The ranch-style house spreads wide across the horizon, blocking a view of the bay behind it that I imagine makes it worth whatever Leviathan paid for this understated place, and whatever it took to amass the fortune.
He parks in a roundabout in front of the house, and lumbers out of the car. I, with just the slightest hesitation, do the same. The buzzard stays put. Leviathan nods his head to the right, where I see a stand-alone structure, maybe a home office or guest house, cut into a break in the trees. He starts walking toward it.
I look in the doorway and see Leviathan’s stunning wife, arms crossed, wearing a bathrobe and a grim look. I look down and away, as if embarrassed.
Leviathan disappears into the trees, heading toward the guesthouse.
I follow.
56
Boxy but distinct. The square edifice stands two stories, the gently sloped and white tile roof extending a foot over the edge of the house, like the brim of a sun hat. Separated by a grove of trees from the main house, accessible by an inlaid stone path, it also projects a less-rustic character, a home office maybe, with the emphasis on office, not home.
The nerve center of a dark plan.
Leviathan, still a few steps ahead of me, walking in silence, pulls open a heavy door and walks through it. I’m struck by the plodding character of his gait, and mine. The two of us head without relish toward an inevitable confrontation. It strikes me that I’m not the one already feeling defeated.
Inside the door, I’m greeted by Richard Nixon. His painting hangs on the wall to the right of a ponderously heavy wooden staircase that bisects the entryway. I can’t help but pause at the former president’s brooding visage, downturned eyes, holding a pen suspended over some document as he sits in the Oval Office.
“Hubris,” Leviathan mutters, halfway up the stairs. He plods upward. Then he says “on” and the upstairs lights ignite. I plod after him. I follow his path into a room directly across from the top of the stairs.
When through the door, I nearly lose my breath.
The view.
Through a window that stretches most of the length of the backside of the house, Silicon Valley materializes. I inhale the majestic view of an airplane at low altitude. In the foreground, the hills give way to the flatlands stretching from Burlingame to San Jose, and then the three spans leading to the East Bay and the rest of the world: the Dumbarton, San Mateo and Bay bridges. From the mind of Leviathan and a handful of true pioneers, semiconductors and software roll out from here across the Earth.
“God and his creation,” I say.
He pulls out a chair behind his antique desk and sits, his back to the view. He gestures with an open palm for me to sit on a worn cloth love seat that looks like he picked it up for free after reading an ad on Craigslist.
“That chair survived the bombings at Dresden.”
“Another reminder from history, like Nixon?”
“Overextension comes at a price.”
The love seat sits a few feet in front of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that line the walls. As I sit, I see the gun. It sits in the middle of the desk, where I might have expected a computer. The black handgun looks inert, small, a toy thing from a movie set.
“We could do a modified interview style.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I ask you a series of questions and then when you feel I’ve overstepped the boundaries, you shoot me.”
He grimaces. He’s not the sort of bad guy who seems to enjoy the role.
“You obviously discovered the Juggler. Tell me what you know and I’ll fill in the rest.”
I look at the gun again. I can’t help but flash on the night that Leviathan as a young man spent in the jail cell in the Eastern Bloc, anticipating his execution. He plotted with all his might to survive. By contrast, I’m going so quietly.
I could run, I suppose. I could yell “off” and command the lights to extinguish, then dive for the door. But run to what? How far would I get? They can track my movements. I knew what I was getting into when I drove here. I wonder if I’m destined to see Isaac and Polly on the other side of some spiritual barrier I’m not sure I believe exists.
“I wrote a file that will be widely distributed in the event of my disappearance. One way or another, the world will know about what you’ve done.”
“Maybe.”
I don’t understand and shake my head.
“You’re a great journalist, I mean that. But you vastly underestimate the ability of even modestly talented hackers to invade your devices, use them to do surveillance on you, control your digital output, and so forth. If you left a file to be distributed by email, I could probably kill or modify it.”
“So I probably shouldn’t have let on.”
“Tell me what it says and, like I said, I’ll fill in the rest.”
“What do I have to lose?”
“Honestly? Nothing I can calculate.”
I tell him most of what I’ve surmised, concluding that the Juggler, scheduled for imminent distribution in China, slows development of kids’ frontal lobes, making them more impulsive, less able to focus, indulgent like children years their junior. “When it comes to frontal lobe development, age ten is the new seven and seven is the new five.”
“See, that’s much better wordplay.”
I tell him I don’t understand the mechanism that allows the technology to take a neurological toll. After all, I note, the Juggler doesn’t seem much different from a lot of the high-intensity phones and game machines.
“I’m not entirely sure myself of the mechanism,” he says.
As a matter of substance, it’s not helpful. But it is an admission I’m on the right track.
“May I pace?” I ask.
He nods.
I walk on the thin area rug past his desk, pivot, make another pass. I tell him that I suspect Gils Simons, his old chief operating officer, passed the technology to the Chinese through the High-Tech Alliance. I pause from my walk and look at him, struck by something.
“You and Gils aren’t exactly on the same page.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Different henchmen.”
“Go on.”
“You’re tracking me with the tall bald guy. Shiny head makes him tough to miss.” He starts to ask who I mean, and then just nods, a silent appreciation or, maybe, endorsement of the description. I continue: “He, Gils, has a closer relationship with the Chinese guy with the crooked smile.”
Leviathan waves his hand, urging me to continue.
I tell him I suspect that Alan Parsons learned of the plot and tried to blackmail the group. But, I say, Parsons couldn’t quite piece it together and somehow needed my help. I’m walking again, a bit lost in my own thoughts. This is where things get shaky for me. And, in addition, I’m not quite sure how to play this next bit. Do I come right out and say that I know about the death of Kathryn Gilkeson? And the recent suicide of the kid at Los Altos High?
My reservation, I realize, is I don’t want to provoke him unnecessarily. I may be going gently into that good night but I’m not going to actually shove myself.
“May I go out on a limb?”
“It’s a bit late to ask.”
“You’ve hated authoritarian regimes since you were a boy. You want to poison a generation of Chinese kids, I
