Fatal Exception Page 2

  Especially sensitive was the basement level. When it was first dug out, the workers were told they were building an underground parking facility. These were rare in Austin at the time, but it made sense — the summers in central Texas could be brutal, and allowing one's workers to park in the shade year-round was just one more perk the company could supply to its employees.

  But once the initial framing and concrete was finished, the workers for that phase were eliminated. The next set of workers was told something completely different. They installed drain pipes in all the floors, put up steel framing for walls and hallways, and ran conduits for excessive amounts of electrical and “other” wiring throughout what had formerly been the garage level.

  Once that was finished, predictably, that group was fired, and so it went.

  None of the contractors ever asked any questions — at least, not more than one. The foreman of the third crew went to Elliot to inquire about some strange duct work set up to run from the upper floors down to a single location in the basement. He was told that it was to evacuate fumes from a server room. When the foreman said that didn't make any sense, he was fired on the spot and escorted off the premises. Nobody else dared doubt the plans after that.

  In truth, Elliot had spent about three years putting together his blueprints. He was a brilliant architect — he could have easily pursued a job in the field if he had wished — but his interest extended to this one job alone.

  When the building was complete, the Storm Computer Corporation Central Campus didn't look that different from any other big high-tech company in Austin — at least, from the outside. But on the inside, hidden from prying eyes, was where the real genius of Elliot Storm was revealed.

  Every room was designed to be completely airtight when locked. A series of chutes ran from multiple locations on every floor down to one room on the basement level. The chutes were designed with a slight downward grade, such that a load of at least a hundred pounds would be driven purely by gravity with no conveyor belts required to move long horizontal distances on the way down.

  Rather than having one centralized air conditioning system, each room or zone of the building had its own heating and cooling systems. This, coupled with the airtight capabilities, rendered each area its own private atmosphere.

  In a few locations — most notably, the corner office that Elliot would occupy — there were sliding panels concealing some sort of projectile launcher that operated using compressed air. Elliot got the system from an expert in exotic security systems. The specialist thought it was odd that Elliot wanted the system in an office on the top floor rather than on the ground floor at likely entry points, but he certainly wasn't going to complain given the amount of money he was being paid.

  All of this and more was installed and wired directly to Elliot Storm's office. From that one location, he would have complete control over the entire campus.

  The basement level was particularly troublesome due to its complexity. When finished, it had twelve identical rooms with adjacent control rooms. Each suite was equipped with various types of medical and computer equipment. Elliot acquired this equipment from various third-world countries, who had in turn received the equipment from charities in the first-world (to which Elliot had made some generous donations). What goes around comes around.

  There was a long central corridor that ran through the middle of the basement, connecting the smaller rooms to a large room sealed off with two giant double-doors on one end, and to the stairwell and elevator on the other. The basement was built entirely of cold steel. Even the floors were a brushed stainless steel, with drains installed in the center of each room.

  When construction was completed, Storm Computer Corporation laid off of all its white collar workers in other cities in order to relocate its entire base of operations to Austin. The economy in the surrounding area exploded, with new apartment complexes and subdivisions breaking ground weekly to provide housing for all the workers Storm would attract. New roads were planned, plowed, and eventually paved. Huge multi-million-dollar highway construction sites on the other side of town were left abandoned as the Department of Transportation shifted its focus to the north.

  And it was all due to the vision of Elliot Storm — the man Texas Weekly magazine would call its Man of the Year for 1997.

  But if the Texas Weekly reporter had dug a little deeper instead of just buying the story Elliot fed him, he would have realized that there was no Elliot Storm. That is to say, he hadn't been born or raised by that name.

  He took the name Elliot Storm when he came to Austin. He had even managed to get a Social Security card, driver's license, and a few credit cards all in his new name. Eventually, that became the only name he knew.

  Elliot's one obsession was with money. He wanted it, and lots of it — and he was willing to do just about anything to get it, including stepping on the people who had it in order to squeeze it out of them.

  Of course, that was the same drive that motivated petty criminals, bank robbers, and guys with guns who walk into liquor stores and have shoot-outs with the clerk on duty. That was never Elliot's style. He realized early on that the best way to get money was to make people give it to you — and give it willingly.

  Sticking a gun in someone's face would make them give you money, but they would want it back, and they would want you to pay for your crime. The best way, Elliot quickly figured out, was to sell them something, so they felt like they were getting something in exchange, and to make sure whatever he sold them was worth a lot less than the amount they paid.

  For a while after high school, Elliot hopped from state to state, peddling stereo speakers out of the back of a van. They were always bottom-of-the-line merchandise, but Elliot's natural charisma helped him sell them as state-of-the-art equipment. But it was never enough — he wanted to do more than just drive around hocking speakers in parking lots.

  He briefly got into the business of manufacturing and selling diet pills. By advertising in newspaper classified ads, he sold miracle cures promising fast results, ridiculous claims made even more ridiculous by the fact that his pills were simply dissolving capsule shells filled with sawdust.

