The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (22 page)

CHAPTER 27

The irritating buzz of her cell phone woke Natalie at six.

She dozed, then dialled voicemail: “It’s Ben. You’d better turn on your TV. Gotta run. I’ll call you.”

Suddenly awake, she remoted the TV on to a breakfast news channel. A news anchor with suitably stern look was announcing the unfolding Clamor IPO/sex trafficking drama. She pushed on her elbows, sat upright – the other news channels were running the same story. She grabbed her laptop and found Brie DuBois’ widely cited article. The only bright spot was that it seemed much milder than the news anchors suggested, mostly involving what was already observable on Clamor’s website, seasoned with some law enforcement hearsay.

She tried Nguyen, left him another message. Then, via the Clamor automated switchboard, she left voicemails for Wu, Michael Marantz, Wisnold, anyone she could think of – while trying to sound as serious as possible, shuffling round her room in a hotel dressing gown and slippers.

Eventually it dawned on her. The wake that would be taking place down in Sunnyvale. The IPO party that wasn’t to be. Corporate birth-to-death in one morning! Famished, she rang room service and ordered salmon eggs Benedict, a tall glass of fresh orange juice and a large cappuccino. Perhaps it would all make sense on a full stomach.

A stock market correspondent on TV was now reporting that, after a series of hastily convened calls with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Clamor
would
be allowed to start trading at the open. Market makers had apparently found support as vulture investors picked away and as the ‘mystery options trader’ betting against the issue unwound his (or her) position. Still the price floundered in the mid-$30s. She padded round the room, pondering what it meant for Ben, but – given the tense tone of his earlier voicemail – she decided not to call him back yet.

By late morning, it had become clearer why neither Nguyen nor anyone else at Clamor was returning phone calls. Beneath a radioactive-looking
Breaking News
! graphic, the news anchor was reading an announcement that Clamor CEO Dwayne Wisnold would be going on sabbatical “effective immediately” as the company dealt with the
Trumpington Bugle
allegations. Chief Connectedness Officer Nancy Wu would also be stepping down. Interim-CEO Thomas Nguyen thanked her and Wisnold for “their contribution towards making Clamor.us the world’s leading social networking site –” Interim-CEO Thomas Nguyen! – his statement concluding: “We will vigorously defend the company’s reputation and unmask the slander being propagated in the blogosphere.”

The stock price had fallen to $19.

Natalie couldn’t hold off any longer: “Ben! – Ben?
Hello
?”

A flight departure announcement drowned him. “Can you hear me?” Then: “– is that better?”

“Yes! Where on earth are you?”

“Heading off to the cabin in Tahoe for a coupla days, to clear my mind.”

“Are you OK?”

“No, not really. But my dad always cautioned me against making rash decisions – either from positions of unusual strength, or weakness.”

“Oh.” The news cut away from the studio to live pictures showing a cortege of black Lincoln town cars leaving the base of Ben’s office building. The commentary was not encouraging: “losses exceeding
one-and-a-half
billion
dollars … clear breach of capital adequacy ratios …  the question now being whether Carmichael Associates can open for business tomorrow?”

“Listen Natalie, I really do have to run for my flight,” Ben was saying; “But I’ll call you when I get back to town, OK? I really wanna talk to you about something.”

“OK,” she said glassily.

Coverage had now moved to a suave-suited reporter standing in front of the columnar, Coliseum-like entranceway to the Federal Reserve building at California and Market, barely eight blocks from the last scene – and even fewer from where Natalie now stood, transfixed by the TV report: “We understand that Leonard Carmichael
will
be attending, along with General Counsel David Hannah, and Credit Chairperson Sara Harding. Technology Head Steven Schweitzer will
not
be attending, having pleaded a
pri-
or
engagement!” A
can-you-believe-it
expression – then the camera unsteadily swung round to catch Leonard Carmichael being hustled through, looking like Richard Nixon during his last hours in office.

The session at the Federal Reserve was short enough for coverage to stay with the camera-friendly reporter, a ‘Live!’ graphic rotating above him like the slowing arm of a roulette wheel. Updates were passed to him, first quoting the regional Fed Chairman as saying it was “no longer acceptable for decent, hard-working American taxpayers to subsidize, with jumbo welfare handouts, investment bankers behaving like drunken sailors on three-day shore leave!”

And then the reporter broke into his own breaking news: “Wait! The gavel seems to have come down, folks! Carmichael Associates has been sold for
… now let me make sure I’m reading this right: Carmichael Associates
has been sold for one single dollar
, to Occidental Bank of the Middle East –– with the assumption of all debts, and the rescinding
of executive remuneration contracts. Now we assume this last part means the undoing of any bonuses or profit share arrangements, with Occidental free to pick and choose from the Carmichael staff pool at will. Well, the market for bankers isn’t what it once was…”

Poor Ben!

Natalie turned to her email, and the briefest of responses from Nguyen:

    From: [email protected]

   
              To: [email protected]

    Date: Monday, 12:42

Subject: yr v.m.

lots going on as i’m sure you’ve herd. please finish trafficking report and shoot it across

    Sent from my BlackBerry handheld wireless device

She finished it that afternoon, saved it to her red memory stick and shot it across.

CHAPTER 28

The next day, a new development broke online: that Paul Towse was bidding $25 a share for the company, valuing Clamor.us at $3.75 billion. Following the IPO, $2.3 billion in cash was sitting in Clamor’s coffers. So the company would be his for $1.5 billion net of the cash raised at IPO – or just a tenth of the cost he’d confronted a few days before.

