The Twain Maxim

by Clem Chambers

  Baz’s broker sat impassively at his side, practically asleep. He said nothing.

  “Of course,” said Baz. “Go ahead.”

  “If this stuff’s just lying around, why don’t you dig it up and fund the mine that way?”

  “Good question,” said Baz. “I wish more people would ask it. You see, the play for us is to map it out, then flog the property to a major mining company. That way we don’t spoil the picture. If we start digging it up big-time, the world and his wife will show up and make life bloody difficult. This way we keep the lid on what we’ve got and when we get all the data sorted we sell the hole and pocket a couple of billion with no mess and no hassle. If we start spitting out tens of millions of dollars in rocks, it’ll get hairy.”

  “Right,” said Sebastian. “How do we keep a lid on it?”

  Baz smiled. The guy had said “we”. What a greedy shit-for-brains he was. He was already imagining he’d bought into the mine. “We park a couple of hundred Congolese soldiers on the land. That’s already sorted. It keeps the freelancers off and lets us get on with drilling. Drills are boring, soldiers are scary. Always does the trick.”

  “How much are you raising?” asked Sebastian.

  “Just a mil, pre, pre.” The broker had woken up.

  “I’ll take half,” said Sebastian.

  “No, no, mate,” said Baz, “there’s not a half to be had. You can have …” He looked at the broker.

  “A hundred,” said the broker.

  “A hundred thousand pounds!” exclaimed Sebastian. “That’s hardly worth me coming out to this meeting.”

  Baz shrugged. “If a quarter of a million profit at pre-IPO isn’t enough for you, I’m sorry we wasted your time.”

  Sebastian blushed. “Well, I’m rather disappointed.”

  The broker sat up a bit. “If you want to roll the quarter into the pre-IPO there’ll be a hundred per cent uplift at that point.”

  “Righty-ho, then,” said Sebastian. “I’ll play.”

  “We’ll hold your pre-pre-certificates in that case,” said the broker. “We do like to control the stock, you understand.”

  Sebastian nodded. If they held the stock certificates, the promoters could ramp the stock to the sky without the risk of early investors betraying them by selling for a quick turn. He’d be able to sell out but only when they said he could. That was the quid pro quo of being invited to the party early: the risk of powerlessness and complete loss was counterbalanced by a thumping great up-side. He was prepared to take the risk because he’d heard that Baz Mycock was the Elvis Presley of mining promotion. Here was a man with enough balls to float a resources company called Barron Mining and have no one spot the irony of the name. He always made the boys a mint so Sebastian wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth – even if it might be a Trojan one.

  8

  Jim scratched at his stubble. He had certainly picked a good time to hammer the markets. They had hit a period of turbulence and the value of stocks and currencies were swinging about with increasing volatility. Something must be going on in the world economy, bad news filtering out and coming to the attention of the big money players. He had made a billion dollars in a week and the total would be a billion pounds by the end of the day.

  Stafford had been a brilliant idea on Davas’s part: the butler pampered Jim with drinks and snacks, as if he was a giant baby, fuelling him to plunder the world’s twenty-four-hour markets. A computer, the Internet and food were all he required to stack up his colossal winnings. He just needed to get up in the morning, sit in front of his screen and be right.

  There was no gatekeeper or umpire, no judge and jury except the market. He could sit at his screens stark naked if he liked. Trading was a game Jim didn’t lose. He looked at the charts and saw what would happen next – and it did, just as thousands of books on trading promised anyone could do if they read and understood them.

  They always said that the patterns were there to be seen: all you had to do was follow the program and you’d make money. The smart investors knew this must be crap because, with a winning formula, any greedy trader could simply grow their trading in scale and soon, like an expanding blob from some 1950s horror movie, all the money in the world would be sucked into the scheme’s exponentially expanding ectoplasm.

  But a system like that could only work if it was known to just one person: two people equally matched in a game would cancel out each other’s advantage. In any event, no system could ever work for long and the Nobel Prize theorists said no system could ever work at all.

  The books on reading charts came out in their hundreds every year and the hopeful dutifully bought them, searching for the key to riches, but no one had yet found the system that worked, not even Jim. He just saw where the chart would go next: there was no technical trick beyond that. The charts of stocks, commodities and Forex moved as the natural flow of events, Jim believed, which suggested what would kick off next. To him it was all obvious, like the next note in a simple tune or the fate of the cute dog in this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster. It wasn’t often that the dog snuffed it and it was equally rare for Jim to find himself in a losing trade. Sometimes the charts didn’t make sense, but when they did he might as well have drawn them himself.

  Trading stopped him thinking about Jane, which was more important to him than the money that was pelting down on him in a cash monsoon. The trading software blotted out her smiling muddy face.

  9

  Sebastian got up and walked out of the meeting, his phone pressed tightly to his ear. He was speaking to Ralph, Barron’s broker.

