Chapter 1
I was the numbers guy, until I wasn’t. When you’re halfway to the top in a financial organization, you’re the most vulnerable. Unlike the entry-level grunts, you’re given just enough rope to hang yourself, but not enough to get any kind of a foothold that isn’t transitory. So there are always those who use that as an opportunity to sabotage the competition- in this case the competition was me.
I had no illusions about camaraderie among this club of the financially predatory, but when the whole operation loses it’s moorings and starts snapping up some seemingly magical opportunities, inevitably people will get pissed off, jealous, self-righteous, or worse, and a plausible call from some rando can get you on the radar from the boys at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and before you know it, the question all around is if you can be turned.
From the first year that I was there, I was put under the management of Harvey Dennison, the senior partner in the firm which was technically a hedge fund, but only technically. He was ambitious, amoral, and a quintessential opportunist.
When it came to personal matters, he was fundamentally a man who had no self-awareness, oblivious to the fact that everyone from Agnes, his secretary, to the big boss Spencer thought of him as a cloying sycophant, and an ambitious prig. It didn’t bother me too much, as long as I kept my nose in the actuarial, I was able to skirt the confrontations that my colleagues liked to engage in.
Entirely self-absorbed in his career trajectory, Dennison calculated how much value you could bring to him in the short term, and adjust his relationship with you accordingly. He was like this with everyone; every week, he offered to bring back a granola bar to his assistant, paid $1.67 for it, and collected $2 from her every time.
Reptilian in his emotional logic, you could imagine him with a spreadsheet tabulating the value any of his relationships towards his advancement, presumably with rankings and little plusses and minuses in various columns. Which is how I imagine Dennison came up with the assignment that was intended to eliminate me from the field; an impossible ask, that would have saddled me with the responsibility for some very shady dealings. The details were somewhat complicated to show here, but the long and short of it is, If it worked, they would reap some tidy profits, if it didn’t, the rap would be squarely mine, and they could simply throw me under the bus.
So it was checkmate in their eyes, heads they win, tails I lose. I didn’t hold any grudges about it; I didn’t feel as though they’d singled me out, this was just what was expected in that world, and of course there wasn’t enough collective imagination in that whole operation to inspire much variation.
I had watched as they ran this play on numerous colleagues. Elliott from Treasuries got the rap for the Ponzi that was the San Diego toxic clean-up fund, Martin in underwriting took the hit for inflating the commercial real estate holdings in the 2008 debacle.
Jon Ewald got the sub-prime double-cross when they stuck him with their under-reporting of risk assessments on credit default swaps. They hunted on, sharklike, and they saw no reason to think that the feeding would ever come to an end; at least not for them.
They thought that they had it in the bag. Except they didn’t expect one thing- that I might be so jaded, so self-serving that I might blow the whistle on the whole thing. Of course that would mean blowing away my future with them and bracing myself for some blindingly expensive law suits, but the feds were onto them already.
They had been surveilling the board for years as I found out. Unbeknownst to them was that a major sting was brewing in the SEC, and by the time I went to them, they knew exactly what I was there to tell them- Good thing I did, or I might have been the next under the bus. I saw which way the wind was blowing and held up my whistle; I simply stepped in front of the parade with the flag, and down goes Dennison.
i
You may think that reporting your boss to the SEC and initiating an FBI inquiry would be a terrifying step across the line, but not this time. It was easy; I just went into the meeting with him that was supposed to be my review, through that grand mahogany door, and took my seat at that long, one-of-a-kind, hundred and seventy thousand dollar conference table, that stretched across the impressively huge boardroom, the imposing architecture of which reminded me of Italian fascism of the nineteen-thirties. I was ready. Dennison really had no clue.
As was his usual strategy, he got me alone in the boardroom, and made me wait, sitting next to him, as he took the head of the empty table, while he answered a few texts while I waited. When he was done, he turned and glared at me, as if to stare me down per some advice in an aggressive management psychology book, in an attempt to weaken my defenses. Authority for him was all about performative gestures and dramatic puffery, so he slipped into his usual routine. In other words, he was clueless as to what was about to happen.
“This deal was supposed to be our flagship,” he hissed. “We lined up the Congress, our boys in the SEC, it cost us a lot. And you stopped it because it was ‘Illegal?’” He struggled as if he’d never heard the concept before.
“No,” I confessed, “I stopped it because I wasn’t enjoying it.” Not really a lie, but I thought I’d dangle it a bit for him to puzzle over for a moment. He of course had no idea that I had been informing on him and the crew to the feds for almost three months now.
