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Chapter 21
DealMaker had the best telecommunications equipment good money could buy. Their equipment was better than private citizens could buy legally. The people who acquired, set up, and ran this equipment and software were even better. Mistakes happened and protocol required Jack to check. “I’m sorry to hear about Ms. Harding’s illness. May I speak to Olga?”
He had let Mike know that he understood the line was tapped and asked Mike to confirm it.
“Ms. Boginskaya is also unavailable, I am afraid. Shall I transfer you to her voicemail, Sir?”
“That’s okay, Mike. I’ll call a little later.” He hung up and started to remove the bug. He stopped and thumped himself on the forehead with the heel of his left hand. He must be getting simple. Accurate information is the most valuable thing on the planet-except for one thing. Disinformation planted and relied on is more valuable still. Somebody had given him a pipeline directly into their organization’s brain. Even if he didn’t know who “they” were, he could still use the pipeline. He could plant information, watch for reactions and figure out who “they” were. Then he could use information to damage them.
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He had a window of a week, maybe. Anyone in his business had their rooms swept at least once a week. He could act real stupid because of his sister and maybe get ten days. Better count on seven or less.
So, Jack, who is it? Maybe it was some overeager journalist. This threat would be the easiest to deal with. Most business journalists had journalism degrees. They couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a percale sheet. If it was the Feds, his life was going to become annoyingly boring. He hardly ever broke laws, other than speed limits, that he was aware of. But, there were so many laws and rules and regulations he was always in violation of something. Even if caught, most of the time it wasn’t so bad. He would pay some bullshit penalty or have to waste a few hours with the lawyers.
If the bug was standard commercial espionage they were also fine. DealMaker’s niche was difficult for anyone else to fill. Yet. The partnership pulled down deals too small to go public and too relationship-intensive for most venture capitalists to compete.
The big boys were now using DealMaker as a bird dog, spotting opportunities. The partnership would do a small deal, proving a concept was workable, and public companies would steal the idea and try to scale up.
Jack’s brain felt as if it were made out of syrup. That wasn’t right. Syrup was sweet and his thoughts were far from sweet. He kept thinking about his sister and her asshole boss. His guts were telling him the tap was connected to them, maybe because he wanted the connection to be there. The connection was too easy, too obvious. He didn’t believe in easy or obvious. He needed to talk to someone smart.
Just then someone very smart walked out of the bathroom wearing a bathrobe. Hong Lee looked very good in a bathrobe. This one was a little too big, belted loosely, open all the way to the belt with nothing on underneath the bathrobe that he could see, except wonderful, soft skin. She walked to where he was sitting and straddled him to reveal he was completely right about what was underneath the bathrobe. He held her and reached over to the desk and picked up the note pad and pen. He tore one sheet off the pad and placed it on the hard surface of the table in case he forgot to throw the next six sheets on the pad away. He wrote:
the room is bugged
She pursed her lips, grabbed the pen and wrote so neatly that it looked like a penmanship lesson from long ago: let’s give them something to listen to. Fuck me. Now!
It seemed like a wonderful idea then and even better a few minutes later.
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JACK WALKED back to the hospital to check on Meghan. According to one of the nurses, she was holding her own, and consolidating her gains.
“What gains?” he asked.
“She’s alive, isn’t she?” was the question he received as an answer.
If being alive was good, how close to dead had she been? He walked into the room that he and Dvora were renting. Dvora had crashed again. When he checked his texts he saw that she wanted to talk. He set the text up to tell her to meet him at the office before dinner and didn’t send it, wanting to make sure the text didn’t wake her.
He walked into Meghan’s room and said hi to the nurse he first thought of as Attila. His name was Cameron Morrison, RN, BSN. The guy looked more like a bouncer than a nurse, with some interesting scars on his face and hands. When Cameron touched Meghan, it was with such overwhelming tenderness that Jack couldn’t help be moved..
“How is she doing?”
Cameron looked down at Meghan, smoothing an invisible wrinkle in her blanket and smiled. His voice said somewhere around South Carolina when he answered. “We are all very proud of your sister and the job our team has done. She looks so delicate, but damn, she must be tough as an old boot. She was beat as bad as I’ve ever seen anybody beat, and then ran into some bad luck with the allergy, and pneumonia and all. Just look at her!” The nurse glanced up at the machines. “Her vitals are great and she is healing about twice as fast as a normal person. Do you have the same kind of genetics?”
Jack smiled, thinking Yes! She is fixing herself! “Yeah, we have always been quick healers. Good thing too because we both share clumsy. Is there any way I could get just a few minutes alone with her?”
