“Not even close.” He spelled it for her.
She stuck out her hand. “Hari Tate. Your boss and I have a ten o’clock appointment.”
“Really? Oh, man. When Art said a Harry Tate would be stopping by—”
“—you expected a guy.”
“Right.”
He wasn’t a good liar. In her line of work Hari ran into lots of really good liars—accountants who cooked books for a living numbered among the best—and she’d developed a feel for falsehoods. Donny had known her gender. Why pretend he hadn’t?
She forced a smile. “You’re not the first. Are you going to ask me in or are we just going to stand here flapping our gums?”
“Oh, yeah, no, come on in.”
Another set of oak doors, these adorned with frosted glass designs, divided the tiny vestibule from the rest of the house. She followed Donny through to the oak paneled foyer. A long narrow staircase ran up along the wall to her right. An ornate chandelier, festooned with heavy red glass grapes, hung overhead. Far to the rear, daylight filtered in through tall windows overlooking a courtyard.
“I should be wearing your T-shirt,” Hari said.
His gaze dropped to her breasts and lingered. She’d been working on dropping some weight and was actually getting her waist back, but still had a ways to go. The good thing was her bust hadn’t shrunk.
“I don’t know if it would fit.”
“Maybe not, but I think it might be more accurate.”
He grinned—he had a nice smile. “I think I like you.”
“You’ll get over it.”
He pressed a button on an intercom/alarm panel to the left and said, “Ms. Tate is here.”
“Be right down.”
Donny turned to her. “He’ll be right down.”
“No kidding? Right down? Thanks for telling me. I never would have known.”
She wanted to pull the words back. Dial it down a bit, Hari. Her ex had told her she needed anger-management training. She didn’t think so. She just needed fewer people saying dumb things.
Also, she was low on caffeine.
But he just laughed. “You’re a tough one, but I guess that was—what would you call it?”
“How about redundant?”
“Nailed it. Captain Redundant.”
She kind of liked Donny. Except for the stubble and the white lie about expecting a guy, he seemed genuine, comfortable in his skin. She tried to make nice-nice.
“I like these old places,” she said, looking around. “They’ve got character.”
“This one’s got some history. Back in the fifties and sixties it was divided into apartments—one to a floor. Then a psychiatrist named Gates bought it and totally restored it. He lived here until just a couple of years ago when he blew a hole through his head in Times Square. Nobody knows why but there must have been something hinky going on because he left the place to one of his patients.”
“I guess you’d call that a close doctor-patient relationship.”
“I guess, right? Anyway, the patient had an accident here and didn’t want to stay, so she put it up for sale almost immediately. Art came along and snapped it up.”
Right on cue, a slim, olive-skinned man of about forty descended the stairs and thrust out his hand.
“Arthur Palaez.”
Hari introduced herself, and Arthur—“call me Art”—offered coffee which Hari could not refuse. The meeting would go much more smoothly if she was properly caffeinated. She told Donny she took it black. As he went off to make some fresh, she followed Art as he bounded up the stairs to the second floor.
“When you said you couldn’t come to my office,” Hari said, puffing, “I assumed you were disabled in some way.”
“I am,” he said, tapping a finger against his temple. “Agoraphobia. I totally flip out if I have to leave the house. I do so only for the direst emergencies. But tell me about you. Indian? Pakistani? Bangladeshi?”
Seriously?
“Han Chinese—pure bred.”
He blinked. “Pardon?”
Oh, hell. “My grandparents were from Mumbai. Does it matter?”
“I just like to be aware so I don’t tread on any cultural differences.”
“I’ll take a load off your mind: I’m American. Born and raised in Mineola.”
“I guess I was also asking because Tate isn’t exactly a Mumbai-ish name.”
“I took it from Mister Tate when we married and kept if after he left. Fits a lot better on a business card that Mukhopadhyay.”
Art cringed a little. “I’ll say.”
My turn.
“As long as we’re being all ethno-sensitive, you’re a Spaniard, I take it?”
“Asturian, to be precise. It’s a little principality in the—”
Hari waved a hand. “‘Spain’ is good enough.” She looked around at nearly a dozen flat screen monitors of various sizes arrayed under the fifteen-foot ceiling, all dancing with graphs and banners except for Fox Business News on one, CNBC on another, Bloomberg on still another. “So why does a day trader—I’m assuming that’s your game—need a forensic accountant?”
He indicated a chair and they both seated themselves.
“I’m interested in the activities of a very small brokerage house called Sedam.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Neither has anyone else. They have only one client: The Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order Foundation.”
“Septimus…aren’t they like the Masons or something like that?”
Art shrugged. “I guess. They say they go way back before Mesopotamia, but really, who’s going to buy that? Anyway, what interests me about their brokerage house is that it’s tres conservative. They deal mostly in Spiders. But back in February, early in the month, they began quietly buying puts in the tech sector—lots of puts: Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, anything that relied on the Internet.”
He stopped and his gaze bore into Hari as he let that sink in.
Hari knew immediately where he was going.
Back in February, a mystery camorra launched violent assaults on the Internet’s infrastructure. The attacks were coordinated with the emergence of the so-called Jihadi virus that ran wild across the globe, creating a botnet that crashed the worldwide system.
If Art was to be believed, just before the crash this Sedam brokerage had switched from safe and sane SPDRs to puts on Internet stocks…option bets that those stocks would go down. And of course, they did, following the Internet into the abyss. The net remained thoroughly trashed for days, followed by a week or two of limping improvement. The experts were still crunching the numbers, but the resulting financial loss was estimated at somewhere between one hundred and two hundred billion dollars. Now, three months later, things were back to some semblance of order, but the crash had caused global chaos.
Coincidence?
“That can only mean they knew the crash was coming,” she said.
Art’s expression was grim as he nodded. “’Twould seem so.”
Did he just say ’twould?
“So with all those Internet stocks in the toilet, this Sedam place cleaned up.”
“Really cleaned up.”
Donny arrived with the coffee then, adding, “Sort of like all the puts bought on United and American Airlines before the 9/11 attack.”
Hari had heard stories about that, but didn’t know if they were true or not.
She sipped her much-needed coffee—excellent.
“Donny,” she said, “if Art ever lets you go, you can come work for me—just so you can make coffee.”
“Deal!” Donny said.
“Really?” Art looked offended.
Donny grinned. “But she’s so much better looking than you, Art.”
Hari took that as a compliment, but looking at Art, she wasn’t so sure.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m guessing you want to look into those options, but why do you want me doing the looking?”
&nbs
p; Art frowned. “Sorry?”
“Lots of forensic accountants around. Why me?”
“Oh, that was Donny.”
Well, now, this was interesting.
Donny reddened a bit and fumbled out, “Yeah, well, I asked around and someone said, ‘Get Tate. Tate is great.’”
This guy couldn’t lie to save his life. Something going on here, but Art didn’t seem a part of it. All Donny…
Hari decided to play along for now, see if she could suss out Donny’s game.
“‘Tate is Great,’” she said. “Has a nice ring to it.” To Art: “What are you hoping to gain from my looking into those options?”
“Oh, those aren’t my concern,” he said. “I’m more concerned with Sedam’s current activities. You see, after cleaning up on the Internet crash, they went back to their Spiders, but only for a month. Starting early April they began selling off all their holdings—all their holdings. They’re doing it discreetly, so as not to draw attention, but I’ve no doubt they’re doing it.”
“And you know this how?”
He glanced at Donny. “I can’t say. Just let me be clear that there’s no question they’re liquidating.”
Okay, he’d hacked them.
Hari shrugged. “So what? What do you care?”
Art leaned forward, his expression grim. “I wouldn’t care in the least if I didn’t know about their February puts. But I do. They were betting on something happening to the Internet. And something did: one of the biggest social, commercial, and communications disasters ever. If the computer geeks hadn’t been able to fix it so fast, I’d be selling apples on the street—and I don’t mean MacBooks.”
The Internet crash…just three months ago. Every business in the world had been affected, including Hari’s. Amazing how fast they’d repaired or replaced the damaged fiber-optic cables and disrupted the botnet by developing a fix for the Jihad virus. In a matter of only a few days much of the Word Wide Web was back up and running. Not without glitches and bandwidth problems, not business as usual by any means, but people were able to begin to get things done again.
“So…you’re wondering if they’ve got some insider info on another calamity?”
“‘Calamity’ might be too gentle a word for it. Catastrophe? Cataclysm? Apocalypse? They’re no longer working an angle to profit from the market, they’re getting out of the market. Does that mean they suspect that all stocks will soon be worthless? If so, I want to know—I must know.”
Hari shook her head. “I don’t see how a forensic accountant can help you with that.”
“Indirectly, you can. Sedam brokerage is moving to cash, and that cash is, in turn, moving to its source: the Septimus Foundation. But where’s the cash going from there? They can’t be storing it in a vault—they’ve got to be spending it. But on what? Krugerrands? Soybeans? Rare single malts? If I know that, I’ll have a clue as to what they think will happen.”
“How do you know anything’s going to happen?”
“I don’t. But I want to know what they know, and then I’ll make my own decision.”
“I don’t know…” Hari said.
And she didn’t. This did not seem to be in her bailiwick.
“One week,” Art said. “Give me one week and I’ll pay you one hundred K. In advance. If you solve it in less than one week or even if you don’t solve it at all, the hundred-K is still yours.”
A hundred thousand for a week’s work…her hourly billable rate was high, but no way she’d ever amass that number of hours in a week. But first offers were rarely the final offer. Could she goose a boost?
“Tempting…” she said slowly.
“One fifty,” he said. “That’s my final offer. And don’t forget: The answer to my question could have a big impact on your future as well.”
“I might have expenses, like travel and such.”
Hey, if you don’t ask…
“I’ll give Donny a credit card to charge what you need—within reason, of course.”
Okay, nice to know what she was worth to this guy, but time to be up front.
