by Stuart Woods
“Simple enough for us to understand?” Scott asked.
“Sure. The instructions didn’t originate in the Thomas computer system. They came from another computer that just called it in. Somebody’s laptop, maybe, or somebody’s iPhone. If we want to prove all this definitively, we need that computer.”
46
They all stared disconsolately at Huey. Jeremy finally spoke up. “So we have to find this laptop or iPhone?”
“That would be helpful,” Huey said. “I’d like to point out that there are fifty people working in that big room that Bob described, and I would think that all of them have a laptop and an iPhone.”
“Maybe you could have someone mug each of them as they’re on their way home from work,” Jamie said brightly.
“That’s not funny, Jamie,” Jeremy said.
“It’s what you’d have to do,” Huey said. “Of course . . .” He stopped talking.
“‘Of course’ what?” Jeremy asked.
“Of course, the code is probably not on a computer or iPhone. Those devices are too easy to lose or have stolen. It’s much more likely to be on a key chain.”
“What are you talking about?” Jeremy asked.
“A thumb drive,” Stone said.
“The kind you can hang on your key chain,” Huey said, holding up a key chain of his own, thumb drive attached. “I keep all my personal records and files on this and a chip imbedded in my neck, in case I’m ever kidnapped.”
“You’re worried about being kidnapped?” Jamie asked.
“Certainly,” Huey replied. “That or being assassinated. The stuff I do is very annoying to the people I do it to. They pay a lot of money to geeks, who try to figure it out. Eventually, someone is going to decide that it’s faster and cheaper to just eliminate me from the scene.”
“Huey,” Scott said, “you have personal security assigned to you.”
“I do?” Huey asked. “News to me.”
“We thought you’d be more comfortable if you didn’t know.”
“Uh-uh. I feel more comfortable knowing. What do they look like?”
“A man and a woman in business clothes.”
“Isn’t this program too big to fit on something like your thumb drive?” Jeremy asked.
“No, it’s a fairly small program. You would load it into the Thomas system, use it, then delete it. All it does is communicate instructions to the central banking facility, then erase its own tracks.”
“Well,” Jeremy said, “it’s going to be a lot harder to locate a thumb drive than a laptop or an iPhone.”
“There’s a way we can avoid mugging all those people,” Huey said.
“Oh, good,” Jamie said, laughing. “How?”
“We wait until they’re going to move some money. When they’ve copied the program into their system, I steal it.”
“I like it,” Stone said. “Nobody gets hit over the head.”
“That is devoutly to be wished,” Jeremy replied.
“How big a window are you going to have between when the software is loaded into their computer system and when they erase it?”
“That depends on how many transactions they want to accomplish,” Huey said. “Of course, they have a semi-supercomputer to work with, and that’s fast, but it can’t be faster than the time the central banking system takes to request and authenticate the instructions. If it’s one transaction, it would take substantially less than a minute, but if it’s a taller order, they could be exposed for much longer.”
“How will you be able to tell when they’re transacting?”
“Well, Bob has already implanted his hardware, so I can write some code that will send us a message when their computers are working full tilt.”
“So, you’re just going to sit there in front of a monitor and wait for it to warn you?”
Huey turned toward Stone. “Can I move into the room where Bob’s setup is?”
“Certainly,” Stone said. “It’s ready for occupancy.”
“Cool,” Huey replied. “Now I can sleep, and the computer will wake me when the activity increases.”
“I’ll tell Helene, the housekeeper, to keep you in ham and cheese sandwiches,” Stone said. “If you want anything different, just tell her.”
“Cool,” Huey said. “I’d better get upstairs and write some code.” He gave them a little wave, then left the room.
“That kid is quite an asset, Jeremy,” Stone said.
“He certainly is. And he’s not just a geek, he knows how to manage his department, too. He’s the only person in our building who has three assistants, who work hard to keep up with him.”
“One of these days he’s going to take your job,” Stone said.
“I’m not worried,” Jeremy replied. “My job would bore him silly.”
“I suppose you have to keep him excited and interested.”
“He doesn’t seem to get excited, and he finds everything interesting.”
* * *
• • •
LATER IN THE DAY, Stone went up to the master suite to get something, and on his way back downstairs he knocked on Huey’s door.
“Come in!” Huey called.
Stone opened the door. The first thing he saw was Huey sitting at the computer console, apparently naked.
“Everything okay?” Stone asked. Then he saw the lump in the bed.
“Their system is idling along at about eight percent of the computing power available to them,” Huey said.
The lump in the bed moved. The covers were thrown back, revealing a lanky young woman with lots of blond hair—just as naked as Huey.
“Forgive me,” Stone said, backing toward the door.
The girl got up and trotted into the bathroom, apparently not noticing Stone.
“It’s all right,” Huey said. “She’s not shy. Actually, she has an exhibitionist streak in her.”
