“Bunch of Canadians. Tried that trick with germanium.” I gave him a sly smile. “In fact, that’s where you got the idea, isn’t it?” I tapped the computer monitor on his desk. “Good ol’ internet.”
“Well, look, if it worked for them –”
“It didn’t work. Most everyone involved with the game is in jail.” I paused for effect. “The rest are dead.” I had no idea if this was true or not, but I’d already decided that if I was going to use Hines to help me unweave Allie’s web, I needed him to do things my way. Couldn’t have him thinking too freely on his own. That leads to improvising, and a mark’s improv impulses can be kryptonite to a con. So I had to put the fear on him. “Let me tell you a little something about victimless crime,” I said. “It pisses off the victims. Sometimes it pisses them all the way off. Which makes your choice of cons the second most important part of your play.”
“What’s the first most?” he asked in a way I found syntactically charming.
“Your exit strategy.” I fixed him with a meaningful stare. “This might not be so important to you, since you see all this as your last great adventure before you get your ticket punched. But I plan to live a long time, and dumping tons of tungsten on the lawns of irate customers is not a step in, you know, the right direction.”
“But how do you ever cover your tracks?” he asked. “Isn’t it the nature of a sting to leave someone feeling stung?”
“Not necessarily. The true art of the con is to make a vigorous fuck feel like a gentle caress. And you don’t do that with a blunt instrument like a boiler room.”
Hines’s look made it was clear that he didn’t know what I meant by boiler room, but didn’t want to admit his ignorance. In relieving him of the burden of asking, I was actually demonstrating the principle of the gentle caress: Don’t make people feel stupid unless you have to.
“A boiler room,” I said, “as I’m sure you know,” though I was sure that he didn’t, but that was the gentle caress part, “is just a bunch of guys with a bank of phones working their asses off to sell nothing for something. They do it well enough, they make a bunch of money—and a bunch of enemies. Sooner or later, they have to close up shop and open again elsewhere. It’s like a mobile auto-detailing service, only instead of cleaning your car, they steal it.”
“So their problem is the trail of irate customers they leave in their wake?”
“Customers. Fraud squads. U.S. attorneys. Suits. Uniforms. Tar-and-feather gangs. But that’s only half the problem.”
“What’s the other half.”
“It’s damn hard work! Have you ever tried beating your head against a phone twelve hours a day selling something that only a total moron or a victim of senile dementia would buy? You know what it’s like? You know what it’s really, really like?”
“What?”
“A job. I was never a fan of those, and you’re obviously done with yours or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So let’s play a different game, shall we?”
Funny thing about honesty—sometimes it’s the biggest lie of all. By telling Milval the simple truth about himself and myself and the situation we were in, I actually won his trust. From that point forward, he allowed himself to be led, which was what I needed, because I knew that no matter how many contacts he’d accumulated over the years, it wouldn’t be nearly enough for our purposes. He was going to have to reach out across the length and breadth of the investment community. And he was going to have to be pretty damn devout when he did.
He had to get religion.
So I had to turn prophet.
The first order of business was to manufacture some convincing cover for Hines. He couldn’t just start throwing my name around like some swami-come-lately. People get recommendations for investment counselors all the time. Sometimes they take the bait and sometimes they don’t, but in any case, that’s a labor-intensive enterprise, the specific labors being abundant one-on-one wooing. For what I had in mind, I needed to pitch the Merlin Game to at least a hundred thousand qualified leads all at once, without anyone looking too closely over anyone else’s shoulder. Why? Obviously, if someone on the heads side of the coin flips compared