by Reece Hirsch
At Starbucks, they sat down at a small table by the window, as far away from the morning newspaper readers as possible. Yuri took the coffee orders.
The market-tested, earth-toned interior of Starbucks seemed incompatible with the abject terror Will had felt a few minutes ago, although he knew that he was not in any less danger. Nikolai didn’t say anything to Will while Yuri ordered the coffees. They both looked out the window at the people walking purposefully to their jobs in the gray morning light.
Across the street from Starbucks was a savings and loan with an oddly shaped, oblong sign. A year ago, a tech company called Blue Gorilla had occupied the building. He could even still see the outline of the company’s logo on the savings and loan’s signage: a cartoon of a blue gorilla wearing a business suit. He had often studied the expression of smug whimsy on the gorilla’s face, wondering what the company actually did.
When Yuri returned, Nikolai said, “I cannot tell you how badly you have fucked up. Bozhe moi.”
“I never told you to invest,” Will protested.
“Who the fuck cares? We are responsible to our bosses. You are responsible to us.”
“There’s nothing I can do.”
Yuri, who was growing visibly annoyed at Will’s assumption that this was a dialogue, interrupted. “You had better hope that’s not true. If you don’t give us something that we can use, asshole, you are going to die. Badly. And so will that cute little blonde, Claire.”
Will was speechless and sick—it was like hearing that a cancer that you thought was isolated had metastasized and spread throughout your body. Finally, he managed, “I’m warning you—leave her out of this.”
“Did you hear that, Nikolai? He’s warning us!” Yuri said with a chuckle.
“Have you done anything to her?”
“No, not really. We paid Claire a visit at her apartment, just to get acquainted.”
“I’m going to ask you again—have you laid a hand on Claire?”
“Do what we say and she will be safe,” Nikolai said.
“What do you want from me?”
“We want a copy of the encryption keys for the Clipper Chip,” Nikolai said.
Will couldn’t have been more stunned if Nikolai had reached across the table with a right jab. How could he know about the Clipper Chip? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you really want to play it like that?” Yuri asked. “We talked to Claire, remember? We know that you’re lying.”
“Okay, I know about the Clipper Chip. But I don’t know how to get at the encryption keys, and that’s the truth.”
“You are their attorney,” Nikolai said. “Figure it out.”
“And you better do it fast,” Yuri added.
“But while you’re working out how to get us encryption keys, we need something else for our bosses,” Nikolai said.
“Something we can use,” Yuri said. “Information about a public company.”
“Maybe something on rich businessman that we could use for . . .” Nikolai searched in vain for the word, then looked to Yuri impatiently.
“Extortion,” Yuri offered.
“Yes, extortion,” Nikolai said, rolling the word around on his tongue, savoring its illicit flavor. “But it must be valuable.”
Yuri licked foam from his stubbled upper lip. “So, Will, are you going to help us or what?”
“Let him think about his answer,” Nikolai said. “This is a very important decision for him.”
Will took a sip of his coffee and tried to look thoughtful. Even if he had been willing to talk, he couldn’t think of anything to offer them. As far as he knew, Reynolds was not currently involved in any other public-company deals. He rarely spoke to the firm’s white-collar criminal defense attorneys, who might be privy to damaging personal information about corporate executives.
What seemed like about five minutes passed in silence, as Nikolai and Yuri glared at him like a pet that was too slow to perform a trick.
“Yes, I’ll help you. What choice do I have? But I don’t know anything that I can tell you right now.” The looks that Nikolai and Yuri were training on him told him that he needed to say something more if he wanted to live through the morning, so he added, “But I can get something.”
“Are you sure that nothing comes to mind? We could take you out in the alley and put a bullet through your knee, see if that helps,” Yuri offered, once more fingering the bulge in his jacket pocket.
“Will that be necessary, Will?” Nikolai asked.
“You have to believe me. I really don’t have anything. I’ve been spending most of my time on the Jupiter deal. I haven’t been paying much attention to what else is going on at the firm.”
“What do you think, Yuri? Should we give him one more chance?”
“I think we should burn him, but it’s your call. I am just so fucking disappointed in this guy.”
“I see Yuri’s point, Will. I really do. But I have not lost faith in you. Not yet.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“But you should know that if we have to kill you, we’re going to kill Claire first. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“And I hope you know that we have been gentle with you so far. I know you don’t think so, but we have. We are not going to waste our time on that again.”
Sensing that the conversation was drawing to a close, Yuri slurped the last of his latte and licked the foam from his lips.
“We’re going to let you go, but you are going to meet us here at this time tomorrow,” Nikolai said, gnawing on the last fragment of a biscotti. “You will have the encryption keys. If you don’t have the keys, you will tell us your plan for getting them, and you will bring something else that we can use. If you’re five minutes late, Claire is dead.”
Will checked his watch. Eight fifteen. “So we’re meeting here at eight fifteen tomorrow.”
“Make it eight,” Nikolai said as he and Yuri rose to leave, both more alert than when they had arrived, invigorated by either the infusion of caffeine or the delivery of their first threat of the day.
“What do you plan to do with the encryption keys?”
