Drummer In the Dark

by T. Davis Bunn

  Thorson Fines mulled that over as he lowered himself back behind the desk. His expression showed he had decided it didn’t matter much. This, Burke knew, was a man looking for the exit. Thorson said, “So who’s the mystery man?”

  “First let’s see,” Burke replied, “if you’re part of the team or not.”

  “You’re here to size me up?”

  “Oh, we’ve got all the information we need about you and your operation, Mr. Fines.”

  “There isn’t any operation.”

  “We realize that.”

  “I’m like the pet monkey they pull out to show potential new investors. Any time I go to them with an idea, they freak.”

  “All this,” Burke soothed, “is about to change.”

  Thorson was like most of the senior traders Burke had ever met, utterly refashioned by his trade. He could once have been fat or smooth or tall or a jock. Now he had been crammed into the hot press of the trading floor. His face was expressionless, the gaze scalded by the suppressed fire of the floor at full cry. “I’ve been making enquiries. For other jobs.”

  “We know.”

  “You think you can change my mind?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right.” He crossed his arms. “So talk.”

  “You have just been made the newest member of the First Florida board of directors.”

  The news brought a grim smile. “Bet that made old Carlton dance a jig.”

  “What Carlton thinks is no longer important. We acquired this bank for one reason and one reason only.”

  Thorson’s eyes widened marginally. “Me?”

  “Of course not. First Florida’s Interbank connection. But it would be excellent if we could have you as well.”

  Currency trades operated in a two-tier system, much like stocks. Currency markets in Chicago, New York, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Singapore operated as centers for most transactions. Until recently, small and medium-size trades—anything up to a hundred million dollars—went through brokers tied to one or more of these exchanges. But electronic trading was fragmenting the system. Increasingly even smaller currency swaps could take place on-line and direct. Brokers stayed in business for two reasons: the confidentiality they offered, and the information they brokered along with their trades.

  Just as with stocks, however, a second tier operated high above this one. In the lofty spheres of big-fund secrecy, major currency swaps called blocks went through the Interbank Exchange without ever touching the street. Once the deal was done, the electronic tape showed a crossed order for some massive amount, anywhere up to five billion dollars a pop. The exchanges had no choice but to take note of the new currency position and recognize themselves for the small fry they were.

  The Interbank market was the most exclusive of the currency exchanges. Entry was restricted to the top fifty U.S. banks, the biggest Wall Street mutual funds, and the huge brokers heavily involved in currencies. The list was very tightly restricted, and for good reason. On the Interbank Exchange, all transactions were one hundred percent leveraged. There was no money down. Credit lines ran among all players, with no collateral required. Every player had settlement limits. Any transaction was ticketed against the limit. But the limits had nothing to do with solvency and everything to do with reputation.

  Hedge funds were kept strictly outside the Interbank Exchange. Which meant Hayek had to post margins, or put down hard cash as a percentage of each transaction. It also meant every currency trade was held up to the public eye, or had to pass through brokers who were notorious for selling information to their best clients. Not only that, but the more conservative Interbank players refused to deal with hedge funds at all. In Forex vernacular, the Interbanks would not do Hayek’s name.

  Thorson’s mind scanned the new data at a trader’s speed—lightning fast. “You’re fronting for an American fund?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Which one?”

  “Are you with us or not, Mr. Fines?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely willing to give this one a chance.”

  “Then the answer is the Hayek Group.”

  The news blew him back a fraction. “Can he get away with it?”

  “We’re working on that. But for the moment, this information needs to remain confidential.”

  In strict accordance with the law, hedge funds could not own a bank. But the same law also outlawed banks from owning hedge funds. The banks hated this part. So they had spent millions lobbying to have the law’s teeth pulled. Now six of America’s top ten banks either owned sizable portions of hedge funds or operated their own in-house. Derivatives and foreign exchange transactions were classed by American accounting law as contingent liabilities. This meant that the banks did not need to show these holdings, or these risks, on their official balance sheets. Which meant they did not have to set aside reserves to cover any portion of these contracts. It was the first time since the Depression that banks had found a way around one of their most hated federal laws, the cash margin requirement.

  Thorson nodded once, accepting the new world order. “So what now?”

  “Talk to your guys. Tell them they’re going to be flooded with new capital. And the new owners know everything there is to know about incentive payments.”

  “Nice little bo’,” Fines agreed. Bo’ was trading vernacular for everything above and beyond actual salary. “Why not just park the fund in your Liechtenstein bank?”

  Burke simply waited, letting the guy work that one out for himself.

  “You don’t want your new asset management team sitting on the other side of the world.” Eyebrows raised a notch. “I guess that means we’re talking serious money.”

  “Tell your team they’re going to make a fortune off this.”

  “There’s a catch,” Thorson said. “There has to be.”

  “Hayek is known for his secrecy. It’s one reason why he’s been on top for so long. It’s not enough for your traders to do well. They have to do it quietly.”

  “Anybody who talks gets the street. I can handle that. And so can they.” A quarter-second pause. “How much new capital are we talking here?”

