The Flip

The Flip

-  Sheelah Kolhatkar

One evening in July 2008, FBI Special Agent B. J. Kang sat hunched over a desk with headphones on, listening to a phone call. It was dark outside, and he hadn’t eaten dinner. His stomach growled. “Raj, you better listen to me,” a woman said in a soft, breathy voice. “Please don’t fuck me on this.” “Yeah,” a male voice said. “They’re gonna guide down,” the woman said. Guide down, Kang knew, was a common Wall Street term that meant the company was planning to announce that its earnings were going to be lower than expected— definitely bad news; the “they” was an $800 million Internet company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Akamai Technologies. “I just got a call from my guy. I played him like a finely tuned piano.”

“I’m short it, you know that, right?” the man said. “I want you to be on top,” the woman purred. “We need to be a team.” She wasn’t talking about sex, at least not this time. This was about money. “Let’s just play this thing. Just keep shorting, every day.”

Who was this woman? Kang thought to himself. She sounded cartoonishly conspiratorial. Kang listened and took notes. He was in the FBI’s “wire room,” a windowless den housing fourteen vintage Dell computers and an assortment of mismatched office furniture on the twenty-fourth floor of 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, home of the Bureau’s New York field office. Along one wall was a metal shelf loaded with granola bars, Goldfish crackers, and Kit Kats—sustenance for the agents who spent hours there each day, monitoring live phone calls.