12

It was on Thursday, 10:15, two days after Eddie’s visit, when Rajiv tossed the remainder of his tuna sub in the basket and clicked on his inbox again. But it was empty. Zero. Alex was keeping busy with something or other just now, and maybe there’d be a little peace and quiet for a while. There was some Pepsi left in the can, and as Rajiv slid back his chair, and put his feet up on the desk, and tossed back his head to take a sip—one of the new girls they had recruited from the college these past two weeks—Andi Something-Or-Other was her name—poked her head through the doorway in his four-foot white partition and announced abruptly, envelope in hand:

“For you, sir—‘scuse me—The Atherton people just came in and they said this envelope is for you—From a Mr. Parker, I think was what they said.”

“OK, great—It’s Andi, right?” She had her nametag pinned just off-center on her “Go Buckeyes” tee, so he was pretty certain the name was right before he asked.

“Yes, sir, Andi. Andi Mackey. That’s Andi with an ‘I’.”

“Uh-huh, I see it on your tag there—So how do you like the work so far, Miss Mackey?”

“Just fine, sir. It’s nice that everybody working here is new, so we’re all kind of at the same place on the learning curve together.”

“What do you think of the stuff we’re doing?”

“The FaceMate website, you mean?”

“Yeah, what do you think? You familiar enough with our operation to have an opinion yet?”

“Familiar! That’s how I got the job here in the first place, Mr. Patel. I saw the job listing on one of the FaceMate posts and sent my resume in.”

“Oh yeah? So you knew about us beforehand then, before you came on board?”

“Knew! Oh, everybody knows. I signed up on the site almost three months ago—I scanned my picture in, I mean—And one of my matches—you won’t believe it, sir, but it’s a girl in Dublin who looks just like me—I mean exactly! My mom couldn’t believe it when she saw the pictures. I’m gonna go visit her next spring—the girl in Dublin, I mean—that or she’ll come here. So we’ve been corresponding and—Oh my God! You wouldn’t believe it, Mr. Patel, but we’ve got the same interests exactly—like tennis and stuff and all. And cooking too. We swapped some recipes, and even the recipes I tried of hers taste the same as mine. And … and….”

“That’s great, Andi. Another feather in the website’s cap, I guess—which is nice to hear. Hey, you’re not the only one, either. We’ve heard the same exact thing from I don’t know how many thousand other kids. So—sorry but, you’ll excuse me for the moment, won’t you?—but this stuff from Mr. Parker: The boss—Mr. Daugherty—is pretty antsy for me to bring it to him ASAP, so…. We’ll talk again later, OK?”

“Sure, Mr. Patel…. Umm, I haven’t met Mr. Daugherty yet. I haven’t even seen him come in or go out of his room. That’s the one over in the corner, right? The closed-in one that looks like a vault?”

“Uh-huh, that’s his place, all right. They brought it up from Three and reassembled the whole damn thing in a day. But his workspace is like that because Mr. Daugherty’s a super-busy guy and he doesn’t like to get distracted from all the stuff he’s got to do. I’ll let him know about the nice things you had to say about the site, though. I’m sure he’ll be pleased. So—talk to you later, then, Andi—OK?”

OK, she said, and left, leaving the envelope in Rajiv’s hand. Which he opened with dispatch, finding….

Yes, just what Eddie had promised he would send: A whole sheaf of big color photos. Good ones too; professional quality, taken by the experts who knew their lighting and poses and contrast. Full body—a nice shot in a tux; then some head shots, front and profile views. Just perfect; even finicky Alex would be thrilled!

Rajiv shuffled through the photos, gauging which to place on top, for Alex had a thing for first impressions. Ben was a handsome dude in person—much younger-looking than his biologic age. But these pictures made him look a trifle younger still—more rested, confident, commanding. The bright eyes, the little dimple in his chin; delicate features, but strong, determined, with—oh, maybe the faintest hint of boyish vulnerability and—how would you put it? A kind of hidden sadness buried underneath the smile?—Well, look at what the guy had been through in his life. How could he help but be a little sad?

The sadness was—yes, right there in Ben’s blue eyes, that was where you saw it clearer than anyplace else. Something about them, the way the wrinkles at the outer angles curled upward all in line, like the makeupped sorrow of a crying clown. That was a feature that Alex had shown him how to look for when they’d first begun the website and entered all the emailed photos in themselves, one by one—Five thousand entries they’d done that way. Happy wrinkles, sad wrinkles, proud noses and humble ones. Every feature of the face held a story written there if you knew how to read it accurately, though whether the life-line of the subject determined the feature, or the feature predicted the life, was something even Alex hadn’t completely mastered yet.

So it was Ben’s eyes that informed you he was sad; but there was much more there than merely sadness. Eyes were the focal feature of his face: the brightness, the intensity, the striking brilliance of blue. When he’d sat across from Ben in the office in Red Bank, only the desk interposing between, Rajiv found that gaze of Ben’s to be so vivid, so powerful, you couldn’t bear to look at it for very long. It made Ben intimidating in a way. It made him dominant. Not an adversary you could stare straight in the eyes unblinking, not any more than you could stare directly at the sun—You’d look straight at him and it would make you lose your train of thought—And while you’d lost it—Bam!— he’d get the better of you on some zillion-dollar deal.

