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  THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, Fritz was trying to make a left turn across traffic on Route 30 so as to get on Route 128 toward Burlington. He was thinking about California. His thoughts were focused not on shadowy hotel suites but on shadowy numbers: the VD unit’s numbers.

  “VD unit” was not the approved company abbreviation (which was VDD, for video development division, although nobody used that, not even Peter Greene, the president), but it was what everybody called the series of off-balance-sheet partnerships Playtime used to develop video games. There was huge money in video games: huge money to be made and equally huge money to be lost. It cost a fortune to develop the software, what with the immensely detailed and multidimensional images. You might make a ton on Death Vault, but you could just as easily get squashed like a bug on Element Master. You could spend two years in development only to have thirteen-year-old Michael Brubaker return a verdict in eight minutes.

  “It sucks.”

  No matter the reason: “It sucks,” from a thirteen-year-old, was death. Kiss good-bye that $24 million in development, and also the $15 million in promotion and advertising. They were gone. If the thirteen-year-olds said, “It sucks,” then, well, it sucked.

  The VD unit had its own accounting, out in San Mateo, and the big games were supposed to be accounted for like movie productions—separate, one-off deals, each with its own books. So if Element Master sucked, it could lose only its own shirt, not anyone else’s. But more and more of these deals had been done with what was starting to look like parent-guaranty financing. And that meant if Element Master sucked, then maybe just a little bit of Playtime would suck with it. Since June, and that panicked rush to get the financial results for the second quarter in line with Wall Street’s expectations, Fritz had had the growing sense that something was amiss in Playtime’s numbers, and that something was the development deals in San Mateo.

  Take that meeting on August 8. Larry Jellicoe, the CFO, had called them all into his office and made his speech. Frank Pitts (who, as controller, was Fritz’s boss) and Rachel Ewald, one of the assistants, sat there awkwardly as Jellicoe told them they had better goddamn well find some revenue or the third-quarter numbers were going to look terrible and the board would not be happy. Then the Street would hammer the stock, which would tank everybody’s options. Fritz had heard this kind of speech before, but this time there was a tremor in Jellicoe’s voice that spelled P-A-N-I-C.

  Last to the meeting, Fritz had taken a seat on Jellicoe’s couch. “Should we look through the cushions?” he asked.

  No one appreciated the joke. And after that meeting, temperatures had only risen. All through August, e-mails with paper-clipped Excel spreadsheets blinked on Fritz’s laptop like fireflies. For the first time ever, he logged more cell-phone minutes than did Linda during the annual Nantucket vacation. All in an effort to find change under the couch cushions. There were weekly and then daily conference calls in which Fritz mainly remained silent, every once in a while venturing to ask, “Will Settles buy off on that?” Which was as polite a way as he could think of to say, “What you are proposing offends the accounting rules, and the auditors won’t let you do it.”

  As the summer rolled into September, the trends at Playtime were bad and getting worse. A couple of hoped-for deals that had anchored the pro forma numbers didn’t quite make it to actual sales. Fritz was hearing that charge-offs might have to be taken in the VD unit. Which meant guaranties being called and more revenue to be found under more sofa cushions. These charge-offs would show up in the third-quarter numbers due in early October, and Jellicoe was trying to figure out how to ease this news to the board.

  MOTORING NORTH on Route 128, Fritz was also unaware of the unique role of the BlackBerry remote wireless in his wife’s infidelity. It would have struck him as fitting, though. Fritz already had a growing sense that this BlackBerry wasn’t just another electronic gizmo. There was something deeply malign about it. He’d decided the BlackBerry was the second most pernicious device invented in his lifetime (yielding pride of place only to the MIRV—or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle—which gave the upper hand in nuclear gamesmanship to whoever fired first). It was one thing to have e-mail. But it was quite another to have e-mail that followed you everywhere, and a device that generated the expectation that you would always be reading it. Fritz had thought of writing an article, an op-ed piece or something, and might have done it if he hadn’t been too busy with his cycling and sailing.

