Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “What’s he got?” Ben asks, playing along with the personal pronoun.

  “Ten million.”

  “I don’t have that much appetite, but I could use a million.”

  “Where could you take down a million shares, Ben?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Done.” Sam Zyberk thinks he is killing Ben Gould, knows it, but this is business. Of course, the way he’s buying this stock, with this fucking binge, Gould may be out of business day after tomorrow. But everyone here’s a grownup. Everybody’s got free will. “You’re wearing ‘em,” Zyberk says.

  Over at Merrill and Goldman Sachs and Smith Barney, the traders are saying, “Morgan’s got a buyer,” awestruck, as if some mad Arab billionaire were buying a mansion at the San Andreas epicenter during a 7.1 Richter quake. “Morgan’s working a piece of Microsoft as big as a battleship,” they’re sputtering, one to the next, over their hundreds of perpetually open lines to other traders and other clients, “There’s a blowout bid-wanted situation at Morgan, and they’re getting a chunk of it unloaded.” Minutes ago there were only sellers, but Ben Gould has single-handedly corrected the order imbalance in the market, going long Microsoft, longer, longest.

  Sam Zyberk comes back one last time, offering 300,000 more shares. Ben bids 73.

  “Done,” Zyberk tells him.

  It has been nineteen minutes since the Reuters story appeared. The laissez-faire macho pride of the men who run the NASDAQ stock exchange make them loath to halt trading in any stock. They’re not the fuddy-duddy New York Stock Exchange, they’re NASDAQ, man, and they live for the fast, mad brawl and bloodiness; this is how people get rich nowadays. Besides, even when they stop trading, Instinet and the other unofficial online exchanges will let people go on buying and selling. The ambiguity of this moment has kept the market open for at least ten extra minutes. Right now, the deaths are unconfirmed, and at NASDAQ that’s being argued both ways—“Let the trading go on until we know they’re dead,” and “Let the trading go on in case they’re alive.” But Redmond is screaming and screaming that they’ve got to halt trading now. And so they do, at 2:40 P.M. Eastern Time.

  “They’ve halted,” Cheryl Berger announces to the Big Room. People shift their weight, or kick away from their desks a foot, or take a deep breath; but no one relaxes.

  Two minutes later, Reuters announces on the Associated Press that their computer system has been the victim of a deep and vast trespass, a hack, and the stories filed on the Reuters wire at 2:22 and 2:24 reporting the deaths of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were false. (Their stringer, Carlos Petersen, however, is still unaccounted for, and has not disavowed the bylined report personally.)

  At 2:46, after the brief trading halt—a halt that will forever gall the roughest and readiest cowboys at NASDAQ—the market in Microsoft stock is declared open again.

  Now everyone is a buyer of Microsoft, as panicky about getting back in as they were six minutes ago about getting out. Instantly, the price climbs to $138, $6 higher than it was before the hackers’ fake Reuters story hit the wire.

  And Bennett Gould Partners owns 2.77 million shares, accumulated in the last fifteen minutes for a total price of $214 million and change.

  No one in the Big Room has ever seen Ben so quiet and still. No one has ever seen him so content.

  Melucci’s phone display is blinking like mad, every one of his big common stock brokers, his old pals, trying to get his attention, desperate to buy back pieces of Microsoft.

  “Whoa, Frankie,” Ben says, nodding at Melucci’s turret, “I think you’ve got some motivated bidders there.”

  “You want to take Zyberk?” Melucci asks Ben.

  Ben picks up. “Hey! Z-man!”

  “Ben. Ben, I—that last 300,000 of ’Soft, the one that you bought at 73? I—I’m afraid that one I don’t have in hand.”

  Ben wants to taste this delectable moment, to breathe the sweet aroma, to let it roll around his tongue. “You said ‘Done,’ Sam. ‘Done’ means done.”

  “But, Ben, that’s—it’s—I’m out nineteen million dollars with that, the customer’s not selling the merchandise. The customer says the trade wasn’t fair.”

  “Fair, Sam? Fair? Fair? Fair? Since when is anything we do fucking fair, Sam?”

  Sam Zyberk says nothing for a long time. “You’re going to make me eat nineteen million dollars, aren’t you, Gould?”

  Ben prepares to delivers his aria.

  “The whole way down here, Sam, from 130 to 73, did you have that picture the whole way? You were fucking me, weren’t you, Sam?”

