The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “And we’ll see you get filled,” said Gavallan. “Thank you, Jean-Jacques. Au revoir.”

  “Au revoir, tout le monde.”

  For a moment, there was only silence. The sound of pens tapping the table. Legs crossing. Meg Kratzer lit a cigarette and took pains to direct her smoke toward the ceiling.

  There it was, Gavallan told himself. The managing director of Europe’s largest accounting firm had just confirmed that Mercury’s Moscow operations were up and running. Gavallan asked himself why he hadn’t called Jean-Jacques Pillonel in the first place. Because you can only trust your own, a cynical voice reminded him. Because people lie.

  More and more, he was certain the Private Eye-PO had to be someone he knew, someone with a personal ax to grind.

  “So, are we back at square one,” he asked his colleagues, “or did we just cross the finish line?” Unspoken, but hanging up there near the ceiling with Meg’s cigarette smoke and the lingering scent of his half-eaten burrito, were the words “postpone,” “shelve,” and “cancel.”

  “Where the hell is Byrnes?” griped Tustin.

  “Give him time,” said Llewellyn-Davies. “He’ll get back to us.”

  “It’s ten o’clock in Moscow. How much time does he need?”

  “Relax, Bruce,” said Meg. “I’ll take Jean-Jacques’s word over the Private Eye-PO’s anytime. I’m sure Graf will only confirm what we already know.”

  “Maybe,” said Tustin grudgingly. “But I still want to hear from him.”

  So did Gavallan. Every minute that passed without word from Byrnes fueled his worry over his friend’s well-being. Still, he was pleased with the give-and-take of the discussion. If there were any doubts about Mercury, it was best that they surfaced within the confines of the office.

  “So, Sam, what’s your call?”

  “Tough one.”

  Tannenbaum was the firm’s resident bohemian. With his tight jeans, flannel shirt, and flowing blond hair, painstakingly groomed and tied into a ponytail, he looked like a refugee from Big Sur. “We seem to be stuck between believing in ourselves and believing the Private Eye-PO. From what I can gather, Mercury is everything we say it is. You think so. Meg thinks so. Jean-Jacques thinks so. Jupiter Metrix says so. It’s a ‘go deal.’ At the same time, we feel compelled to trust the Private Eye-PO because he’s been accurate in the past.”

  “Jesus, Shirley, you’re getting me hard,” whined Tustin. “Say what you want to say and let’s get on with it.”

  Tannenbaum shot him a withering look, but refused to be hurried, either by Tustin or by any of the other curious faces staring at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know what to say except that we need to find the Private Eye-PO as quickly as possible and ask him where he’s getting his information.”

  “Only one problem,” said Gavallan. “We still don’t know who he is.”

  “Can’t we shut him up?” asked Meg. “Slap an injunction on him for false and deprecatory statements? I mean, what he’s doing isn’t any different from some wiseass issuing a phony earnings warning.”

  “Sure,” said Tannenbaum. “But again, we have to find him first, then we have to get an injunction, and eventually we have to take him to trial. We don’t have the time. The balloon is going up in five days.”

  Gavallan was suddenly restless. Frustration cramped his shoulders and clawed at his neck. Rising from his chair, he walked slowly round the table. All roads kept leading back to the same place. The deal was sound. The Cisco receipts were bullshit. So were the pictures of the Moscow NOC. Some asshole getting his jollies trying to hurt Black Jet or Mercury. It didn’t really matter who he was, or why he was doing it. Which left Byrnes. No one knew better than he how important the deal was. Absent his word to the contrary, there was only one way to go.

  “Okay, everyone, that’s a wrap,” Gavallan said. “We all decided on this?” Approaching the table, he extended his hand over its center. “Tony?”

  “It’s a go, Jett.” Llewellyn-Davies laid his hand on top of Gavallan’s.

  “Bruce?”

  “Fuckin’ A, bubba. We’re going in!” Tustin slapped his hand atop the two others.

  “Sam?”

  The lawyer looked unsure. “Umm, if you say so. Sure.” Another hand joined the pile.

  “Meg?”

