The Namedropper

Fourteen

H arvey Jordan decided there was no reason for him to have considered as wasted time the frustrating day he’d spent in the Carlyle suite waiting for the results of the American venerealogist’s examination. He would have been distracted then, not devoting his absolute concentration upon what he wanted to do and the preparations necessary to do it. And the trip to Raleigh had been a useful interval to think things through as well as the opportunity to put things right between himself and Daniel Beckwith.

Today was the moment to start putting into practice the several decisions he’d reached and become pro-active: to start to work, in fact, with just the slightest variation from normal. Not wanting to risk being followed to all the places of public record and reference that he might need to visit – despite having so much useful information already available from the legal exchanges between the lawyers – Jordan’s first priority was to resolve the surveillance uncertainty. How to do that had come to him during the Raleigh meeting.

The most compelling reason for staying in grand hotels was the comprehensiveness of their services, which he utilized by having someone from the Carlyle’s guest assistance go out to buy the laptop he needed, which had the double benefit of him not being seen to make the purchase if he were still being watched and further distancing him from it by having its purchase price registered against the hotel and not charged by name against him, personally. It took Jordan the entire morning to configure the machine and put it on-line, not through an American provider but through the British Telecom Yahoo broadband server. He set up his payments through England, too, from the Paul Maculloch account at the Royston and Jones private bank.

From his previous lawful career Harvey Jordan had brought an unrivalled computer expertise to his new illegal career, in which phishing was essential. The first requirement for successful hacking was never to initiate a direct intrusion into another system, but to work through an intervening, unwitting ‘cut out’ server. The reason for such caution was twofold: computer protection had become extremely sophisticated since its inception, with many preventative systems utilizing tracing facilities to identify the source of a detected illegal entry attempt. It was this unknowing ‘cut out’ buffer computer system that showed up if Jordan’s cyber burglary got ensnared in a firewall, not Jordan’s laptop. The second advantage was that Jordan only got charged for the cost of accessing his cut out. Everything he did through it was billed against the unsuspecting host. Having penetrated the host system, like an intrusive cuckoo, Jordan then installed what in the self-explanatory vernacular of the trade is known as a Trojan Horse.

Over his years as an identity borrower Jordan had successfully stabled his Trojan Horses in a number of illegal sites throughout the world unknown to the genuine owner and while he religiously destroyed the individual computers he only ever used for one identity stealing operation, he’d left his secret entry doors open to all the host sites, creating a bank upon which he could draw without having to hack in to a new system. That day he chose to return to a long term cuckoo’s nest in the mainframe of a beer-distributing company in Darwin, Australia, that he hadn’t used for five years. He still worked as carefully as he always did, with every new job, alert for the first indication that his previous presence might have been discovered during a virus or illegal entry sweep during his absence, but there was no tell-tale hindrance or unexpected ‘entry denied’ flash on his screen and the 12,000 mile connection was made in seconds.

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.

Jordan started work again early the following day, first reentering the available golden goose of Appleton and Drake and again, from the already dated currency trades, spreading $10,500 in transfers between his five Appleton bank accounts. Next he got into his own law firm’s computer to leapfrog into Daniel Beckwith’s personal station, staying there long enough to read the exchanges about himself between Beckwith and Lesley Corbin in London, and then between Beckwith and Reid in Raleigh. He was intrigued to read Lesley’s early opinion of him as ‘arrogant although knocked off his feet being caught with his pants around his ankles, a position in which it is always difficult to remain upright’, and the correspondence between her and the American lawyer questioning the income possible from professional gambling. It was Lesley, too, who had first suggested he would need repeated instructions on how to conduct himself in court to avoid antagonizing a judge or jury. She’d again used the word ‘arrogant’.

Jordan’s need for court training was referred to once more in the correspondence between Beckwith and Reid. Of more interest to Jordan was the email discussion between the two American lawyers about potential damage awards, with one suggestion from Reid that if there were individual judgements against Jordan on each listed claim, the total adjudication could go as high as twelve million dollars. Reid’s qualification – ‘in reality I can’t see it reaching half that figure if all awards go against him’ – didn’t do anything to reassure Jordan.

