The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  As she prowled the target businesses at night, Jin Li moved with light-footed efficiency, for if you clean offices every day, you know a lot about them. Typically she received plans of the floors that CorpServe cleaned and made a point always to ask if there were any sensitive elements of the job, such as a CEO who stayed late, which offices needed to be vacuumed daily because of allergies, which vacuumed less frequently, etc. All in the guise of providing excellent service, which in fact CorpServe did. Very often the response by management pinpointed exactly which office or offices were most valuable. Jin Li had learned that secretaries and assistants had better trash than their supervisors, because they made drafts of responses, copied e-mail, and so on. But that was not all! CorpServe could also provide, if asked, another service: secure, lockable plastic bins marked TO BE SHREDDED, an assistance that companies liked, since it efficiently segregated sensitive documents away from the eyes of their own not-so-trustworthy employees. Of course these bins usually contained the very best information Jin Li most wanted, or, put another way, CorpServe's clients were paying it extra money to more efficiently steal the very information they most wanted destroyed. She had keys that fit all of the different makes of these bins, and it was a matter of quickly emptying them into a bag that she would later inspect. People were amazingly sloppy with paper, especially now that everyone used computers. Companies spent enormous sums on their internal and external computer security, hiring an endless string of geniuses, wizards, and solemn soothsayers to implement every manner of state-of-the-art antihacking protocols. Paper, however, was by definition superfluous, since every document and e-mail existed somewhere on a computer. And because things were not "saved" on paper anymore, they were less likely to be "filed" away. Paper had become the temporary, disposable manifestation of the electronic file, convenient for carrying around but not worth being careful with. You could always print out another copy.

  All this was true from one office to the next. Some had security procedures, but these were rarely enforced with any regularity. People in New York offices were too busy, too pressured, too ambitious to worry about their wastepaper. It was someone else's problem.

  Which was also to say it was Jin Li's opportunity. She had learned to avoid certain industries and to target others. Law firms had some value, especially if they had a mergers-and-acquisitions department, a fact easy enough to determine. But the short-term value of these papers was so obvious, not to mention subject to SEC security regulations, that the law firms generally went to great lengths to destroy their paper. Publishing and media companies, by contrast, had absolutely no value. Retail banking was useless. Insurance companies were useless too, except if they had a corporate liability department, which had the potential to be a gold mine if documents revealed a company facing huge undisclosed problems, such as product lawsuits. The companies underwriting corporate bonds had some value, since they evaluated the underlying creditworthiness of the companies whose debt they peddled. Pharmaceutical companies were good, when you could find one with interesting product research, but the best offices were financial services firms, which evaluated stocks, because what she wanted most was time-perishable information that immediately affected the price of a publicly traded company—stock prices generally reacting to information faster and more dramatically than do bonds. The information had to be so good, so privileged, that the analysts, journalists, stock pickers, inside leakers, and anyone else interested didn't already have it.

  The global stock markets ran on the quaint theory that they were efficient, that is, that crucial information about publicly traded stocks was available very rapidly to any interested party; the reality, of course, was different. Companies lied, cheated, inflated profits, hid debts, booked phony business, and smilingly pretended that their exalted leaders were not dying or ineffective or irrevocably insane or, most typically, widely hated by insiders. Companies "smoothed" their data to appear more steadily profitable, developed products that bombed, suffered internal wars between personalities, between divisions, between the directors and management, between management and the rank and file, between stockholders and management. Internal disagreements could be mild, festering, explosive, litigious, even potentially violent. As one of Jin Li's professors at Harbin Institute of Technology had said, no matter how large and bureaucratized, no matter how rigid and repressive, corporations were ultimately just collections of human beings, subject to everything that both afflicted and elevated them—not unlike, the professor had reminded them, the collective farms created by Mao in the 1960s which, though meant to be efficiently productive, were disasters.

