Zero Sum, Book One, Kotov Syndrome (8 page)

“Tell me what you need and I will see
that it is taken care of. We’ve had a good working relationship,
and I am very happy with your management of our assets.” Sergei
Rajeslsky spoke deliberately and could have been thanking Nicholas
for buying lunch.

Griffen nodded. “I appreciate your
understanding of my difficulty. I have some insight now into who’s
causing me the discomfort. It would be helpful if any solution was
handled discreetly.” Griffen watched Sergei’s face for any
reaction. As a successful import/export broker, his wealth
qualified him as an important investor in Griffen Ventures, not to
mention that as the head of the Red Mafiya in the U.S. he commanded
significant unorthodox resources.

“I am always happy to solve a problem
for a friend. Think no more about this. It will be attended to… is
the correct word, expeditiously?” Sergei had a better command of
the language than many English professors, but still liked to play
the Russian bear on occasion. It was a habit that he’d developed to
cause adversaries to underestimate him; not a mistake they
typically got to make twice.

Griffen had some initial trepidation
about approaching him, as there was always an inequity to the quid
pro quo, but he needed the website issue to go away before it
really got out of hand.

Who could have predicted the site would
call the science into serious question, and also map out the links
of some of his network of media cronies and investors? There really
was no precedent for the website thing. He was definitely not
accustomed to seeing most of his proprietary pump and dump strategy
laid out in black and white.

That was too close for
comfort.

Now he was taking financial hits, and
if the price began tumbling...it could be terminal. If he started
unloading shares to get out of his long position, the price would
collapse and take his fund with him – there wouldn’t be enough
patsies to sell to, much less to go short and make money on the
downswing. He really needed at least two more months or so of
upward trajectory, then a couple of months to sell around the top
and establish his short. The website was causing the bubble to lose
air far too soon – it took a lot of time and trading volume to
unwind as massive a stake as he’d accumulated. The timing right now
couldn’t have been worse.

He was already in enough financial
trouble. Several other unlucky bets along with the Allied play had
turned the $1 billion in his domestic and foreign funds he’d
started the year with into about $800 million as of today, meaning
he needed some short term volatility successes, as well as a short
sale home run to get back to even before he had to do his year-end
investor report. That left about six months to pull it out of the
bag.

He needed this debunking site closed
down yesterday, and the noise to fade so he could get on with
business as he was used to conducting it. Griffen needed a level
playing field with investors taking a skeptical view of Allied like
he needed a hole in his head. Desperate times called for desperate
measures, and Sergei was the court of final appeals.

Only he would be settling out of
court…

Griffen sipped the dregs of his tepid
coffee and looked up at Sergei. “I knew I could count on
you.”

Sergei smiled back. A cozy breakfast on
a busy day in the big city. Neither one’s eyes had a trace of
friendliness residing in them. Bills would come due eventually, and
the piper always had to be paid. Griffen didn’t want to guess what
this go-around would cost.

* * * *

Steven groaned as the alarm went off at
5:30 a.m.. He rolled out of bed, almost falling over Avalon, who’d
decided to sleep at his bedside; uncharacteristic for him. Maybe he
was feeling under the weather. They both padded downstairs into the
kitchen, where Steven downed his coffee as Avalon munched his dog
food; their usual preparation for the morning run.

They loped easily down the strand in
tandem; two lone figures covering a lot of ground in a relatively
short time, surprising the occasional gull with their approach as
they made their way to the pier and back. When they returned to the
house, Steven noticed his answering machine was
blinking.

Strange. He didn’t get a lot of calls,
much less at 6 a.m.. He punched the play button.

“Mr. Archer, this is Kevin at Lone Star
Web Associates. Please call us ASAP; we have an issue. It’s
urgent.” Steven jotted down the number and deleted the
message.

He dialed the number.

The same voice answered. “Lone Star,
this is Kevin.”

“Hi, Kevin, it’s Steven Archer. I got
your message. What’s up?”

“Uh, Mr. Archer, we’ve never had
anything like this happen before, but apparently the server was
hacked sometime last night, and your website was corrupted. The
files are unreadable.” The voice sounded hesitant.

“That’s not the end of the world, I’ve
got it on my hard drive; I’ll upload it in a few
minutes.”

Kevin cleared his throat. “That’s not
really what’s disturbing to us. We have a pretty bulletproof
firewall, and it’s virtually impossible to breach it. In the past,
attempts have been shut down within seconds. This was different.
We’re still going over the logs and trying to figure it out, but it
appears that this was extremely sophisticated, unlike anything
we’ve ever seen.”

“What are you trying to
say?”

“There’s a chance some user data was
compromised. We have you listed as Stanley Jorgenson and your
payment listed via money order; but the servers clock the IP’s
coming in, and yours could conceivably have been logged on a site
upload. I don’t see how an intruder could have gotten to it, but
it’s a risk that’s there nonetheless.”

“I understand, Kevin. Thanks for the
heads up. My IP is one of a group from my cable company, so anyone
who wanted the IP identity would have to subpoena the user data to
get anything. That would take months, according to my lawyer, and
it wouldn’t be a given. So I think we’re good. I’ll get online and
reload the site this morning.” He paused. “You don’t have my phone
number in the system, do you?”

“No, not in that section of the files,
anyway. Your number is in a blank field in our contacts log files,
with no associated site or name.”

Well, that was something, anyway.
Didn’t seem much had been compromised.

“All right. I’ll upload in the next few
minutes,” Steven advised.

“I’m really sorry about this. We’ve
never had one of these breaches succeed. It’s an anomaly, and we’re
contacting the firewall software manufacturer to see if they know
how it could have happened.”

