Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  “Um…got to think about that one.” An ethics puzzler. Maybe I could write up a business-school case when this was all done.

  “They lose, we win. What’s more all-American than that?”

  “You’re right.” I had to agree. “It’s in the Constitution.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riverton Commodities didn’t look like much.

  After leaving Johnny, I’d stopped in at an office services shop to copy, scan and email the copies I had of Hayden’s forged identity documents. Walter had outdone himself, as usual—the work was beautiful. I was sure the DA would lock up Hayden immediately, and good riddance. One less crooked hedge fund manager to blight the world.

  While I was there I bought some small rolls of tape in different colors. My cellphone collection was getting out of hand, and I figured marking them with color-coded tags might help me remember which was which.

  Next, I stopped off at my apartment for a change of clothes. Finally, the trip to Riverton. They’d fronted the rigged trades on cobalt that had earned someone an extra-special payday when Akelman got run over, and I wanted to know who.

  I wouldn’t get anything by asking, naturally, but at least I’d get to see the place.

  They had a suite somewhere in an eight-story building on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, fifty-year-old brick and pressed cement, not far from the 23rd Street station. Coming up from the subway, I watched the pedestrian flow—people in suits, a few deliverymen, women wearing low black heels, not stilettos. A workaday neighborhood, more business than residential.

  The lobby was tiny but nicely trimmed out, with buffed terrazzo floors and a shiny brass elevator. The Near East–looking woman behind the desk didn’t speak much English and didn’t want ID before waving me on. Friday afternoon, a courier coming out, another suit coming in—a typical, one-of-a-thousand office building, too far from any terrorist’s ground zero to worry about.

  I did notice a screen behind the guard’s desk, though, with a four-panel surveillance camera view.

  On the sixth floor, three suites. Doctors Hartzfeld and Logan were clearly dentists, from the fresh mint smell and—how unpleasant—the faint whine of a drill. Transoceanic Services, Ltd., might have been anything, but their windows were dark. Riverton’s door, with custom dark-wood molding and a brushed-aluminum sign, indicated the upscale tenant here.

  As did the access control panel: silver steel with an aqua-blue LCD. I pressed a large button next to it marked “Please Ring.” A moment later the door clicked and I pushed through.

  “Can I help you?” Riverton’s receptionist was young and pretty and not too busy, unless she did all her work on the pink iPhone lying flat on the desk before her.

  “Sure. You buy gold, right?”

  “Um, yes…you mean gold contracts?”

  “No. Gold. The real thing? The metal?” She looked at me blankly. “You know. It’s heavy. And, well, gold colored?”

  When I’d stopped at the apartment, I’d changed into business casual: permanently creased slacks, open-collared shirt, navy jacket. Also dark-framed, tinted eyeglasses, bronzer and a really heavy dose of Panzer cologne.

  No one ever mentions it, but smell is a remarkably effective component of disguise. She’d remember the scent of Panzer forever, but forget what color my hair was in thirty seconds.

  “We’re a trading firm,” she said. “Would you like to open an account?”

  “Not really.” I glanced around. “See, after the divorce, I ended up with some jewelry. Earrings and like that. Part of the settlement when we divvied it all up. What the freaking vampire lawyers didn’t take, I mean. So I’d like to sell it.”

  “Oh, we don’t buy actual gold.” She smiled. “Just like contracts and futures and stuff.”

  “But the sign said—”

  “That’s not what it means. Not what you think.”

  “Oh.”

  Three more doors were visible, but one opened into a conference room with an empty walnut table. A dead-end hallway held four fire-safe file cabinets, all locked. An open closet at the end of the hallway seemed to be the server room; I could just make out a rack with several pieces of installed equipment, a mess of cables, and two keyboards stacked atop each other. LEDs glowed.

  The interior office doors had keypads, same as the entry. I could see a pair of motion detectors, one covering the waiting area and front door, the other the hallway and one office. They were discreet, up in the ceiling, but not hidden.

