The Last Trade

by James Conway

  She pulls away from the phone for a second. He checks his watch, continues to hustle through the apartment. “Oh my God, Drew. You have to tell the—”

  Opening and closing drawers, looking for what? A gun? Hah! “I can’t, Mir. Not now. If I tell anyone right now, I know that he’ll set me up and take me down. He knows too many people.”

  “You sure it’s him?”

  “I saw the guy . . . the killer. He’s a Salvado guy.”

  “What are you gonna . . .”

  “I’ve got to go away until . . .”

  “What?”

  “Until I figure it out.”

  “My God. Then come up here.”

  “I won’t do that to you. He’ll try to blame Danny on me, I know it.”

  “But you didn’t . . .”

  “Which is why, if someone comes poking around, you have to absolutely deny having had any contact with me.”

  “Come up here. I’ll hide you.”

  “Even if they find out we’ve spoken, say it was a fight. Say it was over money and I never return your calls—there’s proof right here on my machine—and, as hard as it may be, pretend you no longer have intimate feelings for me.”

  “What did you find?”

  He decides not to get specific with Miranda. The less she knows, the better. Plus, at this point, he’s not exactly sure. Whatever it is, it’s enough to piss off the CEO and founder of the second best performing hedge fund in the world and, apparently, to get someone killed. “Hard to tell.”

  “But you think he did this and would do this to you? Jesus, Drew, it was your research that . . . If not for you, he’d still be . . .”

  “I know, which is what frightens me.”

  “Please, Drew. Come up here.”

  “I can’t. I don’t want to get you involved.”

  He’s at the front door, adjusting his duffel and shoulder bag.

  “But you have to.”

  He closes the door and doesn’t bother locking it. “Why?” he asks, flabbergasted. “Why, Mir?”

  “Because a few minutes after you and I spoke earlier, Danny Weiss called me.”

  3

  Hong Kong

  Sobieski hates to run, especially at 5 A.M., especially after a late night of gambling and betrayal on a barge, followed by an unfortunate visit to a stranger’s bed, and on less than two hours of sleep.

  But run she must. She finds that an early morning run is the best way to forget the night and transition between her conflicting selves. Sometimes it’s a reward, other times a punishment.

  Most days, she starts outside her apartment in Stanley Market, but this morning she decides to change things up and drives to the Wanchai District for a loop along Victoria Harbour. Predawn light tints the eastern horizon a surreal metallic blue as she breaks into her stride. No stretching, no visualizing. Just dive in and get it over with. Usually she listens to music while she runs. Most recently the Black Keys, Spoon, and the Felice Brothers, but her head is in no condition to listen to anything this morning.

  The tide is in, and the brightening sky looks as if it will soon be relatively blue. Later, the tide will recede and the sun will rise up and bake the teeming streets, and the heat and smog and noise of Hong Kong will change everything. She rounds a bend in the path and sees the Star ferry chugging out for an early morning commuter run. The ferry reminds her of the ferry to Macau. When she first arrived in Hong Kong, she’d take the night ferry to the casinos in Macau, but now that she’s found the barge, and several other local games, she doesn’t have to travel. There’s a moment while she’s thinking about Macau and the barge and the Dutchman when she feels that she might lose her stomach, but after a while it passes and she’s able to keep a decent pace. She’s not far from the barge, and Patrick Lau’s condominium is within sight, when her phone buzzes. She slows to a stop and looks at her watch, incredulously, before answering.

  “Five oh-nine A.M.,” she says. “Just getting home?”

  Michaud laughs. “If anyone else answered their phone breathing so heavily, at this time of day, I’d assume the most impure and obscene of scenarios were going down. But not my Sobieski.”

  “Only obscenity I’m feeling right now is the fact that my morning run has once again been rudely interrupted.”

  “How’s the crowd at the market?”

  “Changed it up,” she explains. “Doing the Harbourfront.”

  “Patrick Lau’s old stomping grounds.”

  “Why not?”

  “Thoughts?”

  Sobieski pauses. In between gambling and screwing, her late night/early morning research into the life of Patrick Lau didn’t reveal any single case-breaking discovery. But she did uncover enough bits and pieces to keep her intrigued.

  “Nothing major. But a couple things I saw about his personal matters up to but not including whatever he did yesterday are worth looking into.”

  “For instance?”

  “Well, I did a secure credit check using the basic software on my laptop. Turns out Lau was in a lot worse shape than his coworkers or neighbors thought or were willing to admit.”

  “Who isn’t?

  “Well,” she continues, “in addition to having problems making his monthly condo rent, Lau was more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars deep in debt, mostly the result of bad real estate deals and personal trades, overextended credit cards, and another thirty thousand dropped over the past twelve months on weekend junkets to Bangkok.”

  “No doubt on sex vacations.”

  “Homosexuals do all kinds of interesting things, Boss. Just like normal people. Except solitaire karaoke. That’s too gay even for them.”

  “So,” Michaud replies, “Lau had some debt issues.”

  “Which begs the question: Who knew that he had a serious debt situation?”

