“Look,” he says to Mr. Twiggs at the end of the first day, “I’ll put everything in a final report, but there are things you should do immediately, so I think I better pass them along to you personally every day.”
“It’s that bad, is it?” the cherubic senior partner says.
“It’s not a disaster,” Cone says, “but you’ve got to learn to operate defensively. I don’t mean you’ve got to make this place into a fortress, but you should take some more precautions. Or one of these days some outlaws are going to stroll in here and waltz out with the family jewels.”
“What kind of precautions?”
“Well, for starters, you’ve got one security guard on the front door. I’m sure he’s a fine old gentleman, but he is old and he is fat. It would take him a while to suck in his gut before he could get that big revolver out of his dogleg holster. Get a younger guy on the door. Get another two or three to wander around. They can be nicely dressed, but armed and maybe wearing badges.”
“What else?” Twiggs says, making notes.
“All your typewriters and business machines should be bolted to the desks. You can even get attachments with burglar alarms, if you want to go that far. But you’ve got a zillion dollars’ worth of portable machinery in here that could be carted off with no trouble at all. Bolt it down.”
“Good idea,” the senior partner says. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, those paper shredders you’re using to destroy confidential documents. … They’re antiques. Shredded documents can be pasted together again. The Iranians taught us that when they re-created CIA secret memos from strips of paper lifted from the shredders in our embassy. You need new models that turn paper into confetti.”
“Excellent suggestion. More?”
“Not today,” Cone says. “I’ll be back tomorrow and take a closer look. I’ll stop by at the end of the day and give you my report.”
“I think you’re doing a fine job.”
“It’s all practical stuff. It’s not going to stop insider leaks, but it may help. Like keeping a cleaning woman who’s on the take from delivering the contents of your wastebaskets to some wise guys.”
At the end of the second day, he says to Twiggs, “This one is going to cost you bucks. You’ve got your Mergers and Acquisitions people scattered all over the place. An office here, an office there. That’s an invitation to leaks. You’ve got to consolidate that whole department. They can still have their individual offices, but all of them have to be in the same area. And that area has to be behind a locked door that can only be opened by authorized personnel with a computer-coded card.”
“It’s beginning to sound more and more like a fortress,” Twiggs says with a wan smile.
Cone shrugs. “You want to cut down on the possibility of leaks? This is one way to do it.”
On his final day at Pistol amp; Burns, he says to the senior partner, “This one is going to cost you big bucks. Your M and A people are writing too many office memos, too many suggestions, projections, analyses of upcoming deals-and all on paper.”
“We’ve got to communicate,” Twiggs protests.
“Not on paper you don’t. Computerize the whole operation. If anyone has something to say on a possible takeover, buyout, or merger, he puts it on the computer. Anyone else who’s involved can call it up on his monitor-but only if he knows the code word. You understand? Nothing typed on paper. And everything in the computer coded so that it can only be retrieved by personnel who have a need to know, and have the key word or number allowing them access. Also, the computer can keep a list of who requests access to the record.”
G. Fergus Twiggs shakes his head dolefully. “What’s the world coming to?” he asks.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Timothy Cone says.
He plods back to Haldering amp; Co. to pick up his salary check. He figures he’s done a decent job for Pistol amp; Burns. If they want to follow his suggestions, fine. If not, it’s no skin off his ass.
But something is gnawing at him. Something he heard or saw that flicks on a red light. Maybe it was something Bigelow said, or Twiggs. Maybe it was something he observed at Pistol amp; Burns. He shakes his head violently, but can’t dislodge whatever it is. It nags him, a fragment of peanut caught in his teeth.
When he gets back to his office, there’s a message on his desk: Call Jeremy Bigelow. So, without taking off his cap, Cone phones the SEC investigator.
“Hiya, old buddy,” Jerry says breezily. “How did you make out at Pistol and Burns?”
“Like you said, it’s as holey as Swiss cheese. I gave them some ways to close the holes.”
“But no evidence of an insider leak?”
“I didn’t find any.”
“That’s a relief. I wrote in my report it was the arbs who caused the run-up of the stock. I guess I was right.”
“Uh-huh,” Cone says.
“So much for the good news. Now comes the bad. We got another squeal on insider trading.”
“Oh, Jesus,” the Wall Street dick says. “Don’t tell me it’s a Pistol and Burns’ deal.”
“No, this one is at Snellig Firsten Holbrook. You know the outfit?”
“The junk bond specialists?”
“That’s right. They’re supposed to have the best security on the Street, but they’re handling a leveraged buyout and someone is onto it. The stock of the takee is going up, up, up. Listen, could you and I meet on Monday? Maybe we can figure out what’s going on.”
“Maybe,” Cone says, striving mightily to recall what he cannot remember.
He wakes the next morning, hoping the night’s sleep has brought to mind what he’s been trying to recollect; sleep does that sometimes. But all he can remember is the entire pepperoni pizza he ate the night before.
He goes over to Samantha’s place on Saturday night. She won’t be seen with him in public, fearing someone from Haldering will spot them and office gossip will start. That’s okay with Cone; he’s willing to play by her rules.
She serves a dinner of baked chicken, Spanish rice, and a salad. They also have a bottle of chilled Orvieto which puts them in a mellow mood. They have a nice, pleasant evening of fun and games, and Cone is home by 1:00 A.M. He gives Cleo fresh water and some of the chicken skin and bones he doggie-bagged from Sam’s dinner.
Sunday is just as relaxed. He futzes around the loft, smokes two packs of Camels, drinks about a pint of vodka, with water, and digs his way through Barron’s and the Business Section of the New York Times. In the evening he has a one-pound can of beef stew with a heel of French bread he finds in the refrigerator, so hard that he has to soak it in the stew to render it edible. Cleo gets the remainder of the chicken scraps.
On Monday he’s late for work, as usual. Jeremy Bigelow shows up at ten o’clock, carrying a fat briefcase. Cone calls down to the local deli for two black coffees and two toasted bagels with a schmear. They wait for their breakfast to arrive before they get down to business.
“Look,” Cone says, “it would help if you could tell me how the SEC works on insider trading scams. Then maybe I’ll know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a two-level operation,” Jerry says, gnawing on his bagel. “We get a lead and start gathering facts. That’s where I come in. If we can’t find any evidence of hanky-panky, the investigation is usually dropped. If things look sour, the staff goes to the Commission and gets an order for a formal inquiry. That’s when we get power of subpoena.”
“Yeah, but what gets you moving? Where do the leads come from?”
“Computers mostly. We couldn’t live without them. You know how many companies are listed on all the stock exchanges in the country?”
“No idea.”
“Neither do I-exactly. But I’d guess about twelve thousand. How could you check all those every day by hand? Imfuckingpossible. So the computers are programmed to pick up unusual activity. Say a stock has been trading an average of fifty thousand shares a day for months and months. Suddenly the trading volume goes up to maybe a million shares a day. The computer flashes a red light, bells go off, and an American flag pops from the top of the machine and starts waving madly back and forth.”