The Finder: A Novel (18 page)

The two men held each other's gaze. Indeed, Ray thought, we've got a problem.

But he played it cool. "No sweat," he said, "not a problem." He put up his hands meekly, backed away.

But now that I know what you look like, Richie-boy, he thought, I'll be watching you.

"Sir,
we are
honored.
But before we begin I just want to say that we know a man like yourself has many options, of course, so I have personally supervised this research, not only for the confidentiality issue—one can never be too careful—but also because I want you to know that we are dedicated to providing you excellent service."

The man, who was named Phelps, got no response, and his voice seemed to echo around the large room full of antiques and paintings thirty stories above Central Park and then get lost up near the high ceiling of concentric ornamental plaster medallions. The kind of ceiling no one built anymore, not unless they had a few extra hundred thousand to spend. Probably not the kind of room where Phelps usually presented his findings. Dressed in a gray wool suit, he had a salesman's fastidious grooming and eagerness to please. With a whiff of a military background, or perhaps law enforcement. His partner, a younger man named Sims, also in a gray suit, blinked constantly, like a timekeeping device. Martz, dressed in a yellow bathrobe and fleece booties, didn't like either man. Literalists, detail men. Pin pokers who found existential reassurance in confirmation of the obvious. Incapable of seeing the big picture. Then again, the world ran on such people. He himself employed dozens of them. These two came highly recommended and after canceling his trip to Germany he had ordered them to come to his home so that no one would see any "security consultants" arriving in his office.

"Go on," he said, irritated by the man's lip-licking obsequiousness.

"We have tracked the trading of Good Pharma back through the various brokerages using our contacts and friendships," Phelps began, opening an electronic display monitor, "and we would like to present what we feel is a thorough analysis of what has happened." A computer graphic appeared on the large screen. "What you are seeing is a time-lapse flowchart of the trades made in Good Pharma from January first of this year through May eighth, the day the stock took its first big hit. We have taken as our baseline the one-hundred-day trailing average trading volume in order to then factor out the typical trade volume originating in the large institutional accounts, whose management is known to us, as well as the retail level trades originating in storefront discount brokerage operations, Charles Schwab and so on, that mostly cater to those few older investors who don't use the Internet. We have also done our level best to filter out the automatic dividend reinvestment buying and scheduled buying by firms for their retirement accounts—in short, anything and everything that creates
normal
trading volume in Good Pharma. Only by knowing the normal does one quantify the deviant."

"Sounds kinky," Sims suddenly interjected, seemingly to his own surprise.

Phelps shot him a look of amazed hatred, then went on. "Anyway, this still leaves some eleven million shares of Good Pharma stock traded
here
—on May eighth, which is nine times the trailing average daily volume." The screen jumped to a multicolored chart detailing the eleven million shares. "We have traced these trades backward through the floor traders and clearinghouses and found that most of the trades were made on Internet accounts flowing through Asia. Now then, you see here"—the screen's time-flow graphic showed a rising mountain of sell orders superimposed with a jagged downward red line tracking the drop in price of Good Pharma—"that the trading volume shows nine thousand sell orders made in a four-hour time period. The first sells hit the New York Stock Exchange as strike price orders and the price dropped immediately, and yet one can see a few institutional traders came in thinking they had a quick chance to pick up a bargain, but
these buyers were soon overwhelmed, about eight or nine minutes later, with another wave of sell orders, these again smaller than before but greater in number, as presumably news of the sell worked its way through private networks. A lot of sophisticated day traders in Taiwan run proprietary computerized trading models, some of them quite good. One can see here that the sell orders mostly came through Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, and even Ho Chi Minh City brokerages. A few through Tokyo. The wave of selling was completed in about nineteen minutes. At this point, news of the enormous price drop had flowed through the financial news networks, and the major institutional customers froze, not knowing whether to buy and pick up a bargain, or sell along with everyone else. The hedge fund guys froze, too. The problem was that the analysis on the stock was generally positive, of course, with buy recommendations running about five to one over sell recommendations."

"For Christ's sake, I know all that," Martz muttered.

"All right, then," Phelps said. "Yes, you know that. We have a very friendly contact high up in China Telecom who was able to collate the sources of the calls to the various Asian brokerages, and then using regression analysis we traced them back to five individuals residing in Shanghai. I'm afraid that we were forced to relinquish a very considerable sum to get the phone records, but once we did, we can see that the probable source of the entire wave of selling originated with these five men or their representatives. They happen to be principals in a variety of real estate projects in Shanghai and the surrounding areas and have made quite a name for themselves. One of them is a Shanghai government official, by the way."

Martz had a bad feeling about what he was soon to hear. "Any legal recourse?"

"Doubtful. We violated private brokerage agreements, clearinghouse confidentiality agreements, American securities law, Taiwanese security law, and Chinese security regulations. That's why our information is so good."

"It's not
that
good—I mean, I basically already knew something like this had happened."

"Yes, sir, I understand that a man of your experience would certainly intuit the basic structure of causation." Phelps smiled ever so indulgently, then thought better of it. "When I worked for the government we were often able to make educated guesses about the causes of illegal trades, but it was the detail work that really showed how people operated. So please give me one more moment. Now then, one of the five Chinese businessmen originating these trades is named Chen. In his early thirties. He has some two dozen holding companies that he controls and we were able to trace one of them, using a confidential source at Hong Kong Banc Trust, to a privately held company here in New York. This small company, which is called CorpServe, provides cleaning, waste removal, and paper-shredding services to a number of office buildings and corporate clients around town. One of the contracts is a midtown address, and you will recognize it as the corporate offices of Good Pharma."

