being raked by the same thunderstorm.
Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-manâs-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.
The thunderclap rumbled across the rain-drenched skyline, causing the windows of Willard DeWittâs condo to shudder. It was at that moment the phone on his desk buzzed.
Standing in his darkened living room, glass of wine cradled in his hands as he watched the cold rain streak his windows, DeWitt didnât turn to his desk, didnât reach to pick up the receiver. Instead, he listened carefully. The phone buzzed again, then a third time, then a fourth ⦠then abruptly stopped. DeWitt held up his left wrist and watched the luminous face of his Rolex Oyster. Exactly fifteen seconds passed, then the phone buzzed again. When it was through buzzing three more times, Willard lowered his watch and took a last sip from his wineglass.
âDamn,â he said quietly.
The two unanswered phone calls had been from the computer mainframe at Geller Piperidge & Associates, the State Street stock brokerage where Peter Jurgenson was employed as a junior broker. When Willard had come aboard at Geller Piperidge ten months earlier, one of his first covert acts as Peter Jurgenson was to install his own encrypted master file in the mainframe. This file, containing his secret records, was guarded by a number of lockout and early-warning systems, one of which was programmed to call his home phone twice in quick succession if the master file was located and entered without his password. There was only one way this could occur: if a Securities and Exchange Commission bunco team were to link Geller Piperidgeâs mainframe to its Cray-9 icebreaker in New York. And that could only be accomplished if the SEC inspectors were at the firmâs offices at this very moment, armed with a federal court order enabling them to conduct a surprise raid on the brokerage.
DeWitt put down his wineglass and strode to his cherry-oak desk. He had been anticipating this; ugly rumors had been circulating through Bostonâs financial community for the past few days that the feds were getting suspicious about some phony-stock transactions that had been originating from Beantown. No one knew who had been flooding the market with bogus stock, but it seemed apparent that someone, somewhere in one of Bostonâs many brokerages, was using his or her companyâs prospects lists to solicit customers under an assumed name, selling worthless securities, and hiding the proceeds in a network of dummy corporations and offshore bank accounts.
Realistically, it wasnât a matter of who was selling crap stock, but which person the SEC was after. The Boston financial community was just as crooked as Tokyo or New York or London; there were no saints on State and Tremont Streets. Heads are about to roll, went the whispers downtown. Re-evaluate your friends and cancel your lunch dates with mere acquaintances. Take a long weekend off; now is a good time to visit the Vineyard or go out to the Berkshires to reopen your summer house. Destroy any notes you would rather not have read by a federal grand jury. Get out of town. Cover your ass.
None of this greatly bothered Willard. He was an expert at covering his ass.
The drawer contained a small stack of airline tickets: all for flights originating from Logan International, all purchased two weeks in advance through the net. They were registered under a variety of aliases: Harry Papp, John Fowler, Kent Llewellyn, Mario Bodini. Every day
Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-manâs-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.
The thunderclap rumbled across the rain-drenched skyline, causing the windows of Willard DeWittâs condo to shudder. It was at that moment the phone on his desk buzzed.
Standing in his darkened living room, glass of wine cradled in his hands as he watched the cold rain streak his windows, DeWitt didnât turn to his desk, didnât reach to pick up the receiver. Instead, he listened carefully. The phone buzzed again, then a third time, then a fourth ⦠then abruptly stopped. DeWitt held up his left wrist and watched the luminous face of his Rolex Oyster. Exactly fifteen seconds passed, then the phone buzzed again. When it was through buzzing three more times, Willard lowered his watch and took a last sip from his wineglass.
âDamn,â he said quietly.
The two unanswered phone calls had been from the computer mainframe at Geller Piperidge & Associates, the State Street stock brokerage where Peter Jurgenson was employed as a junior broker. When Willard had come aboard at Geller Piperidge ten months earlier, one of his first covert acts as Peter Jurgenson was to install his own encrypted master file in the mainframe. This file, containing his secret records, was guarded by a number of lockout and early-warning systems, one of which was programmed to call his home phone twice in quick succession if the master file was located and entered without his password. There was only one way this could occur: if a Securities and Exchange Commission bunco team were to link Geller Piperidgeâs mainframe to its Cray-9 icebreaker in New York. And that could only be accomplished if the SEC inspectors were at the firmâs offices at this very moment, armed with a federal court order enabling them to conduct a surprise raid on the brokerage.
DeWitt put down his wineglass and strode to his cherry-oak desk. He had been anticipating this; ugly rumors had been circulating through Bostonâs financial community for the past few days that the feds were getting suspicious about some phony-stock transactions that had been originating from Beantown. No one knew who had been flooding the market with bogus stock, but it seemed apparent that someone, somewhere in one of Bostonâs many brokerages, was using his or her companyâs prospects lists to solicit customers under an assumed name, selling worthless securities, and hiding the proceeds in a network of dummy corporations and offshore bank accounts.
Realistically, it wasnât a matter of who was selling crap stock, but which person the SEC was after. The Boston financial community was just as crooked as Tokyo or New York or London; there were no saints on State and Tremont Streets. Heads are about to roll, went the whispers downtown. Re-evaluate your friends and cancel your lunch dates with mere acquaintances. Take a long weekend off; now is a good time to visit the Vineyard or go out to the Berkshires to reopen your summer house. Destroy any notes you would rather not have read by a federal grand jury. Get out of town. Cover your ass.
None of this greatly bothered Willard. He was an expert at covering his ass.
The drawer contained a small stack of airline tickets: all for flights originating from Logan International, all purchased two weeks in advance through the net. They were registered under a variety of aliases: Harry Papp, John Fowler, Kent Llewellyn, Mario Bodini. Every day
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