The Big Fear (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

THE STREET

The chair was too comfortable for Christine Davenport. A soft leather number designed to put you to sleep, to steal your edge. But she would never lose her edge, and she didn’t like it when someone pretended it was possible. She had been waiting twenty minutes, and had long finished the very nice coffee poured by the absent man’s secretary.

Making someone wait in your lobby is a weak person’s way of showing that you are powerful. Letting them wait in your office alone, the papers on your blotter within reach, was only for a master. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying, step around the desk and see what’s in my mail. No one is watching. The place isn’t bugged. It’s only that you will feel so weak and so small doing it. Davenport set her empty coffee on a convenient coaster and uncrossed her legs. She set the two slim binders she had been carrying with her on the desk. Davenport now had eighty-two documents to go over with the head of EHA Investments.

She stared past the empty desk through the floor-to-ceiling windows; nothing there but the glass wall of the next tower over, bright and shiny and meaningless. Even in daylight the harbor beyond was an oily cipher, a thick band of gray murk. It was a view, but it wasn’t a top-dollar view. EHA Investments didn’t have a panorama above the other buildings. No matter how he craned his neck, the man she was waiting for could never get a peek at the Statue of Liberty when he was tired of staring at how much money he made.

To the left of the desk, a broad empty space, maybe thirty wasted feet. Davenport knew that it was the empty space, not the fancy furniture, the designer coffee, or the view, that was the showpiece of the office. Real estate in Lower Manhattan still went for almost two grand a square foot. If you really wanted to show that you were somebody, you wanted to waste a decent chunk of it. To those in the know, a half-empty office spoke more than a Kandinsky on the wall. And Christine Davenport was always in the know.

She had pulled the slim batch of e-mails together over two days and talked through with the associate why she had picked them. He was still interested in the drugs, the scandals. She realized when she spoke with him that he hadn’t even realized what they had found; she couldn’t bring him along.

Sitting with the binders in front of her, the coffee cup long empty, Davenport realized what was off. The place was too quiet. The terminals in the trading floor behind her had all been staffed, and there had been men and a few women running from one to the other, chattering in low serious tones, but there was none of the tumult that Davenport was used to at these places. Then again, she thought, it had been almost fifteen years since she had done this work. Maybe the guys who ripped out their phone and shouted through the walls had all moved on to other industries. Or gone to jail.

She never heard him come in. She sensed he was already next to her and turned her head to see a regal haircut and a three-hundred-dollar tie. Two sets of manicured nails peeked out from the folds of a combed-wool suit. It was the height of summer but he was old-school. The voice was barely above a whisper.

“Ms. Davenport. I am so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

Above the offset collar was a thin neck and a jaw that had been the pride of Tower Eating Club in 1964. The eyes were still dazzling: Davenport could tell she was being evaluated. Being judged. The man held out a wiry hand and Davenport stood and shook it. It was strong, but cold. The whole office was cool, and would stay that way through the heat wave. The natural-seeming light came from nearly undetectable sources. It was as though the whole room was a soft little experiment in making a place as unnervingly pleasant as it could be.

“I am at your service, Mr. Holm-Anderson.”

“Well, you are charging by the hour, which is very close to the same thing.”

The man rounded the corner of his desk and set himself in his college chair. Hard wood all around him. The chair, the desk, the bookcase against the other wall, the one without a view. All real wood and solid. Aside from the window itself, there was no nod to either of the twin fads of glass and steel. Aside from the view, you could have been in the 1950s. There was no computer on the desk. No phone. The 1850s, Davenport thought. He sat with his hands on his knees, his eyes sharp above sagging cheeks.

“Would you like to take a look at what we found?”

Davenport gestured to the binder. Usually, the big shots would be eager to thumb through it. Some of them wanted to get the documents in advance, to start the process of kicking out one miscreant or another, proving how attentive they were to whatever regulation had been broken. But the man just sat there, looking at Davenport and not acknowledging the binder. As though the vinyl was so modern as to be poisonous to the touch. He gave a hint of a nod and Davenport went on. She opened to the first set of tabs.

“There are a number of people at your firm who are engaging in extracurricular activities frowned upon by law enforcement.” These were the drug ones. Guys boasting about what they’d done over the weekend. How they’d spent the money that they hadn’t really earned the week before. Holm-Anderson bit a corner of his lip and looked out the window.

“Am I boring you, Mr. Holm-Anderson?”

She could afford to push a little. She had an ace up her sleeve. You always had to start this way. You have to tell them everything. Even when it starts out with something they probably know. More importantly, though, Davenport was watching Mr. Holm-Anderson. When you see how they react to the little stuff, you get a sense of what’s coming next.

He held up a schoolmarm hand. “I have been in this business for nearly fifty years, Ms. Davenport. I know what kind of people work here. If I could change human nature I would. I also know that FINRA and the US Attorney would laugh at me if I came to them and said that was all I had found.”

“This is all in the spirit of full disclosure.”

“Is there more?”

So she went on to the next batch. The guys who had bought up a few thousand shares of a software company two days before it announced a new product. An airline merger anticipated by about a week. The usual litter that suggests someone has a friend of a friend who is willing to whisper a little about something. Enough to revoke a couple of licenses.

