The Last Trade

by James Conway

  This time she’s ready for the kick, same foot and motion. She deflects it with her left arm as she rolls to her right. She rolls another full revolution on top of the platform deck and pops to her feet. Salvado lunges toward her, and realizing she has one chance to surprise him with her skills, she launches a vicious right spin kick. Her heel crushes against his right ear and rocks him back. While he regroups and readies to make another bull rush, she again surprises him by taking the offensive. She strikes his face with two straight left jabs and a right cross to his left temple. More stunned than injured, he staggers back. She kicks him hard in the balls and he flinches, but he still comes at her, pushing her to the lip of the platform. He lunges again. She sidesteps it, twists, and shoves him. The shove sends him to the edge but not quite over it. He teeters, trying to regain his balance.

  There’s a moment when she has an opportunity to deliver the deathblow, kicking him onto the track in front of the train, or to reach out a hand. She looks at the train as he begins to straighten, seemingly recovering his feet. But then the train whistle blows, startling him and sending him reeling all over again. Rick Salvado is in midair, looking directly at Sobieski, when she surprises herself and extends her hand.

  She pulls him toward her, enough to keep him from falling, but not enough to prevent him from being clipped by the lead car. The force spins him away from her with a brute violence and drops him as if from a funnel cloud onto the concrete ten feet down the platform.

  She watches him writhe, wounded but not fatally, and feels neither horrified nor ashamed nor satisfied. Not regretful or relieved. As the cars roll past, she looks at the faces pressed against doors, the heads bent over books, pushed together in a space filled with working people who will never see the inside of a limousine. People unaware of the fact that the blood of a billionaire almost ran beneath them. A billionaire about to be captured by a flawed and compromised and debauched individual. She watches and she doesn’t know what to feel.

  17

  New York City, 10:08 A.M.

  He sprints down the sidewalk and cuts sharply toward the entrance of the Transmediant! Tower.

  Rourke is through the main entrance, moving against the seemingly endless stream of people filing out of the building from the upper floors. Havens follows. He pushes through the door and into the lobby. He can’t see Tommy Rourke. He’s lost somewhere in the chaos. Rourke, the only man to sit with him the night Erin died, the one who understood his moral qualms about the job and his growing distrust of Rick Salvado. Rourke was the only man on Wall Street he ever trusted, besides Danny Weiss.

  He stops and looks for the entrance to the theater. Halfway across the lobby, some fifty feet away, he recognizes the top of Rourke’s head and the pin-striped shoulders of his suit, heading toward the theater. Havens bolts toward him, trying to run, but every few steps he collides with an exiting person. One man shoves him out of the way, almost knocking him down before shouting, “Watch out, asshole!”

  The stranger’s shouts prompts Rourke to turn. When his eyes lock on Havens’s, there is no uncertainty. He knows that Havens knows, and Havens has no doubt that Rourke is the one responsible for this. Not Salvado. Rourke spins and begins to run toward the theater, shoving and stiff-arming people out of his way. Havens pursues, rushing for the hall outside the theater, the boxes of “books,” the spot on the ground where Laslow lies dead beneath a sheet of black plastic, ten feet from more than a thousand pounds of explosives.

  The backpack slows Rourke enough for Havens to close on him. Rourke turns as Havens leaves his feet and tackles him. They roll on the ground. Rourke thrashes and punches, more intent on escaping than doing battle. Havens reaches for the strap of the backpack, but Rourke gouges a thumb into his right eye, twists away, and scrambles to his hands and knees. Havens lunges and grabs his leg, hanging on to Rourke’s left shin as tightly as he can, as Rourke struggles to break away. The cops don’t notice them. Dozens of others do, but stream past without stopping, valuing their own lives more than the lives of these two.

  Rourke kicks at Havens’s hands with the heel of his wingtip. Havens hangs on for two strikes but loses his grip on the third. Rourke breaks free and starts for the boxes of explosives, but a nearby cop sees him and starts toward him with his gun drawn. Rourke turns and runs up the main stairs toward the concourse, against traffic but not as much as in the lobby. Havens pursues, bounding up two stairs at a time. Rourke stops at the balcony, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a phone. He’s leaning over the railing, aiming the phone and jerking it toward the boxes below like a remote control for a set-top box, when Havens lowers his shoulder into him and drives him to the ground.

  Havens dives on the larger man and they begin to wrestle again. With his free right hand Rourke punches his way back to his feet and again attempts to detonate the boxes with the phone. When Havens rises, Rourke grabs him and shoves him against the balcony rail. He’s bent backward thirty feet in the air, grabbing at Rourke’s throat with his right hand and clinging to the rail and his life with his left. He’s squeezing Rourke’s throat as hard as he can, but he’s slipping. His feet are sliding out from under him and he’s bent dangerously backward, close to toppling over the rail. “After I’m done killing you,” Rourke says, “I’m going after your wife.”

