The Never Game

Shaw had bought Margot a present two years ago; Victoria had decided his address was no secret and delivered it unto her mailing-list minions. He hadn’t thought about Margot for... Had it been a month? Maybe a couple of weeks. He said, “Pitch it.”

“Can I keep it?” Teddy asked.

A thud, and laughter. Another thud.

Shaw thanked them and disconnected.

He rebanded the sheaf of pages. One more look outside. No Rodent.

Colter Shaw lifted open his laptop and read Velma’s email. He pulled up a map to see how long it would take to get to Silicon Valley.

4

As it turned out, by the estimation of some, Colter Shaw was actually in Silicon Valley at that very moment.

He’d learned that a number of people considered North Oakland and Berkeley to be within the nebulous boundaries of the mythical place. To them, Silicon Valley — apparently, “SV” to those in the know — embraced a wide swath from Berkeley on the east and San Francisco on the west all the way south to San Jose.

The definition was largely, Shaw gathered, dependent on whether a company or individual wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And most everyone did.

The loyalists, it seemed, defined the place as west of the Bay only, the epicenter being Stanford University in Palo Alto. The reward offeror’s home was near the school, in Mountain View. Shaw secured the vehicle’s interior for the drive, made sure his dirt bike was affixed to its frame on the rear and disconnected the hookups.

He stopped by the cabin to break the news to Carole and a half hour later was cruising along the wide 280 freeway, with glimpses of the suburbia of Silicon Valley through the trees to his left and the lush hills of the Rancho Corral de Tierra and the placid Crystal Springs Reservoir to the west.

This area was new to him. Shaw was born in Berkeley — twenty miles away — but he retained only tatters of memories from back then. When Colter was four, Ashton had moved the family to a huge spread a hundred miles east of Fresno, in the Sierra Nevada foothills — Ashton dubbed the property the “Compound” because he thought it sounded more forbidding than “Ranch” or “Farm.”

At the GPS guide’s command, Shaw pulled off the freeway and made his way to the Westwinds RV Center, located in Los Altos Hills. He checked in. The soft-spoken manager was about sixty, trim, a former Navy man or Merchant Marine, if the tattoo of the anchor signified anything. He handed Shaw a map and, with a mechanical pencil, meticulously drew a line from the office to his hookup. Shaw’s space would be on Google Way, accessed via Yahoo Lane and PARC Road. The name of the last avenue Shaw didn’t get. He assumed it was computer-related.

He found the spot, plugged in and, with his black leather computer bag over his shoulder, returned to the office, where he summoned an Uber to take him to the small Avis rental outfit in downtown Mountain View. He picked up a sedan, requesting any full-sized that was black or navy blue, his preferred shades. In his decade of seeking rewards he’d never once misrepresented himself as a police officer, but occasionally he let the impression stand. Driving a vehicle that might be taken for a detective’s undercover car occasionally loosened tongues.

On his mission over the past couple of days, Shaw had ridden his Yamaha dirt bike between Carole’s RV park and Berkeley. He would ride the bike any chance he got, though only on personal business or, of course, for the joy of it. On a job he always rented a sedan or, if the terrain required, an SUV. Driving a rattling motorbike when meeting offerors, witnesses or the police would raise concerns about how professional he was. And while a thirty-foot RV was fine for highways, it was too cumbersome for tooling about congested neighborhoods.

He set the GPS to the reward offeror’s house in Mountain View and pulled into the busy suburban traffic.

So, this was the heart of SV, the Olympus of high technology. The place didn’t glisten the way you might expect, at least along Shaw’s route. No quirky glass offices, marble mansions or herds of slinky Mercedeses, Maseratis, Beemers, Porsches. Here was a diorama of the 1970s: pleasant single-family homes, mostly ranch-style, with minuscule yards, apartment buildings that were tidy but could use a coat of paint or re-siding, mile after mile of strip malls, two- and three-story office structures. No high-rises — perhaps out of fear of earthquakes? The San Andreas Fault was directly underneath.

Silicon Valley might have been Cary, North Carolina, or Plano, Texas, or Fairfax County, Virginia — or another California valley, San Fernando, three hundred miles south and tethered to SV by the utilitarian Highway 101. This was one thing about midwifing technology, Shaw supposed: it all happens inside. Driving through Hibbing, Minnesota, you’d see the mile-deep crimson-colored iron mine. Or Gary, Indiana, the fortresses of steel mills. There were no scars of geography, no unique superstructures to define Silicon Valley.