ATHERTON, CALIFORNIA
Brooks told Rena she would interview James Wei without him.
The managing partner of the Chinese-backed venture capital firm GCM Investments lived in a town called Atherton, just north of Palo Alto. There was something odd about the place, she thought, as they navigated the tree-lined streets. The homes were invisible. It was the third-most expensive town in the United States. The median home price was $6.8 million. But the houses were all set back so far away from the street and camouflaged by high walls and canopies of oak and pine that it didn’t feel like a neighborhood. It felt like people in hiding. Witness protection for millionaires.
She’d brought Bhalla with her. They needed the FBI man’s cooperation, she thought, and including him would be more helpful in getting it than Rena’s exasperated and curt treatment of him. But it wasn’t unhelpful for Bhalla to know Rena didn’t fully trust him. And it wasn’t unhelpful for Brooks to play the good cop to Rena’s bad—especially when interacting with a real cop.
Brooks didn’t know if they had made a mistake challenging Bremmer—even threatening him with deportation. There could be repercussions, but Peter had wanted to force action and look Bremmer over. She had been curious, too. Now she wondered about Jimmy Wei, the brilliant young venture capitalist who they now suspected might be a spy—or even a murderer.
Wei answered the door in a polo shirt and shorts and led them to a living room. The house was a “C-shape,” its proud owner explained. The children’s rooms ran down one side, he said, the master suite and the parents’ offices down the other. The kitchen and common rooms were in the center. Inside the C’s hollow, landscaped grounds sloped down gently to a running brook at the bottom of a small hill, with a pool and basketball and tennis courts just above it.
Wei was utterly American. He had come to this country at age three. His father was a Stanford professor. He had gone to Exeter and MIT; he had a Stanford MBA. He was the sixth-rated venture capitalist in America according to the Halston rating score of the field. She wondered what she was doing there.
They sat in the living room overlooking the yard.
“You said you had questions about Helios Corp. and you worked for the president. I don’t quite know what that means,” Wei said.
Go slow, Brooks told herself. Be patient. Don’t scare him.
“How did you get involved in Helios?”
“We were looking for a new generation of energy storage. Something with a longer time horizon. The market right now is in lithium ion. But that’s for phones, watches, computers. We’re thinking about the power grid and cars. Ten to twenty years out. So we wanted an alternative storage format, one that leapfrogs lithium. Flow is one option. Helios is one bet.”
“There are others?” Brooks asked.
Wei smiled.
“You know what percentage of VC investments survive five years?” he asked. Brooks pretended not to know the answer. “Half?” she guessed.
“Twenty percent,” Wei said. “Eighty percent of venture investments fail. You make money on a handful of winners. So you have to make a lot of money with those.”
“How do you know what to look for?”
Wei had to assume she was playing dumb, but she couldn’t tell yet. Interviews such as these, with people you suspected were going to lie to you, were like Olympic wrestling matches, all slow positioning at first, feeling one another out, looking for a slip in balance, a moment to take control. Once you had it, you steadily applied more force until the opponent had no way out. Then, slowly pressing harder, you waited for the signal, the first hesitant sign of surrender, as the thought entered your opponent’s mind that perhaps they no longer wanted to fight. Rena called it the moment of capitulation.
“We have ideas about what technology gaps exist,” Wei said. “What problems society will need to solve. Driverless cars. Clean energy. Predictive AI. The future of health care. The future of drugs. Preparation for pandemics.” Wei paused to see if his visitors were following. A man who was used to making the complex simple. “Then you bet on people you think are likely to arrive at those solutions. But we don’t expect them to have the solutions yet.”
“No? You’re not betting on their ideas?”
Wei uncrossed his legs and smiled knowingly. “Ideas are a dime a dozen. Scores of people come to us with variations of the same ideas over and over. What you’re looking for are the characteristics you want to find in a successful founder. Not the perfect solution but someone who can find their way to it.”
“Why Helios?”
“I liked Bill Stencel,” Wei said, referring to the company’s CEO.
“What about him?”
“He’s an actual scientist. He’s not doing this to flip it and get rich. He is trying to find a better flow battery. I’ll take the scientist every time. I can teach them the business end. And I’ve had my fill of so-called serial entrepreneurs.”
Brooks nodded enthusiastically. She didn’t want to threaten Jimmy Wei. Not yet.
“Tell us about how much money you’ve put into Helios.”
The question clearly made Wei uncomfortable.
“Why?”
“Why not?” Bhalla chimed in now, adding a little official FBI presence to the conversation. Brooks appreciated his timing.
“What’s your interest?” Wei said.
“We’re interested in this program. We’re vetting the security of the companies,” Bhalla said. “But I assume Bill Stencel let you know that.”
“Yes. So had Kim Matsuda.”
Kim had warned him, Brooks thought? Or was investigating him? “How much money have you put in Helios,” she asked again.
“You must know the answer to that. I went through this with Kim.”
“And what did you tell her?” Brooks asked.
“Ask her,” Wei said.
“Why won’t you tell us? Since she’s not here,” said Bhalla.
“I don’t understand why you’re giving me a hard time,” Wei said.
“How much of the financing of GCM comes from China? What percentage of the fund’s assets?” Brooks asked.
“It’s not against the law to have Chinese financing in a venture capital firm.”
