'All right, then,' Phelps said. 'Yes, you know that. We have a very friendly contact high up in China Telecom who was able to collate the sources of the calls to the various Asian brokerages, and then using regression analysis we traced them back to five individuals residing in Shanghai. I'm afraid that we were forced to relinquish a very considerable sum to get the phone records, but once we did, we can see that the probable source of the entire wave of selling originated with these five men or their representatives. They happen to be principals in a variety of real estate projects in Shanghai and the surrounding areas and have made quite a name for themselves. One of them is a Shanghai government official, by the way.'
Martz had a bad feeling about what he was soon to hear. 'Any legal recourse?'
'Doubtful. We violated private brokerage agreements, clearinghouse confidentiality agreements, American securities law, Taiwanese security law, and Chinese security regulations. That's why our information is so good.'
'It's not that good-I mean, I basically already knew something like this had happened.'
'Yes, sir, I understand that a man of your experience would certainly intuit the basic structure of causation.' Phelps smiled ever so indulgently, then thought better of it. 'When I worked for the government we were often able to make educated guesses about the causes of illegal trades, but it was the detail work that really showed how people operated. So please give me one more moment. Now then, one of the five Chinese businessmen originating these trades is named Chen. In his early thirties. He has some two dozen holding companies that he controls and we were able to trace one of them, using a confidential source at Hong Kong Banc Trust, to a privately held company here in New York. This small company, which is called CorpServe, provides cleaning, waste removal, and paper-shredding services to a number of office buildings and corporate clients around town. One of the contracts is a midtown address, and you will recognize it as the corporate offices of Good Pharma.'
'Oh, those fuckers!' Martz yelled.
'Yes. Now then, I have asked my colleague Bert Sims to give us the backgrounder in paperized information security.'
Sims, still blinking constantly, stepped forward, shooting his cuffs like a comedian on television. 'Thanks, Bob. Pleasure to help out, Mr. Martz. Heard you were one of the richest men in New York City. Wow, I said to myself. Quite an honor for me. Now then, the great bulk of information security has to do with computer files, text encryption, wireless security, and so on. As it should. That stuff is complicated and you need smart people to protect it. But then one must ask, where else in the universe is important information found? In two other media. The first is brain cells. People walk around with a lot of valuable information in their heads. Its value and accuracy are generally in decay. The other medium, of course, is paper. Good old paper. We have become very-pardon the expression- promiscuous with paper. We once thought we'd have paperless offices but of course that never happened. That's a joke. People print out e-mails, they make copies of reports online, they distribute charts in meetings, and so on.'
Sims blinked as he prepared to expound again. 'There is only one way to remove the problem of paper, from a security point of view. You destroy the paper itself. But what is destruction? That's an interesting question.'
'To you,' Martz said.
'Yes, to me but also to my colleagues in the paperized security industry who are charged with the task of analyzing paper destruction issues and related methodologies.' His eyes lost contact with Martz as he wandered through his interior landscape of abstraction, his voice dropping its synthetic heartiness and becoming the affectless droning of a man who lived for and only loved information. 'You can burn paper, which causes smoke, and if you are running a legal, commercial operation, that smoke has to be cleaned, by federal statute. Has to be scrubbed, because most inks have PCBs in them. Ink is a pretty bad substance once you start spreading it around in gas form. You can also destroy paper by dissolving it in acid or some other kind of solvent, but this is smelly and expensive and very messy. You can hide paper, bury it or lock it away, but this only postpones its fate. If you lock it away, somebody can always break in and steal it. Plus the costs of secure storage are enormous. Just ask the U.S. government. Our country spends ninety-eight billion dollars a year on the storage of undigitized government records. Did you know that? What about burying paper? Well, there are landfill issues. Plus people could always dig up the-'
'I am paying for information I can use, not a complete regurgitation of everything you've ever learned. Get to the point.'
