The Finder: A Novel (7 page)

Alone among the seven factories was the building where Jin Li sat up now in the half dawn, thinking she'd heard something. This building was notable for the implausibility of its continued existence;
the place should have collapsed long ago. Why? All five floors were crammed with heavy useless matter, the crème de la crème of junk. The top floor was filled with claw-footed iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks, many of them tagged with information explaining their origin: "Hotel Edison, 1967 renovation," and so on. The fourth floor contained engine parts not only from vintage American cars and trucks of the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s but, even more obscurely, utterly impossible-to-find motorcycles from early German, French, Italian, and British companies long defunct. The weight of these parts alone should have compromised the floor joists decades earlier. On the third floor could be found close to two million pairs of women's nylon stockings, still boxed, ranging in size from "petite" to "queen." The freight elevator was forever frozen on this floor, its bearings finally burnt out. Just to empty the building, either for demolition or renovation, would have required the replacement of the elevator, a considerable and demoralizing expense. Moving downward, the second floor contained thousands of boxes marked "Property of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development/New York City Regional Offices." These lost records documented the marginally successful attempt by the federal government to house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during the economic downturn of the early 1970s. And finally, the ground floor was piled with spools of obsolete fiber-optic cable, bought when the city was rewiring itself in the speculative fever dream of the 1990s.

From time to time people asked about renting cheap office space in the building and these inquiries were fielded by the custodian, a Russian man with strange, faded Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles who did little more than sweep up the sidewalk once a week and remove flyers advertising art-house movies and new rock bands. He handed the prospective renters copies of the keys to the steel door to the building, told them to use the stairwell, and to go in the middle of the day for the power was off and no lights worked. "And please you drop key in mailbox." But whether the key was returned was a matter of character—as was whether the Russian custodian noticed. He generally didn't, for he noticed very little in life now. He followed the rankings of his
favorite European soccer teams, he drank not vodka but four bottle-inches of Sambuca each night from the same crusty glass, and if asked whether he really cared about who came to and went from the cramped and dirty building on Nineteenth Street, he would have admitted he cared not at all.

Returning to that building by way of the stairwell to the second floor, one could easily discover that Jin Li had pushed around some of the boxes of federal housing records to create a small room within them; in this dim space was all she carried with her: an inflatable mattress, a fat wad of cash, her Chinese passport, a small green suitcase containing not only her blue CorpServe uniform but also one nice cotton dress (why she'd hastily packed this, she had no idea), a bag of toiletries, a cell phone now carefully turned off, and a Styrofoam ice box. On the mattress lay Jin Li, looking at the ceiling, thinking again she had heard something downstairs.

What? Anything?

She listened. Nothing—
maybe.

At least she had planned ahead, Jin Li told herself, keeping the key that the Russian had given her when she'd come looking for cheap office space for CorpServe a few months earlier. The place had been all wrong for her purposes, but its obscurity and neglect had struck her as potentially useful in other circumstances. In China nowadays buildings like this were soon demolished and someone like her brother would put up a cheap apartment building three times higher. The Russian had never asked for the key back and so she'd kept it—in her purse and in the back of her mind as a place she could hide. No one would want to rent space in a firetrap that had no electricity or heat. But still she was anxious. She could have been followed—that was possible. The men at the beach in the big trucks had followed her, after all, had been looking for her and her alone. She was sure. The Mexican girls didn't know anything. How did the men identify Jin Li? She had been so careful. Did they plan on coming back? Were they still looking for her?

And then there was her brother, Chen. As soon as she'd called from a pay phone, he jumped on the first flight he could find to New York
City and started asking around for her, making things worse. Usually it took forever to get a visa to visit the United States, but Chen knew people, was owed money and favors by men and women all over Shanghai and even in Beijing. He'd panicked when she'd called him—not over
her,
but that his clever international criminal enterprise was endangered. "What did you do?" he'd screamed at her in their family's Mandarin dialect. "How did you fuck up?"

