“The operating system of planet Earth,” Willibald says, unsmiling. “That lamer deserves to die simply for that.”
From his office on the east side of the Fifty-ninth Floor, Henry Saddler could, if he wanted, see the world’s largest electric snowflake suspended above Fifth Avenue. But he’s busy. Between the thumb and index finger of his left hand he’s pinching the shirt fabric over his right nipple. With his right hand, he’s moving his mouse around the WinWin.com web page, calling up the account of WINWIN WINNER HENRY G. SADDLER IV. And he’s talking on the speakerphone, to Jack Delancey from Variety.
“Well, Jack, those may be ‘the scoops du jour in the M-and-A chattering caste,’ but I think you’re going to look silly if you go with that. In all honesty.”
“Which? Are you telling me that Mose is not off-loading the stations to Diller? Or that you aren’t going to do a megadeal with WebTV for MBC programming lock, stock, and barrel full of monkeys?”
“At any nimble multimedia entertainment company, all sorts of options are kicked around, Jack, you know that. That’s the nature of nimble management.” Nimble is one of the words on Harold’s MPI that needs goosing. “Like our 2001 reinvention strategies as regards the Winter Channel evolving into Reality Channel, which you yourself reported. Exclusively.”
“And you already have my sincerest for dropping the dime on that bit of intelligence, Hank.”
“Henry. Well, this is no different.”
“Which? The station sale or the programming sale?”
“ ‘Although one top source says the investment in the MBC by Microsoft could be “in the low ten-figure range,” the source denied in the strongest possible terms that the Mose O and Os are for sale.’ Please do not call us a weblet. Please. It drives Harold up the wall.”
“I guess if you really were migrating toward the network exit door, Hank, you wouldn’t give a hoot about the nomenclature.”
“Good point.”
“Is this the right number to grab you at, later in the week when I need to Cuisinart your quotes into deadline configuration?”
“Actually, I’ll be in Burbank late tonight through the rest of the week.”
“Roger wilco, Hank, I’ll 818 you Wednesday, Thursday.”
“It’s Henry.”
Saddler clicks a WinWin.com button to check his account. Most of his Mose Media Holdings shares are in accounts managed by the company and its brokerage house. But on WinWin.com he buys and sells a bit of Mose on his own now and then, just for the kick of it, really, when he has … hunches. Right now he has a hunch that Variety is going to confirm that Mose is not abandoning network television and may get a huge infusion of cash from Microsoft. He has a hunch that the stock of Mose Media Holdings will rise on that news, and keep rising when the WebTV deal does go through. He clicks the WinWin.com EXPRESS TRADE button, and purchases 3,000 Mose Media Holdings shares. TRADE CONFIRMED, HENRY G. SADDLER IV.
He presses the special platinum PHONE ME NOW button that’s operative only on the screens of WinWin Winners, and waits. He is feeling very clever. He has never shorted a stock before, but he’s read and reread Stock-Shorting for Dummies, and he knows the material cold. The broker borrows the shares from the vault and lends them to you. You sell the shares today for $100 apiece. Then, after the stock price drops to $50 next week, you pay the broker $50 for the share and pocket the difference. You double your money in a week, just like that. You’re a winner!
The phone rings. It’s Henry’s WinWin.com Personal Privileges Representative, full of “Mr. Saddler” solicitousness. The asking price right now for Microsoft is $131⅝. Henry—Mr. Saddler—tells the broker he wants to short 5,000 shares of common stock. Just one moment, she says … and then she’s back, telling him of course, Mr. Saddler, you have a preapproved margin account. Hank tells the woman he wants to do 5,000 shares short at $131⅞ for $660,000. And no commission at all, Henry asks her to confirm, just like with all his other trades, since he’s a WinWin Winner? “Of course not, Mr. Saddler!” And just like that, on Tuesday the twenty-eighth of November, Henry Saddler has shorted 5,000 shares of Microsoft. If the stock should drop (tomorrow, for instance) by $20 a share, Henry Saddler will be $100,000 richer. If it drops by $40 a share, he’ll be $200,000 richer. This is what the vice president elect means when he says America is one heck of a wealth-creation engine. This is outstanding! This is sexy! Henry Saddler gleams.
