The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  "For Christ's sake, I know all that," Martz muttered.

  "All right, then," Phelps said. "Yes, you know that. We have a very friendly contact high up in China Telecom who was able to collate the sources of the calls to the various Asian brokerages, and then using regression analysis we traced them back to five individuals residing in Shanghai. I'm afraid that we were forced to relinquish a very considerable sum to get the phone records, but once we did, we can see that the probable source of the entire wave of selling originated with these five men or their representatives. They happen to be principals in a variety of real estate projects in Shanghai and the surrounding areas and have made quite a name for themselves. One of them is a Shanghai government official, by the way."

  Martz had a bad feeling about what he was soon to hear. "Any legal recourse?"

  "Doubtful. We violated private brokerage agreements, clearinghouse confidentiality agreements, American securities law, Taiwanese security law, and Chinese security regulations. That's why our information is so good."

  "It's not that good—I mean, I basically already knew something like this had happened."

  "Yes, sir, I understand that a man of your experience would certainly intuit the basic structure of causation." Phelps smiled ever so indulgently, then thought better of it. "When I worked for the government we were often able to make educated guesses about the causes of illegal trades, but it was the detail work that really showed how people operated. So please give me one more moment. Now then, one of the five Chinese businessmen originating these trades is named Chen. In his early thirties. He has some two dozen holding companies that he controls and we were able to trace one of them, using a confidential source at Hong Kong Banc Trust, to a privately held company here in New York. This small company, which is called CorpServe, provides cleaning, waste removal, and paper-shredding services to a number of office buildings and corporate clients around town. One of the contracts is a midtown address, and you will recognize it as the corporate offices of Good Pharma."

  "Oh, those fuckers!" Martz yelled.

  "Yes. Now then, I have asked my colleague Bert Sims to give us the backgrounder in paperized information security."

  Sims, still blinking constantly, stepped forward, shooting his cuffs like a comedian on television. "Thanks, Bob. Pleasure to help out, Mr. Martz. Heard you were one of the richest men in New York City. Wow, I said to myself. Quite an honor for me. Now then, the great bulk of information security has to do with computer files, text encryption, wireless security, and so on. As it should. That stuff is complicated and you need smart people to protect it. But then one must ask, where else in the universe is important information found? In two other media. The first is brain cells. People walk around with a lot of valuable information in their heads. Its value and accuracy are generally in decay. The other medium, of course, is paper. Good old paper. We have become very—pardon the expression—promiscuous with paper. We once thought we'd have paperless offices but of course that never happened. That's a joke. People print out e-mails, they make copies of reports online, they distribute charts in meetings, and so on."

  Sims blinked as he prepared to expound again. "There is only one way to remove the problem of paper, from a security point of view. You destroy the paper itself. But what is destruction? That's an interesting question."

  "To you," Martz said.

  "Yes, to me but also to my colleagues in the paperized security industry who are charged with the task of analyzing paper destruction issues and related methodologies." His eyes lost contact with Martz as he wandered through his interior landscape of abstraction, his voice dropping its synthetic heartiness and becoming the affectless droning of a man who lived for and only loved information. "You can burn paper, which causes smoke, and if you are running a legal, commercial operation, that smoke has to be cleaned, by federal statute. Has to be scrubbed, because most inks have PCBs in them. Ink is a pretty bad substance once you start spreading it around in gas form. You can also destroy paper by dissolving it in acid or some other kind of solvent, but this is smelly and expensive and very messy. You can hide paper, bury it or lock it away, but this only postpones its fate. If you lock it away, somebody can always break in and steal it. Plus the costs of secure storage are enormous. Just ask the U.S. government. Our country spends ninety-eight billion dollars a year on the storage of undigitized government records. Did you know that? What about burying paper? Well, there are landfill issues. Plus people could always dig up the—"

  "I am paying for information I can use, not a complete regurgitation of everything you've ever learned. Get to the point."

  "Of course. Yes. So, okay, the last way you can destroy information on paper is by shredding it. There are different methods and standards of shredding security, from long strips to confetti. You have your strip-cut, cross-cut, and particle-cut machines, grinders, disintegrators, and granulators. One concept is that you turn, say, one hundred pages of valuable information into ten thousand pieces of confetti, and perhaps mix it with fifty thousand pieces of the same size that have no valuable information, and no one in his right mind would or could reassemble those pieces.

  "But things, Mr. Martz, are not always as they seem. Shredded documents can be reassembled. The most famous case was the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, when the Iranians hired local carpet weavers to reconstruct shredded embassy documents by hand. Nowadays the computerized document reassembly business is well developed. Confetti is small only because you are big. If you were tiny, then you would see it very differently. Let's say that piece of confetti was as big as a pizza box, or even bigger, as wide across as the rug in your living room. At that size it would seem fairly thick, and there would be lots of details about it on all of its surfaces. Well, you know what? We can make that piece of confetti large—informationally, I mean. We can microscan it and get a very detailed image of it. Very detailed. That itself is digitized, labeled, and stored. Kind of ironic, actually. The digital becomes paper, becomes digitized gain. Now, with a computer program that reads all those pieces of paper and puts them back—"

  "What are you getting at?" asked Martz, hearing the door open in the hallway.