It was a question Jin Li couldn't quite answer, though she'd thought about it constantly. CorpServe had been carefully created by Chen with one devious purpose in mind, but in order to appear to be a conventional company it contained three divisions, two of them legitimate business units operating in the open. The first division cleaned New York City offices at conventional rates, bidding for contracts with management companies and corporate operations people. This part of the company ran daily crews in thirty-two buildings, the number naturally fluctuating as contracts were won or lost upon expiration. The crews dutifully cleaned, collected, and hauled dry waste—paper, cardboard boxes, printed matter, coffee cups, and so on—down to the service bays where the refuse was loaded and removed by one of the city's private carting companies, another distinct business so cutthroat and residually mobbed up that one entered it only at great risk and with even greater connections. It would be a good two generations before anyone with a Chinese name operated such a company in midtown Manhattan.

The second part of CorpServe, which serviced seventeen buildings, both collected dry waste and provided onsite "chain-of-custody" document destruction. The company owned nine forty-four-foot mobile units, each of which was divided into a shredding equipment area and a payload space for storage of the shredded materials. Each unit could handle up to eight thousand pounds of paper per hour and could shred not just boxes, files, paper clips, and rubber bands but also CDs, DVDs, identity cards, hard drives, even uniforms. CorpServe provided shredding as high as the level five standard, used for commercially sensitive and top secret documents, which mandated a maximum particle size of 0.8 × 12 millimeters. The mobile units generated their own elec
trical power, and everything was shredded and baled in one simple operation, the bales then trucked away in volume to paper mills where the paper and extraneous matter were separated by particle-weight blowers and recycled. Each mobile CorpServe shredding unit was equipped with a New York State–certified scale that weighed the material to be shredded and came with a complete video system that recorded the actual shredding. After each night's work, the CorpServe technician provided the building services manager a copy of the scale tickets and a video of the shredding. This was usually a big selling point, but in truth these tickets and videos soon piled up and were eventually shredded along with everything else. Document destruction, just like office cleaning, was an incredibly boring business. There was no tangible product except a blur of confettied paper. The customer paid to make something into nothing, literally for the creation of emptiness. The mobile shredders were loud; no one wanted to watch them for very long. On long-term contracts, client oversight eroded away then vanished. The uniformed CorpServe crews—all of them Mexican, Guatemalan, and Chinese women—unfailingly showed up on time and did their jobs. Trying to get a handhold on America, the workers generally felt lucky to be employed, spoke English poorly, and affected a submissive mien, rarely even speaking to office personnel—not out of a quest for efficiency but on the assumption that no one had anything to say to them. Which was true. Faceless, nameless, they were more or less invisible.

From an organizational viewpoint, these two CorpServe divisions were remarkably "flat"; one person ran each, supervising the work crews and schedules from the company's run-down warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Jin Li had picked this location because it was cheap and out-of-the-way yet relatively close to Manhattan. No one much bothered with the CorpServe trucks coming and going there. Another person handled the bookkeeping and payroll for the two divisions. These operations were sufficiently profitable to justify the existence of CorpServe.

But it was the third function of CorpServe that both Chen and Jin Li fixated upon. This part, which generated no organizational paper
work, and indeed was never mentioned or described in writing, combined select elements of the other two. The idea was simply to steal useful information. When the cleaning division worked in offices that generated wastepaper that looked potentially valuable to Jin Li, she tried mightily to underbid the shredding contract for that building, if there was one. Sometimes she was successful and thus gained legitimate access to the stream of desired waste information. This meant that her company not only removed the information but also controlled it after removal. Then it was a matter of segregating the material that should not be shredded. Of course sometimes she was not successful in underbidding the shredding contract and no information could be removed on a regular basis. One of Chen's principles was that no nonrefuse documents be stolen from offices, a directive she agreed with. That was too risky, would draw attention if discovered. Theirs was a quiet, subtle play in which companies were
paying them to remove valuable information.
If there were ever a question about a particular bag of waste, why it had not been shredded, then Jin Li could just say a mistake had been made, bags had gotten mixed up. But no mistake had ever been made.

