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CHAPTER SEVEN

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2023

6:00 P.M.

Camille Lee was a bundle of nerves. For the past three years she had been running point on outside sales for High Noon Enterprises. She’d been drafted into the position when, just prior to the pandemic, her boss, B. Simpson, had been sidelined by a serious automobile collision. Unexpectedly, she had been forced to pinch-hit for him at an important international cybersecurity conference in London, and she had come away a clear winner. Not only had she dazzled her fellow attendees at the conference, she’d brought home some brand-new customers as well.

Once aware that Cami was more than capable of producing sales results, B. had persuaded her to assume the company’s outside sales responsibilities, allowing him to step away from what had been years of constant travel. Now he was back in the lab doing what he loved most: creating new technology.

These days, Camille Lee was the one racking up frequent flyer miles while bringing home the business. During the pandemic much of her customer interaction had been done virtually. Now that Covid was becoming less of a threat, she was doing more work on a face-to-face basis, not only as far as new customers were concerned, but also for touching base with established ones. That’s what she had been doing all week in Southern California—staying in the Lancaster Hotel, a boutique establishment near LAX, and doing meet and greets with old customers as well as prospective ones. Tonight was going to be one of the latter—in spades!

In a little under an hour she was scheduled to go downstairs and host a lavish dinner with her most influential potential clients to date—a delegation of executives from Dozo International, a sprawling conglomerate based in Japan.

Over the past several years, the entire world had been plagued by cases of ransomware attacks in which gangs of black hats hacked into computer networks large and small, disabling them, and then demanding cash payments in order to restore the systems. High Noon had established quite a reputation for repelling this form of cyberterrorism. Their proprietary GHOST technology allowed them to track ransomware demands back to their original sources, where they were able to disable any devices or networks involved in such attacks.

The previous year, Dozo International, after being targeted in a ransomware incident, had coughed up a cool million euros in order to regain the use of their computer system. Now they had made tentative approaches about coming to High Noon for help. If Cami could reel them in, Dozo would be her largest new account ever. With that in mind, this evening she was hosting a private dinner for a delegation of eleven Dozo company executives who had flown in from Tokyo specifically for the meeting.

The Lancaster, a privately owned hotel gem, had become Cami’s home away from home in the L.A. area. It was a relatively small place with seventy-five guest units, all of them junior suite rooms, and with a reputation for first-class service. The hotel came complete with a top-notch restaurant along with an assortment of conference rooms and fitness facilities. Its proximity to the airport made it perfect for hosting international clients. By now Cami had stayed there often enough that she had befriended almost all the staff, including the hotel’s head chef, Robert Chin.

Cami’s grandfather, Liu Wei Ling, had been a well-known and highly respected restaurateur in San Francisco’s China Town, an establishment Robert Chin had often visited with his parents as a child growing up in the area. When Robert learned that Cami was actually Louie Ling’s granddaughter, he’d been blown away, and they had become friends. Cami and Robert were on the same page in terms of language, heritage, and background. Whenever Cami turned up on the hotel’s room reservation list, Robert saw to it that she was treated like visiting royalty.

With the Dozo execs coming to town, Cami knew that offering them Japanese food prepared by a Chinese chef wasn’t going to cut it, so earlier that week she and Robert had put their heads together and devised a deluxe American steakhouse dining experience, which would be served in one of the hotel’s several conference rooms.

Appetizers would include Dungeness crab cakes, spicy buttered shrimp, and seared foie gras. Then, after a table-side-prepared Caesar salad, the entree course would include individually prepared eight-ounce USDA prime filet mignons accompanied by a lobster tail, lobster mashed potatoes, and crispy Brussels sprouts. Dessert would consist of cherries jubilee, again prepared table-side. Naturally there would be an open bar.

But the upcoming dinner also explained why Cami was a nervous wreck. She needed everything to go right in a situation where countless things could easily go wrong. She dressed in a conservative navy-blue suit with a demure white blouse, although there was nothing conservative about her four-inch-high heels. Finally, properly attired and made up, she headed downstairs, making a pass through the kitchen on her way to the conference room that had been transformed into a private dining room.

Chef Robert greeted her arrival in his kitchen with a passable wolf whistle accompanied by a fist bump.

“Not to worry,” he told Cami on her way past. “We’ve got this.”

The hotel staff were all on full alert. As soon as Cami showed her face in the lobby, she was escorted to the reserved room, arriving a good ten minutes early. Her guests, on the other hand, arrived ten minutes late, making their way across the terrazzo-tiled lobby in a tightly knit group. They wore almost identical suits and walked in a kind of lockstep that made them look like a single creature with many legs. That thought alone meant that the smile Cami wore when she stepped into the lobby to greet them was completely genuine.

She had devoted the entire day to studying the dossiers Frigg had prepared on each of her expected guests. Based on the accompanying photographs, she recognized the leader of the pack, Koichi Kawamura, on sight. Dozo’s CEO was a man in his mid-fifties with a degree in engineering from the University of Tokyo, as well as an MBA in executive education from the Harvard Business School. He was the divorced father of two. His son, Kenji, was a media sensation in Japan, known for his three-dimensional sidewalk art, while his daughter, Suki, was a third-year resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“Good evening,” she said, as they came within speaking distance. “I’m so glad you could join me.”

