Chapter 28
Jack knew someone was watching, watching him or watching them. He had been absolutely certain of that for two days. It was same feeling he’d get on occasion in a public place. He’d look up to catch someone turning away, knowing they had been looking. Sometimes they’d look again and smile. Sometimes they would avoid eye contact. When he looked up now no one was smiling. Lee and he walked out of the office and headed straight down Powell. He breathed in the clean, misty blowing air. The weather winnowed the crowds of tourists and washed the world clean of most of the diesel smell.
Lee smiled a huge smile up at him and then buried her face in his neck as she whispered, “What’s wrong?” Burying her face in his neck made it impossible for anyone to lip-read. Soon she would be as paranoid as he was. Then he remembered that Lee and her whole clan were far more paranoid than he would ever be, he hoped.
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99
He held her and whispered back, “I am even more convinced that someone is watching us.”
They stopped to window-shop. The shop windows on Powell were clean enough to use as mirrors. There was nothing like a recession to force people to clean their windows. He acted as if he saw something in a window that was worth a second look. Standing just right, turning to use the light of the occasional sun, he caught a good view of the sidewalk behind him.
They walked and talked and stopped and window-shopped until they got to the hospital. Meghan had moved quickly up the Glasgow Coma Scale and hit a plateau. Now the combination of her scores, eye opening, verbal, motor responses-all indicated that she might soon regain consciousness. When? Would that brilliant, funny mind be the same?
He had tried to prepare Lee for how bad Meghan looked. He knew his words hadn’t been enough. Lee saw Meghan and said, “Dew Neh Loh Mah!” and a few curses he had never heard before. They sat and touched Meghan, telling her how beautiful and smart she was and how they would soon be laughing at her goofy jokes again. Then they headed out, more quiet than they had been coming in.
Nine blocks later they walked down the steps into the Powell Street BART Station. Early afternoon timing and great blowing weather made it easy to get on the tube to Oakland. He almost forgot his claustrophobia. The knowledge certain that he was suffocating hit the moment they entered the tunnel under the Bay. He did not like being underground.
Jack thought about the motherfuckers who had tried to kill his sister. He thought about how strong the men might be. He thought about how the men would feel about their strength when he picked them up and smashed them into the ground and kicked their ribs in. Anger was a wonderful thing. He didn’t hear the announcements for Oakland until the train slowed for the stop.
By shoving their way in front of an old woman leaning on a walker, he got them out of the car first. They walked as fast as they could to the ramp leading up to the street and turned to survey the crowd. Most of the passengers were just stepping on to the platform. He let his eyes slide back and forth over the crowd, trying not to focus on any particular thing, letting his subconscious tell him if he noticed anything special.
No alarms went off. No buzz of intuition told him he had a hit. And, he was still certain he was being watched.
AS JACK walked into the foyer of the hotel, the desk clerk seemed to recognize him and asked, “Excuse me, Sir, are you here for the meeting with Alice Roberts?”
He smiled as he said, “Yes,: thinking he was going to wring Bob’s skinny little neck. He felt like a character in a bad espionage novel. Bob loved to play spy games. There was consolation. People were always best at what they loved.
Alice and Bob sat as far from each other as two people could possibly sit while still at the same small table. Bob sat up as straight as his leg would let him. Alice’s arms were folded tightly across her chest. He thought about Dvora’s comparison to sixth graders. He knew she was right. This relationship was having big trouble starting. Bob didn’t have his grin on.
It took a lot to scrub the grin off Bob’s face. Bob hardly ever smiled. He grinned with the grin of a man who’d had bad teeth from a poor childhood. He had beautiful, even, white teeth now. The VA had succeeded in fixing his teeth after they’d failed to fix his leg. His face had simply never learned how to smile.
“Alice, Bob, thanks for your support, help, and time. You both know Lee, my…”
He didn’t know what to call Hong Lee. Was she his lover, girlfriend, or love of his life? He didn’t think they would understand his Cantonese pet name chui or ‘hammer’ cause she could certainly pound his…
Lee jumped in with a smile, “For want of a better word, let’s say I am his girlfriend.”