“You don’t need to know that,” Nikolai said.
Although he knew it was unwise, Will asked, “Do the encryption keys have something to do with the attack on BART?”
Nikolai’s face paled, then reddened, then reddened some more, before he spewed a stream of Russian invective at Yuri. As his anger cooled, Nikolai returned to English. “How could you be so stupid?”
“I asked him. He rides BART!” Yuri stammered. “We don’t want him to get himself killed. We can still use him.”
“But you didn’t have to tell him that! We could have just grabbed him when the time came and kept him off the trains.”
“So the encryption keys are going to help in the attack?” Will asked. “What is your friend Aashif going to do? Use them to shut down the power to the trains? Then the riders will be trapped inside with the gas.”
Nikolai and Yuri stopped arguing and just stared at him. Will took that as a yes.
Finally, Nikolai said, quietly, “I don’t think you know how close you are to dying right now.” His face had returned to its normal pallor. “It was Yuri’s mistake to tell you that about the trains. I will be discussing that with Yuri later. But nothing has changed here. You must shut up, and you must do exactly what we say. If you don’t, you are going to watch everyone that you care about in your life die, and then you will join them.”
“Everyone,” Yuri added, apparently not chastened by Nikolai’s abuse.
Rising from his seat, Nikolai said, “You are a good son. Yuri tells me the place where your mother lives is very nice.”
As the Russians walked out of the coffee shop, Yuri turned back, grinning like he was about to tell a funny joke he had been saving up. “But you should really visit your mother more often, Will. She worries.”
NINETEEN
Lullwater Commons was a two-story stucco building in the Richmond District that branched around a central court-yard, resembling an elementary school from the outside. As Will entered the assisted-living facility, the regulars who occupied the couches in the lobby were being herded by the caregivers into the cafeteria for lunch, the clicking of their walkers silenced by tennis balls placed over the front struts.
The lobby was decorated in chintz and flower prints, with a large vase of paper flowers on a table in the center of the room. An ornate, Victorian ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. The lobby was presided over by Barb, a matronly attendant with a gauzy mass of hair that settled around her head like the inhospitable atmosphere of a small, lifeless planet. Barb, who appeared to be only a few years removed from taking up residence at Lullwater herself, surveyed the lobby like a field general. Will had to give credit to the designers of the facility, who had succeeded in creating an environment that was both homey and authoritarian.
Will hurried into the dining room and scanned the tables for his mother. He found Anne sitting alone at a table in the corner of the dining room, a small woman arranging her silverware before her on a paper placemat. Will was relieved to see that she had not been harmed and appeared the same as ever. Her face was still striking, with sharp cheekbones and a long, determined jaw. She might even have been imposing, except that her eyes had lost the intense watchfulness perfected through years in classrooms as a high school history teacher. Now her gaze was soft and unfocused, like she’d lost her glasses.
Anne’s light brown hair was combed straight back, but it wasn’t enough to cover the large spot on the back of her head where her hair was thinning. Her hair had been a darker brown when he was a child, but the hairstylist at Lullwater used a lighter-colored rinse. She was wearing a flowered sweater and the gray pants with the elastic waistband that he had bought her for Christmas. Once she had dressed him; now he dressed her.
“Oh, sweetie, it’s good to see you.” She never called him by name anymore, which made it difficult for him to tell if she really remembered who he was.
“Hi, Mom. How’re you doin’?” He leaned down to plant a kiss on her pallid forehead. In the bright sunlight, her skin appeared almost translucent, revealing tiny purple veins in her temples and hands.
“Oh, I’m fine, I guess. Sort of a mess.”
“Well, I think you look nice. Looks like you had your nails done.”
“They only have one color,” she said, holding out her hand and examining the reddish-brown nail polish. “I’m not sure I like it.”
“I think it looks good on you.”
“I’m cold. Does it seem cold in here to you?”
“Well, maybe a little.” He was actually quite warm in the sunlit corner. “Would you like another sweater?”
“No, I guess not. How are you, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine, but I need to know if you’ve had any visitors lately.”
“Visitors? No, I don’t think so.” Will wasn’t confident that she would remember even if Yuri had paid her a visit.
“A man with a Russian accent?”
“Oh, I get so many visitors it’s hard to keep track of them all.”
Will realized that he wasn’t going to learn anything by asking Anne questions, so he decided to just chat. “Mom,” he said, “I’ve got some good news. I made partner in my law firm.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, sweetie. Did you know that my father was a lawyer?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes.”
Anne’s father had been the owner of a hardware store, not a lawyer. He wondered if Anne was now confusing him with her father. A few years ago, Anne would have thrown a party to celebrate the occasion.
“You always used to tell me that I should become a lawyer, and if I worked real hard, that I’d be a partner in a big firm some day.”
“I said that?”
“All the time.”
“Are you glad you did it?” Her voice had lost the lilt of small talk, and her eyes were focused on him. Will felt as if the mists had parted for a moment to reveal the old Anne, peering out at him, never one to leave anything unfinished.
“Yeah, Mom. I’m glad I did it.”
