Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  About half an hour later they were all seated at their table. Kathryn had walked in with a spring in her step and her hair out of place from driving her new Mercedes with the top down. Her spring died quickly when she saw Margret and her companion. Kathryn was still in her business suit which wasn't showing a lot of leg and the top wasn't see through. She knew right then not one of the guys she had brought would be able to tell what color the other ladies' eyes were at the end of the evening.

  Kathryn tried to be pleasant and upbeat. Once the meals were ordered, her companions went right into the story about how they had partnered with an off-shore version of Iron Mountain providing secure archiving services for documents and backup media. They even tossed out the second lowest fee for the service and wrote it into the contract before Kathryn could begin to cut them off. These guys were thinking with their penises. They didn't even try to put up a fight, which was how they were going to get the higher fee.

  Margret informed the consulting firm that Kent would have to sign the contract since it would require renegotiating with Iron Mountain and transferring of all existing backup media pertaining to the migrated data centers. Carol chimed in that the closing of the deal and the transferring of media would have to occur quickly since the FDIC was in the process of cracking down on this very issue. When Kathryn inquired how Carol knew this, she pulled out the fax on the FDIC letterhead and let Kathryn read it. The second communication regarding the proposed regulation change was left in the folder.

  The wind was really out of Kathryn's sails at this point. She meekly agreed that she would have to make an appointment with Kent next week, when he returns from his work abroad, to get the deal closed. Margret volunteered she would get everything ready for the shipment, but wait to actually give the go ahead on shipping until the contract was signed. She also told Margret she needed to be at her meeting with Kent to ensure he fully grasped the situation.

  One of the men asked what the ladies plans were for the rest of the evening. Margret responded, “We planned on spending another hour or two at the bar before going home. It isn't often Carol gets to spend a night out like this away from her mom duties.” Several of the guys offered to ply them with drinks after the meal ended and Kathryn resigned herself to another defeat at the hands of Margret. She still couldn't tell which way that woman's door swung, and the business suit didn't have any man in the place checking her out. They were all checking out Carol and Margret.

  When the meal was over, Margret excused herself to the restroom before returning the bar. There she used her cell phone to reserve a jacuzzi suite at the hotel down the street. Promptly at 10:30, the ladies called a cab and went to the hotel, leaving the guys both drunk and horny. Once they were in their room, Carol took a quick tour of it and spotted the jacuzzi. “Now this was definitely a plan!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, it was,” replied Margret filling the tub. “We have to do this more often. So tell me, how long have you known about me?”

  “Oh, I suspected for quite a while. I assumed you didn't make any advances because you didn't want it to be known, and given the situation with my marriage I couldn't be open either. Tonight I had the opportunity, so I took the chance,” Carol said while undressing and hanging up her outfit.

  “What if you had been wrong?”

  “I'm not often wrong in when it comes to knowing if a woman enjoys another woman, but if I had been, I was certain you wouldn't say anything. My cover story was already in place, and it has been years since I enjoyed another woman. Had I been completely off-base, I would have had to try my luck in the bar, because I couldn't really go home early. I already promised hubby he could go drinking with the guys and watch the game tomorrow while I took care of the kids all day.”

  With the tub filled, and them both disrobed, their evening began.

  Someone Points

  Time seemed to fly while Kent was gone, given all of the work he had dumped on Margret when he left. Naturally he didn't take anything off her plate when he got back. He had been back from his trip for a few weeks now. Margret and Kathryn had informed him about the issue with backup media and recovery time. For a small additional contract Kathryn's company had partnered with another Indian company that provided much the same service as Iron Mountain. They had agreed to keep the annual fee below that of Iron Mountain and Margret had arranged for all of the backup media from the migrated sites to be shipped to the new location once Kent signed the contract.

  This was one of those things which absolutely baffled Kent. Then again, nearly everything to do with technology baffled Kent, hence, he was made Director of IT. He had no concept of backing up or recovery. He did have a concept of the FDIC regulation Margret presented to him and knew violation of any requirement would cost him his career if anyone found out and the bank lost its insurance. Kent quickly signed the contract and Margret got the shipments going.

  Now alone with Kathryn, Kent brought up his new project. He had already received the spreadsheets with the estimated effort for data conversion, and Margret had already worked up estimated hours for adding the additional banking rules to the central system. Even using both consultants and employees it was going to take a long time just to get the French banking rules in place, let alone the other countries'. Kent didn't have a budget for consultants and didn't want word of this to get out. He needed a method of getting this done right around the time his two year stint was over in IT, and he needed to get rid of most of the programmers once it was completed.

  Kathryn smiled to herself. “I may have a solution for you Kent. There is a new comprehensive banking software product coming out from Pytho Corporation. They currently have U.S. and Canada banking rules audited and certified. They are also working on every other country you do business in. I can get you some product literature in a couple of days. Nobody knows about this product yet as they aren't finished with the globalization effort, but it should be completed in another four to six months.”