  He’d had a head of steam going as recently as three weeks ago in Nantucket, when he and Linda had an argument about e-mail over dinner on the back deck of the beach house near Siasconset. The argument broke out during a particularly gorgeous sunset.

  “My theory is that the BlackBerry has led to a whole new coarseness in manners,” Fritz said to Linda while replenishing her wineglass.

  “Hmm?”

  “Yes. There are actually people who, in midconversation with you, will reach for their BlackBerries and start checking their e-mail. While you are talking to them. You see this happening all the time now.”

  It took a moment for the penny to drop for Linda, who was a little preoccupied. A moment earlier she had reached for her own BlackBerry remote wireless, clicking the little button to scroll down and mmhmming as she not quite registered what her husband was saying.

  Then the penny dropped, and Linda looked up. “Cute,” she said.

  There was a breeze coming across the sand flats to the south. It caught her hair, lifted it. How lovely Linda was, there on the deck of the beach house, in that old faded blue T-shirt she wore, with her hair pulled back, and her . . . fingers working the eensy buttons.

  “I wasn’t trying to be cute. I’m serious. What is it about that thing that would make you do that? In the middle of a conversation, reach over and start clicking that thing?”

  “Fritz, we were just, you know, talking.”

  “Right. That’s what conversation is. Talking.”

  “I’m checking my e-mail. It’s part of my job.”

  “During dinner?”

  “Yes, during dinner.”

  “Well, why don’t you do a little legal research over dessert? That’s part of your job, too, isn’t it?”

  She would not dignify this offensive remark, and so, red-faced, she returned very deliberately to the BlackBerry.

  “It’s part of your job to check your e-mail right now, while we are on vacation, during dinner?”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation again.”

  “What kind of job is that?”

  “I don’t think you want to go there,”she said with dark significance. Not thinking you wanted to go somewhere had become a refrain of Linda’s, a phrase of increasing utility. Her conversations with Fritz were becoming a Rand McNally atlas of places to which she didn’t think he wanted to go.

  “Do you see how evil that device is, hon? It’s bondage—mail bondage!”

  “I don’t want—”

  “It’s worse than heroin.”

  “Fine. It’s worse than heroin.” “Fine” was punctuation for Linda. Also, repeating what you just said meant that you could say whatever you wanted and she didn’t care, a kind of adult “sticks and stones may break my bones.”

  But Fritz didn’t let it go. “Linda, honey, the sun is setting. Look at it! Listen to those wind chimes bong-bong-bonging away next door.”

  (I’ve always hated those wind chimes, she thought.)

  “Here we are in this extravagantly fabulous place: on the deck, with good bread and linguini and pesto and a nice fresh chardonnay. With the sun going down. Having dinner. Husband and wife. Having a conversation, enjoying the breeze off the ocean. And your fingers are going tap-tap-tap on those stupid little electronic worry beads—”

  “They are not stupid electronic worry beads. They—”

  “You’re a senior partner in that firm! Why make yourself a slave to every single human being, no matter how dumb, junior, or ill informed, wh
o has your e-mail address? Some mail clerk is sending an e-mail announcing that the new forms for certified letters are available. And that mail clerk owns you! He’s pulling you out of a Nantucket sunset because he wants you to know, now, that the new forms are in.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “He owns you. That mail clerk owns you. Why do you want to be owned by a mail clerk? That’s slavery!”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  But she wouldn’t look at him. She was now scrolling up through the messages she had already read. To make a point. Fritz shook his head quietly, tried to turn and enjoy the sunset of that extravagantly beautiful place, even if he had to enjoy it on his own. He couldn’t. This was a pet peeve of his, and he was not good about letting go of pet peeves. “Linda,” he asked, “what is it about you lawyers? Why do you think you have to be in touch every single second? ‘Hi, look at me, I’m on my e-mail, I’m on line! I’m in touch!’ ”

  “It’s part of the job. The job—”

  “That pays for this vacation. That’s what you were going to say, right? It’s always part of the job that pays for the vacation or the house or the whatever. But does e-mail really pay for this vacation? Is that what the clients want? Someone who’s on e-mail all the time? And is it a vacation at all if you’re sending e-mail? Hon, you gotta have more confidence than that.”

