Turn of the Century (96 page)

“No,” Ben says, “uh-uh, that’s it.”

The brokers might turn out to be right, of course, and Ben Gould will wind up on the wrong side of a monstrous $3 million candy trade. Everyone who trades options, he knows and they know, are piranhas (the guys in the pit, massed and frenzied) or sharks. Ben prefers to think of himself as sharklike, discriminating and even dignified, striking at a few great big flailing, sanguinary trades. He’s a killer, but he is not a scummer, one of the rock people. He isn’t doing anything wrong here; that is, he isn’t doing anything illegal. He didn’t ask; they didn’t tell. He happens to know. He just happens to know. It’s a Perfect Trade.

How perfect will it be? Ben remembers writing the story in 1980 about Arrow Electronics, and how the stock price shriveled by half five minutes after those thirteen executives burned to death in Westchester. On the other hand, when Frank Gaudette died in 1993, the stock of his company wasn’t badly hit. Even though he was one of the top guys, he’d been sick for so long the market had discounted it—the death was de facto preannounced. Gaudette was head of worldwide operations at Microsoft, second only to Gates. But then again, that was seven years ago, a
long time back. These days, on any given Friday afternoon, people bring down Microsoft two or three points on a whisper about something minor, like slow Asian shipments of Windows 2000. Ben knows what he knows. But in the end, who knows?

According to the big Vikings digital thermometer outside Jodie Taft’s kitchen window, it’s warmer this morning than it was yesterday, up to six degrees below zero. She hears the TV on downstairs. And she hears Fanny and the boys chattering as usual, up and at ’em already, at seven-ten! What is it with these kids and the computers? It’s a different world, that’s for darned sure. She steps carefully down the wooden stairs to the basement, balancing the three giant mugs of hot cocoa on a LoveMart bedside sex-toy tray.

“Cocoa time!” Jodie says.

“Thank you, Mrs. Tahhhft!” Willibald and Humfried say in unison, entirely earnest and grateful, not meaning to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Eddie Haskell. They think Fanny’s mom is cute and nice and American. Jodie Taft thinks they’re cute and nice and, in their red fleece tops and with Willibald’s little blond goat’s beard, so
Christmassy
.

The kids have been awake most of the night, of course. Empty ultra-venti Starbucks cups as big as megaphones sit in a neat row at the back of one of the PCs, just beneath a homemade poster, printed in the inch-high letters of a funny-papers Microsoft typeface called Comic Sans Serif:
REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE ON NOVEMBER
29, 2000?
WACKO PRACTICAL JOKERZ RULE!
On the Sony in the corner, E!
²
is showing a tour group of movie stars, live, trying to talk to a pair of toucans at the grand opening of Salvation, the swank rain-forest Eco-resort thirty miles from Selvapesta, Costa Rica.

“I want you to get some breakfast in you before you leave for school, young lady!”

“I’m taking two independent-study days, Mom. Today and tomorrow.”

Jodie Taft smiles as she climbs the basement stairs. She remembers the day thirty years ago—
Goodness
, she thinks,
thirty years!
—when she stayed
up all night and skipped classes helping George Mactier set up the Henry Wallace High School Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations.

“Susan and Tim,”
says the spiky-haired young TV correspondent to two of the movie stars in Costa Rica,
“I know how nice it must be for you guys to kick back for a while here, after your week in the Zapatista territories. Tell me about the fighting—did you see combat?” “We did hear shooting one day,” the female movie star says, “when we were near Chabajebal with Barbra and her crew, but you know how difficult it is to tell what’s going on in that situation …”

Willibald, typing away, nods toward the TV. “See?” he says, “everything is the war in Mexico. I still think a bomb, an accidental bombing by the security forces, is the best. I do. It’s more amusing.”

Fanny, watching her terminal screen, shakes her head. “It might be. But I told you, I don’t want to do anything that involves government stuff.” She turns to Willi. “I can’t afford to do anything that gets the feds pissed off, okay?”

“Look! Look!” Humfried suddenly shouts. “On the TV!”

