Kyle eyed the brown suede couch with two blue throw pillows cross-stitched with the words “Home Tweet Home.”
“I think I’ll stand,” he told the receptionist. He half-expected Donello to make him wait all morning, and then blow him off anyway, but the receptionist’s phone rang just a few minutes later. After speaking in a hushed voice, she hung up the phone and stood up. “Mr. Donello is ready for you. Follow me.”
She led him past the reception desk, through a set of frosted glass doors, and then into the main office area. Virtually everything was painted white except for the light maple hardwood floors. The office contained several rows of cubicles, with each row divided into four workstations.
And every person, at every single one of those workstations, had stood up to watch as he walked by.
They stared silently with a mixture of expressions on their faces, most of which Kyle would not describe as particularly friendly. When they reached the large corner office at the end of the hallway, the receptionist half-smiled. “Good luck.”
Kyle stepped into the office and saw Rick Donello, CEO of Twitter, sitting at his desk. He was a relatively young man, in his midthirties, with glasses, thinning hair, and a look in his unsmiling eyes that fell somewhere between disbelief and disdain.
“I’ll say this: you’ve got balls the size of watermelons, Rhodes.” He gestured for Kyle to have a seat, then nodded at the receptionist, who closed the door after she left.
Once it was just the two of them, Donello got right down to business. “You have sixty seconds to tell me why I should do anything other than toss you out on your ear.”
Fine with him. Kyle was perfectly happy to skip over all the bullshit. “As half the world saw seven months ago, you have cracks in your network that I could drive a truck through. My company can help you with that.”
Donello laughed humorlessly. “I’m not an idiot, Rhodes. We updated everything after you hijacked us. I doubt you’d find us so easy to hack into now.”
“How much of the revenue from your seven hundred advertisers are you willing to bet on that?”
Donello’s gaze was steely. “You’ve got forty seconds left, so finish whatever it is you’ve come to say. If nothing else, it’ll give me something laughable to tweet about later.”
Kyle sat forward in his chair. “I’ve read all the interviews, Donello. When you took over the company a year ago, you pledged to focus on Twitter as a business by turning what has become a massive communication network into a major advertising platform. You’ve emphasized the need for reliability—yet I managed to shut you down for forty-eight hours from a single computer while half-drunk on Scotch.”
Donello rested his arms on his desk. “So your proposal is that I hire you, the guy who made us look like clueless dickheads seven months ago, and pay your company some outrageous consulting fee to come in here and fix our security problems? That’s what you’re suggesting?”
“Yes.” Kyle held his gaze. “Except I’ll do it for free.”
Donello paused at that. “For free.”
“I’ll build a goddamn cyber-fortress around this place—and it won’t cost you a penny. I figure I owe you that, at least.”
Donello studied him and then leaned back in his chair. He spoke slowly, musing aloud. “You want the publicity that will come with this.”
The corners of Kyle’s mouth turned up in a smile. His sixty seconds were up, yet there he still sat. “Yes. And so do you.”
TWO HOURS LATER, the CEO of Rhodes Network Consulting LLC walked out of that modern, six-story office building having landed the company’s first client.
True, the client wasn’t paying him, but Kyle was a happy man nevertheless. As he’d hoped, at the end of the day Donello had acted like the businessman he was and seized on the unique opportunity Kyle had offered: better security and a ton of free publicity that would highlight that fact. They’d even worked out the wording of a joint press release that would be sent to the media at eight a.m. Eastern time the following morning.
Now it was time for Kyle to implement the second phase of his marketing strategy. After his arrest and conviction, and then again after his release from prison, he’d been bombarded by interview requests from virtually every media outlet—yet he’d never answered so much as a single question.
But he’d held on to the contact information for one particular person who’d asked for an interview for just this occasion.
Standing on the sidewalk in front of Twitter’s headquarters, Kyle dialed the cell phone number of David Isaac, correspondent from Time magazine. After getting the reporter’s voicemail, he left a message.
“David, it’s Kyle Rhodes. There’s going to be a press release tomorrow morning—you’ll know it when you hear it. If you can get me the cover, I’ll give you an exclusive. The whole sordid story, directly from the mouth of the Twitter Terrorist. Trust me, you won’t want to miss the part about the cactus in Tijuana.”
Twenty-nine
FOR THE SECOND time since Rylann had starting working in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was abuzz over Kyle Rhodes.
She had, of course, heard the story that had set the Internet on fire earlier that Tuesday morning: that the Twitter Terrorist and Twitter had kissed and made up. She’d been in her kitchen, eating Rice Krispies and catching up on the news on her iPad, when she’d read about the press release. She’d laughed out loud, then had immediately texted Kyle: