This Is How It Really Sounds (33 page)

*   *   *

The next day, it went viral.

 

4

Market Forces

For Peter Harrington
, watching the transformation of the video from an isolated Chinese blog into a worldwide cage match was deeply disheartening. In three days, his beating had been scattered like stars across the online universe. The posts had titles like “The Most Satisfying Video on the Net” and “Pete Harrington, You're My Hero!” In weak moments, he would make the mistake of reading the commentary. “Did u see luk on b1tch's face! Loco good!!!” or “Kick him again, Pete! He's still moving!” There'd been an outpouring of hatred a year ago when the news of the fund's demise had first come out, but he'd developed a thick layer of cynicism about the complainers, had even come to revel in his bad-guy image. Now, though, it was infinitely more personal. The comments were uglier, more visceral, coming not from financial professionals sniffing about their losses or leftists weeping about the cruel world, but rather from a howling mob of commoners, who cheered against him in the online arena in which the rock star defeated him again and again and again. Harrington saw his own astonished delight as the singer came into view, then the confusion, the pain, the blood pouring from his nose, the cowering as he lay on the ground, the look of defeat. He'd been called many things in the wake of the Crossroads collapse, most of them ugly, but he'd never been called “loser.”

He'd hired private investigators to look into the attack, and their report had added an even deeper strata of humiliation to the event. The people from Kroll International had come over the day after the incident, while his nose was still swollen: a Chinese man and an American, both in their forties. He admired their ability to show absolutely no reaction to his puffy features. The American asked most of the questions with a cordial and vaguely sympathetic manner. He asked about Ma and about the security regimen he followed and arranged to interview Ma in private. He asked about Ernie and the events leading up to the assault. He kept returning to the subject of Ernie.

“Did you ever see a passport or credit card with his name on it?”

Harrington felt stupid. “No.”

“Could he have been in his seventies? Maybe an old-looking sixty-eight or sixty-nine? Because … you said he took down your bodyguard.”

“I said he
fell into
my bodyguard. I didn't say he took him down.”

The two men looked at each other; then the American one continued. “Give us a few days, Mr. Harrington.”

They were at his house again in twenty-four hours. The rock star had been easy to trace. He had entered the country two days before the attack and left two hours afterward. They still weren't sure who Ernie was, other than a few references on the Internet and the address in Iowa. “However, we reached the family of the Ernie Sivertsen shown in that old Merrill's Marauders unit photo. He died in 2002.”

The financier nodded, feeling a tremor of dread.

“We were able to pull the passenger list of Pete Harrington's flight to China, and there is one passenger on the plane that interested us. His name is Charles Pico. He fits the age range: he's eighty-six. He has a Service record, but he was honorably discharged in 1945 and we don't have anything on him after that. We asked around. There was a Charlie Pico who has an extensive background in security, and evidently did quite a bit of contract work for the CIA over the years, although we're still trying to confirm that. His last known address was in Los Angeles. But the friend I talked to thought he was dead.” He reached into a folder and pulled out a black-and-white photo. “Do any of these faces look familiar?”

In the antiquated-looking image, five men lounged in front of a wall of high leafy stalks. Sugarcane. Three of the men had dark hair and beards and were in military fatigues. One of the other men had a handsome face that was vaguely familiar. The fifth was Ernie, with dark hair that needed cutting and a pistol strapped to his hip. He wore a loose white shirt and khaki pants tucked into boots. He was no longer hunched or foggy-eyed. He looked fiercely alive, and he was smiling.

“Well, gentleman…” Harrington finally said, “you can tell your friend that Charlie Pico's not dead. Who are these other people?”

The Kroll operative leaned forward and slowly indicated each one with his finger: “This is Raúl Castro … This is Che Guevara … And this is Errol Flynn. It was taken in Cuba about 1958. Evidently the CIA was secretly running guns to Castro, and Mr. Pico was part of the operation.”

