Chapter 5

"So, why I should help you?" Yvgeny was not big, but the two guys with him were. If I had to kill them, though, I would start with Yvgeny - he would be the most dangerous of the three.

He must have thought me stupid for coming alone into his place in L.A., on his turf, but I wasn't there for a war. I wanted his help.

"Yvgeny!" I said in Russian, a tone of hurt and disappointment in my voice, "No family loyalty? Don't you want to help out the husband of your favorite niece?"

"Anastasia is my wife's niece," he shrugged, speaking English, "I do not like my wife that much."

"Well, then," I sighed, "I'll start with the carrot: If you can provide the services I need, It's worth one million dollars to you and your business."

"I know this expression, 'carrot and stick'," he said suspiciously. "What is the stick?"

"The stick," I smiled pleasantly, "is I tell the Colombians who's been knocking off their shipments."

The fact that I had that knowledge was clearly a surprise to him, but he had not risen as high as he had in the Russian mob by being stupid, or slow.

"I can handle the Colombians," he shrugged. "Maybe I should have had a war with them already."

"Yes you can," I agreed, "unless, of course, the Chinese find out at the same time who's been raiding their whorehouses."

Now he was starting to sweat, but he wasn't giving up that easily.

"The Chinese can be paid off," he answered nonchalantly.

"That's true," I smiled, "but you'd have to skim even more off your payments to Moscow, and that's going to be pretty hard to hide, especially after they find out how much you've already taken."

"Kill him now," he told the two goons with him.

They reached for their guns but I was already on top of the table. I kicked Yvgeny in the head first, to make sure I wouldn't have to watch my back, then went after the two goons. They were too intent on using their guns, and I had no real trouble laying them out with a couple of kicks. With their primary weapons in my possession and their hideout guns laid out, unloaded, on the table, I waited for them to regain consciousness.

Yvgeny reached under his coat as soon as he began to come to, but when he saw his weapons with the collection on the table, he stopped.

"I think Anastasia would have taken you off her Christmas card list if you had killed me, Uncle Yvgeny," I chided him. "Besides, now we each know who we're dealing with, can we cut the crap and get down to business?"

"Why I don't just wait 'til you're not looking, and blow your brains out?" he asked sullenly.

"Because you know that a guy who knows what I know about you, also knows that he needs safeguards. Any further attempts on my life, successful or not, will result in the information I have on you being sent to the appropriate parties. The feds will also get a copy, but you know how slowly they move. By the time they get an investigation together, they'll have to put the pieces of you back together just to have a body to put on trial. Now stop all this nonsense and use your brain. If I wanted you out of the picture, why would I come to your place to tell you about it? I came here to do business with you, but I took out some insurance, first. You know how that works, Yvgeny. Now, do you want my business, or not?"

"What's your proposal," he asked. He did know how it worked, but he wouldn't have been who he was if he hadn't tested me.

"I need to find somebody, discreetly," I told him, "and I need to know everything there is to know about him."

"Why you don't hire a detective?" he asked. "You found out all this stuff about me. Use the same people to find out about this other one. I am not P. I."

"I know you're not a private investigator," I told him, "I also know that if you want to find someone, they don't stay hidden. Besides, I may need certain crimes committed against this person and/or his property."

"That costs you extra," he said.

"Of course," I smiled. "I understand how a service business such as yours works. I also know that while you're not above taking a little extra for yourself, you have never reneged on a business deal once you entered into an agreement. So, do we have a deal?"

"For one million, plus expenses," he said, "we have deal. How do I start looking for this person, and how do I get in touch with you when it is done?"

"Here is all the information I have at the moment," I handed him a manila envelope with printouts of the trading profile from the NYSE and certain other tidbits I had discovered about this person: his usual IP address, the P.O. box where he received mail, etc. "I will contact you through Anastasia. You cannot contact me, because I am dead, and I will remain that way until it is convenient to be resurrected."

"You pay up front," he said. I knew that no one he did business with ever worked that way, but he was still testing me. The usual procedure was half up front and the rest when the job was done. A show of good faith, with incentive not to back out, as it were.

"This case contains five hundred thousand," I told him sliding an attaché case across the table. "You get the rest when you deliver."

"You said you know I always deliver," Yvgeny said slyly, "so why not pay me all up front?"

"There's a first time for everything, Uncle," I told him, smiling, "besides, it would be bad for business to set a precedent like that."

Yvgeny had been trying to size me up since this meeting began. He had observed my reactions to his little tests, and every facial expression I used throughout, not to mention my body language. I know, because I had been doing the same with him.

When I got up and held out my hand, he took it in a firm grip, and said, "It is good Anastasia finds a strong man to take care of her. I think I like doing business with you, Nephew."