Cameron said, “Nope. Hospital rules, union rules and, in this case, the rules make sense. Sorry. I’ll sit and watch the monitor for five minutes. But, I have to listen, and at the end of those five minutes I will have to check her thoroughly. She is still very much at risk. I hope you understand?”
“No worries. Can I hold her hand?”
“That you can do, if you go over to that sink and wash your hands in water nearly too hot with more soap that you usually use for forty seconds. Or, you can glove up. I’ll show you how. And, keep your mask on.”
Jack did as he was told and then knelt next to the bed and held Meghan’s hand. He hoped what he was doing looked a like praying. He steadied his breathing, cleared his mind, and reached out with his inner touch. They had never had telepathy like in science fiction, like words in their heads. But, they just knew things and when they touched it was always easier to know. He reached out and she was there and she was scared and trying so hard to heal and come back and she hated the painkillers, but knew that she was really badly hurt and knew that the pain might be too much if she didn’t have them and HELP ME!”
I’m here sweetie, like always he thought over and over again.
You are doing so well, we are so proud. Dvora loves you and I love you and you are doing so well, he said again, and again and again.
Cameron said, “I’ve got to check her again now.”
He told his sister that he was leaving, would be back soon and often. He thanked Cameron for his care, and walked out thinking that when he found the men who’d nearly killed his sister, he was going make sure he didn’t botch the job.
It took him long minutes to control his anger on the walk. He slipped in the side door and snuck into one of the offices, not wanting to talk with anyone face-to-face just yet. He fired up his contact management software. His first call was to a friend in the trust department of what used to be Merrill Lynch.
“Mary St. Clair’s office,” Greta said as she picked up Mary’s phone.
Greta had worked for him years before at Solomon.
“Jack, I was so sorry to hear about Meghan. You got my card?”
“Yes, thank you. Even though she is still unconscious, she is doing much, much better. I will keep you posted.”
Greta patched him through to Mary St. Claire.
“Jack, my spies tell me Meghan is better, although still unconscious. Is that true?”
“Yes, and thank you for the voicemail, and the flowers you sent to the children’s ward on her behalf. I need to check up on ReWire.”
“You are checking ReWire to hedge her bets, or because you know something?”
No matter how much she cared she was a portfolio manager first.
“Hedging bets Mary. You have to know that most of her wealth is in their stock.”
His questions made sense and, if he were she, he would still be suspicious. There was a small, measured silence before she answered.
“I don’t know much about ReWire, or any of the other smaller genetic engineering companies. We have a sector fund in that area, but I don’t manage it. Do you want me to talk to the fund manager and get back to you, or do you want to talk to him directly?”
Jack wanted to talk to her fund manager, but by the end of the day a whole bunch of people were going to connect him with ReWire. If he were a betting man, he’d bet on at least double trading volume on ReWire no matter how quietly he worked.
“Would you talk to him, Mary? Please, keep this as quiet as you can? I’m going to be on the phone all day so the stock’s going to be in play.”
“I’ll be sneakier than sneaky. You should talk to Harry Bernstein at Fidelity Select Small Cap Bio. You want me to call him and ask him to call you?”
“Just check out ReWire as if it’s coming from you, please.” They played catch-up for a while and then Mary invited him to a dinner party a month out and he agreed to attend. He sent a text to Dvora and got on the phone. Thirty-five phone calls later, it was almost time to take Dvora to dinner.
He managed to talk to six people who made decisions, numerous administrative and personal assistants, secretaries, and mostly voice mail. It was a part of the game he knew well and was very good at. His early years as a grunt stockbroker made him immune to the drudgery of smiling and dialing. He stood with his Mac on a stand and made his calls. Standing was way better on this back and made his voice more natural.
While he was making a call he’d slide to the window with his contact management software. When he was on hold he would slide to his search engine or his floor-trading program. Jack duplicated the work Alice and Bob were doing, but he had a big edge in connections.
He checked voice mail again while he was on hold. Eleven messages were from politicians. They were extremely sorry about Meghan. They would personally make sure the investigation had the priority it deserved. The Lieutenant Governor called, former Mayor Willie, and current Mayor Idiot, all of whom he had voted against.
The assemblyman from his district in Tiburon finally maxed his gag reflex. This man was an avowed communist. His parents left the moron more than fifty million dollars. The servant of the people had pissed all of it away except the ten million held in irrevocable trust. The man could barely live on the $400K a year he received from that.
“Jack, Arturo Mendoza here. I’m so sorry to hear about Meghan. She’s quite a girl. I’m going to personally see to it that the police do everything in their power to bring the men who did this to justice. They obviously need intense counseling to help them out of denial and into recovery. I have put three calls in to this Captain Yang. He has returned none of them. I am quite upset.”
