House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  “There’s no pressure anymore, Mr. Falcone,” Fiore said. “There was. It’s been removed.”

  One hand rose from the man’s ample belly and a finger waggled back and forth in warning. “In that case, I advise you to be careful,” Falcone said. “There are few things more dangerous than an honest man when he puts his honesty aside.”

  Gabriel Enriquez was waiting on the sidewalk on Vanderbilt Avenue when Jeffrey’s car pulled to the curb a few minutes after seven. Jeffrey told Martin he wouldn’t be needing him before nine. The car, though, remained at the curb while Jeffrey crossed the sidewalk to greet his guest, offering his hand. Enriquez was wearing a lime-green shirt under a Bill Blass blazer that looked to be a few years old, probably a relic of his days on the First Boston trading floor.

  “Does he just sit there all night?” Enriquez asked, gesturing toward the car.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jeffrey said.

  “Boring job.”

  “I don’t pay him to be entertained.”

  Jeffrey had reserved one of the small dining rooms on the second floor, where the door could be closed for privacy. Although the room contained only a single table, it had its own well-stocked bar as well as its own sideboard for china, glassware, and silver. Albert, who had already been at the club for decades when Jeffrey started coming years ago, poured drinks while Gabriel Enriquez glanced quickly at the simple placard that served as the club’s dinner menu. The date appeared at the top, with an explanatory legend under it reminding diners that the items listed below were available in addition to the usual fare. There were no prices and no indication of what the usual fare might be.

  When a glass of scotch was set in front of the young man, he tossed his menu aside. “You’re familiar with the place,” he said. “I’ll let you decide.”

  “No preferences?” Jeffrey asked.

  “None.”

  “I suppose that’s an admirable quality,” Jeffrey said.

  Enriquez smiled. He had large, even teeth. “It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Blaine,” he said. “It’s simply a convenience.”

  Jeffrey ordered tossed salads, the confit of duck, and roast lamb with shallots for both of them. He wrote the orders on the small pad that lay beside his place setting and Albert claimed it the moment Jeffrey set down his pencil. “I’ll be back presently, Mr. Blaine,” he said, closing the door as he left.

  “I’m surprised,” Jeffrey began, “that you haven’t asked me what this is about.”

  Gabriel shrugged his broad shoulders. “You’ll tell me when you want to tell me,” he said indifferently. “I assume that’s what you’re going to do now.”

  “And you weren’t curious?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m aware of what you didn’t say. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Gabriel reached for his whiskey glass and then changed his mind and took a sip of water instead. “Look,” he said, “everything about this is like some kind of test. So you tell me, what’s the right answer? If I don’t ask you anything, I lack curiosity. If I start asking questions, I’m not a good soldier.”

  “And you want to be a good soldier.”

  “I am a good soldier.”

  “Good,” Jeffrey said. “So far you’re passing the test.”

  Gabriel’s dark eyes looked back at him, patient and unsmiling. The young man was as prickly as a porcupine, which didn’t make Jeffrey like him particularly but seemed to be a desirable quality for the purpose at hand.

  “I’ve got a few more questions, if you don’t mind,” Jeffrey continued. “Why did you leave First Boston?”

  The petulant, slightly amused annoyance that had characterized all of Gabriel’s reactions to this point turned into something sharper, more like anger. “What the hell is this about?” he shot back immediately, even defiantly.

  It was exactly the answer Jeffrey assumed he would get. If, that is, he had read the man correctly.

  “What I am about to propose to you, Mr. Enriquez, is completely illegal. Before I make that proposal, I want to be sure you’re the right man.”

  “I’m the right man,” Gabriel said, without the slightest hesitation.

  The door opened as Albert arrived with a large wooden salad bowl. Working at the sideboard, he tossed the salad with a pair of clumsy-looking wooden spoons, adding oil and vinegar as though he were baptizing the greens, then dusting it all with a few pinches of herbs he took from a small covered wooden bowl. He served out two portions, which he delivered to the table. There was enough salad left in the bowl for four more people. He offered them freshly ground pepper, left the pepper mill on the sideboard next to the salad bowl, and withdrew. “Thank you, Albert,” Jeffrey said just before the door closed, the first words either man had spoken since the waiter came in.

  “All right,” Jeffrey said. “This part isn’t a test. I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to just listen.”

  Gabriel nodded his acquiescence, picked up his fork, and began to eat.

  Jeffrey explained that he needed someone who could enter the company’s computer to move investments from one fund to another as well as to manipulate investments within the individual funds, switching them when necessary from one account to another. The computer’s timekeeping functions, which allowed it to automatically put time and date stamps on all transactions, would also have to be bypassed so that the surreptitious changes could be predated to the dates of the original transactions they replaced. All of this, Jeffrey said, was the easy part.

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow and shrugged as though he were amused by Jeffrey’s judgment about what was easy and what wasn’t.

  “Fine,” Jeffrey conceded. “I don’t know if it’s easy or it isn’t. And I don’t care. The bottom line is this. I have no interest, none whatsoever, in anything you can do or claim you can do unless you can also provide me absolute assurance that you can do it in a way that leaves no trace of the original transactions.”