  “Would you like to cash out now?” said the broker. “The pre-IPO money-raising kicks off today. It’s at two hundred and fifty per cent of the pre-pre-IPO price and we can bid you a two hundred per cent profit in cash for your holding.”

  A two-hundred-thousand-pound profit was a nice hit, he thought, but from the serious face he was pulling, he looked as though he was receiving bad news. “What’s the IPO price going to be?”

  “A fifty to a hundred per cent uplift,” said the broker.

  “So if I hold on I’m up for between three hundred and seventy-five and half a million pounds,” he said.

  “No guarantees,” said the voice. “We’re happy to let you out here.”

  Sure, thought Sebastian. You bastards want it all for yourselves. Coming out with half a million pounds from an investment of a hundred thousand would be a tidy result. Now that Jim wasn’t on-side any more, pickings from the bank would be a lot thinner. His bonanza was coming quickly to an end and he had to make up the slack elsewhere. He had taken on an enormous bank loan and bought back the family estate, paying way over the odds for it, from the money-grubbing farmers who had blighted the land like environmental vandals. But when he had done it, the end of the world had been nigh and his bonus, thanks to Jim’s supernatural trading, obscene. Even so, the upkeep of the newly renovated historic pile, as his forebears had found out, was stratospheric. Keeping the thing up to muster required riches, rather than wealth, and his million-pound salary didn’t stretch that far.

  But he had ways and means of stretching his incomings, this being one. He had a bit of capital to play with and, for now, a whole lot of credit, thanks to his employer. He was a bright boy and he had the strategy worked out.

  “Roll my position into the pre-IPO.”

  “You could,” said the broker, “but we’re looking for more money and if you want to be on-side you’ll need to toss in another couple of hundred thousand.”

  “Really?” he said. “That’s a little unexpected.”

  “You know how it works,” said the broker, condescending.

  Sebastian didn’t. He’d never done a mining stock before and this had been a recommendation from an Old Etonian friend. Sebastian was a bulge-bracket banker, not some spivvy small-cap brokerage man. A further 50 to 100 per cent profit on a bigger stake would see his investment grow to between seven hundred thousand and a million poun
ds. That would be quite a killing.

  And Mycock was a legend. He’d heard the stories. He’d met the man.

  “OK, put me down for another two hundred grand.”

  “Right you are,” said the broker.

  *

  Baz looked happy sitting in the chair by the hotel window, the Manila sunset behind him. Normally he wouldn’t have answered the phone but it was his broker. He was in the final stretch of part one of the project: the flotation of his mining fiction. Once the pre-IPO was complete, the company would float on the London AIM market and the first slug of the big money would pour in. Ostensibly the initial money raised was to develop the mine, but in fact it would go into his bank account via a series of fictitious mining-services suppliers. They would drill, survey and assay to a choreographed timetable that would see the share price rise and fall as he insider-traded it, both long and short.

  At the end of the process all that would have been generated were some funky maps, disks of fictitious data, some drill holes and acres of media carefully orchestrated through the financial grapevine. There would be no evidence to probe, even if anyone could be bothered, only drill holes in the jungle of a war zone in a faraway fetid cesspit. An empty drill hole was an empty drill hole, and whether it went down ten thousand feet or a hundred – or even whether it was there at all – no one would ever know. In the old days when someone might have checked up, he’d had concrete poured down the holes for “environmental reasons”. But his final gambit probably wouldn’t need such care. Things would go pear-shaped rather more cleverly than merely not finding anything. This time his man on the inside would make sure that the licence to the mine was pulled just as they were about to hit it big. Bloody tin-pot countries had no rule of law, no land rights or tenure. Everyone would believe that venal, greedy, kleptomaniac politicians had seized his Eldorado at gunpoint. That would be his exit.

  It wasn’t uncommon for amazing mineral deposits to be indefinitely mired in third-world politics, and he’d use that as the coup de grâce when all possibility of sucking more money out of gullible investors had been exhausted. There would be one last ramp, then goodbye.

  “How’s it going?” he said, distracted.

  “We’re done.”

  “That was quick.”

  “They lapped it up,” said the broker.

  Baz looked down at the pretty little tart performing on him. He ran his fingers through her hair. “I thought they would,” he said, and hung up. “Life is good,” he said, to the naked girl kneeling before him. People would risk all forms of danger and humiliation for money. The only question was: were they the fuckee or the fuckor?

  10

  Jane rolled through the recent email on her phone. It had been three weeks since she had broken up with Jim and she hadn’t had a word from him. The jerk, she thought.

  John Smith was regarding her with a toothy sarcastic smile. “You’re not being very forthcoming.”

  “Is this an interrogation?” she said. “Because if it is, you’ve come to the wrong country to do it.”

  “No, no,” said Smith. “I’m just concerned.”

  “So you flew over to see me on your government’s tab to find out how your old co-worker was shaping up.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “So why did they send you?”

  “It’s not often that two important people end up offing two members of the Black Hand in a Paris boutique.”

  “One member.”

