In for a Ruble (8 page)

Leitz pushed another button on the phone and looked at me. “I suppose my e-mail is compromised along with everything else.”

“Afraid so.”

I thought he was going to punch the phone, but he held back. The voice from the speaker became increasingly agitated.

“Sebastian!? Are you there? What’s going on? We need to do something, dammit! The stocks are trading … Sebastian? SEBASTIAN?!”

Leitz pushed a button gently. “I’m here, Julia. I’ve got some other issues at the moment.”

“What other issues? What are you talking about? We’ve got to respond. We can’t give them the whole day. The press will—”

“I’ve called a meeting for eleven thirty, here. Bankers, lawyers, you too. We’ll review where we stand.”

“Eleven thirty? Where we stand? That’s two hours from now. We can’t wait. We can’t—”

“Eleven thirty.” Leitz’s tone cut off further argument. “I assume you can make it?”

“I … Shit. I’ve got … Dammit. There’s … Hold on.”

The phone went quiet. Leitz said to us, “My sister, who is also my PR adviser on this deal, lives life in a permanent state of high anxiety and overcommitment.” He pulled a paper from the shirt pocket under his sweater and held it out to me. “This happened just before you arrived.”

I took the paper and retreated back to a safe distance. It was a Dow Jones story, timed at 7:48
A.M.

$67.5 Billion Bid for TV Networks

A new consortium has offered $67.5 billion for two TV networks, topping a $62 billion offer from a group led by hedge fund manager Sebastian Leitz.

A spokeswoman for the Leitz group declined to comment and Leitz himself did not return calls to his office.

Wall Street sources, who have been following the situation, say they expect a full-scale bidding war to develop.

“They’re not making any more TV networks,” one institutional shareholder said. “We haven’t seen the end of this. I expect the price to go sky high.”

The market appears to agree. Shares of both networks’ parent companies were sharply higher in premarket trading.

Julia Leitz came back on the line, shattering the brief silence.

“I can do eleven thirty. I may be a few minutes late. But I still think—”

“Good. See you then,” Leitz said and disconnected. He looked at the two of us.

“I can’t operate this way.”

“They already know about your eleven-thirty meeting,” I said. “They’ll be looking to see what you do after that.”

“I’ll tag something coming out of the meeting,” Foos said. “Give them the afternoon to pick it up, we’ll see where it goes.”

“You could try spreading some misinformation,” I said. “Although my altercation last night says they’ll be on the lookout for that.”

Leitz shook his head. “Too many people involved in this thing. Let’s just get back to normal so I can function.”

I handed back the Dow Jones story. “I take it this wasn’t a knockout punch.”

He shook his head. “The margins got thinner, but no, not a knockout. Which begs the question of what they’re up to.” He looked at me. “This is the deal of a lifetime for me. I never dreamed I’d be in this position. I’m not going to go down easily, in fact, I don’t plan to go down at all.”

“I hesitate to say this, but you’ve made an assumption there’s no evidence to support.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You assume that whoever placed the bug is working for a rival bidder.”

“That seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

“Possible, maybe even probable. But, as I said, no evidence.”

“What else, then?”

“You’re looking at this from your perspective. That’s not where the bad guy’s coming from. He—or she—is doing what he’s doing for his own reasons. His perspective, hers maybe, not yours, is the one that’s relevant.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Only what I said. Be careful about assumptions.”

“IT’S AN OPPOSING BIDDER!”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to win the argument, and I didn’t really care much whether I did.

“I need your help,” Leitz said.

“I’ve done what we agreed.”

“I know. But you can find the bastards. I’ll take it from there.”

“Not that easy.”

Foos felt my ambivalence. “That wasn’t the agreement, Sebastian.”

“Find the bastards,” he said. “Just tell me who they are. Give me a name.”

“Arrogance talking,” I said.

I expected fire but I got a hard, level stare from the kidney pools.

“A good trader always knows what he can get from a deal,” Leitz said.

“A good card player knows when the price of seeing the next card is too high.”

“I’m prepared to pay for the help I’m asking. State your price.”

