Carl had always known that their activities would attract attention at some point. He secretly fantasized of long-despised competitors begging him for partnership, or technology mastodons offering billions for a take-over or even super-secret governmental bodies, domestic and/or foreign (preferably at the same time), acknowledging the true potential of their highly sophisticated language technology. The police weren’t exactly what he had in mind in these small reveries, but when the suit in front of him identified herself and her partner as Collins and Turner, federal agents, he felt exalted nonetheless. A visit from the federal police didn’t happen every day, after all.

“Madame, monsieur,” Carl smiled, offering them a chair. He sat down behind his desk. “How can I be of service?”

Silence.

The woman took one of the visitor seats. Carl noticed that her partner had turned his back on him and was nosing around the book shelves on the other side of the room without paying any attention to him or to his colleague.

The woman produced a tablet and laid it on Carl’s desk. She turned it so Carl could clearly read what was displayed.

“Our website?” Carl said, a little confused.

The woman tapped on the mission statement section and leaned back in her chair. Carl watched the page transition into the hurray story he had devised five years earlier. “Our mission statement. We formulated it five years ago. Never changed it. Not many companies can say that, m’am,” Carl said cheerfully, trying to ignore the sense of awkwardness that had crept over him.

“Mr. Dunney.” The man was now looking out of the window, his hands crossed behind his back. Carl recognised the body language and cursed himself for being so easily tricked into the submissive position in what seemed not to be the pleasant encounter he had hoped for. The man turned around.

“Your company specializes in language technology augmented data analytics, right?”

“Yes. We’re the first company doing this and we pride ourselves in the huge progress we have made in the field of semantic inference and intent recognition in online human written language. It’s a very exciting new field of applied language technology. Highly profitable as well, I dare say.”

“I’m sure, mr Dunney.” The man slowly walked in the direction of Carl’s desk, and picked up his Deckard action figure. He looked at it with mild interest, nodded with approval and then put it back where he had found it. Before continuing, he carefully rotated it such that the doll now directly looked at Carl.

Carl had heard the sarcasm in the man’s voice. What was going on? He felt attacked and his lower brain wanted to hit back hard. Fortunately, his years in upper management had trained him well in these mind games. He leaned back and relaxed.

“Are you looking to invest? If so, I have to officially advice against continuing this conversation. Our IPO isn’t due for at least another 10 months, and we haven’t published our prospectus yet. You wouldn’t want to be accused of inside information now, would you?” he smiled. The man stared back at him.

“In any case, sir, stop wasting our time and stop your intimidation tactics. What are you here for?” Carl continued, dropping his pitch one octave.

The man finally sat down. Carl felt victorious. The man still had his eyes fixed on him.

“So, you make money with language technology,” the woman resumed the conversation.

Carl had to fight the urge to roll his eyes.

“In that case, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about online gambling, do you?” the man took over.

“Come again??” Carl replied, genuinely surprised. He hadn’t seen that one coming.

Now, two pairs of eyes stared back at him, expectantly.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Is this your idea of a joke? We calculate probabilities. We don’t gamble.” Carl fired back, angry now.

“Oh, we beg to differ, mr. Dunney. You see, we have our eyes on a particular online gambling site. Nothing fancy. Just a regular, rather small gambling site with a quite steady clientele.” The man grabbed the tablet and switch to another website. “Looks familiar?” he said, pushing the tablet back under Carl’s nose.

Carl looked at the hideous design. The amateurish color scheme hurt his eys. The website yelled its ridiculously optimistic odds at him. He pushed the tablet away. “Never heard of it.”

“Perhaps, mr. Dunney. Perhaps.” The man still looked straight at him. “The problem with this site is that in the last week, its client base tripled. And the majority, if not all of the new customers, placed one single bet and lost. What do you make of that?”

Carl sensed a trap.

“I’d say this is rather unusual. Thanks for the tip; I will not make use of this website.”

“Unusual indeed, mr. Dunney. In fact, it is statistically impossible. Our analytical systems red flagged it immediately. So, we did a little sampling. Do you know what we found?”

These guys were getting on Carl’s nerves. “Please, I asked you to stop playing your little games. I don’t know what you found, but it obviously sent you here. So, you tell me. What did you find?” Carl crossed his arms in front of him. He knew this was a defensive gesture, but it also communicated that he no longer wished to cooperate and he really hoped these pricks would get the message and leave.

“We tracked a bunch of these new customers. Turns out, they are all online female personas tracing back at your very company, mr. Dunney. I believe you call them ‘Anna’?”

Carl felt stupefied.

“Our magnets deliver comments on social media. They make conversation. They don’t have money, and they certainly don’t gamble!” he answered, annoyed.

“If they don’t have money, then why do they have PayPal accounts, mr. Dunney?” the woman interjected.

PayPal accounts? What was she talking about?

“You employ Dr. Isabella Thorne, right?” the man added. “Former investment banker? Very knowledgeable when it comes to financial transactions?”

Isabella?

“Also inventor of what you call ‘magnets’? You have to excuse us, but that is the perfect mix for setting up a massive money drain, wouldn’t you agree?” the woman continued.

What?

“Which leaves the question: where did that money come from in the first place and who is on the receiving end?”

What???

The pricks had gone into cross examination mode now. This was going way too fast to his taste.

“I’m sorry, m’am, sir. Which question was first?” Carl interrupted the query shower.

“PayPal accounts, mr. Dunney. Explain that, please,” the woman said coldly.

“I told you. Our magnets don’t have such accounts.”

“Are you sure about that, mr. Dunney?”

Carl sensed another trap.

“OK. We did an experiment with a new version of them half a year ago and it miserably failed. We gave some money to a handful of them. A handful. We declared them not fit for use and we withdrew them. The current ones have no accounts; they don’t even know how to handle money!”

The moment Carl finished, he knew he had said too much. The silence in the room almost suffocated him.

“Who led this experiment, mr. Dunney?” the man finally asked.

Carl felt his heart skip a beat. He had to count to ten and gasp for air before he could speak.

“Dr. Thorne is not my employee. She’s my business partner and also quite a brilliant statistician. She has imposed ridiculously detailed rules on how to operate our magnets, with the sole purpose of not leaving a statistical footprint. She would never, ever leave such a huge improbability for you guys to find,” Carl had answered.

—

He now realised he had been trying to convince himself.

Ever since that visit, Carl had avoided contact with Isabella. Fortunately, he had to prepare this Board meeting, and Isabella hated these management tasks. Avoiding her was handed to him on a plate, but he knew she sensed something was off. The feds had ‘strongly advised’ him not to confront her, but he had prepared himself for her confronting him.
He had expected her to ask if anything was wrong; if he had something on his mind. What he hadn’t expected though was her playing the ball right back at him as she had just done. She had accused him of fixing the figures. His heart bled for their friendship, but in a way, he admired this deflective tactic.

He watched her taking her seat for the second half of the meeting. She avoided eye contact, and although her anger had seemed genuine minutes before, there was no trace of emotion left on her face. He really wanted to be wrong, but he knew he wasn’t able to convince himself he was.