Dmitri Ustinov couldn’t help grinning as he plugged the flash drive into the USB port of his laptop computer. How naive could these Americans be? He had planted bugs in both Andretti’s and Smythe’s offices weeks ago. Neither executive had become even the least bit suspicious that someone was hearing his every word, as if the eavesdropper were in the room. No one attempted to sweep the offices for bugs, either. Ustinov couldn’t imagine a Russian business being so lackadaisical about these basics of security. Especially one that was engaged in the high-level chicanery that Smythe and Andretti were trying to pull off.

The office was empty this late. Even the hardworking programmers had called it a day and made their way to the neighborhood bars and pizza joints. Dmitri loaded the contents of the memory stick onto his hard drive and donned a headset to listen closely to the raw audio files. The digital recording was remarkably clean, and he was able to hear everything that had been going on in the room. There was Carl Andretti’s gravelly voice, his words slurred, as if the drink he was pouring himself had not been his first of the day.

“I’m telling you, Alan, those bastards were going to shoot me dead. Liked to a’ scared the shit outta me. I don’t understand. Why would that son of a bitch Stern go to all the trouble of kidnapping and trying to scare the piss out of me now? We’re clean. We’ve done just what we said we were going to do. Everything is a ‘go!’”

Ustinov leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head as he listened. So the Americans were still confused and fighting each other. Good! It would keep them too busy to bother him and the scheme he and his friends were about to enact.

He heard Stern talking about Goldman, the SEC woman, and what she had found. Shit! The bitch had somehow stumbled onto his code in the system. She had unraveled the whole thing.

This was not good news. At least they still had no idea who was behind it, and from what he was hearing, the idiots had at least been able to stop the bleeding, to keep Goldman from telling anyone else besides their insider what she had found.

Ustinov chewed on his lip. The American fools might be confused, but it wouldn’t take long for someone as smart as Goldman to backtrack to him. The whole plan would fall apart. Boris Medikov would not accept any excuse for that happening.

The smile was now gone from Ustinov’s face. The only thing to do was to get Goldman out of the picture before the information got out. He couldn’t count on the OptiMarx fools or the moneyman from California to do that job.