The group stopped as one. After handing Cami a business card, Mr. Kawamura replied in Japanese with a murmured greeting, “Thank you for having us.”

As part of her new outside sales responsibilities, Cami had spent a good deal of the Covid shutdown studying both Japanese and German, adding those to the roster of languages she spoke fluently, including French and Chinese. On the road, her language skills made her a force to be reckoned with. She understood at once what Mr. Kawamura had just said to her, but at that point, a young man who was at least a good decade Cami’s junior stepped forward and offered a quick translation. Cami recognized him from Frigg’s dossiers as Yoshi Mashima, a recent graduate of UCLA, who was attending the dinner as the visitors’ official translator.

With a Harvard MBA under his belt, Cami suspected Mr. Kawamura spoke perfect English and had no need of any translation assistance, and neither did she, but with the possibility that some of the other guests weren’t as skilled in English as the head honcho was, Cami accepted the translator’s presence with good grace. After studying the business card respectfully, she bowed in Mr. Kawamura’s direction, smiled, and said in English, “Please, do come in.”

She greeted each of the remaining guests in a similar fashion. Once everyone had entered the room, she followed suit. People had arranged themselves around the large square cherrywood table on which sat a floral centerpiece and place mats with a cherry blossom motif. Mr. Kawamura was seated with his translator on his left. Cami’s designated chair was to Mr. Kawamura’s right.

During the course of the dinner, conversation between Cami and Mr. Kawamura consisted mostly of inconsequential pleasantries. Where did she live? How long had she worked for High Noon? Was she married? Did she have any children? Had she ever traveled to Japan? She returned the favor by asking about his education and his family situation, as well as his long background with Dozo International.

As the meal progressed, the cumbersome and entirely unnecessary translation process made it possible for Cami to eavesdrop on other strings of conversation around the table, all of which were conducted in Japanese. Unaware that Cami understood every word, several guests didn’t hold back on taking issue with the food, and they were critical of Cami as well. Why were they dealing with such a young girl? Wasn’t their business important enough for Mr. Simpson himself to be here in person? Dozo should be dealing with a real decision-maker rather than someone’s know-nothing secretary.

Cami’s disgruntled dinner guests were by no means the first of Cami’s business acquaintances to make the mistake underestimating her and blithely assuming that, since she was American, Cami Lee spoke nothing but English. As she continued her cordial three-way conversation with their boss, Cami had no difficulty maintaining her composure because she knew that when it came time to make the official proposal, she’d be adding in an extra percentage or two and chalking it up to their indiscretions.

It wasn’t until after the table-side cherries jubilee had disappeared and the scotch and sake came out that the meeting finally turned serious. That’s when Mr. Kawamura finally broached the subject of Dozo International’s ransomware problem, once again with the entire conversation being conducted through the interpreter.

“That must have been very costly,” Cami observed.

Kawamura nodded. “It was,” he admitted. “We’re in the process of holding our current cybersecurity provider liable for some of the damages, but they were completely outmaneuvered when it came to dealing with the problem. We had no choice but to pay up.”

“Which is why you’re now coming to High Noon?” Cami asked.

Kawamura nodded. “We want to know what you have to offer and how that differs from what other cybersecurity firms are able to provide.”

“What we have is proprietary technology that makes it possible for us to track ransomware demands back to their original sources and then turn the tables on the perpetrators. If they don’t release the targeted material, we’re capable of disabling their equipment and blasting them out of existence.”

“So you blackmail the blackmailers,” Mr. Kawamura commented.

Cami smiled. “More or less. And once our clients have their networks back up and running, we turn what we’ve learned over to law enforcement. Our first order of business is getting our customers back on track. We leave it up to the authorities to put the perpetrators out of business permanently.”

It was after eleven when Mr. Kawamura called a halt to the meeting. “This has all been very interesting,” he said. “What kind of information would you need from us in order for you to make a formal proposal?”

Clearly the other guys in attendance had been brought along strictly for show. They were not part of the decision-making process. Mr. Kawamura was the one in charge.

“I’ll be happy to send you an email tomorrow morning outlining our requirements,” she replied with a smile.

“Very well,” he said, once Yoshi had translated. “Please do so. And thank you for your hospitality. The meal was splendid.”

“You’re very welcome,” she replied. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it.”

Once he rose, everyone else did as well, but the other guests waited until Cami and Mr. Kawamura had left the room before filing out themselves. Their departing gestures, the formal bowing and smiling, were every bit as insincere as their initial greetings had been. Cami couldn’t have cared less because she knew she had won that round fair and square.

Once the Dozo crew left the hotel, Cami went directly to her room. Normally she would have gone back downstairs to visit the hotel’s fitness center before going to bed, but not this time. Knowing she had three additional appointments the next day, she went straight to bed.

Unfortunately, sleep eluded her. Like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady , she was too wound up to sleep. After a couple of hours of tossing and turning, she got up, opened her laptop, and sent Mr. Kawamura an email laying out what information would be needed in order for High Noon to provide a detailed proposal. By the time she finished, it was close to 3:00 a.m. Finally, she was able to go back to bed and fall asleep.