  “Two.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “The gentleman with the sore head? His troubles are at an end.”

  “Really?” she said. “Good.” John was waiting for her to say something more. “Well, you can take it from me I didn’t know that there still was a Black Hand.”

  “Neither did I,” said John, “but my co-workers,” he grinned, “just want a report on what happened.”

  “Simple. We go shopping across the street from where we’re staying, we get into a situation and it’s resolved quickly. The end.”

  “And how’s Jim?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not together any more.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s a personal matter,”

  “Come on,” said Smith, “you can say, you’re with a friend now.”

  She rolled the pearl on her BlackBerry. “At this rate you might not be a friend for much longer. Work it out for yourself.”

  “I’ll ask Jim.”

  “You do that.”

  The markets were getting wilder. The indices were thrashing around three and four per cent a day and the Forex markets were gyrating like an Internet dancing parrot listening to Gabba.

  Jim rammed his buying and selling into every twist and turn in the markets with his multi-billion-pound positions. By the end of the month he would hit the ten billion, and on he would go to a hundred billion and continue until he was the first trillionaire in the history of the world.

  The moustache was good: he looked like a serious fellow. He had scraped the beard off the week before.

  Every now and again he would minimise his trading software and look at the wallpaper on his desktop. He thought about resetting the default, but instead he stared at the picture of Jane. He wanted to call her, but how could he? She had said it all in her email. He wasn’t the guy for her. Of course he wasn’t. He was no brick-shithouse special-forces officer, with a chiselled chin and muscles on his muscles. He was no martial artist, PhD genius superhero. He was just a common bloke with some freaky crystal-ball-reading skill. Princesses didn’t marry milkmen, goddesses didn’t fall for mortals, and money didn’t buy love. In fact, it poisoned it.

  He was trading so big now that he could tell the market knew he was there. When he went long the market rose, and when he went short it fell. He was becoming part of the market itself. That was strangely gratifying. He was bullying the world.

  The phone rang. He brought up his trading software to cover the picture of Jane.

  It was Davas. “Jim, what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m trading.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I know. So what?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Making money.”

  “You’re making too much. You’re bending the markets.”

  “So?”

  “If you keep bending them, they’ll break.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. How much have you made? Four, five billion?”

  “Eight.”

  “Eight.” Max paused. “And where do you think all this money’s coming from?”

  “You?”

  “No, not me. From everyone else.”

  “So?”

  “It’s too fast, Jim. If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, you’ll break the bank.”

  “There is no bank.”

  “Of course there is. It’s the Bank of Everybody.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Because you’ll end up hurting people, so many, many people. You’re producing an inefficient market that will choke and die. Without the market we all perish.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “What are you going to do with all this money? Don’t you already have enough?”

  “That’s fine coming from you, Max. You have more than Bill Gates.”

  “Yes, Jim, but it’s the gains of a lifetime of work, not treasure plundered in a few weeks.”

  “I’m not plundering – you sound like Jane.”

  There was a short silence. “Jim, you have to stop. If you go on there’ll be untold suffering. You’ve already driven the markets into panic.”

  “Me?” said Jim. “What are you talking about? I’m just surfing this.”

  “You’re not. You’re causing it. Can’t you tell?”

  “You’re not serious, right?”

  “I’m very serious, Ji
m.”

  He began to laugh. “Have I cracked the game?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what the models say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew I could,” he said. “I just knew it.”

  “You know you must stop, then, don’t you?”

  Jim’s mouse hand was aching. He flexed his fingers. “Tell me again, Max – tell me I’ve beaten the market.”

  “You’ve won, Jim. The moment I realised what you could do, I knew it was a risk you’d try and then might not stop.”

  “And did you win the game, too, Max?”

  “Yes, my friend, and I, too, had to stop. You know my game is different now.”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “Ten billion would be nice, though.”

  “Jim, you can always revisit it. Take it slowly. Put it in my treasuries and it will be ten billion soon enough.”

  “A hundred billion would be nicer still.”

  “Would you want the attention that would bring? I think not. What you have now will be hard enough to keep secret, and if it becomes known, your life will be spoilt. Trust me on that.”

  “What am I going to do?” said Jim. “This is the only game I can play.”

  “It’s a cosmic joke, Jim – you, the richest man in the world with no job and no girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” said Jim, “you know about that.”

  “Yes,” said Davas.

  Jim was rather annoyed now. “Do you know everything?”

  “Pretty much,” said Davas.

  Jim minimised his trading software and looked at the picture of Jane. “OK, Max,” he said sadly, suddenly feeling extremely tired, “I’ve stopped. Hell, it was an amazing run.”

  “Yes, and thank you. You’re a good, wise and smart man – thank God for that.”

  11

  Sebastian’s eyes glazed over as he watched his motionless screen. He was about as low as he could get. It was two days since Jim had stopped trading and his team no longer had anything to mirror. Using Jim’s trades as their guide was legal and extremely lucrative, but the gravy train had stopped on the tracks.