  Gabriel considered a moment and then nodded. He wasn’t committing himself, merely leaving open the possibility that it was doable.

  “No trace of the records,” Jeffrey repeated, “and no trace of the software program you use to do all this.”

  Gabriel nodded again, still waiting for his signal to respond. Jeffrey picked up his salad fork. “All right,” he said. “You’ve heard the proposal. Say anything you want.”

  “Questions or statements?” Gabriel asked.

  “Either.”

  “Question. Are we talking about embezzlement?”

  “Is there a reason you need to know that?”

  “If I get involved in something, I need to know what it is.”

  Jeffrey weighed the answer. He had intended to tell the young man as little as possible, but the idea seemed at the moment rather overwrought and melodramatic. Enriquez’s question was a legitimate one. “No,” Jeffrey said simply, “it’s not embezzlement.”

  “Money laundering, then,” Gabriel said matter-of-factly.

  There was no hint of a question in his voice this time. He said it as though it were an obvious conclusion from the rather vague outline Jeffrey had presented to him. If it wasn’t just a lucky guess—and Enriquez didn’t strike him as the sort of man who made guesses—then there were only two other possibilities. Either it was the result of a remarkably quick analysis, for there were at least as many forms of fraud as there were legitimate transactions. Or Gabriel Enriquez had already been thinking about exactly the same sort of scheme himself.

  Gabriel took Jeffrey’s silence as a confirmation. “Statement,” he said. “The company software has safety protocols built into it to prevent the kind of thing you’re talking about. I wrote some of them myself and I know how the others work. They’re surprisingly easy to get around. Kid stuff, really.”

  Jeffrey nodded.

  “Statement,” Gabriel continued. “There are paper records. They would have to be located and destroyed.”

  “They’ll all be my acc
ounts,” Jeffrey said. “The paper records come to me.”

  “There isn’t a master copy?”

  “There is. It comes to me first.”

  “Then you don’t have a problem there.”

  “Where do I have a problem?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Queuing,” the young man said. His explanation was detailed and technical. It had to do with the basic operating system of the computer that told it where to store new records on the system’s data-storage media. “Think of an old-fashioned paper ledger book,” Gabriel said. “Imagine on Thursday morning you want to go back and change something you entered on Tuesday. You carefully erase the numbers and the date, you change them so now it says the transaction didn’t happen until Thursday. That’s okay as far as it goes, but isn’t that record going to look funny sitting there with Thursday’s date in the middle of a page filled with things that happened on Tuesday?”

  He held up a finger to forestall an interruption and went on with his lecture. “Now a computer isn’t quite that simple but it isn’t that much more complicated either. It puts new records in the first available space it finds. If you delete something, it doesn’t really erase it. It just makes the space it was in available for other things. Do you have a computer at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever lose something and have to look through the disk to find it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you did you’d find a terrible mess. Three items from your date book, half of one of your kid’s homework assignments, one or two of your wife’s recipes, the other half of the homework, some records from your checking account. If you sat down and typed in the Gettysburg Address, you’d find eighty-seven different things between four score and seven and this hallowed ground.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it difficult for anyone to notice that records were out of order?”

  “On your home computer it would,” Gabriel agreed. “The trouble is the firm’s software almost never deletes anything. You make a transaction, a record is created. You cancel the transaction, a new record is created recording the cancellation, but the old one isn’t deleted. You see the problem?”

  Jeffrey saw it. “Too much order, not enough chaos. Is there a solution?” he asked.

  Gabriel finished his salad before answering the question. “Sure there is,” he said. “We’ve got to provide our own chaos. I go in tonight and I create about a thousand files. Pure junk. Big ones, little ones. And then one by one I start erasing them. I keep adding, I keep deleting. Within a week, the records are going to be far too random for anyone to know when they were entered. Magic, isn’t it?”

  For the first time in weeks Jeffrey Blaine smiled because he felt like smiling. It was magic.

  16

  Wally Schliester liked wandering around the convention-hall floor when he had nothing better to do, which was most of the time. He liked gadgets and gizmos of all kinds. It was like visiting the Future Pavilion at the World’s Fair every day, better in fact, because the exhibits were changing all the time, he didn’t have to pay to get in, and he wore an ID badge on his breast pocket that made him seem like an important man at the Convention Center. Serving girls were always rushing up to him with hors d’oeuvres while he inspected television sets you could hang on the wall in a picture frame and barbecue grilles that lit themselves and put themselves out and told you when the steaks were done. He saw a clock that set itself every day, accurate to one-ten-thousandth of a second, and he wondered why anyone needed to know the time like that. He saw computers that took dictation and robots that would serve drinks at a party and then vacuum the room when the guests were gone. When he asked, he found out that some of the things he was looking at didn’t really exist. The proprietors of the booths told him they were just prototypes, which meant something very scientific to them but to Schliester simply meant that these things were more or less like Pinocchio. Maybe they’d be real someday but they weren’t real now.

