The Last Trade

by James Conway

  “Bad enough to kill a bunch of innocent people, to take down companies.”

  “Don’t you know anyone with the police, Drew? The SEC? I’ll go with you.”

  “Whoever I know he knows better. Unless we can figure it all out, no one will believe it. Shit, we barely do. And it’s more than just coming forward to say I’m innocent. If I do, I’ll have to abandon this. Then no one will be around to try to stop it.”

  “You can walk away.”

  “It’s going to be bad.”

  “I bet if you told him, he’d let you walk.”

  “Bad as in catastrophic. He already offered me the chance to walk. You really want me to walk away from that? For years I’ve screwed us up, Mir. This can’t fix what was, but it’s a chance for me to finally get something right.”

  Neither speaks for a while. They used to do this when they first started dating, not speaking for minutes at a time in the middle of a phone conversation. And those silences were magical. He felt that he grew more connected to her with each passing second during those silences. Then, later, after Erin died, before the divorce, their phone conversations were also often punctuated by long silences, though of an entirely different type. It was as if the process was being reversed during those calls, their connection fraying more with each passing second. Now this. He wonders what type of silence this is.

  “You promise you’re safe, Mir?”

  “I promise.”

  He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t want to hang up.

  “I’m gonna go now, Drew. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. Mir?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where are you?”

  At first she doesn’t answer. Then, while smoothing the cool white top sheet on her queen bed in the Chelsea Hotel, she says, “I’m fine, Drew. I’m in a good place.”

  12

  Johannesburg

  She follows the lead of strangers.

  Luhabe uses the notes of Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens as a jumping off point and discovers enough to make her cry. The trades in Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, and now Dublin. All shorts. All out of Berlin. All except hers ending with the death of the trader. Somehow they didn’t get her. Somehow, for the time being, she’s managed to survive.

  It’s obvious that these are not random coincidences, but as hard as she tries to make a connection, she can’t find a motive or any clue as to where this is all going, to what happens next.

  It’s after 9 P.M. She slept through the afternoon and woke at 6:45 to see her brother sitting on her bed. They had a snack in her room, and clearly he wanted to talk, to have some sort of confessional moment with her, but even while freeloading in his gangster compound, she refused to indulge him. “I have work to do, Muntukayise,” she said.

  “My name is Jolly.”

  “I don’t know any Jolly.”

  “Yet you’re willing to sleep under Jolly’s roof, with the protection of Jolly’s guns.”

  “I have work to do.”

  He reached out and stroked her cheek. “It is good to see you, sister. I hope you will stay and see that I am a better man than the people you work with, the criminals who hide behind the shields of corporate logos.”

  When she runs out of leads she decides to make a list. A memo, called What I Know Now. She describes everything that has happened to her in the last forty-eight hours, from when she left for work Tuesday morning through all that she has discovered up until now. Of course, she leaves out the part about taking her family to Swaziland, and staying with her gangster brother here in Hillbrow. At the end of the note she cuts and pastes the e-mails that she has received from agent Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens.

  After rereading it, she decides she should share it with them. Why not? She’s researched both and they both appear to be who they said they are. She’s typing the first address, Sobieski’s, when she hears the initial gunshots in front of the house.

  She rolls off the bed and rushes to her window. The armed guard in the back courtyard moves in a crouch along the edge of the concrete wall and then out of view, toward the front entrance.

  Seconds later she hears more gunfire. The staccato bursts of automatic weapons. The roar of a shotgun blast. The same guard has scrambled back into the courtyard and stooped behind a stone barbecue chimney, when a single pistol shot tears into his hip and takes him down. She abandons the window and jogs to the door. Cups an ear to listen before opening it. Men shouting, also in bursts. Then more gunfire.

  Inside the house the guns sound different. A deeper register, like guns that kill rather than toys.

  Above the gunfire she hears the voice of her brother. He’s at the base of the stairs.

  “Come on!” he yells. “Come and get it!”

  These people may think that they are gangsters, but they didn’t know that they were raiding the house of the gangster Jolly Luhabe. She steps across the room and opens the door. Through the railing posts at the bottom of the stairs she sees his legs bending and straightening. When they straighten he reels off a burst of gunfire. When they bend he takes cover behind the stairway. “Jolly!” she calls.

  “Go, sister!” he calls. “Back stair.” He looks up the stairs, and when he sees her, he smiles. Sensing that this will be the last she’ll see of her brother, she smiles back.

  “Jolly, come . . .”

  “Go!” he yells. “You can’t stay here after this. Go now!” He punctuates the last word with another machine gun burst.

  As she heads back to the bed for the computer, she hears a wounded man groaning downstairs, she guesses in the living room. After a short volley, the groaning stops. Then, more gunfire from other parts of the house, inside and out.

  She scrolls up to the top of the document and clicks on SEND. Then she quickly snaps shut the laptop and shoves it inside her bag. When her hand comes out of the bag it is holding her husband’s gun.

