“How do you know I haven’t told him?”
“Because if you had, all those FBI agents allegedly wasting taxpayer dollars in Vietnam would be agitating the natives here in SLO instead.”
“Heaven forfend.” sighed contentedly, pleasantly satiated by yet another of Joey’s extraordinary pizzas. “You are, of course, correct — Roscoe knows nothing yet. As to why I haven’t told him anything, it’s simple: My deal for finding you is entirely on the come — I succeed I get paid. I fail,” another shrug, “it’s Take a hike pal, and don’t let the doorknob hit you on the ass on the way out. The problem is that finding you isn’t quite enough. My concern is that should you slip away between my call to Roscoe and the arrival of the cavalry here in SLO, the VCs will take the position that our agreement requires your physical apprehension.” I shrugged. “So, before calling I felt I needed time to gather a more complete dossier on you.”
“Are you also thinking that perhaps I might give you more money to stay quiet than they would to know my whereabouts?”
I laughed with genuine humor. “If I learned anything at Folsom it was not to do business with crooks.” I held up a hand. “No offense intended. No, as I said a minute ago, I merely needed a little more time to dig up information. That’s why I went to Ms. Fuentes. Beyond that, I must say that I’m also mildly curious as to why you stole the money in the first place.”
“Why do you think I took it?”
“It certainly wasn’t for the money per se — not in the sense that you needed it to support a drug habit, or toys like Gulfstream jets or exotic cars. You could have done all that quite easily on the money you had already earned. And, despite your success to date in staying severed steps ahead of the law, there’s no way you would have believed you could remain under cover forever, not with twenty million on the line. No,” I shook my head, “clearly something else was going on, and until I figure it out I have no intention of telling Roscoe or anyone else that I found you.” I snapped my fingers as it suddenly came to me. “Jesus, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.” I looked at him, shaking my head ruefully. “You never intended to stay hidden long-term, did you?”
“And why not?” Packer asked, obviously pleased that I was starting to figure things out.
“Because you never intended to keep the money — you always intended to return it.” I paused for a sip of water. “But I still don’t know why you took it in the first place.”
Packer waved a dismissive hand. “Simple enough — my startup wasn’t a startup anymore. You see, we’d proceeded well past the mezzanine funding stage and were all set to do an IPO. At that point, the VCs controlled the board of directors and were really running the company, leaving me with lots of time on my hands. During the dog-and-pony shows we were putting on for Wall Street ahead of the IPO I met a guy, a quant for one of the big private-investment houses, and got interested in the concept.”
“A quant?”
“A quantitative analyst, someone who uses mathematic formulas to predict movement in the stock market. At its heart quantitative analysis is based on stochastic calculus, coincidentally a particular interest of mine when I was studying at Cal.”
“Does it work? Reasonably dependably, I mean.”
“Depends on who you ask. The concept got wildly popular some years back and math Ph.D.’s from the best universities across the country suddenly found themselves swamped with ridiculous employment offers from Wall Street.” He shook his head. “Between you and me, I believe one of the reasons for quantitative analysis’s sudden popularity was that few brokers on Wall Street could spell stochastic calculus, much less understand its strengths and limitations when applied to the stock market. In any event, fortunes were made and, as is usually more often the case, lost, and the bloom has gone somewhat off the rose, so to speak.”
“So let me guess: You secretly became a quant and needed money, big money, to break the bank at Monte Carlo.”
Packer smiled and nodded his head affirmatively. “I was able to come up with what is a truly novel approach, mathematically speaking, and used it to write a computer program to play the market in a very specific way. After putting it through several dry runs I was convinced that the program worked and calculated that twenty million was the minimum amount I needed to get into the game.”
“Now, see, this is the part I still don’t understand. Why steal it? I mean, everybody already knew you were a genius, wouldn’t your VC partners have been more than happy to front you the money once they had seen your program?”
“You don’t know a great deal about the venture capital business, do you?”
“Almost nothing,” I cheerfully admitted.
“Then the main thing you need to understand is that, contrary to popular opinion, venture capitalists hate risk. In fact, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that they positively loathe it. The men and women who run the major VC firms are little more than bean counters, glorified bankers and accountants who demand an almost ridiculous level of assurance before they’ll deign to invest in a new firm or a novel idea.” He shook his head again. “There’s absolutely no way they’d have backed a computer program based on mathematical principles not fifteen people in the entire country could fully understand. What’s more, even if they did, it would have been next to impossible to keep the specifics of my computer program, not to mention the underlying math, a proprietary secret.”
“But it is their money, right? I mean, it’s up to them how they want to invest or not invest it.”
“Correct. That’s why I had to borrow it without their consent.”
I smiled. “Back to that word borrow.”
“Well, it is borrowing if I intend to pay it back, with interest of course. And,” he held up a finger for emphasis, “if the interest is, let us say, sufficiently generous, trust me when I tell you that there will be no quibbling about whether the initial borrowing was consentual or not.”
“Not on your or the VCs’ part, perhaps, but the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco is not likely to be deterred from pursuing the matter merely because the money got paid back.”
Packer smiled broadly. “U.S. Attorneys work for the Attorney General in Washington, and the Attorney General works for the President, and the President, all Presidents, work for men and women like me.” He shook his head. “A bank robber steeds twenty grand and goes straight to jail, whether the money is ultimately recovered or not. A wildly successful entrepreneur borrows twenty million and,” he shrugged expressively, “accommodations can be made, particularly when the so-called victims hugely profit in the end. And especially when the entrepreneur takes nothing for himself.”
“Nothing? Not even a little to cover expenses, overhead, pizza, stuff like that?”
“Nada. As you figured out before you even left San Francisco, I already had more money than I could reasonably expect to spend in my lifetime, plus the ability to make more by cranking out a succession of high-tech startups, all of which I could easily get funded based on my reputation alone. Difficult as it may be to believe, the entire point of this particular caper,” he smiled again when he said the word caper, “was merely to prove the validity of the math underlying my program.”
“With big money on the line.”
“Exactly. Otherwise it’s just an intellectual exercise.”
“So where is your share of the profit going?”
“Into a nonprofit foundation established and controlled by Judge Jackson and Bill Masterson—”