The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read online

  “It’s goin’. Thanks for your custom research work last night.”

  “Any time. I kinda like that covert stuff. Reminds me of Casino Royale.”

  He must have been referring to the video game version. “Well, I’ve got another mission for you if you’re interested.”

  “Always!”

  “Winston, this may sound like a pretty odd question, but is there anything about the content of MultiQuest that could be linked to prostitution – of younger women?”

  “There’s a question.”

  He said: “No, it’s really not that kind of game, Natalie. I’ve been playing it for almost a month. There certainly are games with that kinda content: single-shooter RPGs like Grand Theft Auto –”

  “RPGs?”

  “Role player games. But MultiQuest –” And he thought more. “I can’t honestly think of anything. But maybe something’ll come to me.”

  “If it does, would you mind giving me a call?” And she gave him her cell number.

  “Sure thing. You can count on it, Ms Bond!”

  She met Cindy in the Special Agent’s gold Yukon SUV, parked down the street from Clamor’s office. Cindy had suggested the venue, presumably for privacy reasons. Natalie was happy not to re-enter the Clamor building after last night’s crazy scare. Cindy was in the driver’s seat, Natalie in the back, and in the passenger seat sat Agent Lau. Smooth-skinned and suave, he looked like some kind of precision instrument. He was holding a white polystyrene cup filled to the top with black coffee.

  “You met Adam Lau, Natalie?”

  “Briefly, yesterday,” Natalie said, ready to shake his hand properly.

  “We’ve met,” he said, blowing on the edge of his hot drink. He kept looking straight ahead, towards the building entrance.

  In the call setting up this meeting, Natalie had established that Cindy was indeed an Honor Council member at boarding school. She’d learned that the older woman was now a mother of two, a trained psychologist who’d been in the FBI for two decades, and a transplant to San Jose from her native Atlanta – a real ‘Georgia peach’, Natalie thought. Though perhaps a little bruised from her years in the bureau. Natalie liked everything about her.

  “OK, what cha got for us Natalie?”

  “I was hoping you could fill me in a little first, on what you’re looking for.”

  Cindy turned, the upholstery creaking. She looked at Natalie dead-on with her bright blue eyes. “Horse tradin’, huh?” And finally she winked. “Well, I always say – though I’m unusual in this respect: if you don’t say anything, you sure-fire won’t hear anything.”

  She paused, considering where to begin.

  “For several years now, we’ve been investigating Russian-related organized crime, across the Bay Area, as it relates to prostitution, escort services and all the trimmin’s – pimping, blackmail, extortion, racketeering. It follows on from Operation Gilded Cage, if you remember that one.”

  Natalie vaguely remembered but asked for a recap.

  “In 2005, we busted a massage parlour ring imprisoning hundreds of Korean girls, from San Jose up to San Fran, and taking in all these towns, right here in the Valley. Suburban massage parlours in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Millbrae – everywhere. We coordinated with ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that is – and a bunch of other law enforcement organizations. And we indicted fifty bad guys.”

  It made Natalie wonder. “Why are Korean women so often mixed up in this stuff?”

  “It’s the debt culture. Korean girls are desperate to work their way out of the transit debts. Which their pimps, of course, make sure they can never quite do.

  “The problem’s grown like a weed since. We know the clubs, the venues; very likely they know that we know. But this time we wanna go deep. Get all those nasty roots out from underground.

  “Now, Russia and the former Eastern-bloc countries: they’ve developed this world class expertise, in moving young girls from one part of the globe to another.” The irises of Cindy’s eyes sharpened perceptibly in the rear view mirror. “They’re bringing in girls from the Far East, direct across the Pacific, by the boat load – literally. Again, I’m only telling you things any good journalist would already have dug up. What we’re going to be talking about next, you must not speak about with anyone.”

  Natalie thought briefly about Ben. “OK.”

  “Is that an ‘OK, I agree’?” and she turned again to look Natalie dead on.

  It was like speaking with her mother! Jesus, “Yes, I agree.”

