“What do you know about Mr. Watson?”

  “I’m an admirer of his son, who took over the company after his father died. Talk about the greatest generation. Tom Junior’s autobiography is probably one of the most honest books ever written by a tech executive. Until the last fifty pages or so, when he goes on and on about all he did for the Carter administration, which is about as exciting as—well, the Carter administration.”

  “Does the book mention that his father was one of the very few Americans to receive the Nazi Merit Cross?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does. And to his credit, Watson Senior was the only one who ever gave it back.”

  “But why?” asked Bass, putting the question with a touch of melodrama. “Was it because human rights organizations were protesting right outside his office on Madison Avenue? Or was it just a smart business decision?”

  “You seem to be excluding the possibility that it was genuinely an act of courage and conscience.”

  Bass chuckled. “Mr. Gamble, we’re talking about the CEO of a tech giant.”

  The waiter returned to take their order. Bass ordered the special, but Gamble had already wasted enough precious time. He opened his wallet and placed two hundred-dollar bills on the table.

  “Something’s come up,” he told the waiter. “Cut him off at three bourbons and keep the change.”

  The waiter thanked him, tucked the menus under his arm, and left with the cash.

  “That’s quite the thin skin you’ve got there,” Bass said.

  “Is this your idea of fun?” said Gamble. “Commissioning the daughter of a tech CEO to write an indictment of the world’s first tech CEO?”

  “You’re being very unfair.”

  “You’re using my daughter.”

  “I’m allowing your daughter to come to terms with where she is in life and emerge as a playwright.”

  “What kind of literary ‘human condition’ bullshit is that?”

  “Kate has yet to accept what the play is really about. It will take a few more rewrites. She’s very fast, so I’m confident she will get there soon enough.”

  “Get where?”

  “At bottom, Watson was a narcissist. His employees sucked up to the CEO by writing silly songs about him, and he made the entire workforce sing them over the intercom during morning announcements.”

  “Why would Kate even want to write about that?”

  “Because writers should write what they know. Ultimately, this play is about Tom Junior. He’s the conscience his father lacks. He alone had the courage to speak truth to power.”

  “And that’s obviously how you see me.”

  “It’s not about you. It’s about the only hope we have in the world of Big Data. Watson Senior gave back the Merit Cross in 1940. His son was born in 1914. That would have made Tom Junior roughly—”

  “Kate’s age,” said Gamble, totally getting it.

  Bass raised his glass. “To daughters and sons. And to opening night.”

  “Fuck you,” said Gamble, and he walked out of the restaurant.

  Chapter 29

  Kate took a commuter plane that evening to Greenbrier Valley Airport. The lucky ones on her flight were headed to the famous Greenbrier Resort to enjoy the brilliant colors of autumn at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains. Kate rented a car and spent the night at an airport motel. Soon after she finally fell asleep, her alarm went off. Six a.m. It was time to get up and drive to the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

  FCP Alderson is a 159-acre minimum-security prison camp nestled in the scenic hills near Greenbrier State Forest, on the bank of the Greenbrier River. Built in 1928 as the first federal prison for women, Alderson uses a reformatory model where each “cottage” houses up to sixty women and each inmate has only one roommate. The nearest barbed-wire fences are on privately owned farms along the river, and inmates are free to wander the grounds until 4:00 p.m. when not doing chores or participating in a vocational or educational class. Jazz singer Billie Holiday learned to sew at Alderson while serving time for drug possession in the 1940s. Manson cult member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme saw opportunity in the openness and escaped for two days while paying her debt to society for the attempted assassination of President Gerald R. Ford. In what Kate found to be an interesting coincidence, former inmate Martha Stewart was convicted of the same crime that had landed Sandra Levy at FCP Alderson: lying to federal investigators in violation of Chapter 18 of the United States Code.

  “I’m here to visit an inmate,” Kate announced at the gate, and she gave the name.

  The guard checked Kate’s identification and radioed ahead for clearance. Kate had submitted her visitation request online, and she attributed the quick turnaround to Noah’s hand in the matter. The fact that her request was approved by the warden didn’t necessarily mean that Sandra would show up—inmates could not be forced to see visitors—but Kate took it as a positive sign that the guard didn’t turn her away.

  “They’re doing the morning count,” he said. “You can wait inside with the other visitors.”

  Kate thanked him and continued past the stone pillars and tree-lined driveway that looked more like the entrance to a college campus than a prison. She parked in the visitors’ lot. Handbags and cellphones were not allowed inside, so Kate locked hers in the rental car and followed the sidewalk into the visitation center.

  Kate and Noah had agreed on a very narrow purpose for her visit. Neither one expected that, after two years of silence, Sandra would break down and confess all to Kate. Just as the government had failed to prove its securities fraud case against Martha Stewart, the espionage case against Sandra Levy had fizzled. Stewart served only five months for her lies to federal agents. Sandra would serve longer, but not nearly as long as she might if she opened up to Kate, only to be convicted on the substantive charges against her. Noah, of course, had coached Kate on what to ask and how to handle herself.

