Dangerous Bet: A financial thriller

by Jack Gardner

  Eddie drove on the right lane, which was separated from the lane next to it by a large traffic island. The road then widened to a two-lane road, and Eddie saw two cars driving in front of him on the right lane, headed toward the curve that led south. He estimated they were driving about as fast as he was. Once he passed the traffic island, Eddie decided to pass the car in front of him. He push steered the motorcycle while pressing the gas, and started passing the car in front of him from the left. In a smooth move he then straightened, steering the bike the other way.

  And then it happened. While Eddie was driving next to the car he wanted to pass, the car suddenly shifted to the left, clinging to his motorcycle. Eddie tried to straighten the bike but felt he was losing control. The two vehicles were going at sixty miles per hour, one next to the other, and Eddie knew he was trapped. He instinctively pressed the brakes, trying to slow down and separate from the enormous body of metal that pushed the side of his body and squeezed his right leg. And then, when the motorcycle began to lose speed, the two vehicles separated and the motorcycle plummeted to the ground. Eddie felt the panic running through his veins and prepared himself for the blow that would come when his body met the asphalt. And then the blow came. Eddie could hear the sound of metal hitting against the asphalt even through the helmet, a sound similar to a horrible shriek of pain, when the heavy machine glided in slow motion until it stopped.

  ***

  Eddie realized he was still alive. He looked at the 300-pound motorcycle leaning against his right leg and realized that fuel was dripping from the tank onto the road, creating a small puddle under the hot engine. He instantaneously came back to his senses, realizing how dangerous it was; leaning on his right elbow, he pushed himself forward with all his might and released his foot. There was a hole the size of a quarter in his right knee, deep enough to teach a medical student about the anatomy of the knee. To his surprise, though, his secondary blood vessels, which were squashed and slashed, were not dangerously bleeding. Eddie realized all that within seconds, while the driver of the car that hit him stopped and started running toward him, a look of utter fear in his eyes.

  Eddie took off his helmet. Suddenly, his relief for being alive was replaced by uncontrollable anger. He heard himself yell at the driver, “Why can’t you look, goddamnit? Why did you shift lanes right as I was passing you?” The terrified driver mumbled something, and once he saw Eddie was in a somewhat stable state after all, he turned to his car and came back with a small bottle of cold mineral water. Eddie, whose anger has subsided a bit, grabbed the bottle and took a few sips, looking at the open wound in his knee. It was hard not to.

  In the meantime, another driver who stopped to help them called an ambulance, and a police car that passed by stopped once the policemen saw the bike on its side. Within a matter of minutes, Eddie found himself rushed to the nearest hospital in an ambulance. He tried to repress the human tendency to think about the fragility of life in these kinds of moment, as his operational mind was already busy thinking about what he had to do. And so, as he was lying on a stretcher in an ambulance, with a young nurse taking his blood pressure, Eddie tapped the speed dial button on his cellphone. When he heard Sammy’s voice, he quickly and efficiently told him about the accident and that he was being taken to the hospital, whose name he mentioned, and suggested that considering these developments, Sammy should think about sending someone to the hospital so that he could dictate the report he was waiting for—that is, of course, if the matter was that urgent and couldn’t wait.

  Sammy, whose first tendency was to curse the bad luck accompanying every part of this story, told him that he would look into it and decide whether to send someone or not. In any case, he asked Eddie to call him once he knew how severe his injury was and not to hesitate to ask for anything he might need.

  ***

  Sammy hung up and started thinking about a possible replacement for Eddie. How would Ram take the accident story and the need to negotiate with someone else? He thought, ‘Will he think this is another one of the Bureau’s tricks?’

  He did not really feel like seeing the Head again that night, but circumstances left him no other choice, so he called Judy one more time and heard the surprise in her voice as he asked to come back for a quick and urgent briefing. He received immediate approval. When he opened the door to L’s office, he saw the Head standing, his coat on, probably getting ready to leave the office after yet another sixteen-hour day. L looked at him with a “not again, goddamnit,” kind of look, and then let Sammy in.

  Even before the boss took his seat, Sammy started explaining the latest development. He expected the boss’ wrath, but it never came. The boss’ philosophy of life was based on the fact that life—whatever that is—takes place only in the present, and this present is dynamic and constantly shifting. The past is no more than history and nostalgia. The future isn’t here yet. Therefore, all we have is the present, even though one has to admit that at times the present does have an effect on the future.

  The present was the accident, and from this point they would have to move forward. “If you go to the hospital now, we would have a report before morning,” determined the Head.

  “That is not a problem,” Sammy agreed, “but I would like to consider my actions and then decide.”

  “Is the man fit to give a report?” The Head asked.

  “He seemed totally fit when he called from the ambulance,” Sammy replied. Of course, there is no knowing, things may change if he had some kind of internal injuries that have yet to be detected, which could definitely happen in high speed motorcycle accidents.