  “Well, you know, I had to protect the other—”

  “You fucking guy, you’re willing to bury Ben Gould for Fidelity—”

  “No names, no names,” Zyberk says. Then he takes a breath; Ben can hear him exhale. “You’re not going to cut me an adjustment, are you? I’m going to eat the fucking nineteen million, aren’t I?”

  “You know what, Sam? It’s the holiday season. And we’ve had a good day together. So, no. Take an out on that last 300,000, Z-man. Nothing done on the $73 stock.” And with that stroke of magnanimity, crazy Ben Gould is about to become a legend, the ultimate Wall Street good guy, the unbelievably great guy, the guy who shared the wealth when he had Morgan by the balls, the guy who doesn’t just talk the talk but he walked the fucking walk, $19 million worth.

  “Henry,” Cissy says on the intercom, “Mr. Mose is calling from the plane, shall I put him through?”

  “Not right now, tell him I’m at a mission-critical moment.”

  All right. Okay. They may think they’ve made a fool of Henry Saddler. First the WinWin.com report flashed back that he’d shorted the 14,000 shares at $87, and then his Personal Privileges Representative pulled some condescending mumbo jumbo about “a fast market.” All Henry Saddler knows is that he couldn’t cover any of his short positions where he wanted to, at the bottom, at $79. If they’d let him get out at $79, why, he’d have made $700,000 or something! “Fast market!” …

  On another placid, sunny day out in the Bahía Fea de la Roca, with waves hardly big enough to qualify as waves slapping at the sides of Tiburón II, Jaime’s twenty-one-foot Kevlacat, the beep … beep … beep of someone else’s portable phone is not the sound of urgency. It is irritating, but it doesn’t suggest alarm. Thunder in the mountains, or the wind picking up, or certain sickening metal sounds in the engine—those would be calls to action. When the phone of the big, bald one beeped and beeped the first time, twenty minutes earlier, Jaime, who owns the boat, wanted to answer. But Pepe is in charge of the dive; Pepe contracted to arrange everything, and Pepe is not about to answer the rich American computer man’s phone without permission. It is a private call, he says. Who knows what trouble will come down on him if he answers? And how urgent can it be, after all? Urgent enough to dive down and bring up the Americans? A phone call? No. They’ll be up in less than an hour anyway. But then the phone started ringing again, and Pedrito radioed that the men’s company was calling Pepe’s office in Selvapesta as well, so Pepe answers. On the other end of the line is a woman from the men’s office, calling to make sure they are not dead. Dead!? Why would they be dead? (The woman speaks the most perfect Spanish with the most awful American accent Pepe has ever heard in his life.) Pepe explains to her that both her men are carrying special radio alarms with them underwater, that if there is any trouble the other man will signal, and he, Pepe Berrondo, will be in the water personally, eighty feet down in one minute, guaranteed. But the American woman is frantic, hysterical, crazy, and she says she needs Pepe not just to make sure that the men are alive, but to bring them up to the surface as quickly as possible so she can speak to them on the phone herself. Has there been a fire at one of their factories? Pepe wonders. Are their children sick? “I need to speak to them now,” the woman says, “right this second.”

  So Pepe throws on his tanks and jumps in. And five minutes later, he is back with both Americans. As soon as he breaks the sur
face, Pepe tells Jaime both men are just fine, of course, completely fine. But then, as they grip the side of the boat, and Jaime reaches out to help the Americans aboard, the littler one is suddenly ill. Pepe has brought them up too quickly. Jaime pulls, and Pepe lifts and shoves, and gets them aboard, but the pale man with the glasses is dazed, and then he loses consciousness. Jaime has had training to treat decompression illness, and with oxygen, Mr. Gates finally revives, but then he passes out again, and Jaime and Pepe fear they will be blamed. As he climbs onto the deck, the other American, the giant angry one, grabs the phone from Jaime as if he is going to strike him, and then shouts at the woman, his colleague, “I’m fine, but Bill’s unconscious, we’ve got to get him to a real hospital fast. Call D.C. and see if they can help.” And now, both big Yamaha outboards are roaring at full throttle, and Tiburón II is racing at twenty knots back to Selvapesta. With the American computer genius Gates, the richest man in the world, on his hands and knees on Jaime’s deck, groggy and vomiting.