The on-air correspondent, who’s wearing a sleeveless khaki minidress, is now talking to a hulking bald man in a pink polo shirt.

“God,” Fanny says, “he looks like a
Star Trek
alien, with the evil grin and the slitty eyes and the big bulge on the top of his head.”

“Maybe they
are
aliens,” Willibald says.

“Wacko Practical Jokerz, heroes of the solar system!” Humfried says.

“So,”
the woman on TV says, pointing her MTV and E!
²
microphones up toward the man’s face,
“is there a place for computers in the Costa Rican rain forest?”

“Francesca, coming down here makes you realize that there are still so many parts of the world, even in our own hemisphere, that need the solutions technology can provide.”

“Tell our viewers what you were saying before to Michael Stipe, the thing your boss said about the rain forest?”

The bald giant smiles.
“Oh, Bill was just saying how being in the jungle here, and deep diving out there, makes him feel like we’re actually inside planet Earth’s operating system.”

“Interesting way of thinking about this important ecosystem, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft,”
the correspondent says, stepping away,
“here on a scuba vacation with his boss—the richest man
on
planet Earth.”
The camera follows
her, then pans down to find a pretty blond woman squatting, trying to feed a giant longhaired weasel.
“The tayra want to eat
lizard,
señora,”
a man from the resort is saying quietly to her,
“he not like
banana.
”
The correspondent squats down beside them.
“Kim Basinger, it’s Francesca Mahoney, for MTV/E-squared
Real Time News,
who’s your friend here?”

“The operating system of planet Earth,” Willibald says, unsmiling. “That lamer deserves to die simply for that.”

From his office on the east side of the Fifty-ninth Floor, Henry Saddler could, if he wanted, see the world’s largest electric snowflake suspended above Fifth Avenue. But he’s busy. Between the thumb and index finger of his left hand he’s pinching the shirt fabric over his right nipple. With his right hand, he’s moving his mouse around the WinWin.com web page, calling up the account of
WINWIN WINNER HENRY G. SADDLER IV
. And he’s talking on the speakerphone, to Jack Delancey from
Variety
.

“Well, Jack, those may
be
‘the scoops du jour in the M-and-A chattering caste,’ but I think you’re going to look silly if you go with that. In all honesty.”

“Which? Are you telling me that Mose is
not
off-loading the stations to Diller? Or that you
aren’t
going to do a megadeal with WebTV for MBC programming lock, stock, and barrel full of monkeys?”

“At any nimble multimedia entertainment company, all sorts of options are kicked around, Jack, you know that. That’s the nature of nimble management.”
Nimble
is one of the words on Harold’s MPI that needs goosing. “Like our 2001 reinvention strategies as regards the Winter Channel evolving into Reality Channel, which you yourself reported. Exclusively.”

“And you already have my sincerest for dropping the dime on that bit of intelligence, Hank.”

“Henry. Well, this is no different.”

“Which? The station sale or the programming sale?”

“ ‘Although one top source says the investment in the MBC by Microsoft could be “in the low ten-figure range,” the source denied in the strongest possible terms that the Mose O and Os are for sale.’ Please do
not
call us a weblet. Please. It drives Harold up the wall.”

“I guess if you really were migrating toward the network exit door, Hank, you wouldn’t give a hoot about the nomenclature.”

“Good point.”

“Is this the right number to grab you at, later in the week when I need to Cuisinart your quotes into deadline configuration?”

“Actually, I’ll be in Burbank late tonight through the rest of the week.”

“Roger wilco, Hank, I’ll 818 you Wednesday, Thursday.”

“It’s Henry.”

Saddler clicks a WinWin.com button to check his account. Most of his Mose Media Holdings shares are in accounts managed by the company and its brokerage house. But on WinWin.com he buys and sells a bit of Mose on his own now and then, just for the kick of it, really, when he has … hunches. Right now he has a hunch that
Variety
is going to confirm that Mose is not abandoning network television and may get a huge infusion of cash from Microsoft. He has a hunch that the stock of Mose Media Holdings will rise on that news, and keep rising when the WebTV deal does go through. He clicks the WinWin.com
EXPRESS TRADE
button, and purchases 3,000 Mose Media Holdings shares.
TRADE CONFIRMED, HENRY G. SADDLER IV
.

