The Devil's Analyst (28 page)

Danny walked in, trailed by Orleans, and while he tried to signal to Cynthia his apologies at being late, Orleans was demanding his attention.

“Danny, we need to talk. It can’t wait.”

“Whatever it is, it
can
wait,” Danny replied. “I only stopped by to pick up Cynthia so we could walk over to the Temporary Contemporary art museum in Little Tokyo. I’ve held up Cynthia long enough. We need to go.”

“You can’t go. Josh has disappeared again. I can’t find him, and I need a decision made. Time is running out.”

Danny just stared at his company’s chief financial officer. He clearly had no idea what concerned her. Cynthia thought that she should leave the room.

“Okay, just tell me.”

“No. Not with Cynthia here. It’s about the business and is highly confidential.”

Danny didn’t care. “Cynthia is a major investor,” he countered.

“It also concerns your personal funds.”

That didn’t faze Danny. “Cynthia is one of my closest and oldest friends. Just tell me, so we can get on our way.”

Cynthia stood up. “I think I should go.”

“No,” Danny insisted. “Please sit and take a moment. If this is so important, then maybe I’ll need your help. Let’s hear it together.” He turned toward Orleans. “You’ve got the floor.”

The woman gave in. She brushed some loose hair back behind her ear. “Financially, things are critical. You have to make a decision.”

“Why aren’t you talking to Josh? I know he’s at that BLINK conference in Manhattan, but he’s got his Blackberry. Just call him. Send him an email.”

“I just told you I tried and he hasn’t answered. No one at the conference knows where he is. He disappeared as soon as his talk ended earlier this morning, and he checked out of the Hyatt. The market’s crashing around us, and the bankers are getting nervous.”

“Okay,” Danny said but he was mentally checking out. Cynthia was reminded of the high school boy he once was.

Orleans didn’t notice. She had a message to deliver. “We’re out of cash. We may not be able to make payroll.”

Danny just looked at her. “How can that be? Endicott-Meyers invested an extra million back in January, and I know our subscription rates have been going up every month since then. We can’t be low on funds.”

“Danny, believe me when I tell you our run rate has burned through all the reserves. If we had gone public by now, which was our plan, that step would have provided ample new financing. But we haven’t been able to do that.”

Danny was still unconcerned. “I don’t know a lot about the books, but why don’t Josh and I put more of our money into the company to tide it over? Josh always tells me he wants other people to take the risk, but, hey, we’re rich, aren’t we? If there’s a rough patch, Josh and I can afford taking the other investors through it.”

Cynthia watched Orleans, and thought how she had never before seen this woman so unsure and unable to speak.

“Danny,” Orleans finally determined what to say. “You know that I’m not only the CFO for Premios, but that I also head finances for Josh’s personal company including all of his real estate holdings.”

“That’s really Josh’s thing, not mine. But, yeah, I know you’re his right hand man, woman, whatever.”

Orleans was slowly finding her ground. “When I said earlier that the bankers are calling, it’s not the potential investors in Premios, it’s the guys holding the mortgages on all of Josh’s other holdings. Everything he owns, everything you own, is mortgaged to the hilt—and then some. Josh’s stake in Premios is without a doubt the most important part of his collateral. In the bankers’ eyes, the rout on Wall Street is pretty much reducing that stake to the value of a piece of shit. They’re threatening to call the loans. All of them. And there’s no cash.”

While Cynthia was sitting in the room, it was clear she no longer mattered to Orleans. The woman was locked onto Danny whose face was ashen. He struggled to appear unsurprised, but Cynthia could tell he was deeply shocked. Orleans clearly realized the same, and began to backpedal on the harsh disclosures. “Are you aware of other resources you could tap?” she asked.

“What about the house in Los Feliz? The camp in Wisconsin? Each is worth millions. Can’t we tap into them?”

Orleans had the decency to look to the ground. “Already done.”

