by Ian Miller
Rutherford gave a smile, although a rather cold one. "Not yet. As you may have heard, Goldfinch and I don't get along that well, and it seems Goldfinch wants to teach Lamont a lesson in real estate. My guess is that Goldfinch will throw a financial squeeze on that land, to choke Lamont and Ellison. That won't work out as Goldfinch wants, but Dennis will definitely feel the pinch."
"What if Goldfinch hires someone to go after those two physically?"
"That's what Douggie's there for, but I don't think he will. Goldfinch is a money man, and he'll try that first, and when it starts to bite, he'll let everyone know he's doing it."
"So you think Dennis will do something stupid on Goldfinch?"
"That's one of the things I think might happen."
"Then I'd better keep out of Dennis' way."
"That depends," Rutherford said, as he nodded his head a little. "If you want to keep an eye on what Dennis is doing, information could be valuable."
"I suppose," Burrowes said. This would be the third time Rutherford had suggested money, but he had as yet to see a cent, other than from the NSA envelopes and from the payment for his property expedition.
"If you're too nervous, you don't have to," Rutherford said, then he seemed to realise something. "Oh yes, I already owe you don't I?" He pulled out a large wad of hundred dollar bills and peeled off a bunch. "That's for what I've promised so far."
Burrowes could hardly believe what was in his hand, given that he had not done much, and had already been paid for his expedition. "Thanks." He pocketed the notes, then added with a grin, "My interest in Dennis has just taken a surprisingly large step upwards."
"Just be careful, though. You don't want him to catch you doing it."
"I'll be careful. And I suppose I had better get inside. Standing around in a car park is not really being careful."
"Yes, but talking to me is hardly suspicious. If I want to talk to you, you would talk to me wherever I am, and I doubt Dennis would have the nerve to try anything on me. So, let's see what shakes out. Now, one more thing. I want you to go around to Lamont and Ellison and check the security on their computers. I want to know if Goldfinch, or for that matter, Dennis, tries to get into their system. Can you do that?"
"I can do that."
"Take Svetlana with you tomorrow. She won't be doing much, other than looking pretty, but I want her away from here while I check out Dennis."
"I can do that too." So much for Dennis getting away scot-free. Life for Dennis was going to take several turns for the worse, it appeared.
"Good man. Now, try to act normal today."
Great. What was normal around here? But Burrowes nodded acceptance, and set off to do a "normal" day's work.
* * *
Dennis may not have been the most empathetic of individuals, but when he arrived at work he sensed that Burrowes was viewing him in a different light. On the other hand, Svetlana was behaving normally, but then again, somehow he was convinced he could never read her. Rutherford dumped a job on his desk, and gave a brusque, "About time you did some more work," then stormed off. Rutherford was distinctly unfriendly, although it was hard to see why. It was true he had done almost nothing in the last three weeks, so maybe this was just the boss being pissed off that he was paying him for nothing. He looked at the files. It was a detailed list of Irving Goldfinch's dealings over the last few years. The instruction Rutherford left on top of the heap of files was, "Find me something to work with."
Dennis gave a sigh of annoyance and began examining the files. He was not that concerned. He was reasonably confident he was about to get rich. Then again, he might need to because if Rutherford was going to get this angry with his not doing very much work when he had not been given any to do, what would he be like when he found out who had bought the land? He should not be angry because he knew Rutherford did not really want it anyway, but he sensed that was not going to provide an escape for him.
Chapter 20
Janice seemed excited as she bounded into the room, her face carrying a wide grin. "Guess what?"
"I have no idea," Justin shook his head. Janice in this mood was unguessable.
"OK, a clue. Guess what Irving has done?" She stared at him with that infuriating look of superiority that comes with knowing it will not be guessed, but after telling, it would seem obvious.
"Donated his fortune to charity?" Justin had this theory that every impenetrable question deserved a ridiculous answer.
"Well, no, nothing quite like that. No, it's that land deal. It's closed, and Irving lost it, or alternatively, he has given it away."
"Well, he can't win everything. It must be that third party who won it."
"And now, an easy guess. What's Irving going to do about losing?"
"Go and find another deal?"
"No!" she said, and shook her head in dismay that he could be so dense. She paused a little to consider then added, "Well, maybe, but that's not what I'm getting at."
Justin shook his head slightly and added with a grin, "Janice, you've milked this for all the suspense you're going to get, so why don't you tell us what you think?"
"Spoil sport!" She waved a finger at him, and continued, "You could at least try a small guess, but don't even try now."
"Don't even try?"
"It'll only be a stupid guess. Anyway, it's obvious when you know Irving. Irving hates losing, so I think he's going to shaft whoever beat him."
"Any idea of how?" Justin asked. At that moment, Cameron came into the room, seemingly with information, but he had decided to wait until this conversation wore thin.
"Now that the buyer is contractually obliged to pay whatever, Irving has seemingly discovered some highly endangered snails in that stream, and has put in an environmental challenge."
"So, our Irving is an expert in molluscs, is he?" Justin said. "I bet he didn't go out there and get his hands dirty."