“Alice it is so good to see you again.”
Alice said, “Idiot boy here has been trying to keep your relationship a secret. But that shit-eating grin on his face every time he talks to you on the phone or about you or thinks about you, kind of gives him away. Glad he’s finally decided to admit to the obvious.”
Bob was on his feet by then and said, “Lee I am so pleased. And, I think that this is the first time that Ms. Stewart and I have ever agreed on anything. I myself don’t understand what you, a beautiful, successful, and talented woman, see in him, but I am certainly happy for him.” With that he bowed slightly and sat down.
While thinking he needed to find new friends, Jack said, “Thank you for your… sentiment, Alice, Bob. I think. Dvora has asked to join us. She should be here in a few minutes. If no one has major objections, we’ll stick to the planned agenda. I’ll moderate, we’ll let Alice start, you next Bob, and me last. We’ll ask whatever questions we like, waiting until each person’s presentation is over to do so.”
Bob didn’t get along especially well with Dvora, but when she walked in, he graciously pushed himself up on his cane to greet her.
“Alice, Bob, Lee, thanks for letting me join you. I’m afraid I don’t have near the level of expertise you all have in these areas. Be patient with me, please?” Dvora could also be very charming when she wanted.
“We all have different areas of expertise. Let’s not make any assumptions about anybody else’s knowledge, so the KISS principal applies,” Jack said.
Alice started. “Anyone who is an officer of a company is an insider. These insiders have to file a report with the SEC when they buy or sell shares in their own company, in their competitors, or a supplier. They also have to report when they buy or sell options. Put options are the rights to sell specific shares at a specific price within a specific time. Call options are the rights to buy shares within a specific period of time at a specific price. Questions?”
She was on very good behavior. Her normal question to Bob would be, “Are you getting this, you fucking hick?”
Bob nodded politely, Lee too, Dvora last. Alice went on. “Our boy Donald’s reported activity looks bland. He sold one hundred fifty-six thousand shares in February to pay off his house in Woodside. He inherited almost six million dollars in May and used part of that to exercise options for shares at $5 each, when the market price was $26 a share. On the surface it all looks innocent.”
Alice paused to take a long pull from her iced tea. “What concerns me is the activity you see on the chart, the very heavy short activity and the much heavier put volume.”
Alice hit the remote clicker and started her Power Point presentation. She had done all the same work Jack had done, and more. Alice had included three more stocks, extended the timeline a year further back and used a smaller share movement to trigger a notation. The chart alone would have taken him half a day.
Alice continued, “Now, when I researched the public record I didn’t get squat, didn’t expect to. I know a couple of boys at the SEC. One of them can shoot pretty good pool. I nibbled around the edges, just looking for a little gossip about a couple of these stocks. He tightened up like you wouldn’t believe. Then I dropped a hint that I might be more accommodating to his constant attention if he gave up a little information.”
“So, there is someone you haven’t been accommodating, then?” Bob asked.
Alice laughed and said, “Sex is fun and good for you. Of course, being a cold fish sort, you wouldn’t know that, would you?”
Jack was shocked by their tone . “Stop it. You are supposed to be two of my best friends. If you can’t be civil to each other, get out. Now.” He said it very quietly. Bob and Alice knew him well enough to know he blustered for effect and went quiet when it was serious. When he didn’t say anything at all it was time to call for extraction or put on body armor.
Bob stood, quickly enough to make him wince. He bowed slightly from the waist to Alice and said, “I am very sorry, Ms. Stewart. My remarks were rude and uncalled for.”
Alice motioned him to sit, not at all embarrassed by his pain. “I know I can be real raw sometimes. Sorry, Robert. Let’s call a truce. We can be pissy with each other after we catch these sons-of-bitches.”
She reached her hand across the table, her forearm thick with muscle, the veins clearly standing out. Bob looked down at her hand for a few seconds. Then he grinned and reached across to take her hand. They held the shake longer than they needed and then both of them pulled away at the same time. For a few seconds they focused on anything but each other. They both looked confused.