"Oh, those fuckers!" Martz yelled.

"Yes. Now then, I have asked my colleague Bert Sims to give us the backgrounder in paperized information security."

Sims, still blinking constantly, stepped forward, shooting his cuffs like a comedian on television. "Thanks, Bob. Pleasure to help out, Mr. Martz. Heard you were one of the richest men in New York City. Wow, I said to myself. Quite an honor for me. Now then, the great bulk of information security has to do with computer files, text encryption, wireless security, and so on. As it should. That stuff is complicated and you need smart people to protect it. But then one must ask, where else in the universe is important information found? In two other media. The first is brain cells. People walk around with a lot of valuable information in their heads. Its value and accuracy are generally in decay. The other medium, of course, is paper. Good old paper. We have become very—pardon the expression—
promiscuous
with paper. We once thought we'd have paperless offices but of course that never happened. That's a joke. People print out e-mails, they make copies of reports online, they distribute charts in meetings, and so on."

Sims blinked as he prepared to expound again. "There is only one way to remove the problem of paper, from a security point of view.
You destroy the paper itself. But what is destruction? That's an interesting question."

"To you," Martz said.

"Yes, to me but also to my colleagues in the paperized security industry who are charged with the task of analyzing paper destruction issues and related methodologies." His eyes lost contact with Martz as he wandered through his interior landscape of abstraction, his voice dropping its synthetic heartiness and becoming the affectless droning of a man who lived for and only loved information. "You can burn paper, which causes smoke, and if you are running a legal, commercial operation, that smoke has to be cleaned, by federal statute. Has to be scrubbed, because most inks have PCBs in them. Ink is a pretty bad substance once you start spreading it around in gas form. You can also destroy paper by dissolving it in acid or some other kind of solvent, but this is smelly and expensive and very messy. You can hide paper, bury it or lock it away, but this only postpones its fate. If you lock it away, somebody can always break in and steal it. Plus the costs of secure storage are enormous. Just ask the U.S. government. Our country spends ninety-eight billion dollars a year on the storage of undigitized government records. Did you know that? What about burying paper? Well, there are landfill issues. Plus people could always dig up the—"

"I am paying for information I can use, not a complete regurgitation of everything you've ever learned. Get to the point."

"Of course. Yes. So, okay, the last way you can destroy information on paper is by shredding it. There are different methods and standards of shredding security, from long strips to confetti. You have your strip-cut, cross-cut, and particle-cut machines, grinders, disintegrators, and granulators. One concept is that you turn, say, one hundred pages of valuable information into ten thousand pieces of confetti, and perhaps mix it with fifty thousand pieces of the same size that have no valuable information, and no one in his right mind would or could reassemble those pieces.

"But things, Mr. Martz, are not always as they seem. Shredded documents can be reassembled. The most famous case was the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, when the Iranians hired local car
pet weavers to reconstruct shredded embassy documents by hand. Nowadays the computerized document reassembly business is well developed. Confetti is small only because you are big. If you were tiny, then you would see it very differently. Let's say that piece of confetti was as big as a pizza box, or even bigger, as wide across as the rug in your living room. At that size it would seem fairly thick, and there would be lots of details about it on all of its surfaces. Well, you know what? We can make that piece of confetti large—informationally, I mean. We can microscan it and get a very detailed image of it. Very detailed. That itself is digitized, labeled, and stored. Kind of ironic, actually. The digital becomes paper, becomes digitized gain. Now, with a computer program that reads all those pieces of paper and puts them back—"

"What are you getting at?" asked Martz, hearing the door open in the hallway.

"You could read the documents. But it would take a lot of labor and a lot of computing power. Yet in China, both of those things are almost free now. The cost of labor is actually still dropping in some areas, as more and more people come off the farms and search for work. And most computing programs in China have been pirated from Western companies. You literally have small Chinese companies running on software they got for free that cost their original owners millions of dollars." Sims's eyes noticed something behind Martz, something that unsettled his robotic composure. "The government supports, I mean
sees,
no I did mean
supports,
this—this activity I am—"

"Hello!" Connie pranced into the room across the Persian carpet on shiny high heels, carrying a shopping bag and wearing a wicked little black cocktail dress that showed her every gigantic and fabulous curve. "Pardon me! I'm so sorry! Bill? What do you think?" She whirled around, displaying her impossible convexities. "Do you just
love
it? Please say you do!" She looked back coyly at the security men. "Oh, please excuse me, I just had to show my husband." She flung her hands up and bent one leg, an old model's pose. "See?" She pulled the hem up one side of her steel-hard thigh. "Perfect fit. Here,
feel."
She stepped forward, her leg grazing Martz's yellow robe, touching his pale hairy
calf, and took his hand and put it flat on her stomach, made him rub it, his fingers making incidental but not unnoticed contact with the round underside of the firm shelf above. "Nobody produces this kind of silk, no one. Don't you just
love
it?"

Martz nodded, not sure who in the room was the most humiliated, he or the two men. Connie was capable of this kind of behavior, he knew all too well, and it came in part from her awareness that she would never have children, that her sexiness was her only hold on him, and also from her unacknowledged desire to be attractive to men other than her husband. Younger men, more attractive men,
vigorous
men. Christ, he'd been married four times and humped sixty or seventy women, he knew a thing or two about female human beings. Connie needed a good banging, really
needed
it, and he hadn't given her that in a long time. So, no wonder. Poor girl. Now she bent down to his ear, no doubt flashing her perfect rear side at the men waiting patiently. "Oh, Bill, don't be mad," she breathed. "I wanted it for
you."