by James Conway
Then he sees him.
Across the lobby, standing with his broad back to him, staring at Larry Rivers’s Dutch Masters, to the left of the hotel’s glass front doors, is the man with the shaved head who murdered Danny Weiss last night. Laslow. He’s sure of it.
He steps back, eases the door closed, and continues downstairs to the basement. He wonders, How did he find me? Then he remembers the malware alert, the screen flashing off and on, and he concludes they must have tracked his IP address right back to the hotel’s servers. The fire door opens on a laundry room filled with carts of soiled linens. A middle-aged Asian woman in front of a bank of washing machines stares at him with horrified eyes. If someone wanted to harm her down in this din, there’s nothing she can do.
“Exit?” he asks, smiling, but the woman only stiffens and glares as he barrels past.
Coming into the light of an alley on the west side of the building, he pulls up his hood and lowers his head as he approaches the sidewalk of 23rd Street.
Zigzagging south and west with his head down, he wonders why Rick Salvado, a self-made multibillionaire, would want to kill anyone. He thinks of the Rick Salvado he’d heard of before he came to The Rising, the Rick Salvado who hired him, as compared to the man who is bent on killing him.
The Salvado he’d heard of was a fiercely independent investor, orphaned at a young age, who worked his way up from a commodities gopher to gigs at Merrill, Bear Stearns, Oppenheimer—before going out on his own. His first company, the now infamous Allegheny Fund, briefly made him a star and then, all at once, a villain, a government scapegoat for alleged trading improprieties during the NASDAQ dot-com bust and market collapse of 2001–02. His meltdown was public and the case against him was bitter and contentious. Somehow, amazingly, he didn’t go to prison, but his fund went under and his reputation was seemingly destroyed.
All of which made his comeback all the more unlikely and remarkable. After paying his fines and eventually expressing his regrets, Salvado dedicated himself to helping to promote ethical and responsible trading practices. Plus, it didn’t hurt that he still had a knack for making money and for self-promotion. Havens can still remember watching him on the business channels in his dark suit with the omnipresent American flag pin, dispensing wisdom, recommending winners, and cautioning against losers and market traps with the gusto of a vaudevillian, the passion of a televangelist.
Soon, instead of reading “Rick Salvado: Former Fund Manager” the title under his onscreen image began to read, “Rick Salvado: CEO, The Rising.” Not long after that Havens got the call while sitting in his windowless back office at Citi. What he remembers is that the initial call wasn’t from a recruiter, or a human resources pro at The Rising.
The voice on the other end that day said, “Drew Havens, Rick Salvado at The Rising here. I’ve heard a helluva lot about you. How’d you like to get rich together?”
At 20th Street he climbs the stairs onto the High Line trail and walks south. At the 14th Street passage he stops in a semi-enclosed industrial space to listen to his latest favorite piece of art, a sound installation called A Bell for Every Minute. Every sixty seconds he hears the sound of a different bell recorded somewhere in New York City. School bells, church bells, and the New York Stock Exchange bell. It soothes him, listening not so much to sounds, but to the memories of other people and other times. As he looks westward across the roof of an abandoned meat packing plant, toward the Hudson and Jersey, the recently salvaged Coney Island Dreamland bell chimes a deep and haunting tone. He takes out his phone and pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket.
A different ringing now, a different tone. A call halfway around the world to a place he’s never been, for a woman he’s never met and who may very well already be dead.
“Rosehall, how may I help you?”
“Yes,” he says. “Sawa Luhabe, please.”
6
Witwatersrand, South Africa
Wendy is asleep. Finally.
Sawa Luhabe drives east, away from the twilight. Her mother is in the passenger seat, looking out at the East Rand and mouthing the words to a prayer Luhabe has never heard. Her mother knows that something has forced them to leave, but even after Luhabe tried to explain, the older woman didn’t fully understand. Nonetheless, she followed. She’s seen enough in her life to know when to run, when to second-guess, and when to pray.
Even Wendy knows, Luhabe tells herself. Just three years old, but she knew that something was wrong. Something different from the normal energy of the day; a less patient type of maternal sentiment. So, of course, Wendy cried. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to stay. She cried because she knew. Luhabe thinks this is not unlike when the girl acts up, claiming to miss the father she never met. Some kind of extra sense, rooted in the heart.
If traffic on the N-17 and her mother’s seldom used 1997 Daewoo Cielo cooperates, she’ll cover the 430 kilometers to her cousin’s house in Swaziland in less than four and a half hours. She’s chosen these relatives because of the distance from Jo’burg and because, to the best of her knowledge, she’s never mentioned them to anyone at work.
She’s tempted to call her oldest cousin to give her some warning, but she doesn’t want to use her phone. This morning she would have thought it preposterous that someone might want to track her mobile phone calls, but now she thinks it’s not only possible, it’s likely. Plus, today the phone has been her undoing. First the call from the mystery client out of Berlin. Then, in her post-shooting absence, calls to the office from Hong Kong, the United States, and then more calls from Berlin. The last, she reasons, was to check if to see if she is still alive.
