Backward-Facing Man (23 page)

John Russell was pleased when his pager went off. As a favor to his old friends at the Bureau, former special agent Ken Ford, who'd retired to a desk job with Interpol, had agreed to keep an eye on the next of kin of fugitives like Fergus Keane. “I dunno know if this means anything to you, Jack,” Ken said, “but the Volcano Bomber's old lady just went missing in Switzerland.” It was Friday—the day of the dreaded millennial shift, Y2K—one of the few times you'd find right-wing survivalists and New Age crystal gazers side by side, joking in the aisles of Wal-Mart. Most other guys Russell's age were barbecuing ribs in the Poconos or snuggling their honeys in the suburbs. Whoever was assigned the Volcano Bomber case had probably long since stopped working it, except to make out paperwork each month.

Russell took the turns to Lorraine's house without thinking. He hadn't given up. Many a night since he'd arrived in Philadelphia, he'd sat outside their house, watching the Nadia women on the unlikely chance that Fergus, aka Frederick, might try to see his daughter. It was that way with fugitives. He knew this. Some—like Abbie Hoffman—have a face-lift, get married, and become activists all over again, only to circle back and turn themselves in. Some walk away, but just as many, or more, awakened by age or infirmity, return to see an old lover or a child on holidays, anniversaries, or in times of trouble. He realized this was a long shot. Even if Keane was still alive, somebody would have had to tip him off to Lorraine's disappearance, which would have been unlikely. The radical underground had pretty much dried up.

Being honest with himself—a habit he fell into now for reasons he didn't much understand—it wasn't just the fantasy of catching Keane in the twilight of his career. The week between Christmas and New Year's is a tough time in law enforcement. Everyone's heard about holidays and depression. Russell had experienced firsthand how this time of year leaves a man with too much time on his hands. Nowadays, his peers did woodworking in their basements, traveled, coached Little League, bought boats, and babysat their grandkids. Russell read a little—mostly mysteries—and he still went to the track, but for the most part, his only hobby, the thing John Russell liked most, was work.

He parked on Medley Street about three hundred feet from the Nadia house and slid his seat back. Satisfied he could see the front door clearly, he took a newspaper out and stuck it in the visor. Then he memorized his surroundings—the lights that were on, window treatments and whether they were up or down, the position of vehicles on the street, the young man in a military jacket, the middle-aged woman at her doorstep looking for her cat, the heavyset guy with the hood of his car up, a couple of teenage girls sharing a cigarette. Twice, he emptied his bladder into a Nalgene. He read the paper and ate a Mars Bar. Less than an hour later, Stardust Nadia appeared in her doorway, dressed to the nines.

The girl looked more like her mother now. She was a little fuller in the face, and curvaceous. There was confidence in her gait, coolness in the way she shook her head to keep the hair out of her face. She was wearing a tight-fitting red shirt with sequins and carrying a leather jacket. Her blonde hair, short skirt, black tights, and pumps would make a lovely New Year's Eve package for whomever she was planning to meet.

Russell put the car in gear. He'd been present at key moments in the girl's life—outside the hospital waiting room the night she was born, at her christening, school plays and graduations, her confirmation, a Christmas pageant or Halloween parade here and there. From behind the wheel, behind a newspaper, or from the back of a crowd, Special Agent John Russell understood things about Stardust Nadia that most agents didn't know about their own kids. He knew, for example, that she was bright, left-handed, had a pretty bad sense of direction, and was forgetful, inclined to lock her keys in her car and leave her credit card in stores. Yet if someone had pointed him out to Stardust, she'd have pegged him as a neighborhood guy, somebody's dad, a familiar face in a photograph. It was Russell's belief that Stardust knew nothing of the Volcano Bomber or Fergus Keane. The very idea that the Feds thought her father was the prime suspect in a federal criminal case—a fugitive from justice for thirty years—would have amused her.

Russell followed her to the end of the street and turned left, riding the brake. At Appleberry, she turned left again and waited at the intersection. Russell parked and followed her up onto the train platform. Downtown, Stardust Nadia walked from Market Square to Third Street and turned right. On South Street, she bought a falafel and then headed up west to Eleventh. By ten thirty, she was standing at the end of a line of urban hipsters in spiked leather and long black coats, before deciding to move on. At eleven, she entered a martini bar on Arch Street called Rox.