  “Four hundred million dollars will be transferred to your Capital Markets account on Tuesday. Another four hundred Wednesday.” Burke pulled a second envelope from his jacket. “Account instructions and confirmation of your new position. And new salary.”

  Thorson’s hands trembled more than those of his chairman’s, but for different reasons. The sheet Fines held declared him to be a rich man. “You’re bringing in your own senior trader?”

  “That’s right. His name is Brant Anker. Top quality. Formerly with B of A.”

  “We don’t have the staff in place to handle another eight hundred million in trades.”

  “You do now.”

  Thorson glanced up from the sheet. “Or the space.”

  “They’ll just have to cram in. For now.”

  “How many people are you bringing in?”

  “Twenty-five to start. We’re doubling your staff, effective tomorrow.”

  “So the eight hundred million—”

  “Is just a start. We want you to begin establishing Hayek as a preferred customer. Open a credit line for Interbank exchanges. Start as high as you can without creating a backlash. Say half a big one.”

  Fines could no longer hide his astonishment. “Half a billion is twice my current ops.”

  “This is just a start. If Hayek wants to move beyond this level, call me day or night.” He set his card on the desk. “My private number is on the back.” Burke rose, glad to see the man rising with him. The two were moving in tandem now. “The new staff will be here Tuesday.”

  35

  Saturday

  THE FEDERAL MEDIUM-SECURITY prison farm was just as Jackie had always pictured it. The visitors’ parking was surrounded by pines and fronted the Beeline Expressway. The air was very quiet, the heat cloying. What in Orlando had been just another muggy spring
morning was now compacted tight with dread. Jackie fumbled with the bottle of pain pills, spilling two into her shaking hands and another three onto the sidewalk. She stood there a long moment, then slid the pills back into the bottle.

  She joined the line of dejected mothers and lovers trudging through security. Jackie could not help but look up as she passed beneath the first line of chain link and razor wire. The unblemished sky did not so much beckon as mock her every step, saying in those blue-blue depths that she was as imprisoned as anyone inside. She handed her driver’s license to the gatehouse security guard, endured the pat-down, and almost vomited as she spoke Shane’s name.

  She took a seat beside two heavy-set women smoking and talking in Spanish. Jackie leaned her head against the coarse brick wall and fought for control.

  At the beginning of their relationship, Shane had been all polish and allure and chiseled good looks. He was a master at enticement. Shane could fool anybody for a couple of hours. Which was how she had been won over, that and the fact that her brother had introduced them. Shane had started off easy, keeping their meetings brief enough for him to hide his deeper nature, until she was well and truly trapped. Then he had revealed his other side. The menace. The terror.

  Over the course of their eight months together, he had driven away all her friends. He’d throw fury fits when she attempted to go anywhere without him. Steadily he had peeled away all protection she might find in others, even throwing Preston out of his apartment one night. The only person he had welcomed or felt comfortable around was Jackie’s mother. Which should have been all the warning she needed. But by the time their kinship was revealed, Jackie was already snared.

  Gradually she had been stripped by his acid tongue and pent-up venom, reduced to a trembling mass too spineless to leave. Before that, she had never understood how a woman could become trapped by a man known to be dangerous. Now, she ached for them all. Toward the end she had become unsure of her own identity, uncertain of whether there was enough of herself left to leave for.

  In truth, Shane had never intended to marry her. Early on he had used marriage as another lure. But only when she began to nurse Preston, and he sensed she had found a way back to a life without him, did he pressure her. In the end Jackie had left him, not for herself, but for Preston. No one should be forced to die alone—that was the litany she kept repeating to herself as she escaped late one night, her brother bundled into the back seat, everything she owned packed into two suitcases in the trunk. She took an apartment under a false name, paying cash out of Preston’s dwindling reserves, and kept what was left under his sweat-stained mattress. She lived out those terror-filled days with a stun gun charged and armed at her side, breathing easy only when she learned that Shane had problems all his own. The news had been good for a few final laughs before her brother left her all alone.

  “Jackie Havilland?”

  “That’s me.”

  The guard was black and huge. “This way.”

  But she had trouble rising. The air was gone from where she sat, and strength as well. The two ladies beside her turned and smiled with the bitter memory of their own such times. Jackie used both hands and clawed her way up. Once standing, nausea rose in a violent wave. She rested her head against the wall.

  The guard rumbled, “Lady, nobody is pushing you down this path.”

  She rolled around and winced as her shoulder wound came into contact with the wall. “It’s high time I killed these old ghosts.”

  One of the women grinned up at her, a gold incisor sparkling in the sunlight. “You might feel like a train wreck going in. But you clean his clock good, you’ll come out floating on air.”

  When the guard was certain she could make it, he turned and led her across the path to the lockdown. Jackie focused on his broad back so as not to see where she was going. The guard moved lightly as a dancing bear, the keys marking time. “We don’t usually restrain folks here. But you say the word, I’ll put a shackle on the man.”

  Jackie said nothing. The guard grunted his acceptance and pushed through the door into a long hall of concrete and industrial gray. He pointed her toward an empty table. “I’m stationed right over there where I can watch the whole thing. You hear what I’m saying?”