Until now, that is. What was it?

Jin Li had supervised all three operations, only occasionally appearing at one or another of the legitimate cleaning or shredding locations, but five nights a week riding with mobile shredder #6 (a lucky number for the Chinese) as it appeared at the small number of locations she wanted to plunder for information. She always wore a baggy blue CorpServe uniform, removed her makeup, tucked her hair up under a cap, and presented her company ID if asked. The security officers in the buildings either recognized her as the supervisor or knew that cleaning company staffs had a lot of turnover and didn't bother to question a diminutive Chinese woman in uniform with an ID clipped to her breast pocket. Except for the driver of #6, the other CorpServe staffers didn't know her true role. She was just the shift supervisor who sometimes removed waste herself. The promising stuff made it into the "blue bags," as they were called, and these were set aside for careful scrutiny later. If any of the cleaners seemed too interested in Jin Li's
activities, Jin Li quickly praised the woman on her excellent work, shifted her to one of the legitimate cleaning operations, and gave her a marginal raise.

As she prowled the target businesses at night, Jin Li moved with light-footed efficiency, for if you clean offices every day, you know a lot about them. Typically she received plans of the floors that CorpServe cleaned and made a point always to ask if there were any sensitive elements of the job, such as a CEO who stayed late, which offices needed to be vacuumed daily because of allergies, which vacuumed less frequently, etc. All in the guise of providing excellent service, which in fact CorpServe did. Very often the response by management pinpointed exactly which office or offices were
most
valuable. Jin Li had learned that secretaries and assistants had better trash than their supervisors, because they made drafts of responses, copied e-mail, and so on. But that was not all! CorpServe could also provide, if asked, another service: secure, lockable plastic bins marked
TO BE SHREDDED
, an assistance that companies liked, since it efficiently segregated sensitive documents away from the eyes of their own not-so-trustworthy employees. Of course these bins usually contained the
very best
information Jin Li most wanted, or, put another way, CorpServe's clients were paying it extra money to more efficiently steal the very information they most wanted destroyed. She had keys that fit all of the different makes of these bins, and it was a matter of quickly emptying them into a bag that she would later inspect. People were amazingly sloppy with paper, especially now that everyone used computers. Companies spent enormous sums on their internal and external computer security, hiring an endless string of geniuses, wizards, and solemn soothsayers to implement every manner of state-of-the-art antihacking protocols. Paper, however, was by definition superfluous, since every document and e-mail existed somewhere on a computer. And because things were not "saved" on paper anymore, they were less likely to be "filed" away. Paper had become the temporary, disposable manifestation of the electronic file, convenient for carrying around but not worth being careful with. You could always print out another copy.

All this was true from one office to the next. Some had security
procedures, but these were rarely enforced with any regularity. People in New York offices were too busy, too pressured, too ambitious to worry about their wastepaper. It was someone else's problem.

Which was also to say it was Jin Li's opportunity. She had learned to avoid certain industries and to target others. Law firms had some value, especially if they had a mergers-and-acquisitions department, a fact easy enough to determine. But the short-term value of these papers was so obvious, not to mention subject to SEC security regulations, that the law firms generally went to great lengths to destroy their paper. Publishing and media companies, by contrast, had absolutely no value. Retail banking was useless. Insurance companies were useless too, except if they had a corporate liability department, which had the potential to be a gold mine if documents revealed a company facing huge undisclosed problems, such as product lawsuits. The companies underwriting corporate bonds had some value, since they evaluated the underlying creditworthiness of the companies whose debt they peddled. Pharmaceutical companies were good, when you could find one with interesting product research, but the best offices were financial services firms, which evaluated stocks, because what she wanted most was time-perishable information that immediately affected the price of a publicly traded company—stock prices generally reacting to information faster and more dramatically than do bonds. The information had to be so good, so privileged, that the analysts, journalists, stock pickers, inside leakers, and anyone else interested didn't already have it.