  Oops. Mentioned the confidence thing. Shouldn’t have done that. Arctic air blasted in from Labrador, flash-freezing the linguini and raising goosebumps on the arm. “Fine,”she punctuated again. Conversation over. For a lawyer, she really wasn’t his match in argument. But she was a hell of a meteorologist. She could invoke tundra at will.

  Linda left the table and went back into the house through the open slider. He watched her head up the stairs to the bedroom. She took her BlackBerry with her.

  “Linda, do you get my point at all?” he called plaintively after her. “Hon?”

  AT FIRST it was hard to see anything that different about this BlackBerry device. It was just the latest nifty plastic thing, wasn’t it—one more in a regression of smaller and smaller plastic objects? Faxes and copiers became fast and easy to use; computers came out of the word-processing center and onto Fritz’s desk; then came e-mail; then cell phones and pagers, then laptops, then bite-sized cell phones and flat-panel screens; and as the stuff got smaller, it got whippet-fast: messages, e-mail, e-mail to which five-hundred-page spreadsheets could be clipped, blue-lined, and cyber-whisked to the world. The lumps of plastic shrank, the batteries got lighter, and the time delay retreated to the realm of quantum physics.

  It was only e-mail without a wire, after all. But something was different. “Without a wire” was big. No more hunting in airline terminals for pay phones that would accept your phone jack; no more wondering whether to take the phone off the hook as you slid the credit card. No more waiting for modems. No half-hour seminars with the IT guy about how to boot up the computer in the satellite office. This new lozenge meant you could send a fifty-page document to Singapore and get a response in thirty seconds, all while sitting on a beach in the Maldives. All from your beach chair, all without plugging anything in or booting anything up.

  Even bigger than the technology shift was the change in manners it subtly drove. Communication could be instantaneous and continuous, so it must be instantaneous and continuous. Your partner, or your broker, or your lawyer might be away from his computer terminal, he might be in a meeting and unable to take a phone call, but the lozenge was wireless and quiet and utterly portable. And so . . . there was no excuse. An immediate response was demanded. For everything.

  The Berry must be read, always and everywhere. In a restaurant, for example. On the train. In the Little League dugout while Johnny was leaning in for the sign. During dinner at home. In the FastLane approaching the Newton tolls. In a theater. And, most curiously, when real people were talking to you the old-fashioned way. What happened on FritznLinda’s Siasconset deck was a familiar event by late 2001: Berry talk had trumped larynx talk. All over America, lawyers and investment bankers and deal makers were still flying across the country to meet in restaurants and conference rooms, and yet after coming together in person, the first thing they were doing was checking the BlackBerry. The prospect of an electronic message was more immediate, more vital, more interesting than whatever the poor human being in the room was saying. So the speakers at such meetings found themselves, like priests among penitents, speaking to bowed heads, while the bowed heads prayed to their new god.

  3 NUMBERS THE

  STREET CAN TRUST

  AT THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES PAST NINE, Fritz Brubaker emerged from the elevator on the fourth floor of the Playtime Tower in Burlington, carrying, in lieu of a briefcase, an L.L.Bean canvas sailing bag with the blue piping peeling off the handles. The bag contained the essentials for the day’s work: his running shorts, socks, New Balance shoes, a jockstrap, a gray and blue Patriots T-shirt, a banana, an apple, a raspberry yogurt, and a Demoulas bagel. He passed the glass-walled conference room, passed Milly Kortanek’s cube (smile), passed Jerry Adler’s (wave), and fetched up to Luce’s cube outside his small office.

  “Mornin’, Luce, how’m I doing?” This was Fritz’s standard greeting.

  “Not good, boss.”

  “Where’s the posse?”

  “Up on nine in Mr. Jellicoe’s office. They said—”

  “That I should go up there the minute I got in?”

  “The second. The second you got in. Fritz, what’s that on your pants?”

  “What?”

  “That, that silvery, like . . . goop on your pant leg? It looks like glue or something.”