But more than that were the shorts. The bets against companies that anticipated failure. One against a drug company days before a patent got invalidated. Another on a natural gas company in the Ukraine two weeks before a pipeline exploded. A short on a construction company the day before its crane had collapsed in Midtown Manhattan. The list went on—a Japanese fishing venture shorted just before it lost four boats in a typhoon, and a clothing label shorted a week before its shanty factory in Bangladesh collapsed. Then last week, a bet against an international freight company, the one that owned the ship Ralph Mulino had shot Brian Rowson on three days later.

Holm-Anderson looked up at these.

“The fund makes money any way that it can. Right now, things are sinking ever downward. Companies are falling. Public opinion is falling. We are as aware as everyone of what has been happening in the city these past few months.”

“Mr. Holm-Anderson, there is a question of what people would think.”

“We short companies on their way down and we might buy them on their way up. We might try to catch a falling knife or profit from a dead cat bounce; there is no shame in it.”

“A what?”

He stopped staring at the numbers long enough to look up at her. His eyes were bright and attentive. “Anything that falls fast and far enough will come up off the ground when it hits. Should you throw a dead cat out a twenty-story window, even that will rebound a bit from the pavement. And when a miserable stock collapses from forty dollars to two, there will be money to be made on its way back up to six.”

“But it will fall back down. Not just to two, to zero.”

“It’s all in the timing.”

“You’re in it for the short term.”

“Everyone on the planet is in it for the short term, Ms. Davenport. The best anyone can hope for is a moment of joy before we sink back into the muck. Over the very long term, the target price for every stock is zero. There’s nothing we can do to change that.”

“But there is the question of whether they knew, Mr. Holm-Anderson. Whether they were tipped off.”

“A typhoon in the East China Sea is public information.”

“Let’s look to the last set of e-mails.”

Delicate and reluctant, he took the binder, licked his finger, and turned the tab. Davenport went on.

“You’ll see there is no return address on these e-mails. And they aren’t identified as being received by anyone at your firm. We had the vendor run analytics and they came up dry. No evidence of who the recipient was. Except that they are on your server. And all we have for the sender is the country. Yemen. Malaysia. Six from Indonesia. One from Syria. Does your company do any business in any of those places?”

“We talk to people all over the world. We are always researching.”

“And you’re writing in code like this?”

The e-mails themselves were the real problem. Someone has a few exchanges with someone in Yemen, it could be anything. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to e-mail Indonesia. But when the texts of the e-mails are nothing but slashes and dots, a collection of letters that don’t make words, antennae go up. Writing that you think a drug company is going to lose its patent is one thing; writing that “q*--d/ <)dln @a-+ $Dn” is quite another. Davenport hadn’t sent them out to be de-encrypted yet. She wanted to see his face when he saw them. To see if they were a surprise to him. But he gave away nothing. Quiet, intent, he could have been reading the phone book.

“What do we know about them?”

“Only where they came from. And that they landed here. It could be anyone at the firm. It could be more than one person.” And she looked up, into the bright eyes, and thought, rather than spoke the final threat:
it could be you
.

When you set out on one of these investigations, you always hope you are going to find something, but that you are not going to find too much. Because if you uncover a rogue employee and you wrap him up and hand him to the company in a bow, you can take your check and walk away and everyone will be happy except the guy who has to go to jail. But when you find out that someone who is really in charge has strayed, it makes for a whole other ballgame. You want to know and you don’t want to know. Because pretty soon you aren’t sure whether you are working to protect them or turn them in any more. But you have to ask.

Eliot nodded. He looked down at the paper. “I can keep this copy?”

“Yes.”

“I will think this over. Can I get back to you in a few days?”

“Sooner rather than later is best.”

“I understand.”

She turned and heeled to the door, silent over the plush carpet. Nothing was patched with tape here. She eyed the frosted office doors as she walked out along the too-quiet trading floor. Heavy masculine names, ringing with self-importance. And one woman’s name, she paused a moment to see, Veronica Dean. As Davenport stopped, sensing a fellow soul in a rigid suit, she saw a figure behind the pane. A woman sitting with sure posture, typing rapidly, fixated on her terminal like a racecar driver on the road.
Nothing to see here. Move along.

Davenport turned out through the trading floor to the elevator, worried that every set of eyes in the place had been staring at her on the way out. As the elevator swept her back down to safety, she caught her breath for what felt like the first time all day.

Eliot Holm-Anderson leaned back in his club chair and traced the e-mails. He looked back to the dates in the section before. The news was nothing more than he dealt with in an ordinary miserable week. Then he flipped once again between the coded e-mail and the short trades. He had caught something in them after all. He fished a pen from a drawer and marked the first of the series. He traced down again. He made another mark. When Davenport had first given him the binder he hadn’t seen the pattern in the jumble of trades. He marked again. He was beginning to make sense of it. He turned the page back again. He noted again. It was undeniable what was there. That woman hadn’t even realized what she had been carrying around with her. She hadn’t connected the dots on her own investigation. He marked the final page. He set down the binder and turned toward the window, looking out into the inky harbor.