It took Russell a few minutes to find her. At the bar, she exchanged polite smiles with men who said things that either she ignored or that made her laugh politely, and then drifted away. It was so loud Russell's rib cage shook. At eleven thirty, somebody gave up a stool next to her, and a sharp-dressed man sat down. Russell put him in his late thirties—fancy suit, slicked-back dyed hair. After a short conversation, the man in the gray suit pointed to a table, stepped back, and made a little motion for Stardust to sit down. He was too young, too slick, and too flashy to be directly connected to the radical underground, though he could easily have been the messenger.

Stardust opened her purse and pulled out a compact and lip gloss. They ordered drinks. The guy laid an array of electronic devices on the table—a pager and two cell phones, which lit up, one after the other. John Russell moved in an arc around them. From a little alcove near the bathroom, he watched her toss one back, then another. Just after one
A.M.
, they headed toward the door.

According to John Russell, a woman who's decided to go home with a man walks tall in her heels. She lets her hips sway and sticks her chest out. If you look closely, her head sits back on her shoulders and her eyes dilate, which, in his opinion, accounts for a lot of bad choices. A man who thinks he's about to get some swaggers. If he's insecure, he'll stretch his neck, looking around to make sure he's being noticed. The guy in the gray suit who led Stardust through the crowd looked like he didn't want to be recognized, as if he was embarrassed or hiding something. He practically pushed her into the limousine. Russell was suspicious. He flagged a cab and followed them down Arch to Fifth, then west on Market.

Both cars proceeded around City Hall to Eighteenth Street. Russell could have called in the plates, but that would have alerted the office he was working on New Year's Eve, something he wanted to avoid. When the limo stopped in front of Quick Copy Center, Russell gave the taxi driver a twenty and told him to wait. He stood in the shadows near a door that said
ORIENTAL MASSAGE, SECOND FLOOR
. It seemed odd. The limo driver didn't get out. The lights didn't go on. The doors remained shut. John Russell drew his weapon—a 9-millimeter Sig-Sauer.

When the back door finally did open, a man's shoe touched the ground at the same time a woman's stockinged foot kicked, then retracted. There was a struggle, then an embrace. As Russell stepped forward, Stardust twisted loose, her midriff bare, her skirt hiked up around her waist, revealing her ass, divided by a black string. She swung her purse around, almost hitting Russell, who was standing with his feet planted, his pistol aimed at the man's temple. The man in the gray suit was bleeding from the mouth. Stardust screamed, which caused them both to freeze.

The first few names they came up with for the new venture—pawnshop.com, pawnbroker.com, pawn.com—were taken. These were the heady days of the Internet when opportunists would squat on desirable domain names for years, waiting for big businesses to buy them out. Rahim found a server farm near Temple University and a software company in Minneapolis that offered a catalogue system in modules for uploading, viewing, and purchasing online. They registered the URL to a shell corporation that was registered to another shell corporation, which was owned by an offshore Bahamian company that Charlie Puckman had set up in the seventies. Fat Eddie told Chuck to put the stock in somebody else's name, somebody who couldn't be linked to him, which would protect any money they earned from a civil suit, should one occur. Chuck thought of it late one night, while surfing porn sites stoned. In less than a month, Softpawn.com was up and running.

Chuck's former customers were a motley crew—street toughs, loan sharks, money launderers, petty thieves, scammers—most of them guys like Charlie Puckman Sr. They got their starts dealing drugs or fencing stolen goods, made only vague encoded notes about transactions, watched one another's backs, kept their business to themselves, and never forgot a favor. Chuck's first few sales calls felt awkward. His business suits—once tailored and pressed—were wrinkled and too big on him now, and his hair was wiry and unkempt. One guy asked if Chuck was feeling better since his surgery. Another wondered if Chuck was another Puckman brother, returned to salvage what he could of the family fortune. But Chuck's unsteadiness came across as credible, and he was more successful than he'd expected.

Big Harvey agreed to let Chuck catalogue his high-end inventory. So did two North Philly accounts provided Softpawn.com agreed to take title. To those engaged in illicit trading and hot property, commitment and consignment mean nothing. Physical possession rules. Whoever holds an item, owns it. “I have a civil suit pending,” Chuck stammered, uncertain about the effect. “You can't afford your merch to be seized.” Miraculously, everyone agreed. By the end of their first week, four pawnbrokers had furnished Softpawn.com a list of items that hadn't moved in months for Chuck to post on his Web site.