  “OK. The bureau, and I’m taking national now, has spent the last few years following the money. We’ve had our forensic accountants and our best surveillance jockeys –” she eyed Adam Lau – “monitoring the path of the proceeds. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, moving from one company to the next. Daisy chains they’re called. Pretty term, huh? Problem being they always end in what’s known as a ‘burn’ company: a parent entity that ghosts on us.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Vanishes. The P.O. box expires, the server gets unplugged – typically in some offshore jurisdiction where we don’t have extradition rights. – We’re working on that.

  “We need whatever leads we can get. The Internet, social media sites... We noticed this Malovich guy’s sudden death, and his Eastern European background, and we got curious. Telling ya, it took some work getting that search warrant from a judge, but we got it.”

  Natalie: “And what have you managed to find out, about Malovich?”

  “We’ll come back to that. Your turn.”

  Natalie ran through the events since the investor presentation: the four thousand profile pages on Clamor, the links with the mysterious website identifiable only as Surefar Enjoy – “which has a Russian domain name, by the way.”

  Cindy thought. “Sure far enjoy, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK,” Cindy looked at her colleague. “We’ll check it out. This dog may hunt.”

  Natalie: “Actually, there’s more. I think I may have uncovered an upstream link to a new online fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest.”

  Both turned towards her. “Huh?” Cindy said.

  “It’s where the site traffic to these profile pages originates from.”

  Cindy remained puzzled. Adam looked thoughtful but said nothing.

  “Adam, we maybe need to get you a role in this game,” Cindy said.

  “No need,” he said, doubling the number of words he’d spoken the entire meeting. “Hi, I’m Brastias,” and he turned back to Natalie with outstretched hand. He couldn’t help smile at her surprise. “I know, I know. It was very weird the first time this happened to me too. After we met in the office yesterday, I went home and into the game, and noticed you arrive.”

  Natalie was too disorientated for words.

  “– I was up on the Scintanel Plateau when you were crossing the Quorn Valley,” he said, to Cindy’s total bemusement too. The Special Agent looked at her partner like he’d taken leave of his senses.

  “Well I’ll be darned,” Natalie finally managed, smiling back.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Woodside Village Pub was situated in one of Silicon’s Valley’s ritziest enclaves. With its humble exterior, white-veranda seating area and lazy flower boxes, it was still possible to imagine the avocado orchards and horse farms of Steinbeck’s era – except for the Bentleys, top-of-the-range Mercs and other European supercars filling the parking lot.

  Inside, there was a large central room with a bar at one end, backlit honey-amber. The décor mixed old English and even traditional Japanese themes: a real fire, lacquered-brown geometric ceiling beams, candles set on white linen and blood red upholstery. It was a meticulous and yet a rather crazy, Pacific Rim reformulation of the village pub.

  The four men arrived at the maitre d’ stand within minutes of each other. Towse was last to arrive, at 7pm precisely. He was lanky – 6’2” maybe, with wild, nervous energy. He wore an ope
n-neck shirt and dark gabardine jacket. While greeting the three bankers, he rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Right this way gentlemen!” – and the maitre d’ led them to a private room. Eyes lifted from the candlelit linen as they passed through. At one table sat actress Michelle Pfeiffer; at another, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

  The private room was like the main room in miniature. They took their seats, Towse fussing for a moment with his place setting, arranging a battery of mobile communication devices within reach. The maitre d’ said the sommelier would be right along, then she left them to it. Napkins were drawn.

  Ben had done his homework, researching Towse’s background in detail. He’d consulted all the usual sources: Forbes, Business Week, the Journal, Financial Times and Economist, but focused on his favourite: the technology-business magazine Gold Standard, which had published a recent, in-depth piece on him with the rhyming title:

  The Future: Who Knows? – Towse

  And though it too dwelled on his Farther Frontier Fund, the article gave a fascinating personal portrait of the man as well.

  Paul Towse was 39 years old, single, and a billionaire.

  His father was born in Hungary, his mother in Minnesota. Pál Tőzsér senior had taken advantage of the post-‘56 freedoms to emigrate from Budapest, improbably landing near Reno, Nevada, as a pit boss at a local casino. His soon-to-be wife worked as a dancer at the same gambling resort. Paul junior grew up with a gift for numbers, and went on to specialize in mathematics at Princeton.

