Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  Napier says, “Did you think that you would be able to con me? Do you know who I am?”

  I nod.

  Napier turns to a goon. “Tell him.”

  The goon walks up to me and kicks me in the chest, sending me backward onto the floor. “He’s Ed Napier,” the goon says, loudly.

  I try to roll away from my tormentors, across the concrete floor. I notice I’m leaving a trail of blood. “Okay,” I say, “now I understand.”

  “What’s the con, Kip?” Napier asks. “There is no Pythia, is there?”

  “Stop hurting me,” I say.

  Napier says to a goon, “I don’t think he heard me.”

  The goon strides over, pulls back his shoe, and kicks me in the face. My neck snaps. I look down and see two of my teeth skittering across the concrete floor like Chiclets. The goon says, “Mr. Napier asked you a question.”

  “Please,” Jess says again. “You’re going to kill him.”

  “Interesting prediction,” Napier says. “I have a ninety-percent confidence level you may be right.”

  I say, “Stop. Please.” I touch a finger to my mouth, look at it. It is red with blood. “Okay,” I say. “You’re right. There is no Pythia.”

  “What are you trying to do?” Napier asks. “Are you trying to con me? What the fuck are you thinking? Don’t you know who my friends are? Don’t you know who my business partners are?”

  I cough. I think I might pass out. Passing out is not part of the plan. Neither was the kick in the face. Napier’s men are a bit overzealous. I say, “It’s not what you think.”

  “Tell me what to think,” Napier says.

  I cough again. I groan.

  Napier says to his goon, “I guess he didn’t hear me.”

  The goon walks over to me, lifts his shoe for another kick.

  “Wait,” I say. “I’ll tell you.”

  Napier holds up two fingers. The goon freezes with his shoe raised, as if he’s a dancer in a boy band, about to bust a move.

  I say, “It is a con. That part’s true. But the money is real. The profits are real.”

  The goon looks to Napier, as if to ask: May I kick him now?

  “You have thirty seconds,” Napier says to me, “to tell me everything.”

  The goon’s face registers discomfort. Thirty seconds? I can’t stand with my foot up for a half a minute! He lowers his shoe to the ground.

  I say, “We need your money to make it work. We’re not trying to steal from you. We’ll pay you back. The money we made this morning—it was real.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “The software—it’s not predicting anything. There’s no genetic algorithms. No neural networks. It’s low-tech. We intercept orders at the brokers. We change the IP routing. All the online brokers—Datek, Ameritrade, E-Trade. We intercept all their orders. The orders come to us first. We hold them for twenty seconds, thirty seconds max. Our software analyzes them. We put our order in first, then release the others.”

  “Slow down,” Napier says. “Say it again.”

  I take a breath. I cough. I look at my hand. It’s speckled with blood. “It’s simple,” I say. “When someone enters an order on the Internet to buy a stock, we intercept it. It goes to us first, not the broker. We collect thousands of orders—hundreds of thousands—see which stocks people are going to buy. If we see a thousand people are buying a stock, we put an order in to buy it first. Then we release the other orders, after we’ve bought the stock. The stock price goes up because everyone’s trying to buy. We make money and sell the stock.”

  “You’re front-running . . .”

  “Intercepting stock information before it gets traded. It doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  “It’s illegal,” Napier says.

  I shrug.

  “Why the big act? The Pythia company? Why do you need me?”

  “Money. I need capital.”

  “Explain.”

  “We have a month—maybe two—before they catch on. That’s why I need you. We need to make as much money as we can in one month, before they figure it out. If we can only gamble a few times, let’s gamble big.”

  “You were going to rip me off,” he says, although now he doesn’t sound sure.

  “No,” I say. “I swear. The money’s real. I’m splitting it with you, fifty-fifty, just like we agreed. Look, you checked your bank account. There’s four hundred thousand dollars in there. I’m not trying to rip you off.”

  “If you’re lying to me, I’m going to kill you.”

  “I’m not lying to you.”

