The conversation was taking a turn, and it was making Kate nervous. “Forgiven you for what?”

  “That play you wrote your senior year of high school. What was it called?”

  “With L.”

  “Right. The high school boy who had a crush on a classmate and sent her a Christmas card signed ‘With L.’ A dangerous thing in the 1940s in the Deep South, when the boy is Black and the girl is white.”

  “Willie James Howard. It was a true story.”

  “And still relevant. That play deserved an audience.”

  “It deserved to find an audience. It didn’t deserve to have one bought and paid for by the playwright’s father.”

  “I’m sorry for that. I went a little overboard.”

  “A little? You rented a theater and hired a director and a team of actors. Thank God Mom stopped you.”

  “Is that why you’ve kept this new play a secret?”

  “Partly.”

  “What’s this one about?”

  It didn’t seem like the right moment to reveal her dramatic take on the dangers of Big Data. “It’s about player pianos,” she said.

  “Well, then Patrick really pulled your leg. None of those around Buck.”

  Twilight was turning to darkness. An attendant brought blankets, but it wasn’t nearly chilly enough to need them.

  “Speaking of music to one’s ears,” her father said, though it took Kate a moment to connect the awkward segue from player pianos, “what did you think of my presentation to new employees this morning?”

  “It made we want to run out and get a big dog.”

  “They allow pets next door.”

  “Stop,” she said with a roll of her eyes. She drank her champagne. “I did have a question that I didn’t dare ask in front of the group.”

  “Ask it now.”

  “What did you mean when you said Buck can’t control who’s driving the sled? I’ve heard you say a thousand times that you don’t do business with buyers unfriendly to the West.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then what was the point of your analogy? Sometimes you get duped? You might sell to a ‘sled driver’ who’s actually just a front for the Chinese or Russian governments?”

  “That would never happen.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We have people who vet that for us. Very talented people.”

  “Like who?”

  He smiled. “When you accept permanent employment in the Buck legal department, I’ll be glad to tell you.”

  “Okay, that’s fair. But if your vetting process is that good, what did you mean when you said you don’t know who is driving the sled?”

  He paused, then seemed to turn philosophical, almost professorial in his tone. “Even if you don’t do business directly with the enemy, it’s still a leap of faith as to how the technology will be used. There are bad apples everywhere. In every company. In every government. It’s impossible to know what’s in every customer’s heart.”

  “That’s unsettling,” said Kate.

  “Is it? You make a car, someone might drive drunk. You make a gun, someone might use it for something other than sport or self-defense. Technology is no different.”

  Kate drank her champagne, wondering if he really meant what he was saying.

  “Can I buy you dinner, Kate? There’s a great restaurant downstairs.”

  She accepted, and they started across the rooftop. He was walking slowly, controlling their pace, as if he needed to get something else off his chest before dinner. “I suppose by now you’ve seen today’s press conference.”

  “I watched it live,” she said.

  He stopped. “I’m sorry, Kate. On top of the loss of your mother, now this nonsense has reared its ugly head again.”

  “Why do you think it’s come up?”

  “I don’t know. But Jeremy Peel has already claimed dibs on my job. He wants to be both CEO and board chair, which would be a disaster. I need to get to the bottom of this—and quick.”

  “Is that why you asked the U.S. attorney to have Noah lead the cybersecurity audit?”

  She’d genuinely caught him off guard. “How’d you hear that?”

  “Noah told me. He wanted me to hear it from him. I would have liked to have heard it from you.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want you in the middle of this.”

  Such a lame explanation from such a smart man was exasperating. “You asked the U.S. attorney to put Noah in charge of the audit. How is that not putting me in the middle?”

  He was appropriately contrite. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Dad, what are you really thinking?”

  “Here’s the deal. You know and I know your mother got all worked up about something that never happened.”

  Kate didn’t disagree, though in truth, she was only ninety-nine percent sure that “nothing had ever happened” between her father and Sandra Levy. “Mom admitted everything to me the next morning.”

  “What did she admit, exactly?”

  “I’ve told you this before.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry to bring this up, but it’s important.”

  “Mom had it in her mind that there was something going on between you and Sandra Levy. She got drunk and called nine-one-one to get even.”

  “You and Noah were dating when your mother made that revenge call.”

  “So?”

  “By any chance did you tell him about the conversation you had with your mother?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “That was between Mom and me.”

  He glanced toward his bodyguard, as if to make sure that not even he was close enough to hear what he was about to ask. “Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Tell Noah.”

  “Do you mean now?”

  “Yes. It comes across as self-serving for me to explain it. Coming from you, it rings true.”

  Kate was getting annoyed. “So you want me to throw Mom’s memory under the bus because this audit has you in a jam.”

  “That’s not a fair statement, Kate. Your mother was very sorry for what she did. She would set the record straight herself, if she were still here and could see the ridiculous direction in which this audit is headed.”