“Did you bring this upon yourself? Out of greed?”
“No, Mother. I did nothing to invite this. If I am guilty of anything, it’s believing that something good could finally come our way.”
Her mother clucks her tongue. “Does this mean you will lose your job?”
“No. Unless the job brought this upon me.”
After a while, her mother turns to her and says, “You know I believe you. I think you are the strongest and most decent person I know.”
She crosses through the Oshoek border post, twenty-three kilometers from the Swazi capital. Abandoning the N-17, she takes a series of back roads to a small village that she has visited many times since her childhood. Her relatives—three cousins, their six children, and the home’s owner, her mother’s seventy-four-year-old sister—are standing in the dirt yard, as if someone alerted them to their arrival.
After they’ve eaten and Wendy has kissed her good night, thrilled to sleep alongside her big cousins in their bedroom, Luhabe goes out into the yard and sits on a folding chair next to her mother.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mother. It’s for the best.”
“And this is what I would do, too. If it were my daughter.”
Driving west alone on the N-17, back into the country that she loves and hates, that amazes and repeatedly confounds her, she begins to cry. When the tears start to impede her vision, she reaches into her shoulder bag for a tissue. Before removing her hand from the bag, she extends her fingers and runs them along the barrel of her late husband’s handgun.
7
Berlin
Sobieski can’t sleep.
Combine a type-A federal agent with a life-or-death criminal case, a seriously blown opportunity with a potentially fantastic man, a gambling/debt problem, and the opposite of jet lag, and this is what you get. This is how you feel.
The cabbie dropped her off in front of the Spielbank Berlin in Potsdamer Platz in Center City. She checked her suitcase in the lobby and walked past the slots and roulette screens of the first floor toward the elevator. On the third floor she scoped out the poker tables, observed two games for fifteen minutes, then purchased one thousa
nd euros’ worth of chips. After fifteen additional minutes a seat opened at the first table, which was filled with Chinese men. A half hour later she had lost all but fifty euros and handed over her card for another five hundred in chips. A half hour after that she had won back her losses plus another seventeen hundred euro. During a dealer change she checked her watch. Two A.M., Berlin time. Three more hours of action if she wanted. She stood up and stretched her hands over her head. One of the Chinese men said something about her to another and they laughed. She stared at them until they stopped smiling. Then, in their Cantonese dialect, she said, “I wonder how your wives would feel about your opinion of my ass.” They looked away, but she didn’t stop. “Now shut up and fucking play.” As she began to sit back down, her head grew light and a wave of nausea fluttered from her abdomen through her chest. Heart attack? she wondered, but only for a second. Anxiety attack, coupled with a bout of acute self-loathing? More likely. Usually this sort of feeling came when she was losing. The fact that it’s on the heels of winning an eleven-hundred-euro pot convinced her that she had to get out of there.
In her room, which is nicer than she’d imagined, she’s stretched out on the bed, propped up on two comfortable white pillows with a serious thread count, working the keys of her laptop. Next to her right hip is a yellow legal pad on which she’s written in Sharpie the names of the three traders, the cities in which the trades occurred, and the names of the securities involved.
She looks for coincidences, common denominators, some kind of human or cultural significance or sequence, rather than the purely numerical. All the while consumed by two questions: Who’s responsible? And who’s next?
But as she works, as she asks the hard questions, she also asks questions of herself: Why didn’t you share that cab? Why didn’t you call him later to say that your night just opened up and you’d love to have that drink? Instead of the casino. Why?
The easy answer, the easiest lie, she knows, is the job. Duty calls. Lives and more are at stake. Etcetera. Etcetera.
Bullshit.
Sobieski knows that lives will always be at stake. Or at least livelihoods. Someone will always be manipulating the markets, bending the rules, and committing crimes, often at the expense of the innocent. She also knows that there’s a big difference between dedicating your career and dedicating your life to a thing, and she crossed that line a long time ago. And the farther she gets from that line, the more she hates herself. And the more she hates herself, the more she’s compelled to ruin what good remains of Jan Sobieski’s daughter.
Jan Sobieski is why she majored in finance and economics with a minor in criminal justice. Jan Sobieski is why she and her mother and her younger brother lived in one of the finest houses in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, had a beach house in Cape May, and just about everything a family could ever want. He called himself King Jan, and she worshipped him and was more than happy to follow his rules, because if they worked for a self-made, handsome success like him, why not?
King Jan pushed her to get perfect grades and perfect attendance. He pushed her to compete in soccer and softball and martial arts, where she truly excelled. At times she resented his rules, his strict regimen, but she also appreciated the results. So she went along with it, and by the time she was twelve they were best friends and she, much more than her rebellious, disinterested brother Luke, was considered the heir apparent to the family business, which was all about making money for others, and themselves.
Only in retrospect, with the accumulated wisdom of a federal financial terrorism agent and the resentful heart of a child, could she begin to fathom how it all blew up.
