by James Conway
She picks up this time.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“Michaud . . . I had to go in. . . . It was empty and, well, he surprised me.”
“Who surprised you? I sent a six-man backup team to Siren. You couldn’t wait fifteen minutes? What the hell were you thinking? Do you know how big this is?”
The crowd peels away from the body as the first policeman arrives.
“Let me go talk to the cops,” she tells Michaud.
“No,” he says.
“What?”
“Stay out of it.”
In the distance, Sobieski can make out the wail of an ambulance. While the police begin directing the crowd to push back, to give them room, a young woman bursts out of the front door of Shultz’s apartment. Sobieski drops the phone from her ear to watch. Halfway to the body the young woman is intercepted by one of the cops. He wraps his arms around her. When he lifts her off the ground her feet thrash at everything and nothing.
Finally the woman lets out a primal wail when she gets her first look at the still body of Heinrich Shultz, master hacker, licensed financial advisor, accomplice to terrorists, failed fugitive, and a man she must have loved.
9
Newark
Dempsey is not in, and no one knows how to reach him.
Havens hangs up, grabs the large pad, and tears off a page. He smooths the page’s sticky back against the wall behind the bed. He removes a framed watercolor print of a beach scene from a hook and then affixes four more sheets along the same wall.
The burger arrives. He devours it with one hand and writes in black marker with the other. “HONG KONG” atop the first sheet, then “DUBAI” atop the second, “JOHANNESBURG” atop the third, “RIO” atop the fourth, and atop the fifth he writes “DUBLIN.” Next, on each sheet, he writes the date, the securities and approximate dollar value involved in the transaction, the name of the foreign/soon-to-be-murdered broker in that city, the name of the firm in Berlin that served as middle man, the name of the U.S.-based account that initiated the transactions, and the name of the U.S. citizen to whom the account supposedly belonged.
He rips off a sixth sheet, sticks it on the mirrored closet door, and writes “NOTES” atop it. Copying off Danny Weiss’s whiteboard and Miranda’s e-mail, he writes the corresponding book and line numbers from The Odyssey. Miranda’s right: To figure this out, he’ll need to be a human as well as a quant.
Rapidly, he scrawls a list of the sectors:
—TECH
—OLD MEDIA (publishing, TV, Hollywood, mags, newspapers)
—NEW MEDIA (social nets, digital entertainment, gaming, search, browser, etc.)
—ADVERTISING (agencies, holding co’s, media buyers, etc.)
—INSURANCE (CGI)
Then he lists beneath the appropriate sector title the individual stocks that have been traded so far. There are dozens.
It’s not difficult to make a connection between old and new media, technology and advertising. They’re all, to some degree, in bed with one another, trying to figure out how to make a buck in a constantly evolving, digitized universe. Every day there’s news of some new alliance between tech, entertainment, and branding. A slew of books have already been written about the age of convergence. But this insurance company’s place on his wall makes no sense at all to Havens. What does CGI have to do with the others?
He does a search to see if there’s a connection between one of the world’s largest insurance companies and the other trades. Nothing. It doesn’t insure any of the other companies or the buildings in which they are headquartered. Even the ad agency of record for CGI has nothing to do with the others.
Next he loses himself in data mining and model building, employing not just the considerable skills of the statistical arbitrage quant, but the skills of every type of relevant quant and theorist he knows. Normally his job is to determine the probable short-term success or failure of a security or sector, but in this instance it’s about more than running numbers through a program and letting an algorithm determine the next step. This time he also must solve a behavioral problem. What does all of these trades and killings lead to? What goal, event, or catastrophe?
He strips down each trade and stock and looks at it in discrete and continuous time. He employs the tenets of basic probability theory, stochastic calculus, and builds and implements models in C++. He uses the martingale approach to analyze the effect of asset prices on the change of information flow, specifically how a piece of speculative or hypothetical information—for instance, a rumored terrorist act, or the death of a broker—can influence the price of an asset. Within two hours the walls and floor are littered with sheets covered with equations and notes.
An interesting pattern emerges. In addition to the Rising Fund longs and the huge matching international shorts, a growing supplemental short market has taken root. With each day, each ensuing trade/assault, the volume of the additional shorts placed on each security increases. At first gradually but now almost exponentially. Havens concludes that someone has been leaking information on the criminal end, and others around the world are copycatting the moves in smaller batches.
Next he turns to history. He takes the sequences that are occurring with these five stocks now and applies them to Weiss’s historical models constructed to detect volatile stock movement before and after some of the worst disasters of recent times. The Mumbai shootings. The Bali nightclub bombing. The Spanish train bombing. The London Metro explosions. The attack on the USS Cole. The triple disaster in Japan. The first attack on the World Trade Center. And, of course, the last.
