The Last Trade

by James Conway

  “What?”

  “They have you on his phone. On surveillance vids outside his place. And of course Rick told them all about your visit. What are you gonna do? How can I . . .”

  He thinks of all that Rourke did after Erin died. After Miranda left him. The long talks over dinner. Helping with his move and his guilt. “You’ve done enough, Tom.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In a cab. Somewhere in Newark.”

  “Dude, this is nuts. I’m worried about your state of mind.”

  “Me, too. But the more I dig the more I know that Salvado’s attached to something bad, Tom. Scary bad.”

  “What? Let me help.”

  “He’s gaming the market. Lining up shorts only to knock ’em down with something big and bad.”

  “Terrorism?”

  “Call it whatever you want. It’s pure evil.”

  “I’ll see what I can find on my end. Where you wanna meet?”

  “I’ll call.”

  Minutes after getting off the phone with Rourke, on the outskirts of Newark, his phone rings again. An unfamiliar number with a Philly area code.

  “Hello.”

  No reply, then: “Thought you might want to know. Just paid a visit to Springfield. Chuckie’s gone.” It’s Laslow, he’s sure of it.

  4

  Berlin

  The young man sitting alone surrounded by stacks of slush pile manuscripts looks up. At first he seems pleased to see signs of life enter his solitary cavern of paper and unfortunate words.

  Looking up and smiling, he says, “Guten tag.” The couple nods back, but upon seeing the woman’s wire – and cable-bound hands, the young man’s smile fades.

  Heinrich raises a finger to his lips and shushes him.

  Sobieski turns to face the door, raises her hands behind her back, and jerks her wrists toward Heinrich. Soon after Heinrich has untied her, she turns and smiles at the young man at the desk. “Guten tag,” she whispers. But the young man, his face frozen with terror, doesn’t reply. Pressing her ear to the door, she hears soft footsteps receding down the hall toward Siren Securities.

  Slowly she cracks open the door and peeks out. Two dark-haired white men stop in front of the door at the other end of the hall. One reaches into his black leather waistcoat, removes a pistol, and waits for the other to open the door. Sobieski turns to Heinrich, who is peeking over her shoulder, and whispers, “Get ready.”

  She watches the man without the gun swing open the door to Siren while the other drops into a shooting stance. They remain in the hallway for several moments before the shooter straightens and they cautiously move inside.

  As soon as the men disappear from view, Sobieski grabs Heinrich by the elbow and fully opens the door. She bends her head out and looks down the hall one last time before pulling Heinrich into the hall. Five steps away she quietly opens the door to the emergency fire stairway. After Heinrich is through, she gently pulls the door closed behind her and they start down the first of nine flights of stairs.

  The sky above Gendarmenmarkt Square is no longer a robin’s egg shade of blue. It’s been transformed into the ash gray she’d expected from the city of Berlin.

  They turn right as soon as they leave the building. The lunchtime sidewalks are busy. Men and women in suits briskly passing, running errands, bringing bags of takeout back to their cubes. They are all walking with a sense of urgency, Sobieski thinks, but not a sense of purpose. The urgency of a hamster on a wheel rather than a person headed toward a fixed destination.

  She’s walking fast, with urgency and purpose, passing even the quickest pedestrians.

  “Can you slow down a bit, please, my ribs . . .”

  “You want to die? Then move.”

  Heinrich jogs to catch up. “Where to?”

  Sobieski answers without looking. “First, away from here,” she says. “Then, I have no idea.”

  “Where did you learn the kung fu?”

  “It’s not kung fu. It’s nothing. Those men. Were they the ones who gave you the orders . . . your employers?”

  “No,” answers Heinrich. “I’ve seen them once before, but they were not my employers.”

  “When was that?”

  Heinrich thinks. “Yesterday, actually. Only yesterday for the first time.”

  “What about your employers?”

  “Employer, actually. One man.”

  “Right. Ever see him?”

