“You better be right.” Bonnie nervously picked a cat hair off her sweater.
“Of course I am.” Morty checked his watch and said, “One hour until the draw. Time to put a bow around the ticket file.”
Bonnie quickly gathered her folder and headed out of the office.
“Close the door,” Morty called after her. He took a deep breath and on the exhale pulled out his cell phone and laid it on his desk. As he thought about his plan and the risk, his brain manically cycled between fear and elation. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. He picked up the phone. While it rang, he rummaged through his desk and located a cigar, stripped off the wrapper, and ran his tongue along the leaves, tip to end. “Basarov. Morty here,” he said in a low voice, “game on!”
Professor Sergei Petrov paused, searching the faces of his nineteen University of St. Petersburg undergrad mathematics students for some sign of intelligence. The late afternoon sun filtered through the stained glass windows of the Twelve Collegia, a former palace of Peter the Great, dappling the students in prismatic colors. “Dabro pozhalovat!” he barked, rapping his knuckles on the podium. “So, can a recurring event truly be random? If this question does not torment you, keep you up at night, you do not belong here. Are not the most important occurrences of your life the result of probability?”
The professor loosened his plaid tie and felt the weight of his wool herringbone sport coat on his shoulders. Nothing to do now, but cede this cerebral battle to an unseasonably warm winter day. He could not compete with the allure of the pubs along the Universitatskaya Embankment. He pointed to the door. “Class dismissed, yes.” There was a short burst of appreciative applause, and then the students darted for the exit.
The professor’s eyes followed the nubile fanny of a coed out the door but were caught by Dmitri Basarov entering the room. The professor put his hand on his heart. “My friend!” he said, and turned to clean up the blackboard. “It has been so long,” he added as he tried to fight off the flush of embarrassment.
“What is it you do here, lecture or lecher?” Basarov said, enjoying the joke.
“Yes and yes.” The professor set the eraser down and turned his attention back to Basarov. “Call it fringe benefits.”
“I do remember the low-rent life of a University professor,” Basarov said.
“You are also well recalled for having left a dead-end academic career for the frontier of cyber hacking.”
“Ah, good to hear I’m not forgotten. May I suggest a visit to the pub?” Basarov led the way out of the classroom, their footsteps echoing off the stone floor. They passed portraits of important alumni, among them the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, President Vladimir Putin, and curiously, the Russian-educated American novelist Ayn Rand.
Sergei claimed a wobbly table set on the sidewalk, open to the winter sun and within sight of Saint Andrew’s Cathedral. “Two Livivske Premiums in stone mugs,” he called out to the waiter. He turned to his former academic colleague and looked into the shadows cast from dark eyes set deep in their sockets. “So, what brings you to St. Petersburg?” Sergei asked. “Let me guess, your ponies quit on you?”
“You heard about my technical difficulties,” said Basarov, shaking his head slowly. For a moment the hard-core Internet security hacker seemed improbably humbled. After leaving academia, Basarov had moved to Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn. There he ran a software business and recruited underpaid and out-of-work Russian programmers to facilitate his schemes.
He had successfully exploited a hole in New York’s off-track betting system. His programmers intentionally overloaded the computer system used to handle the bets with data, causing a delay in the transmission of the off-track bets to the tracks. Basarov’s inside guy took advantage of the delay by placing bets on winning horses for races that had already run. The scheme raked in millions before it collapsed due to its own greed. The inside programmer disappeared, leaving the feds to charge Basarov with grand larceny and tax evasion. Luckily he found an accountant who cooked, simmered, and served up a paper trail so bulletproof that the feds dropped the charges, leaving Basarov with only a levy for back taxes. A minor consequence for Basarov, considering he had potentially faced a long prison stretch.
“I am off the horses, Sergei,” Basarov said. “The future is Lotto!” Basarov instantly perked up as he mentioned the new opportunity.
“Lotto?” Sergei let out a hearty laugh.
“The BlizzardBall lotto from the States,” Basarov said evenly. “Minnesota, no less. The prize is currently over a half a billion
U.S. dollars and rising.”“Never heard of it.” “No matter,” Basarov said. “You are an expert in hypergeometric
distribution probability, yes?”