They had a tip from a broker in Cleveland who had my name pegged to a transaction from the Ohio Water Company; fortunately I was just the clerk on that one; my nose was technically clean. But not so clean that I could get in the way of the SEC if they really wanted to put the screws on Dennison, and they really did.
There wasn’t enough time for me to have planned for a smooth exit, so I was faced with the imminent possibility of all of my future plans evaporating into a grim penury, and my too-steep mortgage on my newly constructed Bay Area bi-level propelled me into thinking and re-thinking my career. Hang time.
“That attitude tends to scare people. Sorry Lawrence. You need to find a new career.”
I had already cleared most of the stuff out of my desk, and turned over the evidence to the feds, so, yes, I knew my career with the firm was over; and I even had worked out options for leaving the country for a while. Once the street gets wind of you as someone who’s willing to scuttle the ship because of mere corruption, you’re radioactive.
“There are a lot of customers out there for my skills who are just as corrupt as you guys,” I reminded him. He seemed surprised to hear the word, as if it was in a foreign language, and it’s not one that I was even accustomed to using, since it requires the assumption of it’s opposite. “Cor...rup..tion?” What was corruption really, without the assumption of some benign, gentlemanly standard that everyone normally complies with?
Poor Dennison. The rug, so comfortably beneath his Bostonian brogues about to be so rudely pulled out from under him. He had no idea the white trucks were lining up in the alley, back by the service elevators, the exits on Sutter and Mason were being sealed, the intercoms disabled, and O’Connor from the FBI was right outside the boardroom door with the forensic agents, ready to haul the whole operation downtown.
Still, obliviously, he lectured me about how things work in this business, as if rehearsing a Toastmasters presentation, and I can’t say he was wrong.
“Your clientele is about to dry up rather suddenly after this, Lawrence.”
“I appreciate your career advice,” I said, “but I’ll leave that judgement to the free market.”
He used that phrase “Free market” so often, I knew that he would get the irony. But of course, humorless lizard that he was, he was not amused. He screwed up his face in a grimace of disbelief and condescension.
“Good luck with that, Lawrence,” he crooned. “When you get too cynical, betrayal becomes…“
The building alarm suddenly sounded, cutting him off. There were resonant percussive thuds echoing out in the hallway, and I knew that the floor was being sealed. The agents suddenly appeared in the hallway, with a lot of jingling of keys and the screech of walkie-talkies, and FBI Agent O’Connor burst through the sleek mahogany door of Dennison’s Architectural Digest-featured boardroom.
I finished Dennison’s thought:“…Second nature.”
O’Connor strode over to the long conference table like a Texas sheriff. He clearly had been through hundreds of these securities fraud arrests, and he read off the charges like a train conductor on a familiar route: “Mr. Dennison, you are under arrest for violation of securities fraud law, Title 18 U.S.C. 1834…”
The law had found it’s case. The dominos began to topple. Those conditions that everyone had always speculated about now reached the critical point at which the reaction takes place.
With the alarm blaring, and the thud of doors shutting, the feds burst into the office, and escorted me out; over my shoulder I could see them arresting Dennison, handcuffs clicking tight under the blue and gold Yale cufflinks that he liked to wear. As I descended the elevator the 37 floors to the lobby, the Muzak chirped up in an bouncy Vegas lounge-style instrumental cover of Britney Spears “Oops, I Did It Again...”
I walked across the lobby and glanced away from all the faces that I knew would eventually be affected by this betrayal of mine, and I did imagine their dismay and eventual anger. I though about how each face might exact their retribution if they caught on.
As the A-team were accommodated in the police vans with shiny new bracelets, they could see me among the officers with my wrists free, and I ducked around the corner and down the alley. As I wandered down the blocks to my car, I passed the Korean electronics store, and the news was playing on one of those big LCD screens. They were showing a live feed of the outside of the building where the executives at the firm were being packed into the vans, and carried off, and Dennison sliding in awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. I walked on into the night through the drizzle, with an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction.
It should have been the end of it, but it was the beginning of something else again. Their grift, I was to learn, was small potatoes compared to what I was to discover when I entered the market as a freelance data thief; Dennison may be sorry for his hiatus from raking in lucre from the unsuspecting retirement fund, but what I was to find among the international clientele I was to fall in with was on another order entirely.
They were guilty, but I was out. Even though I was treated decently by the feds, I was still in an extended limbo, and I expected some level of bad blood from Dennison’s little club. I certainly didn’t care to have any more contact with that circle, so I just assumed I’d just go out and join one of the reputable firms, and it would have been a good story for a luncheon or Christmas party, how I foiled some crooked hedge fund managers.
