Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  “It sounds like you are all worried this play may be too big and someone might go to jail.”

  “Normally if you admit to insider trading you simply pay a fine and lose your trading license. Since we aren't a licensed trader, just running individual accounts for others, I don't think the latter applies. Oddly enough, you can be a financial advisor without much oversight or training.”

  “Well, I think you should go sooner rather than later.”

  Jeremy was rather shocked to hear Stacie say such a thing. He glanced at her and could tell she was dead serious.

  “How come?”

  “You said yourself what you are doing will play out in a few months. By that time someone will have gotten wise to it and you will need to be out of reach of the law for a while.”

  “I'm not so certain that will happen. Just how many people went to prison for shorting Enron when they had insider information? How many did you even hear about getting investigated?”

  “Lots of people went to prison over Enron!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes they did. The company officials and the people helping them artificially inflate the stock price along with those helping them get creative with accounting. Nobody got investigated who shorted the company at its peak or when it was on the way down.”

  “Martha Stewart went to prison for using insider information.”

  “Martha went to prison for obstruction of justice. Anyone else would have said they asked their broker to call them when the sell off started and sold accordingly. They would have paid a fine and the broker would have went to prison for violating the terms of their license. She denied the arrangement and the broker testified the arrangement existed. There was also a tape of the phone call. It was a dumb play.”

  “Oh.”

  “By the time Martha went to trial the stock was trading for more than when she dumped it. Had she been as dense as a rock rather than pridefully stupid she would have made money and not gone to prison.”

  “That's a rather cold way of looking at it.”

  “It's reality. Insider information is only good when you are smart enough to actually read the play. Yes, the company was going to take a hit, but it wasn't the only product in the pipeline, just the most hyped one. A dump, a short, and a cover done quickly could have made some money, but she didn't have the information soon enough. You can't use insider information unless it is at least three days in advance. News the day of gets you in trouble.”

  “You really are a natural at this aren't you? Don't you worry about going to prison?”

  “Not really. I'm smart enough to know you cut a deal up front and admit your guilt. Then you pay a large fine and have to stay out of the trading business for a while. You cannot even have your own trading account during your probation.”

  “Couldn't the fine be all of your money they can find?”

  “There are prescribed limits, and even if it was, a lot of our money isn't here. Even less of it will be here once the Kyyiv office opens up.”

  “Oh. And they can't pull you back from Kyyiv?”

  “No extradition treaty and insider trading isn't currently a crime over there. They handle extradition on a case by case basis and the crime has to be a crime in Russia before they will even hear the case.”

  “Wow”

  “Lenny is good.”

  “You are getting there from the sound of it,” she chuckled. “Anyway, I think you should go. Get a place big enough for two.”

  That freaked Jeremy for a moment and caused him to swerve on the road just a little.

  “Careful big fella, I want to get there in one piece.”

  “Why two?” he asked once the car was under control.

  “If they start digging I will probably turn up. I haven't signed any confidentiality agreements, nor have I told you anything particularly incriminating, but I would rather have a lawyer handling that part. I said two because if they start looking into this I expect you to call me and let me come live with you, at least until it is all settled. You are going to make enough from this you should be able to support me for a while.”

  The girl had a point. Jeremy's bonus this year would probably be well over a million. There was absolutely no reason he couldn't support her for a year or two since she was directly responsible for the income. It would cut into him trying to sample the local talent but her talent was incredible.

  Finally the lodge appeared. They parked, checked in, and had the luggage carted to the room. Jeremy was dumbfounded by the amount of luggage Stacie had brought for a weekend. It was even more odd considering they would be naked much of the weekend in the hotel room. He had learned early on you don't bring these things up before sex though, as they tended to shut off the sex.

  Once they made it to the room and tipped the bellhop, Jeremy informed Stacie he needed to take a shower after sleeping on the plane. She told him not to get dressed after he got clean.

  Jeremy walked out of the bathroom still drying his hair and was greeted by the most incredible stocking and garter set he had ever seen on one phenomenally hot lady.

  “Aren't you going to say something?” asked Stacie with the most knowing seductive smile on her face she had ever had. “You never did answer about letting me come and live with you in Kyyiv.” Stacie knew all too well that Jeremy couldn't answer right now, there wasn't enough blood left in his brain to formulate a response. That piece of information was easily obtained by taking a look at the dipstick. She was enjoying this!

  A pounding in Jeremy's ears was how he first came to realize he hadn't taken a breath since coming out of the bathroom. Once respiration had returned to him he recovered quickly. “I guess that depends on how well you respond to this,” Jeremy said as he reached into his carry-on bag.

  Now it was Stacie's turn to not be able to breathe. She had just been teasing, but if that was a ring instead of the jewelry she had asked for there was no way she could say no this weekend. There was a momentary breath of relief when she saw two Helzberg boxes come out of the bag. One was obviously a necklace and the other had to be the earrings. It was a good thing she had gotten that breath in, because when he opened the box for the necklace she lost all her air.