  Kent sat there dumbfounded. Finally he asked, “What does it cost? Will it run on our existing machines? How many of the existing machines can be eliminated?” At this point he realized he was talking like a little boy trying to get a girl to show hers to him for the first time and he shut up.

  Kathryn responded that they hadn't settled on pricing yet, though Kent would be able to eliminate all but two of the existing machines at the off-site locations once the data center migration had completed. She informed him that he would need to train and keep only two developers to handle any additional reporting needs of the bank as the vendor had a support staff for the product. If any deal was put together, the bank would need to make some kind of public statement they were moving to the software. This could be as simple as Kent giving an interview in one of the weekly trade magazines and answering a few questions during a phone call from a Langston Group analyst.

  “A rough estimate would be four months for them to complete certification and one month for each system migration. You could install and begin conversion using the U.S. and Canadian systems this month if you wanted. As new countries are added you would receive software upgrades and each country's migration could occur piecemeal. At the end of another six months or so, you could have every location running this software, lose at least 12 machines at the off-site locations, and skip having to migrate the last three data centers. Once completed, you could eliminate all of your IT staff except the two developers you should keep and one or two operator people to walk reports around if management refuses to pick up their own. It should dramatically slash your costs.”

  “So, you are saying I will go from a staff of over 60 to a staff of four inside of a year?” asked Kent.

  “Inside of six months if all proceeds according to plan,” replied Kathryn. “According to the numbers we had for the data center off-shoring project, you were spending $16 million per year on IT expenses and personnel salaries. Once this is complete I will wager that your annual IT expense falls below $4 million. Do they give pro
motions for saving $12 million per year?”

  Kent simply smiled. Once again he had bought the white elephant.

  Margret soon returned to the room and the rest of the meeting was spent going over the progress of the data center migration and its numbers. So far, every machine they abandoned had been sold, though not for as much as they had hoped at the start of the project. Still, one data center had been sold for much more than they planned, three more had offers at or near list, and they had to pay a pair of lease termination fees or find a company to sublet two others. The New York data center was now in the middle of a three-way bidding war and was going to close later this week for four times the original asking price if the machines were left in place. The rest had not been put on the market yet. All in all, things were progressing smoothly. Even Margret was somewhat surprised.

  Kent chose that moment to inform Margret of the new system from Pytho and the plan to move all of the locations onto it. Margret was a bit defensive at first and pointed out she had filed such a consolidation plan with Kent's predecessor. She could tell by the look in Kent's eye that the white elephant had just been sold. She even assumed that Kathryn had told Kent he would be able to get rid of Margret once the new system migration was completed.

  Kathryn tried to placate the situation by stating Pytho had hundreds of developers working on this and several leading auditing firms providing the certification. The time frame for them to deliver all of the countries was measured in months, not years like it would be using internal staff and consultants. Margret was very aware “time frame” was the operative phrase for Kent. His two-year tour would be up around the time this project completed and he was looking for a major promotion.

  The meeting ended with Kathryn agreeing to put together the sale numbers and a timeline for roll-out. There wouldn't be a data center migration this month anyway due to the end of quarter happening. It would be a good time to have a presentation to the board since they would have just jumped through all of the hoops to validate numbers from various banking systems.

  ***

  Lenny had been called many things throughout his life. He was never the most popular kid in school, nor the best looking. He wasn't a jock or a chess player. Lenny knew only two things: How to run a business and how to shred a business. He had been called a corporate raider, a shareholder's advocate, and everything in between.

  He had worked as an accountant for a large auditing firm before they got into legal trouble and lost their license. He got out in time to save his own license and avoid paying any fines.

  Lenny hadn't been paid a lot working as an auditor or a senior auditor, but he did know how to read balance sheets and smell ripe fruit. He played a lot of penny stocks while working as an auditor because those were not on the verboten list of things to do. A few thousand dollars bought you millions of shares in those companies. Lenny was good at finding those with a chance of turning around. He managed to turn $10,000 into $10 million more than once.

  After leaving the audit firm Lenny could invest in stocks trading on the big exchanges. He used all of his audit contacts to get inside information and quarterly reports days before they went public. He formed an investment group so things were done through company accounts and paid himself a healthy salary. What really shocked him was when a couple of other wealthy individuals offered to invest in his company. Overnight he went from managing $50 million in assets to managing more than $500 million.

  This wasn't a large operation and it didn't advertise. He had a very nice office in a very nice office building away from the hustle of the city. There were five programmers, three analysts and a receptionist. Legal services were provided by a law firm kept on retainer. Lenny's data center wasn't a bunch of worthless PC's, he ran everything on a fault-tolerant OpenVMS cluster. He even had a hot site on another power grid out in another suburb. As tiny as Lenny's operation was, he spent well over $1 million per year on IT and data services because that is what made the money.

