The Weed Agency (17 page)

He heard giggling in the back.

“Quit giggling, you’re grown men! Why not take this opportunity to press the president on policy?”

“You mean let him off the hook in exchange for a few budget cuts? Are you serious, Bader?”

The room rejected the idea instantly and outright. A passionate consensus in favor of impeachment emerged, and the House Republicans exuberantly adjourned the meeting and filed out the doors.

Bader was the last one left in the room.

“Doesn’t anybody want to cut the government anymore?” he asked the empty room.

JANUARY 1999

U.S. National Debt: $5.6 trillion

Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $162.33 million

For four years, Ava used two verbal sticks of dynamite to dislodge the obstacles facing Weed.gov: the first was,
Adam Humphrey says this is a priority
. The line’s effectiveness worked in direct relation to how close the person was to Humphrey’s office. It worked within the administrative staff of the Agency of Invasive Species, somewhat with other Department of Agriculture offices, and not much at all with the Mole People in the basement … and it was useless with the agency field offices.

But the other line that worked less often than she expected was,
The Speaker of the House has personally endorsed this project as a priority
. Her coworkers often rolled their eyes, and sometimes blurted out how much they detested him. Among the federal workforce, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was surprisingly unfeared.

She hoped invoking the name of Newt Gingrich would be her sword to cut the Gordian knot of red tape; apparently her sword smith was Nerf
^®
. And now even that was being taken from her.

He didn’t even make the announcement in person: “Today I have reached a difficult personal decision. The Republican conference needs to be unified, and it is time for me to move forward where I believe I still have a significant role to play for our country and our party.” Some rotund wrestling coach she had never heard of was the new Speaker.

Ava was halfway through a thoroughly miserable day when she received an e-mail from an old college classmate—technically, an old fling—Raj Chattopadhyay.

She hadn’t heard from him in about two years, but out of the blue he said he would be in Washington for a couple of days and wanted to grab dinner. His e-mail signature indicated he was now ‘director of management initiatives’ at some company called GlobeScape in Palo Alto, California.

Booty call
, Ava surmised.

But he had recommended dinner at a new place, DC Coast, and she wondered what seven years of postcollegiate life had done to old Raj.

His choice was one of the city’s newest and most popular K Street restaurants, a site that celebrated the power and luxury that now surged through the avenues of the once-sleepy city.

A bronze-colored mermaid greeted patrons at the door, her breasts brazenly exposed. Giant oval mirrors sat on the walls above the tables, letting every status-minded diner know who else was there and who wasn’t, and who was sitting with whom. The cuisine cost quite a bit, but seemed worth it, at least to a palate like Ava’s, which had relied heavily on Pop-Tarts and bar chow.

Raj arrived, impeccably dressed—his suit was Armani, and it probably cost one of Ava’s paychecks. His black, curly hair
had grown a little longer, and he had a small, unobtrusive ponytail. His watch cost more than the suit.

Ava found she didn’t feel hit-upon; she was pleasantly surprised to find Raj really wanted to reconnect with a long-lost friend.

“So how’s life in Washington?” he asked after ordering appetizers. “You seemed very Manhattan, very NYU, so I was kind of surprised you moved here—but then I remembered you were going to save the world.”

“Change the world,” she corrected. “And … Washington sucks. So four years ago—wait, five now, I guess—right after I started, I come up with this plan to get the agency on the Internet—beyond the embarrassing single page they had at the time. Huge. Elaborate, groundbreaking, exactly what the Internet would be if you took hold of all of its potential at once—this thing is beautiful. I’m still working on it. Five years, and it is bare bones—crashes all the time, the data is out of date, nobody listens, nobody pays attention …” she sighed. “I’m … I really need to get out of here. I’m growing old here.”

Raj oddly smiled. “You are completely in the wrong place. Nobody goes to Washington to change the world anymore. Washington’s irrelevant. I mean, didn’t the president say in some press conference that he still matters? If you have to remind people of that, you don’t really matter. You want to know where the action is? Fifteen hundred square miles in California south of San Francisco.”

He was beaming. Ava looked at him in a new light, admiringly, but she felt jealousy gurgling up from deep within her. She felt a need to puncture the air out of that ego.

“I figured you were soulless enough to go work on Wall Street selling junk bonds or something,” she said with a raised eyebrow.

“Ha!” Raj laughed. “I love where I work. It’s amazing how
few people have heard of GlobeScape, because we really are the essence of what Silicon Valley is all about. And … we’re doing something that I think you would be very interested in.”

Not a booty call after all
, Ava realized.

“Go on.”

“In nine months, GlobeScape plans to launch EasyFed.com, a Web portal-platform designed to provide services to help people deal with the federal government.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we’re going to take the traffic from the government sites … instead of paying your taxes online, or applying for a grant, or complaining that your Social Security check didn’t arrive on time, you’ll go to our site, click on what you need, fill out the data, and BOOM. Done.”