“School’s out,” Sergei said. His attention wandered to a group of women at a nearby table.
“Listen, please!” said Basarov, reining Sergei in. “We both know it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create a truly random event. Flaws emerge even in the most sophisticated random number generators. The lotto process is riddled with non-randomness creep. Mechanical drawing machines, numbered balls, human intervention, and a hundred other elements all contribute to a string of non-random patterns.”
“I suggest you consult a fortune teller.”
“Take a look at this,” Basarov said, and reached into his briefcase. He extracted a stack of accordion-folded computer paper and plopped it on the table.
“Let me guess—a lotto data file.” “Yes, just a sample. I have over seven years of data—from the BlizzardBall Lottery, to be specific.” Basarov produced a memory
flash drive and held it up between his fingers like a gold nugget. “When you chart the historical numbers based on frequency and their hit intervals, plus the sum of the balls drawn in a six-number game, and you track this data by specific ball machines and specific ball sets, some very interesting recurring, predictable patterns emerge.”
“Next you’re going to tell me you have tethered an infinite number of monkeys to typewriters in anticipation that one of the primates will eventually type the Old Testament,” Sergei said. “Hope you have lots of bananas.”
“I am serious, comrade.” Basarov signaled the waiter for two more beers.
“What you are telling me is that you have proprietary data. So who did you bribe?”
“I have a client with a unique interest in the practical application of probabilities.”
“Well, I wish you and your client a prosperous life together,” Sergei said. “Because, my poor over-the-edge friend, it will take light-years to calculate a useable probability distribution model from this data.” Sergie rapped his knuckles on the file. “We’re talking billions of computations.”
Basarov took a deep breath and smiled. “That’s where the PEL comes in.”
The Probability Event Laboratory. Sergie knew all about the PEL. It was a scientifically sensitive collaboration between St. Petersburg University and the Russian government. Its purpose was to explore event predictability. The project’s probability models were based on the premise that all events after the Big Bang are predetermined. Known as the thesis of Causal Determinism, it predicated on the supposition that all events have a cause and effect, and the precise combination of events at a particular time engenders a particular outcome. If it were possible for an entity to know all the facts about the past and the present, and know all natural laws that govern the universe, then an entity might be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future. Causal determinism was commonly employed in predicting physical events such as weather and natural disasters. The actual computing power employed was unknown outside of PEL, but it was speculated that its processing speed was twenty-five quadrillion floating operations per second. In eight hours it could complete calculations that would take a typical laptop twenty thousand years.
“You’re asking me to play games on the PEL? Het!” Sergei’s eruption drew the stares of nearby patrons. “No way will I risk my career, maybe my life, for this what? Blizzard Ball?” he said, his voice still loud.
“All you have to do is come up with a narrow range of probable picks. We both know that even with the results from the data crunch it’s still a gamble. We’re just improving the odds.” Basarov pulled an envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table. “Here’s something for your efforts.”
Sergei squeezed the envelope as if testing the firmness of a tomato.
Basarov leaned in. “It’s ten thousand US plus we’ll fund the cost of the lottery tickets. If we hit on the jackpot, your cut is twenty-five percent. I know I don’t have to do the math for you, Professor. Let’s just say it’s enough to attract some pretty high class fringe benefits, yes?” Basarov sat back and let the proposition sink in for a moment. “If we hit on this one, my client has assured me we’ll have more opportunities at these run-up jackpots. Think oligarchy, comrade.”
Sergei fondled his short trimmed beard. “Where do you purchase these BlizzardBall Lottery tickets?”
“Through the back door,” Basarov said. “Canada.”
A BlizzardBall $750 Million Jackpot banner hung from an overhead pipe in a converted warehouse in Vancouver, Canada. Underneath, one hundred and fifty Lotto2Win telemarketers sat in four-foot-high partitioned cubicles aligned in rows on a bare concrete floor. Cables dangled like life-support lines and dispatched calls from an IBM AS400-driven predictive dialer. The cacophony of thirty-five different languages modulated into white noise.
It was illegal to sell U.S. lottery tickets outside the country, but regulators were stretched too thin to chase down the offshore, cross-border violators. Sales of BlizzardBall Lottery tickets were booming.
