The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  Phelps came and stood before Chen, with his hand out.

  "You will now surrender your cell phones and electronic devices and so on."

  Chen gave him two phones and a beeper.

  "Please remain comfortable," Martz said. He got up to go see Elliot on the other side of the terrace.

  "Everything okay?"

  "Hi, Billy Martz. Yes, we're set up, more or less. I spent the day at the office getting everything ready." He had three screens open, powered off one of the waterproof exterior plugs that Connie used for her elliptical motion machine that she kept stored on the roof, spending hours climbing a little closer to heaven or wherever it was his wife ultimately planned to arrive.

  "You have all your power, all your communications?"

  "Yes."

  "Is it technically very difficult?"

  "This technology has been around for a while now. You want tricky technology, go play around with stem cells."

  "If you say so."

  "Bill, you're turning into a fussy old man." Elliot smiled, patted him on the back. "You go do your thing and I'll do mine."

  But he lingered, looking over all the equipment, amazed at how small it was, except for the large white transmission cone on a ten-foot telescoping tripod that had been hauled in and positioned earlier in the day. The key to a successful lift, Martz knew, now that almost everything electronic was traceable, was to move the communication not just from place to place, and from government jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but across technologies. Moving across each of these boundaries made it harder for any interested authorities to re-create the sequence of illegal communications. From what Martz understood, Elliot's men would, that evening, be communicating directly with a boat about one hundred feet offshore in New York Harbor. The mode was a digitally compressed and encrypted microwave beam, which required line-of-sight transmission and was effective only up to a few miles. Did not travel with the curvature of the earth. It couldn't be used on foggy or rainy nights, either. You shot it at a receiver the size of an umbrella, the beam a quarter inch wide. But it was absolutely untrackable. It was so good Citibank used one to shoot data from its famous headquarters on East Fifty-third Street to its back-office operations facility in Queens, built for that purpose in a line-of-site location on the other side of the East River. He watched the men go about their business. They'd spent hours checking and rechecking the transmission vector. The boat, papered with a Liberian registry, had a phone uplink to a private Dutch satellite network used only by shipping companies, and the data packets were in turn relayed and downlinked to a Greek shipyard that was owned by Elliot. The yard was filled with rusty tankers needing overhaul, but the fiber-optic cables running under and around them were state of the art. With this arrangement, Elliot could speak more or less untraceably to anyone in the world. The many legs of the communication degraded the sound quality and added a little delay, but not too much, perhaps four seconds.

  But this was not all that Elliot did, not by any means. After all, anyone with a few million bucks and an antisocial personality could set up an untraceable mix-tech, global com-link. Mr. bin Laden, for example, among other miscreants. Elliot's real value, and the reason he was effectively paid millions of dollars for what amounted to perhaps seven or eight hours of service, was that he made things happen that otherwise could not; he provided capital and the smarts to leverage it to the greatest possible illegal effect. He and his tiny band of infidels had researched several thousand stock price surge patterns and painstakingly built a proprietary trading program that followed the documented natural arc of these surges using best-fit modeling within a field of scattershot data points. He then started to buy the stock in question and drive up the price, of course. But that was not all; once Elliot's trading gambit began, he didn't just slavishly recapitulate the curve with simplistic buying and occasional selling; instead he created it organically, he birthed it, which was to say that he used several thousand linked trading platforms that he empowered with randomizing block-size choosers and let run autonomously, giving the platforms a buy bias but also letting them react in real time and differentially to spontaneous market information. This meant that he allowed some of his trading platforms to make "bad" decisions, very much the way real flesh-and-blood traders did, getting in or out of a market surge too early or late. He also employed a mix of the patterns typically utilized by day traders, retail brokerages, private wealth managers, investment banks, and big institutional players such as pension fund managers and mutual fund companies. His platforms traded not just with and against all the legitimate traders in the market but blindly against each other as well. The result was not a simulation of a real stock surge but a real-life, real-time rise that was, from a statistical point of view, utterly legitimate.

