Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan (beach read txt) 📖

Chloe something to think about next time the discussed him joining up.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled into a parking garage in Cupertino and quickly unloaded everything in the van into two rental cars. They split into two groups and headed back to Chloe’s house. Mission accomplished and time to debrief. 

CHAPTER 18

The whole crew came together again at Chloe’s house, which looked the same as when Paul had last seen it. Computers still crowded every flat surface and serpentine cables crisscrossed the floor on their way into the server room. None of the crew trusted wireless networks; they had too much experience hacking them. The Crewmembers moved with purpose, wrapping up the final phases of the operation by wiping hard drives and otherwise covering over any digital tracks they might have left.

Raff had come in the other car, which arrived behind Paul’s group. As had become the norm, no one paid much attention to him as he stepped through the door. It took the lanky leader’s arrival a few minutes later to spark some excitement in the group. Raff bounded into the room, ducking through the doorway, and held the briefcase aloft with both hands, like an athlete showing off a championship trophy. 

“We got it! We got the fucking bastard by the balls now!” shouted Raff. Crewmembers turned in astonishment and started to cheer. As they ran up to hug and congratulate Raff, Paul managed to squeeze past them towards the kitchen and thus avoid being trampled. They buzzed with questions for Raff, who seemed bound and determined to try and answer all of them at once. Apparently he’d found time to check the contents of the hard drives while he was in his own car, out of Paul’s view. More members came out from other rooms to see what all the fuss was about. Paul watched from the kitchen entrance, rubbing his bruised back in discomfort. 

When Chloe walked in from the back of the house she made a bee-line for the crowd that had Raff at its center. As if they sensed her presence, the Crewmembers stepped aside so she could embrace her partner in crime. Her hair was still wet and she wore just a loose fitting tank-top and men’s boxer shorts. She must have been in the shower when she’d heard Raff come in. Paul straightened up and started to move back into the room but found forward progress impossible as the throng of crewmembers pressed back towards him. He retreated into the kitchen and decided to wait out this burst of piratical camaraderie.

They went through much the same kind of ritual as they had after they’d helped him get his revenge on his former partners. Paul sat at the kitchen table and drank a beer he’d found in an overflowing cooler beside the refrigerator. They’d planned for a celebration tonight. He listened to Chloe as she took the group through the self-congratulatory debriefing. This time though, Raff did almost as much talking as she did and he certainly got all the biggest laughs. The whole operation had been his idea from its inception and Chloe was a strong enough leader to stand aside and give him his moment in the limelight. Paul thought that she sounded like a proud and indulgent mother.

Paul drank three beers in the time it took them to retell their tale of victory. The whole Crew had helped out on this job, which was unusual. However, only a few of them had been intimately involved in every detail of the plan, so Chloe and Raff went through the whole thing from the beginning. 

The target had been a man named Jackson Gondry, the CEO of a software development company in nearby Cupertino. A year ago Gondry had started his own company, Advantriq, after a feud with his former partners at Bendix Software got him fired. It took Gondry less than a month to gather start-up money and hire a staff for Advantriq, leaving many industry observers speculating that he’d secretly planned to start his own firm all along. From day one Gondry openly boasted that his new company would put Bendix out of business in less than two years. By all accounts, Gondry was well on his way to fulfilling the boast. Bendix’s new software line was late shipping, while Advantriq had gotten a competing product onto the market in less than ten months – a pace unheard of in the software industry. 

Everyone assumed that Gondry must have taken some of his work from Bendix and brought it with him, but there was no way of proving it. Even once the Advantriq software hit the shelves, the Bendrix analysts couldn’t find any proof positive that Gondry had illegally used software code he’d developed while working for them. To hear Raff tell it, Bendix had all but given up. If their already delayed next release didn’t sell well, they were going to have to lay off half their work force, maybe worse. 

In all this Silicon Valley turmoil, Raff saw an opportunity. It was no secret that the new CEO of Bendix, a businessman named Oliver Fruch, hated Gondry beyond all reason. He’d famously thrown a drink in Gondry’s face during an industry conference just a few months ago. Even as the rest of the crew had been working on the Comics Con, Raff and a select few had been digging into Fruch’s life and history in every way they could. It didn’t take much digging to get a read on him. Like most Silicon Valley CEO’s, he lived at the office, putting in sixteen hour days as a matter of course. He had a wife and son, but scarcely ever saw them except on Sundays. His only other recreation was his weekly volleyball game at a local 24 Hour Fitness. Raff decided to track him down there.