"Doesn't matter," Janice said. "The whole point of highly endangered is they are very rare. Any casual inspection that can't find them will not be taken seriously."
"Yes, Irving makes up for an absence of decency and honesty with a surfeit of greed and deviousness."
"I suppose we should try to warn whoever that person is," Janice said.
"You should do nothing of the sort," Cameron said. "You realise Goldfinch thinks it's you who he's shafting? If you spoil his fun, it will only make him angrier, and more to the point, make him find some other way to get at you. If he is going to misfire, let him do it where you don't get hurt."
"I can live with that," Janice said.
"In the meantime," Cameron said, "the boss's sent around his tame computer experts. He's going to check the security and so on of your machines here. They'll work in the background, and be seen but not heard."
"Still doesn't believe we don't have secrets," Justin said, a touch of sadness running through his voice.
"Everyone's got secrets," Cameron said with a laugh. "What the boss doesn't want is your secrets heading off to Goldfinch, unless, of course, we know they will, in which case –"
"You'll get his attention that way," Janice interrupted approvingly.
"Exactly. Now, in half an hour, you have an appointment, so I'll get out of your way."
The appointment was something of a puzzle. They believed it was their first independent clients, except that Rutherford seemed to have guided them to their office, which suggested these clients might not be as independent as they had hoped.
Very little real work was being done by the two bankers. Burrowes had taken over most of their computers while that young Russian woman did not seem to know why she was there. Janice suspected that she was there as a distraction for the two young men, and she found it a little annoying that the Russian woman's curves were more pronounced than her curves were, and her clothes were tightly fitting to show them off to best advantage. The bright yellow top drew attention directly to them, and when the two young men were shown in, their eyes immediately went in that directio
n.
Introductions of chalk and cheese followed. Colin Hooper was dressed "smartly" in a suit that was probably too flashy, and it looked a little as if he lived in it. He had a look of supreme confidence on his face, as if he felt he could sell anything to anyone, but he also had the look of someone lacking in substance. He looked as if he had no worries in the world, but as Svetlana remarked to Burrowes later, if he had no worries, why was he there? Raymond McKenzie was also dressed in a suit, but it appeared as if it had just been thrown on. It did not really fit his body all that well, and he looked awkward in it. Hooper's hands looked as if they had never been involved in hard work, while McKenzie's were calloused and had ingrained oil stains. McKenzie stood slightly subdued, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
"Take a seat," Janice invited. "What can we do for you?"
"We need to raise money quickly," McKenzie blurted out. Justin noted that Hooper had given him one of those, 'keep quiet and let me do the talking' looks.
"So, take your time and give us the details," Janice offered.
"What about those two?" Hooper said, and pointed at Burrowes and Svetlana.
"They've got work to do," Justin explained, "but they are employed by the people who will arrange your money, assuming we decide to give you any, so why don't you make your presentation?"
"What we've done," Hooper started to explain, "is to develop a hunter-killer torpedo."
"That's military," Justin said with a frown. "Why?"
"It's like a guidance system for torpedoes," McKenzie started to explain. "You know how aircraft are brought down by guided missiles?"
"Yes."
"Well, conceptually this is the same. The torpedo searches until it finds the target, and is guided to it."
"I would have thought that was a fairly obvious thing to do," Justin said. "Why hasn't someone else done this?"
"They've often been guided with a wire. An operator can send signals down the wire to guide the torpedo onto the target, but that has certain problems, such as the torpedo always has to be connected with whatever launched it. The other problem is seeing the target. Radar does not work under water, and while you can have something similar using acoustics, the pinging gives away the torpedo and it's not very accurate."
"I suppose that would be a disadvantage," Justin said.
"More than a disadvantage. The target can just let go a "pinger", and –"
"Raymond!" Hooper interrupted. "Let's get to the point. We've had an idea . . ."
As Svetlana was to say later, "we" was something of an overstatement. Hooper clearly wanted his role to be predominant.
" . . . and anyway, DARPA funded us and we built a prototype, and it worked great guns."
"And?"
"You've heard of Seaforth Capital?"
"We have," Justin gave a smile. "They're a major source of funding for new ventures in the marine area."
"Yeah, well they're a bunch of sharks and –"
"What? They're usually regarded as really traditionally honest, and I've heard of a number of inventors who've got rich through them."
"Not with us they weren't. We did a joint venture with them and approached Super Dynamics Corporation –"
"That's one of the largest suppliers of naval equipment in the world," McKenzie offered.
"Yes, well, Seaforth did this deal with SDC in which they provided initial money and the Joint Venture would hire the participants to do the development work."
"Seems reasonable," Justin remarked. "You would get hired for some of the work, so you would recover much of your investment money."
"Yeah," Hooper said, "you might think that, but it didn't quite work out like that. Seaforth more or less handed the work to SDC and we quickly run out of the Seaforth advance. Unless we can meet out obligations, Seaforth takes all our equity."
"I've never heard of Seaforth doing that before," Janice said. "Are you sure that's what happened?"