  The trick was to induce enough other legitimate traders to buy with sufficient speed and volume that Elliot's platform trades were hidden within the general movement of the stock. He started a little trading fire, hoped it caught, then added gasoline to it. Which was also to say that were the SEC to examine the general trade data, it would be hard-pressed to filter out and reveal Elliot's platforms. It was that sophisticated. Which, again, was also to say he'd probably bought some wee black-market SEC software, when rarely available, and studied it closely.

  Elliot had an excellent record. Never exposed or investigated. And he was picky as hell. Had turned Martz down a few times. In general his bias was toward industries or companies that were experiencing a lot of market volatility. Tweaking his model continuously, Elliot stealthily moved around among New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Melbourne. Each exchange or bourse had its own wrinkles, of course, its own trading rules, national holidays, weather seasons, electoral cycles, and sporting events. Best time to do a British lift? When the World Cup was playing on the same weekend as the Wimbledon finals. Trading volume always light on that summer Friday morning in late June or early July. Best time in Japan? During the Japanese World Series with a typhoon predicted for Tokyo. And so on. The stock had to have a story that made the restoration of its price somewhat plausible. Couldn't be in a dying industry, couldn't be in a takeover battle, for trading patterns around those were heavily scrutinized. Couldn't involve weapons systems, a personal belief of his, and couldn't directly enrich any of a select group of people, including Rupert Murdoch, Donald Rumsfeld, or George Soros. Elliot had a few standards. If necessary, he was able to trade one stock simultaneously across multiple exchanges, his trading patterns customized by location. It made for mind-boggling computer research and programming ability. It also meant that Elliot performed only two or three lifts a year and no more. He didn't want to get caught, after all.

  Although he was brought in to work for others, Elliot watched the rising stock price with his own goal in mind, which was to get out gradually before the top was reached. In essence, this concept was paradoxical, because every sell order put downward pressure on the price. The trick was to front-run the market's natural conclusion of the short-term, secular rise in the stock's price. Buy less and sell more simultaneously. By the time the stock had topped, Elliot had sold his shares back into the very same heated demand he had created, booked jaw-dropping short-term profits, and initiated a secondary, obfuscatory buy-and-sell pattern of trading, very often one that maintained an artificially high price that was itself 5 or 10 percent below the stock's high. This rear-guard action often resulted in minor short-term losses that shaved at the major gains yet confirmed and publicly ratified the overall movement of the stock. The whole game could take two or even three days to play out, but the essential gambit would transpire in the next five or six hours.

  And then I can relax, Martz thought, and go get my prostate biopsied. Once the Good Pharma stock rose near his break-even point, his own trading specialists would reduce his holdings in it, leaving him if not in the black then having suffered a loss of only a few percentage points—good enough, under the circumstances. He was down
about $107 million; if he could get back $80 or $85 million of that, he'd consider himself whole and make back the difference another way.

  All of this sounded very good in theory. But it still came down to two men, Tom Reilly and Chen. They would need to get started soon, given when the markets opened on the other side of the world. He returned to where Chen was sitting.

  Chen rose. "I am going to leave now."

  Martz said, "You don't want to do that."

  "Why?"

  "Because you'll be arrested for illegal stock market transactions before you can leave the United States."

  Chen smiled. "I am a Chinese citizen."

  "So?"

  "My government would not allow it."

  "Chen," said Martz, sitting down next to him, "the Chinese government arrests foreigners every day in China, as you know. It's a concept they understand well. We do it, too. There are a lot of people who are very antagonistic toward China's rogue behavior. Mostly conservative politicians. Your arrest would be a matter of personal satisfaction to them. I can arrange for them to praise this event on the floor of the United States Senate. Fast. In a day or two. I'm a very well-connected guy, Chen. I contribute to all their reelection committees."

  The translator said all this but looked a little amazed himself. Chen listened, then nodded, his dark eyes showing nothing, however.

