The Last Trade

by James Conway

  “Damn it!” he shouts. “Stay still. They’ll be here shortly.”

  “Who?”

  “My employers. The people you were vandalizing.”

  She lays her right cheek on the floor and tries to focus on him. Blue jeans. Gray pocket T-shirt. Black canvas sneakers. “Vandalizing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is there to vandalize here?”

  He lowers the blinds. “We shut down this operation because we anticipated a threat.”

  “When?”

  “Yester—Why should I tell you?”

  She closes her eyes and takes a breath. Fine. Don’t.

  The man continues. “What did you mean to accomplish, breaking into our offices?”

  Eyes back open. “I came here because your firm is linked to a series of highly questionable transactions that have been linked to serious crimes.”

  “Crimes?”

  “Murders. Don’t play stupid.”

  He walks three steps away, then turns to look down at her. “Preposterous. We are an international securities firm.”

  She laughs derisively. “Right. And this is your plush and luxurious worldwide headquarters.”

  “Tell me about the murders.”

  “Sure. Let me up.”

  He shakes his head. Not a chance.

  “Okay,” she begins, squinting her eyes and trying to remember the facts. “Hong Kong, Monday, October 17. An order is placed with a broker named Patrick Lau, via a trading account in Philadelphia, linked to a man named Rondell Jameson. U.S. tech stocks, all shorts, thousands of micro transactions, presumably to avoid detection, each just under the total that would catch the eye of someone in Treasury or Homeland Security, or me, totaling nearly a billion dollars. The foreign middleman in the transaction? Siren Securities. Ring a bell?”

  The man cocks his head. It’s clear that he is familiar with the transaction but perhaps not so much with what happened next. “And?”

  “And that evening in Hong Kong, soon after Patrick Lau got home from work, someone broke into his harbor-front condo and shot him in the head.”

  The man sits back down. Scratches his chin. The blinds are at his side, in his loosening grip. “How do you know this?”

  “I was at the crime scene when he was still facedown on his counter, blood dripping onto the floor.”

  “In Hong Kong?”

  “Yes. I can show you pictures if you’d like, once we get out of here.”

  “And there’s no chance this was a coincidence?”

  She begins to speak more rapidly. “Next day. Tuesday. The second trade. Media stocks. Still shorts. Still huge money. This time instead of Hong Kong it was Dubai. This time instead of Patrick Lau the murdered broker’s name was Naseem Al Mar at Zayeed Capital. And of course, Siren Securities, Berlin, Germany, was in the middle of it. They found Al Mar in a car trunk yesterday.”

  He stares, silent, mouth open.

  “I imagine your fingers were on the keyboard for that one, too.”

  “I . . . we simply carry out the orders of others. Clients. Institutions. There’s no way that—”

  “Next came Johannesburg. New media shorts. Rosehall Fund. A woman broker named Sawa Luhabe. They riddled her car with bullets soon after.”

  “Are you an assassin?”

  “Then, yesterday, the same brutal, despicable shit in Rio.”

  He paces away from, then back toward her. Dips his hands in and out of the pockets of his tight hipster jeans. “Who are you?”

  “I work for the United States Terrorism and Financial Intelligence task force. I’m agent Cara Sobieski.”

  His eyes widen further. For the first time Sobieski thinks he might not know anything about the murders. “If you don’t believe me, check my ID. It’s in my back pocket.”

  While he hesitates, she presses. “When are your employers coming? When will they get here?”

  “They’re . . . on their way.” He shrugs. “I don’t know . . . minutes?”

  “Minutes. And you didn’t know about the murders?”

  He shakes his head, glances at her back pocket. “The orders come through and I process them.” As he speaks, he slowly bends and reaches toward her pocket. “Stay still.”

  “Orders from whom?”

  No answer.

  “Listen,” Sobieski says, “what’s your name?”

  “My name is Heinrich.” He carefully removes the leather case from her pocket, flips it open, and sighs when he sees the badge. He’s never heard of TFI, but it’s obvious she’s legit.

  “And you know nothing about these murders, Heinrich?”

  He shakes his head, afraid now, still staring at her badge.

  “Then we absolutely have to get out of here, Heinrich.”

  “But they—”

  She interrupts. “They will kill us, Heinrich. When they come, of course they’re going to kill me. But they’re gonna kill you, too. Same as Lau in Hong Kong, Al Mar in Dubai, and whatever his name is—was—Valverde in Rio.”

  “What about the woman in Jo’burg?”

  “Last I heard, they haven’t gotten her, but they’re trying. She’s a loose end and they’re eliminating anyone who has touched this.”

  As he continues to deliberate, tapping her badge against his palm, she says as convincingly as possible, “Heinrich! You are a loose end. They. Will. Kill. Us!”

  Heinrich agonizes one more moment before deciding to believe her. He puts her badge in his back pocket, grabs her right elbow, and helps her to her feet. As they hustle toward the door, her hands still bound behind her back, he asks, “Do you have a gun?”