  “Hee-yah!” she shouted, half laughing, throwing her hand on top of the stack. “We’re on the road to glory! Two billion or bust!”

  Gavallan felt the weight of the four hands on top of his own. For a moment, his eyes passed from one person to the next. Bruce, the congenital loudmouth. Tony, the gutsy survivor. Sam, the reluctant corporate warrior. And Meg, the discarded treasure.

  These were more than his friends, more than the closest of colleagues. These were the members of the family he’d chosen for himself. The pillars of the life he had built after his world had crashed in ruins about him. It all came back to people. To teamwork. To mutual accomplishment. He waited a second longer than usual, enjoying the communion of flesh, the union of wills.

  “All right then,” he said. “We’re decided.”

  Without another word, he pulled his hand from beneath the others and walked out of the conference room.

  Back in his office, Gavallan stood by the window. Patches of blue peeked through fast-moving clouds. The harbor was alive with mid-morning traffic, tugs and ferries and tankers leaving frothy trails in their wakes. Tired, he pressed a cheek to the glass, enjoying the feel of the cool, slick surface against his skin. “Mercury is solid. Mercury is solid.” He repeated the words over and over, a mantra to convince himself and the whole world. But he’d been in the business too long to believe it. Skepticism had become second nature.

  Right now only one thing was certain: If what the Private Eye-PO claimed was true and Black Jet Securities went ahead and brought Mercury to market, he, as sole owner of the firm, would be looking at a class action lawsuit of tobaccoesque proportions. Forget recouping the thirty-million-dollar bridge loan. Forget selling the company. Black Jet Securities would be doing a Drexel quicker than he could say “Mike Milken,” and he himself would be learning to trade stocks by Touch-Tone phone from the inside of a federal prison.

  Returning to his desk, he found the shaman staring at him. He met the squat carving’s gaze and stared right back.

  “Find him,” he ordered the Indian medicine man. “Find him, now!”

  10

  Child’s play.

  Jason Vann took a look at the Private Eye-PO’s web page and smirked. An amateur. He could see it right away. No sidebars. No pull-down menus. No search fields. And certainly no banner advertisements that might earn him a little dough. Just the guy’s name written across the top in faggy script, a half dozen hypertexted headlines, and a bunch of charts chronicling the latest goings-on in the exciting world of venture capital financing, tech-related mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings.

  There were tables showing IPOs coming to market next week, IPOs recently priced, the performance of IPOs just launched, and the year-to-date performances of the Private Eye-PO’s personal picks. The symbol for each stock was colored an electric blue, denoting a hyperlink to drive the reader to a related site. Vann double-clicked on a few of the links. As expected, they led to commercial portals that offered free content—Yahoo! Finance, CNBC, Bloomberg. Definitely a one-man show. Best of all, there was an E-mail address at the bottom of the page. PrivateEyePO@Hotmail.com. Vann read it, and his smirk took on a decidedly arrogant cast.

  This would be the easiest hundred grand he’d ever earned.

  The individual whom Jett Gavallan had called “the top man in his field” kept his office in two spartan rooms on the second floor of a modest colonial home in Potomac, Maryland. And the “field” to which Gavallan had been referring was alternately called “cybersleuthing,” “systems security,” or, if you were a black-hat hacker, “betraying the cause.”

  If you needed to find someone on the Net quickly—friend o
r foe, cracker, script kiddie, or gray-haired hacker—Vann was your man. The FBI had called him to discover who had hacked into NORAD and raised the entire United States defense establishment to Defcon 2. Since then, he’d lectured regularly at Quantico. The CIA had paid him handsomely to track down a team of cyberterrorists who had defaced Langley’s mainframe. They’d thought so highly of his methods that they’d contracted to keep him on permanent retainer. Five thousand dollars a month so the spooks in Virginia could install a direct line to his home.

  And Mr. John Gavallan of San Francisco was paying him a hundred thousand bucks to find out the name and home address of some Net loudmouth calling himself the Private Eye-PO.

  Child’s play.