'Of course. Yes. So, okay, the last way you can destroy information on paper is by shredding it. There are different methods and standards of shredding security, from long strips to confetti. You have your strip-cut, cross- cut, and particle-cut machines, grinders, disintegrators, and granulators. One concept is that you turn, say, one hundred pages of valuable information into ten thousand pieces of confetti, and perhaps mix it with fifty thousand pieces of the same size that have no valuable information, and no one in his right mind would or could reassemble those pieces.
'But things, Mr. Martz, are not always as they seem. Shredded documents can be reassembled. The most famous case was the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, when the Iranians hired local car pet weavers to reconstruct shredded embassy documents by hand. Nowadays the computerized document reassembly business is well developed. Confetti is small only because you are big. If you were tiny, then you would see it very differently. Let's say that piece of confetti was as big as a pizza box, or even bigger, as wide across as the rug in your living room. At that size it would seem fairly thick, and there would be lots of details about it on all of its surfaces. Well, you know what? We can make that piece of confetti large-informationally, I mean. We can microscan it and get a very detailed image of it. Very detailed. That itself is digitized, labeled, and stored. Kind of ironic, actually. The digital becomes paper, becomes digitized gain. Now, with a computer program that reads all those pieces of paper and puts them back-'
'What are you getting at?' asked Martz, hearing the door open in the hallway.
'You could read the documents. But it would take a lot of labor and a lot of computing power. Yet in China, both of those things are almost free now. The cost of labor is actually still dropping in some areas, as more and more people come off the farms and search for work. And most computing programs in China have been pirated from Western companies. You literally have small Chinese companies running on software they got for free that cost their original owners millions of dollars.' Sims's eyes noticed something behind Martz, something that unsettled his robotic composure. 'The government supports, I mean sees, no I did mean supports, this-this activity I am-'
'Hello!' Connie pranced into the room across the Persian carpet on shiny high heels, carrying a shopping bag and wearing a wicked little black cocktail dress that showed her every gigantic and fabulous curve. 'Pardon me! I'm so sorry! Bill? What do you think?' She whirled around, displaying her impossible convexities. 'Do you just love it? Please say you do!' She looked back coyly at the security men. 'Oh, please excuse me, I just had to show my husband.' She flung her hands up and bent one leg, an old model's pose. 'See?' She pulled the hem up one side of her steel-hard thigh. 'Perfect fit. Here, feel.' She stepped forward, her leg grazing Martz's yellow robe, touching his pale hairy calf, and took his hand and put it flat on her stomach, made him rub it, his fingers making incidental but not unnoticed contact with the round underside of the firm shelf above. 'Nobody produces this kind of silk, no one. Don't you just love it?'
Martz nodded, not sure who in the room was the most humiliated, he or the two men. Connie was capable of this kind of behavior, he knew all too well, and it came in part from her awareness that she would never have children, that her sexiness was her only hold on him, and also from her unacknowledged desire to be attractive to men other than her husband. Younger men, more attractive men, vigorous men. Christ, he'd been married four times and humped sixty or seventy women, he knew a thing or two about female human beings. Connie needed a good banging, really needed it, and he hadn't given her that in a long time. So, no wonder. Poor girl. Now she bent down to his ear, no doubt flashing her perfect rear side at the men waiting patiently. 'Oh, Bill, don't be mad,' she breathed. 'I wanted it for you.'
She stood and flounced away. The men sat there a moment, collectively stunned.
Martz broke the silence. 'Gentlemen, that was my wife, and after you reel your tongues back in, we may resume.'
Sims nodded obediently, his blink rate suggesting a rapid mental rewinding until the point of interruption was found. 'As it turns out, computers can recognize shredder patterns and perform best-fit sorting by shape not just by-'
'Stop talking,' Martz commanded. He turned to Phelps. 'Thus far all you guys have done is waste my time and ogle my wife. The first thing I can't stand, and the second I forgive you for, since you had no choice. Now, get back