  When Miranda comes out of the stairwell and into the lobby, she sees the chaos and knows that she is in the targeted building. Immediately she forgets about the man she managed to elude, still searching for her in the guts of the building, and she begins looking for Drew, first in the main theater, then in the lobby. Finally she sees Rourke trying to throw him off the balcony. She sprints upstairs and across the foyer. Two steps away she leaps and wraps her hands around Rourke’s head and starts to gouge his eyes. He takes his hand off Havens and backhands Miranda in the face, knocking her to the ground.

  This is enough of a break for Havens to regain his footing, but now Rourke is surging at him, intent on driving him off the balcony. Out of the corner of his eye Havens sees Rourke’s phone rising up, and without hesitating he releases his left hand off the railing. With no hands on the rail to stabilize him he clenches his fist and throws a wild roundhouse not at Rourke, but his phone.

  For a moment the phone seems to hang suspended in the air above the chaos of the lobby. Havens twists away from the rail. Rourke lunges for the phone instead of the stability of the railing. Without Havens’s body to buttress him, his weight and the weight of the backpack begin to carry him over the edge. Rourke desperately reaches out and manages to catch the phone, but it’s too late to save himself. He claws and thrashes as he plummets some fifty feet through the air of the building he aimed to topple, landing with a sickening wet thud on the cold marble floor.

  Havens sprints back down the stairs. Bone shards stick out of a fracture on Rourke’s left forearm, but in his left hand he still clutches the phone. Broken and on the verge of death, Rourke continues to pump the keypad. Havens steps on Rourke’s wrist with one foot and kicks the phone out of his hand with the other. Rourke groans as Havens strips the backpack off him and slides it away. To the first cop, Havens says, pointing at the backpack, “Explosives”; to the second, pointing at the phone, “Detonator.” Then he stoops and pats Rourke’s jacket and trouser pockets. Before standing, he looks into Rourke’s eyes.

  “Why, Tommy?”

  Rourke can’t speak.

  “The whole time. All these years you waited, to bring it down.”

  Before he dies, Rourke manages the weakest of nods.

  18

  New York City, 10:49 A.M.

  Miranda leads Havens and two NYPD officers back down the stairwell to the room in which she and Deborah Salvado had been held captive. The blood trail starts on the stairs past the far door. Deb was right, Miranda thinks, there was another way out. But was she fast enough?

  “Deb!” No answe
r. But halfway up the steps they can hear labored breathing, a low, weak groaning. Lying on her back, bleeding profusely from a spot between her right chest and shoulder, is Deborah Salvado.

  “Oh, shit, Deb,” Havens says.

  She looks up at them and manages a smile.

  Havens yells back toward the cops for help. “She’s alive!”

  Deborah opens her mouth, mumbles, “Did he do it?”

  Havens shakes his head. Miranda kneels down alongside her and takes her hand. “No, no, Deb. He didn’t. I don’t think he ever knew what they had planned.”

  Deborah Salvado looks at them both and smiles.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28

  New York

  No one will ever piece it all together. At least not publicly.

  The trades. The killings. The bombs. The Russian connection. The Flash Crash of October 21, 2011. And the fall of America’s favorite hedge guy, Rick Salvado. No one will mention the fact that Exeter – and Harvard-educated Tommy Rourke was also a Chechnyan émigré who became radicalized against the West after being orphaned, a victim of Russian atrocities in 1994. His far-reaching terrorist plot that began in 1994, but took hold more than ten years ago, when he and his childhood friend and fellow terrorist Laslow first identified and approached the shamed and insolvent hedge guy Rick Salvado with an offer he couldn’t refuse and would not fully understand until it was too late.

  A decision was made at the executive level to keep it silo-ed, and silent. The economy couldn’t sustain another crash. Another dip. The market systems couldn’t be exposed to look so vulnerable. A landmark building in the center of Manhattan could never come that close to falling, let alone a building filled with the financial world’s most powerful figures. Although the world has grown used to financial instability, bombs in a building filled with billionaires is a whole other story.

  The crash was chalked up to market anomalies. Everything from computerized trading to double – and triple-dip fears to foreign debt concerns to a series of unexpectedly low quarterly reports in the tech sector.

  A thorough study was promised and commissioned. Two studies, actually. Any significant short trade by which someone profited during the Flash Crash was labeled suspicious and would also be investigated. All this, of course, would take many months to conduct, by which time the public, consumed by new fears, would forget why or how any of it happened in the first place.

  The incident at the Transmediant! Tower was deemed a false alarm. The explosives, which were quickly and subtly taken out of the building by NSA, TSI, and FBI operatives, were called harmless. Not really explosives after all, the story went. The bald man with the backpack acted alone. He was a disgruntled immigrant with a history of violence and mental illness. Rourke’s death was collateral damage. Drew Havens’s name was never associated with the fatal shooting of the would-be placebo bomber. In fact, no surveillance footage of the incident ever became available. It seems that the security cameras at the world’s most sophisticated media and entertainment company were, apparently, on the fritz that morning.