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because I was already in. Maybe because I knew I wasn’t going to allow Nosferatu to get away with beating me up. Maybe because a guy like Leitz gets the competitive juices flowing. I was in the game, and I wasn’t about to fold, especially when I held a couple of aces, including one up the sleeve. Maybe just because I finally was intrigued and didn’t have anything better to do for the next few days. Or maybe because I too, found myself in a position to get something I never dreamed of. I might have told Leitz those are good times to think twice, go home and sleep it over.

I put down my next bet. “One million dollars. And the Malevich.”

That caught him by surprise. The kidney pools widened. He started to shake his head.

I said, “Hear me out.”

He stopped.

“One million dollars, cash—if I’m successful. Plus, the Malevich—four months, one third of the year, on loan, in perpetuity. You own it, I get to enjoy it, part of the time. You sell it, that’s your prerogative, but I get ten percent as compensation for loss of use.”

The laugh that exploded across the room almost blew both Foos and me through the frosted glass. Foos steadied his feet and smiled.

When the laugh softened to a chuckle, Leitz said, “You’d make a good trader. You’ve got creativity—and chutzpah. But you’re trying to take advantage of having me over the proverbial barrel.”

“And when you’re about to clip some guy on the other side, you stop, revisit the Golden Rule, tell yourself that’s not the Christian thing to do, and walk away?”

He was still smiling. “Touché. But what you want is too complicated. The insurance alone…” He shook his big head. “It’ll never work.”

Mathematicians are good card players because they can calculate odds. They’re not always the best psychologists.

“That’s it then. Good luck.” I looked at Foos. “See you back downtown.”

I was out on the trading floor when Leitz called, “Wait!”

I returned to the door.

“You’d walk out on a million dollars?” he said.

“A prospective million. I have to find the guys who bugged you to earn it. That won’t be easy, as I said. But, yes, and here’s why: My last client paid me seven hundred thousand to find his daughter, who was never really missing to begin with, and now wishes he never met me. His wife was murdered, the girl’s a borderline basket case, and he’s got one foot in the slammer, although that’s not my fault. It ended badly for everybody—including me. I lost something more valuable than money. The fee wasn’t enough. I’m sorry to tell you, this has a similar feel.”

I had to hand it to him, he didn’t hesitate. I think he was almost smiling. “Okay. But, the Malevich…?”

“You didn’t listen to what I just said. I’ve already been beaten up once on your nickel. I’m going to be compensated on my terms in ways that satisfy me, however difficult and complicated. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’m sorry. One more thing, while we’re at it—if you really want my help, I go about things as I see fit. You hire me, I’m in to the finish. I talk to whomever I want. I find whomever bugged your computers, I earn my fee. What happens with your TV bid, or your other affairs—that’s your concern.”

He hesitated this time. I turned to go.

“Stop,” Leitz said.

I turned back one more time.

He said, “Tell me this. You charged the last guy seven hundred thousand. You want a million from me, plus the Malevich. What’s the difference?”

My turn to smile. “The last guy didn’t try to crush my legs under his conference table. You get a hazard premium.”

CHAPTER
7

I should have kept walking. To think I could find the guys who bugged Leitz was my own brand of hubris. To think I could find them without suffering consequences was hubris squared. Then again, to think I began to understand what I was getting into was blind stupid. We have another proverb—every fox praises his own tail.

Foos said, “You still playing him?”

“Some. This was an inside job. The data trail you found. The guy who bribed the cleaner knew the office layout, told him where to place the bug. Employee, client, family, friend, someone Leitz does business with.”

Leitz hadn’t wanted to hear any of that. I’d mostly dismissed the employee possibility on the grounds that he or she wouldn’t need the risk of involving a third party. Leitz confirmed he’d only lost two staff in the last year, neither on bad terms. Clients rarely, if ever, visited the office. Vendors were a possibility, but Nosferatu would have had to obtain a list from somewhere. I asked about the bankers and lawyers descending at 11:30.

“All trusted advisers,” he said.

“All potentially for sale. Put the trading floor and all offices off limits. Have them escorted from the elevator to the conference room and back again.”

He didn’t like that idea either, but he said he’d follow my advice.

I broached the subject of family.

“IMPOSSIBLE!” he shouted, temperature headed skyward. “Don’t even … None of my…”

“Any of them pissed off at you?”

“OF COURSE NOT!”

That answer came too fast.

“Anybody under pressure, financial, personal or otherwise?”