  Of all the things he saw, the one that stopped him dead in his tracks was a microphone so small you could practically wear it on your nose and still no one would see it. There was a poster-size blowup of an article from Scientific American at the front of the booth. Schliester stopped to talk to the guy manning the booth, who was a bodybuilder type from Encino, California. All the seams of his suit looked like they were being stretched.

  “This thing really exists?” Schliester asked.

  The man laughed and introduced himself. His name was Loren Bannion but his friends called him Banny, “like Manny with a b,” he said, presenting his card. “You’re looking at it. Of course it exists.”

  Schliester felt stupid for asking, since he obviously was looking at it. “I thought maybe it was a prototype,” he said to get himself off the hook.

  Banny shook his head. “It works on the same principle as a telescopic array,” he explained in a geeky way that didn’t match very well with his square, muscle-bound body.

  Schliester didn’t think he could call anyone Banny but he wanted to hear more. “What principle would that be?” he asked, getting over his shyness about pegging himself as an imbecile. It had probably been years since Loren Bannion had talked to anyone who didn’t know what a telescopic array was.

  “Radio telescopes,” Banny said. “For picking up signals from deep space. For years they kept building the dishes bigger and bigger but there’s only so big you can build them, right?”

  Schliester nodded knowingly. It seemed right.

  “Okay,” Banny said, warming to the subject. “Then someone figured out that if you put a little dish here and a little dish there, like twenty miles away, and another one twenty miles beyond that, and you hook them all up, it’s exactly the same thing or almost exactly the same thing as if you had one dish sixty miles across. Unimaginable. But it works. So now they’ve got these arrays stretched across the Andes and they’ve mapped the whole southern sky all the way out to Christ knows where. They’re picking up signals from hundreds of millions of years ago.”

  “Ago?” He was losing Schliester again.

  “Time, distance, it’s the same thing,” Banny said. “The further out in space you go, the further back in time.”

  Schliester was going to have to take his word for that part of it. “So you’re telling me you can record something someone said yesterday?” he asked cautiously.

  Bannion laughed. “That’s good,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  Apparently that hadn’t been his point. Schliester laughed, too, to show that he enjoyed a good joke as well as the next man. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have left my brains in my other suit. What does this have to do with microphones?”

  “Yeah, right, okay, I got you,” Bannion said. “The thing is, these single-cell microphones, they’re virtually molecular but they’re not very sensitive. I mean they tell you there was a sound but that’s about it. On the other hand, you can string them together—arrays, see what I’m saying? You spread a couple thousand of them out on a desktop and all of a sudden the whole desktop is one gigantic, incredibly sensitive microphone that’s going to pick up a mosquito’s footsteps. Hey, you mind getting us a couple of those shrimp things?”

  He pointed to where a young lady in a microskirt was working the crowd with an immense platter. She disappeared around the corner, down another aisle.

  Schliester promised to be right back. He caught up with the girl just in time. Her plate was almost empty. “How about I put you out of business?” he said, helping himself to the last four shrimp and a little specimen cup of cocktail sauce.

  “Oh, I’ll get more,” she said in a tone of earnest reassurance. She was a pretty little thing who obviously took her work seriously. That was nice to see.

  Banny and Schliester divided up the shrimp. While they were eating, Banny whipped out a tape recorder, hit rewind, then play. Schliester heard himself saying How about I put you out of business? and the girl saying Oh, I’ll get more.

&n
bsp; “Jesus,” Schliester gasped. “Where was the mike?”

  Bannion plunged a couple of meaty fingers into the outer breast pocket of Schliester’s suit coat and came out with the business card he had given Schliester only a few minutes before. He handed it over and Schliester held it up and studied it like a man looking for an image of the Holy Virgin in a stain on a tablecloth. As far as he could see, it was just a business card.

  Bannion explained that the paper stock was embedded with hundreds of microscopic microphones, chained together with invisible wire and powered by the kind of metallic batteries used in something he called smart credit cards. A transmitter so thin and flexible it could be woven into the paper the way metal threads are woven into paper money completed the technology.

  An hour and a half later Elaine Lester called on Mr. Bannion and presented her credentials. If these things were anything like she had been led to believe, she said without explaining who had led her to believe it, the U.S. Attorney’s Office would be interested in testing the capabilities.

  Bannion grinned and explained that he had some interesting hardware but the card-bug she was talking about wasn’t on the market yet.

  “But you have them?” she said.

  He placed a call to the home office in Encino and he got the answer Elaine Lester wanted to hear. She signed a paper and he gave her three cards. The batteries were good for a month. They had Loren Bannion’s name on them. She asked for blank cards instead and she got them.

  Any printing process that didn’t use heat could do the printing, he told her.

  In the few weeks between Amy Laidlaw’s funeral and the start of the fall term at Yale, Phyllis witnessed a major change in her daughter. She saw it in her eyes, which sometimes came to rest in odd and empty corners of the room. Not that she was sad or morose all the time. But the sadness was there, even when it was invisible. And with the sadness came a new recognition of her parents, an acceptance of them, perhaps because she needed them, perhaps simply because of their shared complicity in Amy’s death. It made Phyllis feel closer to her daughter than she ever felt before.