “Melinda?”

“Yeah, I think so,” and they started to catch up a little. But how differently, how hesitantly compared to times gone by. When Melinda got up to go the restroom and Stacey made as though to join her, Natalie couldn’t take it any longer:

“Gals, what
is wronng
?”

They looked at each other, then at her.

“Stacey? Look, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it up here Saturday. I thought it was OK – that you were OK with that!”

“It’s not about Saturday, Natalie,” Melinda took charge. “It’s about your page on Clamor.”

The gnawing apprehension was back. “Huh?”

“Your Clamor page,” Stacey agreed.

“What are you talking about?”

“The profile page you have here on Clamor,” for the third time.

“Nuh-uh. I don’t have a Clamor page, I’m not on Clamor!”

“Yes you are!”

“
No I’m not
!” Natalie almost shouted, to the entire bar.

“Come on Natalie, you’re
de-fi-nately
on Clamor.” And Melinda reached for her handheld, pushing it towards her.

She was definitely on Clamor. 

Natalie gave up trying to navigate Melinda’s handheld and pulled out her MacBook. A moment later, she had the wi-fi password from the barman and the three of them huddled round her Clamor profile page, their faces lit white in the darkness.

Natalie suddenly felt very weary. The lead photo of her was a simple headshot from several years back. She had about 20 friends, an odd assortment of people from over the years. Her English friend Verity was there, as was Hélène from Paris.

“When did you guys become my friends?” It felt like she was outside her own body.

“We got the ru-quest this morning. That’s the first time we saw it. We thought you’d caved and joined, an’ we were happy. Then we looked closer.”

Her stated interests were all semi-familiar ones: yoga, ‘lotsa eastern philosophy’, self-inquiry, ‘going-within’, and on went the list of self-indulgent attributes.

But it was the blog feed that sent her heart pounding in her chest cavity:

‘Feelin kinda antsy today. just went 4 a latte, gotta cut down on that caffeine. maybe I need 2 smoke something!’

It went on to describe, in a rather hectoring tone, how glad she was to be free of her last job. How that last job had
succkked!!

It was everything Natalie had disavowed about blogging. She’d won prizes for her school essays, and who did she have to thank for that?  It had taken her father years to become a featured columnist for
Le Monde
. He’d trained under the most experienced of reporters, his copy obsessively researched, proof-read, fact-checked, with earlier attempts shredded by editors bearing down their decades of experience on him, his later attempts finally accepted and vouchsafed by one of the world’s great news organizations. It had been an apprenticeship. A calling. And that was before considering the
substance
. A single memory flashed up, of an elderly man sitting at their apartment on the Avenue Kléber, mumbling to her father about worldly matters. The tobacco smell was as pungent in her nostrils as though it were yesterday. She must have been three or four at the time. The man was Jean-Paul Sartre, in the last year of his life.

What would her father make of this self-referential nonsense were he still alive? She shivered and scrolled back to the photo area of the page. There she was on the beach, in a brown bikini, standing with hands in prayer position. She vaguely remembered the moment, with two other girls from the yoga organization, after snorkeling one afternoon: a Thank You to the wonders of the sea or some such. The photo had been cropped to focus on her glistening chest, down which water trickled. There was another photo of her on the beach, this time horseback riding. To avoid skin rash, she’d worn breeches and old boots. She remembered it well: galloping along in the early day with several others, sea spray and salt air and horse smell and the rhythmic movement of massive limbs filling her world. This time a three-quarter shot, from behind. Hers.

A third photo: a close up, less flattering, revealing the fine lines spreading round her eyes. Others from the yoga studio… All real. Doubtless they’d been taken by retreat-goers and posted online somewhere, perhaps even the yoga retreat’s own website. None appeared to have been digitally altered. But the way they’d been edited together created an unmistakable impression:

Look at Me!
Am I not gorgeously desirable, glamorous and
SEXY
!?