  So what had been Jin Li's mistake? This was the question that had haunted her since she'd run through the rainy dawn away from the shit-flooded car and the two Mexican girls sprawled out next to it. Hurrying to the parkway and flagging down a cab on its way into Manhattan. Hunched in the back clutching her purse, terrified, smelling the excrement on her clothes and skin, trying to keep her sobbing quiet. Someone must have seen what she was doing. Who? This would take some analysis. Every night she received the blue bags culled from the night operations, each bag tagged by floor and company and day. These were trucked to the building in Red Hook, where by day Jin Li and three trusted other Chinese women separated them into their respective piles, arranged by company. One night's trash was usually useless, but as the record accrued, a context was revealed. Jin Li watched divisional struggles, executives attacking each other, results exceeding expectations, projects being canceled or accelerated—everything that happened in a corporation. As conflicts heightened, or as she became more fully aware of their possibilities, she focused the paper collection on the respective desk, office, or floor. Perhaps a dozen time-lapse narratives played out continuously on paper. Often there were gaps in information and she would have to infer what had happened. She kept notebooks on each company and updated these regularly, and included newspaper stories and chat room conversations that confirmed or conflicted with the inklings revealed in the corporate garbage days or weeks earlier.

  A laborious process, this sifting for flecks of gold in a stream of data, but perhaps once or twice a month Jin Li found a genuine opportunity. In the ebb and flow of possibility, there inevitably arose companies that were approaching a merger, a new product launch, a phase of "restated" earnings, or quietly confronting a government investigation. She scanned all useful documents, along with her written commentary, onto an encrypted disc that each week was sent hidden in a fat bundle of last month's computer magazines that she bought in wire-wrapped bales at three cents a pound from a New York company that was paid handsomely to falsify circulation figures for glossy national magazines. Many of these magazines had promotional computer discs bound into them, and it was a simple matter to swap her disc into a certain issue, fold over the corner of the front cover, and send the entire wire-bound bale of magazines to her brother. The Chinese authorities generally smiled on any activity that created the free transfer of valuable information from the West to China and were happy to wave the computer magazines through. Of course it was easier, faster, and cheaper to send the information by e-mail, but her brother was rightly terrified of the American government's electronic surveillance programs, which sniffed phone and Internet chatter for keywords or word patterns. And then there were the filters that the Chinese used on all incoming e-mail. The people's government went through waves of greater and lesser repression of e-mail, but it was safe to say that Chen was not so well connected that he could be sure when the periodic tightenings would take place or how good the filters were. He had seen friends arrested for merely having the word "freedom" appear in their incoming e-mail.

  So better to smuggle information the old-fashioned way—physically. Each week Jin Li reserved space on an air cargo container that left JFK on Thursday night and arrived in Shanghai the next Saturday at dawn local time. Twenty-seven bales of the computer magazines, arranged in a cube, shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, went into the huge container. T
he container was off-loaded within an hour of arrival, and one of Chen's men would take possession of it. The bale containing the correct disc was always in the center of the pallet, and thus it was a simple matter to remove this bale, cut it open, and search the stack of magazines until the one with the folded-over cover was found. The plan was elegant in its simplicity. If for some reason another magazine cover had been folded over by accident, then the discs in the two magazines could easily be compared. The disc would be driven at high speed to Chen's apartment complex in one of the newest and most outrageously expensive high-rises where impoverished newcomers from the far provinces skulked around hoping to cadge errands from the smartly dressed Shanghai professionals too busy to pick up dry cleaning or polish their new cars. By Saturday morning, Chen had booted out whatever hookerish women he had entertained the night before and set to work, downloading the disc and following Jin Li's instructions as to what certain documents might reveal. He employed a small group of dedicated analysts, some of them trained by and stolen from the same large American and European venture funds and banks trying to spin money out of China, and they would collate the information against conventionally available research, sometimes deriving perception where she had not but mostly corroborating her judgment.