In the silence that followed Harrington felt himself sinking into an even deeper sense of despair. Charlie Pico, he realized, was real. He truly was the living legend, a man he would have wanted to befriend and whose admiration he would have liked to have. Instead, Charlie Pico had viewed him as just another despicable mark.

He said softly, “So you think they were working together.”

“This is what we think happened: Pete Harrington hired Charles Pico to help him set you up. Pico approached you the night before, played on your goodwill, and then told your attacker where you would be the next day. Then he disabled your bodyguard so that your assailant could get a clear shot at you and escape, though in those cases the bodyguard usually stays with the client in case of a second attacker. That's something a man of his experience would have known.”

Harrington nodded, feeling sick.

The Kroll men went on. “The next thing we looked at is the video, which corroborates our theory to some degree. There was one principal video, the one with the Chinese subtitles, and that was actually edited from two videos taken from two different angles, which we'll call Video A and Video B. These are the three most prominent videos. They're unusually high-resolution for cell phone videos, though it's entirely possible they were taken by passersby that happened to recognize Pete Harrington. He does have some notoriety here in China, so it's not implausible. How they identified you is another question, because your face isn't immediately recognizable, at least in China. What's also interesting is that neither video shows the old man. You could almost think that the people shooting it intentionally kept him out of the frame. In the three other videos that have surfaced, the quality is much lower and you see more of Charlie Pico and the bodyguard.”

“Okay.”

“So then we ask who took them, who posted them, and how they spread. We couldn't really answer those questions. This isn't a criminal investigation, and without cooperation from the Chinese justice system, we can't access the metadata we need to determine those things. There was an aggressive linking effort in the first few days that we tracked, but it's a pretty sensational topic involving two well-known people, so it's not surprising that it spread quickly. There are no repeats of user names on different sites or user accounts that were set up an hour before the post. Those are the kinds of things that indicate an organized campaign. This appears to be a spontaneous event.” The agent shrugged apologetically, but Peter imagined he saw a trace of a smirk slither across his features. “People are interested in you, Mr. Harrington.”

The Kroll briefing, coming on the heels of the humiliating business meetings with Kell and Shenzhen Red Dragon, sent Peter Harrington into a deep depression. He muddled around his house, too depressed to face Camille, until, like a bubble rising from the depths, in the space of a few hours, his depression swelled into outrage. Did Pete Harrington think some legal loophole would protect him? That he could hit him and just walk away? Within twelve hours of the second meeting with Kroll, Peter Harrington was staring at the vice president of Guardian Services blown up to life-size on his flat-screen TV. He looked like he was about twenty-five years old. They'd moved fast: Harrington was an A-list client with a lot of money to spend, and he was angry.

Guardian had already developed a two-pronged strategy, the man said. Part of it was defensive: burying the links. They would help Harrington set up a scholarship fund: something on the order of about ten million dollars would be enough to get traction. They'd create a Web site and staff the foundation with a few employees who would set about giving away scholarships and grants to the needy. This would be touted across the Web in a dense thicket of Internet links and announcements. They'd work with a press agent to get media coverage. It wouldn't make the bad links disappear, but they would counterweight them with pictures of happy kids with schoolbooks. Or they could set up an environmental fund: it didn't matter which. Meanwhile, they would go after Pete Harrington's reputation with an ice pick. “He's definitely got a history,” the Guardian man said. “Paternity suits, assault charges, critics trashing his music. And that's just a ten-minute Internet search. We'll paint a picture of a washed-up rock star who assaults you in a desperate, pathetic attempt to get people to pay attention to him. We'll hit Pete Harrington with that truth from a thousand directions, and we'll hit him over and over and over. Roboposts on message boards, blog commentary, press releases, a social-media campaign. We will make him cringe every time he turns on his computer. I guarantee you: he will come out of this looking like a loser. We can put five people on it, starting whenever you say the word.”