  Vann’s offices were small, each room ten by twelve. Windows high on the wall overlooked a green pasture where horses were left to run. Not that Vann spent much time looking. Everything in the world that interested him could be found in this room or the next. Every bare surface was packed with computers and peripheral equipment: PCs, Macs, servers, scanners, printers. At last count he had nine systems up and running, twenty-four seven. He also had some cool Lord of the Rings stuff on the shelves, a Lava lamp he’d gotten for Christmas that he couldn’t decide whether was lame or not, and a model of the Eiffel Tower he’d gotten at Paris! Paris! on a trip to Las Vegas last year with his parents.

  Scrunching his nose, Vann saddled closer to the monitor. Though not entirely necessary—given the parameters of the assignment—he decided to spend a few minutes studying the Private Eye-PO’s web page. He backtracked through a month’s worth of the man’s weekly columns, basically “rants and raves” about new issues coming to market. Finding the attacks on Mercury Broadband, an IPO managed by Black Jet Securities, he understood why Mr. Gavallan was in such a hurry to find out who had written such mean-spirited words. If it had been his stock the Private Eye-PO was attacking, Vann would have killed the guy.

  The first thing Vann did was contact a buddy who worked for Hotmail.com and get him into a private room on IRC, the Internet Relay Chat.

  Hotmail.com was a free mail service, and anonymous—that is, you could set up an account there without giving your name, address, phone number, or credit card, any of which would have made it way too easy for someone like Jason Vann to find you. You did, however, have to provide a valid E-mail address to retrieve the password you needed to access the system. Unbeknownst to the lay user, the sign-on page contained an “x field” that recorded the IP address—the “Internet protocol” where the mail was sent.

  Vann’s contact at Hotmail.com was Ralph Viola, who went by the handle “Stallion.”

  JV (Jason Vann): My man, I need the 411 on one of your users. Usual terms apply. Here you go: PrivateEye-PO. Whatcha got?

  Stallion: Wait a minute while I get the logs. . . . Okay, got it. Your man’s IP=22.154.877.91. Logged on this morning at 7:21 EST. Gaming tonight? We’re doing Stalingrad. You can be General von Paulus.

  JV: Screw that. Krauts always lose in that one. Too busy, anyway. Who is the ISP?

  Stallion: Not so fast, jack. Time to up the scratch. People watching over my shoulder. Five bills’ll do the trick.

  JV: You’re a thief, but since I’m in a hurry, okay. Try it again and I’ll brand thee “Highwayman.”

  Stallion: And thee “Rogue!” The ISP is BlueEarth.com in Palm Beach, Florida. Thanks and aloha, McGarrett!

  JV: Aloha!

  Since word had gotten out that Vann had joined up with the feds, everyone had started calling him McGarrett. Like Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O, which even the biggest dumb-ass knew was the coolest cop show ever on TV. “Book him, Danno!”

  He looked down at the name of Private Eye-PO’s ISP, or Internet service provider. BlueEarth.com. Every time the Private Eye-PO logged on, his modem was connected to one of BlueEarth’s servers, and that server had its own unique and permanent Internet protocol address. Stallion had given him the server address where the Private Eye-PO’s mail was last sent and the time of transmission. All Vann had to do was contact BlueEarth.com and find out the IP and corresponding phone number that had logged on to that particular server at 7:21 EST this morning.

  Child’s play.

  Vann entered his mail program and pulled up a file containing the names, E-mail addresses, and web handles of people who worked for ISPs. When he’d first gotten hooked on the Net there were maybe a hundred ISPs across the country. Now there were thousands. He guessed BlueEarth was a newcomer, because he couldn’t recall ever coming across the name before. No matter; he was sure that somewhere in his files, he’d have something about BlueEarth. Some of the information came from his friends. Some he purchased. Some he procured by more sophisticated means.

  Amazingly, the search failed to turn up any associates he might contact at BlueEarth.com, no Ralph “Stallion” Viola he could slip five hundred bucks in exchange for Private Eye-PO’s IP and phone number. Vann scratched at his hair, frowning.

  Suddenly the screen stuttered, went blank, then colored a sizzling hot pink.