  “I may kill you anyway,” Napier says. He stares at me. He’s weighing the evidence. I’m a con man, but then again, I just wired four hundred thousand dollars of cash into his bank account. That’s not the kind of cash most people have lying around. I must be on to something.

  “So there really is software,” Napier says.

  “It’s not rocket science. It just looks at what everyone else is about to do. And we do it first. The hard part is intercepting the orders.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “I can show you,” I say.

  Now I’m on Napier’s Citation jet, twenty thousand feet above the ground, with Peter sitting beside me. Toby and Jess sit in the back of the plane. Napier is asleep, snoring in the front seat, dreaming about his next weekend in St. Croix, or maybe an upcoming lobster dinner at the Palm. The goon with the bloodstained Cole Haan shoes sits in the chair across from us, wide awake and staring.

  Last time I was on this plane, I was being served caviar and champagne by a platinum blonde with great tits. Now I’m being stared at by a well-muscled Italian guy with big pores and a good corner kick. Times change.

  Before they took us to the airport, they let me clean up. By clean up, I mean: I was allowed to collect my two loose teeth from the floor and put them in my slacks pocket, and to wipe the blood off my face with cold water. Despite my efforts I’m sure that when we touch down in New York, I won’t be discovered by Wilhelmina on a busy sidewalk and asked to do some modeling work.

  After six hours, we touch down at La Guardia. At the gate, we’re met by two fat guys in suits. They shake Napier’s hand and bow their heads respectfully. They lead us from the terminal into the parking lot. I’m expecting a limo at a minimum, maybe a Rolls. But they show us to a van painted blue and white, with a yellow siren light on the roof and a Consolidated Edison logo on each side.

  “Like you asked, Mr. Napier,” one of the fat guys says.

  My crew of four pile into the back of the utility company van, stepping over coils of copper cable, wire cutters, and leather utility belts. Napier and his muscle sit in the back seat of the van, the two New York goons up front.

  When we pull out of the La Guardia parking lot, the driver says, “Where to, Mr. Napier?”

  Napier turns around in his seat to look at me. “Where is it?”

  “Downtown,” I say. “Fourteenth and Fifth.”

  We speed through Queens and take the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan. A half-hour after we start, we pull in front of an art deco building, five stories high. An engraved steel sign near the front door says: “Datek Securities.”

  “This is it,” I say.

  We double-park on Fourteenth Street. Napier’s muscle climbs out of the van and circles around the back to let us out.

  We jump down to the pavement. One of the New York goons hands each of us a white hard hat with the Con Ed logo. Although each of us looks ridiculous in his own way, I’m certain Ed Napier looks the most absurd: St. Bart’s tan, Hermès tie, Armani suit—and a white plastic hard hat. But then again, I’m missing my two front teeth and have a swastika-shaped gash on my forehead like Charles Manson. Maybe Napier’s laughing at me.

  Napier says, “Show me.”

  Peter leads the way down the block. At the corner of Fifth, he points down to the asphalt of the street, at a manhole cover. “This is it.”

  The New York goons try lifting the manhole cover, with the
ir fingers, unsuccessfully. One of them shakes his head and then goes back to the van. He returns, moments later, with a crowbar and a flashlight. He pries open the manhole cover and slides it across the asphalt.

  “Down there,” Peter says.

  Peter crouches, grabs a rung of the ladder, lowers himself into the manhole. I look to Napier for permission to follow. He nods.

  I say to Toby, “Stand watch.”

  He points to the cast on his leg. “Not going anywhere.”

  I follow Peter down under the street. We descend twelve feet into a tunnel. It’s dark and cool. The wall, for as far as we can see into the blackness, is snaked with thick wires and PVC pipes. I stand clear of the ladder to let Napier descend. He jumps off beside me. Jess follows.

  Napier calls up to his man, “Give me the light.”

  Napier’s muscle tosses the flashlight down the hole. Napier catches it. He swings the beam to Peter’s face.