Dvora’s newly acquired frown lines turned up for just a few seconds. Lee took all of it in with such serenity that he was thinking he would never, ever play poker with her again. Bob and Alice hemmed and hawed. Jack coughed. Alice didn’t seem to hear at first and then she glanced at him as if surprised that there were others in the room. Then she looked at Bob and said, with a surprised look on her face, “Oh my!”
Then she smiled, a big growing smile and said, “Oh yeah. My, my, my.”
The last sound was almost a purr. Alice took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and said. “With my inside track closed, I tried another way. I called Michael Bien, editor of the “Inside Indicator,” and asked him if he’d heard anything. Again nothing, although he’d heard some silly rumors three times removed about some foreign non-profit having inside dope on a couple of biotech stocks.”
Alice paused, looking through the notes on her laptop, every thirty-seconds or so glancing over toward Bob as if she were seeing him for the first time.
“I went back to basics to get the information you see on the charts, using a simple net search of records of news stories about the stocks. Next I built a little utility to match news to share price change, also public, and that’s what you see. Dvora, are you with us so far?”
Dvora looked down at her handouts and notes, looked at the charts again and said, “I think I’ve got it, but I won’t feel comfortable with it until I have written the numbers down myself.” She smiled a tired smile. “Just be kind and go slowly, keeping the syllables to a minimum.”
“Lee, you trade stocks, don’t you?” Alice asked.
Lee nodded and said, “I manage some the family’s money, and Jack has filled me in a little, so go on.”
Alice smiled again and zoomed in on part of the chart. “If you look at the chart from a distance it does look like insider trading, but when you pull out what are generally referred to as acts of God, like a chief scientist getting in a car wreck or something even weirder, like the CFO running off with the money, or a fire in a lab, the aberrations flatten out.”
She paused to make sure everyone was on the same page. “Now my intuition bump is nothing compared to yours Jack, but I felt like something was going on so I went a step further. The FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, in concert with other exchanges and the SEC, have a software program that is specifically designed to spot insider trading. They talk about it and they don’t. They talk about how good they are at spotting crooks, but don’t say a fucking thing, sorry Bob, about how it works.”
Alice was trying not to look at Bob. Jack saw a tinge of color around her throat. Bob’s grin looked like it was going to split his face. Alice seemed to soften as she continued.
“I know a couple of the programmers who worked on the original program, so I had a better start than most. The program tracks each individual trade. The data is then dumped, with most of the information scrubbed off, into a hell of a database. I’m not going to go into the programming aspects of it; it’s all pretty much standard decision trees. If this stock does that before this date, which is the date of a public announcement, then flag this data and reattach account info. All simple stuff, but they’re the only ones with the data about where all the trades come from. Everybody follow?”
Alice took a breath and went on. “So I accessed their data base and downloaded copies of every trade on ReWire. I then expanded the search parameters to include all trades, over five thousand shares, in all biotech stocks in the last three years. I got zip, so I dropped the barrier down a thousand shares. Still squat. Then I said, what the heck, and included all trades at a hundred shares or more. I then used the same utility to match trade data with news stories…”
Jack knew what he had heard, but it was so nuts he had to ask. “Did I just hear you say you’d hacked the FINRA’s freaking stock watch system?”
Alice looked at him like he was a six-year-old and she was trying to explain hormones.
“That’s approximately what I said. I took the data, massaged it and then I…”
“Alice. Jesus H. Jumping Christ! Do you realize we just broke who knows how many laws? Do you know what the Feds will do to us if they ever catch us? We’ll be screwed blued and tattooed, here. I can’t…”
It was Alice’s turn to interrupt. “Calm down Jack! I swear; you can be such an old lady. We didn’t do anything. If the SEC ever does track the penetration, which I highly doubt, they’ll discover it was from a workstation at the little ReWire facility in Davis over one of ReWire’s leased lines. The only way we will ever be implicated is if those boys and girls can read minds. They work for the government. You know what the quality of most of those people is.”
She had a point. He decided not to ask too many questions about methods. When he caught the men who’d nearly killed his sister, Lee, Bob, Alice, and Dvora wouldn’t want to know where he disposed of the body parts. Or, if he took the men apart before or after he killed them.
