The Great Game

by D. R. Bell

“The brokerages must still record their trades to so-called “national consolidated tape” as over-the-counter transactions. It’s possible to purchase access to the ‘tape,’ UCLA likely has it, but the reports are not as detailed as what you get on major exchanges. Without a regulatory access you can’t get the raw data about the transactions. You can, however, use the tape to get information about trading done by particular brokers. Companies usually have their preferred group of brokers that they conduct business through. If you make a list of brokers that Changzoo Tongren and Novaya Energya used and correlate it against the transactions these brokers made— companies often use the same brokers for equities and Forex transactions— you might get some useful data. It won’t be a proof, but it might be sufficient to imply that you know more than you do.”

  After hanging up with Frank, James suggested they walk over to UCLA Management Library and then head to Ackerman Hall for lunch. As could be expected on a college campus, there were posters everywhere. David thought that the content of the posters felt different from his college days: political leaders smiling and holding children or shaking hands with students, young people with clenched fists declaring war on inequality, reminders of civic duties, etc.

  At the library, James found a research assistant he’d worked with before and asked her for a record of Forex transactions recorded on the consolidated tape and involving the US dollar for the twelve-month period starting October 1, 2018. The assistant exclaimed, “We can’t do a printout. That’s an enormous amount of data.” David replied that they would take digital format. The assistant nodded and said she’d have it in the professor’s mailbox in an hour.

  The cafeteria had a giant poster of a smiling woman proclaiming, “Proper diet is your duty!” It was a popular poster around the country. Jim Plasche claimed that it cost him his job: he’d publically made fun of it in the Space Systems’ cafeteria, incurring wrath of the head of human resources.

  Just as David and James got their food and sat down for lunch, David’s phone rang. It was Oleg, who was on a speakerphone with others. One of them introduced himself as “Alejandro, but you can call me Sasha,” and asked for a description of the two Mexicans that had kidnapped him on Friday, particularly the one with a tattoo. David walked to a somewhat private location outside and gave the best description he could muster.

  Monday, 4/25/2022, 11:34 a.m. PDT

  “Mr. Chao” had just left Maggie’s room. She took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking, but she was still alive.

  She hadn’t slept long last night. A nightmare of being chased and trying to run away had woken her. When she’d looked at her watch, it was 5:47. The room was dark. Heart racing from the nightmare that was all too real, she sat in her tiny prison, breathing the stale air and listening to the waves. There was nowhere to run.

  When the first knock came at about 8:00 a.m., she thought, this is it. She prayed silently and remained seated on the bed, afraid that her legs wouldn’t hold her if she stood. But it was the balding man with a sandwich and a cup of coffee. This restaurant only serves sandwiches, she thought and laughed. The man looked at her like she was insane. She stared back defiantly. A thought came to her. If they plan to kill me, why are they feeding me? Her appetite returned.

  When the man came to get the tray, she tested the situation by asking for a toothbrush, toothpaste, and another cup of coffee. The man scowled, but brought everything a few minutes later. Maggie’s spirits lifted a bit more.

  She brushed her teeth, sipped lukewarm coffee, and started thinking. What she told them yesterday was probably the only thing she could have done in her condition, but probably not the best for her survival. She basically said she did not know anything, and Mr. Chao seemed to believe her. In which case, why keep her alive? If she still had value to them, it was probably because of something David or Andrei told them. Or they came to believe that she knew something. So they must have thought that David knew something too. Yesterday she’d portrayed David as a clueless bystander who didn’t know what was going on. She actually believed this to be the case, but it was possible she was wrong and he’d played her for a fool. Regardless, she had to subtly change her story to allow for the possibility that he was not innocent, and neither was she. Being innocent was not a good thing here.

