Shimmer by Eric Barnes Page A

the warehouse were owned by a Washington-based networking supply company, which in turn was owned by Red Tree Limited, a holding company operated out of the Cayman Islands and funded entirely by me. The dish on the warehouse roof pointed to a satellite leased from an Austin-based company that resold the services of Global Satellite Security, one of fourteen wholly owned satellite subsidiaries of Core Communications. The few system administrators needed to operate the mainframes in San Antonio had been hired by yet another company, this one based in Germany and funded by a series of my personal foreign bank accounts.These admins came from a local Texas employment agency, were paid high wages by the hour, and were given only the lowest-level access to the machines.
    (Probably, given the usually disjointed, even paranoid state of mind so frequently exhibited by contract technical help, most of the admins thought—or at least wanted to think—that they were working for some secret outpost of the CIA.)
    And what made possible the use of the San Antonio mainframes in the first place was that, months earlier, the mainframes and satellite uplink had been configured by a team of friendly customer service and tech support representatives from the world’s leading provider of high-capacity mainframe networking solutions, Core Communications. A Core team had been hired to install twenty-four Blue Boxes. They’d gone through a test upload and download of information and billed the then Portland-based owner of the mainframes for the work. Once the invoice had been paid, Core had never heard from the Portland-based company again.
    What this all meant was that, in a period of three months, I’d used one of my personal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands to push money through a short-lived Portland limited liability company in order to pay Core—whose stock I’d sold in order to deposit the money in the Caymans in the first place—to connect the computers to Core’s real network. Once the bill was paid, a Seattle attorney working at the behest of an anonymous client had closed the Portland company, ended the contracts of the three workers and sold the company’s assets, which consisted entirely of twenty-four new mainframes. The assets were bought by a recently formed company in Washington, D.C., whose attorney hired two local temporary employees to fly to San Antonio and install a relatively small piece of software on twenty-four mainframes sitting—untouched but operable—in a warehouse near the airport.
    It was that final small piece of software that told Shimmer these mainframes were part of the shadow network.
    These were the trails and connections that I tracked in my spreadsheet and that flowed through Shimmer. Even more, these were thethreads and connections wrapped around all my thoughts and all my dreams. The shadow network was, for me, a mass of places, people, machines, work and decisions. Bright and shifting and shimmering as it grew. And it did, always, grow.
    And none of it—none of this growth—was questioned or doubted inside or outside the company. Because as long as we were acquiring new businesses every few weeks, as long as sales continued to exceed our best projections, as long as the press continued to treat Core— and me—as a darling of the business world, then the board of directors, the investment bankers, the brokers and financial analysts, no one would look past the surface of what I did.
    From the beginning I’d feared every sale Trevor made, each addition putting pressure on the shadow network. But from the beginning, I’d known that in truth Trevor and his salespeople were the key to keeping the lie alive.
    But not even Trevor knew all the details of the system I’d built. He’d never seen Shimmer. He didn’t know about the spreadsheet I used to track the pieces of the shadow network. And really, Trevor didn’t care. For him,