He spoke to the group as a whole and said, “What Alice is describing here is grossly illegal and, by listening to it, you have become an accessory after the fact. Did you want to forget what you heard and leave?”
Dvora shook her head very quickly and said, “If it’s important to Meghan, then I need to know. I have to know everything.”
“Lee?”
Lee said, “What? I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I don’t remember anything, and who are you people?”
Bob smiled at Alice. Alice looked down at him, her brow furrowed and jaw thrust forward. “What are you smiling at?”
Bob said, “Miss Stewart, I am smiling in pure admiration. I heard a story about a very bright fellow who is rumored to have tried to access that very same net. He is also rumored to have said, after he supposedly worked on this program for weeks, that it couldn’t be done. Other rumors say he had to step lively to cover his tracks to avoid spending time trying to explain his attempt to some folks who might work for the government.”
Jack felt like he was an observer from another planet. Alice talked quietly and calmly about hacking into a top-secret government program. In the past it wouldn’t have carried the same penalty as if it were national defense, but things were different after 9/11. The Feds had used 9/11 to brand every attempt to access a government file as a threat to national security and, as such, treason. The recent change in the laws was even worse. The government got to decide what was terrorism and could detain people without a trial and without right to a writ of habeas corpus.
Alice started in again. “There is something weird going on here. On the surface, with the trades I’ve traced, it looks like our boy Donny might be doing some minor inside trading. But, and it’s a big fat butt, somebody is playing these stocks. And, they are way, way smart. Rather than drawing attention to themselves they are having a whole lot of people, 623 I think, make the trades. They are offshore and they are freaking careful. Who knows where they are getting their information? I’d bet my favorite painting that someone is shorting and buying puts in a number of biotech stocks and they have inside knowledge on all of them. This is more your field than mine, Jack, but I’ve never seen or heard of anybody this slick. Now-any questions?”
Jack was still ruminating when Bob asked, in his quiet way, “Alice, do a number of the trades come through the International Bank of Trade and Commerce, headquartered in the Cayman Islands?”
Jack didn’t know where Bob was going but he’d done something Jack had seen very few people do before-shut Alice up. Her mouth hung open for a moment before she closed it with a snap. Alice walked over and grabbed Bob’s shoulder. He winced and tried to shrug free.
Alice loosened her grip and said, “Sorry, Bob. The answer is yes. Now Give!”
Bob reached up to pat her arm. He took a sip of his Mountain Dew, turned his stack of three-by-five cards face down on the table, placing his left hand on top of them.
“Jack, you got real nervous about the methods this fine gal used to help you. I got some answers, too, doing things just as bad, and some maybe a little worse than an admirable process of real fine data acquisition and precise manipulation of ones and zeros. Do you all want to know what I did, or do you just want to know what I know, or none of the above?”
Jack looked at Bob, sitting bland and quiet. He knew Bob hadn’t killed anybody to get the information he wanted. He knew Bob might have done almost anything else. And he knew, absolutely knew that whatever Bob did would be ethically pure. Bob’s sense of right and wrong was absolute. Like most moral men, he didn’t necessarily follow all of the laws of this overregulated land. Jack wasn’t worried about himself. If the cabal was found out, he had a ton of money to cushion any blows the legal system could dish out. Alice wasn’t as personally involved.
“I want to know,” Jack said. “Before I ask you to answer that question, Alice, are you done?”
She nodded.
“What about you, Alice? I know Bob comes across as nice, maybe even sweet, and he is, but he can be a hard man when it’s called for. Do you want to know just what he knows, or do you want to know everything?”
Alice looked back and forth between Bob and Jack. She stood up and walked over to stare at her computer as if she might find the answer to Jack’s question there, then turned back, a grim smile on her face, sat on the edge of the seat of her chair, reached across, and gently put her hand on Bob’s.
“I want to know everything.”
Dvora didn’t wait for Jack to ask her. “Ditto squared here.”
Lee said, “I’m all in.” Jack was certain he’d never play poker with her again.
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99
