Chapter 63
The smoke cloud over Mombasa was so thick, they couldn’t see the city. But after a few minutes of debate, Desmond, Peyton, and Avery agreed that it was still their best hope of reaching help and getting out of Kenya.
Desmond sat back against the helicopter’s rear wall and closed his eyes. The sight of the city on the coast reminded him of another place, what seemed like another life to him. And somehow, it also reminded him of Peyton, though the memory of her was just a feeling. He sensed that seeing her—touching her on the helicopter and during the escape—had been a sort of key to unlocking another memory.
The night Desmond disposed of Dale Epply’s body outside Slaughterville, Oklahoma, he thought hard about where he would go. He considered three places: Seattle, New York, and Silicon Valley. Thanks to countless IRC chat sessions, he had met people like himself from around the country and the world, but they were mostly concentrated in Silicon Valley, in cities like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. He couldn’t wait to get there and start over.
He drove all day and camped every night. He obeyed the speed limit and avoided hotels—he didn’t want to leave a paper trail in case anyone from Oklahoma came looking for him. Thanks to the bounty he’d found in Orville’s safe, money wasn’t a problem.
It was morning when he drove past Fremont and Newark, onto the Dumbarton Bridge and over the San Francisco Bay, arriving in East Palo Alto.
He found a small RV park off Bayshore Freeway, where he asked around to see if there was anything for sale. A few hours later, he was haggling over a well-used Airstream trailer with a bearded old man who was chewing tobacco and listening to talk radio. The man claimed he was in poor health and was headed, in his words, to the glue factory pretty soon.
“You’d rob a man on his deathbed?”
When Desmond finally got the price down to the high side of fair, he placed the hundred-dollar bills into the man’s hand—slowly, one at a time, at the man’s request, so he could count them out loud. The old man wished him luck and told him to take good care of the trailer. Then he walked across the street and moved in with another resident—a woman who Desmond later learned the old man was romantically involved with.
Desmond hitched the Airstream trailer to his truck and towed it to the tiny site he had rented. Then he shaved, cleaned himself up, and stocked up at a local grocery store.
As soon as his computer was set up on the trailer’s dining table, he connected to the internet and began chatting. Luckily the RV park offered telephone service as part of its base services, and there were a number of local AOL dial-in numbers available. Within the hour, he had three job interviews at promising web startups.
The next morning, he worried a bit about his appearance. He was about to turn nineteen and had worked outdoors most of his life. The wind and sun on his face had aged him some, but not enough: he still looked like a teenager. He was also built like an NFL linebacker, not a computer hacker. He expected to look totally out of place, and to possibly get rejected on sight.
To compensate, he bought a dark suit, a white button-up dress shirt, and a tie. The clerk at Macy’s tied it for him. He even bought a pair of dress shoes, which felt weird to him after a life spent in steel-toed boots. Shaved, showered, shampooed, and dressed in the crisp suit, he thought he looked like a roughneck dressed up for prom. He was still nervous.
He was also worried about his programming skills. He had been playing with all sorts of scripting languages on his free GeoCities page and a few other web hosts, but he wasn’t completely sure what languages the startups would use.
His concerns about his appearance vanished at the first interview. They barely looked at him. Everyone was wearing T-shirts and Teva sandals.
In a cramped conference room, the company’s CTO, Neil Ellison, slapped down a few sheets of paper with a programming problem on it. It was in PERL, a language he knew.
“If you don’t know PERL, you can leave now.”
Desmond picked up the pencil and began scribbling.
“Find me when you’re done.”
Desmond didn’t look up. Fifteen minutes later, he approached Ellison.
“Problem?”
“I’m finished.”
The man glanced at the page, started to discard it, then saw something that made him study it closer.
Another programmer peeked over his shoulder. “It’s wrong,” he said dismissively.
“No,” Ellison said. “It’s a better solution than ours.”
Ellison looked up.
“What did you say your name was?”
The next two interviews proceeded in a similar manner. Only the programming languages changed. Desmond solved problems in PHP, Javascript, and Python. At the end of the day, he had three job offers in writing. His first choice was an offer from a promising startup called xTV, but he needed help: he didn’t understand half of what was in the contract.
He asked around about a good lawyer, and later that day, he was sitting in the office of Wallace Sinclair, Attorney at Law. The office was nice, which made Desmond worry about the man’s rates.
The biggest disappointment with all the job offers was that he wouldn’t automatically get stock in the company when he signed on. Instead, the companies had something called a vesting schedule: he would get the stock over time, as he stayed with the startup. And it wasn’t even stock outright; he was granted options, which were contracts to purchase the stock at a set price.
“How does that do me any good?” Desmond asked.
“If the stock goes up, it does you a great deal of good,” Wallace said. “Think about it. If you have an option to purchase the stock at one dollar and the stock is trading for fifteen dollars, your option is worth fourteen dollars per share.”