  That was probably true. But the whole thing still felt manipulative. “Is this why you asked for Noah to lead the audit?”

  “Someone has to lead it. I figured it might as well be someone I know.”

  “You mean someone you can influence?”

  “Someone I can trust.”

  Kate looked at him quizzically. “What are you trying to accomplish, exactly?”

  He took a half step closer, very serious. “Half of Buck’s business is government contracts. This company can’t afford to fail a cybersecurity audit. I want to know what’s driving it.”

  “It could be routine, like you said at the press conference.”

  “That’s wishful thinking,” he said. “It’s more likely that the Justice Department really is worried that I’m vulnerable to extortion. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Is something else entirely driving it?”

  Kate felt the need to sit down, or at least put a little more space between her and her father. She found an open couch by another firepit and placed her near-empty champagne flute on the table.

  “Dad, if you want to know what’s driving the audit, you should ask Noah that question yourself.”

  He joined her on the couch. “He would never tell me,” he said, the flickering flames of the firepit reflecting in his eyes. “But he might tell you.”

  It was exactly as Kate had feared. “Are you asking me to be your spy?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. I’m just saying that I need to know, and it would appear that you’re in the best position to find out.”

  “What makes you think Noah would tell me anything?”

  “Come on, Kate. He obviously still cares what you think, or he wouldn’t have rushed to tell you it was my idea that he be in charge of the audit. From what I remember, that boy would empty the ocean with a teaspoon if you asked him to.”

  “You still think I should have married him, don’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. But I do think it was a mistake to let the sad state of your parents’ marriage foreclose the possibility.”

  Kate drew a breath. “I’m not really comfortable with this conversation.”

  “I understand. You don’t have to give me an answer tonight. Let’s put that question aside and just have a nice dinner.”

  “Good plan.”

  “But if, come the morning, you can see your way clear to helping your old man save his company from the financial ruin of a wrongheaded cybersecurity audit, then happy day.”

  He rose and started for the elevator, but Kate stopped him.

  “Just so I understand, are you asking as my father or as my employer?”

  He shrugged, as if he hadn’t really considered it. “Both.”

  “Then my answer is no. And maybe.”

  She got up from the couch and started walking. Her father caught up. “Maybe, as to which?” he asked.

  Kate stopped at the elevator and pressed the call button. “You’ll figure it out.”

  Chapter 13

  September ended. Good riddance, thought Kate.

  Morning classes had kept her on the law school campus until nearly lunchtime, so it would be just a half-day at the office. She exited the train at the Tysons Corner Metro station, buttoned her coat, and started her ten-minute walk to Buck Technologies.

  It was starting to feel like late January. Not the weather, but metaphorically speaking—specifically, the way friends and colleagues greeted Kate upon seeing her for the first time since her mother’s death. During the immediate aftermath, without fail their first words had been “So sorry about your mother.” By week three, the expressions of sympathy had dropped by about fifty percent. By week five, it was only occasional, like the oddball who wished you “Happy New Year” in the last week of January. Life went on. But Kate still had her dark moments of grief, especially late at night, when she was alone and trying to write—rewrite—the script she’d promised Irving Bass. The words weren’t coming, or at least they weren’t finding their way onto the page. In a way, Kate had been witnessing her mother’s suicide for years, powerless to stop her from drinking herself to death. Even that, however, hadn’t prepared her for the choice her mother had finally made.

  Kate was a block away from the Buck Technologies campus when her cellphone rang. It was Sean O’Hara, the young man who’d assisted Irving Bass at Ford’s Theatre.

  “First of all, let me say how sorry I am about your mother,” said Sean.

  Happy New Year to you, too, thought Kate. “Thank you, Sean. How’s Irv doing?”

  “Crankier than ever. He can’t work while in rehab, so he asked me to make sure the play is moving forward on schedule. Can I see what you’ve written so far?”

  Kate stopped at the red light, her pulse quickening. She had nothing shareable.

  “Just the first ten pages is all I need,” Sean added.

  The walk light flashed green, but Kate didn’t move. “By when?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  Panic set in. She needed a few days. Actually, she needed the full ninety days that Bass had given her. “How about Friday? They might still be a little rough.”

  “No worries,” he said. “I promise I won’t show them to anyone until they meet the ‘Irv test’ for the first ten pages.”

  “What’s the ‘Irv test’?”

  “Do you want to get to page eleven?”

  “Irv’s a smart man.”

  Sean agreed, and the call ended.

  Kate crossed the street, checked in with Buck security at the gated entrance to the company campus, and then caught a ride on the golf cart with the security guard to the athletic facility. In ten minutes she was dressed and on the squash court for a challenge match against the CEO.

  “How long has it been since you’ve played?” her father asked.

  “Since the last time I beat you.”

  “You mean the time I let you win.”

