Fallen: A Leopold Blake Thriller (A Private Investigator Series of Crime and Suspense Thrillers Book 5)

by Nick Stephenson

  Glancing up, Leopold counted four security cameras, modern enough to be at odds with the shabby exterior. He guessed they were probably infra-red, given the lack of ambient light, and hoped to hell their range wasn’t extensive enough to catch the heat signatures of Kane and her team as they waited at the end of the street.

  Leopold approached the front door. It looked in better condition than the rest of the building – solid steel, with an intercom mounted on the frame. He took a moment to compose himself, running through the plan in his head.

  Step one: get inside. Step two: convince the Triads he wasn’t worth killing. Step three...and that’s where things got a little hazy.

  Still, it was too late to turn back now.

  Leopold took a deep breath and hit the intercom button. He heard a loud buzzing noise, followed by empty static. He waited. Almost thirty seconds passed.

  He reached for the buzzer again, but was cut short as a metallic screeching sound indicated somebody was opening the door.

  The steel doorway swung inward, revealing the outline of a muscular man dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt. His head was shaven and he wore a chunky gold chain around his neck. The medallion swung from side to side as he opened the door. He also sported a gleaming silver pistol holstered to his belt, what looked like a Desert Eagle .44.

  “Nǐ shì shuí?” the man asked.

  Leopold glanced down at the man’s weapon, then up at his face. “You speak English?” he said.

  The man growled. “Who the hell are you?” he said, in a strong accent.

  “Li Huan sent me.”

  Another grunt. The man stepped to the side and ushered Leopold inside. He said, “Keep walking. Turn right at the end of the corridor.”

  Leopold obliged and headed down the hallway. He didn’t hear any footsteps following him, meaning the big guy had probably gone back to keep watch at the door.

  At the end of the corridor, the hall opened up into a large reception area. The room was a complete mess – it looked like someone had knocked down several partition walls to make a larger space, and hadn’t bothered patching up afterward. The floor had been partially carpeted, the rest bare concrete, and the walls were stained with more unintelligible graffiti.

  Even more disconcerting was the group of heavily armed Triads stood in the center of the room, around a dozen men in total, all of them glaring at Leopold with a mixture of contempt and intense dislike. A couple of them muttered something Leopold couldn’t hear. Then one of them stepped forward.

  “The American! You here for the job, yes?” the man said. He stood a little shorter than the others, but no less lethal-looking. He was lean, with an angular face, and wore a knife and pistol.

  Leopold looked him up and down. “Yes,” he said. “Li Huan sent me.”

  “Good, good,” the man said. “I am Lo Ping. I’ll need you to put your hands on your head, thank you.” He nodded at three men stood behind him. They marched forward and began patting Leopold down.

  “Just procedure,” Ping said. “Looks like you’re all good.”

  The three men nodded simultaneously and retook their positions.

  Ping continued, “So, you some kind of business superstar, yes? You help make us good money, we’ll take care of you.”

  “Yeah, something like that,” said Leopold. He kept his eyes on Ping, trying his best not to pay any attention to the array of weaponry his colleagues were making a point of brandishing behind him.

  “The let’s get started, huh?” said Ping. “You do good, maybe we find something useful for you to do. You don’t do good...” he chuckled. “Well, you make sure you do good, huh?”

  “Yeah. Do good. Got it.” Leopold offered a mock salute and immediately regretted it. A couple of the armed goons shuffled impatiently.

  “This way,” said Ping, turning around. He led the way past the group of onlookers to a makeshift workstation toward the back of the room. It was an old desk, with an ancient-looking computer tower perched on the end. A bulky CRT monitor took up most of the remaining space, leaving just enough room for a keyboard and mouse. A tatty desk chair stood waiting, some kind of dark stain on the cushion. Leopold tried not to think about what might have caused it.

  “Sit here,” said Ping, pointing at the chair. “I’ll go fetch Zhang and Huan. They will see what you can do.”

  Ping smiled, revealing pointy white teeth, and left Leopold alone at the desk. The three men who had frisked him hung back, keeping their distance. The rest of the group shuffled off, chattering to themselves quietly.

  “Nice place you got here,” said Leopold, settling into the chair. “It’s got that shabby-chic look. Really popular these days.”

  No reply.

  “Yeah, this place would sell for a fortune back in New York. Even with the missing walls, it still beats the hell out of Queens.” Leopold grinned.

  Still nothing.

  Leopold sighed and turned his attention to the computer. It was an old Hewlett-Packard, with what looked like a 56kbps modem hooked up to a port in the back. He tapped the space bar and the screen flickered into life, revealing a Windows 95 desktop, complete with a desktop wallpaper of a woman dressed in a bikini straddling a motorcycle.

  Classy joint, Leopold thought, opening up one of the folders.

  “I see you’re getting yourself acquainted,” a voice from behind said.

  Leopold spun around in his chair. Two men stood a few feet away. Both wore dark suits, no visible weapons. They looked like typical middle management. Neither seemed a day older than forty, but Leopold couldn’t be sure.