These pictures—at least the straight-on, full-face views—they captured the power of Ben’s eyes pretty doggone well. And if the FaceMate program could find another set just like them, blue and brilliant, handsome and intimidating, then—game over—the matching would be ninety-five percent achieved.

Rajiv slipped the photos back in the AthCorp envelope they came in, front facial view on top, shut up the flap again, slipped out of his cubicle, and headed across the six-thousand-square-foot room. Alex’s closed-in work space was roughly twice the size of Rajiv’s. And not just closed, not just private, mind you, but positively tomblike, with solid, sound-proofed walls and a vault-like door that opened inward for optimal security. The lock was pretty nearly equal to a bank’s.

Alex liked to work in isolation, and positively hated to be disturbed. If anyone other than Rajiv dared to knock on his door, or ring his phone, or spam him with an unsought email—Duck your head and run for dear life!—There would be an outburst at best, a demotion in the middle, and a summary dismissal if the disturbance proved too brash. Alex, of course, never executed the punishment himself. That was Rajiv’s job. So since Rajiv was too obliging a guy to relish firing folks, one of his foremost duties was to keep the FaceMate staff observant to Alex’s requirements, and thus at bay.

Rajiv himself, of course, was immune to the directive—If he couldn’t bother Alex from time to time, then Alex was cut off from the outside world entirely, and the whole operation would go grinding to a halt. Rajiv, therefore, had the go-ahead to enter the sanctum sanctorum at will, pretty much. And so, today, at 10:35 a.m., envelope in hand, he tapped on the door, not too loudly, but not too concerned about the consequences either. He did, however—just for good measure—announce the identity of the knocker concomitant with the first light tap:

“Alex—Hey, it’s me, Rajiv. I’ve got your pictures.”

The lock popped open. Alex had rigged it electronically, so that it didn’t merely open, but you could easily hear the click—which gave the green light for a supplicant to proceed. He could operate everything around him through his keypad that way. One of the gizmos that the keypad activated was a series of colored lights outside the door. There were four possible options which could be lit singly or in varying combination of one to four. If the red one glowed alone, stop dead in your tracks—Red meant that Rajiv himself wouldn’t dare to even knock.

But green and yellow were glaring at the time, the red signal bulb was dark. So in he went, closing the door behind him—it locked with another strident click—finding Alex where Alex always was, sitting rigid in his chair, staring bug-eyed at the monitor, his fingers dancing over the keypad as deftly and rhythmically as Chopin at the keyboard at his best. Alex’s head jerked a little when the lock clicked shut again, indicating that he knew Rajiv was present in the room. But he didn’t turn his head: Alex never really turned his head toward anyone, ever, no matter what the circumstances were. Ben’s eyes had struck him as so brilliant in the photos, and their impression was so vivid in his mind, that it dawned on Rajiv that he couldn’t quite picture the color of Alex’s eyes. Had he ever really seen them well enough to notice whether they were brown or green or blue? He wasn’t all that sure.

Rajiv looked into the monitor while Alex typed, and as he watched, the words appeared:

LEVE ON DSK

That was how their meetings went. You could talk your goddamn brains out, but Alex wouldn’t give a spoken answer unless the situation warranted, and it rarely warranted. When it didn’t warrant—which was ninety-nine percent of the time—you’d need to read his answer on the screen.

“OK, I’ll put it there; but don’t you think you need to check them out while I’m here in case you need me to get something else?”

No typing. Alex reached over, picked up the Atherton cover envelope from where Rajiv had set it down, and opened it, then shuffled through the dozen or so photos enclosed. Then he typed again:

LOOK OLD. NTHING YNG??

“No, like I told you, they really don’t have anything of Ben when he was young. He burned all the pictures of him when he was young.”

GOT 2 B

“Maybe so, Alex, but if they won’t give them to me, there’s not much I can do, is there? Hey, I’m trying, pal. I’m giving it my best.”

TRY MRE

“OK I will. I’ll ask again. But in the meantime, how about this: I’ll check with Eddie and see if he won’t mind looking through the matches the program kicks out before we send them to Ben. He knew Ben when he was young, and he can tell us if the match-ups we find are close, whatever age they are. That way, Ben won’t see anything that doesn’t impress him—Which is the idea, right? We don’t want Ben seeing any matches that aren’t close?”

RGHT

“OK, great, then, Alex—We’ve got—oh, I guess ten or so percent of our file photos in the over-thirty category—that’s ten or fifteen million. I bet we get a pretty good match out of those.”

WLL TRY. ASK AGN. GET YNG PICT IF PSSBLE.

Then Alex hit the keypad again, the overhead lights blinked off, then on, and the screen flashed in a bigger font size than before:

OK GDBYE.