  People are sprinting through the blank, beige halls in Redmond, then stopping suddenly, causing a new round of gasps, then sprinting again, spreading the news on foot, in person, face-to-face, too panicked to e-mail. “Bill really did have a diving accident,” they’re shouting to each other. “He’s unconscious, it’s true. Ballmer was on the phone from the boat.”

  As the news spreads around the Redmond campuses, a few people cry. Most people shake their heads, shocked all over again, unsure what’s true and what’s rumor. Dozens of people sing the opening bars of The Twilight Zone theme song. And a few people begin responding quietly and constructively to the news of their supreme leader’s incapacitation. They go to their screens. They click over to Datek or DLJdirect or E*Trade or WinWin. Howard Moorhead is among the rational camp, on the phone in his office, talking to his broker, his bow tie slightly askew.

  “I know they aren’t dead,” Moorhead says, “but I want you to sell. I want you to sell.” He waits on hold, listening to an instrumental version of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” staring out his window at the dozen of news vans, the cameramen, the correspondents, and satellite dishes.

  Ben is staring at the TV. He fights off the thought that this is a delusion.

  “How many shares of the common do we still own, Frank?”

  “Two million one-fifty,” Melucci says, holding two phones against his belly. “Do we keep offering?”

  “No. Wait. Hold off.” God is punishing me, Ben Gould thinks, unsure whether he deserves it. I am being punished now.

  The CNBC camera is not mounted on a tripod. The picture is a little shaky. And Daniel Wesselman is a little shaky as he looks hard into the lens, making up his words as he delivers them. “Again, Mark Franklin, that was Microsoft spokesperson Tina Obermeyer, informing us that she has been in contact with CEO Steve Ballmer in Costa Rica, who told her, Mark, that Bill Gates has suffered a scuba-diving-related injury. He is alive, she reports, but is or was unconscious. She says a medevac helicopter from the U.S. Southern Command in Panama is rushing as we speak to southwestern Costa Rica with emergency medical help, including a hyperbaric chamber for re-compressing victims of the bends. And in answer to your question, Mark, it is not known at this time if Gates’s injuries are life-threatening.”

  “Thank you, Dan Wesselman, stay right there, of course.” Mark Franklin turns to the CNBC studio camera, looking as grave as he knows how. A graphic of the current Microsoft bid price, as big as his head—$109½—consumes the lower half of the screen, along with the flashing words TRADING HALTED 2ND TIME. As the anchorman takes a breath and counts to himself, one-one-thousand, he’s thinking, Walter Cronkite, November 22, 1963, and says, “As this extraordinary and dramatic breaking story continues to unfold, CNBC will stay on the air to bring you special live, uninterrupted coverage. When we come back, we’ll be joined by a medical expert who will discuss the neurological damage that accidents like this can cause. This is Mark Franklin, and you’re watching CNBC.”

  There’s nothing to do until trading resumes, which probably won’t happen before the close at four, an hour from now. Ben was intending to sell his 2.8 million shares over the next hour, even into tomorrow morning, working it, no rush, keeping the price up. Melucci has gotten rid of 400,000 at $137 and $138 a share, for a total of $55 million. Ben still owns 2.4 million shares that he bought for an average price of $78, and which he may now wind up selling for closer to $78 than $137.

  In the forty minutes since the first story appeared, Ben has not discussed the big question with anyone. “Frank?” he asks Melucci, “if Gates does croak, or he’s a vegetable, where do you think the stock opens tomorrow?”

  “Well, we know now it doesn’t go south of 75, right? And Ballmer’s fine. The next eighteen hours gets everyone past the shock. But if he dies, there’s the estate problem. I don’t know, Ben.… 110? 115?”

  “Yeah, I figured par, maybe 110,” Ben says. It would be callous, Ben decides, to do the math out loud: if Gates dies and Ben can sell the rest of the shares he bought for $78 at $100, it would cut his net gain in half, to around $75 million. But $75 million is not bad, and that doesn’t even count his profit on the puts, or the fact that he still owns 5,000 95 puts, which protect him if, God forbid, the stock really goes in the tank.

  Then he wonders, Maybe this is another part of the hack, maybe one of those kids convinced somebody in Redmond that he was Ballmer?

  No. Not possible, he decides.

  Then, finally, a full minute after the CNBC report, Ben arrives at the nightmare scenario, the horrific panicky thought, What if Gates dies, or has brain damage, and blame falls on him for not snitching on the hackers in the first place? Ben Gould becomes the new century’s Terry Nichols, its Dr. Samuel Mudd, its Marina Oswald (at best).

