Clawback (12 page)

St. Joseph’s, unlike, say, some of the uptown teaching hospitals, tends to cooperate with the police. If the detectives wanted Clara boxed up for a day, for reasons of either protection or suspicion or both, they might have mentioned it to the supervising physician.

Or maybe they were just worried about cranial trauma. I should stop being so paranoid.

“We’ll get a cab,” I said. “Let me carry that.”

“Sure.” She shifted over the carrier bag.

“Jesus, what do you have in here? Cinderblocks?”

“Documents, books. You know. Work stuff.”

“So much for the paperless office.”

Outside, the evening air was cool and damp. The rain had stopped in late afternoon, and the sky had cleared halfway. Down York Avenue, up above the lights and noise, I could make out a misty gibbous moon.

“You’re really feeling okay? No double vision? Loss of balance? Pain?”

“Just tired from being in bed all day.” She tipped her head up and breathed deep. “Feels great to be out of there, actually.”

“The reason I ask is, I’ve got something to do tonight—”

“Oh.” She brought her face back down. “No problem.”

“No, I…”

“I can make it on my own.”

“That’s not what I—that is, I mean.” Christ, I sounded like I was fucking thirteen years old.

Which was annoying. Maybe I’d gotten spoiled. Being a veteran—especially of the black-ops sort—is kind of like being a firefighter after 9/11: women tend to be really interested.

I found my tongue. “Uh, do you want to come along? With me?”

“Sure.” She smiled. “Where?”

“BitCon.”

“The big con? What?”

“No. A hacker convention.” I raised a hand, waving over a taxi from the row of them on 71st Street.

“Hackers?”

“They’re not all social misfits. And some have useful skills.”

“I bet.”

“Anyway, I need to see a guy.” I opened the cab’s door for Clara, then followed her in. “It might even be fun.”

In the backseat, Second Avenue flowing past outside the windows, I said, “You didn’t tell the police about me.”

“No.” Clara shook her head, face dim inside the cab. “I thought about it, and decided you might not want me to.”

“Thank you. It’s…helpful to me that you didn’t.”

“You had nothing to do with it. You weren’t anywhere around when they jumped me.”

The concussion. If she’d remembered I’d come to her defense, she’d have told the detectives.

I started to thank her again, but that would just sound stupid. Instead I covered the moment by leaning sideways to check the cabbie’s ID placard—a good habit even if you aren’t dodging the law, what with the
Post
reporting at least one egregious scamster behind the wheel every week. “Omar Amirana,” and the photo looked like him. So we probably weren’t headed to the convention hotel via Queens.

“What do you remember?” I asked Clara.

“Of that attack? Almost nothing.” I could see her tensing up, and I regretted the question. Her voice became higher and a little hoarser. “After we finished talking, I started off again. I’d been running for maybe thirty seconds when two men appeared from the trees. Then another. And then they started—punching me.”

“I’m sorry.” Which didn’t make much sense, and seemed inadequate to boot.

“After that, it’s just sort of blurred. Pain, I remember that, for sure. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I saw was the paramedics. One was shining a light into my eyes.”

“Did you notice what they looked like?”

“No.”

“Or anything they said? What the voices were like?”

“They were angry about the story.”

She sat straight in the cab’s seat, almost rigidly so.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “This is too painful. Forget it. Let’s talk about something else.”

“No, it’s all right. The hospital sent in a therapist—I’ve talked it out. What I have to do is stop running it over and over in my head, like a tape loop. So it doesn’t get burned in.”

“I think that’s right.” I almost reached over, to take her hand or something. But I hesitated, and the moment was lost.

“Never mind.” Clara shook her head, this time as if to clear it. “Change of topic?”

“Sure.” Safer ground. The mood shifted.

“Akelman, Sills and Marlett.”

“I saw your posts.”

“There’s more to it.”

“Of course. Who killed them?”

“No.” She braced herself as the cab turned a corner, then relaxed somewhat. “Start with, what did they have in common? Finance, sure, but that job description covers a lot of ground.”

“Especially around here.”

“I spent a few hours digging up performance data. They weren’t just three money managers. They were three
really bad
money managers. Each one lost tons of money before they died.”