“Doesn’t that just create a middleman?”

“Ava …” Raj scoffed. “You of all people know that dealing with any part of the federal government is a pain in the ass. The sites are slow, they’re down, they’re poorly laid out, they’re not intuitive. The beautiful thing is, once we get all of this set up, almost all of this can be automated. We just need people to build the site. Once it’s done and running, the thing will run itself! Set it and forget it.”

She tried to picture in her head the whole system working. “So, once I’ve helped build the site, what will you need me for?”

“Well, somebody needs to make sure it continues to run, and we can expand and develop it to work on new services—state governments, local governments, etcetera. This is a big project with lots of opportunities for expansion. We are talking about the largest customer base in America—everyone who has to interact with the government in any way: 270 million people.”

She couldn’t help herself—she admired Raj, but he had the bad habit of believing his own bull. “You’re counting the kids. And you’re counting the people who aren’t on the Internet.”

“Okay, fine. We’re
only
talking about everyone on the Internet who has to interact with the government in any way. The federal government has enormous brand leverage and market share for government services”—Ava resisted the urge to burst out laughing at the nonsensical marketing doublespeak—“and so our aim with EasyFed is to take that and integrate it into our business model.”

Ava felt herself growing more intrigued. “How will this EasyGov or whatever make money?”

“Eventually we’ll charge usage and processing fees, like banks, but for now we’re building market share. We’re also contemplating Web advertising. The big deal these days is building a platform that can leverage what we call ‘floating sticky eyeballs.’ ”

“One pop-up ad and you’ll lose everyone,” she warned.

“Ava, you need to get out there,” Raj leaned across the table and started to close the sale. He cheerfully boasted that Silicon Valley had been the ultimate boomtown since Netscape incorporated in 1994.

“Silicon Valley is to the rest of the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world,” Raj said. “You can just
feel
the electricity in the air.”

“You’re probably feeling the power lines giving everyone brain cancer,” she said, biting down on an ice cube. “Okay … I’m interested. What’s the next step?”

“Let’s pick some dates soon for you to come out and meet some people.”

She smiled a warm smile that had been all too infrequent lately. “I think I’d like that.”

“I’d like that, too.”

A game of footsie commenced under the table.

At the conclusion of the meal, Raj grabbed the check before Ava could even look at it.

“I’ve got this. This is a recruitment dinner. At GlobeScape, we don’t do anything halfway. Platinum company credit cards are for old money. We have
osmium
,” he said, throwing down a silvery-blue slice of plastic.

GlobeScape FedExed plane tickets to her Dupont Circle efficiency apartment. Ava took some vacation days and flew business class for the first time in her life. At the San Jose airport, Raj picked her up in a BMW that could not have been more than six months old.

“Alright, I’m impressed already,” she said as they drove away from the airport.

Raj flashed a gleaming smile.

“We’re just getting started,” he said, kicking the car into a higher gear onto Interstate 880—the engine roared beautifully, for about twenty seconds, before the traffic ahead forced him to stop and idle.

“Everything’s new out here,” Raj said happily. “Except Stanford University. I thought about going there.”

“You were too much of an East Coast guy, huh?”

“I’m starting to think it was a huge mistake,” he said, before correcting himself. “I mean, I’m glad I met you at NYU, and things turned out fine. But I think we were a couple of oddballs who didn’t fit in.”

“I always thought the city was big enough for everybody,” she said.

Until moving to Washington, Ava had considered herself a New Yorker in spirit. For much of her childhood, her father worked in midtown Manhattan in the production department of a large publishing firm. Her mother, an exotic beauty, feminist, and child of Lebanese immigrants, was an author
and professor of art at Rutgers University, an avant-garde intellectual.

Ava only made sense of her parents’ love after it ended. Opposites may attract, but they rarely grow old together. At first glance, Ava’s parents were yin and yang—a levelheaded, rational father and a free-spirited, unpredictable mother. But the nights at home and family vacations included arguments, fights, long awkward silences, and ultimately a sense that everyone was fooling themselves, keeping up a façade until the pair’s joint project, Ava, shipped off.

When they announced their intent to divorce shortly before Ava went off to college, she resisted the urge to thank them. She knew the pair would not enjoy a happy or even content marriage with an empty nest.

Growing up, she had all of her material needs more than cared for—they lived in a large house in Maplewood, New Jersey, making day trips to enjoy all of the benefits of pre-Giuliani New York and few of its dangers—but she had been eager to break out of what she found to be stultifying suburbia. The city had taunted her with its proximity, and while her big change-the-world dreams made going to school in Washington tempting, she found herself close to home.