Long Way Down (9 page)

I knew I was staring and that someone would soon notice, but I was transfixed. The knowledge that a bit of magic is possible, and that the technology behind the trick is not even that difficult, takes very little away from the actual performance. I wanted to punch the screen with my index finger and close the page. Instead, I willed myself to look away and take another seat facing the window.

My phone rang a minute later.

“How did you do that?” I said.

“Your ID is your email account. You should change that. Your bank should have caught it. I found that in less than a minute. Maybe you should change your bank. Then I ran a password-busting program I designed. It’s essentially a pattern-checking iterative cracker with various dictionaries to back it up. Much faster than Cain and Abel or John the Ripper. Your password is only thirteen characters. My program can break anything up to thirty in less than five minutes.”

“It took you just over four.”

“If it can’t find a pattern, it reverts to brute force. Sometimes that takes longer. What is it, by the way?”

“You don’t know?”

“The program does it all. I don’t ever need to see it.”

“It’s the site of one of maybe three Shakespeare quotes I know. HVIPt2A4S2l84. Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2, line 84. It’s where somebody says, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ It’s easy to remember.”

“It’s not bad. It would keep most lowlifes out. Add a space break somewhere in there and it will up your bit strength a thousand percent. Most people just use their name and a couple of numbers. Or their dog’s name. I don’t have to know their dog to find it out. The program will run dog names.”

“King?”

“King123. You wouldn’t believe. Then you get the math or techno geeks who think they’re being smart. They use the decimal value of pi, or a series of prime numbers, or a Markov chain. Pattern checkers pick those out in nanoseconds.”

I had used prime numbers for my password when I was back at Case. One of the IT security guys had cracked it after only five attempts.

“But if I screw up typing it in, the website will stop me out after three tries.”

“It will stop most hackers because they won’t want to spend the time, but if you have enough monkeys typing . . .”

“What about those systems that use a randomizer program to generate passwords?”

“They’re good, but truly random is not easy to attain. For example, it takes seven shuffles of a deck of cards to remove the patterns from the previous game. Show me a history of randomly generated passwords, and I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy what the next password will be.”

“I’m impressed. No, I am awed.”

“Well, it’s not me. The program does it. Unless you’ve got a Department of Defense–sized computer generating your passwords, there will be holes. In theory you can create an unbreakable code, but the reality is somewhat less than.”

“You’re hired.”

“Thank you.”

We worked out details. The money request was surprisingly modest, and McKenna said the work would take him less than a week. I gave him as many details of Haley’s story as I could think of, and we agreed to meet again in Manhattan in a few days.

If he managed to stay a step or two in front of the Feds.

I
had owned a house in Montauk.

There was no water view unless you count the backyard pool—although out there, Long Island is so flat and narrow that all you really need for a water view is a third story. Montauk, unlike the Hollywood Hamptons to the west, tends to look down upon ostentatious wealth and twenty-thousand-square-foot stone mansions built on shifting sandbars. My house had no third story, or second. It was a Santa Fe–style ranch on two acres and surrounded by deer-tick heaven—scrub oak, pitch pine, and poison ivy—but it had a faux coyote fence that enclosed a terrace of slate and river stones, and an L-shaped pool long enough to make swimming laps possible if not exactly comfortable. And it was very private.

Angie had never liked the house. She had used it, entertained friends there constantly—all summer and every summer until the Kid turned three, when keeping an eye on him around a pool all day had become more an ordeal than a vacation. But she did not love the house. It was small—though three bedrooms and two and a half baths, plus the full apartment in the pool house, seemed adequate to me for a family of three. It was only small if a necessary
piece of the weekend curriculum was throwing a lawn party for a couple hundred gin-guzzling hangers-on. And for Angie that was the single unforgivable inadequacy—the house was too far from the party circuit of the Hamptons.

But I loved that house even before I knew Angie. I bought it from a woman who had just survived a messy divorce, and I bought it furnished. The furniture was all Mission, with plenty of quartersawn oak, both masculine and feminine in feel. The fabrics were all in vaguely Southwestern colors and design, but a bit muted to give a more sedate, East Coast atmosphere. The touches that I added on my own were few, but each had a meaning or memory for me: the powder room mirror with the hummingbird motif in pressed tin that I bought in Cabo; the framed photo of my father behind the bar, beaming into the camera with love and pride, that stood on the fireplace mantel; and the set of handmade fireplace tools in the shapes of various dragons that I had found in Hong Kong.

When my legal bills began moving up into the seven-figure range, I was forced to sell. The people who bought the house from me wanted it gutted. The salt air had pitted the silvering on the mirror so badly it went straight into the trash. The picture of Pop had survived our downsizing and the trek back into the city, but disappeared somewhere when Angie moved out of our Tribeca apartment. While I doubted that she had been heartless enough to toss it on purpose, she may have been simply too inebriated to notice. I don’t know what happened to the fireplace set.