Neither did Beckwith’s response. ‘A sum in either of those amounts would inevitably attract national if not international publicity,’ Beckwith had written. ‘And from what we already know from our preliminary enquiries, both the Appleton and Bellamy families have a recognized social and financial standing on the east coast, which is an added publicity attraction. My client is anxious to avoid publicity, as you tell me your client is, which makes it imperative we establish as soon as possible who the judge is going to be. If it is someone who enjoys notoriety – as I remember several did from the time of my practising in Raleigh – there might be a difficulty in you successfully arguing for a closed hearing. We need to liaise closely on this point.’

Jordan was curious that there had been no exchange between the two men following the Raleigh conference, quickly correcting his impatience with the self-reminder of how recent it had been. Whenever it came – and for as long as he required it in the future – he had this permanently open window into their every thought: into every thought of anyone with whom he found himself entangled.

Except Alyce, he corrected himself sharply. Her lawyer would have been the obvious pathway but nowhere in the man’s computer address book could Jordan locate any email exchanges between Reid and Alyce, and so successful and unobstructed had his entry been into all the other computer systems that there was a blip of positive disappointment at his not being able to worm his way into the last of his targets.

He’d been wrong about all his suspicions of Alyce, Jordan acknowledged not even having to force the unfamiliar honesty. He’d been wrong about believing she might in some way be complicit with her husband in trying to get money from him, wrong in imagining that she would have exposed him to the sexual complaint with which she’d been infected, and wrong to have made his hostility so blatantly obvious towards her during the Raleigh encounter. Objectively, continuing the honesty, Jordan accepted that he had been as much the cause of Alyce’s misfortune as she was guilty of being his. Judging from what he had just read of Appleton’s efforts to uncover Alyce’s infidelity to compensate for his own, if he had not so deliberately set out to seduce her, Appleton would have wasted even more money having her pursued by the inappropriately named Watchdog.

Fully aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies there were in the vocation he followed, Jordan would have been the last to claim that he suffered a conscience from his actions and certainly didn’t consider that conscience was part of what he was feeling now. But there was at least a genuine regret at behaving as he had towards her in Raleigh. Maybe, he thought, there would be other opportunities to apologize.

There had been several times in the past, working as successfully in America as he had in England, when Jordan had actually considered relocating permanently to the United States. Everything he needed to adopt and take advantage of a new identity was so much more easily and publicly accessible in the States, if a person knew how and where to look – which Jordan did. Upon application the essential and identity-proving Social Security number was readily available; so essential that it was more often than not printed as a guaranteed payee authenticity, along with full addresses, upon personal cheques, which was why he had included Appleton’s on all five accounts he’d opened in the trader’s name. As he knew from the legal exchanges, it was on Appleton’s bank record. Determined upon avoiding any conceivable error on this very particular occasion he confirmed it as he accessed all the social register entries in Boston through the public library reference books and the archives of the Boston Globe. Through this he learned the Appleton family history from the Boston tax rebellion, that was the incendiary to the War of Independence, to the marriage of Alfred Appleton’s parents, from the records of which he double-checked the family name of the commodity dealer’s mother. From the same sources he got the names of the man’s prep schools prior to Harvard, into which he phished to learn that pre-college as well as at Harvard Appleton had been considered dilatory and disinterested in anything other than sailing. Through the Harvard records Jordan discovered three police references to drunken driving offences, none with conclusions, all presumably minimized into cautions due to his family money and influence.

It was while he was scrolling through the final Harvard records, cross-referencing dates wherever possible, that Jordan began to be troubled by an inconsistency that he could not immediately isolate, but which remained in his mind as he forced himself on. It was not until he had downloaded everything on to hard copy and was cross-referencing from all his various sources that it became obvious to him, although the basic mystery remained even more tantalizing.

Jordan realized that he had assembled virtually enough information about Alfred Jerome Appleton to write the man’s biography. But, missing from any publicly available source Jordan had so far accessed was what Appleton had done in the three years after his Harvard graduation.

How, where and doing what had Appleton spent that time? Jordan wondered.

And wondered further how much it would benefit him to find out. Which he would, Jordan thought, adding this to his list of determinations. And then he thought that Alyce would probably know.