to belong to him—an antique notion, silvery as Ingrid Bergman’s fine features, sad as Bogart’s gravel voice.
She embraced him, pressed against him, but even as she throbbed again, Emily’s cooler self, observing her entanglement, looked down upon her limbs and his. Her reasonable soul broke in, interrupting at the worst possible, or rather, the best possible, moment to ask: Who is this man? And who are you? Do you love him? Does he love you? And how can you tell? What proof do you have? Only kisses melting into air. Touch forgotten in an instant. Don’t you have some better evidence than that?
Yes, she had evidence. She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.
“I’ve got Alex working on password authentication,” she whispered. “It’s a new system called Verify, with a feature called electronic fingerprinting.” He held still as she told him. He seemed to hold his breath as she explained how the system recorded every user of every piece of data—a graphic history of each touch.
“Stop.”
“Did I say too much?”
“Of course not,” he said, but his voice was surprised. He’d never imagined she would confide so much in him. He was moved by the gesture. Overwhelmed.
She rested her head on his chest. “Tell me something too.”
She heard his heart beat faster. Why? Surprise? Chagrin? He was supposed to be the demanding one, the instigator.
“Tell me what’s really wrong with Lockbox.”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s really wrong’?” Jonathan asked softly, defensively.
Oh, she was proving his point. She was like him after all, competitive, even now. No, that wasn’t right. She only wanted parity, a fair trade of information. That wasn’t right either. All she wanted was to draw him in and hold him close. “What did Orion find?” she pressed. Curious, just like Jonathan. Alert, insatiable as he was. “Tell me.”
Part Three
High Fliers
11
Information was currency, and Jonathan understood this better than most. After all, his company encrypted Web transactions. Credit-card numbers, personal data, customer preferences—these were valuable, but other bits shimmered as well. Information about rival companies, hints at future trends, insider tips. In graduate school Jonathan had studied cryptography. In business he sold electronic Lockboxes and ChainLinx fence, but in life, his instinct was to trade on secrets, not to keep them. Therefore Emily’s information about electronic fingerprinting tempted. Alex’s idea was dark and clever, and while Jonathan was not sure exactly how such a scheme would come to market, he sensed its value. He had a strategic mind, and he could already envision a world in which some spied with electronic fingerprinting, and others tried to defend themselves against it with new ISIS products. What if ISIS developed an encryption service of its own? He could almost … but he loved Emily, and he would not violate her trust.
He had grown up in Nebraska, where he and his brothers rode the school bus an hour and a half each way. His parents, Dan and Jeannie Tilghman, had been farmers, and raised him to be smart, ambitious, and unsentimental about country life. When it came to living off the land, his mother told him, “Don’t even think about it.” And when it came to school, she said quite seriously, “You’re smarter than anyone there, including the teacher.”
By fourth grade Jonathan was working independently, whiling away the hours memorizing digits of pi. In fifth grade he studied bookkeeping on his own. He was known as a math genius, but he was also the fastest runner in his class. He could beat anyone in the sixty-yard dash, even Scott Livingston. In revenge for this, Scott lured him into a game of Crack-the-Whip at recess. Watching his classmates holding hands, tugged by the leader in a snaking line whose tail moved ten times faster than its head, Jonathan was tempted by Courtney Cahill, the girl everybody knew Scott liked. She was freckled, her eyes copper-brown with long lashes, her hair streaked gold from the sun. Jonathan stepped between Scott and Courtney and took her hand, the first girl’s hand he’d ever held, and as the line whipped back, he felt her soft palm against his, a rush of delight, and the next moment, an explosion of pain on the side of his face, smack against his nose. Scott had stepped out of line and thrown a roundhouse right. Jonathan fell to the ground with blood gushing from his broken nose. Kids swarmed, girls screamed. The teachers were coming, but Jonathan sprang up and sprinted after Scott all the way across the playground. Heart racing, shirt drenched red, he chased his enemy down, caught him from behind, and slammed him to the hardtop. He punched Scott in the face until he was bleeding on the painted hopscotch squares.
Jonathan returned home with a week’s suspension.
“How does the other guy look?” his father asked.
“Bad,” said Jonathan.
Then Dan was satisfied.
Jonathan’s mother wanted to take him to the doctor, but Dan said he would heal better naturally, and so the break mended on its own, into the bold and busted nose Emily insisted she loved anyway.
He skipped two grades, read Ayn Rand, and planned to go to Harvard and become president of the United States, and make a gazillion dollars. Harvard didn’t work out. He hit a speed bump at Woodrow Wilson High, where he was too bright and warlike to get along. He got into trouble in his senior year, a brawl involving alcohol and school property, and he was not allowed to graduate—a fact he enjoyed telling interviewers. He could have done time in summer school, but he took the GED instead and enlisted, serving in Desert Storm, after which he attended Dartmouth, where he became a rugby player and confined his scuffles to the field. He had not yet explored politics, but the gazillion dollars went without saying. He had enormous confidence. He simply knew what to do. Was this good judgment or the extraordinary financial moment? History had never been his subject.
Investors fought to place large sums in Jonathan’s hands. He seemed a new breed, part genius, part industrialist—a game changer—and Jonathan did not disabuse them of this notion. But Emily never looked at him this way; she knew his moods and saw through his stratagems. She understood his business as well, because she’d blazed the trail. Long before ISIS, Jonathan had heard of Emily and Veritech. Back in 1996, when he was still pursuing his Ph.D. at MIT, he caught his first glimpse of her. He had been at Orion’s place, and Molly was flipping channels when Emily materialized on television—cool, slender, bright-eyed as she explained to an interviewer why she did not pursue an academic career in computer science.
“Why are you surprised?” Orion asked. “That’s Emily Bach. Who did you think it was?”
“You know her?”
“I’ve known her forever,” Orion said.
“Introduce me,” Jonathan said. “I’m serious.”
He’d turned back to the screen. She had the longest neck, delicate and white. Just the sight of her stirred him, but what she said next changed his life. She expressed exactly what he was feeling and had not yet put into words.
“I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there’s money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn’t you go out and paint?”