  Maggie wished she had some dark chocolate to help her think. She always kept a stash in her room and in her purse, grabbing one or two whenever she was stressed or had a craving, which was at least a dozen times a day. She became rather religious about making her daily run around UCLA campus, hoping that it would prevent her chocolate addiction from affecting her figure. Of course, at the moment, neither chocolate nor running was available, and Maggie had never been good at calming her mind by other means. She sat cross-legged on the bed, closed her eyes, and tried to bring up some of her favorite melodies in her mind.

  By the time Mr. Chao came back, Maggie had a knot in the pit of her stomach, knowing she was on an interview with a possible life or death outcome. She crossed her arms over her chest so he couldn’t see her hands shake. Mr. Chao went over the same ground as yesterday, and Maggie gave similar answers but allowed some additional nuances. When he asked about her job at the East European restaurant, she added that it was recommended to her.

  “By whom?” Mr. Chao asked.

  She hesitated. “It was suggested by people from Kiev.” Even more reluctantly, she admitted that on her last visit to Kiev she was invited to a meeting with SZRU, the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Agency, that she had been hearing from them from time-to-time, and had received a bit of money in checks and cash. She claimed she was not asked to do any work for SZRU yet, but had been told that she would be called upon. Maggie stuck to her assertion that she had not known David before Friday, but allowed that she was not sure David came to that particular restaurant by accident. She also admitted that David’s story did not seem quite plausible, and she suspected that he knew more than he told her, but she could not be sure. However, when Mr. Chao started probing a possible connection between Andrei and David, she was firm that she did not think they knew each other. It was enough that Andrei’s house had been attacked; Maggie did not want to repay his hospitality with a betrayal on top of it.

  Like the day before, Mr. Chao would repeatedly circle back and ask similar questions from different angles, attempting to catch Maggie in a contradiction. She tried to maintain her breathing and her presence of mind. She didn’t really change her story from yesterday, just added the SZRU connection and allowed for some uncertainties. Particularly tense moments happened when he started questioning her about Schulmann. Maggie said that Ferguson did bring up the name, but she did not know what Ferguson knew. Eventually, Mr. Chao must have concluded that he wouldn’t get much more out of her, and he, together with the big balding man, left the room.

  The knot in Maggie’s stomach unclenched a bit. She thought that she avoided major mistakes and allowed for some new possibilities for Mr. Chao to think about. Perhaps as long as they were not sure about her exact role, they would keep her alive. And at the moment that was all she could do—try to stay alive and hope for a miracle from outside her prison.

  Monday, 4/25/2022, 1:38 p.m. PDT

  James and David headed back to the house. They decided to pull together whatever information they could and reply to “acegik,” as they started to refer to their adversary. James liked to vary his route, so they went down to the southern end of the campus and turned west through Los Angeles National Cemetery. They walked in quiet introspection through tens of thousands of gravestones and by a small chapel.

  After crossing Sepulveda, David broke the silence. “Aside from what the research assistant will send us, is there anything in particular you want to look at when we get back?”

  “I did not have much success. At least there was nothing that would be useful against Maggie’s kidnappers. I spent some time on analyzing the gold market and came to the conclusion that Frank was right; a likely reason for the US not b
acking the dollar with gold in 2019 was simply gold not being there in sufficient quantities.”

  David’s face twisted into a puzzled look. “I still don’t understand why in the twenty-first century anyone cares about gold?”

  James nodded in agreement. “There is a certain irony in an ancient relic underpinning modern finance. But as I said earlier, it places constraints on governments’ abilities to devalue their currency by unchecked printing. And the relic does have over five thousand years of history behind it. Human nature changes much slower than the technology.”

  Back at Bowen’s house, David ran the file that the research assistant sent over against some names from Androssian’s research. Many of the brokers and intermediaries that Androssian fingered in helping to cover market shorting by Changzoo Tongren and Novaya Energya had also been prominent in establishing dollar shorts during that period. After discussing this with Bowen, David crafted a careful response to “acegik,” offering a “small sample of data available for publication” and listing some of the equities and Forex transactions that they suspected could be linked to Changzoo Tongren. They decided to leave Novaya Energya out of it for now. He replied using Maggie’s computer.