  While still in college, Paul visited Europe, and detoured east, to his father’s homeland. One thing led to another and he soon found himself investing throughout Eastern Europe in basic commodities: copper, aggregates and other re-building materials. He hardly became an oligarch but, by the age of 30, he’d accumulated several million dollars worth of capital.

  Towse missed the 2000 tech party altogether, but was happy to participate in the clean up. He developed a theory that the companies which had built out the Internet’s infrastructure were significantly undervalued by 2002 – that the vast amount of network capacity installed would inevitably get taken up, as web usage grew. Accordingly, he bet heavily on networking stocks such as Juniper, Foundry and OptiShaft. He evolved a complicated statistical model and an associated philosophy he termed ‘Re-contextuality’ – something which few people understood at the time, and least of all Towse it appeared, whose net worth promptly halved. However, he made some valuable contacts in tech circles, hitting on the idea of taking US technology models that did work to Russia, the Ukraine – wherever. He would wait to get bought out by the very same expanding US companies whose ideas he’d ‘emulated’ in the first place, or – in the worst case scenario – do it the old-fashioned way, building actual, profitable businesses. Social media became his focus.

  His first big hit was a Russian dating website almost indistinguishable from Match.com. He went on to make a killing, his fund averaging annual rates of return in excess of 1,250% during the mid noughties. Soon he was getting first look at hot Silicon Valley deals, one of which was Clamor.us.

  He decided to move the center of his business operations to the Bay Area, acquiring an estate in nearby Woodside and a mansion in Pacific Heights (San Francisco) once owned by the movie mogul Sullivan B. Wentworth. Wherever he was in residence, no fewer than five chefs attended to him, each specializing in a different regional cuisine, his current favourite being Balinese. He gave generously to the arts, donating to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He meditated, he was a Chess Master, and – Gold Standard mischievously disclosed – he had an eye for the ladies.

  The sommelier arrived and proposed two eye-wateringly expensive bottles of wine: a red and a white. Nobody objected. Schweitzer and Ben ordered the grilled New York Angus steak, medium-rare, with braised Romano beans and a sauce Bérnaise. Towse went for the American Ossetra caviar weighing in at a remarkably reasonable $90 an ounce, while Leonard Carmichael had a cup of warm milk and a pale, viscous-looking soup, not on the menu. He was like a bear with a sore head. Ben had just learned from Schweitz’s assistant, Francesca, the reasons for the Chairman’s permanently foul mood: a bad and worsening stomach ulcer, and a yet more debilitating feud with his 18 year-old daughter.

  Conversation got off to a cautious start.

  “So how d’it happen?” Towse was asking after Malovich in his staccato-flat voice. He seasoned his caviar.

  “Suicide apparently,” Schweitzer said.

  “Apparently?” Towse suspended his fork. “We don’t know?”

  “Law enforcement’s working the case. They have a team of forensics looking at it. It’s OK: we already have somebody else on point, for the company’s security affairs.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name’s Natalie Chevalier. She used to run security up at –”

  “Chevalier,” Towse interrupted, his eyes flickering recognition. “Not the daughter of Henri?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Philosopher, used to write for Le Monde newspaper in Paris?”

  “If you’d met her, you’d remember,” Schweitzer said, hoping to warm this male assembly up a little: “early thirties, she’s a traffic stopper.”

  “Let’s talk strategy,” Carmichael said.

  “Sure. Ben?”

  “Thank you. So, the plan is to head out east in two weeks’ time and do a couple of select pitches, before the road show proper gets rolling – assuming we still need a road show proper. We’ve set up two meetings: one with Constellation Capital, the other with Ensign – Ensign being the private investment vehicle of Sheik Yasan. Has a hundred billion under management.”

  “A hundy, huh,” Towse ruminated, pushing his picked-over caviar to one side.

  “And Constellation?” Carmichael asked Ben to clarify, ostensibly for Towse’s benefit.

  “It’s a quant fund based out of Connecticut,” Towse answered for him. “Hedgies,” he said disdainfully.