  On this particular day Lenny had received a data file from one of his informants. It was the quarterly report for First Global Bank in XML format. The report wouldn't come out for several days, but Lenny wanted to see what was going on. He loaded the data into one of the formatting programs and let it crunch the numbers. Something stunk with this report. First Global was going to beat analyst estimates by nearly a dollar per share, unless the analysts quickly upped their estimates. The analysts generally didn't miss sales or business increases, so this must have occurred from someone refusing to eat for three months.

  At any rate, this stock was going to hop big time, so Lenny keyed in the trading parameters of maximum price, total number of shares to be purchased, and chose an account list to spread the purchases across. Lenny always tried to purchase more than 5% of a company, but until he was ready to go public, he spread the purchase across many trading accounts so the SEC couldn't figure it out. Lenny had trading accounts spread across a hundred paper companies. Every one of his employees had set up a P.O. Box address for at least a dozen of these companies. Banking stocks had been trashed lately, and the entire stock market was looking for some good news from the financial sector. This was going to be good for a $3 to $7 bump in share price and Lenny wanted to take advantage of it. He keyed in the target sell price for each of the accounts doing the purchases and then chose the submit option.

  Most people thought Lenny's programmers spent their entire day thinking of new ways to analyze financial data. In truth they spent about three days per year doing that. The rest of the time they spent creating inventive ways to distribute purchases so Lenny wouldn't have to go public until after he owned 40% of a company instead of the 5% the SEC made you report.

  With the purchases submitted and waiting to happen, Lenny called in his three analysts and told them to start digging on this and find out where First Global slashed a dollar per share from its operations over a year ago. It shouldn't be a big task for them because there was a program on the system to kick those things out. He wanted them to find out the details, not just the place where the numbers differed. Lenny doubted the bank managed to trim a penny per share in a hundred locations, so there should be a dead fish lying on the bank for them to find.

  By this afternoon Lenny should have the company's credit maxed out purchasing 100 million shares of First Global Bank. Once the target was achieved he was going to have several trading floor workers put out the story that First Global Bank was going to beat analyst estimates and beat them big. The rumor sniffers would hear the rumor and see the trading volume. They would assume it all to be insider trading and jump on the band wagon. Stock would be up $2.00 per share an hour later. If Lenny didn't have the rotting fish in his hands by then, he might have to get out rather than run a bigger play.

  You see, Lenny knows how to run a company and Lenny knows how to shred a company. You can make a profit running a company, but you always make a killing shredding a company. This company was looking like a perfect setup. Yes, he would make around $7.00 per share during the run up with his little bit of insider knowledge, but that was nothing compared to the $60 or so per share he could make by selling short after the run up then shredding the company. All it took to start the shred was a few well placed rumors based on facts. Before Lenny could make more than the initial bump, he had to hold the rotting fish in his hand.

  ***

  Vladimir had a lot of time to read and surf the Web with his current job. He only needed to work when the hits came into the “ping server” and not all of those had to be responded to quickly. Any IP address he had previously identified and stored in the database would simply generate an automatic email out to the team stating the time the hit came in and what hit number this was.

  When Vladimir played the killing game, information was his friend. He analyzed everything when it came to an operation. More often than not he got it all right, too. The problem with being in the field and being right is that those making the decisions tend to filter your repo
rts via a paper shredder because those reports exposed them as idiots too many times. This was how Vladimir ended up in this wheelchair. Those who should have listened didn't, and his team was sent into a meat grinder. When the grinder was done, two of his team were dead and he had a bullet lodged in his spine. The debacle made the news and some government officials had to investigate. When they got a copy of Vladimir's report there were some people no longer working in the agency and a comfortable retirement for Vladimir. Nobody spoke about what happened to those no longer working for the agency.

  Of course most major media were completely controlled by the interests of the MBAs running the media corporation. They would never run a news story lambasting a corporation they held stock in. They would also never allow a story to be run that said their money maker was either bad or about to hit a brick wall.

  Vladimir knew where to look on-line to get the real news. He had written his own spider programs to crawl the blog sites looking for keywords and pulling down the content for him to read. Blog sites that happened to get something really right had a tendency to disappear in a matter of hours. One MBA called another MBA and the account got deleted. In this way the Internet was not an avenue of free expression, but was quickly becoming a heavily moderated form of Corporate Correct Speak. Politically correct didn't matter, as long as you never dissed or pointed out the crimes of a company one of the other MBAs held stock in.

  Since Vladimir learned what part of this project was really about, he had been using his talents to identify the next terrorist hot bed. Nobody cared about the desert training camps and everybody knew about the current hot spots. He was looking for the next event horizon. The one that would be the basis of a 9/11 or larger-sized attack. For the last three days Vladimir had been reading stories which were scaring him. The Indian IT workers were trying to unionize.