“Okay,” Danny’s voice was halting. “What about my proceeds from the sale of my blog InnerEatz. When we sold that to AOL, we invested my share in a bunch of mutual funds. We can use that, can’t we?

“Danny, you gave Josh full power of attorney over those investment accounts. They’ve already been emptied. I am sorry that I have to tell you this, but Josh has faced several reversals in his real estate developments. Everything hinges on the success of Premios. And this company has just been flushed down the drain.”

Danny slumped into the chair next to Cynthia. She grasped his hand, but he didn’t seem to care or even notice.

“Is everything gone?” he whispered.

“What are you doing here?”
demanded Oliver. He was standing on the high stoop of a newly built townhouse not far from Chicago’s McCormick Center. The street was stately but rather barren—the kind of in-town development mostly occupied by the young and newly rich. He quickly glanced in both directions to see who might be watching. But it wasn’t the kind of street to attract nosy neighbors.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Josh asked.

A brisk spring wind was blowing off the lake. The patch of daffodils in the small bed by the bottom step didn’t seem to be doing well in the chill. Josh understood how they felt. He wanted out of the weather.

Oliver stepped aside and motioned him to enter. Josh walked in, unbuttoned his coat, threw it on a chair in the foyer, and strolled into the living room where he promptly sat. He smiled because he didn’t care whether Oliver wanted him there or not. He knew what had to be done.

“We’ve had our offices and computers scanned,” Oliver said, knowing that Josh would understand what he meant. “We found the malware left behind from your last visit. It’s gone now, so your snooping days are over. You should behave more carefully. My colleagues aren’t happy.”

“Who can be happy in times like these?” Josh asked rhetorically. There was something exhilarating when you reached the point of no return. There would be no safe harbor ahead unless he created it.

Everything was so monitored these days. It was getting harder and harder to avoid scrutiny, he thought. Credit card records could be tracked. Video cameras were becoming more and more common in public spaces. But there were still ways around all of that. That’s why he boarded Amtrak’s Broadway Limited the night before to take a sleeper into Chicago from Manhattan. No one paid attention to anyone’s identification when you took the train, especially when you paid with cash. He saw no reason to make it easy for anyone to discover his unannounced stop in this Lincoln Park neighborhood.

The real trick was to stay off the computer and the network. You thought you were alone, but you weren’t. Oliver should have known that, but people were so quick to forget unpleasant truths. Of course, few held the tools that Josh did to focus on people of interest. Josh supposed the government did, but he wasn’t likely to be of interest to them, and he meant to keep it that way.

Josh was feeling himself
again, the man in control, although it took a while to get his bearings back after stepping off the stage at the BLINK conference. Barbara abandoned him like a dead weight. The panic in the hotel was infectious. Over the past few weeks, reality had a nasty way of stripping away any illusions one had about the economy. On the overnight train ride, he fell into a nightmarish slumber where he relived over and over a conversation that Barbara and Chip once had about some cat and whether it was dead or alive. In the clarity of the morning, there wasn’t a question in his mind. This dot-com cat was dead, and that rather limited Josh’s options.

He hadn’t been quick enough. The demands of Oliver and his pals kept him from dipping into the IPO sea soon enough. Their focus on proving the viability of Project Big Stick ate up his cash and delayed his real business. Josh wasn’t a miracle worker. He tried everything he knew to keep things afloat while he found a way to toss the bad guys overboard. He wanted to do it without swamping them all. It didn’t work, but he didn’t intend to drown in his own mistakes.

A safe passage was still possible. The problem was that for a while it seemed so unclear exactly what his bearings should be.

Throughout yesterday and all during the night, his Blackberry buzzed incessantly with Orleans’ calls and e-mails. Finally, he turned the device off. He wasn’t going to pick up a call no matter how many times she tried, nor was he going to look at her written pleas. They would only be a distraction.