"I think you're full of shit, Uncle," I smiled. "You'd just as soon cut my throat as look at me, but since I've passed all your little tests, you'll be careful about how you try. You do your part, Yvgeny, and I will do mine, and maybe nobody's throat will have to get cut."

He clapped me on the shoulder and roared with laughter. I took the clips out of the two guns I still held and put them on the pile of weapons on the table, jacking the slides first, in case they had rounds chambered. They did.

I turned my back to them and walked out of the room without looking back, but those weird senses of mine told me that, had not Yvgeny signaled them to wait, the two goons would have been at the table shoving clips back into their weapons with every intention of unloading them into me.

Since I was rich, but not famous, my funeral had been televised on only a few channels, and Anastasia played the part of the grieving widow very well. I do believe the tears that were visible in her closeups were real.

"Please," she told the cameras, "we could not even recover his body. This has been very difficult for me, and I would appreciate it if you would respect my privacy during this trying time."

It was a shame that I would have to stay away from her for a while, but she was going to be the center of a lot of attention for the next few weeks and it was best if we had no direct contact. As I had instructed her, she had a web site set up for well-wishers, and would be watching the message boards for messages containing certain phrases. Those phrases would be her cue that the messages were from me. I was surprised by how many total strangers wanted to send their condolences.

As for me, my hair was now a dirty, stringy blonde, and I sported a five day growth of beard. I made sure that I smelled of body odor and beer to anyone who came near. The room in the flophouse was cheap and the walls paper thin, There was no internet connection in the fleabag hotel, but the coffee shop on the first floor had Wi-Fi. Unlike the pay-per-use Wi-Fi that the bigger places had, however, they just installed a DSL line and gave customers the access key on a piece of paper. Having bought a cup of coffee there wearing more presentable clothing and carrying my laptop, I still had the little piece of paper on which the key was printed. I had been lucky to find a neighborhood like this: a thriving retail district at street level during the day, but the rooms above the first floor were mostly occupied by bums like me who slept most of the day and wandered the streets at night, usually cradling a precious bottle in a brown paper bag. These were the lucky ones. Down, but not yet out. They still found enough work to pay the rent on the rooms above the ground floor businesses, but not much else.

With this room I rented right above the coffee shop, I could get into the internet anonymously without leaving my room. I used my connection to set up some monitoring routines. Sure enough, the day of my funeral, the owner of the account that had been working against me restarted his own trading.

That told me that he or she had bought the story of my death, and now felt it safe to continue his or her own program, whatever it was. I set a few 'time bombs', carefully made to look as if they had been created in the days before my 'death'. These were carefully planted viruses on certain trading computers that would go off at a certain date and time. They were designed to make my opponent wary about trading in this way, as they would cause him to lose substantial sums of money. There were workarounds for each of them, but each was designed to work differently and to go off at different times. My opponent would, eventually, defeat each of them, but they would slow, or perhaps reverse his accumulation of wealth for a while. They were harassing tactics, but would, if I was lucky, keep his or her mind off who might be following or snooping into private matters.

With that done, I went back to doing my own trading - from fourteen different, independent accounts.

I had modified my trading program to create those accounts and to 'bounce' my access IP address around the globe for each account. One day, I might be a student on Long Island, a flight attendant at an airport in Dubai, a guy having lunch at McDonalds in Winchester, England, or a businessman at a Starbucks in Hong Kong. The trades actually originated from viruses planted on those computers, under the master control of my computer, which was working through an anonymous server in the Caribbean. It would take a great deal of time and effort to track me down, and I did not think my opponent had the resources for that. He might detect one of my accounts if he bothered to look since I was supposed to be dead, but if he started playing against any of them, they would simply cease trading and a new account would be created. Those accounts were working commodities, the money markets, and the bond markets as well as the stock market. That was Anastasia's suggestion, and the trading program was based in part upon the economic model she had provided for me.

Just to err on the side of caution, however, I physically moved around. One day, I would be in L. A., the next, in Las Vegas. Two days later, I would be in San Francisco, then in Bakersfield. Seattle, Portland, Albuquerque, Tucson, and many other cities. A city might host me for a day or two before I moved on to the next, or back to one I had already visited. I tried to keep my movements random and never stay at the same place when I revisited a city. Sometimes, I would buy time on a pay-per-use Wi-Fi, and sometimes I would steal it from businesses or individuals. It was easy to drive my rental car through a residential neighborhood, for instance, and find a Wi-Fi router whose owner had gotten tired of using access keys and had disabled his Wi-Fi access security. I also grew adept at breaking into Wi-Fi networks that required a password. People do get sloppy with network security sometimes.