It was everything she’d tried to avoid for so much of her life. At boarding school, the daughter of Lorelei Chevalier-Smythe – not even a well-known model! – yet enough of one to make her an easy target for the comments and malicious gossip of other girls. Hence the avoidance of anything like these photos. Then she saw her whiteboard:

Downwerd  d oggie style oh YEAH

Her profile page apparently lacked even the minimum level of security. Anyone could access it and write whatever they wanted. And everyone could read the result:

Id like 2 ride that ! !

Pricks. But it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps she was overreacting? The photos were not awful. The lewd comments were self-evidently the work of prying creeps. Others were weirdly complimentary:

Super cool! Where d’ya get that bikini from?

– one woman, a complete stranger, had posted. Ordinarily, closing a Clamor account – the foundation if not entirety of many peoples’ social lives – was an arduous old task if you lacked the account login and password. But she was now working for Clamor. She resigned herself to calling Nguyen or Malovich, finishing up the night with her friends, then emailing everyone in the morning: “my account was just hacked…” At the end of the day, no one had stopped breathing.

Then she saw it.

The continuation of the blog.

Oh. My. God.

– guess I was the wrong person for my last job, coz it
succkked!!
Or maybe I just sucked the wrong guy, but that’s another kinda job Ha Ha!

She pushed the laptop away. Her girlfriends’ arms wrapped round her:

“We didn’t know how to tell you,” one said soothingly.

Noise and confusion…

“RAY-mee!” Stacey and Melinda were chorusing to the barman across the room, who was flailing among the dusty, expensive bottles in one corner...

“No-wh!” they called out: “The RAY-mee
ex
-
oh
!”

Only the Rémy Martin XO Excellence would do for this one.

She surprised herself by laughing out loud. What a strange gaggle they made! The whole room was watching. The shy barman poured a triple measure. She glugged it down, the sickly liquor coursing through her, warming her back up a bit.

She opened the laptop again, suddenly realizing how the identity hijacker may have gone about it. “
Don’t
– look at that!” Stacey said, reaching to close it, but Natalie told her No, it was OK: she wanted to show them something.

She opened a separate browser window and pulled up Friendster.com. It had lived on, popular now in Malaysia and the Philippines. Stupidly, she had not closed her account. There she still was, with the same 2003 photo and the same friends: someone had simply opened a Clamor account in her name, copied across the photo and found others, then tracked down as many of the same friends as he (or she) could on Clamor – the maverick Ray Ott being among them. It seemed likely that Ray had accepted ‘her’ request and checked out her profile on Sunday as well –
after
their Saturday email exchange. Suddenly, his radio silence that afternoon didn’t seem so strange.

Natalie remembered being sent to an executive course at a business school near Paris, and learning about the ‘sleeper effect’ in corporate communications: how over time, we remember only the message, not the source. It stuck with her because of the male executive colleague she went on the course with, a rising star at the company – whom she got to know a lot better that weekend. She vividly remembered the epiphany in that lecture hall, of why malicious gossip tended to be so effective.

Her very identity had been violated with the world at large – carefully, calculatedly. And if the perpetrator could do that, what else could he or she do?

“I need to run,” she told her two friends.

“Huh?”

“There’s something I need to do, immediately.”

“No!” Stacey said, “we’re your family, Natalie!”

But she was already packed up and half way out the door. “I’ll call you.”

CHAPTER 7

Outside, the rain had let up some. She made her way back to the Public Market. Its red neon sign hovered, reflected in the pools of standing rainwater she fought hard to avoid. Her car was fine, no ticket. Rather than getting in however, she hurried up Pike Street, away from the water. It was only four or five blocks to the big Bon Marché and Nordstrom department stores at the heart of Seattle’s downtown shopping area, but the vicinity of Second and Pike was a sketchy corner, particularly at night. Bums huddled under awnings, talking to themselves, cradling their one or two possessions. It wasn’t a place to loiter. Yet it
was
a place where she’d once seen an Internet café, just round the corner from Amazon.com’s original building on Second, she recalled. Would it still be there? Did
anyone
still use an Internet cafe in a city as digital as Seattle? There it was: beneath a cheap noodle bar. She descended the basement steps.