  "The last thing you want to do is be arrested for illegal trading here. This will launch an investigation into everything you have ever done, and like a fatal disease it will touch all of the people to whom you have ever given information. It will cause loss of face. All those businessmen and government officials. All those Western companies that have those nice special arrangements with you and your people. You know this better than I do, Chen. You will become persona non grata. No, worse. You will have cancer and be terminally ill." He looked directly at Hua. "Will that translate?"

  "More or less."

  He uttered a few more words.

  "So," resumed Martz, waving at another man just now arriving by way of the elevator, "you are going to call your friends and tell them to start buying Good Pharma. We will explain everything. My friend Tom Reilly is here—"

  "Number two at Good Pharma?" interrupted Chen.

  "The one and the same."

  A big, handsome man in a good suit came over, shook Chen's hand. Like it was a business deal. Which, in a sense, it was. Just business.

  33

  Harlem had changed, yo. Now white people lived there! He knocked on the door of Norma Powell's house on 146th Street. It was well past the dinner hour; he'd be lucky if someone answered. The traffic up the FDR Drive had been a disaster; nearly two hours from Red Hook to west Harlem. 1010 WINS radio said the body of a mobster had been discovered dumped between two cement traffic barriers. The roadway in both directions crawled with cops and evidence technicians. Now Ray saw movement behind the curtain, and a moment later an enormous black man came to the door, with some kind of delicious smell of Italian cooking following him.

  "This Norma Powell's place?" Ray asked.

  "She's my mother. What's up?"

  "I'm looking for a Chinese girl. Name's Jin Li."

  "We don't say who lives here, mister. Especially eight o'clock at night."

  Ray held out the fax he'd found in Red Hook.

  The man inspected the piece of paper, handed it back. Tough to argue with that.

  "You a cop?"

  "No."

  "Then we ain't got something to talk about."

  She could be in her apartment or room right now. "How about you call her for me, find out if she'll see me?"

  "You got a phone?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Long story."

  The man pulled out his own phone.

  "You have her number?" Ray asked.

  "Do I look like a chump?"

  "No, you do not look like a chump."

  The man dialed, listened, a look of patient disgust on his face. "Message," he said, snapping the phone shut.

  "You should have said that—"

  "Wait a minute there, Cool Breeze. I thought you answered my question."

  "What?"

  "That I wasn't a chump. Didn't you say something like that? Just because I'm calling her don't mean some funky white guy gets to talk to her, especially on my dime."

  Ray tipped back his head. He hates you, he thought. But it's not personal. Don't react. Seek the elegant solution. What next? Stalling, he looked up the front of the building. Which gave him an idea. "Fine. Good-bye and thanks. By the way, whatever you're cooking smells good."

  Maybe because it was burning? The man frowned in worry and shut the door. Ray could see him hurry toward the kitchen.

  Ray examined the name slots on the buzzer. The one for 5F was empty. That would be Jin Li's. Fifth floor front. He stepped off the stoop ledge right onto the fire escape. Norma Powell and her son seemed to run things by the book. The New York City fire code stipulated that every room in which a person slept had to have a least two forms of egress, which meant, usually, a door and a window. He knew Jin Li would never rent a room without a window; she was a bit claustrophobic. He climbed up the fire escape to the fifth floor, his boots kicking a shower of paint chips beneath him. The iron-slatted landing on the fifth floor stretched across three windows, and he peered inside each dwelling. In the first an old black man was in a chair watching a baseball game on television. He had his hand around a forty-five-ounce bottle of beer. The next window was dark; Ray saw no one inside. The last window revealed an overly skinny young woman in a bra, jeans, and an air filter mask waving one arm around. She looked like a human praying mantis. What was she doing? He leaned close. She was spray-painting a giant canvas. Dangerous as hell. He knocked loudly on the window.

  "What? Who are you?" She seemed neither surprised nor scared that he stood outside her window.

  "Fire department inspection."

  She opened the window two inches, leaving a screen between them. "What?"