  A call came from Oleg. Sasha’s people had identified the man with the snake tattoo as belonging to a particularly brutal Compton gang, and Oleg had stopped by Santa Monica, relaying this information to Megrano and picking up a couple of GPS trackers.

  When Bowen’s home phone rang, it was Frank with news from Seattle. The man wounded in the Friday shooting at Green Lake was still drifting in and out of consciousness, and the doctors were not sure whether he was going to make it. The deputy was allowed ten minutes with him and pleaded for means to contact Julius because a young woman’s life depended on it. He came out with an e-mail address that Frank read to David

  David sat at Maggie’s laptop and typed a message: “Hello Julius—or is it Thomas Mann? My name is David Ferguson. I am the man you approached at the bar near gate N9 at SeaTac airport, just before noon on Friday, April 22nd. People are pursuing me for the Schulmann file. At least two people have been killed and a young woman has been kidnapped. You have the information they want. Please help to save her life.”

  David looked back at James who was standing behind him reading. James nodded. David hit “Send.”

  They went back to their research into the world of Forex brokers, knowing that they were racing against the odds, but hoping that some breakthrough would come. The activity at least kept them busy rather than simply anxious.

  Monday, 4/25/2022, 4:27 p.m. PDT

  Fai Hsu was pondering chessboards, trying to figure out the ending of the Fisher - Spassky game number six from 1972 on the real one in front of him as well as the high-stakes imaginary one being played with Julius and David Ferguson. Additional interrogation of Sappin yielded that she had a connection to SZRU. Unfortunately, SZRU was a relatively new and a not-high-priority organization, so there was no way to quickly verify this through Beijing. Her meeting with Ferguson now appeared to be not entirely unplanned. And assuming that the latest information from Ferguson checked out, he was not an innocent bystander. Fai’s initial analysis appeared to be correct: the Julius – Ferguson meeting in Seattle airport was not accidental, and Sappin was a low-level associate.

  He wondered what the meaning of SZRU in all of this was and whether Sappin was making it up. If SZRU was working with the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), their big brothers up north, perhaps Julius was aligned with GRU as well? Or perhaps Ferguson was but Julius did not know about it? And why did Ferguson go to the police? Did he want to maintain his cover as a law-abiding US citizen? This carried the danger of police discovering who he really was. One possibility was that Ferguson did not have enough associates in LA and wanted to use local police to eliminate Hsu’s team in order to revenge their attacks and to convince people in Beijing that they had to meet his demands. Hsu thought to himself that he was getting too focused on being an attacker and should not forget about playing defense.

  He read Ferguson’s latest e-mail carefully and then forwarded it to Beijing. Only they could verify whether the data was “real” or something that anyone with Internet access could figure out in a few hours. That would ultimately unlock the mystery of Mr. Ferguson.

  He thought about the wounded agent. They were not equipped to deal with stomach wounds. The man was dying a painful death, but they couldn’t take him to a hospital and jeopardize the whole operation. The colonel decided that there was no point in further torturing someone he couldn’t save. It was time to give the man an injection and call the idiots from Compton to get rid of the body. It was sad, but the agent’s family would be well taken care of back in China. He’d be a hero.

  Monday, 4/25/2022, 5:42 p.m. PDT

  James motioned to David. “Let me show you my little hobby.” They walked past the study. James opened a door on the right and turned on the lights. Shelves along the wall held dozens of chess sets. James proudly pointed. “This is Alexander the Great vs. Darius, here’s George Washington vs. the British, Napoleon vs. Kutuzov, Rommel vs. Montgomery, Frodo and his Lord of the Rings fellows vs. Saron and the orcs …”

  “Do you make them all by hand?”

  “I started that way, but then some smart people invented 3D printing.” James pointed to a machine in the corner. “I get to do the creative part and leave the hard work to the machine.”