  "You could read the documents. But it would take a lot of labor and a lot of computing power. Yet in China, both of those things are almost free now. The cost of labor is actually still dropping in some areas, as more and more people come off the farms and search for work. And most computing programs in China have been pirated from Western companies. You literally have small Chinese companies running on software they got for free that cost their original owners millions of dollars." Sims's eyes noticed something behind Martz, something that unsettled his robotic composure. "The government supports, I mean sees, no I did mean supports, this—this activity I am—"

  "Hello!" Connie pranced into the room across the Persian carpet on shiny high heels, carrying a shopping bag and wearing a wicked little black cocktail dress that showed her every gigantic and fabulous curve. "Pardon me! I'm so sorry! Bill? What do you think?" She whirled around, displaying her impossible convexities. "Do you just love it? Please say you do!" She looked back coyly at the security men. "Oh, please excuse me, I just had to show my husband." She flung her hands up and bent one leg, an old model's pose. "See?" She pulled the hem up one side of her steel-hard thigh. "Perfect fit. Here, feel." She stepped forward, her leg grazing Martz's yellow robe, touching his pale hairy calf, and took his hand and put it flat on her stomach, made him rub it, his fingers making incidental but not unnoticed contact with the round underside of the firm shelf above. "Nobody produces this kind of silk, no one. Don't you just love it?"

  Martz nodded, not sure who in the room was the most humiliated, he or the two men. Connie was capable of this kind of behavior, he knew all too well, and it came in part from her awareness that she would never have children, that her sexiness was her only hold on him, and also from her unacknowledged desire to be attractive to men other than her husband. Younger men, mor
e attractive men, vigorous men. Christ, he'd been married four times and humped sixty or seventy women, he knew a thing or two about female human beings. Connie needed a good banging, really needed it, and he hadn't given her that in a long time. So, no wonder. Poor girl. Now she bent down to his ear, no doubt flashing her perfect rear side at the men waiting patiently. "Oh, Bill, don't be mad," she breathed. "I wanted it for you."

  She stood and flounced away. The men sat there a moment, collectively stunned.

  Martz broke the silence. "Gentlemen, that was my wife, and after you reel your tongues back in, we may resume."

  Sims nodded obediently, his blink rate suggesting a rapid mental rewinding until the point of interruption was found. "As it turns out, computers can recognize shredder patterns and perform best-fit sorting by shape not just by—"

  "Stop talking," Martz commanded. He turned to Phelps. "Thus far all you guys have done is waste my time and ogle my wife. The first thing I can't stand, and the second I forgive you for, since you had no choice. Now, get back to Good Pharma's stock price. Can you get any kind of phone logs here?"

  "This would require lawsuits and subpoenas, in my opinion," said Phelps. "Even with my connections in the Justice Department and the Southern District's offices, it would take weeks, minimum."

  That was too long. Martz wondered about Tom Reilly. Did he know about this Chen? Or did he know there might be a security problem? No wonder he wouldn't talk. And, more to the point, what did Chen know about Good Pharma that Bill Martz did not?

  Phelps waited, his eyes bright with secret knowledge.

  "Go on, tell me the rest," said Martz.

  "The younger sister of Chen is listed on CorpServe's website as the contact person for Manhattan sales."

  "Chen's sister works for the shredding company?" Martz asked, voice rising in furious amazement. "Why didn't you say so? It's her!"

  Phelps nodded. "It would appear so, yes."

  "Can you find this Chen person?"

  "We anticipated that question, and using our contacts in the Department of Homeland Security we have traced his movements."

  "Where is he? Some casino in Macao raising a toast to all the American investors he's burned?"

  "No, sir," said Sims. "Actually, he's here in New York."

  "What?" Martz stood up and his robe hung open, revealing the hairy landslide of flesh that was his chest and stomach.

  "He received an expedited clearance to travel here, and when one of these requests comes from a Chinese national, we automatically—"

  "I don't care about the paperwork, tell me where he is!"

  "Short answer, we don't know."

  "Why not?"

  "It wasn't clear that you might want us to find out, sir."

  He flung his open hands at them in exasperation. "I want you to find out! Christ on a cracker, man, I want that information!"

  "Yes. We can use our contacts in the U.S. Immigration Service to—"

  "Now, today! As soon as possible!"

  "We will do everything that—"

  He pointed at the door. "Go! Get out! I want the answer as fast as possible! End of day!"

  They packed up their equipment and left, though not without, Martz noticed, a furtive pivot of the head by Sims in the hope that he might catch one more eyeful of the bewitching Mrs. Martz.

