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“Does something like this make you think twice about visiting a music piracy website?”
“Uh,yeah,” she said, as if the question were stupid.“Who wants to end up with their giblets chained to a post?”
Giblets?Social media was, at bottom, the world’s worst game of telephone.
“I need my numbers!” Kava shouted into the phone.
“I’m—I need a minute,” the CTO said, stammering.
“Just give me the numbers!”
“Something’s wrong. Traffic is down sixty-two percent in the last thirty minutes. It has to be a system error.”
Kava nearly choked on his wine. “Is the system telling you there’s an error?”
“No.”
“Have we ever had a system error that caused a sixty-two-percent drop in traffic in thirty minutes?”
“Nothing like this ever before,” the CTO said in a voice that quaked. “We’re now at sixty-eight percent and still falling.”
“We need to get control of this. I want you, me, and Sergei on a conference call in five minutes. Get advertising and marketing on it, as well. Somebody better have a plan.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kava ended the call and placed his phone on the table.
“How bad is it?”
“Beyond bad,” he said. Before he could say more, his phone vibrated on the table with an incoming text message. He put on his reading glasses and read it to himself:
Feeling the pain yet?
The sender’s number was unfamiliar, but another text quickly followed:
Want a reprieve for pirates?
Kava stared at the message. His son said something about the “pirate killer” story, but Kava wasn’t listening. Another text message appeared in a third bubble:
You can stop the killing NOW.
His son spoke again, but Kava heard only noise. Whoever was texting him had the oligarch’s full attention. Another message appeared.
Pay me $75 million. Instructions to follow.
“Dad, what is it?” Sergei asked, his voice too loud to be ignored.
Kava’s mind was racing. Piracy websites were worthless without traffic. Pirate executions were bad for traffic. It had taken a quarter century, but someone had finally figured out a way to stop music piracy. Kava was pretty sure he knew who his blackmailer was.
“Sergei, you’ve been following the Nichols trial, haven’t you?”
“Who hasn’t been?”
“Remember the testimony of the investment banker who worked for Shaky Nichols when he was trying to sell EML Records?”
“Yes. What about him?”
“How much did he say Shaky Nichols lost on his stock options because of music piracy?”