  “No. He’s in the States. Strictly phone and text.”

  “What was his name?”

  “His last name, at least I think it was his last name, was Homer.”

  They turn left, away from the busy square and the palatial walls of the financial institutions. They walk past a lunch shop and a pharmacy and an electronics store. As they near a Biersalon, she nudges Heinrich and says, “In here.”

  A waiter begins to lead them to a window table, but Sobieski tells Heinrich to ask him to sit them near the back of the dining area, in a booth. Once seated, Sobieski asks for a cup of tea and Heinrich gives the waiter a lengthy order.

  She shakes him off. “Tell me about Homer. How did you come in contact with him? When did he recruit you?”

  “I was contacted by one of his associates. This is embarrassing, but I met him at a beer hall about, I’d say, two months ago. Not as quiet as this. It’s near the Square, and after work it is filled with traders and brokers and investment bankers. I had recently gotten my trading license and had been looking for work and—”

  “What was he like?”

  “His name is English, or perhaps American, but he clearly isn’t. My guess is that he is Russian, perhaps Croat. He claimed to be an extremely wealthy person who needed an accredited broker to work for his firm.”

  “Siren?”

  “Exactly. I started within a week of our meeting.”

  “And when you went to work for him and saw what this extremely wealthy financier’s headquarters looked like, you didn’t even think of . . .”

  The waiter brings their drinks. Heinrich nods thanks, then finishes Sobieski’s sentence. “Questioning it?” He sips his Berliner Weisse and nods approval. “No, I did not. I needed the job. I had been unemployed for almost a year and I was broke. Did I suspect that he was a criminal?” He shrugs. “You know what the economy has been like.”

  “So it’s okay to work for terrorists in a bad economy. Do you think it was an accident that he found you at that bar?”

  Heinrich scratches his chin, look away. He knows the answer, but isn’t sure if he wants to give it to Sobieski. “I want, what’s the word, immunity?”

  “What do you think, I’m district attorney for planet earth? I saved your life, now you want immunity?”

  They don’t speak for a minute. Sobieski runs her fingers over the keypad on her phone. She knows she should check in with Michaud, who she sees has left her two messages, but she doesn’t because she defied him and she doesn’t know what to say. Right after this, she thinks. Looking around the restaurant, filled with young professionals, laughing, drinking in the middle of the day, she thinks of Marco Nello, who has also left her two messages in the past hour and a half, and wonders what he’s doing right now.

  “I don’t think they found me by accident,” Heinrich says. “I think they identified me as a potential employee, talented yet desperate enough to ignore certain things, and sought me out.”

  “Because you were an unemployed broker?”

  “That,” he answers. “But mostly because of my skills as a hacker, which, if I must say so, are substantial.”

  “What did you hack?”

  “The trading accounts in the U.S., the brokerage houses and personal accounts of the traders in Hong Kong, Dubai, et cetera. The corporate sites and private
accounts of the CEOs of the companies whose securities we later targeted for the trades. The shorts. Plus, the sequential thing, the multiple trades, that was my idea.”

  “Were there other trades that you performed for him besides the big ones?”

  “Yes. Much smaller. But yes.”

  “How much longer? How many more do you think they’re doing?”

  “Not sure. They didn’t say, but my guess, from the activity pattern since I began, is that this is their big week.”

  Sobieski straightens up. “By any chance did you, did you hack into . . . Homer’s account?”

  Heinrich’s eyes go dead. Of course he did, Sobieski thinks. Then I’ve got to call Michaud and find a place to take this guy to break this open. But who knows if he’ll freak and clam up under more intense scrutiny? For now, she thinks, while he’s talking so freely, it’s best to let him go.

  “Look,” Heinrich confesses. “I knew that something criminal was going on. I knew that Homer wasn’t legitimate and that the nature of these transactions . . . the short positions . . . the specific instructions to spread them out over time—I knew that they were done in this manner to avoid drawing unwanted attention to all parties. But I really was broke and they were offering me a lot of money for a few months’ work. And the murders . . . Do you really think they will kill me?”