At that point Jack could hear Mendoza ineffectively try to cover the mouthpiece of his phone, laughing at something said in the background. How smart could a man be if he couldn’t use a mute button?
Art started back in with a different tone. “Oh, before I forget, we’re having a little fund raiser for the People’s Council on Executive Compensation. That’s 5:00 PM Thursday, at the park in Petaluma. Bring your checkbook.”
If Jack was getting this much crap, what must Yan’s life be like? It took him ten minutes before he found someone with big enough balls to put him through to the Captain. The station’s phone system played a loop on home security along with their pabulum hold music.
Professional burglars look for changes in routine. If you have a lawn that looks like a green at Pebble Beach and it turns into a rough, you raise a red flag. Any evidence of neglect is like waving a sign that says, “Rob Me! Please!” Some of our citizens install alarm systems and do not use them. Burglars watch as you come home from shopping. If they see you open the door and immediately start to unload groceries without spending the time to disarm your alarm, the criminals know you do not use your system.
Captain Yan eventually answered, breaking him out of his surprised interest. “What may I do for you, Mr. McDonald?” His voice was tired, more than tired, without the usual inflection of friendliness.
Jack loaded his conversation with the same formal double-talk Yan usually used. “Captain Yan. I know you are extremely busy. I have been interrupted by calls from well-meaning political types who all assure me they are going to personally make sure the investigation goes as smoothly as possible. Knowing these ladies and gentlemen as I do, I am quite certain their direct involvement in anything would cause it to run as un-smoothly as possible. I am very seriously considering making my views on this transparent. I will make it clear to everyone that any ‘help’ or interference from anyone outside your department will be taken as a personal affront to me, and Ms. Schacter. I think we could make people understand that we would see this interference as unintentional attempts to sabotage your investigation. I will let them know my fervent wish-which is for you to be left completely sovereign to conduct the investigation as you see fit. My thoughts run along the lines of a press release to help deliver this message. What do you think of my idea?”
Yan’s tone was appreciably warmer, but just as tired when he said, “Mr. McDonald, I want to commend you on your very clear thinking. It is unusual for one so personally involved in a crime, as a victim or member of the family of a victim, to have this clarity of thought. This will certainly help me spend more of my time doing what I do best, which is leading and managing investigations.”
Jack signed off and went back over the charts he’d assembled on the suspect stocks. If it were obvious, even the Feds would have spotted any insider trading. The database was complicated and he couldn’t grasp it clearly enough when he graphed it on his laptop. He printed the graph and it told him nothing. He knew it was old-school, but he needed a big white board, some colored dry erase markers and different colored sticky notes.
Dvora dropped by the office for an update on ReWire. He had one more call to make before they could leave. After listening to O’Hare’s second message, he scheduled his call back to O’Hare last just to pull the man’s chain.
Jack, Donald O’Hare, President of ReWire. Thanks for the email updates on Meghan’s condition. We are all so concerned about her. I am sorry to call at a time like this, but the company is at a very critical stage of development on one of our core projects. Meghan has vital development data on our workstation in her home office that we must retrieve. It is imperative you call me immediately so that we may arrange to pick up our data.
When Jack listened to O’Hare’s first message he was annoyed. He was more annoyed when he listened to O’Hare’s second message. Then he listened three more times to make sure. O’Hare was concerned and a little annoyed. Jack was sure a good voice stress analysis of the second message would show that O’Hare was lying. But the man’s over-riding emotion was fear.
O’Hare’s admin kept him on hold for three minutes and thirty-six seconds before O’Hare answered.
“Sorry about the wait. I was in one of the labs and it took my secretary a while to track me down. Thanks for returning my call, Jack. How’s Meg doing?” he asked.
Jack told him and shut up, letting the silence work him. The timer on his contact management software said Donald waited for twenty-one seconds before he asked, “Are you still there, Jack?”
Dvora came back in. He muted the phone and quickly explained. He made O’Hare ask him again before he answered, “Yes,” and waited some more.
He put O’Hare on speakerphone to piss him off even more.
“Jack, I need your help. We are at a critical stage of level-three research. I won’t bother you with details; hell, I hardly understand them myself. Meghan was going over this piece of research on our workstation at her home, as she often does. We need the files. I can have a few of our best people over to her place on Nob Hill first thing tomorrow morning. When would be a good time for you to meet them, nine or nine-thirty?”
“Donald, is that your preference, or do you prefer Don or Donny?” Jack asked.
