by Diane Duane
Ownership and control are only rarely the same.
Eddie Brock was nothing if not methodical. His background as a reporter had tended to make him so until, late in that reporting career, issues had so blinded him to the truth of one business he was investigating that he jumped the gun and printed material that could be proved untrue. The rebuttal…
He shook his head, hating to let the thoughts into his head again, but unable to keep them out.
Another authority had stood up in front of the world, embarrassed him, called his integrity into question—a questioning that had been applied retroactively to everything else he had ever written—and caused him to be blackballed from the one profession he had ever really cared about. But that other authority, and the person behind it, would be dealt with soon enough.
But right now, he had other fish to fry.
CCRC was being audited by the government. Everybody knew that. The IRS, the DEA—and for all he knew, the FBI, the CIA, and even the FAA—were all on its tail. And Eddie Brock was still enough of an investigative reporter to know that a company involved in the laundering of millions, and perhaps billions, of dollars of illegal funds is not just closed down like a bankrupt shop putting its shutters up. There is almost always warning that there’s trouble in the wind and, almost always, the money goes away.
Specifically—and it was practically the standard method—other companies would be purchased or established and clean money already laundered through other sources would be channeled into them. Any companies that had previously been founded as intermediaries to service the laundering pipelines would themselves be closed down. In military terminology, it was a “withdrawal to prepared positions.”
Eddie sat now in his little hotel room working on a laptop computer whose present program allowed you to construct complex graphical expressions of relationships between completely abstract factors. Those could be anything you liked, but corporate entities was what he was looking at right now.
The New York Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bureau of Records had begun to work very closely together since the days when insider trading first reared its head. There was now more information available about companies opened in New York, the United States, and, though to a lesser extent, overseas than there ever had been before.
In particular, Eddie was looking into those overseas connections, searching for large amounts of money that had been moved out of CCRC or its accounts—and especially money that had been removed from the United States—during the period immediately before the audit had been announced.
The period when Venom and Spider-Man had been tearing the place apart.
Compared with other countries, even those that didn’t make an issue of it, banking secrecy in the U.S. was little more than a joke. If you had friends in the right places, say the IRS, the DEA, or even some local police departments, and you knew the right phone numbers to call, then you could access databases that would tell you far more than any private citizen had a right to know about the movement of funds in and out of the country. Put that together with the SEC’s register of newly formed companies and corporations—onshore or off, it didn’t matter—and you had a powerful tool for levering your way into corporate secrets. Always assuming you knew how to sort the data.
Fortunately, Venom knew how. The copies he had made yesterday in the Bureau of Records were all New York based. Some of them were hard copy because they were already too old to be worth keeping online. Say, three months old. That was how fast corporate formation turned over in New York State. Not as fast as in some offshore havens, certainly—where if you lingered too long over lunch you could find your morning’s harvest of information already well on the way to obsolescence—but fast enough.
Venom was looking for corporate formations that were immediately bolstered by large transfers of funds. Certainly bank managers, and banks in general, were required to report suspicious transfers of any value, and all transfers above a certain threshold, to the government. But if your bank manager was pliant, as it were, and kept that way by regular applications of folding grease, then such reports would never be made. He would know you, would certainly know what you were capable of doing if he let you down, and wouldn’t be suspicious of your money because he knew full well that it was dirty.
His search was for newly established companies without a track record, whose names appeared in no previous register—but who suddenly sprouted large bank balances that they promptly wire-transfered offshore. New York being what it is, he found plenty; the difficulty was in determining which were more or less innocent, and which were the ones he was after.
Almost all had addresses of record in lower Manhattan; hardly surprising, since that was where almost all the really good corporate formation attorneys had their offices. By correlating the records of the SEC and the IRS, an interesting picture was assembling itself. Again and again he was turning up references to a company called Rothschilds Bank Securities S.A. He knew immediately that it had been purchased off the shelf and that the name was no accident. Most shell companies invoked the name of some encouragingly large and well-established concern, trying to sound legit whether they were or not, and whether their reasons were nefarious or just good business sense.
Rothschilds had a brass-plate address which was the same as that of a well-known lawyer in South Street, near the seaport. It had opened for business about three days after the break-in at CCRC’s New York headquarters during which a fission-eating life-form had killed two homeless people. Even then, paranoia or merely guessing at which way the wind might blow had caused them to jump.
Rothschilds was formed on a Tuesday. By Friday of the same week, it was showing a deposit balance at Chase Manhattan of $180 million. By the following Monday, that had already dropped to $60 million, and the rest of that week saw further deposits of $240 million come and go. Venom knew a pipeline when he saw one.
He also knew what most people did not, the actual names of the company directors. The SEC required those on the registration documents, U.S. banking policy being what it was. He noted their names and addresses, but paid most attention to one in particular, a name that had also appeared far down the list of CCRC’s directors.