  “Good to meet you in person, Mr. Carter,” one of the men said. He was the taller of the two. “I am Li Huan. We spoke on the phone.” He offered a shallow bow.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” said Leopold. He shifted his gaze to the other man. “And you must be Zhang.” He stood and held out a hand.

  Zhang ignored it. “Let’s skip the formalities,” he said. “I don’t have time to waste. Huan says you might be of some use. Prove it.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Zhang stepped forward and leaned over Leopold, taking hold of the computer mouse. He clicked through a few file folders and found a spreadsheet file. He opened it up.

  “This is a record of New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ activity going back eighteen months,” Zhang said, handing over control of the computer to Leopold. “I want you to find us a trade.”

  Leopold glanced at the screen. “This is the S&P 500?”

  Zhang nodded. “Find me something good. What do you like?”

  “Give me a minute. It’s a lot of data.” Leopold highlighted the spreadsheet cells and created a pivot table. “I need to get all these numbers into something I can use.”

  “Make it quick.” Zhang glanced at his watch. “Five minutes.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Leopold. “You want me to analyze five hundred rows of data and give you a stock pick in five minutes?”

  “Four minutes fifty-six seconds.”

  Li Huan shuffled uncomfortably. The three armed heavies gripped their weapons a little tighter.

  “Okay, okay, I get the picture.” Leopold returned his attention to the computer screen.

  He configured the pivot table to show historical averages for the top-performing thirty stocks going back eighteen months. He stuffed the data into a chart and looked at the trend lines.

  Nothing exciting.

  Ignoring the top performers, Leopold decided to test a theory. He located firms trading on both the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges and eliminated the domestic firms from the sample. Next, he focused on the top ten by share price.

  “Three minutes,” said Zhang.

  Four of the top ten were Japanese companies. Three were British, three German. Leopold homed in on the Japanese stocks.

  “Okay, I’ve got something,” said Leopold, swiveling around in his chair.

  “Go ahead,” said Zhang. “Impress me.”

 
“This is all theoretical. But there’s a chance something like this would work.” He turned back to the screen. “The Japanese market took a massive hit a few years ago thanks to the earthquake and tsunami that knocked out a significant portion of the east coast. Naturally, the economic damage was severe and the Yen plummeted.”

  “Get to the point, Mr. Carter.”

  Leopold sighed. “The point is, the Japanese market recovered quickly. Too quickly. These four companies especially have seen greater-than-average growth during a time of exceptional hardship. That growth has overestimated the value of the company stock.”

  “We’re not a Forex operation, Carter,” said Zhang. “We don’t trade in currency fluctuations, if that’s what you’re getting at. Give me something solid.”

  “I’m not suggesting you bet on the currency,” said Leopold. “There’s no way these four corporations saw this level of investment without some kind of embedded derivative keeping the value of the stock tied to the Yen. No US investment firm in their right mind would buy Japanese stock that wasn’t, especially at these levels.”

  “So what?”

  “It means that the derivatives have grown faster than they should. The value of the Yen will catch up soon enough, meaning the American investors will lose out in the exchange rate and they’ll start selling. More importantly, these big investors will have a portfolio insurance policy in place. As the value of their stock drops, the policy will force the shares to be sold every time there’s a downtick.” Leopold paused. “And there’s going to be a hell of a lot of downticks if this level of unsustainable growth continues. Within months, not years.”

  Zhang leaned in a little closer and peered at the numbers on the screen. He said, “You want us to short the stock?”

  “Like crazy,” said Leopold. “The second you see the Yen shift the wrong direction, pump everything you’ve got into this. You can stand to triple your investment.”

  “If your predictions come true,” said Zhang.

  “Without access to the companies’ filings, a robust analysis, and a few hours alone with the Tokyo Stock Exchange records, I can’t be sure. But based on the information you gave me…”

  “Not good enough,” said Zhang. “We have analysts who can do this. They would have noticed if it was a viable option. What do you know that they don’t?”

  Leopold frowned and looked up. “I suspect most of your analysts weren’t working in a room full of heavily armed Triads. It’s quite an incentive, I can tell you.”

  “I know people who made a fortune when the Japanese market took a dive in the nineties. If we’re going to expose ourselves to that much risk, I’m going to need better than triple.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Leopold.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Zhang checked his watch. “You now have forty-five seconds.”

  “Look, you stand to make the most money on a market turn. All I can do is try to predict where and when that might happen.”

  Zhang nodded at one of the armed men standing behind him and held out his hand. The man unholstered his sidearm, what looked like a Glock, and handed it over. Zhang checked the chamber and turned his attention back to Leopold.

  “Thirty seconds,” he said, pressing the gun against Leopold’s head. “You’re running out of opportunities to impress me, Mr. Carter.”

  Leopold felt the cold metal against the back of his skull and felt his pulse rate quicken. He tried to concentrate. The numbers on the screen didn’t mean a damn thing if Zhang was looking for some kind of Hail Mary. The kind of investment opportunity that only came around once every decade.