  It was a risky move, and even though he managed to keep moving (if the pills promised results in 30 days, he only stuck around in the city for 2 weeks before moving on to the next one), eventually law enforcement caught up with him. He was given a hefty fine, enough to eat up all the profits he'd made from selling the sawdust pills.

  Defeated by the system, Elliot moved to Austin, Texas, just in time to be swept up by the information age. Something called the “Internet” was just taking off, and for an enterprising fellow like Elliot Storm, the atmosphere couldn't have been better.

  For decades, the Internet had been an exclusive club. At first it was only available to the military, but then universities jumped on the bandwagon. The public was largely limited to small, private dial-up bulletin board systems, and the exposure of those was largely word-of-mouth and limited to the extreme geeks.

  But then public Internet service providers started springing up. Many of them were local up-starts, but soon larger nationwide companies were born. Elliot could smell the opportunity. While people were content to use their computers as typewriters or to play a few games, a storm was coming. They would want newer, faster computers. Like the automobile industry in the 1950's and 60's, the average person would want to have whatever the neighbors had, only better.

  Elliot knew he had to get into the computer business, and he had to get in fast. He didn't have time to learn enough about computers to start building them himself — and something like that couldn't be faked like speakers or diet pills. He needed to find some people who were already in the thick of it.

  He staked out a few computer clubs, until he stumbled across some kids at the University of Texas who had a similar vision. Once again utilizing his gift of gab, Elliot talked his way into their club and managed to present their ideas back to them as his own.
They would work together to build a brand (named after himself, of course) that would appeal to the average person.

  And so, Storm Computer Corporation was born.

  They started off, as every news article at the time and since would say, building computers in a garage and filling orders through the mail. Eventually, they started selling their computers through big-box retail shops. It was far easier to do it that way than to try and build their own store while manufacturing the boxes.

  From garage to warehouse to bigger warehouse, the company kept growing, until they had outgrown their small operating environment entirely and had to build their own complex.

  They were in the right place at the right time in history, and once the brand took off (and after Storm's business partners conveniently disappeared), Elliot Storm became the most powerful man in the computer industry.

  Chapter 3

  The Smell of Commerce in the Morning

  PHINNAEUS WEBB GREW UP IN the suburbs of the 1980s white-flight districts outside Austin, Texas.

  As a child, Phinnaeus — his mother called him Phin — was drawn toward all things technological. First it was the Atari, then the Commodore 64, then the IBM, then the Nintendo. While most kids were playing little league, Phin was typing away at a keyword or frantically pressing buttons on a joypad.

  He was far from anti-social; he just tended to like more solitary activities. Besides, his skin-and-bones 5'9" frame wasn't built for football or basketball. But those slender fingers sure could type — and type they did.

  Phin quickly learned that he had a natural talent with computers. The way he thought of it, it wasn't so much that he liked computers; rather that they seemed to like him. Programming languages like COBOL, Pascal, and C++ just made sense to him the way baseball stats clicked with so-called normal kids. There was a symphony of logic to it all. Start with an input, test it, compare it, calculate it, manipulate it, spit it back out. Everything works the way it should with a computer — they only do what they are told — and the monitor's hum bathed Phin in a warm brain-massaging glow night after night.

  It came as no surprise to Phin's parents when he graduated from high school and wanted to jump head-first into the Computer Science program at the University of Texas. Unfortunately, all those late hours of code-crunching had taken their toll on Phin's report cards, so even though he was extremely gifted, he didn't have the grades to back that up. Thus, no scholarship or university.

  For Phin, it was straight from high school into the working world and community college. He'd have to pay his own way to school, which suited him just fine. While he'd never gotten caught up in the drug culture, Phin did have a bit of a rebellious streak, so he was more than happy to shoulder the burden of his education since that also meant more independence from Mom and Dad.

  Phin's first job was less than glamorous. With nothing on his resume but a high school diploma, Phin was viewed as unqualified for all but the most menial tasks. Not having had a job in high school, Phin was in for a bit of a culture shock.

  After applying at several retail stores — and failing to make it past the initial interview at any of them — Phin decided to concentrate his efforts by applying at the brand new consumer Mecca — Lakeline Mall. In a single afternoon, he managed to blanket every store (on both floors) with resumes and job applications — even the ones that told him in no uncertain terms that they were not hiring.

  By that evening though, his efforts had paid off. He landed a job making 6 bucks an hour peddling overpriced suitcases at the Lug'n Luggage store in one of the dark and scarcely visited corners of the mall. The disposable culture vended in shopping malls didn't balance well with high end Tumi and Hartmann rolling suitcases, so Phin spent most of his time at work leaning against the counter and reading The New York Times. But there was a kiosk near the food court with bright, shiny CRT monitors all over it that acted like a rare earth magnet to technologically inclined fellows like Phin.