It was a florescent-lit rabbit hutch of a place where time seemed to have stood still. She prepaid and took a seat in front of a light brown Compaq, looking as old as she felt. She launched the web browser and opened her Clamor page again – unable to recall an Internet connection this slow, even back in the days of dial-up.

Please wait…  …  …

She reached into her bag, for what had required her to come to an Internet café.
Detection avoidance
. She delved into an inner, zipped pocket, emerging with a glossy red memory stick, which she inserted into the Compaq’s updated USB port. Then she clicked open a folder, entered her two-factor authentication password and launched the application. Onto the screen popped:

                        LoverSpy, Deluxe

Here was the more specific reason why she’d had to leave her job. A Californian company had created the spyware to track online activities of partners in intimate relationships, usually to find evidence of infidelity. Monitoring a partner's online activities without his or her consent was usually illegal – and that had proved problematic for the authors of LoverSpy. But
not always
illegal, Natalie had managed to persuade herself, as she’d started to realize that a love triangle may be at play in her own workplace romance. Rather, it depended on
local laws
regarding marital/
communal
property. A fawning programmer in her department had re-written the software so that it contained a rootkit, thereby becoming ‘LoverSpy, Deluxe’. Rootkits modified host operating systems, giving the hacker administrative or root access. After listening to her lover’s suspiciously fierce denials, Natalie directed the programmer to infiltrate her lover’s computer software
not only
to install and hide the spyware, but also to repel any attempts at removal.

She no longer wanted to remember.

How the spyware knew whenever a ghost-job was killed, how it would start a new copy of the slain program within milliseconds, how the only way to remove it was to slay both ghosts simultaneously (very difficult) or
to
crash the system altogether
.

For right there had been her undoing.

Bringing herself back, she opened up the LoverSpy executable and re-parameterized it using a Boolean-style command: IF visitor accesses Natalie Chevalier profile page AND visitor first accessed login page, THEN scrape username, password. Next she copied the executable across to the open scripts of her profile page. From there, it would upload itself to the Clamor web servers in some hosting facility thousands of miles away, working its way in – then winging its way back.

She leaned away from the Compaq, crossed her arms and waited. Waited. Waited …

It still all felt so raw, so vivid.

How, from his account of it, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources had gone in to bat for her at the last minute. She could imagine it all: him dropping by the CEO’s office at the end of a day, the CEO with his sleeves rolled up, his ball-shaped head reddened by the day’s exertions, but still listening intently. HR, in his clipped accent, acknowledging that Natalie Chevalier had been naive to get involved with a fellow executive, that there had been no defense for what she’d gone and done.
And yet
the company had long since tolerated workplace relationships, she was growing into a “world-class senior software executive” (the cost of recruiting and developing a replacement being significant), the provocation had been unusual – it was an aberration. “She didn’t have it easy earlier in life,” he’d apparently said on his way out of the CEO’s office.

Natalie was left wondering what then went on behind closed doors. Perhaps that last remark to the CEO had proved her undoing. Perhaps it had been repeated to the Chairman, who could only have responded one way: “those are two mutually exclusive states: difficult childhood, total aberration – which?”

Perhaps, perhaps.

The CEO personally delivered the bullet. He told her that on a human level, he could empathize with what she’d been through. But business was about making the tough calls. She’d used the resources of her department to launch malware onto the personal computer of another serving executive. She would be given the chance to resign. She would receive twelve months’ severance provided that she signed a new non-disclosure and non-compete agreement covering that extended period. Both she and the other executive involved had reported into the senior leadership team. The circumstances of her departure would remain confidential to that small group.

“What about him?” she asked.

Her ex was not in a good place. His peers just didn’t care too much for his behavior. He’d been hit with improper use of corporate email or similar.

“He’ll be dismissed for cause. Whatever he chooses to say, I very much doubt people will pay attention to.”

But that wasn’t what she’d meant: “I
love
-d that bastard!” she’d burst forth, tears leaking out again, the sky falling in once more.

