In Too Deep(60)

Another group you could fall into, one that I was probably considered now, was a threat, someone who not only had skills and abilities but who was in her way. This group of people were to be destroyed utterly and without mercy, and if someone else got hurt in doing so, tough shit. That was the way of the world to Lanstridge.

The third group was the vast bulk of humanity, and that was what I guess could best be called 'the groundlings,' to borrow a term from Shakespearian times. They were more or less beneath her consideration, except as something to be exploited. You could have been her housekeeper, the waiter who filled her glasses at a three Michelin star restaurant, or even a member of Congress, it made no difference to her. Except for the moments when you were at least marginally useful to her, she just didn't give a damn about you.

She was fifth generation blue blood from Stamford, Connecticut, and had grown up rubbing elbows with the highest levels of society. She'd never married, wanting to protect the family name, although from what I had learned she’d given birth to three children, all of them from what she termed 'the finest breeding stock.' In public, she was just another old-money woman approaching her sixties, but in private she was one of the ten most powerful people in North America.

I didn't want to just wipe her off the map, that wouldn't have been helpful at all. First of all, her name wasn't the sort that got headlines on a weekly basis, but it did have enough public weight that I couldn't eliminate it. She had friends, or at least social acquaintances that would be able to swing enough weight with the courts or court of public opinion that she couldn't just disappear. Not without a reason.

My first move was to wipe out her bank accounts, but not through normal means. First, I took about a third of her money and had it given to various charities and groups that would garner her public disfavor. Then, using access to the New York Stock Exchange, I had all of the rest of her money put into stocks that I then intentionally false-shorted.  Basically, each and every transaction lost her money. It didn't take a huge manipulation, half a cent on each of the stocks, but it was enough to take away almost all of the rest of her money. Within twenty-four hours, there were multi-million dollar liens on her family's estate, her public businesses, even her classic car collection she'd inherited from her father.

The final piece, however, was the releasing of evidence against her. Patricia, as an aristocrat, rarely had gotten her hands personally dirty with her schemes. It was beneath her, at least in her point of view. But there had been one incident, about ten years prior, that she had gotten personally involved. When one of the fathers of her children approached her about the way she was raising them, she killed him. A twenty-five caliber bullet fired in the back of the head, in fact. Somehow, the initial coroner's report listed the man's death as a suicide. Such is the power of dark matter.

A little bit of changes through Albertine however, and evidence that had been suppressed or thought destroyed at first was brought to light. The first group to get it was CNN, but when they didn't act fast enough, I had Albertine blast the same information to the BBC and place a news report on most of the major news websites. Of course, the news report was written by me and attributed to a false name, totally untraceable, but the evidence was solid, and the Internet went wild.

By the time football season was over, Patricia Lanstridge was arraigned for the murder of her second child's father, awaiting trial while in jail, denied bond. Her family's home had been auctioned off to cover her stock debts, while her children were at least left somewhat untouched. She'd seen far enough ahead to give them trust funds at least, and both Melina and I felt it unnecessarily dangerous to back her children into a corner as well. They were true sociopaths, and I didn't want them desperate. Still, they would have to be corralled for the rest of their lives.

The next largest target was Monroe Cavanaugh, who’d, at first, surprised me by his appearance on the network from Pinzetti. He and Patricia Lanstridge had traditionally been at odds, but as Melina had said, politics made strange bedfellows. He was totally unknown to the public, his family having had the unfortunate fate of being African American when they first garnered influence and power back in the eighteen hundreds when Monroe's great grandfather had become the guiding influence with the patriarch of a very powerful Southern agricultural family. A stupid patriarch and a daughter who was easily seduced, the Cavanaughs grabbed the keys to power, and they'd never let go. Still, it was the post-Civil War South, and as such, they learned to pluck the strings of power truly from the shadows, a tradition that Monroe continued regardless of public perception or laws nowadays.

The man wasn’t famous at all. In fact, while he lived in a Park Avenue high-rise, if you passed him on the street you wouldn't have been able to tell him apart from any other man in New York City. He was as anonymous as anyone else, but controlled a network that could have crushed the entire city if he wanted. Yet outside of the doorman at his high rise, I doubt anyone knew his name.

He was young, only a year older than myself, and didn't have any family, so I was able to totally take him out. First, I deleted him from the world. Every database, every bank account, every trace of him in public or private records was destroyed. By the time that was done, the only thing left to prove he even existed were hard copies of his old prep school yearbook.

Next, I slipped a report into the NYPD's database that a delusional psychopath was holed up in Monroe's apartment. A court order and a raid by the police later, and Monroe Cavanaugh, now John Doe #1578, was locked up in a high-security psych ward in up-state New York for the foreseeable future.