  “That’s an odd phrase,” Michaud says. “‘Begs the question.’”

  “Did he owe enough to get himself killed?” she wonders, before answering herself. “Banks may foreclose, but best I know they haven’t taken to killing. And if it’s criminal, really, why would you kill someone who owes you a large sum of money? Wouldn’t killing the person who owes you money guarantee that you’d never see a cent of it?”

  “I don’t know,” replies Michaud. “No one’s ever owed me a large sum of money. Listen, Sobes, it sounds like a funky homicide, but our job at TFI is—”

  She cuts him off and completes the sentence, her departmental mission statement, for him. “. . . Terrorism and Financial Intelligence’s twin aims are safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats.”

  “None of which seems to fit the profile of the murder of Patrick Lau.”

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “You sounded like you were.”

  “It’s five something in the morning. Pardon me if my PowerPoint skills aren’t razor sharp.”

  “What else?”

  “From a TFI perspective, it’s worth noting that Lau’s group was responsible for buying up an inordinate amount of short paper yesterday. This came up in a basic at-home search. Not in one transaction, but most if not all for tech stocks.”

  “Okay,” Michaud says. Now his voice is all business, no longer collegial. “What kind of tech?”

  “Well, Apple, Dell, Cisco, and about a dozen others.”

  “All American-based?”

  “I don’t have the list in the waistband of my shorts, but on first glance, yep . . .”

  Michaud sighs. One thing that raises a red flag for Americans working in the prevention of financial terrorism is a massive short position, especiall
y on American securities. Throw a murdered broker into the equation and the flag gets twice as big and red and flies five times higher. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

  Sobieski watches three small fishing boats head out for the waters of the South China Sea. She considers saying something about the fact that she didn’t discover this until a little more than an hour ago, that it didn’t seem particularly conclusive, and that she didn’t immediately contact him because she imagined he was passed out or still in a bar, but she resists. “You’re right,” she answers. “I should have.”

  “How much of a short?”

  “Hard to tell without getting on our system, but the best I could tell with the tools on hand is that Lau or someone in his group tried to Smurf it, executing a ton of shorts, none more than ten thousand dollars to stay under the tracking radar, totaling in the area of a billion dollars. Thousands of individual transactions. Micro-transactions. Whatever. Over a period of many hours.”

  “Did you . . . ?”

  Again, Sobieski finishes her boss’s thought. “Was I able to discover in my bedroom at four-twenty-six this morning if any external, real-world circumstances may have triggered the position? No, not on the newswires or market trends or the individual company news feeds. If anything, whoever did this, they’re in the distinct minority, betting so aggressively against this kind of blue chip tech. And no, I have no clue at this point about the identity of the investor or investors or if there’s a deeper U.S. connection.”

  “How long would it take you to get in here?”

  Sobieski looks at her outfit. Black tights beneath a pair of charcoal running shorts and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt. “You’re already in?”

  “Just completed a solitaire version of the walk of shame.”

  She sighs. “You know, it would be nice to be able to go to work in big people’s clothes once in a while.”

  “Ten minutes. You like tea. I’ll brew some fancy tea for you.”

  4

  Dubai

  Nobody walks outside in Dubai, which is why Nasseem Al Mar enjoys it so much.

  He’s heard all the jokes about mad dogs and Englishmen, and the warnings about the risks of exposure to the desert heat but, unlike mad dogs and Englishmen, he doesn’t come out in the midday sun. He walks at dawn or, like today, after work, at dusk.

  Al Mar, a forty-four-year-old broker who landed on his post-Lehman, post-collapse feet at Zayed Capital, no longer cares what the others think. In the past five years he’s seen more excess and financial devastation than in the previous twenty. He’s watched friends, clients, and family members make millions, spend more, then lose everything. He’s seen this city and this country rise and soar and crash in a matter of months. All he cares about these days is surviving, and today was a good day, a day that makes walking through the desert on the outskirts of Dubailand doubly satisfying because of a complex yet lucrative series of trades he just finished executing.

  Precisely at 9 A.M., just as the exchange opened for the day, he received a call from someone in Berlin representing an investor in the United States. The caller wanted to take a number of short positions on a series of predominantly U.S.-based media stocks and funds specializing in broadcast, film, music, and print. TV networks. Newspaper, book, and magazine publishing. Major motion picture studios. And music. Nothing unusual. After all, each of these so-called old-media industries is facing a series of technological, cultural, and economic challenges threatening its future. Indeed, every day someone seems to be predicting the death of one industry or another, so the aggressive short positions were nothing out of the ordinary.

  However, what was unusual was the sheer volume of trades and the manner in which the caller wanted to execute them. Rather than going with one transaction per trade, he laid out an elaborate sequence that required the computerized executions of thousands of smaller trades, or micro-transactions, each for less than ten thousand dollars U.S.

  As a brokerage exercise, it was one huge pain in the ass for Al Mar. But because of the relatively modest value of each individual trade, he didn’t have to get his MD’s approval. In essence, only Al Mar and his semi-anonymous client, whose transfers and credentials cleared without a hitch, would know the sum of the trades, which cumulatively totaled just under a billion dollars.