  And two cameras. One seemed to be pointed directly down at the receptionist, which might be why her shirt was buttoned all the way up.

  The door to the corner office opened, and a big guy emerged. About forty-five, really good hair, a rugby-every-weekend sort of physique. His suit undoubtedly cost more than my car, though that might not have been saying much.

  “What’s up, Kels?” he asked. Short for Kelsey, I figured.

  “I was just explaining we’re not a retail store.”

  “Frank Riverton.” He turned to me with his hand out.

  “Mark Wilson.” I gave his overly firm grip right back. “I got some gold jewelry to sell.”

  “I’m afraid you’d be better off up on 47th Street for that.” He smiled. “But what are you planning to do with the proceeds? Because, I’ll tell you, I’ve got some opportunities here you wouldn’t believe.”

  His pitch ran almost three minutes, despite my obviously increasing uninterest. I finally extricated myself when even Riverton couldn’t ignore the twitches, shuffling, glances at my watch, and so forth.

  “Keep us in mind,” he said. “The stock market’s for suckers. Buying and selling real things—grain and metal and oil—that’s how you make your fortune.”

  I decided Riverton had started as a pit trader and never really left the rough-and-tumble. “I’ll do that,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Have a good day, now,” the receptionist added.

  “Thanks.” I turned to go, and as I approached the door, a faint click sounded. “You, too.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I hate hospitals.

  For all the usual reasons—horrifically ill or injured people you can only avert your eyes from, fear of death, lousy food, et cetera. But also because of my profession. If I’m on a patient ward, then either I screwed up and got hurt, or I screwed up and someone else got hurt. Either way, no fun and bad associations.

  Maybe Clara picked up on that.

  “Relax,” she said. “It’s not like someone’s waiting for you with a bonesaw.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I think they checked me out already, but I should stop at the nurses’ station on the way.”

  She was dressed in street clothes. A light leather jacket over an Avalon Shrike T-shirt, jeans and sandals—not the running outfit I remembered, which she must have arrived in. The same faded laptop carrier weighed down one shoulder.

  “My roommate brought me my things this morning.”

  “Good of her.”

  “Him, actually. Yes, it was.”

  Him? I felt an odd ping in my chest. “You look good for an overnight patient.” Her face was unmarked—the kicks must have been to the back of her skull—and her eyes were lively.

  “There’s wi-fi, so I was able to work most of the day.”

  “Really?” I followed her into the hallway. “Whenever I get a concussion, I seem to spend two or three days in blinding pain.”

  “I’m not sure why they kept me. I felt fine when I woke up.”

  St. Joseph’s, unlike, say, some of the uptown teaching hospitals, tends to cooperate with the police. If the detectives wanted Clara boxed up for a day, for reasons of either protection or suspicion or both, they might have mentioned it to the supervising physician.

  Or maybe they were just worried about cranial trauma. I should stop being so paranoid.

  “We’ll get a cab,” I said. “Let me carry that.”

  “Sure.” S
he shifted over the carrier bag.

  “Jesus, what do you have in here? Cinderblocks?”

  “Documents, books. You know. Work stuff.”

  “So much for the paperless office.”

  Outside, the evening air was cool and damp. The rain had stopped in late afternoon, and the sky had cleared halfway. Down York Avenue, up above the lights and noise, I could make out a misty gibbous moon.

  “You’re really feeling okay? No double vision? Loss of balance? Pain?”

  “Just tired from being in bed all day.” She tipped her head up and breathed deep. “Feels great to be out of there, actually.”

  “The reason I ask is, I’ve got something to do tonight—”

  “Oh.” She brought her face back down. “No problem.”

  “No, I…”

  “I can make it on my own.”

  “That’s not what I—that is, I mean.” Christ, I sounded like I was fucking thirteen years old.

  Which was annoying. Maybe I’d gotten spoiled. Being a veteran—especially of the black-ops sort—is kind of like being a firefighter after 9/11: women tend to be really interested.