"It happened. We've got a meeting tomorrow, and either we come up with our share of the money, or we're out."
"Give me a look at your agreement," Justin said.
There was a certain reluctance from Hooper to pass it over.
"Look," Justin said, "unless I can see what the situation is, the answer is no."
Rather reluctantly, Hooper handed over an agreement.
Justin looked at it, shook his head, then began reading it.
"What's so wrong with it?" Hooper asked, his voice laden with irritation.
"Um, if you think you have an agreement with Seaforth, you don't."
"What? What d'you mean?" Hooper looked as if he would pull the agreement back from Justin.
"This isn't with Seaforth. The section on "Parties" says Seafarth."
"What?" The blood seemed to drain from Hooper's face.
"I suspect you've been scammed," Justin explained.
"Is there anything we can do?" McKenzie asked. He was a little calmer, but was clearly annoyed with Hooper, who was the "business" guy in their partnership.
"Possibly," Justin said. "Look, I'll have to read this agreement in more detail. Can you come back early tomorrow morning?"
They could, and as Burrowes noted, there were two rather unhappy people leaving the office.
"I couldn't help but hear that," Burrowes said to Justin. "Since we're both more or less working for Mr Rutherford, do you want me to find out what I can about this Seafarth outfit?"
"Could you?"
"Can't see why not. Give me a look at the title page."
"I'm not sure it'll tell you much, but, here you are."
"For this to work as a scam, it has to have certain characteristics," Burrowes said. "If it lacks certain things, it won't be legally binding, so the whole effort will be a waste of time." He looked at the document. "Yes, there's some promise here, although for whom remains to be seen."
* * *
With the office empty except for Brian and himself, Dennis attacked the pile of documents, which were mainly about the activities of Irving Goldfinch. These were simply tedious. Goldfinch had his claws into a number of businesses, but what would anyone expect? He was, after all, an investor. The real question was, why had he been given this task, with no clues as to what the boss wanted? Perhaps the boss expected him to go through all the companies, looking for examples where Goldfinch might be overexposed, but it did not take long to notice that Goldfinch seemed to have a set of rules, and all his investments followed them. There might be weaknesses in some of the companies, but if so, surely Goldfinch would get rid of their stock before they started to dive.
Goldfinch might do something with them based on inside information, but how could he find that? Inside information, by definition, was not publicly available. Dennis then decided to make lists of the companies, separating them into those publicly listed on the exchange, those "over the counter" companies, and the private ones. Interestingly, none of the companies in any of these stacks had any interest in property. Had Goldfinch succeeded in buying that land, this would be his first entry into property.
All of which did not help much. The private companies were essentially shelf companies, although there were three that showed signs of activity. He wrote those down on a piece of paper, although he knew nothing of them, and saw no immediate chances of changing that. One of them was Seafarth Marine Corporation. The word "Corporation" struck a note; a quick computer search showed it had no declared income, no declared liabilities, no employees, and no physical office other than Goldfinch's office for mail and notices. Some corporation!
Presumably, if there were to be any activity by which Rutherford could hurt Goldfinch, it would be through the over the counter companies. A quick computer search on each of them gave very little information. Dennis gave a sigh of annoyance. What was he supposed to do?
It was then that a thought struck him. Rutherford had given him this task not to achieve anything, but to keep him occupied. Why would he do that? Maybe Rutherford was suspicious of his pos
sible part to play in the land deal. Dennis almost froze. He suddenly realized he had been careless. After he had secured that land, he had overlooked the need to be subdued. He had been too happy, and too busy teasing that Russian woman. He knew that had annoyed Rutherford, which in part was why he had done it, but in retrospect that was stupid. He still needed money, and if Rutherford and Goldfinch both decided to do him over, it would be impossible to raise the money. That would be very awkward for him because the contracts needed him to come up with the money at the end of the month. Perhaps he should get on with that right now. He had been hoping to leave it until it was more obvious that the land was going to go up seriously in value, but if he did nothing and failed to raise the money, he would lose the land and the deposits.
He would do a web search on his new properties. At first, he found no sign of activity. That was disappointing, but probably not altogether unexpected. It would be the small local newspapers that he should look at. Again, no building projects announced. Then he saw what horrified him: a report that someone had seen a very rare snail in one of the waterways that ran around the edges of two of his properties. This could be fatal. If the environmentalists found out about this . . . Then he noticed the author was cited as a fervent environmentalist who was thrilled to bits.
Yes, there would be a protest, and worse, nobody could prove there was no such endangered snail. You cannot prove that something does not exist. Just because you did not find it does not mean it is not there. Worse than that, the over-enthusiastic environmentalist may have misidentified the wretched thing. What he had seen might have been a rather ordinary snail.
Maybe he should try to contact this environmentalist? He looked at the name, and started a computer search. A huge number of hits, even for this rather bizarre name. but when he restricted his search to someone residing within a hundred miles of New York, and being an environmentalist, he got no hits. He was dumbfounded. Then it struck him. Either Goldfinch or Rutherford were after whoever had got this land. The big development would never go ahead, and he was going to lose big.