He presses the special platinum
PHONE ME NOW
button that’s operative only on the screens of WinWin
Winners
, and waits. He is feeling very clever. He has never shorted a stock before, but he’s read and reread
Stock-Shorting for Dummies
, and he knows the material cold. The broker borrows the shares from the vault and lends them to you. You sell the shares today for $100 apiece. Then, after the stock price drops to $50 next week, you pay the broker $50 for the share and pocket the difference. You double your money in a week, just like that. You’re a winner!

The phone rings. It’s Henry’s WinWin.com Personal Privileges Representative, full of “Mr. Saddler” solicitousness. The asking price right now for Microsoft is $131⅝. Henry—Mr. Saddler—tells the broker he wants to short 5,000 shares of common stock. Just one moment, she says … and then she’s back, telling him
of course
, Mr. Saddler, you have a preapproved margin account. Hank tells the woman he wants to do 5,000 shares short at $131⅞ for $660,000. And no commission at all, Henry asks her to confirm, just like with all his other trades, since he’s a WinWin Winner? “Of course not, Mr. Saddler!” And just like that, on Tuesday the twenty-eighth of November, Henry Saddler has shorted 5,000 shares of Microsoft. If the stock should drop (tomorrow, for instance)
by $20 a share, Henry Saddler will be $100,000 richer. If it drops by $40 a share, he’ll be $200,000 richer. This is what the vice president elect means when he says America is one heck of a wealth-creation engine. This is outstanding! This is sexy! Henry Saddler gleams.

“Wie sagen Sie ‘sicher’?”
Humfried asks Willi.

“How can you be certain?”

“How can you be
certain
,” Humfried says directly to Fanny, “that this stranger is still in the jungle in Mexico with the Zapatistas? Maybe he’s returned now to Costa Rica. Maybe he’s right by the phone in the office.
Boom!
He tells them right away, ‘This is not true.’ ”

“Stringer
, not
stranger,”
she says absentmindedly to Humfried. Fanny is at her computer, editing their two stories one last time, plugging in a couple of final facts plucked from a web site about Costa Rican scuba diving. She turns to face him. “Well, yesterday Carlos Petersen e-mailed his boss that he’d be filing another story tomorrow from the Mexican guerillas’ camp. Which means today. And last night he e-mailed somebody named Claudia that he wouldn’t get home until the weekend. So, no, we’re not
certain
. But you’ve got to figure he’s still out in the jungle.”

“We’ve got good mission probability,” Willibald says. “Worst case, we’re up for one half minute. But even up for one half minute, there will be FUD, right? Thirty seconds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And so this will be covered in the media. Because it’s
a fantastischer
hack. Because it’s him. Like with the phones in their meeting. Everyone knew that was a prank, right? But it still was the big story.” He gestures toward their wall poster. “ ‘Wacko Practical Jokerz.’ The Microsoft guys pretended to laugh, but they were embarrassed.”

“Humfried,” Fanny says, “it’s your turn in the kitchen. We’re probably getting close.”

Humfried bounds upstairs with his Domino’s pepperoni, and hops up onto the counter to stare at Jodie Taft’s giant digital thermometer.

“One degree under, still,” he shouts toward the basement door.

They have decided that since they have no way of knowing the Costa Rican dive times, it doesn’t matter exactly when during the day
they push the button. Willibald picked up the thermometer trick as a boy, a Thaelmann Pioneer, at his kommunist kinder kamp in East Germany. The idea is to ensure that one’s apparently random actions are actually random, to preclude any inferences of logic or motive afterward. Fanny and Humfried and Willibald have done their best to cover their tracks technologically—the phony internet aliases they’ve spoofed, the root kit they planted inside the Reuters system, the Stasi stealth tricks Big Bob showed them. Willi said, “We will wait for God to tell us when the time is right to launch.” The countdown from five below zero to one below has taken all morning.