“Good.” Then, with an added note of finality, “Good.” And with that, the old Anne seemed to vanish again, if she had ever been there at all. “Now, do you want something to eat? I’m going to have some hot tea.”
Anne waved at the dining room attendant, a whippet-thin teenager pushing a cart with lunch plates and plastic pitchers. “Hey there, Anne,” he said. “You going to go for some tea today?”
“Yes, please. Hot tea. Not iced tea.”
“And how about the entrée? Meat loaf or fish sticks?”
“What kind of fish is it?” she asked, ever the discriminating diner.
“It’s just fish, Anne. Can’t get more specific than that.”
“Then I’ll have the meat loaf.”
“Good choice. Who you got here with you today?” he asked.
“This is my son, Will. He’s a lawyer. Will, this is Daunte.”
Will and Daunte nodded at one another and shook hands. “Your mother’s a trip, you know that?” Daunte asked.
“Yeah, I do.” Before Daunte could push his cart on to the next table, Will asked, “Has Anne gotten any visitors lately? A guy with a Russian accent?”
Daunte gave the question some consideration, then said, “No, I think I would have remembered that. But I’m not here every day. Sorry.”
Will said good-bye to his mother, planting more kisses on her forehead, then went back to her room. Every time he visited, he checked her wardrobe to see if she needed anything. Clothes had a way of becoming community property in the facility.
Will was sifting through his mother’s dresser drawers when he saw it and froze. On his mother’s nightstand was an item that had not been there before—a lacquered Russian nesting doll. He opened it up and removed four colorful figurines of Russian peasant women. They were still wobbling on the nightstand as Will rushed out of the room.
TWENTY
Will returned to his apartment and showered and shaved, nicking his face three times in the process. He turned up the volume on the television so that he could listen for any further news of Jupiter on the Financial News Network. He desperately hoped that investors might discount the rumors and start buying Jupiter, but the stock price remained flat. Mort and Christine moved on to other harrowing collapses and miraculous recoveries in the financial markets. The swift stream of commerce coursed onward, and there was no time to linger over the eddying wreckage of Jupiter Software.
Will tried to call Claire’s home number and got her answering machine. He was tempted to go to her apartment and wait there until she showed up to make sure she was okay, but concluded that the best way to keep his mother and Claire safe was to find something that the Russians wanted as quickly as possible. Will had no idea how he would be able to obtain the encryption keys; the high-security and biometric scanners of Jupiter’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility seemed to present an insurmountable barrier. But he did know how to access his law firm’s confidential files. Will decided that he was going to give Yuri and Nikolai at least a semblance of the insider information that they were looking for.
Although Will sought to appease Nikolai and Yuri in the short term, he knew that, through his disclosure to Richard, he had also set in motion the process that might expose the Clipper Chip program and end the Jupiter-Pearl merger negotiations. If Jupiter’s dealings with the NSA became the focus of national media attention, Will expected that the Russians would give up their efforts to secure the encryption keys and would move on to other, less risky criminal schemes.
He arrived at the offices of Reynolds Fincher at two P.M., prepared to stay at the office all day and all night if that was what it took to find just the right bit of tantalizing but ultimately innocuous pseudo-insider information. As Will approached he
r secretarial station, Maggie gave him a look that Will had never seen from her before, at once pitying and accusatory. No doubt she was still wondering about yesterday’s visit from the SEC and DOJ agents. Will simply gave her a sheepish wave as he passed, not wanting to discuss it.
He booted up his computer and got to work. First, he entered his e-mail inbox and reviewed the most recent messages that he had received from the firm’s securities practice group, looking for some mention of a pending public-company transaction.
After wading through about ten e-mail notifications of practice group meetings and new cases, Will found a copy of the minutes of the practice group’s last meeting, one that he had missed because he had been immersed in the Jupiter deal.
The last entry in the minutes was headed M&A: Workload and New Matters. Three corporations were listed in addition to Jupiter: ABT Solutions, Farallon Consulting, and Q-Biologics. These were all publicly traded companies represented by Reynolds Fincher that were apparently in play.
Will accessed the firm’s document management system and typed in the names of the three companies, obtaining the client numbers. Next, he searched the system for the most recent documents saved to the ABT Solutions file. A glance at the first document told him that ABT Solutions, a relatively small database management software company, had already been acquired; the deal had closed two weeks ago.
Will next turned his attention to Farallon Consulting. The most recent document on the system was a draft stock purchase agreement dated the day before. Farallon, a technology consulting business, was going to be acquired by personal computer manufacturing giant Koretsu, which was trying to bolster its narrow profit margins on desktop computers with a thriving consulting practice. The fact that Nikolai and Yuri would have heard of Koretsu made this transaction a promising candidate.
The trick would be to find a nugget of publicly available information suggesting that the acquisition was in the works. If a financial newspaper or stock tip website had already guessed at the impending deal, then his disclosure would still be a breach of client confidentiality, but it was less likely to have an actual effect on the stock price of Koretsu or Farallon. Even so, Will knew that there was no justification for violating attorney-client privilege. He tried telling himself that he was just gathering the information and that he would decide later whether he would actually share it with Nikolai and Yuri.