  I found my tongue. “Uh, do you want to come along? With me?”

  “Sure.” She smiled. “Where?”

  “BitCon.”

  “The big con? What?”

  “No. A hacker convention.” I raised a hand, waving over a taxi from the row of them on 71st Street.

  “Hackers?”

  “They’re not all social misfits. And some have useful skills.”

  “I bet.”

  “Anyway, I need to see a guy.” I opened the cab’s door for Clara, then followed her in. “It might even be fun.”

  In the backseat, Second Avenue flowing past outside the windows, I said, “You didn’t tell the police about me.”

  “No.” Clara shook her head, face dim inside the cab. “I thought about it, and decided you might not want me to.”

  “Thank you. It’s…helpful to me that you didn’t.”

  “You had nothing to do with it. You weren’t anywhere around when they jumped me.”

  The concussion. If she’d remembered I’d come to her defense, she’d have told the detectives.

  I started to thank her again, but that would just sound stupid. Instead I covered the moment by leaning sideways to check the cabbie’s ID placard—a good habit even if you aren’t dodging the law, what with the Post reporting at least one egregious scamster behind the wheel every week. “Omar Amirana,” and the photo looked like him. So we probably weren’t headed to the convention hotel via Queens.

  “What do you remember?” I asked Clara.

  “Of that attack? Almost nothing.” I could see her tensing up, and I regretted the question. Her voice became higher and a little hoarser. “After we finished talking, I started off again. I’d been running for maybe thirty seconds when two men appeared from the trees. Then another. And then they started—punching me.”

  “I’m sorry.” Which didn’t make much sense, and seemed inadequate to boot.

  “After that, it’s just sort of blurred. Pain, I remember that, for sure. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I saw was the paramedics. One was shining a light into my eyes.”

  “Did you notice what they looked like?”

  “No.”

  “Or anything they said? What the voices were like?”

  “They were angry about the story.”

  She sat straight in the cab’s seat, almost rigidly so.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “This is too painful. Forget it. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “No, it’s all right. The hospital sent in a therapist—I’ve talked it out. What I have to do is stop running it over and over in my head, like a tape loop. So it doesn’t get burned in.”

  “I think that’s right.” I almost reached over, to take her hand or something. But I hesitated, and the moment was lost.

  “Never mind.” Clara shook her head, this time as if to clear it. “Change of topic?”

  “Sure.” Safer ground. The mood shifted.

  “Akelman, Sills and Marlett.”

  “I saw your posts.”

  “There’s more to it.”

  “Of course. Who killed them?”

  “No.” She braced herself as the cab turned a corner, then relaxed somewhat. “Start with, what did they have in common? Finance, sure, but that job description covers a lot of ground.”

  “Especially around here.”

  “I spent a few hours digging up performance data. They weren’t just three money managers. They were three really bad money managers. Each one lost tons of money before they died.”

  “I might have heard that.”

  “Tons of money.”

  “I know.”

  She shook her head. “After the S& L crisis—like twenty-five years ago, when there was still some pretense of the rule of law—thousands of crooked executives were prosecuted. Hundreds actually did hard time. You know how many prosecutions the Justice Department has initiated this time around? After Wall Street drove the entire world economy into the ground?”

  “In fact, I—”

  “None. Not a single one.”

  “Really?”

  “Zero,” she said. “And if someone’s upset about that statistic and is trying to even things up, well, all I can say is the cheering section is going to be huge.”

  “Big story, huh?”

  “Massive!”

  “I’ll see it in the paper tomorrow?”

  “The paper? It’s all over the internet right now. Fox Business might run a segment. I had a call from Hong Kong.”

  Ganderson was not going to be happy. I hoped he didn’t have any guns lying around when he started hearing the reports.

  Clara touched my arm. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Nothing.” We were in one of Mayor Bloomberg’s hybrid taxis. I’d never noticed how small the rear seats were. Clara and I were bumped right up against each other. “Nothing,” I said again. “Just thinking.”