  So it’s a screen-weary yet soon-to-be well-compensated Nasseem Al Mar who is walking away from the ghost town periphery of his city in 101-degree, 6 P.M. desert heat. He’s left his black suit jacket on the front seat of the car and loosened his red tie, each part of the corporate uniform he and his fellow brokers wear every day. Even though they rarely if ever have face-to-face interactions with clients, the new MD insists on the formal dress code, says it reflects integrity and creates solidarity within the ranks, and puts their Western clientele at ease. Al Mar thinks, in addition to being bloody hot, the matching suits make them look like members of a football club. But whatever. He’s a survivor. And if wearing a corporate uniform is part of the deal, so be it.

  He thinks about his wife. Maybe this windfall will relax her, because steady employment hasn’t been enough. She’s seen too many others fail. His brother. Her brothers, and her brother-in-law who disappeared after the crash and left her sister alone to raise four children. She wants a return to the golden times. This deal won’t quite do that, but it’s something. It’s a decent start.

  Briefly, he considered defying the client’s request and putting some of his own money on some mirror shorts on a personal account, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. Not because he is afraid of retaliation, but because he has no money to invest. But, because he thought it would make his wife happy, just before leaving the office, Al Mar dialed his brother-in-law, who has some liquidity, and told him about his last trade. Not surprisingly, his brother-in-law, who is something of a gambler, jumped all over his information.

  He walks to the burned-out wreck of a Mercedes. Stolen or abandoned, he thinks. Once the property of a fool, now owned by the desert. He turns around to begin his walk back to his car. Not a long walk, but a good walk. Enough to get the blood flowing, to clear the head. As he nears his car, he sees the shine of another vehicle approaching. In this stretch of the desert, when the light is right, one can see for miles. It takes more than a minute for the car to reach him. Another black Mercedes, same model as the wreck down the road.

  When it’s twenty yards away, Al Mar steps off the edge of the road. It’s rare that one sees a pedestrian out here, plus the light is fading, so why take a chance? When the driver spots him, the car slows, almost to a stop. There is a moment when driver and pedestrian make eye contact, and it sends a shiver up Al Mar’s spine. He’s filled with the sensation that something is about to go terribly wrong, that he’s made a mistake coming out here to this same spot day after day, that sooner or later he will be robbed or worse.

  But then the driver, a middle-aged man with a mustache not unlike Al Mar’s, turns back to the road and floors the gas. Al Mar stops and watches the car shrink in the twilight and the despair passes. The survivor lives another day.

  5

  New York City

  The doors close behind him as he hops onto the last car of the last train to Katonah out of Grand Central. It’s a local, filled with drunken concert – and club-goers and a handful of glassy-eyed men in suits for whom the demands of work have overtaken the importance of almost everything else. He sits on a cramped and stiff rear-facing jumper seat at the back of the car and attempts to prioritize what’s happened and what he needs to do.

  First, always first, Miranda. She told him she didn’t pick up when Weiss called because she didn’t recognize the number. She said his message was short and harried. He was upset that Havens had not returned his calls; he feared for his life; and he was certain that something horrible was about to happen. He said that the fund was involved, and that Havens was his last best h
ope to figure it out. When she called him back five minutes later, there was no answer.

  Next, Weiss. Weiss was right. Havens had begun to ignore his messages. They’d joked about it several times. Weiss knew that Havens wasn’t a great communicator, especially when it came to text messaging. The way Havens saw it, if he replied to one, it would open the floodgates. And Weiss, who Havens once said did not have an off button, would strive for constant contact. He looks around the train, then scrolls back through Weiss’s messages, starting chronologically with two he read but chose to ignore while he was at the club:

  – . . .wilt thou not be brotherly to us?

  -Berlin. 12.42-6

  After considering the first two, which still make no sense, he opens two more:

  -Murder @ Hang Seng

  -Help 3.338-9

  Of course Havens is familiar with an institution the size of Hang Seng. But he has no relationship with the Hong Kong HQ’d bank or its employees. Help he clearly understands. That must have come soon after he walked away from Salvado at Elysian, just before Laslow got to Weiss. However, he has no idea what to make of the second part of Weiss’s text: 3.338-9. All that he can theorize is that Weiss knew he was in danger and had begun an information dump on him, one cryptic text at a time. The next and final text, sent less than a minute after Help, says:

  This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.

  Havens wonders what was going on when Weiss sent this, and why he’s now seeing it for the first time. Was he hiding? Had he heard Laslow coming? Or was he simply jamming the night away, trying to find answers, scribbling explanations for his confounding world on a whiteboard and then dispatching them one text at a time, like messages in a bottle? In the end, it’s obvious that he hid. What else could he do? Weiss had neither the skills nor the temperament of a fighter. At least not a physical fighter. But for an idea or a cause, he was as tenacious as they come, and Havens realizes that this message was Weiss’s last punch in a fight whose outcome is yet to be determined.