Dollar Down (6 page)

I also needed help in Paris. It didn't take me long to
decide on Pascal Lucet. A few years back, we'd worked
together on an industrial espionage case for a handbag
manufacturer. Someone in the company had been selling
design specs to pirates. Merchants in Korea and Hong Kong
were coming out with copies before the legitimate items hit the
market. Pascal was savvy, with the right touch of sleaze for that
kind of undercover work. He was born in Algiers and spoke
Arabic along with French and English. Those skills could be
useful if the Saudi meant a Mideast connection. Besides, he ran
a one-man operation. He might teach me something about the
business. I left a message on his answering machine, then
flicked on CNN and watched until eleven thirty-six, when the
phone rang.

"Mick Sanchez," I answered.

"
Och aye
, Irish."

Irish?
Och aye
? Scottish Gaelic with a Gaulish
tinge, "Pascal?"

"Who else? You got work for me?"

At least his English was American. "I do." For the next
fifteen minutes, I explained the situation. My briefing included
the names, resumes and current hotels and phone numbers of
the two men from PDVSA.

After Sabine died, I'd been ready to pack it in. Thanks
to Oddsson, I now hungered for the hunt. Like a hound, my
brain was alive with scents, not of the prey but of the victim, of
her hair, her skin, her essence that lingered in the flat. If Sabine
had been murdered, I would track the killer down as an
avenging angel. It was a long time before I could sleep. When I
did, I dreamed of flaming swords.

Alexandra's call woke me at six-fifteen on a Saturday
morning.

"I'm still not sure about the notations you showed me."
She didn't waste time with niceties. "You asked me about Bizet.
After he left the firm, he became a quant, a quantitative analyst.
He ran a hedge fund for several years. Now he runs the family
vineyard near Bergerac. If you still want to see him, you'll have
to go there. It's a day trip. Can you meet me at
seven-thirty?"

I could and did.

The trip by train and rental car took us through
forested valleys, flanked by stony outcrops of steep hills
topped by castles. Villages were built into the sides of cliffs.
Houses nested among hills and trees. We crossed fast flowing
brooks and broad swaths of farms and cattle pastures. The
natural beauty of southern France easily outshone the
manmade art of Paris.

On the way, Alexandra said that Bizet had worked in
the firm a little less than two years. He had left because he
disliked what he considered the servile posture of consultants
toward their clients. When a client called, the consultant came.
Also, in the end, the client made all the decisions. Consultants
could only recommend. He was open and friendly, she said, but
he was emotionally an aristocrat. Besides, he had made much
more money as a quant than as a consultant.

Alexandra turned onto a narrow gravel road that ran
through fields of grapevines and stopped in front of a
sprawling two-story home. When I got out of the car, a rangy,
longhaired dog looped toward me. He planted his front paws
on my chest. A man as rangy as the dog followed and grabbed
its collar.

"Bonjour, M. Bizet," Alexandra said.

"Jack likes you too much," Bizet grinned and reached
out with his free hand.

I shook it, and then scratched the dog behind his ear.
"Hello, Jacque."

"No," Bizet corrected. "He's an English hound, so he's
Jack."

Alexandra laughed. "It sounds the same when you say
it."

Bizet shrugged. "I know six languages, but when I
speak them they all sound French. Only I know what language
I'm speaking. Let's go inside."

Bizet's wife greeted us briefly before excusing herself.
We drank coffee in a parlor, while Alexandra filled in details
about Sabine's death and Trevor's disappearance. By the time
she showed him the chart, Bizet was beginning to look uneasy.
Nevertheless, he studied it for several minutes before inviting
us into his study.

Alexandra and I sat quietly as he ran through computer
programs. After about twenty minutes, the mechanical shush of
a laser printer broke the silence. He handed us another chart
that showed fluctuations of the dollar against the euro over the
past two months. Each peak and dip corresponded to a date on
Trevor's chart and the percentages cited in the chart were
close to the rise or fall of the dollar against the euro on the
corresponding day.