The most interesting irregularities occurred prior to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. According to the 9/11 Report and analytics that have emerged since, in early September of 2001 five times as many shorts as normal were placed on stock for American Airlines, United Airlines, Boeing, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied more than twenty-two floors of the Trade Center. Havens tries to imagine if, assuming there was a connection, he could have predicted what was coming if he had had foreknowledge of the 2001 trades; if he could have gathered enough information and presented a strong enough case to prevent the terrorists from ever getting off the ground that day.
Finally, exhausted, he flops onto the bed, closes his eyes, and thinks of Miranda and Danny Weiss and the five trades. And he wonders if there’s to be a sixth, what will it be? What trader will die? And . . . why?
10
Berlin
“I’ve been relieved of my duties.”
Marco Nello looks across the table at Sobieski. He had offered to take her to the finest restaurant in Berlin, anywhere she wanted. But here they are in a bakery at 9 P.M. Not having dinner, having strudel. It’s what she wanted.
“I have to go back to Hong Kong.”
He looks down.
“Not us. It’s work.”
“Why don’t you stay a few extra days here?”
She shakes her head. “I have to make things right.” She wants to tell him everything. That she went to a casino rather than get to know him, that she defied her boss, that she was assaulted as a result of her defiance, that a young man died this evening because she failed to properly do her job, and that somewhere in South Africa a woman might be dead—all because she lacked discipline and willpower. And whatever act of financial terrorism she’s been investigating gets closer to happening by the minute.
Nello puts down his fork, holds up his hands. “You’re right. I don’t understand. And I’m guessing it’s for the best that I don’t. It was wrong of me to . . .”
“It wasn’t wrong, Marco. It’s just, right now, I’m what’s wrong.”
“You take your job seriously, which I admire. And it seems that you’ve made some kind of mistake. But if it was unintentional, if your
reasons were pure, they’ll forgive you.”
“They may,” she answers. “I won’t. Not when lives are on the line.”
“Look, without revealing state secrets, tell me what’s going on.”
She takes a bite of strudel, stares at him, and decides to tell him about everything, except the gambling. She tells him about Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, and Johannesburg. Michaud and Mo, Lau, Al Mar, Valverde, and Sawa Luhabe. She tells him about Heinrich and Dublin, the shorts in U.S.-based new and old media, advertising and tech. Then, because it feels so good to have someone who cares to listen, she finds herself telling him why. Why she took this job. Why she can’t stop caring about it. Why her father’s fifteen-year-old actions still consume, drive, and haunt her. “In other words, why I’m really a deeply flawed, extremely poor choice for you to enter into a relationship with.”
Nello smiles. “We’re all flawed.”
“What should I do?”
“Go to Hong Kong, do what you need to. If you don’t, we’ll never have a chance.”
“Really?”
“Then come back. Please. And stay for a while.”
She twists the corners of her napkin and thinks of past boyfriends who refused to put her priorities first. Maybe that’s because they knew that no matter where they lived or how much they agreed to accommodate her, she would always put her job before everything. Why should Marco Nello be any different?
“Or,” he continues, “I can go to Hong Kong.”
“Really?”
“Sure. When you’re ready, I can take some time and visit you.”
“Or,” she says, allowing a smile, “maybe we can go someplace else.”
* * *
The taxi stops in front of her hotel. They kiss briefly and hold each other close until the driver clears his throat.
“Do you want to come up?”
“Of course I do,” Nello answers. “But you’re leaving when—dawn? And I imagine you want to work, to start your comeback.”
She opens the door, takes his hand, and pulls. “Come.”
He pulls her against him in the empty elevator and they kiss. As the doors slide open, they back out onto her floor, still kissing. He brushes his lips against the back of her neck while she fumbles with the key card and unlocks her door. Inside they attempt to undress each other but quickly lose patience and strip off their own clothes. In bed her intensity is all-consuming and her release is almost primal, charged with visceral desire and, for the first time in too long, pure romantic attraction. Not sadomasochistic punishment, or the alleviation of guilt, or escape.
She’s on her stomach, sweating, catching her breath, when he rises and looks out the window. It’s late, close to three in the morning. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”
He comes back and sits on the edge of the bed, looks at her, and traces the back of his left hand against her hair.
“What about Fiji?” she asks.
“Fiji?”
“Our trip. Rent a bungalow . . . surf . . . read.”
He puts on his underwear and reaches for his pants. “So,” he says, buttoning his pants, then grabbing his dress shirt, “why do you think they’re making those short trades and killing those traders?”
She rises up on an elbow. “That’s what we were trying to find out. They’re obviously gaming the market, hoping that some event will happen naturally, or they’ll make it happen so they can cash in.”
“You mentioned the categories, the—what do you call it—sectors they’ve shorted, but not the specific stocks. Do you know those?”
She sits up with her back against the headboard. “Yeah, Marco. Of course I do. Why?”