Wednesday, November 29
“Wie sagen Sie ‘sicher’?” Humfried asks Willi.
“How can you be certain?”
“How can you be certain,” Humfried says directly to Fanny, “that this stranger is still in the jungle in Mexico with the Zapatistas? Maybe he’s returned now to Costa Rica. Maybe he’s right by the phone in the office. Boom! He tells them right away, ‘This is not true.’ ”
“Stringer, not stranger,” she says absentmindedly to Humfried. Fanny is at her computer, editing their two stories one last time, plugging in a couple of final facts plucked from a web site about Costa Rican scuba diving. She turns to face him. “Well, yesterday Carlos Petersen e-mailed his boss that he’d be filing another story tomorrow from the Mexican guerillas’ camp. Which means today. And last night he e-mailed somebody named Claudia that he wouldn’t get home until the weekend. So, no, we’re not certain. But you’ve got to figure he’s still out in the jungle.”
“We’ve got good mission probability,” Willibald says. “Worst case, we’re up for one half minute. But even up for one half minute, there will be FUD, right? Thirty seconds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And so this will be covered in the media. Because it’s a fantastischer hack. Because it’s him. Like with the phones in their meeting. Everyone knew that was a prank, right? But it still was the big story.” He gestures toward their wall poster. “ ‘Wacko Practical Jokerz.’ The Microsoft guys pretended to laugh, but they were embarrassed.”
“Humfried,” Fanny says, “it’s your turn in the kitchen. We’re probably getting close.”
Humfried bounds upstairs with his Domino’s pepperoni, and hops up onto the counter to stare at Jodie Taft’s giant digital thermometer.
“One degree under, still,” he shouts toward the basement door.
They have decided that since they have no way of knowing the Costa Rican dive times, it doesn’t matter exactly when during the day they push the button. Willibald picked up the thermometer trick as a boy, a Thaelmann Pioneer, at his kommunist kinder kamp in East Germany. The idea is to ensure that one’s apparently random actions are actually random, to preclude any inferences of logic or motive afterward. Fanny and Humfried and Willibald have done their best to cover their tracks technologically—the phony internet aliases they’ve spoofed, the root kit they planted inside the Reuters system, the Stasi stealth tricks Big Bob showed them. Willi said, “We will wait for God to tell us when the time is right to launch.” The countdown from five below zero to one below has taken all morning.
In the basement, Fanny and Willi are finishing their large mushroom pizza. The fourth computer, the Virgin, is booted up and online. It will be their observation post.
“I guess it’s like some form of really high-priced push,” Fanny says. “I guess five hundred thousand business guys really need to have, like, every piece of information at their fingertips immediately, all the time.”
“But isn’t Reuters’ news free on the web site?” Willi says. “And even on Yahoo!?”
“Not all of it. Not as fast. And some people would just rather pay for stuff. It’s America.”
Humfried is coming downstairs. He’s got a big smile.
“Yes?” Willibald asks his friend.
“Zero,” Humfried says. “Zero degrees.”
It’s 1:22 Central Standard Time.
“Do it?” Fanny asks.
“Just do it,” Willi tells her. “Assassination time.”
Fanny clicks her mouse once.
“Awesome,” she says in a little voice.
This interlude o
f temperatures in the sixties and seventies, three days running, gives everything an unreal, antic cast. It’s the twenty-ninth of November, and the windows are open. The regular south-side pigeon, the fat, dirty, yellowish one they call Steinbrenner, is hopping in and out over the sill, a little crazily, pecking at bits of soy-soaked sushi rice from Dianne’s lunch, going momentarily airborne every time he hits wasabi. Frank Melucci is wearing his $ softball T-shirt. Ben figures the disorienting weather will help camouflage any odd behavior on his part. He’s made two dozen trades today, routine stuff, and no one in the Big Room has any clue. He’s wound up tight as a crackhead about to stick up a 7-Eleven, but that’s normal. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the screens all day, but that’s not abnormal either. They can’t tell he’s paying exceptionally close attention to the news-wire feeds stacked above the rows of green and red stock prices on one of the ILX screens, the three inches of one-liners from Bloomberg and Dow-Jones and First Call and Reuters. A new bead of information distillate drips onto the screen two or three times a minute.