  “Uh-uh. Not with me.”

  They bound into the hall and jog toward the elevator bank. As Heinrich reaches to press the down button, Sobieski bumps his hand away with her hip. “Wait.” She gestures with her chin at the lights above the elevator.

  It’s rising . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .

  Sobieski starts walking away from the elevator, in the opposite direction of the Siren office.

  . . . 4 . . .

  Heinrich follows.

  They’re too far away from the stairwell to make it in time. She stops outside the photography studio. “Quick, try this.” Heinrich rushes over and twists the knob, but it doesn’t give. There’s a bell to ring, but there’s no time.

  6 . . . 7 . . .

  They scramble across the hall to the accountant’s office. Heinrich twists the knob. No go.

  8 . . .

  Back across to the literary agency.

  9 . . .

  Heinrich twists.

  Ding!

  It opens at the same moment as the elevator doors.

  2

  Johannesburg

  His house is a fortress.

  To try to enter it in the middle of the night, unannounced, was a risk she didn’t want to take. The alternative, sleeping in the car on a dark side street of a violent slum while being hunted by someone who wants to kill her, wasn’t much better, but it’s the choice Sawa Luhabe made.

  She had driven straight through from Swaziland. Once she was back in the city, she considered calling a friend, or sleeping on the couch in her office, but she decided that the first choice unnecessarily endangered an innocent, and the second was too obvious.

  Just after 2 A.M. she drove past her house in Alexandra, out of curiosity, and was not surprised to see a man standing in front of a car out front, and lights on inside. She never slowed down and never turned back. Instead she continued on to the Hillbrow slum, and the home of her brother Muntukayise, better known by his gangster name, Jolly.

  Luhabe hasn’t seen or spoken to Jolly in seven years. Since he left home for good at sixteen to pursue the gangster life h
e had courted since he was twelve. Their last conversation, on the back stoop of the family house, had not gone well. She was home from university and had found two guns and a kilo of cocaine in his closet. When she confronted him, he said, “Because crime is easy, and all that I am doing is taking back what was ours.”

  “This was ours?” she said, holding up the bag of cocaine.

  “That is a means to an end. Faster and easier than what you propose.”

  “It’s easy until you die,” she answered. And she told him that if this was the life he had chosen he had to leave her parents’ home because his guns and drugs under their roof had put them all in danger. He never said good-bye to his parents, but before he left, he kissed his sister and told her he loved her.

  “I love Muntukayise,” she answered. “Jolly, I hate.”

  Roosters awaken her. Then, in the distance, a gunshot.

  Horizontal sunlight slants through an alley, directly into her red and swollen eyes. She sits up, rubs her cheeks and eyes, then starts the car. She’s never been inside Muntukayise’s house before, but she’s driven by it dozens of times. And besides, everyone knows where Jolly lives. The last time she drove past it was the day after her husband was murdered. If there ever had been a time when she thought she would cave and ask him to use his influence, that would have been it. It would have been for vengeance, to ask her brother to kill the man who killed her husband. But she didn’t. Couldn’t. She knew it would have felt good for a moment and wrong for an eternity.

  Now she doesn’t want anyone to kill anyone. All that she wants is refuge. A place even an assassin would fear.

  As the car warms up and daylight spreads across the ruins of Pretoria Road, she continues to wipe the sleep out of her eyes and takes civic inventory of her surroundings. More than half the commercial buildings are burned out and gutted, plate glass windows long ago shattered and bricked up. Staring at sidewalk junk refrigerators and sinks, mattresses and office chairs, she thinks how odd it is that most of the buildings are closed up and vacant while people live on the streets below among their contents.

  During apartheid, this street was the home of the whites-only main shopping district of Hillbrow; now it’s a predominantly black slum. Progress. She rolls down her window, shifts into drive, and begins the short journey to her brother’s place on Catherine Street.

  Jolly’s home stands out because it is something of a compound, gated, guarded, and surrounded by concrete walls. Plus there is glass beneath the iron bars in the windows and the red brick is free of graffiti, which makes the place contrast with most of the homes in the neighborhood. There are no mattresses or refrigerators in front of her brother’s place. Just two armed guards standing sentry on the lawn side of the sidewalk gate.

  She stands before the gate, waiting for one of them to acknowledge her. When she determines that isn’t going to happen, she speaks. “Excuse me. I am here to see Muntukayise.”

  Both guards approach the gate. One already has raised his machine pistol poised up to his hip. “What you say, girl?”

  “I am here to see Muntukayise.”

  Together the guards shake their heads—no one here by that name.

  “Jolly.”

  This stops them.

  “Jolly sleeping. What you want with Jolly?”

  Sawa Luhabe steps closer to the gate and looks between two bars. “You call him Jolly, but to me he is Muntukayise. Wake him and tell him his sister is here.”

  * * *

  Muntukayise opens the door in a pair of orange boxer shorts. He is a tall and muscular man, like their father. He grimaces and then, recognizing her, confirming the best and the worst, he smiles. Like their father. He bounds down the six brick steps and opens the gate. Sawa Luhabe was determined not to hug the most infamous gangster in Hillbrow, but when her baby brother reaches out for her, she can’t help it.