The toilet flushed, and the blonde trotted back to the bed and dived in, noticing Stone for the first time. “Oh, hi,” she said, then pulled up the covers.
“Hi,” Stone replied.
“Stone, this is Trixie. Trixie, Stone.”
“Hi, again,” she said from under the covers.
“How do you do?” Stone replied.
“She does very well,” Huey said. “I’ll call you, if the pot starts to boil.”
Stone let himself out and continued downstairs, shaking his head. Young Huey did pretty well, too, he thought.
47
Stone took Jamie, and they met Dino and Viv at Patroon. Everybody air-kissed.
“I hear you met Huey Horowitz,” Viv said.
“I hear your people have been following him.”
“Yes, and with the greatest difficulty. The kid never stops moving, and he moves at the speed of light.”
“He apparently takes that trait to bed with him,” Stone said.
“Oh?”
“I stopped into his room to see how he was doing, and there was a smashing blonde with him, running around naked.”
“Oh, good,” Viv said. “Maybe he’ll burn off some of that energy and make our work easier.”
“I hear he has three assistants trying to keep up with him.”
“Actually, it’s four,” Jamie said. “He employs the fourth himself, and she’s in charge of running his life.”
“It’s hard to imagine a nineteen-year-old life that requires four assistants.”
“Yesterday, he went up to Turnbull & Asser and ordered a dozen shirts made. He also got measured for some suits.”
“Suits? For a nineteen-year-old? How can he afford that shop on a Times salary?”
“He probably doesn’t need the salary,” Jamie said. “He does all sorts of other stuff. He’s written half a dozen apps for the iPhone that are heavily used. He
gets something like a quarter or fifty cents for each sale, but the sales are in the millions. He also does a lot of stock trading, buying and selling from wherever he is on his iPhone.”
“How does he do with his trading?”
“Nobody knows, except his personal assistant, I guess, and his accountant.”
“Well, I’m glad Huey is working on our side, instead of with the Thomases.”
“Me, too,” Jamie said.
They ordered.
* * *
• • •
“HOW DID YOUR SWEEP of the Times offices go, Viv?” Stone asked over dessert.
“We found three bugs,” she said.
“Where?”
“I don’t think I can say,” she replied.
“Let me say it for you, Viv,” Jamie said. “All three were in Jeremy’s office.”
Stone tried not to choke on his crème brûlée.
“You’ve never seen anybody so embarrassed,” Jamie said.
“Well, his instincts were good,” Stone replied. “There were bugs after all.”
“He’s been reconstructing his conversations from his diary and his memory, trying to figure out what the bug might have picked up,” Viv said. “Fortunately, nearly all his sensitive conversations for the last few weeks have been conducted in Scott’s office or the conference room, both of which are clean.”
“Jeremy has instituted regular sweeps,” Jamie said.
“He’s also started to spread some disinformation,” Viv allowed, “hoping to throw whoever is listening off the trail. He has pointedly said that the investigation into the Tommassini files bore no publishable fruit.”
“Do you know who’s doing the listening?”
“No. The signal goes to the Internet, but we haven’t been able to figure out what the website is called. From there, the listeners can recall whatever he may have said within listening distance of the microphones.”
“Once Huey has solved the big problem he’s working on,” Stone said, “put him on tracing the bug. Somehow, I don’t think it would be hard for him.”
“Have any of the Thomases visited Jeremy in his office?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” Viv replied, “but I’ll find out. That’s one way the bugs could have been planted.”
* * *
• • •
ONCE HOME, Stone stopped by Huey’s room to check on him. He was sitting up in bed, watching Rachel Maddow. “This woman is very smart,” he said to Stone.
“Where’s Trixie?”
“Oh, she’s got an early-morning shoot at Vanity Fair tomorrow morning.”
“She models?”
“She used to. Now she’s a photographer, and she makes a lot more money than a model does.”
“Good for her. Nothing yet from the semi-supercomputer?”
“All quiet,” Huey said.
Stone said good night and went to join Jamie in bed.
* * *
• • •
THE FOLLOWING MORNING as Stone sat at his desk, he heard the sound of a telephone ringing, but muffled. He traced the noise to his desk drawer and found the State Department phone Holly had sent him.
“Hello?”
“I thought you weren’t going to answer,” she said.
“I had to find the phone. How’s the campaign going?”
“Very well, thanks. We had a little of the wind taken out of our sails when Hank Thomas revealed his list of super-contributors.”
“I don’t suppose any of them are contributing to you, too.”
“You don’t suppose correctly. Listen I’ve heard a rumor that the money all those people contributed came right out of the Thomases’ hands and into their accounts, and were then donated to Hank’s PAC.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From an overseas source, oddly enough.”
“How far overseas?”