Bizet had replaced the letters in one of Trevor's notes
with numbers. He pointed to the date of one example. "This
appears to represent a set of derivatives and a futures contract
that would have paid more than nine hundred percent of the
initial investment, if they were entered into and executed on
the dates cited in Trevor's chart. That means a one thousand
dollar investment would yield a profit in excess of ten
thousand dollars within six days."

I frowned. "Legally?"

"A derivative is a financial instrument that derives its
value from something else. For example, you can buy a futures
contract on a stock index that will pay off if the index rises to
the target level, but you don't own actual shares. This one is
quite complex. It would pay only if the dollar traded within a
range of half a percentage point of your target rate on a
selected time frame in the future. You get great leverage with
something like that. A very small investment earns an
enormous payoff, or loss. You'd have to be crazy to bet on
it."

"You got all that from equations?"

"They aren't equations. They're just notations. A lot of
it is math, but some of the letters are simply
abbreviations."

"Alexandra, does this fit into your petroleum
study?"

"Not that I can see."

Then where did it fit? The checks I had requested on
the client team and on Cervantes might have been a
waste.

"M. Bizet, would it be useful to work out all the
notations on Trevor's chart? Would that show us anything,
else?" I said.

"What are you looking for, exactly? "

"We just wanted to know what these meant."

"In that case, I doubt it. I don't know if these were
actual trades or he was back-checking a theory."

I had a final question. "Do you know an investment
banker in London named Gordon Mumby?"

"I know of him, but the last I heard, he worked at
LIFFE."

"Life? Insurance?"

"The London International Financial Futures and
Options Exchange."

Alexandra said, "It was purely British, until it was
purchased by Euronext. It's still one of the world's largest
trading centers for equity derivatives. It also handles more
than thirty percent of the world's foreign exchange trading,
which ran more than five trillion dollars a day in 2013,
according to the Bank of International Settlements. That
includes spot trades, swaps, forward contracts, options. Trades
in dollars account for more than eighty-five percent of the
total."

"Could Mumby have designed the instruments in
Trevor's chart?" I asked Bizet.

"Absolutely, but he couldn't have anticipated the
forex—that's the foreign exchange—market with such accuracy. No
one could."

We thanked Bizet for his time and the donation of his
expertise.

"Before you go," he said, "I would like to know if you
have told anyone else you were coming here or that you had
contacted me?"

I shook my head and looked at Alexandra.

"No," she said.

Bizet nodded slowly and hummed under his breath. "I
have one more favor to offer in exchange for a vow from you. I
will tell you how to contact my former colleague, Jim
Burroughs, an American. He's quite gifted. He has designed a
grid of supercomputers specifically for modeling financial data.
I believe it is being tested now, but is not yet online for
business. He might be interested in this. Actually, I think he
should see it."

"What do you want us to promise?" I said.

Bizet laid the charts side by side. "As you see, my chart
covers historical data through yesterday. Besides past data,
Trevor's chart extends two weeks and a day into the future, to
March five. Look at these dates." He pointed to a line sloping
downward from March three to five. "Whoever created this
expects the dollar to fall thirteen percent in two days. Such a
plunge, forgive my understatement, could occur only from a
deeply disturbing event. What you must swear is that you will
tell no one, including Jim Burroughs, that you have spoken to
me about this."

I looked for a hint of showmanship, a little
just-kidding-guys, in Bizet's face. There was none. We swore
ourselves to silence in exchange for Burroughs' phone
number.

I didn't know why Bizet was so concerned about
maintaining anonymity. Maybe it was just to preserve the moat
around his idyllic existence, or maybe something more sinister.
I couldn't guess. In any case, I was glad Alexandra was driving
and left me to daydreams of tranquility.