The owner of Lotto2Win, Roddy Pitsan, had just consumed a quart of custom-made tonic prepared by a Chinese herbalist. The coarse green liquid, concocted to cleanse his system and repulse the introduction of drugs, smelled like grass clippings mixed with tobacco. An addiction to cocaine had stripped his already lanky thin frame of twenty pounds and fragmented his thinking. He had to get focused, get straight. There was too much money on the line for him to be fucked up. The tonic did not go down easy, and he dropped to the Persian carpet in his office, clutched a waste basket, and vomited.
Gisele Marsalis had been watching Roddy’s curious behavior from her telemarketing cubicle. Gisele was mid-thirties, tall, and athletically firm. “You okay?” Gisele asked. She had a self-confidence about her that men found attractive, especially guys like Roddy—big idea types. They had dated once. It went nowhere. She was getting better at recognizing losers.
“Food poisoning,” Roddy said and brushed back his long greasy hair, revealing a wavy nose and cheeks hollowed by drug use. “I’ll be fine, eh.” He grabbed the basket again and held it.
Roddy had been raised in the glacier-scraped flatlands of Saskatchewan where an “eh” stretched conversation and bridged the emptiness of the frozen winter. People on the tundra took their time sorting words and more often than not actually drew a deep measure of themselves when presented with a polite, “How are you, eh?”
Always the entrepreneur, Roddy forfeited a high school diploma for a juvenile rap sheet that included petty theft and fencing stolen goods. He caught on as a busboy at an all-night truck stop outside of Saskatoon. An older waitress who carried around a dog-eared copy of Tropic of Capricorn took him under her wing. Over the long empty hours, she shared with Roddy, Henry Miller’s observations of people going through life like dead men, day in and day out, from generation to generation. The account mirrored the lives of the broken farmers and exhausted miners on the hardscrabble tundra. Miller’s antidote to drudgery—a concoction of Eastern mysticism, sexual exploits, and the chaos of capital-ism—struck a chord with Roddy. The impressionable youth adopted it as his talisman. The path was made straight for his exodus from the Canadian Great Plains.
He landed in Vancouver and got a job as a cruise line shuttle bus driver. He observed non-U.S. citizens pooling their money and dipping into the border town of Bellingham or going down the coast to Seattle to buy lottery tickets. From his kitchen table, he hatched a business that would make it easy for people beyond the U.S. borders to purchase Mega Millions, Powerball, and state-operated lottery tickets.
Roddy viewed himself as enlightened on the human condition of want. His business venture simply leveraged people’s irrational hope for riches, their inherent insecurities, and the search for life’s shortcuts, with the lottery being the perfect fix.
Over the past ten years, he’d been threatened with closure from government regulators, ripped off by employees, roughed up by competitors, and been near bankruptcy, but he had always managed to keep going. The $750 million BlizzardBall Lottery had put his business in overdrive. Worldwide demand for tickets was off the charts.
Gisele was his best telemarketer. She earned a high percentage commission and the privilege of opting out of the autodialers and canned scripts. She dialed her own calls and was given the best leads. Her elite status was the goal of the other fledgling telemarketers, whose scripts were displayed on monitors with prompts to guide the sale of lottery ticket packages and overcome objections. Call production was paced, monitored, and measured. Contacts-to-close ratios were like batting averages. Fall below the line and you’re fired. Telemarketers had been known to pee in a cup rather than take a bathroom break and jeopardize their call performance. Gisele’s book of business contained the names and numbers of hot leads and clients she’d cultivated. It was locked in a safe after every shift. Client predation practices were rampant among telemarketers.
Gisele scanned her contact list and tapped the name of her next call, a recent lead: Professor Sergei Petrov. The professor had made a couple of small lottery ticket buys over the past several weeks. “Professor, Gisele here from Lotto2Win,” she said. Gisele presented a smooth, deep, matter-of-fact voice to her customers. She made sure she looked into a small mirror at the beginning of every call, aware that her smile transmitted through her voice. Comfortable in her own skin, her makeup amounted to a swipe of mascara over her deep-green eyes and a touch of blush. She also liked to play with the color of her hair.