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“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Elbaño,” she said.

Mountain bathrooms. That was another thing that hadn’t changed since the heyday of the FARC.

Javier stepped closer. The glow of twilight was fading, but with some effort, he could study her expression. “Did you hear the conversation I was just having?”

“No. But don’t be alarmed. I’m told it’s quite normal to talk to yourself. Only when you start answering is it time to worry.”

He didn’t appreciate the attempt at humor. “I was talking on the satellite phone.”

“Oh. Cool. No. I didn’t hear anything.”

Javier tightened his gaze. If he had to guess, he would have said she was playing dumb.

We don’t pay you to guess.

“I heard Patrick quit,” she said.

It was the ruse Javier had shared with his team: Patrick quit. “Yeah. There’s a quitter in every group.”

“I was hoping you could change his mind. But he’s not coming back, is he?”

Javier let her question hang in the air, and he watched closely to see how she dealt with the silence. He could still only guess as to her truthfulness, but one thing was certain: he would need to keep a close eye on this Olga.

“No,” he said. “Patrick is not coming back.”

Chapter 20

It was almost midnight, and Kate was still angry at her father.

She’d been typing furiously on her laptop since returning to her apartment, alone—out on the balcony. If she wanted a balcony, she’d have one. If she wanted to write a play about Big Data, she’d write one.

If she needed a new hero, she’d find one.

Kate had never told him, but the final assignment in her seventh-grade English class was to write an essay about a personal hero, which each student read aloud to the class. Most chose well-known figures: LeBron James, Jesus Christ, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so on. Kate was the only one to catch grief from her classmates. She’d chosen her father.

The problem with her essay was honesty. Her fatherwasher hero, but she didn’t feel comfortable standing before her classmates and telling them why. Her essay heralded his business success, his study of philosophy at Oxford, and other distinctions that belonged on a resumé. She couldn’t tell a bunch of seventh graders that her mother was an alcoholic—that it was her father who assured her that “Mom didn’t really mean it,” that Kate really was smart and pretty and not a manipulative little “mean girl” who thought only of herself, and that she could be anything from an astronaut to a zookeeper when she grew up, as long as it made her happy. “Be true to yourself and follow your dreams,” he’d told her, and she’d let herself believe that he lived his life by the same credo. Not for a moment did she think he was actually following the money.

“That just sucks,” she said, deleting the last eight lines she’d just written. She’d been on a tear, working without so much as a bathroombreak, but too much was landing on the proverbial cutting room floor.

Honesty. Like her seventh-grade essay, there just wasn’t enough of it in her play. She wasn’t being true to her own research. It was tempting to sensationalize the story and turn Watson into a corporate monster, to portray the founder and CEO of the world’s first tech powerhouse as Hitler’s strategic ally in genocidal warfare. Had she really wanted to go that route, there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to exploit—Willy Heidinger, in particular, the CEO of Watson’s German subsidiary and member of the National Socialist Party. Kate uncovered a speech he’d delivered in 1939, urging Germans to follow the Führer in blind faith. “Our characteristics are deeply rooted in race,” the German CEO had said. “We must cherish them like a holy shrine which we will—and must—keep pure.” But Watson was no Heidinger. And he was definitely no anti-Semite. Other than family, the first person through the church door at Watson’s funeral in 1956 was Charles Gimbel, co-owner of Gimbels department stores, a Jew.

Irving Bass was right. It was up to the world to judge whether or not he was evil, whether it made him any less culpable that he wasn’t motivated by hate. Simply put, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was a capitalist to his core.

And so, it seemed, was Kate’s father.

She stepped away from her laptop and went to the balcony railing. She’d reached a pivotal point in the play. By the late 1930s, IBM’s crown jewel in the world of electromechanical technology was the model 405 alphabetizer. The Germans didn’t have them. Hitler demanded state-of-the-art technology for the 1939 Polish census. No one knows for certain how the decision was made. All Kate could do was follow Irving’s guidance and write, in fairness, what could have been said. She returned to her laptop and started typing.

It was no accident that, as she imagined the words flowing from Watson’s mouth, she heard her own father’s voice.

“I read theNew York Times,” Watson said into the telephone. “I know the kind of questions that the Third Reich asked in the May census.”

Watson was speaking on the telephone from his town house on the Upper East Side. Heidinger replied from his office in Berlin, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone:

“I presume you mean the requirement that all Germans state whether a grandparent was a full Jew by race.”

“Exactly.”

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