But the long and short of it was that it made me an untouchable. I still hadn’t fully realized how out in the cold I was, like Alec Leamas in LeCarre’s book. No honor among these thieves.
So, slow learner that I am, I eventually learned my lesson. A good conscience was not a way to become popular among this crowd, which was vividly illustrated by the brick that had been thrown through the windshield of my car.
I went out to do some grocery shopping, and when I returned to where I parked it, The windshield was a craggy hole and there the brick was on the seat, covered in shatterproof glass. So that was one repair I had to schedule. The dude at the shop was sympathetic; “Aw, man that sucks, why anyone wanna do this shit to your car, man? Not cool, man, prolly just some young troublemakers. I take care of it for you, man.”
I had a feeling it wasn’t just some young troublemakers, and although the shop had cleared out most of the pieces, one piece did embed itself in the sole of my shoe, and needed to be picked out; such was the stickiness of this grudge.
There were the court dates, the lawyers, statements that I had to sign, documents to identify, and the feds made sure that my betrayal was vivid and consequential, and their net was cast wide, so I wound up fingering more than just Dennison- I had no idea how many of these colleagues were enfranchised in the whole operation-practically everyone I worked with, and many more who I had never heard of, so, needless to say, I made a whole lot of enemies in one fell swoop.
The whole lot of them has some part in it, everyone from low level statisticians to upper management had a finger in that pie, and that was the secret to their success and how they managed to run that scam for so long. They might still have been operating like that under the radar for years if no one spoke up.
I suppose that’s how all such operations keep afloat; a grift manages to take hold in an environment of little scrutiny, and then others come along for the free ride, and soon you have a regular gravy train of quiet complicity.
It truly was a house of cards; one little gust and the whole thing went fifty-two pick-up. Fund managers and executive assistants alike felt the full weight of what it takes to mount a defense for the indefensible. To the untrained eye, it looked like business as usual, but the inner truth of it was ruin.
It’s a brotherhood like any crime operation, and disloyalty is emphatically discouraged. It became clear that anything I did would best be kept close to the vest. I scoured my online presences and emails, closed accounts and reopened others, trying not to skip a beat that would leave myself vulnerable.
After a while it seemed like those I ratted out were either too busy trying to keep out of jail, or on to more fruitful enterprises, so I charged on to try to manifest the next chapter in this crippled career of mine.
I laid low for a few months after that. Needless to say, being associated with the famous Sutter Street Raid, so luridly looped on Bloomberg and even the local KRON news, put me in a uniquely unhirable position; honest companies didn’t want to besmirch their reputations, crooked ones saw me as a rat.
I was in between worlds, and having a lot of time on my hands, the time filled up looking up from my business and noticing the world around me, and I wound up in this relationship with Rachel.
In recent years I was beginning to be of the view that relationships were more like a three-legged race at a carnival; both parties adjusting their rhythms to match, and consequently being worse at it than either would be on their own. In my case at the moment, I was on the sidelines of all such races, and in that state of idleness, I began to leave myself open to the kind of serendipity that can lead you to something better than you were looking for. And Rachel was definitely that.
I met her one day by chance while running errands in San Francisco’s financial district. The construction on my house was nearing the interior stage, and being interested in architectural options, I shopped for some books at Wm. Stout’s architectural bookstore on Montgomery street. I bought a few selections and slipped them into my backpack, and wandered past the galleries on Sutter towards the Civic Center.
It had rained that morning, but now the sun was peeking through the clouds. There was a crowd gathered in the Civic Center, and I heard the voice of a woman talking finance. She was speaking at a progressive rally for a group that was organizing to promote public banking.
In truth, I was only walking by; loitering, actually, around the City Hall Complex, where a rotating schedule of activists come to make their public appeals, and Rachel was particularly intense in her passion for changing the economic system. I had no such hope at all, having been too close to the epicenter for too long, but her enthusiasm and sincerity made her very attractive to me, whether I though it was hopeless or not.
It sounded like an interesting idea on the face of it; the banking functions of a community being assumed by the community itself, instead of relying on these enterprises we have now in which the very rich control the flow of money in society and skim a fat slice for themselves in the process, with which they can profit exponentially with every subsequent investment.
That would certainly eliminate the kind of shenanigans Dennison and his crew were able to make fountains of cash on. I listened, and the ideas were made sweeter by the impassioned feminine lilt with which she pronounced them.
My interest, however, as you may guess, was actually more prosaic. Her eyes flashed as she made her points, and her body leaned with each gesture. When it came down to it, she was drop-dead gorgeous, a fantastic body tightly packaged into the requisite black tights and college hoodie, and her cool blue eyes were the kind that always seem to be focused on the horizon, on the elusive ideal that remind one of the better angels of our nature, if such things exist.