  Kate laughed. Her father had picked up the English-invented game as a philosophy student at Oxford. There, one by one, his classmates had discovered that this brilliant young American’s philosophy was “win at any cost.” He never let anyone win anything, going all the way back to Tic-Tac-Toe with his five-year-old daughter.

  Kate served first, and her father answered with the crack of a kill shot. More followed. Game one was their most lopsided ever: Dad, eleven; Kate, one. Kate called for a water break. It was obvious to her father that she was not herself.

  “You seem distracted,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  After several volleys of “Yes-I-do”/“No-you-don’t,” Kate came clean and told him about the rewrite she was doing for Irving Bass.

  Her father drank from his water bottle. “You’re still working with that guy, huh?”

  “What do you mean by ‘that guy’?”

  He laid his racquet aside and took a seat. “I thought you were done with him after the contest, so I kept my opinions to myself.”

  “That’s probably a safe place to keep them.”

  “I hear he’s a washed-up alcoholic who holds contests to capitalize on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers.”

  A teenage Kate might have hit him with her racquet. But she’d come to understand how he operated, saying outrageous things that he may or may not believe just to make sure she had considered the worst-case scenario.

  “Let’s not go down this road.”

  “What road? I’m saying what you need to hear.”

  “That road. What I need to hear. It’s one thing to tell an eleven-year-old girl that she has to keep her commitment and stay the full four weeks at Manassas theater camp, even if Mom says she can come home anytime she wants. That’s tough love. But being nasty to me because you think you know better is not tough love. That’s not any kind of love.”

  “I’m not making things up.”

  “Irving is abrasive. He’s made enemies. You’re repeating rumors started by people who don’t like him.”

  “Sometimes rumors are true. How do you know he isn’t just a charlatan who picks winners who have money and tells them he can get their play produced if they pay him?”

  Her teenage anger was long behind her, but he was edging dangerously close to getting hit with a racquet. It was starting to sound like he actually believed what he was saying.

  “First of all, I’m not paying him anything. And it sucks for you to say he picked my script because I have a rich father.”

  “Kate, it gives me no joy to tell you this. But there’s a forty-two-point-three-seven percent chance Mr. Bass is a fraud.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I had calculated it at forty-two-point-three-eight.”

  “Joke all you want, Kate. Millions of decisions are made every minute of every day using Buck’s algorithms.”

  “That’s what you said when you canceled my prom date. And when you got my freshman roommate assigned to another dormitory. You even made Mom change gynecologists. Now that I think of it, the only person who was ever good enough for your algorithms was Noah, which is no surprise, seeing how he had to pass an FBI background check to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  “They use our software.”

  “Naturally. But I don’t want to live like that. A green light from Buck’s algorithms is not going to be the standard I set for all future relationships—personal, professional, romantic, whatever.”

  “Take a look at Bass’s report. Judge for yourself.”

  “I don’t what to judge him.”

  “No accountability? Is that your philosophy?”

  More of his “tough love.” Fuck off might have been the deserved response, but Kate took the opportunity to tell him what he needed to hear.

  “We are accountable for things we do. Not for things we’re projected to do based on every ‘friend’ on social media, every Tweet we’ve ever liked, every website we’ve ever visited, every video we’ve ever watched, and whatever else goes into your predictive software.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Kate.”

  “You mean the twentieth century,” she said, thinking of her play.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” She tossed him the hollow rubber ball as she led the way back inside the squash cubicle. “Your serve.”

  Gamble took a quick shower, still smiling at the way Kate had roared back to win the best of three after losing the first game 11–1. Saying there was a 42.37 percent chance that Bass was a fraud had pissed her off enough to bring out the real Kate. It was like the old joke that 54.8 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot, and it had worked like a charm. But he had to be careful. That kind of button pushing used to bring out the best in Kate’s mother, too, until it brought out resentment—and worse.

  He stopped at the self-serve refreshment bar to refill his water bottle and checked his cellphone. The text message from Detective Anderson grabbed his attention, terse as it was: pls call me. Gamble stepped outside, found a quiet place in the gazebo overlooking the pond, and got the detective on the line.

  “Toxicology report is in,” he said. “Your wife’s blood-alcohol concentration was point-two-nine percent. For point of reference, a BAC of point-zero-eight is the legal limit for driving.”

  “But you said she didn’t drink any of the vodka from the florist.”

  “Apparently, you were right. She had a stash.”

  Gamble took a seat on the white railing. “Exactly how drunk is point-two-nine?”

  “Blackouts happen, so a person might have no memory of the things she did or the people she did them with. Last year, we had a college student who choked to death on his own vomit because his gag reflex was so impaired. Basically, we’re in the territory where really bad things happen.”

  Like suicide, Gamble was about to say, but he went in a completely different direction. “Is it possible Elizabeth fell over the railing? She didn’t jump?”