are the seeds of new memories that, with passing time, spread out to the rest of the brain, encoding the new experiences as long-term memories and learning. I stare at the peanut until it becomes blurry. I feel something tugging at my own memory centers, more than tugging, pulling, demanding my attention. My head pulses in beats, arrhythmically, with the sound of the car skidding along the gravel.
It’s like I know something so important but I can’t remember what it is. It’s in that void inside my head, surrounded by strange colors.
I close my eyes. I picture a rat. It’s this pudgy gray fellow with a long rat tail and pink around the eyes. On its head, it wears electrodes. I saw it when doing a story about memory research at the University of California at San Francisco. The researchers measured electrical activity in the brains of rats. They were watching new neurons form and travel to different parts of the brain. The researchers discovered that when rats have new experiences, they can only encode long-term memories-the only way those new neurons travel to the rest of the brain-during substantial periods of downtime. It was both a revelation and a confirmation of the obvious: when a brain doesn’t rest, it doesn’t have time to record memories.
I need to rest. Have I been chasing ghosts and irrelevancies at the expense of remembering something critical?
It feels like my brain flickers on and off, like Wi-Fi or bars on a phone.
Do I know some truth and can’t remember it? What is it? A connection between Andrew Leviathan and Sandy Vello and a little girl who walked into traffic, and PRISM and a God drug, and Faith?
Is my chase leading me to truth?
Or is it obscuring truth by denying me downtime to record my own memories, my own truth?
Or, as Bullseye and the Witch suggest: Is chasing what heals me? Is this all nonsense, cooked up by a concussed brain?
I sit up. I look at the newly arrived car, a late-model pickup, its brake lights still gleaming. Two men sit in the front seat conferring.
I don’t have the answers. Sandy Vello has some of them, at least.
I look back at the web site with the address of the registrant for WildPhotos, Clyde’s address, presumably. There’s a phone number. I dial it.
At the first ring, someone answers. “Hello, Clyde?”
I catch my breath. It’s Sandy’s voice.
I hang up.
I put the car in drive.
38
After a twenty-minute drive south on a darkened Highway 280, I glide past the Farm Hill Road exit, which leads to the residence of a former Marine and reality-TV wannabe. Before I stop there, I’ve got more traps to lay.
I drive five miles farther south to Sand Hill Road, the exit for Palo Alto, feeling the property values rise with each tick of the odometer. I pull off the highway, pull out my own laptop, and cruise around the tree-shrouded office complexes just off the highway. I stop every few offices to see if I can find an unsecured Wi-Fi access point. I find one outside Mercurial Ventures, which, nearly makes me smile; it seems like a refreshingly frank name for an investment firm throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into the wildly swinging tech market.
From my wallet, I pull out the yellow Post-it note I’d been handed by Bullseye. It contains the home address for the Chinese hacker. He lives in a tree-lined area of Palo Alto once catering to Stanford scholars called “Professorville.” I call up his address on a map. I have no intention of going there. But I hope someone thinks I intend to-maybe the shiny bald buzzard or the stout pyromaniac, or whoever is monitoring my computer activity. I pause on the map in hopes of letting the image sink in with whichever miscreant is watching over my shoulder. I close the browser but leave the computer on to let the additional misdirection set in.
I want to close my eyes, but find myself looking at the surrounding venture-capital firms, struck with another question. I pull out Bullseye’s laptop, open it, search for Andrew’s former business partner Gils Simons. I get a mountain of hits. He’s celebrated as the canny operational guy who knows how to turn cutting-edge technology into gold. It’s no small trick, by the way; there are countless stories in these parts of savvy engineers who came first to the idea of online auction sites, or Internet search engines or online booksellers, but got crushed by eBay, Google and Amazon because those companies coupled the technology with business smarts.
From his bio on Wikipedia, I learn that Gils grew up outside Normandy, attended the Sorbonne, dropped out, came to the United States, paired up with Andrew Leviathan in the early 1980s as Co-employee Number One of Leviathan Ventures, left the company in the late nineties to pursue his investment interests, and likes sailing and climbing. There is no reference to the China-U.S. High-Tech Alliance.
Wikipedia lists Gils’s current investment firm as Alps Partners. I visit the web site to find an image of a snowcapped mountain and little substance. A blase formulaic section describes the firm’s determination to find “break-out” companies and market-moving ideas with international potential. Same old blah-blah investment rhetoric. I look down the list of his strategic investment partners. One is Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google. He’s got a hit on his hands. The other is Trans-Pacific Limited Partners, described merely as a leading Chinese investment firm.
There’s a contact link. I click on it and am surprised to find an email address: [email protected]. I noodle my missive only briefly before writing: “My name is Nat Idle. We sat across from each other at the luncheon at MacArthur Park. I’m interested in writing about your latest venture. Want to meet and discuss?”
I leave my phone number. It’s cryptic enough to suggest much more knowledge on my part than I’ve actually got and, as a result, perhaps lure him into a conversation. It’s meaningless enough that, should Gils have no involvement in whatever it is I’m chasing, I can easily explain the note away by saying I wanted to learn about his latest business dealings.
I search for information about the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center and the learning annex. Various wire news reports repeat what I heard on the radio: pretty much nothing of value. I look at some of the history of the place. When it was rebuilt in the late 1990s, it was intended by county authorities to be a model of modern rehabilitation. Huge cost overruns ensued. So the learning annex got privatized into a place where the county pays monthly fees for learning classes, supplies, volunteers, but far less than it would pay to take care of the entire building and pay the mortgage on it. It’s a classic taxpayer abdication but one that has gotten kudos from around the country, particularly from economists and right-wing think tanks. Through all kinds of classes, the learning annex has taught youngsters basic employment skills, including short-order and pastry cooking, maintenance of things like air conditioners and furnaces, “manners,” email etiquette, computing.
Computing.
I search on this specific area. I’m looking for connections to PRISM and Sandy Vello to something called the Juggler. I find little. There’s a brief mention in a filing from a year earlier to the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco of a pilot project at the facility aimed at teaching residents the latest media techniques. It is passed unanimously without comment.
A handful of searches about the learning center gives oblique notifications of other partnerships offered and accepted. From what I can gather: a major coffee chain has contributed espresso machines to teach both coffee making and maintenance of the fragile devices; tutors in computer support give technical certificates for learning the ins and outs of Windows software; a medical conglomerate has donated an old-generation magnetic resonance machine so teens can learn to be medical assistants.
It’s all both heartening, I guess, and self-serving by the private partners, who develop brand-specific line workers. The tech-savvy lower classes of the next century.
I look at the clock. Nearly thirty minutes have passed since I parked here. It’s just before nine. I close and turn off both laptops and start the Audi. Moments later, I speed onto Highway 280, and after five minutes more, exit again, this time on Farm Hill Road. The directions on Bullseye’s computer guide me up a steep, narrow road that climbs a Silicon Valley hillside. On some of these hillsides reside the swankiest estates, $3.5 million at a minimum. Not this one. Smaller houses, fixer-uppers needing serious cosmetic surgery at a minimum. I drive by one ranch-