“You bawled
that
out to the big guy?” Melinda had asked, open-mouthed, in the Alibi Room. Natalie had been given just five days to get her story straight, get her emails out, say her goodbyes and vacate her office for good. Initially the headhunters called. She was still crouching in her comforter, knees to her chest, forehead to her knees – on the floor of the penthouse once shared with the man she’d loved, not even ten blocks north of where she now sat … … …

Where she now sat, in a ratty Internet café beneath a grimy noodle bar, in front of the world’s slowest ever computer. Living the latest nightmare. She’d been waiting for some alphanumeric sequence on the screen, and didn’t at first notice the double
blink
sound:

A computer-headed stick figure, appearing in duplicate.

What the hell
?

She tried to run an image search, but the Compaq was too slow. She felt hunger. She pulled out her notepad and drew the character and stared at it till it danced above the page.

Then she trudged upstairs: the grimy noodle bar would have to do.

Just a couple of other diners at greasy formica tables. As with the basement, someone had gone to great lengths to ensure the place was awfully lit. An elderly owner took her order: house noodle soup, please. She pushed the boat out, succumbing to the Three Dollar Deep Bowl.

After wiping the table with a paper towel, she opened her notebook and stared again at the stick figure. What did it remind her of?

One of those
Space Invader
graphics, from the retro-‘80s video game. Suddenly she thought of Malovich, and that damned Atari T-shirt…

The soup arrived. It was warm, oily water but nutritious and flavorsome enough. She hoped it wouldn’t react too weirdly with the Rémy Martin triple measure and Alaska in-flight snack. Bringing the bowl closer to her mouth, she exhaled the steaming vapors into her face, closing her eyes. How she’d loved to do that as a child, in the Vietnamese restaurants around Paris, with her dad.

When she looked up again, the owner was smiling at her. She smiled back: he was almost a parody of himself. Right down to his wispy beard, like soft strands of wool.

“Ah,” he said. “Very good”.

He seemed to be talking about the soup.

“Yes,” she said.

“I can do better,” and he walked back to the serving area.

“No,” she called after him, “that was quite enough, thanks!”

But instead of returning with more soup, he came back with an old fashioned, ornate pen. “Here,” he said. And with the most beautiful, sweeping curves of his willowy wrist:

The black ink bled into the coarse paper.

“This very popular Chinese name,” he said proudly. “Woooo.”

The owl-sound went through her like a blade –

Had Nancy Wu signed her own forgery?

“And this, he pointed to her space-invader version higher up the page, “is American version of same name. More stray’-for-wah’,” he laughed.

Or was someone expecting her to infer that – someone impersonating Wu? With her head spinning, she paid, found her car, fervently hoped she wouldn’t be breathalysed and headed back to the airport.

For the rest of that night, she traded texts with Tom Nguyen. Ultimately, she was too tired to talk to him, let alone meet him – what she’d intended boarding the plane. On arrival back in San Francisco, she returned to the Keaton and there, fell into deep sleep.                        

                                 *    *    * 

No!
– she tried to yell, awakening and realizing that she could only manage a suffocated gasp. The ‘Wu’ symbol had come alive in her sleep, wielding a machete-like blade. “No,” she repeated. She heard the murmur of the hotel’s air conditioning system, and felt cold sweat at the nape of her neck. Rubbing her wrists, she remembered the events of the previous day. The fraudulent Clamor page. She reached for her laptop and groggily googled herself. But before she had time to check the results, the room phone exploded –

Nguyen: “Are you avoiding me?”

She couldn’t tell whether he was pissed, joking or what. “I just woke up,” she said.

“Natalie. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

“No way! –
Shit
, I’m sorry!”

“Never mind. What did you want to talk about?”

She came right out with it: “I’m having second thoughts about this.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, me taking over Malovich’s security role – it feels like it’s stirring things in ways I don’t understand, or like. It feels as though it’s starting to make someone very unhappy – likely Malovich himself...”

“I doubt it,” Tom said. “At least, not any more.”

The phone silence rumbled loud in her ear.

“Yuri Malovich just took his own life.”