  Kate very much had her own agenda.

  She entered the visitation center and signed the visitors’ log. The sign on the wall advised that visitors were subject to search, but in Kate’s case it was cursory, and the visitation officer led her directly to the visitation room. Kate was aware that Alderson was minimum security, but still she was surprised.

  “It’s so . . . un-prison-like.”

  “This ain’t Orange Is the New Black, honey,” the guard said.

  FCP Alderson was designed for open visitation, so there was no security glass to separate inmates from visitors, no talking by closed-circuit telephone while law enforcement monitored every word. Tables and chairs were set up in a room as big and open as a gymnasium, with appropriate spacing between them. A designated play area accommodated mothers with young children. It struck Kate that, even with guards patrolling the visitation area, conversations in this minimum-security prison were probably more private than the average cellphone conversation in the “free” world.

  Kate was seated at a table opposite an empty chair. She and a hundred or so other visitors waited at their assigned spot for the end of the morning count, after which the guards would bring in the inmates.

  A woman at the next table looked over and said, “Haven’t seen you here before. You new?”

  “My first time,” said Kate. “But I’m seeing someone who’s been here a while.”

  The woman nodded knowingly, as if to say that she understood Kate’s situation perfectly. “Your mom?”

  “What?”

  “I asked, are you here to see your mom? ’Cause I get it. Took me a while to put aside the anger and come visit mine.”

  “No, it’s not my mom.” Far from it, thought Kate.

  Happy voices from across the room caught Kate’s attention, the sound of inmates and visitors reuniting. A kiss and a hug were allowed at the beginning and end of each visit, and lonely people made the most of it. Kate watched from afar, trying not to let her gaze intrude on private moments on public display. Mothers hugged their children in the play area. Wives and girlfriends clung to husbands, partners, and significant others. The woman at the next table embraced her mother, which for some reason made Kate feel good, even though she knew almost nothing about them.

  Twenty minutes passed. Still no Sandra Levy.

  Kate had seen her only once before in person. An attractive woman. More than attractive, actually, though not the classic beauty her mother was. She was a brunette, and Kate wondered what that gorgeous long hair would look like with no gold highlights inside prison walls.

  A guard approached the couple at the table catty-corner from Kate. They were definitely taking liberties with the “one kiss, one embrace” rule.

  “And no sitting on each other,” the guard told them, as he stepped away. Then he came toward Kate and glanced at the empty chair.

  “How long do you want to wait, miss?”

  Kate hadn’t considered it. “As long as it takes, I guess.”

  Patrick was locked inside a windowless room about the size of a closet. In fact, he was pretty sure that it was once a janitor’s closet, as it still smelled like cleaning fluids. He ate there, slept there, and tried not to drive himself crazy marking the passage of time. He’d been fed three times so far, which could mean one day in captivity. But was he getting three meals a day? No way to know when the kitchen closed at the Hostage Hotel. Bathroom breaks were completely sporadic. They took him down the hall and let him do his business when it was convenient for them, not based on the hostage’s needs.

  Patrick heard the jingle of keys outside the door. “Stand in the corner, facing the wall,” the guard said.

  Patrick did as he was told. The guard opened the door and tied the prisoner’s hands behind his back. Some guards were careful to tie the blindfold tightly, but this one wasn’t. Either way, Patrick was getting good at using his facial muscles to shift the blindfold just enough to get some line of sight. As the guard led him down the hallway, another guard said something, and Patrick caught a waist-down glimpse of another prisoner. Women’s shoes, he noted, and it made him shudder to think what the Hostage Hotel was like for the opposite sex.

  The guard untied his hands, removed the blindfold, and opened the bathroom door. The stench had nauseated Patrick the first time, but he was getting used to it.

  “Two minutes,” the guard said.

  Patrick entered. The guard left the door open a crack, for some modicum of privacy. Patrick took all of his two minutes, if only because the small window in the bathroom was his only view of daylight.

  “Time,” he heard from the hallway. But it wasn’t the same guard. The voice was a woman’s, and it sounded familiar.

  Olga?

  The door swung open and Olga entered. She closed the door, and with her back braced against it, she spoke in a hushed but urgent tone.

  “You are in a lot of danger.”

  “No shit,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  “Some of these kidnappers are ex-FARC but most aren’t. They’re just thugs, and money is their only ideology.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “Sort of. Not really. I do certain jobs for them on a contract basis. My particular skill set makes me welcome in most any operation of this type.”

  “Who are you?”

  She didn’t seem eager to tell him, but time was short. “I was hired to make sure you didn’t bail out of the corporate adventure and go home. It was my job to make sure you were a happy boy and in no hurry to go back to the United States.”

  Only by looking into her eyes did he fully understand what she was saying. “You’re . . . a prostitute?”

  She looked away, then back. “I can leave, if you’ve got a problem with that.”

  He saw his one glimmer of hope receding and rushed to stop her.

  “No, don’t leave! Who hired you?”