“Keep me posted if you figure it out.
I’ll be online in five.”

Well, he had to expect there’d be some
sort of attempt to hack the site. It was always a calculated risk,
hence all the precautions surrounding his identity. Still, it was
unnerving to have the possible become the actual. But if they kept
trying to hack it, he would just keep uploading it. Two could play
that game.

Steven took the stairs three at a time,
diving in and out of the shower in record speed, and pulling on a
threadbare sweatshirt on the way to his desk downstairs. He logged
onto his system, and began the morning ritual of opening the
streamer windows – and then his system crashed.

He rebooted, and waited patiently for
Windows to restart all the files. Halfway through the process, the
system crashed again. An error message declared ‘damaged sectors or
files’. He’d been meaning to get a new computer for the last six
months, and today of all days his hard disk had decided to give up
the ghost. One more try, but no go. Damn.

Fortunately, he’d backed up his data to
CD-ROM, so he grabbed his laptop from upstairs and hooked up the
monitors and peripherals. He copied all the data to his hard disk,
and then logged in and reloaded the site. The whole annoying
process had taken almost an hour, and the market had been open for
most of that time, so his next step was to load the quote systems
and see what the damage was. Amazingly, they were down eight cents,
on light volume. That was a relief.

Finished, he went back upstairs to
check on Jennifer, who’d left a note for him when he was out
running that she’d called in sick and was asleep. She’d started
feeling out of it Sunday night and was pretty miserable by Monday
morning.

He got her some water and gently woke
her. No fever, just a little achy. She insisted she’d be fine and
wanted to stay and just hang out and watch TV. No problem. Provided
the market kept stable today, and he wanted to go out and run some
errands anyway.

He checked on the stock one more time.
Still up eighty-four cents, low volume. No fireworks. On the way
out the door, the phone rang. Steven snagged it.
“Hello.”

Silence on the line.

“Helloooo…”

Faint clicking and more silence. He
hung up. After a few moments,
ring ring
…

“Hello?” More clicking, line
buzz.

Odd…still, with cell service you
occasionally got dead spots where you could hear the other person
but they couldn’t hear you. It happened sometimes when the caller
was driving. The wonders of a digital world. If it was important,
they’d call back.

Steven hopped into his car, a
convertible mid-eighties Porsche he’d owned for eons. Still ran
like a charm, looked good, and was indestructible. He dropped the
top and pulled out of the garage, narrowly avoiding taking out a
skateboarder who rolled behind him as he backed out. The kid glared
at him like he was the biggest asshole on the planet. Have a nice
day, and welcome to Newport Beach.

He buzzed up the peninsula, enjoying
the sharp acceleration from the powerful, throaty engine, and
dropped off his dry cleaning, hit the coffee shop, and stopped in
at the grocery to pick up some odds and ends. Next up, he went by
the tackle shop to collect a reel he’d left for
maintenance.

The whole exercise took half the day –
mainly due to the summer beach traffic clogging the streets with
the usual chaotic abandon. Throngs of bikini-clad nymphettes
orbited PCH like satellites, checking out their male counterparts,
who were displaying every variety of tattoo and piercing and
nonchalant muscle-flexing conceivable. It was a state of
barely-controlled pandemonium that occurred every summer; part of
the price one paid for living in paradise.

Steven arrived back at the house to
find Jennifer languishing in the living room, watching the parade
of humanity go by on the boardwalk.

“How’s the head?” he asked, moving the
grocery bags into the kitchen.

“Getting better. I went back to sleep
after you left, then the guys from the Gas Company woke me up, and
I’ve been down here ever since.” She sounded better, if a little
groggy.

“What guys from the Gas
Company?”

“They knocked on the door, needed to
check the kitchen and garage with their sniffer. It was routine.
They said they were doing all the houses around here
today.”

The hair on the back of his neck
prickled. “What exactly did they do? Where did they go?”

“Why? I just told you, they sniffed
around in the kitchen and the garage. What’s wrong?”

“Were you with them both at all times?
How long were they here?” He tried to sound light.

“Well, I let them in, and walked them
back to the garage. One of them spent some time by the water heater
looking around the pilot light, and the other one went into the
kitchen and sniffed around the stove. Oh, and he went upstairs for
a minute to check the heater in the attic. They said everything
looked fine... What? Why are you looking at me like
that?”

“So the one in the house was alone some
of the time?”

“Well, now that you mention it, I guess
he was for a minute or two. Steven, you’re scaring me. Why are you
asking all these questions? What’s wrong?”

Steven sighed. “Probably nothing. It’s
just that the website was hacked last night, and my system crashed
this morning, and I guess I’m a little rattled.”

“You didn’t say anything about any of
that. They were very polite, had the little blue jumpsuits – I
didn’t even think twice about it.”

“No worries. How long ago was
that?”

“About forty-five minutes... Steven,
should I be worried?”

“Nah. I’m just a little wound up right
now. Damn...I’ll be right back, I forgot something in the
car.”

He hurried into the garage and looked
around. Everything seemed fine, nothing out of place. Still, his
stomach had a knot in it, little butterflies singing the
‘something’s not quite right’ song. He pushed the garage door
opener and went out onto the street. Looked in both directions. No
Gas Company trucks. Didn’t mean anything, but didn’t mean that
everything was okay, either. He lowered the door and went back
in.

“Did you find it?” Jennifer called from
the couch.

“What? Oh, I just left the top down. I
wanted to put it up so it wouldn’t wrinkle. I’m going to go hit the
head.”