  Several hours later they were lying in bed very exhausted and incredibly satisfied. Stacie sensed Jeremy was about to doze off again. She herself had just woken up from a brief journey in that abyss known as sleep. “We should probably try out the dual shower and then go find something to eat.”

  “We could just put on those robes hanging in there and order room service,” muttered a groggy Jeremy.

  “Oh no. I brought a killer dress and it will show off that jewelry grandly!”

  “Are you going to wear that garter set under it?” teased Jeremy as he started to come around.

  “I brought several different ones. Thought I might need all of them,” she giggled.

  “While I've got you like this, I need to talk to you about New Year's Eve.”

  “What about it? That is four months away.”

  “You received the email with the pictures of my roommates didn't you?”

  “Yes. I hadn't really known what you were up to with that.”

  “I wasn't trying to set up a four-some Jeremy, just cool your jets. They invoked the girl code on me, so we need to talk about New Year's Eve.”

  Jeremy had been around long enough to know that “invoking the girl code” tended to bring about less than happy times for a guy.

  “You still have some good-looking single friends from college who are at least as successful as you don't you?”

  Now Jeremy understood where this was going. “You want us to go out as a group on New Year's Eve?”

  “Sort of. My roommates want dates for an all inclusive New Year's Eve party at some posh hotel. They haven't chosen the hotel yet.”

  This was starting to sound like a guy was going to have to guilt a friend into going out with his sister. Stacie could see the look forming on his face and continued, “They
've both promised to put out. For two of your friends this is going to be a sure thing. They simply have to wear a nice suit, make the reservations, and show up.”

  Wow! thought Jeremy. She left me no wiggle room whatsoever.

  Finally, he decided to risk the rest of the weekend with the one question he could use to get out of this. “Are they both on the pill?”

  Stacie sat up with a shocked look on her face, gasped, punched Jeremy in the ribs and exclaimed “How can you ask that?”

  Recovering, Jeremy sat up, looked her in the eye and said, “It is going to be the first question I'm asked.”

  Stacie knew it was true, she just didn't think she would have to give up the information. In truth, she had forgotten to make them promise that part as well, and now she was going to be forced to make a commitment for them. “They are, but that doesn't mean they won't want ...”

  Jeremy interrupted her by holding up his hand. “That's all I wanted to know.”

  “But,” Stacie tried to protest.

  “Don't.”

  There it was. She had violated the girl code by taking the choice away from them. Both dates would be infuriated if they had to use a condom now.

  ***

  Kathryn was sitting in her office fuming. Migration of the final data center did not go smoothly. They had no significant problems migrating the other data centers, but this last one was under the impression they were being expanded, not migrated. As a result, everyone working there refused to assist in even the slightest way. The job to migrate final data changes never ran. Some buffoon on the team thought because the disk farms were integrated that all of the data should be there anyway and there was no need to migrate anything. Boy were they wrong!

  On Sunday morning when the system restart test happened and the last data center wasn't booted, nothing worked. Each system in that group had a security ID file which had to be exchanged during system startup to allow the disk farm to be shared. Nobody had mentioned that little tidbit, so when they tried to start two data centers in India instead of one in India and one in the U.S. only half of the bank locations could log on.

  Why didn't the fail over work? Nobody bothered to turn off the communications equipment in the U.S. location. In theory they would have all failed over to the Indian location, but a sequence of events stopped that from happening. The first problem was the communications equipment was still running. It would have noticed the system wasn't running if someone had turned it off. They never turned off the other system, they simply stopped the application. None of the IT staff working at the U.S. data center had reported for work on Sunday. Nobody had bothered to contact Kathryn so she could start ringing Kent and Margret's cell phones. This was a debacle and someone was going to be calling Kathryn on the carpet for it.

  To add insult to injury Kathryn had come in late this morning. She didn't arrive at the office until 9:30 AM. She didn't find out about the problem from her own team either. She found out when Kent called her cell phone. Someone was holding his feet to the fire and he was offering up Kathryn. So much for all of those short skirts and heels she had left to keep Kent's mind elsewhere.

  Kathryn was on her cell phone to Margret as she was heading out to her car. She grabbed a couple of the young studs who were supposedly intelligent enough to be on this project to bring with her. They were supposed to have been at the data center this weekend along with one other to supervise the migration and the subcontractor. The third young stud who was on the short list to be out the door had called in sick this morning. He would probably get his termination notice by courier later today.

  Adding more insult to injury was the fact Kathryn had the worst case of cramps she had ever had in her life. She had been up half the night with them. That was the reason she was late this morning. She told the studs to drive their own transportation over to First Global. She didn't tell them they wouldn't have jobs by the end of the meeting as she needed them cooperating now.