  The fall of Rick Salvado was just another in a long line of high-profile outrages in the financial industry. The Madoff du jour. Nothing surprised the public by the autumn of 2011 when it came to financial scandals. The story that was served up to the public was that Salvado was a fraud and a man who would do almost anything in the name of profit. What was truly scandalous was how many people believed him. His behavior on the subway platform late in the morning of October 21 was said to be the result of a market crash–driven psychotic episode. The acts of a man who had suddenly lost everything. The collapse of his fund was swift but not exactly shocking. Stars rise and burn out, and the collateral debris crushes millions every day on Wall Street.

  In the end, Havens was convinced that Salvado was not a terrorist. Just a weak man who had made a pact at his most desperate and vulnerable moment and was willing to look the other way from everything for years. Even, eventually, terrorism, if it meant holding on to his money.

  No one came forward to defend him at his trial. Not even his wife.

  The markets survived. They quickly gained back some of the losses, but far from all. Because while the media and the authorities told one story, the markets themselves knew better. Deep down in the recesses of the patterns, in the calculations of the quants, the markets could discern and unearth the truth, and it was not at all pretty.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 8

  1

  Brooklyn, New York

  In Boerum Hill she finds a sparring partner whom she cannot hit but who frequently hits her, with ease. And this makes her happy. It’s the only way to improve.

  She asked Michaud for a week. He declined, but she took it anyway. And why stop at a week? She is trying to think long-term. Why not Brooklyn? Why not something different, away from money and terror and her past?

  Her opponent snaps one, two, three straight left jabs at her, and she only manages to catch the third. She considers this progress. The only way to learn is from someone better than you. The only way to move on is to move on.

  The second time Michaud called her, she did not pick up. The third time she threw away the phone.

  Late one morning last week she spoke to Drew Havens. He was thrilled to hear from her. They discussed that day and clarified some of the events that had led up to it. At one point he asked her if she was all right. From their talks that night in Manhattan he remembered her issues with her father and Marco Nello, and her gambling.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Havens asked, remembering their conversation on that night on the streets of Manhattan. “Because it would be my pleasure to—”

  She cut him off. “No, everything’s been resolved,” she lied. “But thanks.” She could not abide taking his money.

  A few days after throwing out her phone, she got a call on her new one. From Cheung. He wanted to know how she was enjoying Brooklyn.

  She doesn’t have a big problem with the way the government handled things. She understands there are some things too dangerous for public consumption. She understands that at that level there are secrets on top of secrets, and she assumes that she only knows half of the facts and even less of the truth.

  The same way with her family.

  The same way in which those who think they know her only know half of the facts and even less of the truth.

  Then today, just before she left for the gym, Michaud called on her new phone.

  “How did you get this?”

  “I think you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.”

  “You gave my number to Cheung, didn’t you?”

  “A relationship with Cheung can have its privileges.”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore, Michaud.”

  “Who cares about what we want to do? Want never enters the equation with this job, Sobes. We do it because we have to. And right now, you have to pay back some favors and get your ass back to work.”

  “Are you drinking?”

  “Actually, yeah. But I’m karaoke-free for eight days. Taking it one song at a time. What about you? Staying away from the tables?”

  She’s so fixated on blocking the woman’s lightning-fast punches that she doesn’t see the leg sweep. She falls down face-first, barely catching herself with her gloved hands. The stale sweat smell of the canvas, the threat of defeat, feels good. It pushes her to her feet, more determined than ever to be ready for what’s next.

  She’s spent quite a bit of time online these past few weeks. Looking into the case, but mostly looking into Rick Salvado. When discussing his fall, the media frequently wondered how one of the world’s richest men could fall so hard, so fast. Because she knows more, she took it farther: She wondered how he ever became so complicit in destroying the system that made him. When she discovered his father’s story, she unders
tood. When she read more closely about the demise of Salvado’s father, she realized they weren’t so different after all.

  He was the son of a hero.

  She was the daughter of a criminal.

  Each lived life as a response to the life of a father. The death of that father. They simply chose different paths.

  Often, just before a punch is thrown, she thinks of that moment on the subway platform and how easy it would have been to let him fall. She’s decided that her reaction did not come from her brain, but another part of her. She’s happy that she reached out her hand toward Rick Salvado. Killers deserve death; thieves slightly less.

  She shuffles her feet, adjusts her headgear, and readies herself for her opponent’s next move. This time she sees it coming before it even happens, and she has a response that surprises even her.

  2

  Katonah, New York

  For the sixteenth consecutive day Drew Havens lives in a world without numbers.

  When he wakes up, he doesn’t bother to check the markets or his portfolio or even the scores on the sports pages.