“I don’t care. Would later, perhaps ten or ten-thirty, be a better time?” O’Hare asked, hardly sounding pissed off.
“Well, Donny, you do have a problem. I would be more than happy to go to my sister’s home to retrieve something for you, but it’s not my decision to make. Why don’t you use your main files? Surely she has only a copy of the research. The original notes would be archived and there would be copies of her staff’s working papers, wouldn’t there?”
There was another long silence. “I’m embarrassed, Jack. We had problems with our mainframe. There is a chance, and this must remain confidential, that it is industrial sabotage. We are reconstructing the files, but time is of the essence. We need our files. They are company property. I understand you are upset now, we all are, anyone would be, but it’s vital we have our files.”
Jack let silence work on Donald again before answering, “Donny, I’d like to help you with your problem, but I can’t. When Meghan is well enough, I am sure she will agree to let you look at the files. Oh, you could ask her partner, Dvora. When I see her again, I’ll tell her you called. I’m sorry, but I can’t really think about anything except Meghan’s health right now. Take care.”
Dvora waited until he finally got O’Hare off the line and said, “I don’t get it. Meghan was very upset because the research was a sure dead-end. She had harsh words about it with O’Hare just last week.”
He waited for her to work it through. Dvora looked better. She’d done a few dancer’s workouts in the room, using the bar in bathroom and made a couple of quick visits to the pool. The whites of her eyes shone with the light-blue tint of perfect health. She watched him watching her.
“You think O’Hare knows the research is a dead-end, but he’s pretending it isn’t to talk up the company, maybe to prop up the stock price?” she asked.
“Why else would he talk up a dead-end research project unless it was to cook the rumor mill on the stock?”
She didn’t answer the question, but did ask one of her own. “Did Meghan talk to you about the research she had performed outside the company?”
Meghan read his blank look and continued. “Meg had one of her ideas, you know the ones that even other brilliant people in her field can’t comprehend. I sure as hell didn’t understand it. She pitched it to Donald, expecting him to blank-check it like always because she is such a money machine for the company. She waited a few days, thought she’d caught him in the right mood and asked again. He said “no” again.”
“Meghan pointed to a clause in her contract that said ReWire had first right of refusal and after that she was free to pursue any line of research. Donald got really pissed and tried to intimidate her. He talked lawyers. You know Meghan. She hates to be backed into a corner by anybody and especially hates people trying to play the lawyer card. She told him to lawyer up. He did and the lawyers told him he was SOL. She was very excited about the results from the independent lab’s trials.”
She looked puzzled again as she said, “She went back to O’Hare again, telling him that she had done research on the process and he still wasn’t interested.”
As she talked he kept his face free of expression. He would bet US to Zimbabwe dollars that the research was on one of the missing laptops.
She paused, still puzzled and then asked, “If you blow the whistle, the share price is sure to drop, isn’t it?”
“The stock will get hammered. I can hedge Meghan’s position. It would be as illegal as what I think our boy Donny’s doing, but it would work. I’ll short the stock through off-shore assigns before we rat Donny out, but my guess is, at best, Meghan’s only going to get fifty cents or so on the dollar. And, what about her coworkers? Most of the ones in upper management are, like her, working for slave-wages, waiting for their payoff in stock. If Donald is playing loose with the earnings, then he is screwing them too. I can’t take care of everybody. What about you? I know you took a big position in the stock a few years ago.”
Dvora smiled her Mona Lisa smile and said, “When ReWire made me too nervous, I started selling off. I didn’t tell Meghan about it, didn’t want to start a fight. She’d always insisted that we keep our finances separate, I think because my net worth was so much higher than hers, at least when we met. I watched the results of the portfolio you insisted that Meghan put a good chunk of her money into. You didn’t know it, but you made me a little bit richer over the last three years, in spite of the market.”
They walked back to the hospital to check on Meghan. She now looked as if she just might live. Her bruises had subsided to a dull yellow. Her eyes were still black from the broken nose, but even that was starting to fade. Meghan had always been too thin from forgetting to eat. Her muscle tone was good from Tai Chi and Yoga, but she’d been stringy. Now she was filling out. Meghan’s presence, that mystical, playful spirit that surrounded her, was still asleep. He hoped more than anything that Meghan’s lightning-bug mind would wake soon. He missed talking to his super smart sister.
Meghan had moved quickly up the Glasgow Coma Scale. She babbled as she came out of dreams. The doc said there was no way of knowing when she’d progress further. The doc said that physically, Meghan was stable and amazingly strong. Jack still felt guilty moving the five blocks to the Mark.
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