  “What happened this weekend Margret?”

  “I don't know. You were supposedly handling this migration. I was just around to advise.”

  “Why didn't any of your people report to work on Sunday?”

  “They all resigned on Saturday when the migration started. They assumed they wouldn't have jobs once the migration was complete since everybody else had been let go within two weeks of their data center being migrated.”

  “Don't they realize they won't be able to use your company as a reference when they go looking for other jobs?”

  “We never provide references, only confirm dates of employment. We don't even confirm salary information, just job title. No way to legally deny providing that information.”

  “I'll be there in 20 minutes. What has been done to rectify the situation so far?”

  “I had someone go in and power down the machines at the data center. Most of the branch locations are now up and running, but we are running on a single data center. This has to be resolved in under 24 hours now. The primary outage was less than the 12 hour window, but we have less than 24 hours left to get another data center up and running.”

  There was that rule again. The one Margret had swatted Kathryn between the eyes with nearly a year ago.

  “Is the high bandwidth connection still up?” Margret asked.

  “I have no idea at this point. I have two of the team who were supposed to supervise this coming with me. If this isn't resolved shortly they aren't going to have jobs.”

  “Let me guess, these are the guys you had over in India before?”

  “Yes,” responded Kathryn and hung up.

  Margret wasn't slow, Kathryn had to give her that. She had caught onto the fact their careers would end long before their lives after getting a hint about their exploits in the Red Light District.

  A while later they were all seated in the conference room at First Global headquarters trying to figure out how to undo this mess.

  “If we bring up the communications equipment and the machines we will be right back in the same boat,” said Margret.

  “Are we sure we only need one file copied over?” Kent asked. Everyone in the room was shocked he grasped that much of the situation.

  “We won't know until we try,” responded Margret. “Since we cannot bring up the external communications equipment, we can only bring up the machine, FTP the file to a notebook, then communicate out via wi-fi or dial up. Do you have an email address of someone they can send it to at the site in India which needs it?” Margret asked looking at Kathryn.

  “Yes, those two both have email addresses we can send to and cell phone numbers they can call to ensure the file got there. Is there anyone at the data center they can work with now?”

  “One of the IT workers from this office is over there now.” Margret scratched out a phone number for them to call and told them to use the phone here in the conference room. She then turned to her laptop and followed through the links on the company Intranet to find the system startup documentation for the data centers. Once she found it she looked at Kathryn. “Tell one of the skirts you left here who has an account on the system to bring her notebook in here and work with these two.”

  Kathryn didn't even notice the slight. She got up and walked out to get one of the skirts. Kent did notice it though and said, “Margret, there is no reason to insult people, they are trying to help us.”

  “They are the ones who got us into this situation Kent. This should have all been fixed on Sunday. We are now less than six hours from the FDIC showing up at our doorstep asking for full accounting of the situation. Are you going to be the one waiting for them at the doorstep?”

  “It's not so bad. We have a system startup problem.”

  “We have a 24 hour recovery period per the FDIC regulations. After that, we are no longer insured. I'm certainly not going to be in the room when the board of directors gets that little bit of news.”

  Invoking the board of directors, Margret now had Kent's complete attention. “What do you
need me to do?”

  “I need you to talk to Carol and let her know we have a situation. Then I need you to ask her if she wants to be in here while it happens or if she wants plausible deniability.”

  Kent's eyes went wide, but he got up and left. Kathryn returned with one of the skirts who sat with the guys. Margret looked at her and said, “Send me an email so I can reply with the link to the information they are going to need.”

  With the emails exchanged and the person at the data center on the speaker phone, the team set about getting the system started. They used the boot option to avoid starting the banking application automatically.

  “Pete,” said Marget, “I need you to copy the security file off to your laptop. Is the internal network stuff still running?”

  “Within the lab it is. I'm using a terminal emulator from my notebook to monitor the system.”

  “OK. The others here are going to tell you what file to find keystroke by keystroke. Once you have it, ZIP it and they will give you an email address to send it to. Is the cable modem still working there?”

  “I don't know. I only have one network port and there isn't a wireless hub on that thing.”

  “I know, we didn't want them surfing the Web in a manner that wasn't monitored. Is there a modem compatible phone jack?”

  “There is a bank of modems over here. I can just keep hooking up until I find one that works.”

  “Good, you have the remote VPN software on that notebook don't you?”

  “Yes, it is how I do support at night. I will be able to send the email once I have the file. Is that all you need me to do?”

  “Sadly you are going to have to stay there until we get the system in India up and running.”

  “In that case, you are buying me lunch. Send someone over now so they can answer the door. There is nobody here, not even a receptionist. FedEx already showed up to drop one set of backup media off and collect another. I had to tell them we didn't have an outbound today.”

  Kathryn looked at Margret. “Do you have a link with directions and a street address on that site?”