The Kraken Project

41

Moro drove the Navigator down Main Street in Half Moon Bay, California. It was a spiffy downtown of whitewashed buildings, art galleries, craft breweries, gift shops, and an upscale feed store catering to horsey people. The town was framed by green hills on one side and the sea on the other. It was morning and the town was just stirring, but the parking spaces were already filling up with white Lexuses and Mercedeses and late-model pickup trucks. Everyone walking on the street was young, thin, and blond. The whole place smelled of honest, hard-earned money. Not, Moro thought, like Wall Street.

“I could live here,” he said.

“You’d miss that grand New York odor of rotting garbage in the morning,” said Lansing.

Moro pointed. “There it is, Baynet Internet Services.”

“Park on the next block,” said Lansing. “We’ll walk past, take a good look, and have a spot of breakfast at that little café beyond. Our appointment is at nine.”

Moro drove through the intersection and slid into a diagonal parking space between a Tesla and a Mini Cooper. He got out, Lansing following. Moro was a little embarrassed to be seen with Lansing, who looked like an alien in this place, a poker-up-the-ass East Coast patrician dressed in a dark suit, tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and wingtip shoes. Moro figured he himself looked more like a native, with his long hair, skinny jeans, and hipster glasses. But they both had the pasty, grub-white skin of New Yorkers. Everyone around them was gorgeously tanned.

They strolled along the street, an odd couple when you got down to it, but nobody paid them any attention — this was California, Moro figured, the land of live and let live. They walked past the Baynet building and stopped at an outdoor café just beyond. The ISP was located in a cute 1920s bungalow redone as a commercial space. It irritated Moro all over again to see the fussy neatness of the place. This rinky-dink ISP was buttoned up so tight he had been unable to hack into its system, no matter what he did. It was one of those mom-and-pop operations that should have been gaping with holes and unfixed security patches. Instead, it was state-of-the-art. All network access hardware was on a subnet, with access control lists and an up-to-date IDS system. Not only that, but Baynet had hidden all customer account information behind its very own firewall.

What was the world coming to?

An ISP normally would release account information only in response to a court order. But this was a small operation run by one guy. All they had to do was persuade the owner — a fellow named William Echevarria — to give them the account information for the IP address in question. Moro had checked out the guy’s online presence, ransacked his Facebook page, rifled through his Twitter feed, and perused his other social media sites. People told you all you needed to know about themselves online, which could be useful when answering such log-in security questions as your mother’s maiden name or the name of your childhood school/dog/best friend. None of this, however, had helped him break into Echevarria’s personal accounts or deduce any of the Baynet passwords. But the exercise hadn’t been in vain. Moro had learned quite a lot about the guy: forty-five years old, born in Mexico, brought to America as a baby, naturalized twelve years ago, Eagle Scout, UC San Diego graduate, into surfing and sports cars. He was a Big Brother, owned his own house, mortgage up to date, married, two kids. He had made some money from a Silicon Valley start-up and with it had bought the ISP about five years ago.

Moro and Lansing had discussed how best to persuade Echevarria to give up the account information behind that IP address. Echevarria didn’t seem to have money troubles, and that Eagle Scout thing made a bribe attempt too risky. He had no criminal record, no divorce, nothing salacious. His relatives back in Mexico were, it seemed, poor, hardworking farmers from Michoacán who seemed to keep their noses clean.

It was Lansing who’d suggested they pose as buyers. This was a small ISP that resold bandwidth, not worth all that much. They would bandy about some eye-popping figures, get the guy drooling over a potential windfall. But Lansing had insisted on backup, so Moro had kept poking around in the guy’s history. He’d eventually hacked into the USCIS network and checked out Echevarria’s N-400 application for naturalization. And right away he saw that Echevarria had lied. He’d said he had no children, when it was clear as day from his Facebook page that he had a mentally retarded teenage daughter in Mexico, born out of wedlock, living with Echevarria’s mother. But why had he lied? It wasn’t against the law to have a daughter out of wedlock. So again using Facebook — what a godsend — he’d found the identity of the daughter’s mother. She came from a wealthy family connected to narco-trafficking.

Bingo.