  “When they’re through with you?” Sobieski dips a spoon into her tea, twirls it counterclockwise, and arches her brow. “If they cleared out because they perceived some kind of threat yesterday . . .”

  “Which I detected. I detected several actually. From Hong Kong and an IP address in New York City.”

  “Then why did you go back today?”

  He pauses, takes another drink of his juice beer. “Because I kept the tracking software and a backup of everything I did there on a flash I’d hidden.”

  “A flash drive? That’s a little crude for a hacker with substantial skills.”

  “I thought about floating it into my cloud, but then someone would have been able to make the connection.”

  “What software? Promis?”

  He smiles. “You know Promis? I’m impressed. No, I made my own. Better than Promis. Promis on steroids. For kicks.”

  “Did they know about this?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “No.”

  “Did you get it?”

  Another head shake. “I was distracted.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Stuck to the underside of a radiator with electrical tape.”

  The waiter arrives with Heinrich’s fried meatballs. Sobieski takes a look at the dish and pulls her chair back. Her head aches from the concussion and her stomach is fluttering with nausea. “Where . . .” she begins, “what location were you going to work out of next? You were going to continue working for them, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “They didn’t say. But for the time being, today, I was to work out of my flat. I took one of their computers with me last night.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “It’s in Prenzlauer Berg, near Mitte. Sure. But don’t you imagine they’ll be looking for me?”

  Sobieski doesn’t answer. As she stares at him, she sips the tea for the first time but lets it trickle back into the cup because it has a coffee aftertaste. What else? “Did they give you orders to initiate any transactions today?”

  As soon as he begins to nod, she sits up and leans closer, despite the smell of the meatballs.

  “Where?”

  “Ireland.”

  She tilts her head.

  “Dublin,” he continues. “They didn’t tell me the name of the security yet, or the type of transaction.”

  “How would they contact you?”

  “Coded messages. Cryptic. Greek stuff. I was to hear from them at two o’clock.”

  “If we get on your computer, it still might be there on the Siren account.”

  “If I go back, isn’t it likely they’ll kill me?”

  “Take me there and I’ll go up.”

  “Plus, it’s not Siren anymore.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “They closed that down yesterday when they broke down the office. Starting at two o’clock it’s Ithaka. With a K.”

  “We have to go.”

  He shoves a meatball into his mouth. “You sure you don’t want one?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  He stands and wipes his mouth. “Okay. I’ll take you there, but I’m not going in.” She waves for the check while he puts his napkin on the table and holds up a finger, excusing himself to head to the restroom in the back.

  While she waits, Sobieski pushes Heinrich’s plate to the far side of their table and tries to gather her thoughts. She’s only been gone from her hotel for a few hours, but it feels like days. She knows she has to check to see if Sawa Luhabe has responded to her message, but first, she realizes, she has to call Michaud to tell him about Heinrich, to figure out what is going to happen in Dublin, to try, for once, to save a life.

  For the first time in weeks the son of a bitch isn’t there to pick up. “It’s Sobieski,” she begins her message, “and I have to talk to you ASAP about the next trade, which I’ve just been told is gonna go down in Dublin, with a connection to Siren’s replacement firm, Ithaka. With a K. But Jesus, call me, Michaud. I need a secure place to take someone for interrogation.”

  She clicks off and begins drumming her fingers on the table. After two minutes, and still no sign of Heinrich, the once and former employee of Siren Securities and, briefly, Ithaka with a K, she stands up, spooked, overcome with the sense that something has gone disastrously wrong. She rushes to a waiter, grabs his sleeve, and says, “Bathroom! Wo ist die Toilette?”

  The waiter points to a narrow hall in the back of the Biersalon. She runs past the other diners, followed by the waiter. She pounds on the door of the men’s room with her open palms, but no one answers. She tries to push it open it, but it is locked.