  David gently picked up a figure of an Elvish archer from the Lord of the Rings set.

  “Are you a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien stories?”

  James nodded. “It’s funny to admit this in my age, but yes, I am. Remember, I grew up close to where he was raised. I feel like we are on a quest of our own now.”

  “James, you asked me earlier, now let me ask you—why are you doing this? I mean, helping me. And please, don’t tell me you are sixty-eight and have nothing to lose. That is not very old and it doesn’t explain anything.”

  James laughed. “You are right, being old is not a reason to do or not to do something. Of course, this is partly about Maggie; I do have a soft spot for her. But mostly I am doing this for myself. I sense that there is something ugly behind this. I want to know the truth, I want to know what happened, I want to see justice done. I was born in 1953, close enough to the most horrible war the world has ever seen. And this horror was brought about because people in Germany voluntarily ridded themselves of individual responsibility, knowledge, and judgment in favor of a strong state, mistakenly thinking they would gain security. At the end of this road is applying Zyklon B because the government authorized it. I am not drawing parallels; I am saying that we don’t know exactly what happened in 2019, what took place below the surface. And I think we, the people, deserve to know. We are all worse off if we don’t.”

  “And what do you think people would do with it?”

  “Hard to tell. The choices are similar to what we discussed this morning: abandon a moral choice and conform to Caesar like Pontius Pilate did, give up like the Master, or speak the truth like Yeshua. I honestly don’t know what we as a society will do if the truth is ugly. We had a greed-fueled financial crisis in 2008. It caused tremendous suffering, but nobody went to jail, and we took it in stride. Perhaps by now we are too complacent, too dependent on the government, to do anything. Perhaps we reached the point where expediency replaced long-held principles. I can only control what I do, and I don’t want to be silent in the face of wrong.”

  The phone rang. It was Megrano. He had news: they started trailing the members of the Compton gang that Oleg and Sasha helped to identify and hit a possible jackpot. The two thugs drove to a Malibu house on PCH, between Topanga and Malibu Canyons, parked in the garage, stayed there for a short time, and drove off. The house was rented to a Chinese national who was supposedly out of the country, but it was clear that there were people in the house. The original tail went with the Compton car, but a new car was on the way to watch the Malibu house.


  Megrano dismissed any offers of help, saying they’d handle it. He was quite interested in any contact from Thomas Mann, aka Julius, but said his priority at the moment was to get Maggie out and to capture the killers of Jim Plasche and Alex. Megrano suggested that David should not yet respond to acegik’s request for a meeting.

  Next, Frank called again. Upon hearing the news, he said he’d come over.

  David checked his e-mail. There were two messages. One was from “acegik,” asking again for a meeting. The other said: “What was I drinking at the airport, what color was my tie, and which college team was I rooting for?”

  Wound up in anticipation, David typed back: “Heineken, blue with yellow stripes, Notre Dame.”

  Monday, 4/25/2022, 6:58 p.m. PDT

  He drove past the house, going north on PCH, turned around and drove by again. It seemed like an awkward place for a “safe house,” but Megrano came to appreciate the logic of it: there was no convenient observation point. No houses across the road, obviously no houses on the ocean side, no view into the house from the top of the cliff on the east side of PCH. He risked having a car with two detectives parked across the street, telling them to stay down as much as possible. The two members of the Compton gang were taken an hour ago with a dead body in the trunk. They admitted to picking it up from “a group of Chinese in Malibu.” They had not confessed to killing Jim Plasche yet.

  The captain did not want them to approach the house at this time, especially since it was outside of Santa Monica. Megrano contacted LAPD for assistance. Unfortunately, all SWAT teams were busy dealing with situations in other parts of the sprawling city and could not get here until after dark. They didn’t want to risk a night operation, so it was decided to wait until the morning.

  Megrano did not agree, but had no choice in the matter.