  The room was sixty feet long and forty wide, yet held less than a dozen groups clustered around tables set far apart from one another. Jackie sat and remembered how Preston had excitedly prepped her for that first meeting with Shane. A genuine showstopper was how Preston had described him, the guy most likely to become the next senior trader among Hayek’s currency team. That was before Shane had been caught double-dipping.

  On tense market days, currency trades flipped as fast as ten to twelve times an hour. Shane had bounced certain trades through a Jamaican bank, flipped them once for himself, then reinserted them back into the day’s flow. All went smooth as silk until one day the market had gone against him in a very bad way. Shane had tanked, come up so dry he had been forced to dip further. And further still. Which was why he had been caught out.

  Hayek had stripped away everything Shane possessed—the cars, the bonds, the pension fund, the house. Everything. Then Shane had taken the fall for felonious embezzling and been sentenced to twelve years. As far as Jackie was concerned, the verdict had been a very bright spot in an otherwise dismal time.

  “Jackie?”

  She was not ready. No matter how much she had prepped herself, she was not prepared. Shane slipped into the seat opposite her. “I don’t believe this.”

  She swallowed and forced the gorge out of her throat. Swallowed again.

  “You came. You really . . .” He looked the same, rapier sharp and virile. Fourteen months of prison had paled his skin and thinned his hair. But his looks were still arresting. “I wrote you three times after I saw the light.”

  “I got the first.” She found her voice with strangled effort. “Tore it to shreds.”

  “Don’t blame you.” The real difference was in his eyes. “You’re looking good. Great, in fact.”

  “Save it.” Having him this close left her wishing she could scrub off her own hide. Strip away everything he had ruined with his touch. “I’m here because I want to go after Hayek.”

  Shane froze just as his denim-clad elbows touched the table. “What?”

  “You heard me. Hayek is hurting friends of mine. I want some leverage. Somebody with access.”

  For the first time, Shane showed a hint of the other side. She saw the familiar tightening around his eyes, the skin drawn back by the rage he kept so well hidden. Then it vanished. There and gone in less than a breath. But it was enough to transport her back to the terror hours, caught and trapped and hopeless.

  Shane glanced about the room. Whispered, “Hayek.”

  She pulled herself back from the verge of screaming wrath. Locked it down with an effort that had her trembling from knees to voice. “I need an insider with confidential access.”

  Shane seemed to be speaking to somebody else. “I don’t know if I should get involved in this.”

  “You’re already involved.”

  Shane nodded slowly, the savage side utterly gone, a strange soft light back in his eyes. “You’re right. I can’t do this for myself. But I can for you. I owe you, don’t I.”

  She forced herself to sit there, her hands clenched below the table, her jaw so tight her teeth felt cemented together.

  “There were two of us working the scam. I needed a partner to move the funds unseen.” He lowered his voice. “Guy by the name of Eric Driscoll.”

  “Another trader?”

  “He was then. I never ratted on him. I claimed I did it all on my own. Far as I know, Eric’s still there, climbing the ladder, pulling down the big bucks.” He smiled thinly. “Man with a lot to lose. You tell him I said that.”

  “Right.” She slung her purse over her shoulder, winced as it hit her wound.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’ve tou
ghened up, Jackie. It looks good on you.” As she started to rise, he reached for her hand.

  Jackie jerked back so hard she slammed into the wall behind her. Then cried aloud as the pain shot through her shoulder.

  Instantly the guard was moving toward them. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, sir. Everything’s cool, right, Jackie?”

  “I’m out of here.”

  “Wait, please. Just a minute.”

  She was halted by the seemingly genuine plea, the look, the way he held himself, one hand open and outstretched. The handsome knave turned beggar.

  “You think a lot in here. There’s nothing else to do but think. About how I got addicted early on to the trade and the floor.” He rushed through the words, as though he had spent months waiting for this chance to tell her, “The adrenaline drug killed everything good I had in me, I know that now. I lived on ashes and anger. Whenever I let myself be around normal people leading normal lives, I could actually feel the cancer growing inside me. Probably why I hated them so much.”

  Jackie released the loathing with the words. “You put yourself in here. Nobody else. And it isn’t half the punishment you deserve.”

  “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

  “What is this, your latest charm offensive?”

  “No. Just a guy who’s come to see how important it is to tell you how sorry I am. For everything.” He backed away from any further confrontation. “Hoping maybe saying the words will help me forgive myself.”

  Jackie fought a losing battle for control as the guard led her back outside. In a prison-hard voice, the guard told her, “Tough to watch a man hide his evil behind a mask of God.”

  Jackie swiped hard at her face. She’d shed more tears in the past three days than in twice as many years. She felt eroded by weakness she could not fathom. “Excuse me?”

  The guard moved with the light-footed grace of much hidden muscle. “A lot of them take to the religion kick in here.” He pushed open the gate for her, stepped aside, and added, “I don’t have no trouble with it. Anything that keeps them docile is fine with me. But it don’t mean a thing on the outside, not till the day they step through those big main doors. Not a thing. You just remember that.”