  “I had a little problem with a DVD player.” He wiped at it with the bag. “What do they want, anyway?”

  “Something about the board meeting.”

  “That’s today, right? This afternoon?”

  Luce nodded. She was wondering how, exactly, a person had a “problem” with a DVD player. “The board meeting is at eleven,” she said.

  “Oh . . . kay. Guess I’ll head upstairs.” Fritz turned for the elevator.

  “Ah, Fritz?” she called after him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe you want to leave that? In your office?”

  She was pointing at his Bean bag. “And you might want to, you know, see if you can wipe that stuff off your pants.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Luce,” he said.

  FRITZ GOT ANOTHER couch assignment. He made a quick reconnaissance. Jellicoe was in his teak command post, with the Bloomberg units on the desk and the top-on-bottom dual seventeen-inch flat-screen computer monitors on the credenza behind him. Gathered round the eminence were Frank Pitts and Rachel Ewald. And there with them was Milt Dorfman from sales. Curious. Still more curious, Milt had brought a deflector shield with him, one of his achingly lovely but brain-dead assistants, curvaceous bottom perched just on the tippy edge of the couch. She smiled gorgeously at Fritz. Beneath her linen blazer, she wore a sheer white something or other that clung for dear life. The rest were all present and accounted for in the formal dress-down uniform of the finance department (men: pressed khaki Dockers, iron crease showing crisply on the pant leg, navy socks, penny loafers, crisply starched blue button-down shirt; women: pleated and pressed pumice cotton J. Crew trousers, pumps, blouse). Fritz tried to catch Rachel’s eye, but she wouldn’t look up. She was locked on spreadsheets.

  Suave Milt’s honey-on-the-couch deflector shield, Rachel in the bunker: these were ominous signs.

  What the hell has that rascal been up to, wondered Suave Milt as Fritz took his seat. Frank Pitts noticed, too. There was some kind of . . . it looked like . . . gross! . . . on his pants. Like it might be . . .

  Jellicoe looked up severely, and then he noticed it, too. What the hell?

  Suave Milt didn’t want to speculate about why this guy was late to the meeting, but there was this . . . oh, man! . . . right on his . . . this . . . br />
  Christ, Brubaker!

  . . . stain . . . this stain . . . right on Fritz’s pants!

  Jesus. The male minds in the room all leaped to the identical absurd conclusion, expressed loathing, then embarrassment, then envy, and then settled back down. Better focus on business.

  A problem had developed with the California regents deal on Point ’n Learn!, the lead product in a suite of educational software targeted at schools. Playtime’s lawyers put this venture into a bulletproof off-balance-sheet partnership known as Eduvest, part of the VD unit. The partnership had real revenues, as Peter Greene liked to say, not like all these other e-commerce vaporware companies. So Playtime’s equity investment in the partnership had been conservatively valued at $75 million on the basis of a discounted cash-flow analysis—because, after all, Point ’n Learn! was a hot item, and Eduvest had real cash flow. So Playtime hadn’t felt the need to show a liability on its books.

  Except that there kindasorta was this timing problem with the “real” revenues, as Milt from sales was saying when Fritz joined the meeting. There was this side letter. Somebody in finance had forgotten to ask for the side letter, was the way Milt put it.

  (“Did they ask for it, Les?” asked Milt. “Oh, no, I don’t think so!” answered lovely Les, the deflector shield.)

  This was all when they were doing the Q2 numbers last June, Suave Milt explained. Finance hadn’t asked for this letter that said that if the board of regents changed its mind for any reason in its sole, absolute, and mercurial discretion, then it could return Point ’n Learn! from the 2,650 high schools for a full refund and cancel the four-year contract. Finance hadn’t asked for that letter, said Suave Milt, and he guessed, shrugging, that finance didn’t get it into the contract file when the auditors at Settles Bartlett did the Q2 review. And three days ago some lawyer from the California board of regents had written a letter. It purported, Suave Milt was saying, to reserve rights to opt for its $17 million back and cancel the four-year, $12-million-a-year contract that constituted 43 percent of Eduvest’s 2002 revenues.