2:20 = BN Berkshire Hathaway
2:21 = FC One week after Animal Kingdom tragedy, Disney
2:21 = DJ Quebec secession schedule hits Canadian debt futures
2:22 = RT Clinton and Bush join to “beg” Rubin to return to Treasury
Ordinarily, Ben finds none of it tedious, these dribs of information appearing one by one on his screens. The picture Ben tries to see is vast, the whole sprawling pointillist mural of the world, changing relentlessly and endlessly, sometimes in a shocking splash of dots but mostly speck by speck by speck. His job is to recognize the new image as it’s forming, first, faster, before every dot of color falls into place. Today, though, he’s indifferent to the itsy bits of the picture accreting here and there, the weakening euro, the strengthening ruble, the fiscal paralysis caused by the bloating federal budget surplus, the names being bruited for the new cabinet. Today Ben feels like a civilian, a yokel waiting for one big, dumb, dramatic piece of news. He’s staring.
It’s 2:22 Eastern Standard Time. Microsoft is 131½ bid, 1321⁄16 asked.
“Look,” Frank Melucci says, “Steinbrenner is actually all the way inside.” Frank stands and creeps toward the pigeon.
Ben glances over at the window for an instant.
“St. Francis the sissy,” says Heffernan, watching Frank Melucci tiptoeing as Billy waits for his Morgan guy to come back on the wire with a price for Yahoo! January 280 calls.
And then Ben looks back at the ILX screen.
2:22 = RT Clinton and Bush join to “beg” Rubin to return to Treasury
2:22 = RT Microsoft
“Holy fuck! Holy mother fuck. This is huge.”
Before anyone can ask Ben what has happened, before the second “Holy,” his hands are at the Reuters keyboard, tapping—
***GLANCE-Reuters top business news***
11/29 2:22 P (RT)
Rtr 14:22 11-29-00
2:22 RT 8378 > Microsoft
Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer missing in scuba
mishap off Costa Rica
2:22 = RT 8374 > Clinton and Bush join to “beg”
Rubin to return
—and before the second “fuck!” the full story is up on his Reuters screen.
“Billy!” Ben says as he reads, “start selling the Microsoft puts. Blow out of the puts. Now! Gates and Ballmer may have croaked. Reuters.”
Heffernan thinks the panic has made his boss misspeak. “Sell puts, Ben? You mean buy more puts, right? This is bad news.”
“No, sell. Sell as many of the fucking puts as you can. The company is going to be okay. Do it, Billy. Now.”
(Reuters) By Carlos Petersen
Microsoft Corporation chairman Bill Gates and his number two, president and CEO Steve Ballmer, are missing in the waters of the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica, according to local officials in the isolated Costa Rican town of Selvapesta, on the Bahía Fea de la Roca. The two men arrived in the remote area Monday for a scuba-diving vacation, and a Second Quarter Century Microsoft corporate brainstorming session next week at a nearby resort.
It isn’t known whether Gates or Ballmer are experienced divers.
“The currents and reefs and volcanic tunnels can be treacherous out there,” said Homfredo Göring, a longtime local dive-master. According to Göring, the local marine life includes white-tip sharks, whale sharks, bull sharks, barracuda, and giant manta rays.
Missing. Only missing? That makes Ben nervous.
“Billy,” Ben says, looking up from his screen, then back to the green blinking line of Microsoft BID and ASKED prices, “get me a size-ola market in the Microsoft puts, the Decembers first, as many as we can, all of them, as fast as you can. The programs are going to take it down fast. Go, go, go.”
“Nothing on Bloomberg or Dow-Jones,” Berger says, tapping furiously. “AP says Ballmer and Gates are down there, though, diving.”
Ben hears Heffernan saying “Sold … sold … sold … sold,” hitting every sane bid, selling the Microsoft puts as quickly as he can to anybody who’ll buy.
Not a month has passed in the last decade that Ben Gould hasn’t thought of himself as John Henry, muscling ahead on instinct to make trades against the giant, rapacious steam engines of the mutual funds that buy and sell giant tranches of stock automatically, blindly, stupidly, at any price they can get, blasting through transactions recklessly, faster and harder than any normal human trader can or would. This is his ultimate John Henry moment, the apotheosis. He will triumph in the next hour, or he will die.
