The Prince of Risk

41

“Ivan. I need you for a second.”

“Everything all right? None of the platforms are off?” Dr. Ivan Davidoff jumped from his desk and began scanning the array of monitors and screens that made up his office.

“Everything’s fine,” said Astor. “Relax. Unless of course, you’ve come up with a way to make the numbers only go up.”

Ivan looked at him nervously, as if the thought had crossed his mind. “No…not yet.”

Ivan was thin and pale with a three-day stubble, a shaved head, and dark eyes that looked as if he’d just gotten 30,000 volts. He had a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York and had spent three or four years out west at Apple doing cutting-edge stuff he still refused to talk about. It was the stress that had done him in. Ivan wasn’t built for fifteen-hour days and the relentless, deadline-driven world of Silicon Valley. He was built to design and oversee the sophisticated trading platforms that powered Comstock’s daily business and to work in a quiet, orderly environment that he could control.

“I wanted to ask you a few questions. Just stuff for my own curiosity.”

“What about?”

Astor closed the door and pulled a chair up to Ivan’s desk. “I’m not sure how to put it. I guess about controlling things. Like at my home. I can turn the lights on and off by voice command. And I can program the heat and air conditioning and the TV through my phone.”

“That’s old technology. Very simple. If you’d like, I can explain.”

Astor stopped him before he could get started. “Not necessary. Just listen to what I have to say.”

Calmly and with as much objectivity as he could muster, he related the events of the past evening, leaving out a few salient details-for example, how he’d fallen into the elevator shaft and nearly been killed. Ivan took in the information blankly, registering no surprise even when Astor explained how the elevator doors had opened without the elevator’s being there.

“The first part is simple,” said Ivan. “Someone hacked your phone, accessed your voice mail and manipulated the data, then resent it to you.”

“How can they do that?”

“Depends. You ever leave your phone anyplace that people can get it without you looking?”

“My office, maybe. Home. But I always keep it close. Why?”

“Someone could have cloned it. Takes about ten seconds.”

“What’s that-cloning?”

“Copy your SIM card. Get all the information from it. Numbers, contacts, texts, and passwords. Or they could have installed spyware. I can check. Give me your phone.”

“Actually, I don’t have it.”

“You leave it in your office?”

“I crushed it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Last night. With a hammer. I was kind of pissed off.”

Ivan looked at him with a newfound respect. “They can access it other ways,” he went on. “Get into your voice mail. Or through social engineering, you know, contacting someone at your phone company and convincing that person to give them the passwords for your accounts or to reset everything to factory defaults. You’d be surprised how many people at those big carriers are on the take.”

Astor thought about Mike Grillo and his contacts at those very same big carriers. Point taken. “And the elevator? I mean, you can’t tell an elevator what to do.”

“Why not? A computer controls it. You control the computer.”

“But it’s inside the building. I mean, who would know how to reach it?”

Ivan smiled and began rocking in his chair, and Astor could practically read his mind. Welcome to my world, homey.

“Nothing is inside anything,” said Ivan. “Elevators are like computers themselves. They have software that tells them how fast to go up and how fast to go down. How long to keep a door open and how quickly to close it. But someone has to be able to control the elevator itself, and that someone is probably not always on the premises.”

“How do they do that?”

“By connecting the elevator to a remote operating platform that is hooked up to the Net. The platform probably controls everything in the building: heat, security, lights. Hack the platform and you can take control of the elevator. For the elevator doors to open without the elevator’s actually being there, someone had to break into the platform and issue an override command.”

“So it’s possible?”

“For an outsider with little knowledge of the system, it would be very, very difficult,” said Ivan. “But if he worked for the elevator manufacturer, easy-peasy.”

“Thanks, Ivan. That should cover it.”

“You sure I can’t help you with something else?”

“You’ve been more than helpful.”

Astor left the office and headed across the trading floor. Halfway there, he stopped. A thought came to him, as clean and white-hot as a bolt of lightning.

Page 23. Sonichi annual report. The Sonichi Express 2122.

Whoever wanted to hurt Astor didn’t work for the company.

He owned it.

Astor slammed the door to his office and turned on the whiteboard.

“Memo. Private equity investors in Evans’s companies.”

The names of the private equity companies that had invested in those firms whose annual reports he’d found at Penelope Evans’s home appeared on the board. One by one, he called up their websites and scrolled through the contents until he found a list of companies the equity firms had invested in, past and present. He was not sure what he was looking for. He was only hoping that if there was a pattern, he could sniff it out and make sense of it.

“Watersmark.”

Astor paid particular attention to the sponsor that had been involved with the Sonichi Corporation. He noted that Watersmark had purchased Sonichi seven years earlier and taken it private for $6 billion. There was no mention about how Watersmark had restructured Sonichi, only that Sonichi had recently achieved record earnings and was set to go public again in the fourth quarter of the present year. Watersmark could count on making a hefty profit. Chalk up one for the good guys.

The other companies in Watersmark’s portfolio included Pecos, a large supermarket chain based in Texas and with operations in the southwestern United States; Silicon Solutions, a microelectronics company out of Canada; and a mining company in Australia.

Astor tried to imagine a connection between them. What might an industrial engineering firm whose smallest division manufactured elevators have in common with a supermarket chain or a mining company or a maker of specialized microchips? He could think of nothing. Nor could he link them to the bigger question: How might products manufactured by any of these companies allow someone to take control of an automobile?

Astor dug out the sheet of blue stationery from his father’s home that he’d found at Penelope Evans’s. Cassandra99. Still the word meant nothing.

She was there with my father, thought Astor. In our home. A home I swore never to set foot in again.

The answer was in Oyster Bay.

“Boss, the China boys are ready.” Marv Shank stood in the doorway, coffee in one hand, daily breakfast burrito in the other. “You good?”

“Be right there,” said Astor.

Whether he was good or not was another question entirely.