Rahim visited the dealers and took pictures of furs, jewelry, and electronic equipment. Within days, he'd uploaded the photos and arranged them by category along with a two- or three-line description, written by Ovella. Chuck hadn't said much about his marketing plan, alluding to kiosk displays in malls, students going door to door, church sales, and the like. In truth, pawnshop owners couldn't care less what Chuck and his friends did as long as they got paid.

 

Finding customers wasn't as easy, particularly because it involved Chuck calling people he'd known in his old life—the guy in charge of the softball team Puckman Security sponsored, the head of the Equestrian Academy where Chuck's daughter, Ivy, had ridden, and a handful of ex-neighbors and business club members with whom he'd played tennis. His worst fear—that he would be regarded as a pariah—never materialized. People remembered him. They'd even heard about his difficulties. But they just weren't very interested. He called his daughter's friends' parents, former suppliers he'd favored with large orders, even a couple of Eileen's uncles with whom he felt some rapport. Nobody was the slightest bit interested until he got through to Sharon Gladstein—customer zero—as Rahim called her.

Ms. Gladstein was a waxy-faced, hook-nosed gossip and shopaholic, too homely to breed. In the early eighties, through the nuances of divorce law, Sharon turned a short ill-fated marriage to a low-level environmental lawyer into a lifelong pension and thereafter devoted herself to becoming a human Rolodex. She was also the best friend of Chuck's ex-wife, Eileen. “Nu?” Sharon said, as if she'd run into him at a bar mitzvah.

“You've probably heard,” Chuck began, “the security business is in the crapper.”

“Anybody could see
that
from Eileen's settlement,” Sharon said.

“Actually, I'm into this new thing where I got really top-shelf stuff from pawnshops and put it on the Internet where people can buy it at a fraction of its retail cost.”

“Say more,” she said, taking an earring off and pressing the phone against the side of her head.

“It's really simple,” Chuck said. “The pawnshops get really upscale stuff, but nobody with taste wants to drive into their neighborhoods. I put it on the Internet at ridiculously low prices, which is probably why this thing is taking off….” He let his voice trail off. “I should have done this a few years ago.”

“So how does a girl get in on this?”

“You got a pen?” he asked, smiling.

 

Over the next few weeks, Chuck solicited dozens of pawnshop owners from Newark, Delaware, to Trenton, New Jersey, and west to Harrisburg, sending Ovella with a digital camera to take pictures of the booty. Back in the factory, Rahim and Ovella's girlfriend, Gloria, uploaded the photos and typed in detailed descriptions, pricing merchandise between 20 and 40 percent over what the pawnshop owners told them they wanted. As Chuck hoped she would, Sharon Gladstein told everyone she knew, including former decorator clients, bridge and mah-jongg partners, women she played tennis with, and her girlfriends from the club. The first weekend online, there were eight purchases, ranging from a fourteen-inch color television for $25 to a twenty-four-piece set of cutlery for $80. Over the next few weeks, there were eight hundred hits and fifty-five sales, including a moped, a high-definition color television, a his-and-hers pistol set, a snowblower, and a trunkful of Elvis memorabilia. In the first month of business, they filled orders for more than a hundred items, with revenues to Softpawn.com of $3,700. When Chuck took ad space in a few upscale shopping mall circulars, sales increased another 50 percent. After paying quarterly real estate and payroll taxes, utility bills, and a couple weeks' wages to Jose, Ovella, Gloria, and Big Lou, Chuck put $1,200 into an account for Gutierrez. By June, Chuck told his pawnbrokers they could ship directly to customers and be guaranteed payment while remaining anonymous. It reminded Chuck of dealing dope in college—or a hack some brainy student might have conceived as a joke—a novelty that started blossoming into something much bigger—something with upside, commercial appeal that could make something out of nothing. Rahim became more adept at writing computer code and developing the Web site. Almost by accident, he figured out how to hack into Web sites, tap into databases, even send and receive messages from e-mail addresses that weren't theirs.

“Give me the name of some mail-order catalogue your ex-wife got, someplace you remember from the credit card bills,” Rahim said to Chuck one morning.

“What for?”

“Just give me one.”

“Lattie's Under Covers.” Chuck was standing behind Rahim, reading a spreadsheet that summarized the prior week's sales. A moment later, they were looking at a photograph of a teenage girl with thick lips and heavy eye shadow wearing a dark lace bra. Rahim went back to his desktop and clicked on an icon with a skull and crossbones.

“Perfect,” he said, a minute later. “Port Eighty's open. Let's see if we can get into the FTP.” He minimized that screen and opened up a new one that was blank except for a blinking cursor and a blank space into which he typed a string of characters. “Bingo. Port Twenty-two is open.”