“I’d love to take your money, Art, but I don’t know if I can deliver. You’re in no position to get a court order to make this Septimus Foundation open its books to me, and they aren’t going to do it because of my good looks and scintillating personality. The only option is hacking their in-house system and that’s—”
“—illegal?” Art said with a smile. “Donny’s already done it.”
Just as she’d suspected. “Donny?”
“The kid’s an ace. We’ve been in for a while but it’s a messy maze in there. We need someone who knows what they’re looking at.”
Hari had a thing about privacy. An almost extinct concept now, but that didn’t diminish her reverence for it. Still, Art was talking about a group that had profited from the Internet outage—which might mean they’d been party to it. That put them on the Hari Tate shit list. A long list, to be sure, but always room for one more.
Her job was to study a pile of numbers and know what she was looking at when people didn’t want her to know what she was looking at.
She nodded slowly. “Might be worth a try.”
“Super!” Art said. “And since it’s our hack, you’ll be working from here.”
“Oh, no. I need my office staff to—”
Art shook his head. “In the course of trying to do this on our own, we’ve learned some stuff about Septimus. They’re not nice people.”
“‘Not nice’ how?”
Donny spoke up. “For one thing, they’ve become pretty cozy with the Kickers lately. They’ve got their own security people, but the Kickers seem to act as their Brown Shirts.”
Kickers…everyone knew the Kickers. Supposedly a self-realization group, but it seemed to Hari most of its members had a knack for embracing their inner thug. Rumor had it they’d contributed to the Internet outage by helping to damage its infrastructure, but nothing had been proven.
“For safety sake,” Art said, “everything’s got to stay under one roof—this one.”
Hari considered: her office was only a few blocks away…she’d be tied up for a week tops…she could have some of her associates service her other clients during that time.
She gestured around. “Doesn’t seem to be room enough here for the three of us.”
“You’ll be working with Donny in the basement.”
“All right.” She turned to Donny. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Along the way they stopped in the kitchen so Hari could get a coffee refill and she noted with approval that Donny used a French press.
“So…” she said. “You’re the in-house hacker?”
She expected some dodgery, but he nodded immediately and said, “Yep.”
“Exclusively for Art?”
“Lately, yeah. Used to be an on-and-off thing, but now he’s got a bug up his butt about this Sedam brokerage and the Septimus Foundation and what they know and what they’re up to.”
“In a nutshell,” Hari said, “what do we know about what they know—so far?”
“Well, for one thing—”
“Let’s take this downstairs so I can see if your man cave is going to work for me.”
She wanted to get him out of earshot of Art.
He opened a door that led off the kitchen and motioned her to follow.
As they descended the steps he picked up where he’d left off. “We know they’re spending their cash and not keeping good financial records.”
“Even a charitable foundation’s got to keep records—to show where the money’s coming from and where it’s going. Else the IRS’ll getcha.”
“They used to keep great records. I mean, their past records are as scrupulous as all hell, as if they were terrified of an audit. But now it’s like they don’t give a shit. Almost as if they’re not worried about an audit. Like it’s never gonna happen. And that’s got Art worried. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little worried myself.”
“But that’s not the strangest thing I found,” he said as they reached bottom. “Come over here and I’ll show you.”
Hari followed him across the basement to where two rolling desk chairs sat before a counter supporting three monitors. Donny held a seat for Hari.
“Appreciated,” she said as she sat, “but that’s the last time you do that, okay?”
“Gotcha.”
He dropped into the other chair and moused a monitor to life.
“I did some editing in advance to bring you up to speed. Since I can’t make sense of their financials—that’s why you’re here—I’ve been delving into—”
“Let’s hold it right there on why I’m here. I want to hear something a little more truthful than that ‘Tate is great’ bullshit and how you didn’t know I was female.”
He reddened again. “How did you know?”
“I’d love to play poker with you sometime.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, I really suck at poker. Okay, I’ll give you the skinny, but you might not want to hear it.”
“I’m wearing my big-girl panties. I can handle it.”
He took a breath. “I hang out on the dark web. That’s like my employment agency.”
“There really is such a thing?”
“For sure. I can’t exactly advertise my hacking services on Craigslist, so…anyway, last fall your name came up in a chatroom about getting too close to piercing a legend some powerful folks would have preferred you leave alone. They were talking about making a move against you if you kept poking, but apparently you stopped. They were pretty impressed with how far you’d penetrated, but they weren’t going to let you get any deeper.”
Last fall…she remembered being hired by a guy named Stahlman to check out the defunct Modern Motherhood Clinics and—coincidentally—the foundation behind them. She’d discovered that the foundation was a shell and the woman who had fronted the clinics was a bogus identity with a skillfully constructed legend. Hari would have dug deeper had Stahlman requested it, but apparently that had proved enough for him.
“How would they have stopped me?”
“The dark web is a gathering place for hackers like me, but also less savory types—like pedophiles and bomb makers and, well, hitmen.” Donny held up a hand. “I know you’re going to try to laugh it off, but there are more button men out there on the dark web than you want to believe. It’s perfect for them. They don’t know who hires them, the contractors don’t know who they hire, the hitters have no connection to the victim, and they’re paid with bitcoins or some other cryptocurrency.”
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