She wore her hair long with a buoyant body of dark curls that was both casual and romantic. As I meandered through the crowd, her natural charisma and fine features drew my focus. I listened to her whole speech and applauded at the right moments; it was a welcome diversion. Her whole being exuded enthusiasm, which I wasn’t used to, so I decided to abandon the rest of my shopping plans, and hung around afterwards when she was answering questions from the audience.
We heard,”Fake news!” called out by someone in the crowd. She turned and looked.
“Who was that? Do you have a question, sir?”
A man in the audience who sported a knit cap, thin blond pubic beard, and too-large camo coat with emblem patches on the sleeves chirped up, “We know socialism doesn’t work, didn’t the Soviet Union prove that point?”
“That’s debatable, sir, depending on who you ask. But even if you believe that old cold war propaganda, public banking isn’t socialism. It’s just a way of making the banking system work better for working class customers.” She generously explained, “It’s more transparent, and less susceptible to the kind of corruption you have in the financial institutions we all have to rely on now.”
Another voice interrupted, “You commies are always trying to raise taxes and take away our freedoms! That’s why they call it ‘Free Enterprise, baby!’”
“Free for those who have the money, man, it’s the golden rule, don’t be lying to yourself!” came another voice in the crowd.
“I would rather trust the existing system, call it corrupt if you want,” quipped the questioner, his hands smugly shoved into his jacket pockets, “it wouldn’t be so strong if the bankers didn’t know what they were doing, it’s survival of the fittest.”
I knew something about this stuff, and I answered from behind him. “You’re pretty naive if you think the bankers know what they’re doing, and you’re really naive if you think that they’re not corrupt.”
I got some cheers for that from the crowd, and the dude confronted me: “Oh, like you’re some kind of expert?”
“I used to work in that field. There’s a reason I don’t anymore.”
“Hey, there’s always winners and losers, which are you, bro?”
“I don’t even play that game.”
“We’ve seen what bad investments companies like BBHM make,” Rachel retorted. “It’s just that when they blow it, they get bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars. If you’re worried about socialism, what we have is socialism for the very rich and the corporations, and hard knocks for everyone else.”
That triggered a crescendo of cheers from the crowd. There were laughs and jeers, a few call-outs from one side or the other, eventually winding down to mumbles and a dispersing crowd. When the rally ended we were all milling about and she came up to me. She turned and flashed those eyes at me. I paid attention.
“So you have firsthand knowledge of that world? I’d like to hear about that. What are you up to now?
Just looking for a good seat from which to watch civilization collapse.”
“Wanna get a drink with me?”
We went out for drinks, and then to a club where she knew the DJ, and as often happens with music, alcohol and good times, we took to each other. We began sharing tid-bits of autobiography, just enough be sporting, but not so much as to reveal red flags. In the ensuing days, we perused the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park, and caught a bit of the Outside Lands festival, and had pho at a dive in the Haight.
The chemistry was strong, and at one point in the evening we exited a club from the back door into an ally, and she wheeled around and kissed me. I was ready, and pulled her close, our mouths testing each others lips, ears, neck, and downward, the sinews and swells of her steaming body melding with mine as we made love standing there against the brickwork, enveloped in shadows.
After a while, I found out that she had just emerged from a long affair with her poetry professor; something about Dylan Thomas, she implied. My history was best left unexplored, I thought, so I just focused on the simple joys of physical contact. I let her in a bit on my history among the wolves of Wall Street, and that I was now on the outside, but not much else. She took to my cynicism about the financial system, perhaps mistaking it for political conviction, and soon I had a real girlfriend, the first in a few years, with a potential future and everything.
Only thing was, I was making my living in this questionable and compromising way. Which made having a public presence as a couple among her circle of the high-minded problematic to say the least. If she were to graduate into a level of political notoriety where she would have to begin answering for her connections, our relationship might become an unfortunate casualty.
My career, if you could even call it that, consisted of freelance activities of a shadowy nature. Things companies needed done, but couldn’t be caught doing. Eventually I did happen on a kind of specialty. I did find work among those that were willing to take the risk, personal, financial and legal, of spying on their competition. I asked myself, how bad is that, really? Doesn’t everyone want to know what the competition is doing?
But it’s the truly ambitious that will take the chances that others won’t. It’s not so much that they are afraid of doing something wrong, it’s that they just don’t know how to get the information they need; people today are lazy, made lazy by relying on the internet for everything; if they can’t Google it, they don’t know how to find it.
