Only one person knew for sure—Charles Merrick. But Lydia Malkin, the reporter who had conducted the interview, would do in a pinch. Where are you, Lydia Malkin? Foot tapping excitedly, he Googled her, all thoughts of finding a job forgotten. It was only Merrick now.
Merrick just didn’t know it yet.
His attempt at bluster fell flat, cornball and hokey in his ear. He was trying to pump himself up to do something that he didn’t believe possible. More than that, something he knew better than to try. Was he really going to chase Lydia Malkin down about a single word in an interview? And if he was right? What then? Would he travel to Niobe Federal Prison despite the judge begging him to stay away? If those two knuckleheads, Birk and Swonger, had deciphered Merrick’s boast, then how many others had reached a similar conclusion? How far was he going to push it?
He was afraid he already knew the answer to that.
He remembered an old framed map of the world that had hung in his father’s office in Charlottesville. At its margins, far out to sea, the mapmaker had written, in ominous letters, “Here there be monsters.” He’d asked his father what it meant, and his father had said, Some lines you can’t uncross, Gib. It means be sure.
In the end, Gibson traced Lydia Malkin to an address in Queens, New York, through her food. She belonged to that curious segment of the populace who obsessively photographed their meals in restaurants and posted it online. Gibson didn’t get it, but it definitely made her easy to find since she also hadn’t bothered to turn off the GPS metadata that her phone embedded in each photograph. It was just a matter of triangulating her location based on the places she frequented regularly. She ordered from New Good One Chinese Restaurant at least twice a week and really had a thing for their dumplings. It turned out to be only a block and a half from where she lived on Astoria Boulevard; the delivery guy was more than happy to reunite Gibson with his “sister” for forty bucks.
He waited outside her building under an awning for two hours. Dumplings were starting to sound good. Across the street, Lydia Malkin finally came out. He watched her cross the street toward him; in person, she looked younger than he’d expected. Maybe it was the fact that she was barely five feet tall. She seemed taller on TV. Since the Merrick issue of Finance had hit the newsstands, she’d been a busy woman. Appearances on all the major cable news networks, interviews in which she’d acquitted herself ably. But while he’d been impressed by how assured she was on camera, she hadn’t answered the question he needed answered.
He felt more than a little stalkerish tracking her down this way. He hadn’t liked resorting to it, but his efforts to contact her using more conventional methods had been met with silence. Understandably so. Her star was in the ascendancy, and who was he? But he needed answers and didn’t have any more time for social niceties. The clock was ticking on Merrick’s release, and Gibson felt late to the party. Hopefully the price of a round-trip ticket to New York City would leapfrog him to the front of the line.
The seven a.m. Amtrak from Union Station had allowed him to continue his homework on Mr. Charles Merrick. And there was always more to learn. It was astounding how much press Merrick had received even before his arrest. Easy to see why, though. Merrick was an extremely quotable interviewee. Outspoken to the point of recklessness, the man had a knack for the controversial and seemed wholly unafraid of the media. There was a tactical flamboyance in the way Merrick spoke to reporters.
That was a good word for it. Gibson had stopped reading and typed “flamboyant” into the file he was creating on Merrick. Research was the cornerstone of any successful hack. Knowing your targets better than they knew themselves: their habits, the name of their high-school English teacher, the street they grew up on, their children’s birthdays. Gibson compiled it all, because you never knew what would turn out to be the key to unlocking someone’s personal security. Personal experience was most people’s first point of personal security. Despite the howls of warning from security experts, people went on believing their memories were private. They weren’t. An entire generation was conveniently compiling its personal history on social media websites. Convenient to people like Gibson Vaughn.
Charles Merrick’s background seemed typically privileged. He claimed to be self-made, but Gibson didn’t know how self-made you could be growing up in a wealthy enclave of Connecticut. According to his transcripts, Merrick had coasted through his elite education, attending high school at Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, followed by an undergraduate degree in history from Dartmouth and an MBA from Wharton. There he’d met his future ex-wife, Veronica Barrett-Hong, whose WASP and Chinese family lines had sired a tireless overachiever. Unlike Merrick, Veronica had graduated summa cum laude from Wharton to accompany her undergraduate degree in economics from Yale. They’d married the summer before starting jobs on Wall Street, Veronica again the more impressive of the two, so it came as some surprise when Charles Merrick announced the creation of Merrick Capital while Veronica segued into the role of socialite and mother. They were a formidable pair, and as Merrick Capital roared to success in the late nineties, they’d risen together—stars of the New York scene with a home overlooking Central Park, a summer house in Southampton, a spectacular apartment on the ?le de la Cité in Paris, and, in London, a house in Kensington.
After his arrest, Charles and Veronica Merrick had endured an ugly and public New York divorce. Veronica Merrick’s newly minted status as social pariah had not sat well with her. Her revenge consisted of scorching what little remained of her husband’s reputation and sprinkling the ashes across the New York tabloids. A steady stream of unsubstantiated gossip about drug use, infidelity, and physical abuse flowed from unattributed sources as the divorce dragged through the courts. It took several years for the Justice Department to sort out whether there were any assets for Veronica Merrick to contest. In the end, she’d walked away with almost nothing. Before the arrest, the Merricks’ net worth was estimated in the billions. Veronica Merrick had a little money left to her by her parents, but it was no understatement to say that her standard of living had taken an ungainly swan dive from the balcony of her old life.