There it was, Gavallan told himself. The managing director of Europe’s largest accounting firm had just confirmed that Mercury’s Moscow operations were up and running. Gavallan asked himself why he hadn’t called Jean-Jacques Pillonel in the first place. Because you can only trust your own, a cynical voice reminded him. Because people lie.
More and more, he was certain the Private Eye-PO had to be someone he knew, someone with a personal ax to grind.
“So, are we back at square one,” he asked his colleagues, “or did we just cross the finish line?” Unspoken, but hanging up there near the ceiling with Meg’s cigarette smoke and the lingering scent of his half-eaten burrito, were the words “postpone,” “shelve,” and “cancel.”
“Where the hell is Byrnes?” griped Tustin.
“Give him time,” said Llewellyn-Davies. “He’ll get back to us.”
“It’s ten o’clock in Moscow. How much time does he need?”
“Relax, Bruce,” said Meg. “I’ll take Jean-Jacques’s word over the Private Eye-PO’s anytime. I’m sure Graf will only confirm what we already know.”
“Maybe,” said Tustin grudgingly. “But I still want to hear from him.”
So did Gavallan. Every minute that passed without word from Byrnes fueled his worry over his friend’s well-being. Still, he was pleased with the give-and-take of the discussion. If there were any doubts about Mercury, it was best that they surfaced within the confines of the office.
“So, Sam, what’s your call?”
“Tough one.”
Tannenbaum was the firm’s resident bohemian. With his tight jeans, flannel shirt, and flowing blond hair, painstakingly groomed and tied into a ponytail, he looked like a refugee from Big Sur. “We seem to be stuck between believing in ourselves and believing the Private Eye-PO. From what I can gather, Mercury is everything we say it is. You think so. Meg thinks so. Jean-Jacques thinks so. Jupiter Metrix says so. It’s a ‘go deal.’ At the same time, we feel compelled to trust the Private Eye-PO because he’s been accurate in the past.”
“Jesus, Shirley, you’re getting me hard,” whined Tustin. “Say what you want to say and let’s get on with it.”
Tannenbaum shot him a withering look, but refused to be hurried, either by Tustin or by any of the other curious faces staring at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know what to say except that we need to find the Private Eye-PO as quickly as possible and ask him where he’s getting his information.”
“Only one problem,” said Gavallan. “We still don’t know who he is.”
“Can’t we shut him up?” asked Meg. “Slap an injunction on him for false and deprecatory statements? I mean, what he’s doing isn’t any different from some wiseass issuing a phony earnings warning.”
“Sure,” said Tannenbaum. “But again, we have to find him first, then we have to get an injunction, and eventually we have to take him to trial. We don’t have the time. The balloon is going up in five days.”
Gavallan was suddenly restless. Frustration cramped his shoulders and clawed at his neck. Rising from his chair, he walked slowly round the table. All roads kept leading back to the same place. The deal was sound. The Cisco receipts were bullshit. So were the pictures of the Moscow NOC. Some asshole getting his jollies trying to hurt Black Jet or Mercury. It didn’t really matter who he was, or why he was doing it. Which left Byrnes. No one knew better than he how important the deal was. Absent his word to the contrary, there was only one way to go.
“Okay, everyone, that’s a wrap,” Gavallan said. “We all decided on this?” Approaching the table, he extended his hand over its center. “Tony?”
“It’s a go, Jett.” Llewellyn-Davies laid his hand on top of Gavallan’s.
“Bruce?”
“Fuckin’ A, bubba. We’re going in!” Tustin slapped his hand atop the two others.
“Sam?”
The lawyer looked unsure. “Umm, if you say so. Sure.” Another hand joined the pile.
“Meg?”
“Hee-yah!” she shouted, half laughing, throwing her hand on top of the stack. “We’re on the road to glory! Two billion or bust!”
Gavallan felt the weight of the four hands on top of his own. For a moment, his eyes passed from one person to the next. Bruce, the congenital loudmouth. Tony, the gutsy survivor. Sam, the reluctant corporate warrior. And Meg, the discarded treasure.
These were more than his friends, more than the closest of colleagues. These were the members of the family he’d chosen for himself. The pillars of the life he had built after his world had crashed in ruins about him. It all came back to people. To teamwork. To mutual accomplishment. He waited a second longer than usual, enjoying the communion of flesh, the union of wills.
“All right then,” he said. “We’re decided.”
Without another word, he pulled his hand from beneath the others and walked out of the conference room.
Back in his office, Gavallan stood by the window. Patches of blue peeked through fast-moving clouds. The harbor was alive with mid-morning traffic, tugs and ferries and tankers leaving frothy trails in their wakes. Tired, he pressed a cheek to the glass, enjoying the feel of the cool, slick surface against his skin. “Mercury is solid. Mercury is solid.” He repeated the words over and over, a mantra to convince himself and the whole world. But he’d been in the business too long to believe it. Skepticism had become second nature.
Right now only one thing was certain: If what the Private Eye-PO claimed was true and Black Jet Securities went ahead and brought Mercury to market, he, as sole owner of the firm, would be looking at a class action lawsuit of tobaccoesque proportions. Forget recouping the thirty-million-dollar bridge loan. Forget selling the company. Black Jet Securities would be doing a Drexel quicker than he could say “Mike Milken,” and he himself would be learning to trade stocks by Touch-Tone phone from the inside of a federal prison.
Returning to his desk, he found the shaman staring at him. He met the squat carving’s gaze and stared right back.
“Find him,” he ordered the Indian medicine man. “Find him, now!”
10
Child’s play.
Jason Vann took a look at the Private Eye-PO’s web page and smirked. An amateur. He could see it right away. No sidebars. No pull-down menus. No search fields. And certainly no banner advertisements that might earn him a little dough. Just the guy’s name written across the top in faggy script, a half dozen hypertexted headlines, and a bunch of charts chronicling the latest goings-on in the exciting world of venture capital financing, tech-related mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings.
There were tables showing IPOs coming to market next week, IPOs recently priced, the performance of IPOs just launched, and the year-to-date performances of the Private Eye-PO’s personal picks. The symbol for each stock was colored an electric blue, denoting a hyperlink to drive the reader to a related site. Vann double-clicked on a few of the links. As expected, they led to commercial portals that offered free content—Yahoo! Finance, CNBC, Bloomberg. Definitely a one-man show. Best of all, there was an E-mail address at the bottom of the page. PrivateEyePO@Hotmail.com. Vann read it, and his smirk took on a decidedly arrogant cast.
This would be the easiest hundred grand he’d ever earned.
The individual whom Jett Gavallan had called “the top man in his field” kept his office in two spartan rooms on the second floor of a modest colonial home in Potomac, Maryland. And the “field” to which Gavallan had been referring was alternately called “cybersleuthing,” “systems security,” or, if you were a black-hat hacker, “betraying the cause.”