Holy shit, Katya thought. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. She needed to listen again. She went back to the beginning of the recording and clicked play. Mack’s voice again. Isabel’s voice. The silence. Mack. Isabel. Crying.
The logical thing to do, of course, was to post the recording. This was explosive. This was the scoop to end all scoops, and whoever this [email protected] was, he (or she) had chosen her. There was no reason to send something like this to a reporter if you didn’t want it disseminated, right? And yet, there was always the chance that this was some kind of elaborate hoax. You could never be too skeptical. She would need to contact Isabel and Mack and verify that the recording was real. She also wanted to know where it had come from. Thanks for sending this, she wrote back to [email protected]. Where did you get this? Can you verify authenticity? Who are you? Thanks, Katya. Then she messaged Dan on Slack: Check out what just landed in my inbox, she wrote, and uploaded the file.
Three minutes later he messaged her back: holy. fucking. shit.
22
Fallout Shelter
AS SOON AS Isabel had run out of Flatiron Social, Mack just kept going like nothing had happened. He was surprised, and annoyed, and embarrassed about it, but also just a little impressed that Isabel had done it. She had more balls than he’d thought. And so far, three days later, no one at TakeOff had said anything about it—even though he could sense that there was a different, not altogether positive, charge in the air. It was like nothing had happened and yet everything had changed.
Jason’s advice had been not to fire her, that firing her was only going to antagonize her more. Instead, he should either wait for her to quit or fire her if she stopped showing up for work, because then he could say he was firing her for that reason instead of for her outburst. “This is just a blip,” Jason assured him. “In fact, this is probably good, because it makes things reach their logical conclusion faster than they would have. We don’t want this to drag on and on, but she kind of put us in a terrible situation, and now she’s done us a huge favor.”
Mack nodded. “I shouldn’t contact her, right?” Jason laughed and didn’t even respond. But even if Mack did contact her, he wasn’t sure what he would say to her. What he wanted to say was something to the effect of I can’t believe I was actually attracted to you, I wish I had never met you. Isabel had become a distraction, one that was starting to permeate too many aspects of his life. He wanted the distraction gone.
Which was when Jason pinged him with a link to a tweet from the @invisibletechman account, saying something about stuff that had “gone down” at their drinks the other night. Again? Why was this guy totally on his ass? There were always going to be people—or anonymous Twitter accounts—who were going to try to bring good people down. That was just a fact of life. It just sucked that right now the focus had to be on him and his company. That was the thing about people like this. He would be willing to bet hundreds—actually, make that thousands—of dollars that not only did this person not work in tech, but whoever was tweeting from this account had never started anything on his own. He’d never known what it was like to pull an all-nighter because you had a new release you had to ship the next morning or what it was like to have dozens of people relying on you for their livelihoods. It was a shit-ton of responsibility! And sure, it was easy to sit there and be critical and think you knew everything about everything if you had never actually done anything.
Let’s get ahead of this, Jason wrote on Slack. Mack was about to respond when his phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. “Mack McAllister,” he said as he looked at Twitter on one computer monitor and read TechScene on the other.
“Hello, Mack, this is Katya Pasternack, from TechScene,” said the female voice on the other end of the line. She had a faint accent that Mack couldn’t quite place.
“Hey, Katya, I was just looking at your website,” he said.
“What a coincidence,” she said. “So I’m calling because, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, the invisibletechman tweet? Saying that something had gone down at a TakeOff event on Friday night?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, he thought. How was TechScene already on the case? The tweet had literally just gone up like fifteen minutes ago.
“Okay.” He sent Jason a message on Slack: on phone w Katya from TechScene—she’s asking about the tweet. To Katya, he said, “What about it?” Stall, stall, stall.
Jason replied right away: Don’t tell her anything.
Roger that, he responded to Jason.
“Can you tell me what happened the other night?” she said.
“It was a private TakeOff drinks event,” he said. “Beyond that I can’t really comment.”
“So you’re confirming that there was a TakeOff event on Friday night.” Oh, fuck, he thought.
“You know what, Katya, I’m going to have to have you talk to our PR department. How did you get my cell number, anyway?”
“I’d rather not say,” she said.
“Okay. I’m going to hang up now. If you have additional questions, you can direct them to our PR team.” He ended the call without waiting for her response.
Jason materialized in the doorway. “How’d that go?” Mack shook his head. “Not well?”
“Not well,” Mack said. “I managed to confirm that we had an event the other night.”
“Huh.” Jason contemplated this. “Maybe that’s not so bad.”
“Explain.”
“Well…like I was saying before, we want to get ahead of this. Or at least, get our version of the story out there.”
“Which is what? She hasn’t even written the damn story yet and I already feel like this is all over. Everything is over.”