The report claimed that Dwayne Wisnold had already accepted the offer.
Now what’s all that about
, Natalie wondered. Perhaps for Wisnold it was binary: either full-spectrum control, or nothing. She wished that Ben were there to talk it through with. What was he doing up in some cabin in the woods, anyway?

She huffed and then noticed a separate but related article about how that ‘mystery options trader’ had made ‘one-and-a-half billion in profit from the Clamor IPO, net of option purchase costs’.

A billion-five in net cost, a billion-five in net profit:
had Towse come by Clamor that week effectively for free
? But as the first report pointed out, other shareholders still had to agree to the sale.

She looked up the San Francisco skyline, the fantastic westward sun turning the buildings to hammered bronze. Thinking back to that Malovich sketch Cindy showed her, she had an idea. She reached into her bag for her
glossy red memory stick and was soon looking at:

It was the application Ray Ott had reminded her about – the one analyzing how well two known points in a network were connected. Her university professors, giddied up by the mid-‘90s tech boom, had encouraged the patent application. Over the years, she’d updated the underlying code.

She entered her usual login name: ‘search-girl’, and her password.

When fed two IP/web addresses, the application would score how closely connected they were out of 1.0. The higher the score, the stronger the connection. Everything came down to correlations, to
patterns of connection,
Natalie had come to conclude – whether with her yoga and the wider universe, or with the world of networked computing that she’d discovered earlier in life.

Well, now she had known points.

She recalled ‘Multiworld’ featuring prominently at the top of that Malovich sketch. She searched for it, soon encountering what Ben seemed to have run into: there was no relevant site for an organization of that name. Must be masked. Or did it exist at all? She tried another name, this time from the right-hand side of the Malovich sketch: ‘Surefar’. She froze, from recollection of those appalling scenes at the raid she’d gone on with Cindy and Adam. Regaining composure, she typed a name she knew would connect with it: Further Online Gaming, the corporate owner of
MultiQuest
.

The score was high at 0.68. No wonder, given the known clump of paths between Further Online’s game and the Surefar Enjoy site – through Clamor.us, of course.

Next she ran the application’s Thematic Extractor command, the function that got her university professors so excited. It identified key attributes of the path. It was similar to the technology that went on to make investors in certain search firms so wealthy. The key attributes in this case were: ‘Dating’, ‘Singles’, ‘Casual Relationships’ – the usual euphemisms…

Recalling the other entities written down the right hand side of Malovich’s sketch, she entered ‘Sayonara’. There were many apparent ‘possibles’, but with the Theme Extractor running, the point of connection resolved to a single point: an investor called Xiao Lin.

She ran a separate search on him, the most eye-catching result being a feature for the local section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, according to which Lin was a Chinese citizen, US educated, with a penthouse in Nob Hill – barely a few blocks away. She stared for a long second at the picture of him in the
Chronicle,
at his clenched jaw and hollow, prison-like eyes. Was this the man at the source? – of the Jasmines, their supply?

So many unanswered questions. The last name on Malovich’s sketch, ‘LLA’. Again there were innumerable results with such a common acronym, but again the Theme Extractor forced a hit: ‘The Leading Ladies Agency, an elite escort agency featuring the finest girls from the Baltics, Hungary, the Ukraine –’ Paris-based, Armenian registered, and password protected.

Around the world in 80 clicks.

                                   *    *    * 

That evening, Paul Towse appeared on the top-rated TV financial affairs show
Money Now
. He appeared against a slightly out-of-focus Transamerica Building back-dropped by blue sky. He wore a loose grey jacket and periwinkle-blue shirt. Despite the ‘establishing’ background, he didn’t appear to come from – or belong to –
anywhere
.

Yet he was
everywhere
. Omniscient!

The presenter in the studio was a real blond honey, Natalie noted.
Sassy
, wearing a form fitting beige suit profiling the swell of her breasts, her skirt ending above the knee
just so
. Never mind the recent deaths or the child sex trafficking allegations. The audience was to be treated to the sexual chemistry between these two.

The presenter led with a series of teasingly provocative questions about his intentions for the takeover bid, the resistance he may encounter – “Just how
would
you overcome the company’s challenges, Mr. Towse?”

Certainly his TV persona was well crafted. He was clear eyed: optimistic, yet pragmatic. He answered directly. He spoke of everyone being “wholly unprepared for this sequence of events”, of these being “the most unusual economic times for all.” He likened Clamor’s stock market debut to “a flag ship of the Web 2.0 economy, tragically sunk on her maiden voyage.” Help was at hand. He was ready to put his fund’s resources and acumen at society’s disposal. “What matters, I think, is that we preserve the integrity of our technology sector – and the jobs, innovation and wealth that flow from it.”

The on-screen duo then touched on another of Towse’s ventures: “long term retreat centers”. Young gamers could move into honeycombed condominiums below ground – and play
MultiQuest: Dark Ages
to their hearts’ content. All ‘support services’ would be arranged, including ‘physical relationships’ – whatever that meant. It sounded like assisted-living for the young. He’d broken ground on the first center in Pine Bluffs Nevada, not thirty minutes from where he grew up. It was already 75% sold through with plans for another 40 such centers across North America and a further two hundred or so around the world, the immediate focus being on the Far East.

At some level, Natalie had to hand it him. He was, quite simply, a brilliant businessman. It was a more-than assured performance on
Money Now
. Indeed it looked like an outright PR coup. Which it needed to be, if he was to elicit that precious consent for his tender offer from those other Clamor shareholders – the largest undeclared one, Natalie reminded herself, being Jon Vogel’s estate.