  As she takes two steps back, the waiter, sensing what’s coming, calls, “Miss!” But it’s too late. She lunges with her left leg toward the locked door while her right foot swings back and already begins to swivel above her waist.

  The cheap interior bolt lock gives way beneath the impact of the bottom of her foot, and the door bursts open. Sobieski doesn’t have to step inside to conclude that Heinrich is gone. The wide-open window that leads onto an alleyway tells her all she needs to know.

  5

  Katonah, New York

  This is not how Miranda had planned on spending her day.

  Having lunch with a deposed billionairess. Digging around on behalf of her fugitive ex-husband. Rethinking everything about him and their marriage and divorce. And now this. Coming home to an apartment that has been visited by a stranger who may still be inside.

  She knows someone has been here because she had left her to do list, a yellow legal pad, where she always did before going out, on the small oak table in the entry hall, next to a crystal vase of dried hydrangeas. Standing in the door frame, she takes a quick look into the apartment, scanning from left to right, and finally sees the yellow pad, facedown on the easy chair.

  “Oh, shit,” she says, to no one and perhaps someone. “The mail.” Stepping backward out of the door and onto the front stoop, she wonders if Deborah Salvado had snitched on her so soon. And how could someone have gotten here so quickly? Or had someone been watching her long before this? She closes the door and walks slowly down the front path. At the mailbox she makes a show of inspecting each letter and piece of junk mail, in case someone is watching. Then she tilts her head back as if one of the envelopes has reminded her of something, shuts the mailbox door, clicks her key holder to unlock the Prius, and slides into the stil
l-warm front seat.

  She drives north on Bedford Road, then right onto Route 35, and then quickly onto the on-ramp for I-684 North. Looking into the rearview to see if anyone is tailing her, she drives as fast as the Prius can manage. She hops off the interstate after one exit and winds her way along a series of stone wall–lined, wooded back roads. She stops in the parking lot of a pizza joint in the village/train station of Croton Falls. She wants to call Drew again, but she doesn’t want to upset him about the visitor at her apartment, and he’s right, until this is resolved it’s best if they stay apart.

  At one point last night, he told her, “Money didn’t ruin us. I did.” She didn’t answer and wishes she had. You should have told him that a lot of things ruined us. Not just money, or the fund. A lack of judgment ruined us, she concludes. Allowing ourselves to be transfixed by a lifestyle that never should have been. The guilt, the self-loathing, the blaming—those were all collateral damage from the initial lack of judgment.

  She opens her laptop and taps into one of the stores’ wireless signals. You should have told him, she thinks, searching through the text of a poem nearly three thousand years old, that something that still exists cannot have been ruined. While seeking connections between past art and present evil, Homer and Salvado, scouring some twelve thousand lines written in dactylic hexameter, she can’t help but note that for all of its focus on the epic adventures of Ulysses, it’s the women of the story who make its most important and heroic choices. And that the ancient hero’s homeward journey is not at all unlike the homeward journey Drew is in the midst of right now.

  It begins to make sense in a cryptic, if not fully explicit way. Each of the first four passages from The Odyssey are somehow linked to one of the cities where a short occurred and an attempt was made on the trader’s life. It’s easy to find the link after the fact, when she knows both the city and the passage. But it’s harder on upcoming days on which Weiss marked a passage but there is no information about the securities to be traded or the city. If she could find that out, the meaning of Weiss’s glyphs for Thursday and Friday, perhaps she and Drew could save a life and find a way to catch Salvado in the act. The lines, from Book 24, refer to the “home of Ulysses.” She thinks of Troy, or Ithaka. She thinks of every major city in the Mediterranean, but then it occurs to her that perhaps they are referring to a different Ulysses. What if they mean the home of the other famous literary Ulysses—the great novel by James Joyce, set not in Troy or Ithaka, but Dublin?