CHAPTER TWO

      Dev

      MONDAY MORNING SHOULD not surprise me. After all, I wrote the agenda for my company’s executive team meeting. When I stroll into King Me’s San Francisco conference room, however, the mood is not jubilant. I closed a major e-commerce deal at the Friday mixer despite crazy chick’s drenching, and that means more stock options, bigger bonuses and the hugest possible gold star. Winner.

      I drop into my chair at the table and eyeball the room. People claim my surfer boy outside in no way matches my CEO insides. That I’m a cranky bastard who routinely demands near-impossible coding heroics from my people. I offer this truth: I make those people money and ergo there are no complaints. Something is up today, however.

      “Explain.” I point to the head of my engineering department. Simon Rand is an excellent software developer. He doesn’t do the bullshit dance around unpleasant truths. This forthrightness saw him let go from two previous start-ups, where the CEO-owner-entrepreneurs preferred team members to blow expensive, happy smoke up their asses while the companies burned through VC capital and made rapid descents into bankruptcy. I prefer making money hand over fist, so I insist on truth-telling.

      Simon makes a sour face. Rather than ask the logical question explain what?, he assumes I’ve acquired telepathy powers over the weekend and already know the what. He plunges into explanations.

      I hold up a hand. “Stop.”

      Simon stops.

      A tense pause follows as the team attempts and fails to get on the mind-reading train to figure out who I’ll fire for this. It’s tempting, because Simon’s news (and it’s news to me) falls into the no-good-very-bad-day bucket. It’s also humiliating, frustrating and makes me see red.

      I recap on the off chance I’ve misheard. I don’t make mistakes but hell could freeze over. “Someone stole our brand-new e-commerce shopping cart code.”

      Simon nods.

      “The exclusive code we’ve presold to twelve major online vendors.”

      Another nod.

      “Exclusive code that is no longer exclusive unless Merriam-Webster has changed the definition of the word.”

      A veritable storm of head-bobbing around the table. We’re all on the same page.

      “Who is the cause of this really big fucking problem?”

      No one moves because the first thing you learn in the corporate world is that moving makes you a target. Simon looks like he might be sick.

      I try again. “How?”

      This one should be easier to answer given the multiple levels of security I’ve instituted. Unfortunately, this question is also met with silence.

      “So essentially we know nothing.” The theft may now be a fact, but revenge remains an option. I build a back door and handy-dandy detonator into our apps. Steal my shit and poof—your e-commerce site sells rubber ducky dildos in fashion colors rather than whatever you’ve really got in your warehouse. And because industrial espionage is rampant and I trust no one outside my immediate circle of friends, I build in that safeguard from day one. I also build in a tracker that alerts when my software goes live on the internet, which must be how Simon knows.

      “Yet,” Simon clarifies. “We don’t know anything yet.”

      Now it’s my turn to nod. “Exactly. All we have to do is figure out the connection between the three seemingly unrelated businesses illegally using our code. We didn’t sell it to them, but they’ve got it. Somehow. There’s a pattern even if we don’t see it yet.”

      Simon leaps to his feet, grabs a dry-erase marker and starts sketching on the whiteboard. While the rest of the room pretends to listen intently to the stream of engineering coming from his mouth, I brainstorm internally. The first business sells mail-order hemp candles and I assume they’ll likely get arrested on drug distribution charges. The second business, an adult pool float company, might not mind a deluge of rubber ducky dildos (I’ll trigger the alternate version of my destructo-code for them, the one that crashes your site by playing endless loops of puppies and kittens). The third company is a woman-owned, eco-friendly, socially conscious feminine hygiene products start-up that promises to donate a box of tampons for every one you purchase in the ultimate two-for-one deal. The only obvious connection between the three is that none of these companies can possibly make any money.

      The marijuana maker inhabits office space three hundred and forty miles north in Humboldt County and an ocean separates me and the pool party, which maintains offices in China. That leaves the girl boss company. I check my phone. I can get there in forty minutes, straighten out this Lola Jones who thinks she can steal from me and still make my two o’clock. I just need to know. I hate secrets. I’ve always sussed out my Christmas presents early, I read the ends of books first and I check for spoilers on my favorite TV shows. Enjoying the ride is easier when you know how the ride ends.

      When Simon finally comes up for air, I stand up. “Meeting adjourned.”