Blackmailed - Part 1

Sorry for the late post this week, it's been really busy at work trying to get things ready before Christmas. I hope to have some more free time over the holidays, but I fear that may not be the case. Fingers crossed!

Liam had it all. Born to a rich family, he was fresh out of business school where he graduated with hire honors--so high, in fact, that his father had already placed him in charge of a large hedge fund. He was the envy of everyone around him: young, attractive, and motivated. He really did have it all.

A few months later, and the real world proved to be a lot more difficult than the classroom. The stock market didn’t perform in any of the ways predicted in his very expensive models and he was already down a full point. His father had stopped introducing Liam to the other bigwigs that he wined and dined with on Saturday nights, and if things didn’t turn around soon, Liam was worried he’d wind up a failure in his father’s eyes.

So he did what everyone else did: he cheated. He made some anonymous social media profiles, hung out in seedy underground financial chat rooms, and started rumors. A few hints here, a few there, just to get Claraco.com and Pharmatec moving in the right direction--namely, down. He’d shorted both companies quite a bit, and he couldn’t afford to cover his losses should their stock prices rise.

Luckily, Liam’s plan worked. The next day, Claraco and Pharmatec lost 5% of their stock value, and Liam made back all his losses and then some. He was back to being the toast of the company and the apple of his father’s eye.

And if it worked once, it’d work again. He kept doing the same thing to every company in his portfolio. He made a bundle, nearly doubling the fund’s value in 6 months. He was even getting approached by magazines, calling him the youngest billionaire in history. Every night was a party, and every day more and more money came rolling in.

Then, one day, he woke up after a vodka-fueled bender to find an email in his inbox. The subject was simply “I Know”. He read it quickly while trying to down a couple of pain pills.

“I know how you did it,” the email read. “You lied. You cheated. You planted those rumors to ruin those company’s value and then you profited on their suffering. So I’m going to ruin you.”

That got through the funk that had gripped Liam’s morning. He kept reading as a bead of sweat rolled down the small of his back.

“I’ll give you a choice: either I can ruin you financially, or I can ruin you socially and physically. From this day forward, you must eat enough to gain at least 3 lbs every week or I’ll let recorded chat logs out onto the web. And every week you fail to meet that goal, I’ll post an IP address that leads closer and closer to you.”

Liam swore. He routed through half a dozen VPNs, but this asshole had somehow tracked him through all of them. He’d have a word with his IT guy first thing this morning.

“And since today is Tuesday, you’ve only got 5 days to put on the pounds. I expect to see a picture of a scale with your baseline weight by tomorrow, and then another pic by the end of the week. I suggest you get eating.”

There was nothing else after that--no signature, no sign-off, just a period.

At first, Liam thought it was a joke--just some sick fuck who somehow found his email address and wanted to pull a prank. Liam trashed the message and never replied.

But after the first week, Liam nearly had a panic attack when he recognized a post on a financial message board purporting that recent market trends were the result of false rumors started by short sellers and that the anonymous poster was tracking them down.

A week after that, another post, this time with more info and a first IP Address somewhere in Manilla. Liam knew that was the first level of his internet defenses, and whoever this guy was, he was serious.

That night, Liam got on his scale and took a picture: 164 lbs. And then he ordered some late night Chinese.