“Let’s just say a Caribbean island. Have you heard such a rumor in New York?”
“I never listen to rumors,” Stone said, avoiding the lie.
“I’d love to nail him doing that,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s illegal, but it would greatly embarrass his campaign.”
“It would be illegal if the contributors didn’t declare the money as income.”
“Now that’s an idea I can do something about.”
“Are you going to sic the IRS on them?”
“I’m not going to do a thing, but somebody might put a flea in their ear.”
“You should have been a mafioso,” Stone said. “Or whatever the female of that is.”
“Mafiosa, I expect,” Holly replied. “Well, I’d better go find somebody who can transport a flea to its destination.”
“Good luck with that, and everything else, too.”
“Bye-bye.” She hung up.
48
Stone was watching MSNBC the following morning when their ace poll-interpreting guy, Steve Kornacki, began putting up screens with numbers on them.
“These represent the first polls we’ve seen where several candidates from both parties, plus one well-known independent, are the subjects. Holly Barker is leading the Democratic candidates with 57 percent of her party backing her, along with 21 percent of Republicans. Her Democratic number is smaller than we might expect, since she’s the best known of the candidates, and her Republican numbers are higher than we might expect, which is very interesting.
“None of the candidates for the Republican nomination has more than 35 percent of the Republican vote because of this guy.” He put up the numbers for Hank Thomas.
“Congressman Thomas is getting 41 percent of Republican votes and 18 percent of the Democrats. When we get the race boiled down to fewer candidates, this is all going to get a lot more interesting.”
Stone mulled this over, and he was not displeased with Holly’s showing.
Huey Horowitz rapped on his office door and entered.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” Huey said. “However I think I may know the reason for the lack of traffic on the semi-supercomputer.”
“What’s that?”
“The transfers for the twenty giant contributors are complete, so now they’re waiting for something else.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“In some of their e-mails they call it the BO,” Huey said.
“Do you know what that means?”
“I’m just guessing, but I think it could mean the Big One.”
Stone poured Huey some coffee. “That sounds ominous.”
“I mean, if this were North Korea talking about nuclear testing, we’d know what the Big One is.”
“Have they taken in any other deposits, except the contributors’?”
“No, just those.”
“And you think they stole those funds from the banking system, but covered their tracks?”
“I do.”
“Then maybe the BO is something they’ve been building up to. They’ve tested the system with the contributors’ accounts, and it worked, right?”
“Right.”
“Maybe they’re planning to pull off a heist,” Stone suggested. “The Big One.”
“What, the two hundred million they’ve stolen isn’t enough?”
“That was for Hank’s campaign,” Stone said. “Maybe now they want a little something for themselves.”
“By ‘little something,’ you mean a lot.”
“Right,” Stone said. “Tell me, are there any limits to what they can steal and get away with?”
“That depends on how they’ve written the code we’re trying to intercept. In theory, they could steal anything they want. However, at some point the drain on the system would be noticed by somebody, who might start questioning the transfers. The cent
ral account probably has a limit on individual transfers and/or the total number of daily transactions, or the amounts of those transactions.”
“They’d be crazy not to,” Stone said.
“They certainly would.”
“Is there any way to find out what the limits are?”
“Maybe Jeremy knows somebody in the international system,” Huey said. “I could ask him.”
“Do that,” Stone said.
“In the meantime,” Huey said, “I’m getting a bad case of cabin fever, so I’m going to set up the system here to send me an e-mail if anything starts to happen. Then I can get some fresh air.”
“You’re in charge, Huey. We’ll do it any way you want.”
Huey shifted in his chair but didn’t rise. “Stone, may I ask your advice about something? This is personal advice.”
“Sure, Huey, if you think I can help.” He reflected that Huey didn’t need advice about women, if Trixie was his standard.
“Over my years at the Times I’ve also dabbled in other things: I’ve written some apps, which have been lucrative, and I’ve done some consulting work, also lucrative. As a result I’ve built up a portfolio, doing the trading myself, which has grown into quite a pile.”
“Is the pile mostly from your cash contributions or from portfolio growth?”
“Mostly my contributions,” Huey said.
“If you don’t mind my asking, because the question bears on the advice I might give you, how much is in the pile now?”
“About three and a half million.”
“Have you paid taxes on all of it?”
“Yes, I’m scrupulous about that.”
“Well, let me tell you how I handle my pile, as it were. A few years ago I formed an investment company with two friends, Mike Freeman . . .”
“From Strategic Services?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got some of their stock, it’s done well. Who’s the other guy?”
“His name is Charley Fox. Previously he was one of Goldman Sachs’s youngest partners. Charley does our investing, along with any tips Mike and I might pick up, and he’s done better for us than I was doing with a private bank. Perhaps you and Charley should sit down together and discuss how you’re going to proceed.”