  Reset. Fatal exception at F275A-II/7. 13:52:45.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be the easiest hundred thousand he’d ever made.

  A long gulp cleaned out the Dew. He tossed the can in the trash and slid back his chair.

  It was a lovely day outside: blue sky, a few clouds, temperature closing in on ninety. The Bullises had their Thoroughbreds roaming free in the pasture. He particularly liked the bay gelding and was certain it would have made an excellent charger. If he ever learned to ride, he might ask the Bullises to allow him to take the bay to the jousting tournament at the annual Renaissance Faire in College Park. He toyed with the idea for a few seconds, then discarded it. He’d never be able to find a decent suit of armor. Besides, before that, he’d have to learn how to drive.

  Cracking his knuckles, Vann brought his chair close to his PC. It looked like Mr. Gavallan was going to make him earn his money today. Vann didn’t like hacking into an ISP, but sometimes a carefully considered violation of an individual’s or enterprise’s privacy was necessary. If anyone had a problem with it, they could take it up with the FBI. Agent Fox Muldur would be pleased to assist in the matter. And whistling the theme from X-Files, he began banging code into his computer, working his way, step by laborious step, into BlueEarth.com’s innermost sanctum: the customer address files where they guarded the names, phone numbers, and IPs of all their clients.

  Three hours later, he was still working.

  The sun was setting and the small room had grown hot and stuffy, the air as rank and cloying as a high school weight room’s. Vann didn’t notice. Head bowed, he banged line after line of code into the computer, waiting for the walls to fall. So far, every one of his ploys had failed. He couldn’t find a back door. The firewall was impenetrable. And he couldn’t keep hacking into the site much longer for fear of being spotted by BlueEarth’s security programs.

  A voice called from downstairs. “Jason, dinner’s ready!”

  “Just a second.”

  Vann tapped at the keys a few moments longer, then threw his hands up. He was beaten and he knew it. “Damn it all!” he muttered, sliding back from his desk and staring at the impotent keyboard.

  “Jason!!”

  Vann logged off the Net and stalked from his room. There were other ways of finding the Private Eye-PO. It might take a little longer, but in the end, he’d nab him just the same. These “messiah” types were all alike. They craved attention. The anonymous ones were the worst. They couldn’t go a day without dropping into some chat room on the web or the IRC to learn what their public thought of them. And next time the Private Eye-PO did that, Jason Vann would be waiting for him. He just hoped it was soon. Vann wanted the fifty-thousand-dollar bonus.

  “Coming, Mom,” he called.

  “And be sure to wash your hands and face.”

  Vann closed and locked the door behind him. Here he was, thirty-nine years old, and his mother was still telling him to scrub up b
efore dinner. Maybe when he turned forty she would start treating him like an adult.

  11

  Ghosts in a frozen mist, they ran.

  Twelve men. Bold apparitions clad in white, doggedly advancing to the same silent cadence, their breath erupting in violent, staccato bursts. Forward. Ever forward. Against the wind. Against the snow. Against themselves.

  The cold seeped through their boots, clamping their toes and nipping at their heels with teeth as hungry as a bear trap’s. The snow was deep here—two feet, at least—a soupy, devilish mixture of slush and dirt and the spores from the unyielding tundra. And this one week from midsummer’s eve. A frantic wind howled around them, clawing at their eyes, scratching their cheeks, slyly slipping beneath the folds of their anoraks and burrowing through their sweaters, their fatigues, and their thermals, biting their skin like ice on fire.

  The men’s legs were strong, their muscles hard and conditioned, exquisitely calibered pistons willing to carry them over hill and dale hour after hour. Their arms swung by their sides, the dry, rhythmic chafing of the snowsuits sounding like sandpaper scraping velvet. Each man carried a pack, and in that pack a jumble of rocks and stones weighing twenty-five kilograms—fifty-five pounds. They leaned forward as one, their well-toned shoulders and tensed abdomens working in concert to distribute the load. Soon the packs would be filled with a different cargo—timers, fuses, detcord, and plastique, sophisticated devices as far evolved from stones as men were from apes.