Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

To my relief, there was no sign of Owen.

The IPO required a massive amount of preparation, especially on the accounting systems and the legal documentation. There was a prospectus to be written and checked and rechecked. Much of this work fell on me. Mel was a great help, and we spent long evenings together going over obscure points.

My father called, proposing lunch at Sweetings. I had blown him off the last two times he had suggested it, so this time I agreed. Besides, I had good news for him.

They had heard of dot-com fever in deepest Northamptonshire. Even the Daily Telegraph was reporting it excitedly. So my father could hardly wait to ask me how Ninetyminutes was doing.

‘It looks like we’re going to float at the end of the month,’ I said.

‘No! You haven’t been going a year yet.’

‘I know. Absurd, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t even realize you were making profits.’

‘We’re not.’

My father shook his head. ‘The markets have gone mad,’ he said as he tucked into his dressed crab. But he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

‘They have. But I’m not complaining.’

‘So, um, how much...?’

‘How much will your stake be worth?’

‘Er, well, yes. I was wondering that, actually.’

‘If the shares come out at anything like the level the bankers suggest, about nine hundred thousand pounds.’

My father choked on his crab. He began to cough, went bright red, and took a desperate swig from his half-pint tankard of Guinness. Eventually he recovered. ‘Did I hear you right?’

‘I think you did.’

A broad grin spread across his face. ‘Well done, David. Well done.’

I couldn’t help smiling back myself. I was proud to have repaid his faith in me so handsomely. I knew what really delighted him wasn’t just the money, but the fact that it was his son who had made it for him. What I hadn’t told him was that my own stake would be worth just under ten million pounds.

‘Don’t count the cash until you’ve sold your shares,’ I cautioned. ‘And certainly don’t spend any of it.’

‘Of course not,’ said my father. And then, ‘Well, well, well. I think the time has come to come clean to your mother.’

‘Haven’t you told her yet?’

‘No,’ said my father, looking a little embarrassed. ‘She might not have approved. But she’ll have to, now, won’t she?’

‘I suppose she will.’

I returned to the office to find it in full panic. I could tell it was a technology-related panic, because everyone was standing around Sanjay’s desk looking anxious, while he was frantically tapping into his computer and trying to communicate with his staff through the bodies around him.

‘What’s up?’ I asked Ingrid.

‘Goaldigger has been attacked by a virus.’

The goaldigger.com website was one of our biggest competitors. It had been active a year longer than us and had more visitors, but we were catching them up quickly.

‘What kind of virus?’

‘Apparently it’s been spitting out e-mails to all Goaldigger’s registered users. Look.’

She handed me an e-mail. It was addressed to Gaz, who had presumably been keeping tabs on the opposition.

Virus Alert

Please be aware that a virus has been detected in the goaldigger.com system. This virus may be able to access the computers of Goaldigger registered users and might download private information, or even corrupt customers’ hard disks. Customers are advised not to log in to the Goaldigger website or open e-mails from Goaldigger. We apologize to those customers who have lost significant personal data as a result of this virus.

The Goaldigger team

‘This sounds strange,’ I said.

‘It is. It’s a hoax.’

‘You mean there’s no virus?’

‘There is a virus. But a simpler one. It just sends this e-mail to all Goaldigger’s customers scaring them off the site. It’ll take Goaldigger weeks to repair the damage to their reputation, if ever.’

‘What a shame,’ I said with irony. The hard truth was that bad news for Goaldigger was good news for Ninetyminutes.

Ingrid looked at me sternly. ‘If someone’s done this to Goaldigger, they might do it to us next. Guy wants to be sure that we’re not vulnerable.’

‘We’ve got firewalls and anti-virus software and stuff, haven’t we?’

‘Yeah, but presumably they had all that too.’

Sanjay was pretty sure that we had protection against a similar attack, but he monitored our system constantly over the next few days to make sure. Goaldigger did try to get the message out to its customers that the whole thing was just a hoax, but there was no doubt that the episode did them damage. No one found the perpetrator.

Guy, Ingrid and I decided to take an evening off to attend the March First Tuesday event. They were keen to have us. In the internet world we were already billed as a success story before we had even made our first profit. The event was held in the auditorium of a theatre, specially cleared for the occasion. There were queues to get in and pandemonium once we got there. I felt very different than I had last time: much more secure in who we were and what we were doing. As last time, there were hundreds of eager entrepreneurs with ideas. But even more of these ideas were half-baked. In the case of some of them, no one had even turned on the oven. There was also a new kind of venture capitalist circling the room: the ‘incubators’. These were young men or women who had raised money to invest in internet companies at the earliest stage: the equivalent of the Wapping phase in Ninetyminutes’ history. They were scarcely less flimsy than the companies in which they were investing, but somehow they had attracted cash and they were throwing it about. They made the thirty-year-old Henry Broughton-Jones look like a dinosaur.

Everyone had a story about one success or another, but the big story on everyone’s lips was lastminute.com, run by the woman I had met at my first First Tuesday. This was a website which provided tickets at the last minute for anything ranging from air travel to theatres to sports events. They were in the middle of an IPO, and the investing public were fighting for shares. The flotation price had just been raised again, valuing the company at nearly five hundred million pounds. Everyone in that room wanted to be as successful as lastminute and most of them thought they could be. Even, I’m ashamed to say, me.

After a couple of hours of frantic schmoozing, the three of us met up.

‘What a zoo!’ Ingrid said.

‘Can you believe these people?’ said Guy.

‘That’s where we were nine months ago,’ I said. ‘I didn’t believe it would last then. But it has. It’s grown. Lastminute is worth five hundred million. We’ll be worth a hundred and eighty. It really is a new economy after all.’

‘I told you, didn’t I, Davo?’ Guy said. ‘You should have had faith in me.’

‘I did have faith in you!’

‘Yes, I suppose you did.’ Guy smiled at me. Then he looked out over the throng. ‘I wish Dad could have seen this.’

‘He would have been proud of you,’ I said. Actually, I thought it more likely he would have been envious, but I didn’t want to mention that. Nor did I want to ask any more questions about his death. I had asked enough questions and found out as much as I was ever going to on that subject. Although I still didn’t know what had happened to Tony, I was convinced of Guy’s innocence; Owen was gone and I had told myself to be satisfied with that. Besides, if Guy could feel better about his father, that was a good thing.

We left the throng and went our separate ways. I walked down a side-street looking for a taxi. Guy and Ingrid went the other way. I waited at a corner, and nothing came, so I doubled back, trying to find a better spot for a cab.