Brian Freemantle - The Namedropper

Continuing on was easier than normal, because he already had not just the publicly available website address of Appleton and Drake, a few blocks away from where he sat in Manhattan, but Alfred Appleton’s personal registration entry code supplied in the exchanged legal documents by Appleton himself. Jordan was, effectively and electronically, looking over Appleton’s shoulder in three minutes, and by another five had tied up a new, untraceable Trojan Horse within Appleton’s computer through which he could monitor every incoming and outgoing email the man had stored in the past and was likely to save in the future.

Which was only the beginning of what turned out to be a very successful and productive day. Like the gambler he was supposed to be – but wasn’t – Jordan had hoped Appleton would have conducted his correspondence with David Bartle at Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein through his office facilities and so it turned out to be. It took Jordan a further thirty minutes to get into the law firm’s main computer system from which he moved on to embed a separate monitor in the lawyer’s personal machine. He scrolled patiently through the inbox and sent box of Bartle’s email service to discover the name of the ultra-efficient private enquiry agency, called unoriginally, Watchdog, whose offices were downtown, on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. Jordan had been surprised by how easy it had been penetrating the computer systems of both Appleton and Bartle, despite the advantages he’d had from the legal documents, but expected more difficulty entering that of Watchdog. He was surprised once more than it only took him another thirty minutes to get through the company’s firewall and a further fifteen to get his Trojan Horse and his own password in place in the personal computer station of Patrick O’Neill, the director with whom Bartle had conducted all his email correspondence.

Jordan was cramped, physically aching, from the concentration with which he’d worked, without a break, into the middle of the afternoon. He still only allowed himself the briefest pause, just long enough to walk through the suite to the bathroom to wash his face and make himself a tall vodka and tonic from the well equipped, ice-maker and glass-backed permanent bar in the suite’s living room, excited at the possibility of being able to answer the most persistently nagging question since the entire episode began.

It took him much longer than the previous hacking, because he had constantly to switch back and forth between in and out emails between Bartle and O’Neill to maintain a comprehensive continuity between the exchanges and even then there were gaps which Jordan assumed to be caused by the two men on occasions preferring the telephone to their computers.

As Jordan’s understanding grew he learned that O’Neill had acted as an on-the-spot supervisor in France, with a staff that at its height grew to ten – with the addition of two photographers – once they’d established the affair between him and Alyce. Two of the Watchdog staff had actually flown on the same plane as Alyce from New York, and dated before that flight to Europe was a lengthy memorandum from O’Neill explaining that despite an intense, two months’ surveillance in Manhattan and East Hampton, they had failed to uncover any evidence whatsoever of Alyce being involved with another man. There were several references to him in France as being ‘someone of obvious wealth’ and as ‘someone who is very familiar with this area of France’.

And finally Jordan found what he was specifically looking for. He guessed it was an email response from Bartle to a telephone call, which would have had to have taken place on the day Alyce flew back to New York from Nice, maybe even from the airport itself. The lawyer had written that O’Neill was to maintain the surveillance on Jordan while he remained in France but that it shouldn’t be continued back to England. In that email Bartle had written: ‘There is incontrovertible evidence of adultery sufficient for proceedings to be initiated and the expense in obtaining it has already been substantial.’

Satisfied that he was no longer under Watchdog surveillance Jordan quit the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon opening four separate accounts at the four other already chosen Wall Street banks in the name of Alfred Jerome Appleton. As with the First National he specified that he would be predominantly using electronic banking and provided the West 72nd street apartment as the mailing address to which bank and credit cards and cheque books should be delivered. He used cash – ranging from between $2,000 to $3,000 – to establish the accounts, anxious now that they were set up to get back to the Carlyle for the first of the many intended phishing expeditions.

He got back into Appleton’s personal computer by five thirty and through it, using Appleton’s unopposed, never rejected password, had the key electronically to pass through every door to wander wherever he chose within the firm of Appleton and Drake. A tour, Jordan both professionally and logically accepted, was too much to attempt in one visit: too much, possibly, to complete over a number of visits. But there was no hurry. The initial priority was to establish the value of the company, which again at this first visit was impossible to calculate. What wasn’t impossible, though, was to confirm that it ran into millions of contracts bought short or long, all set out like prizes in a raffle to which he held all the winning tickets. Apart from Appleton and his partner, Peter Drake, there were five additional traders and between them, after the briefest journey through the combined buy and sell portfolios, Jordan conservatively estimated there were more than 6,000 already logged trades, going through the entire gamut of the company’s range, from metals, its major activity, through its currency, cereal and Chicago meat subsidiaries.

Jordan had only twice before stolen the identity of a commodity trader, but from that experience he knew the basic trading operations, the most important of which was that any buy-or-sell contracts agreed by traders were double-checked and confirmed by the ‘back office’, a secondary, double-checking filter to prevent any contract being overlooked beyond its regulated, three month completion date. But once it was checked and registered – and most important of all dated – it remained on the trader’s book until it was moved on. Which meant, after the back office confirmation, the lid to every cookie jar was open to him, to plunder at will. That night he limited his targetting stings, concentrating upon currency contracts, because of all the commodities they fluctuated the most, sometimes by the hour, and therefore were the most difficult to track. He further limited himself on this first visit to a transfer to the First National bank account, and even more strictly limited the amounts – all of them less than five hundred dollars – he electronically transferred from four, two-day-old currency trades, each in excess of one million dollars from which five hundred dollars would not be detectable, nor swell the initial fake Appleton account beyond what the bank were legally required to automatically report to the financial regulating authorities. The following day, Jordan determined, the taps would be opened more fully to fill all five accounts.

At last, closer to exhaustion that he could remember for a long time, Jordan closed down the laptop and pushed himself back from the bureau to go to the bar to make himself another celebratory drink, putting on room lights as he did so. He carried his glass to an easy chair, needing its relaxing softness. Gazing out unseeingly over the jewellery-box glitter of the Manhattan night, he shook his head at the memories of all the unnecessary, time-wasting scurrying around London he did in order to avoid any potential surveillance when there had been nothing or no one to avoid or from whom to hide. And then he laughed, recognizing how frenetic he would have seemed if people had been watching him. It might have all been unnecessary and time-wasting, and he didn’t like being made to scurry like a frightened rabbit, but he was glad he’d taken the precautions. There was even a positive benefit: his own money was now far better hidden than it had been and, pointless though most of it had proved to be, it had been a useful, if exhausting, lesson. As he’d reflected before, he had definitely become complacent, dangerously believing things could never go wrong to upset his perfect life, which he certainly didn’t believe any longer. But he was correcting the situation now, Jordan told himself, looking across the room at the blank-eyed computer: pro-active at last, thinking for himself, in charge, in control of himself. Before this was all over there were going to be people – Appleton in particular – who’d fervently wish that he weren’t so in control.