  He stood at the window, thinking of this treacherous Chen and his sister planted in New York. He recognized their type. They were the hungry generation. Every family that ever made a fortune had started with a hungry generation, the one that worked harder, hustled, cut corners, jumped earliest. The Martz family wealth had begun in this way, too. His own grandfather had started the family fortune in 1922 when he and his younger brother went out for a picnic in Central Park, enjoying some hard cider and sandwiches from a basket and watching their wives and children play in the grass. The younger brother, a twenty-three-year-old electrical engineering draftsman, had fallen asleep in the grass because, his wife said, he had been working too hard. What was all the work? Martz's grandfather had famously asked his sister-in-law. His brother, he learned, had been assigned the design of a power station in a copper mine in Chile. The Manhattan engineering firm had ten men working on the drawings around the clock. Enormous power requirements, no one quite understood why. Rush-rush, hush-hush. Inside information, not yet public. Martz's grandfather had woken up his brother, asked him the name of the copper mine. His brother had boozily muttered a word that sounded like "Chuckee-Moma" and fallen asleep again. Martz's grandfather had written the funny word with a fountain pen on his pretzel napkin, excused himself, and walked straight south from Central Park to the New York Public Library. "Chuckee-Moma," he learned, was the closest his brother could get to "Chuquicamata"—the name of the largest copper mine in the world. Two months later it was acquired by the Anaconda Copper Company. But not before Martz's grandfather had purchased or borrowed every last share of Anaconda stock that he could get his hands on. Thus was a fortune created and a family legend born—just as this Chen was doing now.

  Martz returned his attention to Good Pharma. It seemed apparent now that Tom Reilly suspected there had been an information breach. He might have had his own analysis of the stock-trading patterns performed. That Reilly had not reported this publicly was grounds for his removal and perhaps prosecution under federal securities law, but Martz was quite happy that Reilly had wisely not upheld any of his legal responsibilities; it meant there might still be a quiet way out of this mess.

  The Chen kid had robbed him—millions, right out of his wrinkled hand. Martz was old and tired and it hurt every time he sat down, but he wasn't too far gone not to defend himself. Chen had stolen a mountain of gold from him, and now, with Tom Reilly's help, he was most certainly going to steal it back.

  13

  The Crown Royale Hotel on Park Avenue above Sixty-ninth Street requires many fresh sheets for its customers. And fresh pillowcases, towels, face towels, and tablecloths, to say nothing of table napkins starched to near rigidity. The hotel's laundry facility, a room nearly forty yards long two floors below street level, consumes tens of thousands of gallons of water a day, pallets of bleach and detergent. No working laundry, no happy hotel. The man who ran the Crown Royale laundry, Carlos Montoya, had, for a Mexican, lived in New York City a very long time. Long enough that his shiny black hair had become gray, that his face had sagged into a mask of tragic sensibility, and that he was a grandfather many times over. He appeared to all who might wonder to be a tired, industrious, law-abiding member of society who perhaps should lose forty or fifty pounds and consider having his shoes shined more often. A naturalized United States citizen, he paid his taxes, had a nice new car in his driveway in Queens, voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and was, by far, the most powerful Mexican crime boss in the city. Which is to say, not very powerful, if compared to the Italians, Chinese, Albanians, Vietnamese, or Russians, but not so bad compared to the Pakistanis, the Haitians, what was left of the Irish, and whatever the Muslims in Brooklyn were up to these days with their shops selling Islamic books, oils, clothing, foodstuffs, and everything else the FBI's informants kept buying from them. Nonetheless, Carlos's distribution network crossed all five boroughs, and with his connections in the hotel and restaurant business, he controlled most of the retail Mexican marijuana business in New York. He had dealers everywhere. And two of them were in trouble, being hassled by the police for the murders of two Mexican girls, murders they did not commit. Two very beautiful daughters of Mexico who were killed in a most disrespectful way. A murder a Mexican could not have committed. Not in Brooklyn, anyway.

  Carlos's office, if it could be called that, was a cubicle at one end of the massive laundry room. It was here that he pondered his predicament, smoking a cigarette in violation of hotel policy. (He had no fear; he could not be fired, he knew.) The two boys, muscular and carrying faces of insolence, had been taken in for questioning by a Detective Blake of Brooklyn. Blake had developed their names wit
hin one day of the murders, which suggested that the Mexicans in that part of Brooklyn were having trouble keeping their mouths shut, or that Carlos's boys had a lot of enemies on the street, or, most unlikely, that Detective Blake was unusually effective. Carlos liked the idea that this detective might be working hard to solve the murders but not if it meant getting the false conviction of Carlos's boys. The two of them were guilty of muchas cosas, yes, but not of killing the two girls, both good hardworking girls from central Mexico who had fled north to the States to find jobs. He'd driven out to Marine Park and been told their story in the back of a pizza parlor that he partly owned—how they'd been smuggled through a Texas safe house, how they lived out in Brooklyn on Avenida U, drove a bad car, smoked a little of his producto, supplied for free by the boyfriends, kept a clean apartment. Carlos felt a kind of paternal responsibility for all the boys and girls coming to New York. They needed older Mexicans around to see how they could make it in America. He considered Mexico a lost and dying nation, but he knew Mexicans to be a beautiful people who were not understood by the rest of the world. He had read about Mexico's history and had actually purchased in an expensive Manhattan antiques shop a vintage map that showed Old Mexico, which stretched well into California, Arizona, and Texas. We were here before they were, he always said, and we will be here when they are gone. The disrespectful way the girls had been killed, asphyxiation by human excrement, made him burn with hatred.