A pristine rill rushed parallel to the road we traveled. A
young woman had stopped to let her horse drink. A fisherman
walked its banks. Forests, though the trees were bared by
winter, exuded aromas of loam and grass. We stopped at a
café that served country fare of pork chops, carrots and
hearty soups. Bottles of wine were set at each table in
preparation for customers.

More than once, I thought about turning back and
asking Bizet if he could use another field hand in his
vineyards.

On the way to Bergerac, Alexandra and I had spent the
time either studying Trevor's charts or discussing how to
approach Bizet. Driving through the countryside, we chatted
about wine, music and mountaintop castles. As we approached
Paris, the tone changed.

"Are you worried?" I said.

"About what?"

"Here's the short list." I held up one finger at a time.
"Trevor's missing, Sabine might have been murdered. Bizet is
predicting an event so disturbing that the dollar will fall
thirteen percent two weeks from now. You're the last
Indian."

"What?"

"You're in the middle of something besides a project to
market fuel for power plants."

She turned her face toward the window. The sun was
low. Its light reflected streaks of red and gold in her hair. The
contours of her cheek and jaw were ideal silhouettes.

When I first met Sabine, within minutes she had let
diverse facets of her personality well to the surface. Her office
alone had told me more about her than Alexandra had revealed
in the entire day we'd spent together. Either there was no
depth to her beyond her career or she had learned to conceal
anything that might be seen as a weakness. The perfection of
her physical beauty ironically made her forgettable. There was
no flaw to stick in the mind to imply character. If she had
disciplined her psyche to appear flawless as well, the irony was
even greater. She would gain only the invisibility of
perfection.

"How can I be part of something I know nothing
about?"

"Sensible question. Someone might believe you know
more than you do, or the study could be a façade."

This was her cue for an arched eyebrow or a sneer, but
her face was placid. "We in the firm advise organizations on
ways to increase revenue or sales or earnings. That's all. It's a
simple career, if you focus on its essence. We don't deal in
conspiracies."

Naiveté at that level was hard for me to follow.
She'd just defined the goal of ninety percent of all conspiracies
ever conceived. Of the rest, eight percent could be written off
to psychotic flakes. The last two percent were saints and
idealists, who had their own psychoses to deal with.

"Bizet might disagree. He clearly wanted to isolate
himself from this."

Alexandra looked toward the window again, but there
was little to see. The sky was growing dark quickly.

"So might Trevor," I said, "if he's alive."

"Are you going to call Jim Burroughs?"

"I'll give him a try, but without a reference or
introduction, it's likely to be a tough sell."

"I'll search for his name in the firm's data base. If he's
worked with Bizet, it might show up. He must be well known in
his field. Someone else in the firm might be able to help. If I can
find a name you can use as a reference, I'll call you."

During our drive, I managed to learn that Alexandra
had never married, was an only child and had graduated from
INSEAD on a scholarship. She also had a Chihuahua named
Maximilan, after the emperor of Mexico. The original
Maximilan had been an Austrian who had ruled Mexico under
France's Napoleon III. He was an idealist who bankrupted the
nation with social reforms. When France pulled out of Mexico,
Maximilan stayed with his beloved people, who promptly
executed him.

Maybe Alexandra was aware of her personal ironies
after all.

When we arrived in Paris, she went to her office to
make night calls to Venezuela and, I suppose, to look for
colleagues who might know Jim Burroughs.

I called Pascal. He asked me to meet him on his "turf."
That turned out to be near Gare de L'Est, a major, but dreary,
Metro terminal. I spent ten minutes of wrong turns and back
tracks through twisting corridors coated in fading paint and
concrete stairs rutted from decades of footfalls to get to the
street. When I emerged from that dismal underground, I
looked back at the station's façade. In Paris fashion, it
was grand.

I crossed the Boulevard de Magenta, as broad as a
football field, and found the bus stop Pascal had described. He
was waiting on a bench.

"You're late, Irish."

"I got turned around." I pointed my thumb toward the
station building.

Pascal looked puzzled.

"Lost."

He tilted his head toward the station and
frowned.