  “Javier runs the show in Colombia. But you’re missing the point. Javier hired me because someone hired him to keep you out of the United States for a few weeks—maybe a month or two. Someone else hired Javier to make sure you never came back. Get it?”

  He did, having survived the attempted murder-by-freefall. But even more chilling was the way Javier’s words—what he’d actually said—finally came clear to him.

  “El jefe del jefe.”

  “What?”

  “I was confused about what Javier said before shoving me off the mountain. He was talking in Spanish, and I thought he said he was taking orders from ‘the boss.’ But it was ‘el jefe del jefe.’”

  “The boss of the boss,” she said.

  “Which is still only one person. But you’re saying there are two people giving Javier orders. How do you know that?”

  “I heard Javier talking on his satellite phone.”

  “Are you still working with him?”

  “No! Why would I be telling you all this if I was still working with Javier?”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “But why?”

  In her eyes, he thought he saw the answer, and he was suddenly reminded of the lark and nightingale. But his question drew resentment.

  “Why would a girl like me do the right thing if there’s nothing in it for me? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “No. That’s not at all what I was getting at.”

  “I thought you were different, Patrick. Thought you’d see me as a real person.”

  “I do. I’m sorry.”

  She breathed out some of her anger. “Fine. If it puts you at ease, I swear, I expect nothing in return. Javier hired me to keep you happy and make you want to stay. But I never signed up to get you or anyone else killed. Do you want me to help you, or don’t you?”

  “I do,” he said, no more questions asked.

  Olga opened the door and slipped away, leaving the door open a crack, just as Patrick’s guard had left it. Patrick heard the pounding of the guard’s boots in the hallway as he returned.

  “I really do,” he said softly.

  Chapter 30

  The clock on the wall said 11:00 a.m., and Kate was still alone at the visitation table. Her cellphone was locked in the rental car, per prison rules, which left her with nothing to do but obsess over her predicament or observe the real-life boredom of prison life. A remark from her father, which at the time she’d dismissed as irrelevant, now seemed sage. “Once upon a time, Kate, in a world you’ll never know, people stood in line at grocery stores, stuck behind a shopper arguing with the cashier over a three-inch stack of expired coupons, and all we could do was read the TV Guide or the tabloid headlines. No texting. No emails. Nothing to ‘like’ on social media. Technology is good.”

  “Okay, I’m here.”

  The woman’s voice from behind startled Kate, and she sprang from her chair. Standing before her, dressed in the standard prison uniform of khaki button-up shirt with khaki pants, was Sandra Levy.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” said Kate.

  “That makes two of us. May I sit?”

  “Please.”

  Sandra walked around to the other side of the table, and the women settled into chairs opposite one another. The steady buzz of conversations continued all around them, but Kate was suddenly less aware of it.

  “Where to begin,” said Kate, breathing out.

  “That’s up to you. You came to see me.”

  “That I did,” said Kate. “I guess I’m wondering if there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to say to me.”

  Sandra arched an eyebrow. “Are you here for an apology?”

  “Do you think you owe me one?”

  “For what?”

  The list began to form in Kate’s mind. Stealing secrets from my father’s company? Making my mother so jealous she called 911 on my father in revenge?

  “It wouldn’t be much of an apology if I had to answer that question,” said Kate.

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  Kate let out a mirthless chuckle. “Seems we’re going around in circles here. You’re sorry for what?”

  She was looking Kate straight in the eyes, arms folded. “I’m sorry your mother died thinking that I was sleeping with your father.”

  “I see.”

  “Not the apology you were expecting?” asked Sandra.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

  Sandra sat forward in her chair, leaning into the table. “Do you think your father and I were having an affair?”

  “He says he wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t ask you what he says.”

  Kate felt that pang she felt whenever she questioned her father, or whenever she questioned the man she thought he was. “I’ve wondered. Sometimes.”

  “Because of something your mother told you?”

  “Mom said some things, yes.”

  “You realize your mother was paranoid, right?”

  “I’m well aware that she had a drinking problem.”

  “She was an alcoholic. But she was also clinically paranoid.”

  “And that is, what? Your professional opinion as an executive coach?”

  “I was a practicing psychiatrist for ten years before I burned myself out talking to teenage girls,” she said. “Yes, I was hired to help Buck Technologies identify your father’s successor as CEO. But I was much more than that to Christian.”

  Kate heard no anger in the use of her father’s first name—quite the opposite. “‘More’ in what way?” asked Kate.

  “Being married to an alcoholic is a terrible burden. Your father needed help dealing with it. But he was in a tough spot. People like to think society is getting better at understanding mental health issues in this country. But how do you think the CIA, as the company’s largest shareholder, would feel about the CEO of Buck Technologies seeing a psychiatrist?”

  Kate took her point, but she was one of those people who liked to think attitudes toward mental health were changing. “I guess it would depend.”

  “No, it doesn’t depend. We’re talking about the CIA. If your father had started seeing a psychiatrist, it would have been professional suicide.”