Legitimate work wouldn’t touch me after the Dennison affair, so I found a way to operate in the margins. And I would be remiss if I didn’t say I resented them for it, the whole preening lot of them, so that fed into my activities as much as pure commerce. My game is that I do know how to get that kind of data, and I don’t just rely on what’s available through a search engine.
People have become careless about everything else, door codes, passwords, thumb drives, newspapers, manila file folders, handwritten notes, the contents of pockets- all much more fruitful for the corporate Pimpernel.
It might even be part of a personality trait, or perhaps disorder, depending on who’s calling it. When I was in college, I learned to pick pockets as a bar trick (The old bump-and-lift); I would drink four or five espressos and practise the moves on a jacket that I had hanging from a closet door. That sort of trick gripped my imagination as long as I can remember, it had even started when I was a kid thinking about being a magician, it turned out to serve me well in my post-career business. Old school subterfuge. Misdirection.
I have to admit that there was a thrill in the act of taking advantage of my mark’s obliviousness, like the surprise in an audience watching as a dove emerges from a silk handkerchief. It is a rather perverse euphoria that comes from having full advantage over someone without their knowledge, and then revealing it to them when they least expect it.
It’s actually a violation in fact, if you take the time to think about it, but one that happens in a subtle area between consciousness and illusion. To be honest, I got a rush from it; which is something I would never share with Rachel. Because she would of course be able to instantly recognize that malevolent spark that is evil.
The same was true in my martial arts training. I got into it back in college as a P.E. credit, and ever since then there has been a local community wherever I go of practitioners that have a dojo, where we are always welcome. Community with anonymity; the best of both worlds.
Aikido, a form which is much misunderstood, was a regular discipline for me since coming to California. Like magic and crime, it relies on the assumptions of your opponent. Where an audience might assume that a painted box is just a painted box, and a silk hat is no more than a silk hat, Aikido exploits assumptions about things like gravity, balance, and timing. That’s what made it so enjoyable for someone like me.
As soon as I got the call from my client, a new gig, I went to my class at the dojo to clear my mind. The white “Gi” outfit has a purity about it, and as I took turns running various throws and pins, the echoing of bodies hitting the mats was both mesmerizing and comforting. There’s always a rush of adrenaline when one throws or is thrown on the mat. There’s little talking, and what few words are spoken are in Japanese, which makes them refreshingly meaningless to me.
My body throbbed with sweat and adrenaline; it always made my breathing deep and my mind clear. I bowed with Sensei, but as I swept the mat with the others, and I filed with the class out of the room, I wondered how many of these people who are so honorable and sportsmanlike on the mat, in the dojo, have lives as morally questionable as mine. I drove along the beach on the way home, under a blood red sky. I showered and put on a suit, and set up my gear for what was to happen later that night.
It was one of those balmy evenings in San Francisco, the palm trees in Golden Gate Park swaying in the gentle breeze against the deep azure Pacific twilight. I got the word on my client’s network screen in my car that the data would be carried around by an unsuspecting minor official from the Shanghai Bank in Lagos, Nigeria, who was visiting for a conference that was being held at Moscone. They posted a photo of a bespectacled African man in a fine British suit, a certain Mr. Ikorordou.
I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge that evening having made every preparation, clear as to the steps of my mission. There was a concert for the conference participants at the atrium at new De Young Museum in Golden Gate park. I was to find my mark there, and the target was his iPhone, and I had a hardware override key purpose-built for defeating Apple’s security (They never mention the hardware).
I drove there that evening listening to a radio conversation about the peculiarities of the European banking system under the EU. An economics professor was being interviewed about the management of debt in the poorer EU countries in 2008. It came down to hubris finding it’s nemesis. Just as it was getting interesting, I pulled into the parking lot outside the DeYoung museum, and I could identify Mr. Ikorordou walking along the museum’s bronze exterior wall. He turned and entered the glass doors to the museum. Time to get to work.
I went in and I could hear the orchestra tuning up, and made my way through the crowd past a multi-screen art installation to where a platform was set up that the orchestra was seated on. I could see Ikorordou ahead, his blue blazer and white collar visible on the back of his neck. He tapped the screen on his phone and glanced at it, then replaced it into his right trouser pocket.
He was engaged in conversation with a woman, perhaps a colleague, and whatever he was saying seemed to be getting him somewhere, so now would be my best time to make my move. I made my way through the standing audience to where he was standing and brushed up behind him, just as his story was reaching a crescendo. Up the flap of his jacket, and two fingers in the pocket, immediately feeling the cold glass of the phone, and just as quickly into my jacket pocket and away.