He buttons the last button on his shirt and looks for his suit jacket. Fully dressed, he turns to her with an expression on his face she hasn’t seen before. “Because we have a mutual acquaintance who would very much like to know.”
11
Newark
His cell phone buzzes and he lurches awake. He sits up and scans the room, trying to remember where he is. When he is. The silent TV and the hotel décor don’t help, but when he looks at the wall above the bed and sees the writing on the wall, the giant pages filled with data but still no story, he remembers.
He scrambles off the bed and grabs the phone on the desk beside the TV remote. “Mir?”
“Yup.”
He rubs his eyes, looks at the hotel clock radio flashing midnight. “What time is it, Mir?”
“Late. I don’t know. Tomorrow late.”
“Are you all right?”
She blows the air out of her lungs, sniffles some back through her nose.
“What’s going on, Mir? You crying?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you home? Because I can . . .”
“No,” Miranda answers. “I’m not home. I won’t go back, and no, Drew, you can’t.”
“Where are—”
She interrupts. “It’s not important. I’m safe. For now. Okay?”
It’s not okay, but Havens knows that voice. The topic is closed. “Tell me what happened, Mir.”
He listens to her fill, then slowly empty her lungs. “Should I start with the midday break-in at my house, what I’ve learned about Salvado, or the two men who forced their way into my car while I was parked in front of the apartment?”
“Awww, shit . . .” He paces toward the door, then back to the window. He touches the slender break in the curtains but leaves them closed.
“I’m fine.”
“Salvado’s people?”
“I thought so at first. But now I’m pretty sure they only did the break-in.”
“Then who?”
“Cops, Drew. NYPD homicide detectives, wanting to talk to me about Danny Weiss and, of course, you.”
“I spoke to Rourke. They think I did it.”
“Of course they think you did it. How does it feel to be a person of interest?”
“Danny Weiss was right. Salvado’s panicking because he knows I can hurt him. Otherwise there was no need to point the police to me.”
“Maybe they figured it on their own. They said without a doubt they can place you in Weiss’s apartment the night he died. Phone records. Security camera at the nail salon next door. The cabbie who drove you there. All kinds of stuff, Drew.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved.”
“Then they asked if I’d seen you and I told them that I had.”
“You should have.”
“I mean, they found me half-asleep in my car, so who knows what else they know?”
“Don’t lie on my behalf.”
“I told them I didn’t know anything about Weiss, including the fact that he had been murdered. I said that you didn’t mention him to me and that I was not at all happy to see you.”
“Did you tell them I stayed?”
“I did. I told them that you begged; said you were having some kind of emotional breakdown and had nowhere else to go. I said I let you stay on the couch. And when I got up this morning, you were gone; where, I have no idea.”
“No mention of Salvado?”
“By the police? Other than the fact that he’s your famous boss and that they’d spoken to him and, they hinted, he ratted you out, and that he’s promised his full cooperation and he’s extremely saddened and upset by the loss of a young talent like Weiss . . . no. I wasn’t going to get into it with them because I didn’t think it would help. Because of who he is and because he’s the one who has them locked in on you.”
He looks at the incomplete sheets of information covering the walls, trying to think of what to say, what to do next.
“My God, Drew, this is bad. Salvado is . . .”
“I’m going to fix this.”
“You can’t fix this! This is much more than a mathematical problem. It’s life. Death. Criminals, Drew. If you try to fix this, you’re going to get killed. And, you know, I kind of don’t want that to happen.”
“This is an encouraging development. The caring.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m gonna be fine, Mir.”
“Well,” she begins, steeling herself, all business now. “Did you get my Dublin message?”
“I did. I was too late.”
“Well, I found out some things about your sociopath boss.”
“From his sociopath wife?”
“That, plus I took the info she gave me and did some digging.”
“And?”
“Your boy Salvado is more dangerous than you ever imagined.”
For the next ten minutes Miranda reveals what Deborah Salvado told her this afternoon, plus what she’s since discovered. This includes revelations of incidents that occurred before Salvado’s comeback as an all-American financial success story, most notably a series of on-campus antigovernment arrests in college, angry letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and dozens of bitter and inflammatory antigovernment, anticorporate, anti-American quotes he made prior to his first go-round in the hedge business.
“The thing is,” Miranda explains, “back then, because he was just starting out, no one paid any attention. By the time he came back and got successful, everyone had forgotten his more radical views and locked in on what he was saying now that the money was starting to roll in.
“But,” she says, “something happened in that period just before he started The Rising, where he flipped the switch that changed him from hate to love, loss to profit, rabble rouser to patriot.”
“Greed defeated revenge,” Havens says. “Funny how no one cares about the past if there’s money to be had in the present.”
“I think there’s more,” Miranda offers. “Something that turned him into this monster.”
He has no reply.
“How bad do you think this might be?”