  Halfway down the hall to the back stairway she stops. Jolly is still shooting and shouting at the bottom of the main stairway. She carefully steps down three stairs during another exchange of gunfire. Jolly has moved behind the edge of a doorway and is still aiming at one or more assailants in the living room.

  Jolly looks up and sees his sister again. His eyes widen and a smile begins to form until he sees her raise the pistol in his direction. He ducks as she squeezes off the first of nine shots. Three find their mark, one in the temple of the man who had come in through the back door and was about to kill her brother.

  13

  Berlin

  This time, when Sobieski goes back to Siren, she brings her gun.

  At first, the night guard isn’t going to let her pass. He asks for ID and when she reaches for her badge, she realizes that she never got it back from Heinrich Schultz. One more thing to explain to Michaud once she goes back to Hong Kong for phase one of her worldwide mea culpa tour.

  “I am a law enforcement agent of the United States. A cop. Police.” She tries to remember how to say it in German, but it’s no use.

  He shakes his head: “ID.”

  She pulls a fifty-euro bill out of the front pocket of her jeans and slaps it on his podium. “Five minutes,” she says, holding up five fingers. “Okay?”

  He takes the money, puts it in his own front pocket, and looks the other way.

  After Nello left, with the names of the securities and her assurance that she would provide more, she went into the bathroom and vomited. Back in her room she sat naked on the hotel bed, the linens barely ruffled, and thought about suicide. It wouldn’t have been for drama, or to show some guy that she meant it, or to get her family’s attention. That’s because there is no guy, and no family to give or withhold attention. It would be just you, she thought. You’d be doing it to punish you. To end you.

 
“Cheung sent you all this way just to follow me?”

  Nello nodded. “He saw immense potential in you. Rightfully, it turns out.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Everything you know. What you owe him, in a sense, plus interest.”

  “Or else?”

  “Not sure. A gradual dismantling of your reputation and your life. Or a rather quick one.”

  “What about the book?”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “On the plane. You managed to sit beside me and to have read the book in my hands?”

  He shrugged. “I looked it up on the Internet while you were reading it. We had a lot of time. By the way, I thought it sucked.”

  The door is still unlocked. She twists the knob, pushes it open, and flips on the overhead fluorescents. When she sees that the office is empty, she turns the lights back off, closes the door, and walks across the room. The glow of the surrounding buildings and streets provide enough light for her to see. On hands and knees she crawls the length of the bank of windows, dragging her left hand along the underside of the radiator cover.

  Beneath the last window her fingers come to rest upon the electrical tape, and the lump beneath it. It doesn’t take much to peel away one end of tape. Heinrich probably did the same almost every day. Since they searched him on the way out it was the only way he could have a hard copy of his transactions. She holds it up to the window for a better look. Red, small. Nothing special on the outside, but presumably powerful enough to take down a man, a company, or a government on the inside. She feels bad for Heinrich Shultz, but the son of a bitch had to know.

  She walks back to her hotel along the night sidewalks of the financial district. She passes beneath the glass and steel towers and the ornate stone edifices that once housed royalty and are now home to the kings and queens of the financial kingdom. The progression makes sense, she thinks, which leads to another question: After monarchs and money, whom will we worship, to whom or what will we bow next?

  In her coat pocket is her phone, which she has on mute. She doesn’t want to hear from Michaud again, or Nello, or Cheung.

  It’s after 5 A.M. when she walks back into the lobby of her hotel. At six she’s scheduled to go to the airport to head back to Hong Kong and Michaud and judgment.

  Packing takes minutes. Primarily because she never unpacked the little she brought to begin with. When she’s finished, she sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her face. It’s too late to sleep, too early to do much else. She never thought she’d want to, but she wishes she could cry. When her father got arrested when she was in high school, she wouldn’t allow it. Wouldn’t even allow it when her mother passed away. She didn’t cry then and hasn’t cried since.

  She thinks of the piece-of-shit Nello reprimanding her for living her life to atone for the imperfections of another and thinks, Even a liar and a criminal can see it. She wonders, When will it be okay to walk away? When will it be all right to abandon a career in law enforcement and leave the financial world and her superhero revenge-and-reparation fantasy and move on to whatever it is that she was meant to do?

  Soon, she tells herself. She can feel it. But not now. Not after compromising everything by giving away inside information to a man who is worse than a criminal. She could never move on or end it like this.

  It’s been more than four hours since she last checked her messages. Some kind of record. She scrolls through the contents of her inbox. Michaud. Michaud. Michaud. Marco. Michaud. Flight confirmation for tomorrow. Or today, really. Michaud. Marco.

  Then this, less than an hour ago: Sawa Luhabe.

  As soon as she finishes reading Luhabe’s What I Know Now message, and Luhabe’s suggestion that she immediately get in contact with this American quant analyst, she grabs her bag and leaves for the airport. In the cab en route she’s already on the phone with the airlines, looking for the next flight to New York.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20

  1

  New York City

  Rick Salvado doesn’t bother to turn on the bank of video monitors in his office this morning. He doesn’t bother to check the overnights or the futures or any of that other bullshit.