Moro wasn’t sure if Echevarria’s citizenship could be revoked. But he hoped that Echevarria’s life could be made inconvenient if this fact came to the attention of Immigration or the Department of Homeland Security. It might well cause problems with his FCC license to be an Internet service provider.

Moro finished his tea with lemon and popped a cough drop into his mouth. Lansing checked his Rolex. The time for their appointment had arrived. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said, rising and tugging smooth the panels of his suit.

They went into Baynet, passed the customer service counters staffed with fresh-faced girls, announced themselves, and were escorted into the back. Moro looked around. This was good: the servers were right here, on-site. They walked past the humming cabinets to a small, bright office in the rear.

There was Echevarria. The man rose, shook hands all around, invited them to sit. He was a fit, handsome man with dark, melting girly eyes, wearing a tight Ralph Lauren polo shirt that showed off his biceps. A tattoo crept just below one short sleeve. This was one macho dude.

“Well,” he said, “I want to tell you up front that I’m not interested in selling the company. Although I appreciate your interest.”

What a crock, thought Moro. Everyone had a price.

Lansing said, “I understand. What a beautiful place this is — and what a perfect little town for a company. I’m a trader on Wall Street, but I’m tired of it and looking for a change. This is very attractive.”

“Thank you.”

“How did you end up here?”

This got Echevarria going about how he had made “a little money” in a dot-com start-up in Palo Alto, over the hill, got tired of all that and settled down here, where life was slower, people friendlier, and so forth and so on. Lansing skillfully segued that conversation into some personal chitchat about whether he was married (recently), children (baby girl, toddler boy), his interests (surfing and climbing), and so forth. Echevarria once again declared his lack of interest in selling, but Moro could tell the guy was curious to hear the size of the offer. He was too savvy to come out and ask directly. Instead he asked general questions about why Lansing was interested in his company. Pretty soon Lansing slipped in, offhand, that if everything checked out he was thinking of a cash offer somewhere in the “low-eight-figure” range, if Echevarria might consider selling.

Now, that got Echevarria’s attention. As much as the guy was doing this as a hobby and didn’t need the money, that kind of price for a low-margin business grossing no more than a million dollars a year was just crazy enough to turn anyone’s head.

Echevarria got all jolly, palsy, offering them bottles of Lauquen artesian mineral water, telling his secretary to hold his calls, all the while reaffirming that, indeed, Baynet was not for sale.

About half an hour into the meeting, Lansing made his move. He waited for silence, clasped his hands, and leaned forward. “Mr. Echevarria, before I make any sort of offer, I do my research. After all, I didn’t make almost a billion dollars on Wall Street by winging it.”

Echevarria nodded. A billion was impressive, even to a dot-com guy. Even if the billion had been reduced by 50 percent a few weeks ago.

“I’ve looked into your company. What I found looks satisfactory — or, of course, I wouldn’t be here.”

Another sage nod from Echevarria.

“I just need one question answered.”

“Shoot.”

“Are you really, absolutely, and totally closed to the idea of selling?”

A long silence. “I love what I do. I love this town. I love being in the tech business. It would take a lot for that to change. But … I’d be a fool not to at least listen to someone bringing me a good-faith offer.”

“Excellent. That’s all I need to know. I’d like to draw up an offer. Make it in writing. Spell it out in detail. You can have all the time you need to look it over, discuss it with your attorneys. Are you open to that?”

“I would say so.”

Another silence. “In order for me to make my offer, the one thing I need is this: I need to verify your customer base.”

Echevarria said, “I’ll have my accounting firm provide you with a certified audit.”

“We all know that accounting firms are sometimes … flexible. I’d like to verify it directly. Myself.”

“What are you proposing?”

“I’ll examine your customer information right here, in your office, with you present. The list will not be copied. My associate, Mr. Moro, is a computer specialist, and all he will do is verify that you have the number of customers you say you do. That’s all.”

Echevarria smiled. “I appreciate that, but I have a strict policy of not ever releasing my customer list. Having been in this business a long time, I’ve come to believe that the security and privacy of my customers is number one.”

“You’re not actually releasing your customer list. We take nothing away. It all happens right here, in your office. We simply look. No copying.”