  “Constellation Capital is a wild card,” Ben conceded. “Consider it the warm up act. But Ensign’s the real deal. The Sheikh is a big personal user of Clamor. His Chief Investment Officer is signalling he may be in for a billion, plus.”

  “We’re calling him the pivot,” Schweitzer said laconically. “He takes half the issue, the rest is going to one-fifty a share, no question about it.”

  The blood was up. A large killing suddenly felt real, imminent. Schweitzer continued: “We were hoping you could accompany the management team out east. Spread a little of your futurist gold dust.”

  “Right right right,” Towse said like a machine gun.

  There was a foreign silence.

  “I think,” Towse said, fingering his napkin, “that we all agree on the desirability of a liquidity event.”

  The silence resumed, Carmichael and Schweitzer eying one another. Finally Schweitz said: “It’s called the IPO, Paul.” Nervous laughter.

  “The question being whether we’ve explored all the possibilities.”

  Possibilities?

  “For example, whether a combination could also make sense.”

  There was another pause as Carmichael, the heaviest heavyweight on the banking team, pondered dignifying this statement with a response.

  But this was Paul Towse. “A combination with whom?”

  “I have a company in my fund,” Towse went on, “involved in the online entertainment space.”

  “Online entertainment,” Carmichael repeated slowly.

  “Not porn or gambling,” Towse said quickly. “M.M.O.R.P.G.”

  Carmichael frowned. “What?”

  “Massively multiplayer online role player gaming,” Towse said. “It’s a fantasy world, like World of Warcraft, only – bigger! Better. It’s destined for ten times as many users, and disproportionately more profits. With the right distribution partner, that is.”

  “But this is perfect,” Schweitzer said with apparent sincerity. “A deep commercial partnership: this could complete
the story! A new and sustainable revenue source, showcasing the versatility of the Clamor partner-advertiser base –”

  “Do-Re-Mi’s already in there,” interrupted Towse. "Exclusively promoted on Clamor.”

  “The Korean gaming company paying Clamor eighty-five million,” Ben murmured to Schweitzer.

  “Outright ownership’s preferable,” Towse said. “Definitely preferable.”

  Ben started to wonder just what else could go wrong with this IPO, now that the hoped-for cheerleader-investor was questioning whether there should even be one!

  “But Paul,” Carmichael said, with as much good humor and flattery as he could muster, which wasn’t much. “Fifteen billion dollars is a lot of money, even at this table.” He spoke in soothing, doleful tones – as if talking to his daughter, Ben imagined.

  More uneasy silence.

  Towse looked like a child being denied his Christmas toys. He was rubbing his neck again.

  Schweitzer: “What makes you think it’s such a great fit, Paul? Sure, Clamor’s got lots of users – but where do the synergies lie?”

  “The kid – Wisnold, and what’s her name? Bitchy Wu – have created this piece of technology for abstracting identity roles. It’s called a multi-identity engine.”

  “Sure,” Schweitzer said. “But how –”

  “It can be custom-tuned, to encourage new users into the game. Getting newbies into character roles that truly delight them. I assume you guys know about the psychological concept of liminality?”

  Schweitzer rolled his eyes; it even rhymed with Re-contextuality, the concept that had lost Towse half his fortune after the tech bust.

  “And then there are the groups, and the mapping of them to the guild system in the game –” but Towse suddenly caught the glances being exchanged among the bankers.

  “Paul, I’m not privy to the specifics of your company, nor your fund,” Carmichael said, “but Clamor.us will shortly be valued by the public markets at fifteen billion dollars. I submit that you’d end up issuing so many shares, Clamor would own you!”

  Towse paused, controlled himself and swallowed hard. “And that’s where you guys could help. Say you arrange a ten, twelve billion dollar loan facility for Further Gaming. What kind of fees are you making off of the IPO? Because I could give you a point. Right there, that’s a hundred, hundred-and-twenty million. Right there. Pays for a few bottles of this.” He picked up one of the wine bottles. The sommelier arrived and vanished as fast, perhaps afraid Towse was about to throw it.