“NO!”

Much too fast. I shook my head. “You’re not being candid. That’s not going to help them or me.”

“Chill, man,” Foos said to his friend. “All in the Big Dick anyway.”

Leitz looked from me to him. Big Dick is Foos’s nickname for what he calls the Data Intelligence Complex, the network of computers and databases—government and private—that store just about everything we do that involves anything electronic, from our purchases and paydays to our dental records and divorces. It is all there—death and taxes too.

Leitz looked back and forth between us again.

“We are a normal family,” he said, spacing every word. “We’ve had … adversities, like any other family, but we’ve overcome them. Nobody would…”

He left the sentence hanging and just shook his head at the impossibility of familial duplicity. Even geniuses have a hard time facing the prospect of betrayal.

“Sometimes, people don’t have any choice,” I said. “They’re forced to do things they don’t want to. Anybody have legal troubles, marital problems, need money?”

“NO!”

“I assume they’ve all been here, to the office, at one time or another?”

“Of course. I mean, I guess so. Why not? Why is this relevant?”

I let it go. Better to have this conversation later, when I had some idea of who might have set him up.

Back downtown, Foos, the Basilisk, and I went to work. Named by its creator after the mythological beast that was supposed to be the most poisonous on the planet, this Basilisk is hardwired into the Big Dick and is for sure the most poisonously invasive data-mining system in captivity. Fortunately, Foos doesn’t let many people use it. I grew up in a society that had no privacy. The state—more accurately the Communist Party—had the self-proclaimed right to find out anything it wanted to about anyone it chose, by any means it felt necessary. For twenty years as an officer of the KGB, I served as an instrument of state and party, although most of my time was spent spying on foreigners. Other people looked after the locals. I left Russia after communism collapsed under the weight of its own corruption and incompetence, and I moved to New York in part to live in a place where individual privacy is respected.

Wrong.

I soon found out how easy it is to acquire all kinds of information—phone calls, purchases, financial records, criminal records, mortgage, tax and car payments, salaries, employment histories, almost everything except maybe how someone voted in the last election—just by asking and paying a fee. Companies like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, and Seisint maintain voluminous files, fifty billion of them, on virtually every one of us, in the name of more effective marketing and occasionally combating crime or terrorism. Foos was one of the czars of the Big Dick for several years, with a company that employed an earlier generation of the Basilisk, until he realized he was propagating evil. He sold his firm, endowed STOP with half the proceeds, and designed the current Basilisk to be more powerful than anything that came before. He now fights a guerilla war against the entire Data Intelligence Complex, which has resulted in several TV and newspaper exposés, Congressional hearings and a couple of laws that strengthened consumers’ rights and infuriated his former clients. He laughs out loud whenever he’s reminded of how mad he makes them.

A few years ago, when things were slow and I needed to get away for a while, we made a wager—lunch at Peter Luger in Brooklyn where they grill steaks big enough to feed a Russian village. I bet I could leave town with two days’ headstart, and the Basilisk couldn’t find me. He laughed and said he’d be ordering a porterhouse. In the end, we both won.

I got a lockbox for the trunk of my car, filled it with cash and took off without saying good-bye on the twenty-seventh of September, figuring whatever head start I could get on the Basilisk was worth it. I drove upstate, then west into Pennsylvania and Ohio, sticking to back roads. Highways have tollbooths. Tollbooths have cameras. Those cameras are connected to databases. It’s still primitive, but the Basilisk has photo-recognition capability.

I made leisurely progress westward, following Horace Greeley’s advice, even if I was no longer young, staying at out-of-the-way motels and eating at diners and mom-and-pop restaurants where nobody takes much interest in who’s passing through—unless they stay. I’d done four tours of duty in the States with the KGB, two in New York and one each in Washington and San Francisco. I’d rarely left the coasts during any of them, and when I did, it was to travel to another big city—Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas. This was the first time I got to know the rest of the country—the varied landscape, the orderly towns, the warm and welcoming people. For years I’d heard about “Main Street”—now, I saw it firsthand. When I got west of the Rockies, I bought some camping equipment and spent two months in the national parks of Utah and Arizona. You can really get lost there, if you stay away from the tourists. The landscape is vast, awe inspiring, and inhospitable. Siberia with sun.