Echevarria shook his head. “Confidentiality of information to me is sacred. If I lose my customers’ trust, I lose everything. I just can’t do that. Help me find another way to verify the information you want and I’ll do it.”

“There’s no other way. I must see your customer list.”

A silence. Echevarria scratched his head, crossed his arms, flexed his muscles. The man was thinking. Finally he shook his head. “No can do.”

“You’re being unreasonable, Mr. Echevarria.”

More head shaking. “Perhaps.”

“My dear sir, you can’t be serious. You’d let a golden opportunity like this slip away over some notion of privacy?”

“I won’t compromise my principles.”

“We could do it this way: I’ll give you a random list of Baynet IP addresses — say, twenty — and you give me the customer information for just those accounts. A random check, just to make sure you don’t have dummy customer accounts.”

No response. He was thinking again.

“Surely you can understand why I need this information,” said Lansing.

Echevarria sighed. “I do understand. I really do. But the answer is still no. I’ll give you a sworn, certified letter from my accountants affirming what you need to know. I’ll give you metadata on accounts receivable. I just can’t give you specific customer names. That’s a red line for me. I’m sorry.”

Moro saw a faint flush gathering on Lansing’s fine, chiseled features. When he spoke, his voice had changed. It was low, frosty. “There is a second problem with your company.”

“And what’s that?”

“Your FCC license.”

“What about it?” Echevarria sounded alarmed.

“It requires the owner to be an American citizen.”

At this Echevarria darkened. “I am an American citizen.”

“Of course. But … I’m sorry, I can’t put this any other way, but if a person makes a false statement on their N-400 declaration, that’s grounds for revoking citizenship.”

Echevarria leaned forward. “Listen. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I did not make any false statements on my N-400.”

“You swore you had no children on your N-400. But you had a daughter, Luisa, living with your mother.”

Echevarria sat back in the chair with narrowed eyes. After a moment, he said, “You certainly did your research, Mr. Lansing.”

“If Baynet’s license is questionable, well … that’s something I need to know, if I’m buying the company.”

A silence. “How would anyone ever know?” asked Echevarria. “That was twelve years ago.”

“If I buy Baynet, when the license is transferred to me, I have to affirm by oath I have no knowledge of any defect in the license.”

Echevarria stared at him, and then smiled a cold smile. “I see. So you’re threatening to report me.”

“I’m simply complying with the law.”

“Wow. This is some kind of New York shakedown.”

“No, no, Mr. Echevarria, you’ve got me all wrong. In my business, on Wall Street, with all the regulations we face, everything I do is scrutinized under a microscope, even my outside business activities. I have to be careful.”

Echevarria rose. “Mr. Lansing? Mr. Moro? It’s been nice. The door is over there.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” said Lansing.

“Time to leave, gentlemen.”

“You throw me out, I’ll feel obliged to go straight to the FCC with this information.”

Silence. This last threat seemed to bring the business owner up short.

Lansing went on: “There’s no need for me to mention this problem of yours at all—at all, ever—if you’ll just allow me to glance over your list so I can make my offer. You’ve no obligation to accept. This is no shakedown. If you don’t like the offer, we go our separate ways.”

Echevarria had suddenly become calm. “Across the hill, over there in Silicon Valley, those guys are the great white sharks of the business world. You Wall Street traders are baitfish compared to them. You’re chum. You think you can come in here and threaten me? Go ahead, take your best shot. I can handle the FCC. Now you get your gangster New York attitude out of here before I call the cops.”

“Mr. Echevarria—”

But he had picked up the phone, and Moro saw him dialing 911.

Back on the street, Moro followed Lansing over to the car. That, he thought, had been spectacularly mishandled. Mists were rolling in from the sea, along with darker clouds. It looked like it was going to rain.

“Give me the keys,” Lansing said.

Moro handed them over. They got into the car. Lansing sat behind the wheel, dark and silent, and started up the engine. Moro was taken aback by just how quietly furious Lansing was, his face flushed, his hands leaving wet prints on the steering wheel, the fingers trembling.

“What now?”

“We’re going to need the assistance of our Kyrgyz friends.”