  “This is where I did it,” Peter says. “There.”

  Peter points to the wall. Napier tilts the flashlight beam to illuminate a black plastic cube, the size of a cigar box. On the face of the box, two green LEDs blink spasmodically.

  Peter says, “Datek has one T-3 line running to its office through here.” He points to a black wire, pinkie-width, that has been spliced to the rear panel of the plastic box. “And here’s the line out.” He points to a second black cable coming out of the box. “Think of this as a router. We installed it six weeks ago. Every packet coming into Datek hits this box first.”

  “And you intercept everything coming in?” Napier says.

  “Exactly. When a packet comes into this box, it’s relayed back to California, to our office. We decide whether to forward it right away to Datek, or to hold it.”

  “If it’s a stock order, you hold it,” Napier says. He’s starting to understand the con.

  “That’s right,” Peter says. “We can queue up tens of thousands of orders at a time. We’ll look at ten thousand orders and decide who’s buying which stocks. If we see that a lot of people are buying one particular stock, we send our order from California to buy the stock first. As soon as we’re filled, we release all the other orders that have been queued. It sounds like a big deal, but the process is fast. The extra bounce to California and back takes about a tenth of a second. Plus however long we hold the orders.”

  “And no one notices?” Napier says.

  “Not yet. They probably will, eventually. But we never hold orders for very long. Thirty seconds at the most. And not all the time. Just for a few minutes each day. So it’s going to be a while before people catch on.”

  “What makes you think you’ll ever get caught?”

  I answer for Peter. “Because you always get caught. That’s the rule. That’s how life works.”

  Napier nods. He understands that rule. His entire life—his purchase of his first casino with mob money, his kickbacks to the Genovese family, his payoffs to the Nevada Gaming Commission—has been one example after another of not getting caught, just. He knows that he is due.

  Peter continues. “We have one box here, near Datek, one box in Omaha near Ameritrade, and a box uptown near E-Trade. Between the three of them, we can look at around forty percent of daily Nasdaq volume. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s enough to practically guarantee that we can call when a stock’s going to move.”

  “Amazing,” Napier says. He thinks about it. “Is there anything linking the box to you? Let’s say someone comes down here, finds the thing.”

  Peter says, “Every forty-eight hours the boxes contact our servers in California. If the servers don’t respond with the correct security code, the boxes are programmed to erase their own memory. They just stop doing any funny stuff. Like they’re not even here. If someone comes down here and finds the box, there’s nothing pointing to us. A few off-the-shelf components you can buy at Radio Shack.”

  “Good,” Napier says.

  I rub my tongue across my top gum, feeling the sockets where my two front teeth are missing. I say to Napier, “What do you think?”

  He nods. “For a bunch of shitheads,” he says, “you did pretty good.”

  At eleven o’clock at night, we touch down in Palo Alto. Napier takes us back to his mansion.

  We walk across the arcaded loggia, through the warm night and the sound of crickets. I smell jasmine and rosemary. It has been twelve hours since I was beaten to a pulp by Napier’s men, and I could use a drink.

  Napier leads us through the sitting room, into his dining hall. The table is set formally with white linens and tapered candlesticks.

  Napier says, “Sit down.”

  We take our seats at the table. A man in a suit appears, carrying a bottle of wine on a silver coaster. He pours us each a glass.

  “Now,” Napier says, “let’s drink to our new agreement.”

  “What new agreement?” I say.

  “I’ll lend you money. You keep doing what you’re doing. Make money in the stock market. We split everything eighty-twenty.”

  “That wasn’t our agreement,” I say.

  “Like I said,” Napier explains. “Our new agreement.”

  “And if I refuse?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  “Then I turn you in. I make a phone call to the FBI, and I describe how you’re manipulating stocks. You’ll go back to prison, Kip, for a long time. Understand?”

  I nod.

  “There’s one more thing,” Napier says. “If I find out you’re ripping me off, in any way, or lying to me, even the slightest bit, I’ll have you all killed. Every one of you.”