There may be others, he thought, but that one will do to start.
“Time to go,” he said aloud to the symbiote he wore as a second skin, and it responded at once. The tank top and shorts he wore changed shape, and blackness wrapped itself around him. Blackness with fangs.
Twenty minutes later he was in lower Manhattan.
It was getting on toward dinnertime, and those offices not already shut were showing signs of doing so. Venom, high above it all, was calmly wall-walking up the side of another of Wall Street’s latest crop of steel-and-glass monstrosities. He had never cared for the newer schools of architecture. Its soullessness appalled him, and it probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year just to keep those acres of glass clean. It did, though, make it easier for a wall-climber with the proper technique to go straight up the side of a building in a big hurry, pick a window, and get inside unseen except by their potential victim.
In this case, Venom knew the window very well. He had called earlier, and the building’s security people had been more helpful than they knew about which floor and which office he was most interested in. After that it was just a matter of sticking his head quickly down from above window level for a peek inside, to see who and what were in a given office. Now, in a south-facing corner suite with a nice view out over the Battery, he was correctly positioned, and he was waiting.
A man came in and closed the door.
The office was a handsome chrome-and-steel affair, late Industrial Modem. Very sleek, very Memphis. Venom had difficulty with the Industrial style of interior design. It looked, well, industrial, and there was no point in saying that was the intention all along. There were other, subconscious intentions being pandered to, and as for the people who willingly embraced it…
&nbs
p; He smiled, and the symbiote smiled with him. They were hardly people at all.
The man sat down at his desk, and there was a long moment of stillness before Venom extruded several pseudopods and punched the window in. He was careful to strike hard enough that all the glass went inward, rather than falling on the innocent bystanders down below whose business this wasn’t.
The man sitting at the desk, who had just taken off his jacket and tossed it onto the couch, jerked around, mouth and eyes wide, his curly hair practically standing on end. He was a tall man, broad shouldered and built big.
But not big enough.
Venom was on him in two pounces, and only a few seconds after that the man was well-wrapped in alien tentacles, with several others waving their razory tips in front of his face.
“We may as well call you Mr. Rothschild,” said Venom conversationally, “since that name is only slightly more fake than your own, and a good deal more pronounceable.”
As Venom swung in the window, a second man was coming in through the door. He stopped in his tracks, staring. The first man looked at him, then at Venom, and yelled, “Bistrah! Ookhadeetyeh!”
As this second man turned to run, “Rothschild” threw himself straight at Venom’s huge, dark figure, struggling. This didn’t discomfit Venom in the slightest, though the collision of his heavily muscled body was enough to stagger even him. And that stagger was enough for his flurry of extra pseudopods to miss the fugitive. Not by much, but by enough for him to get clean away.
There were, if that was possible, even more fangs and drool on show than usual when Venom turned his attention back to “Rothschild.” “You seem unusually eager to keep us from meeting your friend,” he said grimly.
“Innocent guy.” The English had only a faint hint of Russian. “Nothing to do with you.”
“Innocent indeed? You’ve been watching too much television, Mr. Rothschild. What makes you think that anything you could say would make us consider him—or you—innocent? Now then. You’re evidently a well-educated man with an excellent command of language. Do you understand the meaning of the culinary term ‘julienne’?”
There was a long silence, broken by gasps, whimpers, and the occasional thin scream.
After a few minutes, Venom said, “Don’t imagine that anyone is going to call the police, or that even if they do, that New York’s finest would be so foolish as to come in here. We really think not. Now, let us tell you why we’ve made this little visit. We want to know—”
“CCRC,” gasped the man. He was bleeding from dozens of long, thin cuts, and what remained of his shirt wasn’t white anymore, but he was still comparatively unharmed, and knew the reason for it only too well. Venom was making him last.
“No, no, nonono,” said Venom, shaking his head and spattering drool all over the carpet. “The answer we want is nothing so simple. For instance, we already know that you’re involved with CCRC’s, er, reconstruction. Perestroika, isn’t it? A shame to leave all that perfectly good money in a country. And we also know all about the setting up of several new foundation trusts in Liechtenstein and Switzerland. And Hungary. Interesting choice, Hungary. The country with the tightest banking laws in Europe at the moment. The country least likely to tell you where anything is. They know what side their bread’s buttered on; they’re looking to pick up where Switzerland now leaves off.
“That said, there’s other business of much more interest to us. Someone has been moving large amounts of, let’s call it ‘cargo,’ but we both know what it really is, don’t we? And it glows in the dark. So this ‘cargo’ is transported from a processing plant in Florida, all the way up to a location in upstate New York that’s not too far from the southern boundaries of the Adirondack State Park. Details are hazy, as the eight ball would have it, on where exactly that storage location is. But we’re not going to ask again later. We’re asking you now. And we want to know, or we will continue our investigation of cooking terminology. Julienne, until we’re bored. Then frappe. Then puree, or saute, or maybe just plain old shake and bake. Your choice, tovarish.”