I turned off into the side of the room behind a curved glass wall that reflected the colored lights of the multiscreen installation and clicked my device into the slot of the iPhone, and the screen immediately wiped off to a crude red screen that had a simple text box and progress bar, and I could see that the data was being downloaded to my decryption device. After not quite a minute, it was done. I wound my way back through the audience to where he was standing, still talking, and I was able to slip it back in the same pocket, and I made my exit.
So within a few minutes, I had Mr. Ikorordou’s data, and his phone was back in his pocket without him (Or the shapely regional account exec he was hitting on) being any the wiser.
So you can see, in this new, sketchy line of work, a few keys, a few passwords, a few casual sticky notes here or there would get me in to the treasure, not brain surgery, but apparently all that really mattered was swift execution and lapsed ethics. A hell of a job description.
What kind of people would hire you to do such a thing, you might ask? You would be surprised.
You might think that the clients would be risk takers and wildcatters, with an eye to get rich quick and pad their lives with hookers and blow, but not so; my work was slow, quiet and methodical. No room for drama, and the clientele that came my way valued anonymity, simplicity and silence. I endeavored to deliver on these maxims, and I was well compensated for it. After a while I began to see it as a kind of meditative practice, transcending the emotional drama of normal society. I would focus my attack, slip in and out like a ghost, collect my fee and clear the drives.
The ideal client was equally stoic. That’s how I got hooked up with Kurt Waldenstein. There was a professionalism about him that made my job easier. And the DMG Group was based in Frankfurt, a comfortable distance. I preferred the foreign gigs- less chance of it putting me in danger of colliding with Rachel’s world, she had a lot more to lose than I did; all I had to lose was her, and I didn’t want that.
Kurt Waldenstein always had one job or other for me to do- He was never any trouble for me, always a straight deal. His business was money, so I could always count on being paid. He always used yellow manila envelopes stuffed with neat stacks of unmarked bills. Almost an anachronism. I never asked about the details, and neither did he. Better to keep it simple. I knew how to find things out, that used to be my world. Not anymore.
At least that’s what I told myself. Now each piece of information that I provided was a neat little package- they could do whatever they wanted with it, and it was easy to wash my hands of it right away. Clean. That’s how I like it.
This one began to be a pain in the ass though. When I got into the network of a particular eastern European server, it didn’t behave normally. Every time I discovered something, it would disappear. It was as though I had come into it just as it was being taken down on the other end, almost as if they had anticipated my move.
I like to deliver the goods, pick up my cut, wipe the drives clean, move on to the next one. But this time, it was like tugging on your line thinking you snagged a trout- but you wind up with a Great White Shark instead, that would in turn vaporize as soon as you saw it.
I had the same feeling when I was at summer camp, and I first saw the hired entertainment, a magician who was billed as “The Great Cassini” place a red silk scarf in my hand, touch it with the white tip of his magic wand, and then incredibly, I opened my hand and discovered it to be empty.
Finance. Sounds simple. Obvious. Like “Plumbing” or “Laundry.” Soon I was to discover what kind of cataclysmic power lies behind that word. The dread of kings, the folly of saints. Some of them march to that ticker from duty or need; others ride that tiger for sport, for the glory of the game. They are compelled by misanthropy and thrill to the smell of blood. They have a compelling need to make a mark on the world- even if it’s a black one.
This particular night, Rachel was out at one of her fund raisers, so I just kept working away at Waldenstein’s gig. Once I got the data home and parsed a few database entries, I found within it a series of banking records. A section about Albania. Some weird paramilitary gang site. They had the website tricked out with pixel art skulls and machine guns; that Balkan sense of black humor.
Kurt’s company was the DMG group; a private fund he managed, based in Zurich from what I could see. A rival fund was Doremus, a large brokerage house that had its fingers in all sorts of eastern European pies. Kurt hired me to get the scoop on Doremus’s transactions with European banks, and I came across one big one, but not theirs- 1.3 billion dollars- from the National Bank of Greece. As I scrolled across the page however, the listing disappeared. Someone was deleting it as I was looking. It had a strange moniker- TO ARNAKI- a quick Google translate identified it as Greek: “The little lamb.”
And the strangest thing here in this Albanian payout record- a column of payments to DMG group, Waldenstein’s company, my client. And suddenly gone while I was watching. I refreshed the page; nope. Gone. Someone was literally swiping the record clean on the other end while I was watching! Did I imagine it? Not likely.