  From now on, he thinks, none of that matters. For the next thirty-six hours he is the market. He will make and break it.

  It’s 5:25 A.M. The call is in five minutes.

  He walks to his window and looks out at the Hudson. A tug pulling a barge out of the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty. The lights of commuter ferries blinking back and forth from Hoboken and Weehawken and points north. He thinks of his first job, before he was married, before he became rich. On the Mercantile Exchange, working for some douchenozzle who had a seat trading oil. “Light, sweet crude oil,” the jackass told him on his first day, “the most wanted and valuable form of crude oil in the world.”

  For two years he took a bus from Fort Lee because he couldn’t afford to live in the city. The moon and stars were out when he waited at his stop in the morning and again when he went home at night. For two years he lived and died by the fortunes of his boss, and light, sweet crude. Each contract was for one thousand barrels, or forty-two thousand gallons. The contracts were and still are traded for twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes each day from Monday to Friday (with a break from 5:15 P.M. to 6 P.M.), and from 9 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. in the open outcry, also called the pit session. He worked twelve-hour shifts, starting at 5:15 A.M., and discovered everything he needed to know about life and money in the pit, one of last places where buyers and sellers trade by hand signals and shouting. He found the primal, bloodthirsty competition nothing less than addicting. Often, when the guy working the late shift couldn’t make it, he would volunteer to cover, working thirty-six straight hours.

  When his boss got it right, young Salvado would sometimes get a spot bonus, nothing special, a few thousand here and there, and the occasional invite out for happy hour drinks. There he would pick at and probe every worthwhile quadrant of the greedy bastard’s mind. And of course, when his boss got it wrong, when he’d lose big on the day or hit a prolonged slump, Salvado bore the brunt of his wrath.

  It was those radical mood swings in his small, white, alternately generous and irascible boss that prompted Salvado to call him, behind his back, by the name of the commodity they traded: Light Sweet Crude.

  For two years he helped make his boss tens of millions of dollars, only to be fired one brutal Friday afternoon in October. To this day, other than the fact that his boss was losing that week, he doesn’t know why he was shit-canned. When he asked why, his boss said, “You should have seen the writing on the wall.”

  “The wall of what?” he answered. “A pit?”

  In retrospect, he often thinks, after what happened to his father, he should have seen it coming. That day he vowed to do whatever it takes to succeed, and to never again be surprised by the markets and the people who control them.

  At 5:30 the cell phone rings. He has a mobile for work, one for personal calls, and a phone just for this.

  He answers: “Calypso.”

  “What if his great father came from the unknown world and rove these men like dead leaves through the place?”

  “Right,” Salvado replies. “Now I need to ask you a question.”

  “All right.”

  “What the fuck happened? Why so messy?”

  “This is not a simple plan.”

  “Maybe it should have been,” he says. “Maybe you got too cute.”

  “Cute?”

  “Ambitious. Unnecessarily complex. Killing . . .”

  “We couldn’t afford the risk.”

  “That’s how you deal with risk?”

  “We eliminate it. It’s how . . .”

  Salvado slams a hand his desktop. “It’s how things fail! It’s how people get caught
. What about the other one? The loosest loose end?”

  “We are working tirelessly to ensure that he is found.”

  Salvado looks back out the window. “So at lunch I do a tech walk-through. Everything in place?”

  “Yes. And the transition?”

  “Jesus. We went over this. It starts when the markets open here. Sometimes I think no one is paying attention to—”

  “Just making sure.”

  “What about my cars? The flights. Because there’s no way I’m sticking around—”

  “It’s all good.”

  Salvado sighs. “Listen. We need to find this fucking guy.”

  “You said he was a geek. Not much of a threat.”

  “I’ve upgraded him from geek to pain in the ass.”

  * * *

  He sits on a couch facing the windows. First light touches the storm clouds from below before the sun breaks the horizon to the east, transforming black into eerie silver. The clouds roll low and fast across the still-dark river as if captured in time lapse. Four hours until the markets open. Then things will be better because then it will be all about work and execution. Cumulative steps toward a goal. There’s no time to worry or second-guess or rage while the markets are open, or the cameras are rolling, or you have the attention of an auditorium. It’s the downtime like now that has always been difficult. Memory lives in the downtime, as well as conscience and guilt.

  At 7:15 the office phone rings. Caller ID announces it’s Deborah. His ex. They haven’t spoken in weeks, and it occurs to him that it’s likely they will never speak again. While the office phone is still ringing, his personal cell also begins to ring. How the hell can she do that? he thinks. Harassing me in stereo. He takes the call on the cell.

  “What, Deborah?”

  “I want you and your attorneys to move it. I want this done as soon as possible.”

  “It will be done very soon, Deborah.”

  “Do me a favor: Try not to flush the rest of the fund down the toilet before we settle.”