  "Fire department. That's an illegal industrial use of aerosol propellants in a multiunit residential dwelling," he said. "But I'm not going to write you a violation if you promise me one thing."

  "What? Sorry."

  "Keep your room ventilated, miss. Keep this window open."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you."

  "Are there illegal activities taking place in the next door apartment?"

  "The room, you mean? No, she just moved in. I don't know what she does."

  "Where is the occupant now?"

  "I think I saw her getting into a taxi like a couple of hours ago. She lives in Korea or something."

  "Was she alone?"

  "I don't know."

  A couple of hours ago? In a taxi? Ray climbed down the fire escape and headed toward his truck. The fact that Jin Li left in a cab meant something, since reaching lower Manhattan from Harlem was a lot more easily done by subway. You would take a cab from Harlem to someplace more difficult to reach. Like the airports. Or Queens. Brooklyn? He had a bad feeling. I've got to be smarter, he told himself. He'd come to a dead end. But just because he hadn't found her didn't mean no one else had.

  34

  The profit margin on single-serving bagged potato chips was enormous. Most people had no idea. And that was the key to owning a gas station. You had to have the convenience store with it, because the absolute profit margins on pumped gasoline were very tight, perhaps four cents per gallon. The retail gas market was highly competitive and utterly transparent. People could see the price and literally look across the street to see who had the lower price. The margins on coffee, snacks, and other convenience store items—yes, he would sell porn, which was nothing compared to what kids were looking at on the Internet—were about five times higher. The Turk's place on Flatbush Avenue was a gold mine. Better than he expected. He had all the info now, thanks to the man who did the Turk's business taxes, a Pakistani guy who didn't mind selling out his fellow Islamic brother an
d making an extra thousand bucks just for photocopying a federal tax return. The accountant knew everything. The Turk was pumping about 125,000 gallons a month. His Dunkin' Donuts franchise, just started a few months earlier, was doing an average $50,000 per month, daily gross increasing every day. The convenience store on the other side of the property was averaging $23,000 per month, with additional income from the ATM, the AirVac machine out in the lot, the paid-in-place cigarette displays (the tobacco companies desperate to hook teenaged buyers), and the prepaid domestic and international phone cards. Two years into a ten-year lease. Blimpie sandwich shop additionally approved for the location. And best of all, it was a great Lotto spot, people coming in and buying a hundred dollars' worth of tickets at a pop, fucking Mexicans and Haitians and Gambians and goddamned everyone, except the Hasidic Jews with their freaky wigged wives, but also including the poor old Italian women living off Social Security. The place was a money machine.

  He knew all about the overall business now, too. The big oil companies were getting out of the retail gas station trade. Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil, all selling off thousands of stations. At the same time, the big-box stores were getting into the business. Wal-Mart and Costco. But not in Brooklyn, folks. Very tough to get new gasoline tanks going into the ground, thanks to the state's tough environmental laws. What you see is what you already got, and what he was going to get was the station at Flatbush and Avenue J.

  And his new best friend, the Chinese chick, was going to help him—a lot. He had not expected to find her at the old detective's house, but hey, he got lucky for once, and as soon as she'd appeared coming out the door he'd known he needed her. Not only had she possibly seen him on the night that he and Richie had attacked the girls in the car, but, more important, he had a feeling that whoever had sent the white limousine looking for her boyfriend had the kind of money that Victor could use. It was just a matter of making a couple of phone calls to the guy and arranging a pickup for the money. He wasn't going to hurt her. A few whacks upside the head were no big deal, didn't count. He did like the way she looked, though, had trouble keeping his hands off her, and the idea that she was his captive, and that he could do anything to her, excited him. She had a legitimately hot body, and he knew what it would feel like beneath him. What a groaning good feeling to slide the beef up into her, especially if she struggled. Hell, she could bite him, kick him, anything. Eventually she'd just have to lie back and take it. Total domination. The idea of this sent some wood down south to where the wild thing lived.