“I might have heard that.”

“
Tons
of money.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “After the S& L crisis—like twenty-five years ago, when there was still some pretense of the rule of law—thousands of crooked executives were prosecuted. Hundreds actually did hard time. You know how many prosecutions the Justice Department has initiated
this
time around? After Wall Street drove the entire world economy into the ground?”

“In fact, I—”

“None. Not a single one.”

“Really?”

“Zero,” she said. “And if someone’s upset about that statistic and is trying to even things up, well, all I can say is the cheering section is going to be huge.”

“Big story, huh?”

“Massive!”

“I’ll see it in the paper tomorrow?”

“The paper? It’s all
over
the internet right now. Fox Business might run a segment. I had a call from
Hong
Kong.”

Ganderson was not going to be happy. I hoped he didn’t have any guns lying around when he started hearing the reports.

Clara touched my arm. “Why are you smiling?”

“Nothing.” We were in one of Mayor Bloomberg’s hybrid taxis. I’d never noticed how small the rear seats were. Clara and I were bumped right up against each other. “Nothing,” I said again. “Just thinking.”

She waited. “About?”

“Everyone is figuring this as a vengeance play, right?
Death Wish
on Wall Street.”

“Like I said.” She frowned. “You have to admit it makes sense. Motivation-wise.”

“There’s a counterparty on every trade,” I said. “
Every
trade.”

Silence for a moment. Omar slowed for a stoplight, then accelerated as it turned green.

“I don’t believe it.” Clara’s voice was soft.

“Congress has some trouble with the idea, but you can profit just as easily on the way down as up. You
know
that.”

“Holy jump.” She went from zero to sixty in half a second, scrabbling
through her bag for the laptop. “You’re serious. It’s not Charles Bronson, it’s Gordon Gekko.”

So she was an old movie fan, too. “Could be.”

“Killing these guys just to puff up returns.
Awesome
.”

“Well—”

“How can I verify it? The commodities trader—okay, I could see that. But a mutual fund? Too liquid to matter, I’d think.”

“Sills was batting a thousand a few years ago. So Freeboard closed the fund. Her death caused a lot more volatility than you might expect.”

That is, the number of shares was fixed, unlike most funds. As a result, their value could rise and fall more steeply on what the economists like to call exogenous events—like, say, her murder.

“Who’s doing it? Give me a name!”

“Whoa, hold on. I’m just speculating.”

“No, I’m convinced. Come on, I’ve got to get this out before anyone else does.” Clara had snapped open her ultrabook and was tapping the keys impatiently, waiting for it to boot.

I’d begun to regret my bush-beating strategy. If there was a murderous conspiracy behind the deaths, Clara’s reporting would help flush them out—and could make them nervous, too, which might mean mistakes, all good for me. But they’d gone after Clara much faster and harder than I’d expected.

The warning attack, on her, was already too much blowback.

“Get some facts first,” I said. “Okay? The story will be that much better if you’ve got proof, not just speculation. Look, it might be total coincidence after all. People die every day. Plain old law of
averages means you’ll always see some suspicious, but completely spurious, correlations.”

“There’s no such thing.” She glanced at me. “‘Law of averages.’ Nothing but innumerate superstition.”

Somehow my hand had come to rest on her shoulder. “That vocabulary. Wow.”

Her eyes were about six inches from mine. She started to say something, then just smiled instead. The whole world narrowed in a great
whoosh,
and all I could see was her face. All I could hear was her breath. All I could feel was her leg, pressed against my knee, and her shoulder, under my hand.

Time stopped—

—and so did the cab. Abruptly pulling over to the curb.

“Flagstone Marriot,” said Omar.

B
itCon had spilled over onto the sidewalk.

Bemused bellmen watched as groups of twentysomethings smoked, argued and shoved odd bits of technical flotsam at one another. Those who weren’t hunched over their phones, that is. People wandered in and out the revolving doors, new arrivals with their laptops and rucksacks, bored attendees taking a break from the sessions. A couple of young guys were selling something, maybe their startup, pushing business cards onto strangers.