  By Sunday evening Chen had selected the strategies and supporting documents that he found most useful, and on Monday, while seated in a private dining room in one of China's most elite banks, he would explain to a small group of investors what he had discovered. Sipping their turtle soup, they listened intently, nodding solemnly if the opportunity appeared especially promising. Chen was transparently motivated by a mix of greed, hedonism, and national pride; older men, especially those who had lived in the time of Mao, found him easy to read, since the satisfaction of all his desires required outward behavior. Every week or so Chen had a nugget to display, and when he didn't, the group reprised the week's news about the companies they followed, speculated upon, or manipulated. If they wanted to take action, their position on the globe helped them. Most American stocks traded thinly in the off-hours when the European and New York stock exchanges were closed, and it was possible to quietly take a sizable position before the main action began hours later on the other side of the globe. The fact that Chen was mining data directly out of New York City appealed to the nationalistic aggressions of his Chinese investors. To a man, they hated America, or said they did.

  A most agreeable business, cheating the rule of law and the play-book of Western capitalism.

  Chen and his coconspirators knew what they were doing, too. China had first allowed the public trading of stock in the nineties, and so the older men all had years of experience feeling the whims and drift and anxieties of markets. They had reached a level of intuitiveness that rested upon having had fortunes lost and larger ones won. In recent years stock market mania had reached deep into the Chinese middle class, and the opportunities to pump and dump stocks were now routine. The government's warnings and attempted restrictions on the frenzied trading of stocks had only served to embolden that same behavior, for the Chinese people knew that good times were often followed by bad. Life was luck—but you didn't wait around to be lucky, not when a thousand others wanted what you had. Thus did desire in the many create opportunity for the few. Very often Chen and his group determined how to first make money off a stock against the Western markets and then how to make money off it again, a second time, within the Chinese markets. Together they discussed the bets to be made, very often finishing the discussion with the ceremonial ringing of a small brass gong, a sound that reaffirmed their Chinese culture and mocked the opening bell that would start the trading on Wall Street hours hence.

  After this moment, a great feast followed in one of the city's private clubs, at which drinking was accompanied by the attentions of the dozen or so girls brought in not only to help the men forget their anxieties about having just committed millions of hard-currency dollars but also to confirm their impression of themselves as masters of all they surveyed. There was one girl particularly skilled at manipulating the back of her throat and her tongue simultaneously. Jin Li had heard her brother discuss with great excitement this seemingly rare and remarkable ability. The girl, who had arrived in Shanghai penniless but quickly achieved significant wealth, was not particularly beautiful, but her services were highly sought after and the men had been known to bid drunkenly against each other until one man persevered past any reasonable limit and purchased his pleasure. The lucky fellow then retired to a private room with his consort.

  Pigs, thought Jin Li, fucking pigs, all of them. And here I am, over in America, helping them do such things, and in trouble. She could hate herself for it—almost, except that, yes, she had agreed to her brother's proposition and had even explained to him how she was the best person to carry it off. She would do it for their family, she'd said, for their parents. And, to be fair, Chen had risked a great deal. As the Mexicans said, he had huevos, eggs—balls. The start-up money for the project required nearly $6 million and her brother had gone to a series of investors, describing the scheme—nothing on paper, of course—using terms either oblique or specific, depending on his audience. Yet the scheme had been quickly funded. So quickly, in fact, that Chen had worried that someone else might steal the idea and set up a competing operation—if not in New York, then in London or Paris or any other Western city where the Chinese did a great deal of business.

  But that was then and this was now. Which company had gotten wind of what she was doing? Which company had sent the two men and the big truck after her? Why had they also killed the two Mexican girls? I am partly responsible, she thought sadly, I endangered them. Who had claimed their bodies? Who would tell their families in Mexico? They would want to know why this had happened.