  He looks at each of us, slowly—perhaps in the order he will have us killed?—to make sure we understand.

  “Now,” he says. He takes a glass from the table and lifts it high in the air. “I’d like to propose a toast. To our new partnership.”

  My own team turns to me, looking for guidance. I shrug, as if to say: What the hell. I raise my own glass. “To our new partnership,” I say. “And to complete and total honesty.”

  Everyone raises their glass in a toast.

  I can’t help but notice that Napier is smiling, as if I’ve said something funny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Of course the box that we installed beneath Fourteenth Street in Manhattan contains merely this: a nine-volt battery and two blinking green LEDs. Despite Peter’s intricate explanation about how the box intercepts Internet packets, and routes them back to California, and how we analyze tens of thousands of stock market orders, the reality is more prosaic. The box does nothing, except blink green lights. We intercept nothing. We analyze nothing.

  What we do is: We blink green lights.

  Did you believe otherwise? You must keep in mind: This is a story about a con. In a con, everyone takes part in a play. And everyone knows it is a play, except for one man. The thing you want to make sure, when you’re running a con, is that the man is not you.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When I wake the next morning, I have mysteriously been transported to the cathedral at Chartres, France; and my head is firmly planted inside the huge brass bell at the top of the steeple. Below me, a monk plays a sprightly version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the carillon.

  At least, that is how my skull feels. It takes a moment to realize that I am not in Chartres, but rather—less interestingly—am lying on my Naugahyde couch, in my Palo Alto living room, in a puddle of drool, with a bruised sternum, two missing front teeth, and a headache that burns bright like a magnesium flare on a rain-slicked road.

  I sit up, peeling my face from the Naugahyde. I rub my cheek and feel the couch imprint in my skin, like cheesecloth. I try to remember what happened last night: the long flight back from New York, the dinner at Napier’s, the threat-inspired business partnership, the several glasses of wine, and then the quiet ride back to my apartment in Jess’s car.

  I look at my watch. It is ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. I stumble across my li
ving room, and am surprised to see that—last night, while I was being beaten up by mob thugs—MrVitamin.com rang up $983 worth of vitamin sales. It seems impossible, so I sit down at the computer and pull up the transaction records to double-check. Sure enough, the sales are real—from all over the country—a box of vitamins here, a box of fish oil tablets there. The reason for the sudden interest in my Web site is a mystery: Maybe I got some good press in a newspaper, or maybe it’s just a fluke. But it’s a good feeling to know that, if the Big Con business doesn’t work out, and I survive this fiasco, I may have a future in online retail.

  I spend thirty minutes flipping through the Yellow Pages, calling dentists, trying to find a nearby office with emergency Saturday hours.

  I wind up taking a taxi to San Jose, to a dentist with an exotic foreign name full of surprising consonants, and a suspiciously empty appointment book.

  But Dr. Chatchadabenjakalani, if indeed he really is a doctor, is pleasant and efficient. His office, on the second floor, above a Vietnamese restaurant, is clean, although it does smell vaguely like nam pla, Thai fish sauce. Before I recline in his dental chair, I reach into my pocket and offer the doctor my two front teeth, which I have been carrying for the past day like lucky charms. I notice that the root side of the teeth have turned black.

  Dr. Chatchadabenjakalani holds out his hand and graciously accepts my teeth. He lifts his eyeglasses to his forehead and looks at my incisors, carefully, like an Amsterdam diamond merchant. Finally he pronounces, “I think these are no good.” He hands them back to me, in case I want them.

  I say, “It’s okay. You keep them.”

  Two hours later, I’m back in Palo Alto, with two shiny white choppers in the front of my mouth, good as new. I’m not agitated by the five-hundred-dollar bill the good doctor handed me on the way out. I consider it a business expense, the same way that regular people treat legal bills, or photocopying costs. Having your front teeth replaced, after you’re kicked in the face by your mark’s thugs? In my line of work, that’s just the cost of doing business.