“Screen price is 129½,” Melucci says, “but the screen may not be updating. Might be a bad quote.”
That’s down two points since two twenty-one P.M. Eastern. In the last minute, the value of Microsoft Corporation has been reduced by $14 billion.
“Sold … sold … sold,” Billy Heffernan is saying.
It’s now 2:27 P.M., and Microsoft is trading at $109, down 22 points a share, or around $60 billion in market value. Billy Heffernan has sold 19,000 of the 24,200 Microsoft puts Bennett Gould Partners owned seven minutes ago. The profit on the 19,000 is $21 million.
“Ben,” Billy says, “they’ve declared it a fast market.”
A fast market is an official options-exchange designation meaning that prices for a particular company’s puts or calls are moving up or down so quickly that the prices listed on computer screens are unreliable, essentially irrelevant. It’s every trader for himself. There are no trustworthy prices for Microsoft puts, so if Ben wants Heffernan to keep selling, he will have to let him give a market order—that is, an offer to sell with no minimum sales price. Other traders would be able to buy the remainder of Ben Gould’s Microsoft puts for a pittance. “They’ll pick us off,” Heffernan says. “We’ll be fucked.”
“Christ, when are they going to halt trading?” Frank Melucci says. “It’s five minutes already.”
When are the men who run NASDAQ, Microsoft’s stock exchange, going to certify the chaos, declare a time-out, and halt trading? This is the great do-or-die timing variable in the Perfect Trade. How many minutes will Ben have to buy and sell? Only a few. Certainly a very few. He needs to start buying Microsoft stock at these prices, and fast, because he knows that the bargains will be fleeting, finished the instant Gates and Ballmer are resurrected.
“Frank!” he says to Melucci, his other trader, his common-stock guy, “let’s cover ourselves, I want to do the common. Billy, double-check me—how much are we short?”
“The stock’s looking 95. You’re still short 500,000,” by which he means that Microsoft is down to $95 a share, and that Heffernan managed to sell three quarters of the puts before the fast-market declaration.
“Frank?” Ben says, waving toward himself as a signal to his trader, but with both hands, like a loading-dock foreman guiding a tr
uck into the bay. “Take Microsoft until I tell you to stop.”
This is the first order Ben has given so far that surprises everyone. This is rare. This is balls-out.
“Any limit at all?” Melucci asks, his voice almost cracking.
“Don’t pay north of 95. Let it run. Buy Microsoft common until I tell you to stop.”
Frank Melucci has already picked up his phone and hit the wire for Sam Zyberk at Morgan Stanley.
“No, I think that’s true, Willi,” Humfried says, already unplugging and pulling the hard drives out of the dirty computers. “Even for a few minutes, this might affect the cost of the stock, you know? Make it go lower.”
Willibald, stroking his goatee as he rereads their first dispatch on the Reuters Moneynet web site, shakes his head. “No,” he says to Humfried with absolute Thaelmann Pioneer confidence. “At this stage of advanced capitalism, the business of a giant corporation is not so dependent on the living or dying of individual managers. That’s why they’re corporations.”
“How long’s it been?” Fanny asks.
“Almost two minutes,” Willi says, pointing at the screen of the Virgin machine. “And SCUBA, I swear, should be all big letters, I don’t care what your spellcheck says. It is an acronym.”
“I’m not going to change it now. That’d look lame.” She clicks. “Boom,” she says. “Adiós, dudes.”
His Burbank assistants, Cissy and Hector, were surprised to find Saddler already at his desk when they arrived at 8:30. “Hold all my calls, Cissy,” he said. “I’ll be working flat out all day on an important online project.” He loved saying that, and really meaning it. His favorite television show in high school was The Name of the Game, Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa his favorite stars, and “Hold all my calls” is just the sort of Gene Barry or Tony Franciosa line he’d gone into the media hoping one day to say. He finally feels like a man in charge, a real insider, a top, top executive, now that his office is up here on the seventh floor. Even with the internal connecting staircase, it has always rankled him a little to be down on six, below Harold and Timothy. After Timothy’s death, it made a lot of sense for him to move up right next to Harold, and to give his office down on six to Laura Welles.
Turn of the Century Page 70