  Imaginatively dubbed “Internet in the Mall,” the company — one of hundreds of such little start-ups at the time — offered middle-of-the-road dial-up connections to mall goers. Phin stopped by one day during his lunch break and ended up with a new, better paying job.

  The interview consisted of the owner — a smarmy fellow named Rufus Grant, who wouldn't know a computer from a toaster except that the computer was far more profitable — asking him what “TCP/IP” stood for. When Phin immediately responded “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol,” he was hired on the spot, and Phin was filled with the satisfaction of having someone value his skills.

  The services offered by Internet in the Mall were about what one would expect from a company that had little retail presence and outsourced all of its services. They offered several different tiers of membership, each of which came with a number of allotted monthly hours, and they charged about twice what other comparable companies would charge. Fortunately for the bottom line, they also required customers to sign a contract and secure their accounts with credit cards.

  Phin's new job wasn't that different from his job at the Lug'n Luggage, except that he was now in the middle of the common area of the mall instead of hidden away in a rarely entered store. Mainly, he just stood around and answered questions, occasionally signing up a customer for a new account.

  After the first month, Phin's sales numbers were hideously low, and Rufus Grant — who had cashed out all his savings to invest in what the franchise company called a “sure thing” — sat Phin down in the food court to have a little chat.

  “Phinnaeus,” Rufus began, “I appreciate your work ethic. I really do. You show up on time every day, you're well dressed, and your co-workers really seem to like you.”

  “Okay . . . ” Phin had a feeling where this was heading, but he let the conversation keep going anyway.

  “You answer a lot of questions — hell, you probably know a lot more about this stuff than I do, and I own the franchise. But this job isn't just about knowing a lot. You're a salesman. Your job is to sell the service. And when you tell a customer things like . . . ” he flipped through some notes on his clipboard “ . . . 'you may be better off with NetTV,' it really doesn't help sell the service.”

  Phin knew he was caught. The day before, some clueless old woman had wandered up to the kiosk. All she knew was that she wanted to be able to send e-mail to her son who lived in New York City. For someone like that, Phin couldn't just lie through his teeth to make more money for the company, so he told her the truth — that what she probably needed was a low-cost Internet appliance to hook up to her TV set.

  “Anyway, just remember what your job is. I have a stack of applications on my desk from other kids who will sell the service without question. Understood?”

  “Yes sir, I understand.”

  “Good. Now go on back down to the lower level and let's sell some Internets!”

  Phin understood alright. He knew that he wasn't a salesperson, that this company was a fraud, and that he wouldn't be working here for much longer.

  When he got back downstairs, it was still a typical weekday afternoon. The mall was dead.

  “I'm heading up to get some ice cream,” Mr. Grant said before moseying off toward the escalator.

  With no customers around, Phin did what he always did — he took advantage of the kiosk's ISDN line. Was it a classic bait-and-switch to use an ISDN line to sell dial-up service? Probably. But Phin considered his access to the high-speed connection to be one of the few real perks of the job.

  After poking around the Internet for a few minutes, though, he started thinking. The company was obviously doomed. It was simply a flawed business model — people want instant gratification when they buy something in a retail outlet. They don't want to sign up for an intangible service.

  In addition to having an Internet connection far faster than the one they were actually selling to people, the computers on the kiosk also had a direct line into the support and billing systems for the entire compa
ny. Phin decided to take a look around and see exactly how bad things were looking for the company as a whole.

  The customer list was surprisingly robust. From this kiosk alone, the business had signed up over 500 customers to the Diamond tier account with unlimited hours. After just a few keystrokes, Phin was face-to-face with a complete list of the login names and passwords for every single one of them.

  After a look over his shoulder to make sure the owner wasn't nearby, Phin sent the list to the printer. Then he ripped the paper out of the loud dot matrix printer, folded it up, and stuffed it into his pocket.

  His heart was pounding. He'd never done anything remotely illegal before — not physically, anyway — so it was both terrifying and exhilarating for him. He spent the rest of the day with his sweaty hands stuffed into his pants pockets, making sure the list was folded nice and tight and hadn't fallen out onto the floor.

  That night when Phin got home, he pulled the list out and looked at it closely. To an untrained eye, it looked like just a list of words — the randomly assigned user names and passwords for over 500 customers of Internet in the Mall. There was nothing personally identifiable — no credit card numbers, no real names, no addresses. He could use any one of them for any length of time he wanted, and the account could never be traced back to him. He could use a different user name every dayand he'd never hit the same account again for over a year — and since the accounts were on contract and were self-renewing to a credit card, the accounts would probably continue to be accessible for years to come.

  It was the perfect crime — probably not even a crime, as Phin saw it. He wasn't taking the service away from anyone. He was simply taking advantage of a company that was taking advantage of its customers.

  That night, the website for Internet in the Mall was replaced with a page that said “Rufus Grant is a douchenozzle.”