There was more stubborn silence, and then another shriek.
“Yes, we imagine that would have hurt,” said Venom. “But then, you so obviously didn’t hear us that it can’t have been working properly anyway. However, we think we should warn you, we really are getting impatient. Oh—we almost forgot. Besides everything else, we also want the name and address of your friend.”
“Friend?”
“The fast-moving gentleman whose escape you were so eager to cover just now. Interesting, that you would protect him with your life.”
“But I—”
“Oh, but you are, you are,” said Venom softly.
There was another silence, punctuated by more screams, and then a sobbing voice said, “558 First Avenue. 1-D. I don’t know his name.”
“Then his nickname will do. He has to answer to something, we would think. Or do you just whistle?”
“He’s—he’s called Niner. Niner.” The voice gasped, and choked, and said nothing more.
“My,” said Venom. “We didn’t think it would spurt like that.” He spent a few minutes arranging the limp body against one wall of the office, then picked up the phone, dialed 9, then 911, spoke briefly to the recording, and hung up.
Ignoring the sound of shallow breathing from the far side of the room. Venom stalked about, opening files and drawers, looking here and there. The bottom drawer of the big steel and smoked-glass desk was the one that interested him the most. As he opened it, the lock gave way with a small metallic crunch and he looked down at five cell phones.
“Well, now,” he said. “Let’s pack these up and take them away, shall we?” The symbiote obligingly produced several pockets in its costume, and only a few minutes later, a black shape slipped quietly out of the broken window and was gone.
* * *
LATER, in a quiet, shadowy place among the sewer tunnels under the Union Square subway stations, Venom sat calmly going through the cell phones. He would key each one to bring up its home number, the little screen would obediently display the digits, and he would dial. Every time he did so, the reply was in Russian. It wasn’t a language he had ever studied in depth, but he didn’t need to understand what was said to understand well enough how these phones were being misused. One by one, he set them aside. For later.
He repeated the same procedure for the fifth and last time: activate, read, dial, listen. But this time when he held the last phone to his ear, it didn’t speak to him in Russian.
Instead a cheerful voice said, “Hi there! This is Mary Jane Watson-Parker. Either I’m out of cell right now, or the phone’s switched off, or it’s throwing another hissy fit. Don’t ask me. Just leave a message after the beep, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
As the phone beeped at him, Venom pressed the hang-up button and briefly stared into space with those huge pale eyes. “Well,” he said. “Well, well, well.”
His grin was ghastly.
SIX
ABOUT an hour before, Peter walked out of the door of Doris Smyth’s apartment building. He had dropped off the phone with her, and promised to talk to his “famous wife,” and even get an autograph for her.
Just where is my famous wife right at the moment? he wondered. There were other things to think about, though. He badly needed to be up among the tall buildings and about his business of taking care of the city. He ducked into an alleyway, changed, and went straight up the face of a building not too far from Doris’s place.
He swung a little way around the neighborhood just to loosen up, then clung to a building just across from Doris’s penthouse, hiding a little around the corner to peer at her. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows she was quite easy to see. The size of the apartment was still quite startling, and right around from the living and dining area he had already seen was a small office complex with a connecting door into the electronic inner sanctum.
There, Doris hammered away on
a PC, pausing now and then to stare quizzically at the screen. She was one of the fastest typists he had ever seen. God, could we use her in the newsroom, he thought. She might be eighty but, plainly, arthritis wasn’t something that she worried about too much.
Go get’em, Doris. Find out what you can.
He swung away, heading for midtown and parts south.
It was an excellent, bright, sunny day. A breeze was blowing—down among the trees he could hear the song of an occasional bird, and as he swung around the corner of the building he met yet another monarch butterfly, going about its business with great purpose thirty stories up.
“What are you looking for?” he said to it in passing as he shot another jet of webbing at the next building along and paced it. “Girl butterflies? Boy butterflies? A good pollen pizza, extra nectar, hold the anchovies?”
Apart from food and mating, he couldn’t begin to guess what might be on a butterfly’s mind, especially when that mind was hidden in a brain smaller than the head of a pin. Yet this butterfly seemed to have an appointment, and moreover was running late.
Crash!
He hit something—or rather it hit him, something black that left him hanging from the web, dazed and reeling. Then he realized it was swinging back at him, hard. He clutched the building to keep from falling, slapped his hands and feet against the walls, and saw what was heading for him again.
It was Venom, of course—anyone or anything else would have alerted his spider-sense. But, as a by-product of the brief time when Eddie Brock’s symbiote had bonded with Peter Parker, Venom did not trigger the early warning sense that Spider-Man depended on.