Josh wasn’t an idiot. He understood every way in which he had allowed himself to become overextended. He knew how much of his world was built like a house of cards. One wrong burst of air and it would all be sent tumbling. Yesterday, he was pretty certain, that gust occurred. But could he keep Danny from finding out? Could he reset the playing field before Danny discovered the ways in which Josh had betrayed him? The opportunity was narrow, but there was a glimmer of an exit.

In the townhouse
, Oliver failed to find Josh’s flippancy amusing. “Don’t you see it’s over?” Oliver asked with a tone that clearly conveyed that he considered it over.

“You tried to get rid of us, but we’re not playing your game. You see, you’re playing ours. If we don’t step in with more cash, Premios won’t survive and neither will your personal finances.

“Admittedly Colby Endicott is rather a fool. I whispered a few things in his ear yesterday about Danny and your net worth. After all, Josh, you’re not the only one who does his homework. We learned how much you owe, and to whom you owe it. That information is all it took with Colby. He’s easily spooked, and I suspect he called some of the bankers he knew. He probably expressed his concerns. Have you been getting calls from your bankers, Josh?”

“I don’t know,” Josh answered honestly. “I turned off my Blackberry. There’s a reason they call it a Crackberry. You can become so addicted.”

He was looking forward to what he was about to tell Oliver, because he knew all too well what Oliver was—a man who lacked any sense of discretion or honor. Perhaps Oliver thought Josh would never stumble across Lopez’s most recent novel, but Josh had seen it on Danny’s shelves. He read the book, and he knew that Lopez could only have gotten some of the details in that story from Oliver. Of course, there were some elements missing or wrong. But that didn’t really change his assessment. For reasons that didn’t really matter now, the man in front of him had wronged Danny once long ago, did it a second time by misleading Jesus Lopez, and now was attempting a third. Josh would not feel guilty about what he had to do.

Oliver was smirking. “It’s over, Josh. You lost. I know you like to think you’re the emperor of the world, always outthinking the rest of us, always one step ahead. But you’re just a man.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Josh replied. “We all have our weaknesses. Yours is that you don’t maintain a very strategic view. And for an asshole at heart, you’re also remarkably trusting of the people that you think are on your side. After all this time, you never learned that in every game, you always have to play alone. There’s no one on your side but you.”

“Whatever.” Oliver was slowly stepping backward into the hall, as though he would cross over into the den. Josh had visited this townhouse before, and knew that was where Oliver kept a gun. But that didn’t worry Josh. He wanted Oliver to have that gun.

“Your team demanded a demonstration of Big Stick,” Josh continued speaking as though he had all the time in the world. He imagined how he might talk about these topics the next time he spoke at a BLINK conference. Admittedly, he would have to do some careful editing, recast the story into a different setting, but still he could envision how what was about to happen could be transformed into an amusing anecdote.

“You may think you erased our software, but you didn’t. Actually, the last few weeks have turned out better than I thought they would. Our guy in Poland, who you so helpfully introduced, has programmed for me an incredibly effective money laundering capability. What we did with Chip and Lattigo was child’s play compared with our most recent feats. It’s too bad your guys weren’t the mafia needing to find a better tool for hiding money. I think we could have been really good at it, and everyone would have been happier.”

Oliver looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

Then Oliver gained confidence as he continued. “You never really understood anything you know. Because you’ve always been fascinated by holding information over other people, you assume that’s what we want. Such a fool, Josh. Focused always on the wrong thing. Big Stick lets us disrupt the modern world, screwing up databases and manipulating financial records. Cyber terrorism. That’s what this game is really about.”

Josh laughed at the ridiculous nature of Oliver’s rant. The man never understood the people he was playing with or the limits and possibilities of the technology they sought. It didn’t matter now.

Throughout Josh’s harangue, Oliver continued to inch slowly backward from the living room across the foyer and into his den. Josh obligingly followed, happy to pretend he didn’t notice what Oliver was doing. He acknowledged that he was acting a bit like a James Bond villain, making sure Oliver knew what was about to happen, but that was part of the pleasure of the plan.