Soon after she turned thirteen, King Jan’s demeanor began to change. He still challenged her to be better, but unreasonably so. He began to accuse her of lying and seeking the easy way out. At fourteen, she witnessed him in the throes of a seemingly constant argument with her mother. That was when he hit her for the first time, a slap to the cheek. Because of her training she could have deflected or avoided the blow. In some ways she had seen it coming for months. But if he wanted to hit her, she wanted the blow to land. It would make it easier to abandon him. That was also around the time when he began to go away on long and frequent “business trips.”
The end came in a disorienting rush. Just before her fifteenth birthday, a guidance counselor pulled her out of second period sophomore English class. Lord of the Flies. In the hallway the counselor told her that she had to go to a doctor’s appointment. But by the time they reached her office, the counselor had said that something had happened with her father, who was not in any physical danger, and that her mother would soon be coming to pick her up.
But her mother never picked her up.
For three hours she sat in the guidance office, with no further updates from a teacher, counselor, or administrator. Classmates she had grown up with and would never see again passed on their way to third, fourth, fifth, and sixth period destinations. She thought of the work she was supposed to submit, the tests she was missing. Then she realized it didn’t matter. She knew by the looks on the faces of the teachers who passed that what was happening to her transcended grades and test scores.
Finally she thought about her little brother, Luke, probably in a similar office nearby in the junior high, and she wondered what he was thinking. Sitting there, she was filled with anxious love and a concern for him that she’d never forget.
Jan, like the king, her father used to say. But even that, even his first name, turned out to be a lie.
Sobieski returns to her notes with renewed intensity.
The traders were killed with different weapons in different cities. While the plays and the way they were executed were similar, the securities themselves were completely different.
Also, the firms at which the traders worked were all legitimate, to the extent that anyone working longs and shorts can be legit. All were small – to medium-sized. And all had some kind of contact with a client or clients here in Berlin, though using the word “client” in this regard doesn’t exactly ring true. More like an accomplice. What else? While Patrick Lau in Hong Kong had significant financial woes, according to Michaud the others, though far from trading superstars, were liquid and made a decent enough living.
While she’s staring at the list of securities, it occurs to her that they’re almost all American companies. Which means by law the trades had to have originated from a U.S.-based account. If they’re killing traders to eliminate links, it’s unlikely that the U.S. account would track back to an actual person, but you never know. The mere fact that she’s aware of the trades and killings demonstrates that they are not as efficient or discreet as they hoped to be.
Finally, she types the name “Sawa Luhabe” into her search box. The digital dossier Michaud compiled on the young South African trader is impressive, but Sobieski wants more. She knows that Luhabe’s not at work, that her bullet-pocked car was discovered on an Alexandra side street, that her corporate e-mail is frozen, and that her mobile phone is either off or she’s not picking up. Which is why, on a hunch, she checks to see if Luhabe has a Facebook account. Or Twitter. Nothing, but she does have a professional profile on the LinkedIn site. Sobieski sends her a message.
I am an agent for the United States Terrorism and Financial Intelligence task force investigating the circumstances surrounding the recent attempt on your life.
I would very much like to talk with you, and to help you.
We believe that other lives, perhaps many more lives, are at stake, and that your cooperation may help to prevent a tragedy.
Please contact me as soon as possible at any time. If you can tell me anything about what has happened, from the description of the shooter to the name of the man who initiated the trades, please let me know, in the strictest of confidence.
Sincerely,
Cara Sobieski
United States Dept. o
f Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
Soon after she hits send, an alert appears on her screen. Malware alert. While she’s been tracking the moves of the dead, the presumably dead, and everyone affiliated with them, someone has been tracking her. The tech guys in TFI call it doppelgänger software. A program that, once it picks up a certain move coming from a certain source, begins to shadow and mimic every move that source makes, all the while dispatching bots into the host system, plundering and copying files until they’ve chronicled every move the source has ever made.
Sobieski captures the alert with a screen grab, then e-mails it to a secure and isolated holding bin for an encryption specialist at TFI to explore. Then she shuts down her computer.
Staring out the hotel window, the lights of the Brandenburg Gate shining a dull gold in the distance, she wonders, Who is tracking you this time? Who’s your doppelgänger?
She’s in a deep guilt-plagued sleep when Sawa Luhabe’s reply alights in her inbox.
8
Darien, Connecticut
The house, like their lives, is surrounded by a hedge.
In many ways, Miranda Havens tells herself, this entire town is. Towering green manicured hedges whose shining oval leaves constitute a unique and proprietary form of currency.
She’s only been to Rick Salvado’s country estate twice. Once for a full-blown corporate family outing and once for a luncheon with “the wives.” It’s hard for her to say which event was more outrageous.
The corporate family gig was all about large-scale excess: a genuine Cirque du Soleil show under a backyard big top, Arabian pony rides, a vintage carousel for the kids, and a private concert by one of that year’s American Idol finalists.