  “Okay, okay,” said Leopold, shifting his line of thinking. The gun pressed up against his head wasn’t helping his concentration. “Forget the figures. You’ll make the most money on a market turn, right? So, instead of trying to predict when they might happen, why not engineer them yourselves?”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  Leopold continued, “Short of figuring out how to create your own natural disasters, you can start smaller. Disrupt trading, you disrupt the market.” His mind began to whir. “We’re talking insider trading on a socioeconomic scale. We’re talking trading in fear. Fear makes people dump stock. So make people afraid.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “There was a bomb attack in New York this week. Rumors are flying around. There might be something big going down.” Leopold looked up at Zhang. “You look like the sort of people who might want to take advantage of that situation.”

  “How do you know these things?” asked Zhang.

  “Like I told Li Huan, I’ve got contacts in the right places. FBI, NYPD, Wall Street. I have information you can use.”

  “What’s the projected return?”

  Leopold felt Zhang push the gun against his skull a little harder. He took a deep breath, feeling his hands begin to shake. “If the whole market takes a dive? Hard to say. If you put all your capital into commodity stocks like gold and you short as many of the blue chip shares as possible, with enough leverage and deep OTM options you could be looking at eight hundred percent or more if the market drops by three to five points. If you time it right. Just look what happened after 9/11.”

  Zhang relaxed a little. He checked his watch again. “Three seconds to spare.” He smiled. “The last person we had come for an interview didn’t do so well.”

  Leopold thought about the dark stain on the chair cushion and suddenly wished he were sitting somewhere else.

  “Come with me, Mr. Carter,” said Zhang, lowering the Glock and handing it back to its owner. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Chapter 53

  CHUNG MON WAITED impatiently in his well-heated office, keen to get the morning’s meeting over with. Nicknamed Mo Dedong, thanks in part to his physical resemblance of Chairman Mao, the Liugong Triad boss had a reputation for brutality – a reputation he was keen to reinforce. And he hated being kept waiting.

  Born to a Hakka family in the region now known as Szechuan, Chung had been ostracized most his life. Despite humble upbringings, his family’s circumstances had only given him the drive to fight harder and faster to get what he wanted – and coming from nothing gave Chung the hunger to keep pushing for more.

  The 14K bosses had brought him in a little over seven years ago after his predecessor had met an untimely end at the hands of a rival faction. Chan Yuen Muk, the previous Dragon Head, had run things differently. With a focus on the cocaine and heroin business, the risks had been high and the payoffs low, especially after the suppliers’ and distributors’ cuts were taken into account. With demand having plummeted since the last market downturn, Chung had known things needed to change.

  His idea had been a simple one: to use insider information to play God with the world’s largest stock markets. With the likelihood of sensitive information being traced across borders almost zero, the risks were low. Even if the Americans’ SEC found out, they were powerless to do anything about it. Only the hapless Finance and Economic graduates he shipped over to Wall Street, London, and Tokyo had anything to lose, and who would believe them anyway?

  The 14K bosses had been pleased. But the inevitable curse of early success is increased expectations. Chung had struggled to keep pace with his masters’ ever-increasing hunger for results, and the last quarter had been the first time the Liugong Group had failed to post an increase in profits.

  And Chung knew what that meant for the prospects of his long-term health. Now, his only hope was to adapt his approach and aim for the big payouts – but he needed more than an army of scrawny graduates to make that happen. He needed someone with seasoned skills, preferably without any concern for banking ethics. He figured, given the right price, that shouldn’t prove too much of an issue.

  Chung paced the carpet, and almost didn’t notice his office door swing open. His second in command, Zhang, stood in the entryway, with the newcomer Huan and some gweilo white man Chung had never seen before.

 
“The foreigner looks promising,” said Zhang, in Cantonese.

  Chung shuddered. His language of birth was Hakka-Chinese, and he had forced himself to learn Mandarin as a child. He still found Cantonese disagreeable, the language of the poor. People with whom Chung had no desire to associate himself.

  Still, traditions were traditions.

  “Good,” said Chung, eventually. “Show him in.”

  Zhang shoved the gweilo into the room and told him to sit down. Then Zhang and Huan left the room, shutting the door behind them. Chung noticed the new guy looking a little shaken as he departed, but the Triad boss chalked it up to nervousness. It wasn’t always easy, this line of work.

  Chung gestured toward the empty seat opposite his desk and the American sat down.

  “You risked a lot coming here,” Chung said in English. He sat down behind the desk. “Why?”

  The American shrugged. He was wearing casual clothes, had scruffy hair and two-day stubble. Definitely didn’t look like the sort of person who knew how to make money, but Chung knew appearances could often be deceptive.

  “Call it boredom,” the American said, eventually. “Call it whatever you like. I’m barred from working in the financial markets in the US, so naturally I needed to find somewhere a little more...accommodating.”

  Chung smiled. Say what you want about the People’s Republic of China, but this nation was truly becoming the land of opportunity.

  “Huan said he’d hook me up, so I figured I’d drop by. Looks like you guys could do with a little help.” He grinned. “I’m your man.”

  “You performed well enough for Zhang to let you through,” said Chung. “And that’s a good start. But I’ll need something more than trust to give you control of our portfolio.”

  The American nodded. “You want a demonstration.”

  “You catch on fast.”

  “What are we talking here?”

  “We’ll see what you can do with three million US,” said Chung. “Then maybe we expand our reach a little.”