—

Charles Penn’s secretary
had granted me twenty minutes with the great man, but I would have to haul my tail out to Montauk first thing in the morning to meet with him. When a billionaire gives an audience, no matter how brief, the wise man shows up early. That was not one of my father’s pithy aphorisms; it was one of my own.

I entertained myself with computing various routes as I drove uptown and east to the Triborough Bridge. The Grand Central to the LIE was the only way to get started, the other bridges and the tunnel being impossible unless you were traveling in the middle of the night. I took the Sagtikos to Southern State to Sunrise Highway rather than stay on the Expressway. The LIE depressed me. And on Sunrise, once past Patchogue, it’s a clear run all the way to Southampton. The Pine Barrens is Long Island’s only remaining wilderness and it’s almost soothing to drive through.

In the old days, I never drove it. After work on a Friday night, I would catch the Hampton Jitney a block from the office, and after putting on my Bose headphones, I was fast asleep before we left Manhattan. I usually woke up as the bus swayed through the dips and rises of Hither Hills, minutes before arriving in Montauk. I once hitchhiked a ride with Burt Terwilliger in his seaplane—he ran the firm’s M&A group, and though he made enough money to have bought a place in Southampton, he spent his weekends deep-sea fishing, and Montauk is where you go for that. I arrived out east in such a jangled, exhausted state that I politely declined the invitation to join him every weekend. In my worldview, airplanes are big things that, one hopes, never land on water.

Midweek, in the gray days of off-season, it was not a bad drive. Two hours from the bridge, I took the left at the Tower and drove up toward Gosman’s Dock. I was an hour early. Dangerously early. It meant that I had plenty of time to drive by the house and dig around in all the old wounds. I could have had a leisurely breakfast at one of the two dueling pancake purveyors, or I could have sat and watched the seagulls fight over the barnacles on the jetty. Instead, I took the right and headed over toward Lake Montauk.

My house was at the end of a twisting lane that threatened at times to turn into a tunnel with the kudzu and out-of-control
wisteria arcing overhead. It was dead of winter and the tendrils of vine looked as wispy and fragile as the last strands of hair on an old man’s head. The town would send a crew through in the spring and they would chop it all back, allowing in the light and making room for the cycle to begin again.

The house was dark, with plywood shutters hung on the outsides of the south-facing windows. I pulled into the short driveway, almost bottoming out on the same old spot. When I lived there, I had filled it with fresh sand every winter, and by the Fourth of July, the geologic forces would have hollowed out a hole again. It was comforting that the new owners had not been able to come up with a more permanent solution.

There were sparse weeds poking up through the gaps in the slate around the pool, two and three feet tall with feathered tops. The pool cover was weighted in the center with a small swamp of dead leaves, tannic rainwater, and a patina of green algae stubbornly resisting the onset of winter. The patio furniture—chairs, tables, and four chaise longues—were all piled together and wrapped with motorcycle chain. A carved sandstone ashtray sat, almost hidden, in a nook of the river-stone wall, black scorch marks ground into the rock, waiting for the first cigar of another season.

I imagined my current family gathered there. My father grilling steaks, wearing long black pants and black oxfords in July because that is what he always wore. Heather and possibly her partner, lounging in dashikis and baseball caps and drinking from quart-sized containers of iced green tea with honey and ginger. Where was Wanda in my daydream? My Skeli? Working, no doubt. Back in the city, because weekends would be prime time for her services. Maybe not. We would have to see how many of her clientele would actually be in Manhattan on summer weekends. Maybe she could get Sundays off. I imagined her there on a Sunday. Multiple copies
of the
Times
spread over the glass-topped tables, the scent of fresh-brewed Zabar’s coffee, and a bag of jelly-filled croissants from the Montauk Bake Shoppe.

A far cry from the days when Angie was there.

Despite Angie’s disdain for the house—or the neighborhood, at any rate—she entertained there all summer long, bringing out limos full of old friends from her modeling days. Few of these friends were men, and as both body hair and tan lines were verboten in the industry, my backyard on a Saturday afternoon in July was guaranteed to be filled with traders and securities salesmen who found, or manufactured, a good excuse to drop in, even though the twenty-mile drive from East Hampton or Water Mill could take a good two hours in summer traffic. I cannot claim to have become entirely inured to the sight of three or four stunningly beautiful women wearing nothing but straw hats and sunglasses, but I did learn to stop staring. And they did draw a crowd.

Greg was part of my team back at Case. He traded a basket of Asian currencies. He was also a frequent visitor out in Montauk before he got married. He was at the house so often one summer that I thought we would have to name one of the bedrooms in his honor. Greg had a share in a big house a block off the beach in Amagansett, but every other Saturday he would load his Chevy Tahoe with surfboards, three or four other weekend surfers, and a cooler filled with iced Bud Light and head east. They typically spent the morning surfing at Ditch Plains, arriving at my house in time for a late lunch—just as the girls began waking up and venturing out to the pool. Greg was the perfect gentleman—he filled glasses, kept the conversation going, and was always ready to volunteer to apply sunscreen. To the best of my knowledge, Greg never once got lucky at my house, nor did any of his pals, but that didn’t stop them from returning. Late Saturday night, as Angie and posse were on their way out to another round of parties and personal appearances
at the restaurants and clubs down the road, Greg’s friends would pour him into the backseat of the Tahoe, sunburned, exhausted, and awash with a case or two of St. Louis’ finest, and carry him back to Amagansett.