  Could she have expected the attack? There were no complaints on file, and the accounts receivable were more or less up to date. Her company had been aggressively stealing information from eight firms in the last six months, and she could easily check the recent stock prices of them, but that would tell her almost nothing. Her brother and his cronies could be building a conventional position in a stock, they could have bet that it would fall, or they could be dealing with a company's competitors or suppliers. They could even be using her good information to sell disinformation. The one thing she did know was that they preferred smaller American companies for which the trading volume was low enough that they could move the price with their buying or selling.

  The CorpServe ploy had been in business for four years now, and in that time it was fair to say they had been spectacularly successful. Her brother had purchased three large buildings in Shanghai, built himself a new house, bought an apartment in Hong Kong for one of his mistresses, and started getting his face massaged each morning.

  And had Chen given Jin Li much in return? No, not enough. A good salary, by New York standards. By Chinese standards, a fortune. But no security. The opposite of security, even as he'd gotten rich. She was the one who could be prosecuted in the United States, thrown into federal prison or deported. The one the men had been after. Her brother needed to find her now, she knew, because his whole empire ran on the stream of information he received from her. No one else at CorpServe knew what to do, what to look for. No one else could be trusted to be loyal. Chen and his investors had taken huge speculative positions that required that Jin Li's hands and eyes be connected to their minds—to their money. A discarded scrap of paper on one side of the globe could conceivably be convertible to millions of dollars on the other side. Chen could not afford to lose touch with her, lose control of CorpServe, or have her disappearance known about. Her brother, she knew, was desperate now.

  But maybe she didn't want him to find her. And maybe he would figure that out. Chen would call Mr. Ling, an old Hong Kong lawyer who still worked in a little office above Canal Street in Chinatown, and Mr. Ling would figure a way to get into Jin Li's apartment and find her bank statements, credit card activity. Well, l
et them do that. She had plenty of cash set—

  Wait! A noise?

  She crept to the window, slid it open higher. Did she dare look out? Someone gazing up would easily see her.

  She hazarded a peek out of the window.

  Nothing.

  She glanced at her cell phone. She wanted to turn it on but knew not to. Chen would have called, just to see if she picked up. To talk, yes, but to continue their ongoing argument. That he had sex with Russian and Eastern European prostitutes meant nothing to him, but the fact that Jin Li preferred not to sleep with Chinese men was an insult to him. Why are Chinese men no good for you? he had screamed. She didn't have an answer. It was no one particular thing. She liked the whiskers on American and German men, she admitted it. She liked how they were taller and heavier than most Chinese men. You have a colonial mentality, her brother said, in your head. It is deep in your head, like one hundred years ago. Can you not see that? Her answer to her brother: Fuck you, you do not understand women. Not at all. She liked some of the American men and the European men because they did not know her Chineseness. They knew she was Chinese but that was all. When she said the word "father" or "mother" in English to them they did not know what she meant. They knew what the words meant in their languages but not hers. Their language did not have her pain in it, her heaviness. A strange thing, admittedly. I have a Chinese part of me and I have a me part of me, she told herself.

  Was this why she liked Ray? Yes, among other reasons. He was like her in some ways, secretive and quiet. Most of the American men she'd dated wanted her to get to know them as soon as possible, as if that was a great honor they were bestowing. Not Ray. He spoke but somehow stayed reserved. He was "reticent," one of her newer vocabulary words. They had fun, walking down Broadway at night, going out for dinner. He knew the city; it was where he'd been born. She often had the feeling he was looking at the individual buildings but he never said why. Inspecting them somehow. Often they took a drive in his red pickup truck. She might have left a pair of yellow tennis shoes in the cab, she remembered sadly. She found the big scar on Ray's belly interesting, its little mountain ranges of swirling tissue, the squarish skin grafts like fields below. Strangely beautiful to her, though she would never say that. Because he wouldn't believe her. She knew that he had traveled a lot. She had poked through his papers and found his passport and seen the stamps from China, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sudan, Thailand, lots of countries. She noticed how good he was with chopsticks. Not careful with them, but bringing the bowl close to his mouth and flinging the food into his mouth like a peasant.