“Was that Iggie’s first business, the one that never got off the ground?” I asked, remembering Alex Cutler’s comment the previous evening. It was hard to believe that conversation had taken place barely twenty-four hours ago.
“Who told you that?” she asked, shaking her head. “If anything, their original idea was exactly what Igobe’s become. They first called the company Igleo, a combination of both their names, but after Leo died Iggie stripped out his name. But the concept was always to create software to help people maintain their anonymity on the Internet. They hadn’t yet begun development when I first met them, but they knew what they wanted to do, and they’d mapped out how it would all work technically. What they hadn’t figured out was whether they’d make money off it.”
“Why couldn’t they just sell or license the software to people?” asked Luisa. “That’s how Microsoft and other software companies do it, right? And isn’t that how Igobe’s doing it now?”
“That’s how the software business has worked traditionally, but more and more Internet businesses are making their money from advertising instead. All of the major portals like AOL and Yahoo! are supported by ads, and so are the big search engines and social networks,” said Peter. His own company was working on ways to speed the flow of data across the Internet, but it didn’t deal with consumers directly. Instead, his customers were the cable and phone companies that provided consumers with Internet access.
“So Iggie and Leo couldn’t decide whether to sell the software to people or to let advertisers support it-was that the crux of the matter?” asked Luisa.
“No. It was a lot more basic than that,” said Abigail. “What they couldn’t agree on was whether to make any money from the software at all.”
We all stared at her, collectively perplexed.
“Not make money?” asked Ben.
“What do you mean?” asked Peter.
“Then why bother?” asked Luisa.
I was relieved the concept was just as shocking to them as it was to me-I sometimes worried that working in finance had so steeped me in avarice I no longer had a firm grip on how regular people felt about these things. “How could Iggie not want to make money?” I asked. “Iggie’s been obsessed with making money for as long as we’ve all known him. The guy had an autographed picture of Bill Gates in his dorm room, and it wasn’t because Bill was such a babe.”
Abigail smiled at our reaction. “I know it’s hard to process. But it wasn’t Iggie-he was all for making money, and for making as much of it as he possibly could. It was Leo. He was pretty left-wing to start with, even by Berkeley standards. And then his father died while we were in school, from cancer. I don’t remember what his father did-some sort of middle-management job at a big corporation, I think-but Leo was convinced if he hadn’t been working so hard his entire life he wouldn’t have gotten sick. The experience made him even more radical. I went to the memorial service, and Leo did a reading from Das Kapital and then went on a rant about how his father had been alienated from the fruits of his labor.”
“And that’s why all of the leftist clues made you think of him?” Peter asked.
“That’s part of it. But only a part-it was more than the politics that reminded me of Leo. I mentioned before that he loved puzzles, and not just solving them, creating them, too. I could practically picture how much fun he’d have coming up with the clues you’ve been getting. A lot of developers hide surprises in the computer code they create-they call them Easter eggs-but Leo took almost more pleasure from burying Easter eggs in his code than in writing the code itself. In fact, the only thing he liked better was hacking into other developers’ code and finding their Easter eggs.”
I was already paying close attention, but this made me lean forward in my seat. “Leo was a hacker?”
“A lot of software developers are. It’s like a game to them, and there’s a certain amount of ego involved, too. They’re all trying to one-up each other by showing they can hack each other’s code. Some companies even pay hackers to try to get into their systems, to help them identify weak spots by seeing if they can break through firewalls and find flaws in security protocols.”
At this point, only Peter knew about my conversation with Laura Taylor. He looked at me. “Sound familiar?”
I nodded. “Abigail, have you ever heard of a hacker named Petite Fleur?” It was hard to ask this with a straight face, but somehow I pulled it off.
“Excuse me?”
“Petite Fleur is the online pseudonym-at least, I think it’s a pseudonym-of someone who says he can hack Igobe’s technology.” I filled them all in on what Laura had told me. “It sounds so much like everything you’ve told us about Leo. An old friend of Iggie’s who’s now an enemy but has the technical know-how to compromise Igobe’s security. Who better to do that than Iggie’s partner in developing the technology in the first place?”
“Leo was more than a partner,” said Abigail. “Iggie’s talented and he has great commercial sense, but Leo was the true technical genius. Leo was responsible for the most sophisticated parts of the software’s design. But this hacker, and the person who’s been sending you these clues, can’t be Leo. Leo’s dead.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that?” asked Peter, taking the words from my mouth.
“He’s dead. I wish he weren’t, but there’s no way he could have survived the fire that killed him.”
“What happened, exactly?” asked Luisa. “The woman at Berkeley mentioned a fire, but she didn’t give me any other details, and it didn’t seem appropriate to ask.”
Abigail took a sip from the glass of red wine she’d been nursing. “Leo had a cabin in the hills above Silicon Valley, off Skyline Boulevard. It was just a small place compared to some of the mansions people have built in the area with Internet money, but it was in a beautiful spot. On a clear day you could see all the way to the Pacific from one side of the house and to San Francisco Bay from the other. Leo thought of the cabin as his private retreat. He’d usually go up there alone, shut himself in, light a fire in the fireplace, put on some music and lose himself in work for days at a time. The report was that he must have fallen asleep one night with a fire going. The fire got out of control, and the cabin burned down with him in it.”
“Are you positive he was in it?” I asked. After all, Abigail had just described a classic way to fake one’s own death, not that I had any idea why Leo would want to do such a thing. All of the other signs pointed at Leo and in such a definitive way as to smooth over any disconnect between his picture and the delicate femininity of the hacker’s online alias. I was reluctant to let a small thing like people thinking he was dead get in the way.
“The cabin was so isolated it took a while for the fire trucks to arrive, and by then there wasn’t much left but ashes. Nobody inside could have survived, and nobody did. Once the fire was out, all they recovered were some bone fragments and teeth.” Abigail gave a small shudder, remembering. “That’s how they ended up identifying both Leo and Scat.”
“Scat?” asked Ben.
“Leo’s dog,” she explained. Scat seemed like a strange thing to name a dog-it was more like the sort of thing you’d say to a cat-but not everyone came from the Forrest school of pet-naming. “He really loved that dog.”
“When did all of this happen?” I asked, disappointed. It was hard to argue with bones and dental records.
“About eighteen months ago. Leo and Iggie were fighting all the time by then, and things were getting really bitter between them. All of the initial development was done on the software, and the preliminary testing was complete. They were ready for a broad commercial launch, but they still hadn’t resolved their disagreement about money, and Leo would complain that he never had time to get any work done, because Iggie was constantly scheduling meetings with venture capitalists to talk about business plans and deal terms. Leo wanted to start small and make some of the software available for free, but Iggie thought from the beginning that the technology could be worth billions, and he wanted the venture-capital firms to invest in the company so they could finance a big splashy marketing campaign and grow the business quickly.”