The Woman Who Stopped Traffic by Daniel Pembrey Page A

floor at Carmichael Associates, then managing to get into Stanford business school – before quitting a year later for the first dotcom boom. It sounded like he’d never left Northern California, physically at least.
    Football, she was thinking. Football and perhaps head of bar ops, Delta House ’95 or whatever: “You play much sport at Davis?”
    “Not a lot. I was too into my course.” He caught her look. “English major. But I kept up with the spelunking,” and he clocked her surprise again. “Sea caving, down the peninsular here.
    “By the way, this here on the left,” and he pointed up towards the yellow-brown grass ascending skyward: “these are the Pastures of Heaven Steinbeck wrote about back in the day.”
    Natalie took in the view, the new information.
    He said: “Boy, The Grapes of Wrath . I tell ya, that book taught me all I needed to know about the Depression – and about my dad’s side of the family.”
    Silvery remnants of barn and broken down corral sped past. She decided to lighten the tone a little: “So you weren’t tempted to become a writer yourself? Pen that Great American novel?”
    “All I could think to write about was myself, and even I ’m not that interested in me.”
    She laughed involuntarily. “So why did you engineer for Buffalo Bill back there to forbid me from leaving town anytime soon?”
    “Detective Pulver makes his own calls. From my perspective, it’s great to know that someone’s looking into the human trafficking problem at Clamor. Someone smart, someone technical. And, you’re not an investor in the company, which almost places you above suspicion.”
    “Above suspicion? Of what ?”
    He didn’t answer, asking instead: “How much d’you know about IPOs?”
    She hesitated, perplexed. “Back in the day, dotcoms seemed to treat them as these big marketing junkets. Whose is the latest hot web site everyone should visit –”
    “But you’re aware an IPO is really about raising capital.”
    “Of course I am.”
    “And that the sudden marketability of the stock gives existing investors an opportunity to cash out. A liquidity event, we call it in the trade.”
    “Right.”
    “So, people get twitchy about their stockholdings as IPO day draws near. They want to lock in, to the big win. It’s within reach: they can feel it.”
    “If you say so.”
    “I do. I’ve witnessed it many times.
    “Take Malovich for example, who held options over 5% of the company. You know about stock options – how they give the right but not the obligation to buy shares at a set price, and typically a pretty low one at that?”
    “Ben. I was a head of security for a rather big software company.”
    “Well I calculated just how much Malovich stood to make. Given how early he joined the company, it would have cost him around five hundred thousand dollars to exercise those options. And after the IPO, he could have sold the stock for some six hundred and twenty five million dollars, based on what we expect the IPO to price at, which would have netted him a profit of – rounding up –”
    “Six hundred and twenty five millions dollars.”
    “Erm, right. So it doesn’t make sense for him to have committed suicide,” Ben continued. “But it may very well make sense that he died at the hands of someone else.”
    “Why?”
    “Because of what happens to options after employment terminates, whatever the cause.”
    “How so?”
    “When your employment ended at your last job, what happened – to any options you hadn’t exercised?”
    She winced. “Sure, I had to exercise and sell them within weeks or the company would cancel them –”
    “Just like at Clamor. You have a brief window after employment ends to exercise your options, or they’re gone. Which effectively augments everyone else’s stock holding by five percent.”
    “But that’s not motivation enough. Let’s say you’re going to make fifty mil’ anyway. And you have the opportunity of making another