“Do you have family still in China?”
Now Jimmy Wei was becoming uncomfortable. They were in his house, asking questions he hadn’t expected. Which was exactly what they wanted him to be thinking.
“Yes, I have family in China.”
“Where? We’d like their names,” Bhalla said.
“Why? Mr. Bhalla, what’s going on?”
“Special Agent Bhalla,” Bhalla said. “What did you talk to Kim about?”
Wei was halfway to exasperated. And they were jumping around from topic to topic to confuse him. He didn’t like it.
“I can’t even remember what you’ve asked me.”
Smart boy, Brooks thought. Everyone was playing dumb.
“So answer what I ask,” Bhalla said. “Do you have family in China? Where? What are their names? And then you tell us what you told Kim Matsuda.”
Wei took a moment to think about it. “I have family in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Wuhan,” he said.
“What are their relations to you?”
“First cousins. Uncles. Second cousins. And so on.”
“A lot of family.”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“I go every few months on business.”
“Do you have a superior you report to in China at GCM?”
A long pause. “I’m managing partner here in Menlo Park. We are an independent subsidiary of a Chinese company. But we have fellow partners in our offices in Beijing.”
“When was the last time you saw Kim Matsuda?”
“I’d have to check my calendar.”
“Answer the question, sir.”
Wei checked his phone. “The last calendar item was two weeks ago,” he said. “But she dropped by the office last week, I remember. Just dropped by. Not scheduled.”
“Why? What did you talk about?”
“She asked me how I thought Helios was doing.”
“Why did she come by unexpectedly to ask that? Why not schedule a regular meeting? Was she asking about something specific?”
Wei studied Bhalla’s expression. “Ask her. It seemed like just a check-in.”
“When was your last phone call with her?”
Wei looked at his call list. “This is the wrong phone. I’d have to check my business unit. It’s in the other room.”
“I can go with you to get it,” Bhalla said.
“When we’re done,” Wei said, hoping Bhalla would forget.
“Did you know Kim Matsuda from before?”
“Before when?”
“Before Helios. And before she began investigating your investment in it.”
Wei tried not to react to the word investigating.
He had met Matsuda at a couple conferences on alternative energy, he said. But she was a climate person, not a financial one, so their worlds didn’t really intersect.
“She’s dead,” the FBI agent said.
They watched Wei’s reaction. If Wei were a trained Chinese State Security officer, he might be prepared for the eventuality of a police interrogation in the United States. If he were simply a naturalized American financial guy, he might be shocked. If he were a spy assigned to penetrate Matsuda’s climate program, he would almost certainly know she had died.
The financier didn’t react at all at first, didn’t appear to understand or maybe he was trying to decide how to react. He just stared at Bhalla.
Then, as if he finally understood, Wei appeared to become genuinely upset.
He put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. “My god. How did she die?”
“How much of GCM’s money comes from the Chinese government?” Bhalla repeated.
Wei looked up at the FBI man as if the question were ghoulish. “How did Kim die?” Wei asked again.
“We’re still establishing that,” said Bhalla. “But I need you to answer my question. How much of GCM’s money comes from the Chinese government?”
Wei took a moment to compose himself. “That’s not as simple to answer as it might seem. What’s Chinese government funding versus private isn’t as clean and simple as Americans would be used to.”
“So you’re a government company,” Bhalla said.
“How did Kim die?” Wei repeated. “An accident? What can you tell me?”
Was he genuinely interested? Or trying to find out how much they knew? Randi couldn’t tell.
“We’ll let you know when we’re able,” Bhalla said. “So all of your investment in Helios is government investment?” Bhalla said.
Wei said nothing.
“Did you know Kim was dead?” Bhalla asked, switching patterns again.
Wei’s face flushed in anger. “Obviously no. And I’m insulted by the question. And I think we’re done talking. If you’re implying that I had any knowledge of what happened to her, I believe any further conversations should include my attorney.”
“You’re not being questioned in connection with anything criminal. I just asked you if you knew she was dead.”
“You were asking me if I was lying before when I seemed surprised to hear that she was. Don’t treat me like a fool, Special Agent Bhalla.”
“I wouldn’t make that mistake, Mr. Wei.”
The two men were staring at each other. Brooks thought they should move on.
“How many times would you say you had met Kim Matsuda in your life?” she asked.
“A dozen. Twenty. Most of it in the last five months.” Wei studied Brooks, trying to decide whether she would be more honest with him than Bhalla. “Why are you here?”
“With Kim’s death, we need to review the situation involving the companies, including Helios. It’s possible that we may require that GCM disinvest. That is why we need to reconstruct what you and Kim last discussed. That is why we need any notes you have of those meetings. That is why we need your candor.” She took a moment before adding, “I have just told you the truth. Now we need the same of you—if you want to retain your investments. You have twenty-four hours to provide the information we seek about the source and scale of GCM’s funding in Helios.”
There was no way they could get a court order to tap his phones. They had no basis for suspecting him. They could follow him. It would take more teams than they had right now. There wasn’t exactly a lot of foot traffic on the streets of Atherton. Or even sidewalks.
And Bhalla had become almost as angry as Peter had.
“He didn’t seem to know Kim was dead,” she said to Bhalla as they were leaving.
“He was absolutely lying,” said Bhalla.