  “Alright, it is your decision, but remember, we have no time to lose. Report to me at 8:00 a.m. I will be here.”

  “No problem,” said Sammy, rising from his seat.

  “I don’t think any good will come out of it all…” The Head uttered a summary, and Sammy thought that statement was more than a double entendre.

  35

  For the first time in a week, I had a good feeling when I left the meeting. The guy who called himself Eddie made a good impression. I did not think that he had completely switched sides, definitely not: I could see his loyalty to the system. I could sense it clearly through my own experience. But he was open to hear me. Maybe he was simply compartmentalized and tried to see for himself what was going on. Maybe he was trying to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. That seemed right when considering his avoiding the tail they tried to give him. I assumed he was of some seniority, because his attitude seemed to fit a senior in the system more than a junior—they tended to follow orders without any doubt. And there was also the thing with the special phone number he gave me. I was convinced it was secret, that the Bureau did not know he had it. That was an obvious sign to the fact that he wanted to keep his options open.

  I thought about what he said. He offered to turn me in and promised to keep me safe—at least until the moment he hands me over to them. My problem was that he could not reassure me as to what would happen then. As soon as they have me, they could make me disappear, my fate would be in their hands. They already revealed their intentions once. Had the price they paid made them more flexible or more determined? And why, for God’s sake, did they believe that the only solution to the problem was to get read of me once and for all? And what was the problem anyway? I had to admit it was all very confusing…

  I asked for time so that I could try and understand what I had gotten myself into. I had already retraced all of my activities at the Bureau for the past six months from all angles; who I was with, what was said, etc., and I could not find a thing that could have set all of this in motion. I also thought about the idea that maybe they thought I somehow got some classified information, but then I reached a dead end. No clue.

  There was also my personal life. Could it be something that didn’t have to do with the Bureau directly? Well, I had to admit that my personal life wasn’t too exciting those days. It had been a year and a half since I realized that I was un
willing to tie the knot with the woman I loved in those dramatic days. Until three months ago, I lived for over a year in a rented apartment, alone, without many social engagements or too many guests. I had a number of casual affairs with women and two of them ended in my apartment, but these two events were nothing irregular in the city where I lived. There was also nothing irregular about them, no damage to any of the two women, none of the kind of hurtful occurrences that could invoke vengeance if one of those women was to be the daughter of someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. To the contrary, I would have defined both events as pleasant and harmless.

  One of my personal preoccupations was the martial arts. I was a member of an amateur martial arts club, where I used to practice and take part in competitions, both inside the club and with opponents from other clubs. The truth was that considering the training I went through in the service and my past preoccupations, I should have been listed as a professional rather than an amateur, but I had to keep my civilian cover. No one, especiallyI, was interested in my becoming famous, a result of which could be that sports journalists would start looking into my private life. Therefore, I was listed as an amateur and acted like one—even when that meant that I had to feign losing a couple of times. I was considered very good among the amateurs, but not good enough to compete with the pros. That, therefore, was not the source of my troubles.

  There was also my gambling activity—if that’s how I should call my pseudo-scientific interest in the Millionaires’ lotteries. I had been following these for almost a decade and never went beyond the boundaries of the law or good taste. As far as I was concerned, it was a statistical study that grew out of the legitimate curiosity of an amateur researcher. I never aspired to reach the scientific standards of the Committee on Statistics.

  I knew that no matter what it was that made someone in the Bureau want me out of the way, if I wanted to find out what was going on, I had to weed out any presupposition and research each and every idea, considering all options.

  I had little time and had to look deep into my past, to turn every stone and try and stay optimistic, as I had no other choice.

  ***

  At times, luck shows itself to man, and at other times, man makes his own luck. Since I had no idea where to begin my investigation, I decided to start off by considering all direct contacts I had at the Bureau in the past month. It is true, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but considering that I would have to do it at some point, I decided to start there, even if only because I had very little direct contact at the Bureau recently and could therefore cover that subject quite quickly.

  And also, I had to start somewhere.

  I took a piece of paper and wrote down all contacts I remembered, without excluding a thing. After a couple of minutes, I had a list of notes including short phone calls, the note I found in my shoe where someone tipped me that I was under surveillance, the lunch with Kirsch and the Vice Head of Operations, escaping the surveillance and moving into the safe apartment, the unsuccessful assassination attempt at Davis, and my visit to the Head of Operations’ home.

  Thinking about it a little, I divided these events according to three subgroups: “chance” events, events “initiated by me,” and events that were “initiated by others.” The random chance encounters and the ones I initiated would probably not be linked to the information I was looking for. On the other hand, events initiated by others could contain such hints.