There are few secrets on a trading floor—there are no walls, no partitions, and every conversation is public, no matter the subject matter. Early on, Greg realized that I was using very creative accounting and hadn’t said anything about it. We drifted apart, neither of us quite able to meet the other’s eyes. He stopped coming by the house.

Somehow, while I’d been focused on the stumbles of my own life, Greg had acquired a wife and three kids and become a deacon in his church. He was still trading, still at Case. I had given him a call when I first got out of prison. He was polite, but distant. We hadn’t spoken since.

I checked my watch. It was time. I had a billionaire to talk to.

I left my memories in the yard and retreated to the car.

—

Gosman’s, like most
of the businesses east of Main Street, East Hampton, was closed for the season and wouldn’t open again until well into the spring, but that’s where Charles “Chuck” Penn had asked me to meet him. And when the eighth wealthiest man in the world (according to
Forbes
and a cover article in
Fortune
) gives a harmless and idiosyncratic reply to a request for an interview, it is only politic to accede.

Penn had made his money in metals, first as a wildcatter in South America, later as a pure speculator, buying and selling mines, stocks, and commodities, using as much leverage as the world was willing to grant him with futures contracts, options, and promises of future deliveries. He was now on the boards of a major U.S. bank and another in Mexico, the world’s preeminent copper mining and
distribution firm, an Australian newspaper and radio conglomerate, a Brazilian lumber company with licensing rights to three-quarters of the privately owned forests on the continent, a fair-trade Colombian coffee company dedicated to sustainability, and a Southeast Asian motor scooter company called Whoosh that had leading market shares in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Bangladesh, and soon expected to expand into Bhutan and Nepal. Penn was a British subject, though he had lived in the U.S. for the last twenty years. He had turned down an Order of the British Empire because of his Welsh ancestry, announcing that he would not accept it until Wales was declared a separate nation. Penn was also listed on the mastheads of the Boy Scouts, Outward Bound, and the NRA.

Along the way, he had managed to pick up a wide range of enemies. South American far-left guerrillas, Russian Bratva gang leaders, Afghani warlords, and Chinese bureaucrats all had major grudges against the man. At times, his word had been called into question. At other times—at least three discovered by MI5 and revealed by the
Guardian
—there had been assassination attempts. There could have been more; Penn refused to discuss it.

He arrived exactly on time. A Town Car and a black stretch limo glided into the parking lot. A man wearing a black overcoat and dark sunglasses—despite the gray sky—got out of the first car and came to meet me.

“Mr. Stafford?” He looked at my face and compared it to an image on his cell phone.

“I look better in profile,” I said.

He stepped forward and waved a wand over my arms, legs, and torso. I passed.

“This way, sir.” He held open the rear door of the limo and I slid inside. A blast of warm air hit me—the temperature must have been in the high seventies. Charles Penn was tapping on an iPad,
dressed in an open-neck button-down white shirt and dark blue pinstripe pants. He put away the iPad while I got settled.

“Jason.” He put out a hand. “Call me Chuck. Nice to meet you.”

He was a big man, big-gutted, thick-necked, but he gave the impression of power rather than obesity. His thick black hair looked like someone may have done some minor color touch-ups, but otherwise there was no sign of physical vanity about him. He wore no rings or watch. The reading glasses he tucked into his breast pocket looked like the ones you can buy next to the checkout counter at Duane Reade.

“I know it’s a bother that I dragged you all the way out here,” he said. His voice reverberated around his forehead and came out sounding like a church organ. A Welsh church organ. “Accept my apologies. There is a method to my madness. I want you to see something.”

“No bother, Chuck,” I lied politely. “I used to have a house out here. It’s nice coming back.”

He gave me a smile that said he didn’t believe me but appreciated my gesture. “They’ll be along any minute.”

I wanted to ask the question
Who?
but there was no point if I was going to find out any minute. Instead, I pushed ahead with my agenda. “Then do you mind if we get started while we wait?” I said. “Your secretary told me I had twenty minutes, no more, and I can feel the clock running.”

He held up a single index finger and stared fixedly out at the harbor. I withheld a sigh of frustration.

When he indicated that something was to happen “any minute,” he had neglected to say
which
minute, and I was very aware of how many of my precious twenty minutes were ticking away, but eventually he relaxed, smiled, and pointed at the harbor. Coming up from the Star Island Marina, chugging along at a sedate pace, was a big powerboat of some kind. It looked like a luxury version of a
working boat, without the sleek lines of the cruisers or deep-sea fishing boats I was used to seeing in that harbor.