Rahim typed a long string of numbers and codes—passwords, screen IDs, alphabetical and numeric iterations. When the CPU stopped crunching, the screen displayed a list of names, addresses, phone numbers, dress sizes, e-mail addresses, birth dates, marital statuses, and purchase histories. Next to one record was: “cashmere sweater with diamond studs.” Beside another: “two pairs of bathing suits—1 thong, 1 with skirt.” Next to a third: “tennis outfit.” “From behind the curtain, I can do anything,” Rahim said, sitting back and smiling.

“Do they know we're doing this?” Chuck asked.

Rahim shook his head. “It'll take me a few minutes to copy their customer list. I'll merge it with our database offline. They'll have no idea.” It took Rahim less than an hour to configure and merge it into the Softpawn.com customer database. Somewhere on the Internet, he'd found a program that let him send e-mail messages that were untraceable. “An IP address is like a fingerprint,” he said. “You want to leave it in as few places as possible,” he told Chuck as he typed. “While I'm doing this, you should come up with an e-mail we can send to Lattie's customers.”

“Profit from Misfortune!” he wrote in the subject line. “Furs, Jewels, Electronics, Clothing, Valuables, and More. It's your lucky day. Click here now.” For Chuck, selling had been an instinct inherited from his father, sanctioned by everyone around him. To have misgivings about it now seemed strange, silly, yet something about this was distasteful to him. For some reason, he pictured himself thirty years earlier, standing in Lorraine's doorway in Boston holding his fake petition, her shoulders wet from the shower, her big eyes looking up at him, and something passed across his consciousness that felt fraudulent and bad.

Over the next five days, Rahim sent that e-mail to tens of thousands of individual addresses he'd surreptitiously acquired from unsophisticated online retailers. By the following weekend, they had over a thousand hits, which resulted in orders for almost $6,000 worth of merchandise. By July, word of their success had spread among pawn dealers, art and antique brokers, and money launderers. Chuck began getting calls from liquidators—people with excess inventory that hadn't moved—which is when Fat Eddie asked him down to the Union League.

 

“Wilkie Crackford,” the man said, sticking out a meaty hand and winking. He was an affable fellow in his mid-forties with an ample belly, a handlebar mustache, and blue eyes that twinkled behind wire-frame glasses. “Wilkie, on account I'm from Wilkes Barre. Crackford because I'm a crack litigator.” Despite his disheveled demeanor and humble origins, Crackford graduated at the top of his class at Temple. He had an easy way about him and a voice that sounded like tiny bubble wrap crackling. Over vodka tonics, Fat Eddie made a ceremony out of telling them he would put up Crackford's initial retainer so he could represent Chuck against any residual claims that arose against him. It was a pleasant meeting, not unlike many Chuck had taken over the course of his career. From a combination of success with Softpawn.com and the right dosages of alcohol and antianxiety medication, Chuck felt better than he had in months. They shook hands on the steps, agreeing to meet again after Crackford had a chance to get familiar with the file.

Chuck bought more computer equipment, food, nonprescription drugs, a couple of Thelonius Monk CDs, and some good weed. By the end of August, he'd put five grand in an account for Gutierrez and split another ten grand with Rahim. By the end of the summer, Softpawn.com was generating enough revenue for Ovella to quit her job. With a solid source of supply and a reliable schedule of online auctions now, Rahim put his cyber-capabilities in full service to Chuck's case.

“What should we be looking for?” Rahim e-mailed Wilkie Crackford, once he'd been retained.

“Violations of the Clean Water Act, old trial transcripts, legislation, prior case law covering white-collar crime, even research and development by the chemical companies that make 1,1,1 TCE,” Crackford wrote back. Late at night, Rahim sat at the keyboard hacking into the search engines, downloading summaries of environmental law and reckless endangerment in the workplace, while Chuck paced behind him, a glass of vodka in his hand. Rahim ran his data through a statistical program someone had given him, entering the number of charges Chuck would likely be found guilty of against the average penalties, and e-mailed Crackford with the results. He did this with a determination that bordered on obsession. To Rahim, Chuck wasn't just a friend in trouble. The factory that housed Softpawn, employing four people almost full-time, risen from the ashes of Puckman Security, was Rahim's mission.

Meanwhile, Chuck grew more and more restive, spending his time surfing the Internet, drinking, getting stoned, listening to the steady drone of the Spanish-speaking radio stations, watching his fish, and waiting.