I had in that room a wall that was papered with a seventeenth century map of Rome that was blown up and covered the whole wall, and I often traced my fingers along the streets that converged at a fountain or piazza. I did this as a kind of reset when I arrived at a logical impasse in my work and couldn’t think anymore, I suppose as a kind of reminder of the fact that everything was connected to everything else.
I would pick two points and try to find a route between them, through all the roundabouts and switchbacks of the ancient city as depicted on this old map, now reproduced as wall covering. There was something tying all the elements together about Waldenstein’s job that I still couldn’t find.
For my part, on the other hand, at this point in my life, I was finally feeling the intoxicating allure of potential domesticity. Maybe this was it. Debts paid, a new relationship, maybe even settling down and having a… Family? And Rachel- She was a real find. Smart, conscientious, and looks that make you rethink the nature of the universe. But, alas, she was on her own track.
Deep into politics, which is something I did my best to avoid my whole life. But it looked better on her than it would on me. From time to time I would wish that I was young and naïve again. She was a native element of that great Berkeley movement of ethical righteousness; fairness and justice were as natural to her as air and water.
Anyone as cynical as myself would have to pause, at least for a moment, to think that perhaps the world could become a better place, if only… Yes, if only. Still, I liked seeing that in her, even though I knew what the world was really like. At least I thought I did.
Beautiful, strong and healthy, Rachel gave me a glimpse of what my life might be like if I went straight, and I was almost convinced that I was ready. These little missions got more tiresome as it went on, and I was looking forward to a nice long chill on an island somewhere, and to take the time to see how much of me is left after all those years of dealing and double-dealing.
I could hear the rattle of the lock downstairs and the door creak open. Rachel had come home, exhausted from her rally; she was organizing support for the pipeline protests, and Native American land rights. I really tried not to let my cynicism bleed over into this relationship. I say I tried, but there’s not much I could do, I really am a cynic, and my recent years in what can be called essentially corporate espionage did nothing to relieve me of that moral handicap.
Still, I was all for her happiness, as misguided as her views seemed to me. I just wanted her to myself if I were to be honest; Her charity work made me love her, but there was a nagging and perpetually selfish voice that whispered in the back of my mind that said that if she had more time for me, I could go straight, I could join the ranks of the upstanding citizens, if only she gave herself completely, if she wasn’t so committed to changing the world, if only she… Of course, it wasn’t her, it was me. Trying to pin it on any decisions that she would make was just an excuse.
Cynicism had become my cage, my shock-collar; whenever I ventured farther afield into the open meadows of the psychologically balanced, I reminded myself of the greed and narcissism of my fellow simians, and retreated to the leafy canopy of my misanthropy.
Rachel’s voice broke my silence that evening, always a sweet reminder, “burning the midnight oil again, I see.”
“I’ll be done soon. How did it go?”
“we got a few big donations. It’s not enough though. We won’t be able to help everyone. Lots of kids falling through the cracks.”
She was discouraged, and the evening had beaten her down. I tried my usual limp attempt at sympathy. “Seems like an uphill battle. I don’t know why you keep at it; you’re not rich you know.” That hit wrong, and I regretted it as soon as I said it.
“Maybe you can just ignore people’s hardship, but I can’t.”
“Hey, I used to take part in all that stuff, I was idealistic once.” But was I ever?
“And now it’s all about you, right?”
“Are we talking about this again?” Of course we were. A little thing like right and wrong is enough to kill the strongest amorous buzz. I tried to explain it away as I usually do, pleading fatigue and maturity. Also not sexy.
“I’m tired. I want to retire. It’s a hostile world, and I don’t have the energy to spend on lost causes.”
My cynicism again prevented me from giving in to the empathy that would have gone a long way to saving my relationship. It would take some profound experience to shake me of my apathetic moorings, and in truth I did long for that, unconsciously.
“They’re people, Lawrence.”
“I know, I know. And I’m just a corporate spy, a mercenary. I get it. Come here.”
I tried to change the subject to a physical one; one in which we were usually in agreement. I took her by the hands and brought her close to me where I could kiss her neck and hold her hips close to mine.
“No! I don’t know how long I can do this with you.”
You know it’s bad when you get used to the rejection and begin accepting it. My affection was genuine, and it usually was able to break through whatever disharmony revealed itself in our relationship. But not this time. I felt my heart sink with the knowledge that it was too late. I had let us get too far apart, taken my eye off the ball.
“What are you saying, Rachel? You have your thing and I have mine. And you know I’m trying to quit this. But this will be a substantial payment. After this assignment I’m done.”
She looked up at me with those gorgeous eyes, now welling up with nervous tears; “I know you mean it, but I’ve heard it before. It’s just how you are.”