Raff had also researched Gondry of course, which was easy since the fiery programmer was never shy about talking to the media. He even maintained his own daily blog that served as his favorite forum for criticizing everyone in the world that wasn’t him or one of the three or four other people in the universe he respected. Not surprisingly, Fruch came under frequent fire on the blog. Raff bragged that this fact made it almost too easy to approach Fruch one evening at the gym. 

Raff explained: “I just walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, you’re Oliver Fruch right? You and I should talk, man.’ He just kinda looked at me like, ‘who the fuck are you.’ I said, I’m Larry Carlson, and I used to be Gondry’s college roommate. As soon as he heard that he offered to buy me a drink right then and there. So that’s what we did.”

As it turned out, one of Gondry’s favorite targets on his blog was his former college roommate, someone whom his readers knew only as Larry. Gondry never gave a last name, but he used the name “Larry” as a synonym for the most moronic person imaginable. He constantly wrote stories that referenced idiotic things this former roomie had done in school and even had a regular “Larry of the Week” prize that he awarded to someone in the news who’s done something he judged particularly inane. Raff immediately saw potential in the roommate’s infamy. He made a diligent search, trying to uncover ‘Larry’s’ true identity but found nothing that pointed to Larry’s last name, or even any indication of who he really was.

“I figured Gondry probably just made this Larry guy up,” explained Raff. “He loves to lord it over people stupider than him, but hates it when he’s proven wrong by one of them. What better whipping boy than someone you just make up, right? Since there was no sign of the real Larry, I stepped in and took the role for myself. I knew that Fruch had to be reading Gondry’s blog. By all accounts he’d become obsessed with the man. And since the only person who Gondry gave more shit to than Fruch was this Larry guy, I figured he had to know who I was. Or who I said I was.”

“Larry” and Fruch hit it off immediately. Raff had read through the whole archive of Gondry’s blog and knew every Larry story backwards and forwards. More importantly, he had an alternate version of most of those stories wherein it was Gondry who played the fool, not Larry. Fruch ate this up, excitedly interjecting his own stories of how Gondry had mercilessly slandered him time and again. They ended their conversation hours later, with “Larry” prompting Fruch into expressing his fervent desire to wreak some sort of vengeance on the bastard who’d tormented them both. Unfortunately, they both agreed that, right now anyway, Gondry seemed untouchable. They exchanged business cards before they parted ways for the evening. The seeds had been planted.

It was while Chloe and Paul were at the beach house that Raff made the follow up call. He waited until Gondry inevitably made yet another scorching critique of Fruch, just to make sure his new “friend” was primed and ready. 

“I told him that an opportunity had presented itself to me and that if he was interested, we might actually have a chance to get that vengeance we’d been dreaming about. He perked right up at that. I said I had an old college buddy who was now working with Gondry. We’d all supposedly known each other back in college. It didn’t take much to convince Fruch that my fictional friend was willing to sell Gondry out after the villain of our piece had screwed him over one too many times. Fruch couldn’t wait for me to tell him more, but I refused to do so over the phone. I said I was scared and hinted I might already be having second thoughts.”

As Paul listened, he recalled some of what Chloe had told him about Raff’s particular style. He liked to take risks, particularly risks in the name of verisimilitude. The more nervous and hesitant and even bumbling he came off when dealing with a mark, the more they got sucked into the false reality he was pitching them. Occasionally this backfired of course – Raff would convince the target he was so nervous and bumbling that the mark lost confidence in the whole situation and pulled out. But the gamble paid off more often than not, and Chloe couldn’t fault his style, even if it wasn’t really her cup of tea.

When Fruch and “Larry” finally met up at a Jack in the Box near the fitness club, Raff managed to maneuver the CEO into actively convincing him to reveal his plan for retribution. They agreed on a very simple plan. Ralph’s mole inside Gondry’s company was willing to turn over all sorts of confidential files to him, for the right price. That price was $200,000. Larry said he would put up almost half, if Fruch could come up with the rest. The Crew had already analyzed Fruch’s financial situation and experience and analysis told them that Fruch could easily put his hands on a little over 100k without stretching himself too thin. 

“It turned out to be the perfect amount,” Raff explained. “He pretended to think about it for a minute, but as soon as I told him we wouldn’t have to pay until we received the goods, he was sold. He came in for $112,000 and even promised me some stock in his company if the purloined data turned out to be as valuable as he thought it would be. I told him I’d make the call and we parted ways with smiles on our faces, although mine was supposed to be a nervous smile.”

This whole scheme also followed another of the Crew’s rules that Chloe had explained to Paul. Never steal something that you