  She waited. “About?”

  “Everyone is figuring this as a vengeance play, right? Death Wish on Wall Street.”

  “Like I said.” She frowned. “You have to admit it makes sense. Motivation-wise.”

  “There’s a counterparty on every trade,” I said. “Every trade.”

  Silence for a moment. Omar slowed for a stoplight, then accelerated as it turned green.

  “I don’t believe it.” Clara’s voice was soft.

  “Congress has some trouble with the idea, but you can profit just as easily on the way down as up. You know that.”

  “Holy jump.” She went from zero to sixty in half a second, scrabbling through her bag for the laptop. “You’re serious. It’s not Charles Bronson, it’s Gordon Gekko.”

  So she was an old movie fan, too. “Could be.”

  “Killing these guys just to puff up returns. Awesome.”

  “Well—”

  “How can I verify it? The commodities trader—okay, I could see that. But a mutual fund? Too liquid to matter, I’d think.”

  “Sills was batting a thousand a few years ago. So Freeboard closed the fund. Her death caused a lot more volatility than you might expect.”

  That is, the number of shares was fixed, unlike most funds. As a result, their value could rise and fall more steeply on what the economists like to call exogenous events—like, say, her murder.

  “Who’s doing it? Give me a name!”

  “Whoa, hold on. I’m just speculating.”

  “No, I’m convinced. Come on, I’ve got to get this out before anyone else does.” Clara had snapped open her ultrabook and was tapping the keys impatiently, waiting for it to boot.

  I’d begun to regret my bush-beating strategy. If there was a murderous conspiracy behind the deaths, Clara’s reporting would help flush them out—and could make them nervous, too, which might mean mistakes, all good for me. But they’d gone after Clara much faster
and harder than I’d expected.

  The warning attack, on her, was already too much blowback.

  “Get some facts first,” I said. “Okay? The story will be that much better if you’ve got proof, not just speculation. Look, it might be total coincidence after all. People die every day. Plain old law of averages means you’ll always see some suspicious, but completely spurious, correlations.”

  “There’s no such thing.” She glanced at me. “‘Law of averages.’ Nothing but innumerate superstition.”

  Somehow my hand had come to rest on her shoulder. “That vocabulary. Wow.”

  Her eyes were about six inches from mine. She started to say something, then just smiled instead. The whole world narrowed in a great whoosh, and all I could see was her face. All I could hear was her breath. All I could feel was her leg, pressed against my knee, and her shoulder, under my hand.

  Time stopped—

  —and so did the cab. Abruptly pulling over to the curb.

  “Flagstone Marriot,” said Omar.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BitCon had spilled over onto the sidewalk.

  Bemused bellmen watched as groups of twentysomethings smoked, argued and shoved odd bits of technical flotsam at one another. Those who weren’t hunched over their phones, that is. People wandered in and out the revolving doors, new arrivals with their laptops and rucksacks, bored attendees taking a break from the sessions. A couple of young guys were selling something, maybe their startup, pushing business cards onto strangers.

  It could have been any midtown convention—orthodontists or bond salesmen or philatelists—except for the general scruffiness of the attendees. And the death-skull RFID badges. And all the portable hardware, including at least two augmented-reality headsets and one guy with a flexible keyboard taped onto his jacket sleeve.

  “Your friend is here?” Clara seemed amused but dubious.

  “Acquaintance. Yeah, he’s around somewhere.”

  “Are you registered?”

  “No.”

  Indeed no. The authorities were here, too, undercover and otherwise. In the old days, at DefCon or HOPE a decade ago, they weren’t very good at blending in, and spot-the-fed was easy. Now the three-letter-agency crowd was experienced enough—or they’d simply hired enough of the hackers themselves—to conduct their surveillance more successfully. No way was I risking the microcameras and electronic profiling we’d encounter just walking into the ballroom.