The First Billion

"No, Konstantin, I don't. I want the deal to go through as badly as you. But as a licensed securities dealer, it's my duty to make sure everybody's talking from the same page, that's all."

"And we're paying you very generously for that duty. Moscow is up and running. Everything is a hundred percent operational. Have you got the fax yet?"

Just then, Emerald hustled into the room and laid a sheaf of papers on Gavallan's desk.

"I'm looking at it now for the first time. Give me a minute."

Gavallan's eye passed from one page to the next. The receipts detailed the purchase of over a million dollars worth of various routers and switches. The client was Mercury Broadband Geneva. The manufacturer, Cisco Systems.

All at once, a smile broke out on his face, and he had to work very hard not to burst out laughing. The Private Eye-PO was wrong. He was dead wrong. Someone had fed him a load of malarkey.

"They look good," said Gavallan, as the weight lifted from his shoulders. He read the documents a second time, still not quite believing them. Only one thing bothered him. It was a small detail, but he had spotted it nonetheless. The receipts were dated February 12 of the current year, yet the summary posted by the Private Eye-PO showed sales for the past three years. He dismissed the discrepancy, if it was one. Before his eyes, he had receipts that clearly confirmed Kirov's statement that the Moscow NOC was "up and running."

"They'll make everyone feel a lot better," he said. "I'll post these as a response to the Private Eye-PO on our web page by the end of business today."

"I hope so," said Kirov. "And what about the Private Eye-PO? What do you plan on doing to him? Surely you do not expect us to sit still while our good name is besmirched."

"I have some people on it already. With any luck, we'll have him located by tomorrow, day after at the latest."

"And then? All of us have our part to play to insure Mercury's future. We expect you to take any and all measures to silence this man. Nothing can stand in the way of Mercury Broadband's going public. Nothing."

"And nothing will," said Gavallan. "I'll see to it the Private Eye-PO's mouth is shut- permanently, if I have my way. In the meantime, these receipts refute his accusations nicely. I'd say we're back on track."

"Good," said Kirov. "It's time to put an end to this tomfoolery. There's already been enough snooping."

The line went dead. Hanging up, Gavallan failed to experience the sense of victory, the burst of joy, that Kirov's call and the Cisco receipts should have brought. Instead, a bitter, unsavory taste lingered in his mouth, and he was left with a question.

Exactly what snooping had Kirov been talking about?

***

Roy DiGenovese stood at the window of a vacant office suite on the forty-first floor of the Peabody Building, peering directly into Jett Gavallan's office seventy feet away. The banker was walking back and forth, one hand to his neck. It was clear he was either very pissed off or very worried about something. "Are you getting a good read now?"

"Yeah, wind's died down so I'm right on target. Hold on." Mills Breitenbach, a tech specialist from the San Fran field office, put a hand to his ear while fiddling with some knobs on a metal device camouflaged to look like a Sony minidisc player. At his feet rested a twelve-inch satellite dish, its cone pointed in Gavallan's direction.

"Hurry up, damn it," said DiGenovese. "Don't want to miss what he's saying."

"Give me a sec. I've got to up the amperage on the beam. Here it comes. Showtime! You're on Candid Camera."

Breitenbach punched a button, and Jett Gavallan's voice filled the office. "No, Konstantin, I don't. I want the deal to go through as badly as you. But as a licensed securities dealer, it's my duty to make sure everybody's talking from the same page, that's all."

There was silence as the party on the other end of the phone spoke. DiGenovese noted the exact time. "We'll pick up the other end of this when we get the transcripts from the tap tomorrow," he said to Breitenbach.

Again, Gavallan's voice filled the room, sounding eerily close. "I have some people on it already. With any luck, we'll have him located by tomorrow, day after at the latest."

Breitenbach raised the silver casing to his lips and gave it a kiss. "You are the best, baby!"

The device that allowed the men to listen to a conversation being held seventy feet away through two plates of glass each an inch thick was called a unidirectional lasersat. Shooting a sensitive laser at the window of Gavallan's office, the lasersat read the infinitely subtle vibrations in the glass caused by human speech, then matched the vibrations against a sonic database, or "dictionary," and translated them into distinct words. Measuring the tonal frequency of each syllable, the lasersat was able, to a degree, to re-create the speaker's voice.