“Right, I’m self-centered and don’t give a shit about anybody else. Well I’m not the only one, babe, this is the world we live in. It’s sweet that you’re so idealistic, but I’m done with reaching for the stars at the expense of my own well-being.”
Yes, I had really put my foot in it. I tried again, “Come here.”
“Not in the mood. You used to be a lot more interesting.”
Ouch. Yes, I was once a lot more interesting; probably long before she knew me. When one gets the sense that one’s lover has lost interest, there’s no way for it to go but down. Again, I tried with the logical argument, and wrong again.
“And I used to be a lot poorer. Whatever. Knock yourself out. I learned my lesson. I’m okay looking out for myself.”
“Yeah, you’re good at that.”
“Funny, I thought you liked that about me.”
“I liked the part that you hadn’t already sold.”
“Not sold, just rented. You’ll have me back soon. I promise.”
“I’m not sure how long I can wait for that.”
“Hey...”
I really thought that I could somehow call upon our animal nature and let the hormones dissolve away our differences. She wasn’t having it. She was done. Her head turned away as she sank into a fetal position, as if in defeat. She curled up on the couch for the night, which she hadn’t done in months. These small nuances, the intimate signals that let you know that a relationship is taking in water and heading for the crags.
I understood too well; it was only myself I was trying to convince. She was good, too good for me, and it didn’t help for me to know it. So I buried myself in this questionable work; the sheer amorality of it was a respite from my relationship and self scrutiny; a detour into a world where I could care about nothing, and let myself be anesthetized by the anonymity and soullessness of my task.
I left her there on the couch and went back up to my computer to try to sublimate my feelings into the abstraction of my task. I delved deeper into these strange billion euro plus transactions, and there were layers that I didn’t expect and wouldn’t have known to look for.
The next day I went out to the Doremus HQ. I had a password that I had snagged a few months ago that let me into the security control site for the door codes in the Doremus building at Jackson Square. Once I had those, I could simple walk across the trading floor among the desks of heavily preoccupied young traders, without anyone even noticing that I was there.
I joined some of the management team in the elevator, and there was a guy all in a lather about missing a trade on a stablecoin, and his colleagues were trying to calm him down. I followed in their wake out of the elevator to the IT floor, and where they turned left into the cafeteria, I went straight and then right towards the server room. I walked right past the security guy who had his back turned, swiping at the grinding nudes on his phone, and turned in front of the server center.
There was a special code for that door with the small wired glass window, that I had found through my system of personal detective work, and I tapped it into the buttons on the door, and with a beep and a clunk, the lock gave way and I was in. I passed the terminals, where there were a couple of guys doing maintenance, and went straight to the rack-mounted servers and found the key server, and went to work. I had a script on a tiny drive that would create a bypass around the secure shell, and let me into the transaction database. The seconds ticked by as 137,000,000 entries were forwarded to my ghost server in Iceland.
But I heard another click. I retreated into the corridor behind the bank of server racks, and I could hear the beep of the door code acceptance, and the shadow of a man cut across the row visible above the rack I was working on. I braced myself and froze in the shadows. The flashing lights on my drive continued, and I hoped that the flashing wouldn’t attract the man’s eye.
He wore the yellow vest of a maintenance guy and a cap. He paused for a moment looking at a row of ethernet cables in a long row on one of the racked servers. I held my breath. He seemed confused. His fingers touched one cable and then another, and I waited. Finally he made his decision and pulled out one connector and replaced it with another. He hesitated, touched it again. Then, satisfied, he turned and went out the door.
I collected my device and glided out from the servers into the power plant and out the side exit.
The bit about the 1.3 billion to the DMG group through the National Bank of Greece and that sketchy Albanian gang site was a puzzle. Later that afternoon, I was able to get into the Embassy records and found something on an SBA, which is an IMF “Stand By Arrangement” paid through Greece in 2010. I supposed this was one of those IMF international level traunches that one hears about, that are transacted at the highest international levels, and hence out of the scrutiny of us mere mortals. Not in any of the digital records that I went through.
That Albanian site was easy to get into, and it had all kinds of random fragments that they were sending each other; jpgs of photos showing a larger shipment of arms being packed, cardboard boxes of British Pounds roughly rubber banded together; and some that looked like customs police photos of the same kind of fare.
Lots to think about, if it was any of my business, and the connections branched every which way. And, conveniently for me, not what I was hired for, and hence not my worry. Let Waldenstein and his bean counters try and figure it out. For me, a manila envelope of cash and a closed deal was all I was after; I only really looked forward to a walk on the beach with Rachel, to feel the pacific foam washing between our toes- and to announce my retirement.