  Why did I even think there were any hints? Only because of that message in my shoe that told me that I was under surveillance. That message revealed that I had an ally somewhere who wanted to help me. I did not know why anyone would want to do that, but I hoped he or she would not abandon me in the battlefield. Still, I understood his or her need to be as careful as possible.

  The note contained no information apart from the words “you’re not alone,” and there was no point dwelling on speculations that could have changed the way I was thinking. I moved on to the phone calls, which were all quite short, allowing me to memorize their contents. I wrote them all down, without missing a single word, from the first conversation with the Vice Head of Operations, where I tried to turn myself in and up to the conversations I initiated in order to renew contact. When I finished writing these down, I leaned back in my chair and started going through them carefully.

  Murphy’s law determines that the thing you are looking for will always be in the bottom of the pile, which was true here as well. (Why didn’t I start from the bottom?) What I was looking for was in my last conversation with Judy. I looked again and again at the word “bet,” which was repeated twice in the message I was given. It did not really belong there to begin with, nor was it part of the usual style of Bureau messages, and it was included twice…in the kind of message where every word is planned in advanced!

  I had no proof, but I knew this was the hint I was looking for. Someone was trying to tell me that the key to all of this was in my gambling activities. It still wasn’t time to look into who was behind these messages and why he or she was doing that. First of all, I would have to use this hint to solve the mystery. Even if it were related to the gambling, what did that mean? After all, I never did anything illegal. What could it be?

  I closed my eyes and let my thoughts roam. Sooner or later, my mind would solve this riddle. Would find the link.

  It better be sooner.

  ***

  If I was going to look into the gambling thing, I had to start off looking into what it was that made it relevant all of a sudden. I was looking for an irregular event that happened recently and was related to my gambling hobby. Something started moving in the back of my mind, even though at this point I still could not tell how exactly it was linked to the Bureau and all that.

  The extraordinary event I came up with was the Millennium Lottery that recently took place. It seemed like the event passed quietly, six new millionaires were announced, and everyone was content. So far for the public. For me, it looked totally different. The Millennium Lottery was the moment where my ten-year-long research collapsed, and not with a whimper, but with a bang. All the conclusions that I thought I had scientifically reached were disproved in that lottery. I thought about that a little, while trying to ask myself the right questions.

  There is no doubt that my troubles began right after the lottery—it was about two weeks after that event that I got the anonymous note that warned me of the surveillance.

  A number of people at the Bureau knew about my interest in the lottery, since it came up once in a while during small talk. The only time when a stranger was part of it was the one time that we were sitting at the dining room—Kirsch, the Vice Head of Operations (Sammy was his name), and myself—and talked about it for a couple of minutes. It was right after the Millennium Lottery. As far as I could remember, Sammy’s interest was no more than simply polite. I remembered that he was skeptic about scientific methods and claimed the final results were nothing but luck. On the other hand, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he wasn’t just a passive listener: he asked a number of questions and learned quite a bit about my activities. If I were to link that with the beginning of the surveillance—or at least, the moment I discovered it—there was a match. I never believed in coincidences. I had a gut feeling that there was something there, hidden from the eye, which might just be my first clue.

  I tried to think about the problem theoretically. Say someone develops an efficient, proven model to predict the results of a lottery that is constructed according to known, systematic rules. Assuming that all of a sudden, in one of the lotteries, the model fails to predict the results completely. What is likely to happen then? The model’s initiator would want to research the reason his model failed thoroughly, meaning, see where things went wrong. What is so wrong about that kind of examination taking place? Unless the model is not at fault concerning its failure, but rather, the rules of the game were different. And if they were changed, they were changed by someone who had something t
o gain from it. But the rules are fixed, public, unchangeable. Or maybe not. What if someone found a way to change them, thus bringing about the failure of the model? I suddenly felt like I could breathe again. Something was shining in the horizon. I still didn’t know what it was, but the pieces of the puzzle started seeming more logical than they ever were up to this point. Obviously, there were still many things I would have to check, but at least I had a direction.

  I created a possible scenario in my mind. Someone found a way to “tweak” the Millennium Lottery in order to bend the results in a way that would benefit him or her. Then he or she discovered that there was a model that, due to the change of rules, failed in predicting the results, and that there was a chance that the person who developed the model would want to look into the reasons why the model had failed. Moreover, the person who developed the model belonged to an organization that dealt with investigations and fieldwork, and he might get suspicious that there was some kind of scheme and try to expose it.

  The prize for the Millennium Lottery was the immense sum of ten million dollars: a sum of money that could, without a doubt, be used for quite meaningful plans. So what did those involved do? They decide to get rid of the person who developed the model, hoping that they would solve the problem that way.

  This was a theoretical scenario, but it might just be true. ‘What I have to do now,’ I thought, ‘is find out who the winners of the lottery were and whether there is any connection between them. If such a connection exists, I would have to discover where it leads. Then the pieces of the puzzle would come together on their own.’