*   *   *

Revenge was a petty motivation, but in the absence of anything more noble, it lifted his spirits. He was Peter Harrington, the man who had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in five short years. Dispensing with a has-been like Pete Harrington would be nothing for him. Aside from his own feelings, though, Peter Harrington found he had a bigger problem with the video: it made the world remember who he was. Within a week of the attack, the whole universe seemed to know that he lived in Shanghai and was partners with Kell McPherson in a business dedicated to privatizing American public infrastructure and putting it into the hands of Chinese investors. The hate mail began to flood in. The volume became so large that Kell had to hire Guardian to screen the messages, and now, when a search was done on Metropolitan Partners, it immediately turned up page after page of scorching hate posts and videos of Peter Harrington being knocked to the ground. Even some of the financial papers discovered a sense of irony, reporting on the attempt to buy up assets by some of the same people that had helped crash the economy in the first place. In America, a public television network was putting together a sensationalized “exposé” about their attempts to acquire the Akron sewer system and the Pennsylvania Turnpike with the working title “Return of the Predators.”

*   *   *

A week after the video first surfaced, Kell called him into the Metropolitan office. The day had already had a brittle start. At ten that morning Nadia had announced from Beijing that she didn't want to see him anymore. The call had been expected, and he cut her off as she began her scripted explanation. “Let me know when you get back to Shanghai,” he'd said brightly. “I'll send your things over to your apartment.” He didn't really care: the night with Camille had brought home to him the emptiness of the relationship. Kell hadn't asked him to attend any more business meetings since the debacle with Shenzhen Red Dragon, and he hadn't seen his partner in several days, ample time to regret not being more honest with him. They shook hands, and Kell complimented him on the fact that his nose was back to normal, asked in a joking way how the Camille-Nadia balancing act was going. He received the answer with a philosophical toss of his shoulders. “Camille seems more interesting, anyway. And she can order for you at restaurants.”

“Thanks for your support. What are we doing here?”

“Yeah.” The lawyer glanced at the carpet, then up again. “Peter, how badly do you need this?”

“What are you referring to?”

“Metropolitan Partners, the venture—the whole plan for monetizing infrastructure.”

“Is there an issue?”

Kell seemed uncomfortable. “To be honest … lately, there has been something of an issue—”

“You mean you want me out?”

His partner smiled at him. “That's one thing I've always admired about you: you cut through the bullshit. The answer is: No.
I
don't want you out. But, unfortunately, other people do.” He went down the list of limited partners who had either dropped out or were beginning to reconsider. “I talked to David Lau about this for three hours, and you've got to understand: this is coming from him, not from me. This video that's out there: it's a problem. Not to rub salt in the wound, but you lost face. In China, that's a big deal. Bigger than just money. Not only that, it makes Crossroads controversial again. Not that it wasn't a very successful fund in its time, but there's a sense that it damaged people and that you're responsible—”

“But I'm not responsible.”

“Yeah, I know: it was market forces. Who could foresee that those mortgages would collapse? Besides us, of course. Which is why we shorted the hell out of it!” He laughed.

“Everybody hedges!”

“Peter!” He motioned toward his own pinstripe-suited body, smiling. “You're talking to your partner here, not the SEC. I remember those conversations. We both knew the backing on those bonds was shaky and that a certain percentage of them were going to fail.”

“We knew there was
risk
—”

“No, Peter: we knew they would fail. You knew it better than anyone, because you put them together. That's why you sold out, and that's why we shorted them. Period. Don't get me wrong! It was a brilliant play!”

“But that brilliance is no longer a selling point for Metropolitan Partners.”

Kell lost his levity. “Right now, you're poison. It's all out there in everybody's face, and the only way we can save this project is by reincorporating under a new name that doesn't have yours attached to it. I have to be able to go to the remaining limited partners and tell them you're no longer an active partner with the company. Which is not to say that in a year, when you've cooled off a little, you couldn't quietly get back in.”