It could have been any midtown convention—orthodontists or bond salesmen or philatelists—except for the general scruffiness of the attendees. And the death-skull RFID badges. And all the portable hardware, including at least two augmented-reality headsets and one guy with a flexible keyboard taped onto his jacket sleeve.

“Your friend is here?” Clara seemed amused but dubious.

“Acquaintance. Yeah, he’s around somewhere.”

“Are you registered?”

“No.”

Indeed no. The authorities were here, too, undercover and
otherwise. In the old days, at DefCon or HOPE a decade ago, they weren’t very good at blending in, and spot-the-fed was easy. Now the three-letter-agency crowd was experienced enough—or they’d simply hired enough of the hackers themselves—to conduct their surveillance more successfully. No way was I risking the microcameras and electronic profiling we’d encounter just walking into the ballroom.

“Hendrick doesn’t come into the city often,” I said. “And he barely leaves the hotel when he does. We’ll find his room.”

“Hendrick?”

“Dutch, I’m pretty sure. That annoying accent they have.”

“He’s a hacker?”

“No. Not like them.” I pointed at two teenagers with BitCon T-shirts, each holding a tablet with one hand, typing with the other, and not saying a word. “Hacking isn’t just about computers. Phone phreaks, biopunks, digital artists, you name it—they’re all here.”

“And Hendrick’s part of that.”

“In a way.”

“So what does he do?”

“Locks.” We pushed through a side door, and I looked around the Flagstone’s lobby. “He’s very, very good at locks.”

I found a house phone and called the front desk—yes, it was only thirty feet away, but why not make it hard on whoever might look at the security videos someday? Hendrick, unworldly naïf that he was, had registered under his own name, which kept it simple. The operator connected me, and a woman answered.

“Hendrick’s busy.” Noise in the background—voices, music, sudden laughter.

“Tell him it’s Silas.”

“Whatever.” She hung up.

I looked at Clara. “They’re having a party, I think.”

“Are we invited?”

“More or less.”

“So…”

“She forgot to give me the room number.”

Clara nodded. “Let me try.”

She took the phone, went through the operator, and waited through what must have been seven or eight rings.

“Hendrick? No? Who are you? Listen, I found Hendrick’s, like, backpack on the floor down here. I dunno, he left it on the table or something, it was just lying there. Some stuff was falling out, like tools and all, but I put it back in. Well, yeah, I think he’d like it back, that’s why I’m
calling
, okay? You want me to bring it up?”

She put the receiver down. “Fifty-four-eighteen.”

“Hey, that was pretty good.”

“Journalism 101.”

“They teach social engineering in J-school?”

“No one will ever tell you what you want to know unless you ask.”

“A profound insight.” We walked over to the elevator bank.

The fifth floor hallway was quiet, though we could hear the party noise closer to Hendrick’s door.

The woman who opened it wore an orange badge on the chain around her neck, identifying her as one of BitCon’s organizers. Apart from that she looked like a community-college student in from Great Neck—straight blond hair, Hollister jeans, a rumpled linen jacket over a plunging purple silk top.

“Silas,” I said. “We just spoke.”

“He does know you.” She sounded like this had been a surprise. “You have his backpack?”

“Backpack?”

“Never mind.”

Inside a half-dozen people stood around the room’s desk, which had been pulled away from the wall. Two men were seated, across from each other, working intently. Brass, tools and mechanical parts littered the desktop. Music thumped from a docked iPod. Bottles and beer cans and half-empty cups seemed to occupy every spare surface.

“Hendrick,” I said to Clara, pointing. Hendrick, who’d grown out his vandyke to an even more impressive point and apparently curled the mustache ends with wax, looked up long enough to glance at me, then went back to the lockset in his hand.

“Seven minutes,” said a guy standing next to us, “and forty seconds, so far.”

“What are they working?”

“Medeco. Right out of the factory box.”

I made an impressed sort of grunt.

“It’s a race?” Clara asked.

“Unofficial,” said the bystander. “The public competition is tomorrow. They’re just having fun.”

Each of the seated men held an unmounted cylinder in one hand, with the tension wrench, and manipulated a pick in the keyway with the other. Hendrick’s motions were sort of jerky, the pick moving in staccato twitches, while his opponent had a more deliberate style.