  When he pulls away, he looks her up and down and hugs her again. “Is that your car?”

  She turns. Nods.

  “I thought you were a big-time stockbroker?”

  “Someone shot up my other car.”

  He tenses. “Who?” The change in his facial expression is so pronounced it unnerves her.

  “I’ll tell you. Can we go inside?”

  While she eats her first food since leaving Swaziland, she tells him her story.

  He stands, paces. “What can I do?”

  “I swore I would never speak to you as long as you made a living at this. I swore I wouldn’t even go to your funeral.”

  “Tell me.”

  “But my daughter . . .”

  “I will send someone to Swaziland.”

  “To protect. This is not about killing.”

  “Fine, to protect her. And Mama. Has she . . . has she mentioned . . .”

  She shakes her head. “Not for some time, brother. It’s the only way she can cope.”

  “I understand. What else?”

  “I need a place to stay until I figure this out. I’m sure they will come back.”

  “Then you’ll stay here. And we will be ready for them.”

  “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a bed? A clean bed would be nice right now.”

  Before trying to sleep, she logs onto her brother’s computer. He’s given her a second-floor room with a private bath in the back of the house.

  The first thing she finds is the apology from the American Agent Cara Sobieski. Then she opens the follow-ups, which are filled with many of the same questions she’s been asking herself.

  Luhabe doesn’t answer. She’s too tired. She’ll answer later, after she sleeps. But first, she decides to open the only other message in her inbox. From a stranger, SafeHavens@hotmail.com.

  Dear Sawa Luhabe,

  My name is Drew Havens.

  I left a message in your office yesterday that arrived too late. I hope this finds you safe and well. I am an American quant whose friend was recently killed by someone I believe is linked to the people with whom you performed the short trade, and who attempted to kill you. You need to know that they have already killed stockbrokers in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Rio. They are also trying to kill me. I absolutely believe they will kill anyone who has any knowledge of or association with them. And I believe that they have something much more catastrophic planned, and that we can potentially prevent. I would very much like to hear from you in order to learn as much as I can about your contact with them.

  Luhabe closes her brother’s laptop, stands, and looks out the window. A guard armed with a machine pistol patrols the small walled courtyard behind the house. A neighbor’s dog begins to yelp. From down the hall she hears the voice of the man who used to be her brother, ordering someone to do something. She pulls the curtains, blocking the light of the rising sun, and lies back down on the bed.

  She closes her eyes and thinks of her daughter and her mother, her dead father and husband and all the iterations of the brother she has known. Child. Rebel. Criminal. Killer. Outcast. And now protector. She thinks of how he’s been each of those things in distinct stages and now he is all of them at once. We all are, she thinks; only the order and the emphasis sometimes changes.

  As sleep finally comes, she is thinking of the American agent Cara Sobieski and now this man Drew Havens, both of whom claim to want to help her, to protect her as well as many others.

  Her last thought, which is really a whim on the edge of a dream, is: I wonder if Drew Havens and Cara Sobieski have ever spoken to each other or, better yet, if they’ve ever met?

  3

  Newark

  He calls Miranda from the back of a cab.

  “Where are you?”

  “Road trip. Where are you?”

  “Out. I spoke to Deborah.”

&nb
sp; “And?”

  “She thinks he’s capable of anything. But she’s more interested in making sure she keeps her half of his fortune than in turning him in.”

  “Anything close to a motive?”

  “He’s not the patriot he leads us to believe. The government screwed his father way back when, and he’s still raging and cheating and acting like an animal.”

  Havens thinks. This is nothing new.

  “What’s in Newark?”

  “A piece,” he tells her. “Enough to make me sure it’s him, but not enough to stop him. You all right, Mir?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just . . . these are bad people, Drew. We basically . . .”

  “I know. It was me. Not you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. I should have answered, but . . .”

  “Not now, Mir. There’s no need.”

  “I want to see you.”

  He looks out the window and takes two long breaths. One to silence the emotional response that’s best for him and the other to formulate a rational answer that’s best for her, and them. “I want to see you, too. I’ve wanted to see you every day. But I need to stay away, Mir. People are looking for me, and to be safe I think you should get out of your place for a while.”

  “Why don’t I meet you in the city?”

  “It’s . . . not a good idea.”

  “I want to try, Drew.”

  “Jesus. I do, too. More than anything. But this . . .”

  “I know. We let them ruin us. I just don’t want them to ruin us again.”

  Minutes after he hangs up, Rourke calls.

  “You okay, Drew?”

  “Splendid, Tommy. Peachy.”

  “The cops were here today. Talked to Rick. Talk to me.”

  “What do they think?”

  “They think you killed Danny Weiss because you have it in for the fund and Rick. They think you’ve lost your shit because of your marriage and Erin.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I told ’em they were dead wrong. But dude . . .”