  Do not die, Ben thinks. Be all right.

  The CNBC report is Henry Saddler’s final glimmer of hope. By his arithmetic, he has shorted a total of 19,000 shares of Microsoft at an average price of $99½ a share. For $1,886,000! Almost every penny he has is now tied up in this awful, awful mess! If the stock shoots back up to $138, he’ll lose $731,000! Three quarters of a million dollars, and it’s not his fault! He was misled by this online mirage, quite frankly conned, ripped off. When he calls his Personal Privileges Representative, she just repeats what she said before about the “fast market,” even after he threatens an MBC News exposé on WinWin.com. He knows now that there’s only one way he’s going to come out of this with a nickel. For his shorts to be worth anything, Gates must die. He’s just got to! Sitting at his desk, Henry Saddler mutes the TV, removes his other hand from his mouse, and bows his head in prayer.

  49

  Hank Saddler is spending Christmas Eve with Mrs. Saddler in the penthouse at The Wellingtons on Wilshire. He’s showing her all his clips, print and video, from the last four weeks. “Hanky,” his mother says as she turns a scrapbook page, “your father and I never got near as much attention in ’62. Not near.” Hank is inconsolable about the three quarters of a million (although it’s tax-deductible), and terrified by the possibility of prison, of course, but every time he sees his name correctly rendered in one of the stories—Henry Saddler, Executive Vice President Henry Saddler, a hundred times over—he does get a kick out of it. “Now of course,” his mother continues, “that was a state charge, not federal, so maybe that’s the difference. Plus, now, this is your job, I guess, isn’t it, Hanky? Public relations.”

  Hank is a PR professional, so how fitting that it’s his quote from the second-day story in the Times that everybody remembers. Hank’s unfortunate line has been reprinted again and again. “I lost almost a million bucks,” he said to the reporter the day after, “and you’re trying to make some federal case out of it. I’m the victim here.”

  Mose would have put him on leave as soon as it leaked out that Hank was an official target of the federal investigations. But he was ready to kill him before the press, the FBI, the SEC, or the Justice Department had any idea about
Henry G. Saddler’s involvement in the episode. Harold was flying with his friend Mike Milken on the Global Express that Wednesday afternoon. He phoned Hank from the plane to remind him to let George Mactier know that Milken is still waiting for that call back, after all these months. Hank’s refusal to take Harold’s call was thus fresh insubordination on top of old insubordination, and intolerable. Mose fired him that night.

  Saddler’s prayers for Gates weren’t answered, either. Gates was fine, out of the Costa Rican hospital the next morning and aboard a Gulf-stream headed back to Redmond. In fact, Ballmer and other Microsoft employees were quoted in the Time and Newsweek cover stories saying that, if anything, Gates seems clearer, quicker, smarter than before—and, they added anonymously, “sweeter,” “wiser,” “almost a mensch.” When Ballmer groused angrily at a Microsoft meeting that the stock hadn’t dropped more than 44 percent on the news of his and Gates’s death, Gates reportedly smiled, leaned close to his lieutenant, put his palms on Ballmer’s cheeks, and, as Newsweek reported, “stared deeply into his eyes for a full minute in what was apparently some kind of ‘healing’ gesture.” Time quoted a neurologist expert in hyperbaric medicine who said that a mild decompression illness like the one Gates suffered could cause personality changes, “including, at least hypothetically, personality improvements.”

  The New York Post has devoted a majority of its front pages for the last four weeks to the story—including GATES UNDEAD the day after and HACKER HOAX $182 MILLION MAN the day after that, then WACKO PRACTICAL JOKERZ! (over a photo of Willi and Humfried holding up the Post story from June about their endlessly ringing corporate-meeting phone prank), FED DEAD END ON HACKER HOAX, and GOLDEN GOULD “SCOT FREE.”

  Hank Saddler and Ben have been questioned for days by investigators for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Two major-case units of the office, one for the computer crimes and the other looking into securities crimes, have been handling the case. (The U.S. Attorney in Minnesota made a stink to Washington about wanting to prosecute the hackers, and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles begged to have Hank Saddler for himself, but New York owns the whole case.) Ben is proving to be a monumental frustration to the prosecutors—as he is to the confused, appalled editorialists who describe Ben’s profits and the hack alternately as a “recurrence of the cancer of eighties greed” and the defining event of the new century.