The Last Trade (15 page)

4

Berlin

D
o you mind if I ask where you are staying?”

“Hmm. Good question.” Sobieski pulls a scrap of paper out of the front flap of her carry-on. They've just come out of customs at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport and are heading out to the street, toward the ground transportation area in the pavilion in front of Terminal A. She doesn't know the name of her hotel, but if the agency booked it, she's sure it's nothing special. “Downtown,” she tells Marco Nello. “Near the gate.”

Nello smiles. “Perfect. I'm staying at the Ritz. Any chance you're also at the . . .”

She shakes her head. She's hesitant to tell this attractive man with whom she's had the most pleasant conversation in a long, long time that she is most likely staying in a budget hotel.

“Doesn't matter,” he says. “I'm sure it's close enough that we can still share a taxi.”

She checks her phone. There are four messages in her queue. Three from Michaud. Surely they can wait another half hour, but something—fear, embarrassment, or a self-destructive allegiance to her job—forces her to peek.

Nasseem Al Mar is dead. Call.

Johannesburg has gone missing.

Don't do a thing until we speak.

The fourth text is from an unknown number, but when she opens it, the identity of the sender is clear.

 

We eagerly await your next invaluable recommendation.

Enjoy Berlin. -C.

Cheung. She turns back to Marcus Nello. “Listen, I'd love to share a cab, but”—she holds up her phone and shrugs—“I've got to deal with some work stuff, like now.”

“I can wait.”

“Well, that's considerate, but . . . my boss, he's always on.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Nello is still smiling, but there's a trace of disappointment in his eyes.

He thinks that I'm messing with his head, Sobieski tells herself. When in fact I'm only messing with mine. “I don't mean to be rude.”

“Sure, no,” Nello responds. “Some things can't wait.” He holds out his hand, and they execute the handshake of business acquaintances, not of a man and a woman about to share, at the very least, a taxi. “It was a pleasure, Cara Sobieski.”

“Enjoy Berlin.”

“Oh,” he says. “I will. I love it here. Well . . .” He half waves and turns to walk toward the taxi stand.

Way to go, loser, Sobieski tells herself as she watches him leave. Then, after four steps Nello stops, turns, and heads back toward her.

“I don't mean to be too forward,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “But I like you. And unless I'm mistaken . . .”

“No, not at . . . I—”

He interrupts, “Good. Here's my card, with my mobile on it. I'm here through Friday. Once you settle in and catch up, if you have time, and feel like taking a break, I'd love to meet for a cup of tea, a drink, dinner, or part two of our mile-high book club discussion.”

* * *

She tries to calibrate the time zone differences, but then decides she doesn't care. It doesn't matter with Michaud, a man who always seems to be half-asleep, but whom she's never caught in the act of sleeping.

“Since you left three messages, all while I was thirty thousand feet in the air. Do I need to call you back three times?”

“You know,” Michaud answers, “with recent technological advances, it is entirely possible to maintain phone and e-mail contact with those near and dear to you even while flying halfway around the world.”

She watches Nello disappear into the back of a taxi. “What's possible and what's necessary are two entirely different propositions.”

“Somebody sounds cranky.”

She puts Nello's card into her pocket. Now that his taxi is out of sight, she starts to approach the stand. “I am cranky. I just had the nicest conversation with a man who, believe it or not, wasn't a cop, a crook, or a finance guy.”

“And now you're en route to his Berlin bachelor pad for a night of debauchery?”

“No,” she says. “Now he's gone. Now I'm en route to what is likely to be based on our travel guidelines the German equivalent of a no-tell motel.” She gets inside a cab and hands the driver the slip of paper on which is her hotel's name and address. Covering her mouthpiece, thinking this may be her only opportunity for tourism in Berlin, she tells the driver, “Please, take the scenic route.” Then she removes her hand from the mouthpiece and says to Michaud, “So our man in Dubai.”

“Bullet in the head. Dumped in the trunk of an abandoned car outside the city.”

She's tempted to ask how Michaud discovered this, but knows better. She's taken to believing that somehow, half-drunk in that empty room in Hong Kong, Michaud knows everything, and only tells the world a fraction of it. “Any news on our friend in Johannesburg?”

“Well,” he replies, “if she's dead, no one has found her yet. She left work at lunchtime and never went back. There was an execution-style shooting at a car that looked like hers near her home this afternoon, but the car managed to drive away.”

“No body, though.”

“Not yet.”

“The female trader?”

“Yep.”

“What else do we know about her?”

“Single mom. Black. Quite bright. Overcame a ghetto childhood, won a series of scholarships and competitions, and got herself a nice job.”

“Divorced?”

“No. Her husband was murdered a few years ago. Collateral damage in a drive-by. Best as we can tell it's not at all related to this, uh, incident, though her brother is something of a boy gangster.”

“What's her name?”

“Sawa Luhabe. Left work every day to visit her mother and daughter in Alexandra township, which is pretty much a ghetto and where, for some reason, despite having a solid broker's job, she still lived.”

“Still lives.”

“Right,” Michaud answers. “There's a digital dossier on her for you to check out after you settle in.”

She looks out the window as they drive along the River Spree. In the distance she sees the lights of the Fernsehturm tower. The Reichstag building. The dramatically illuminated and seemingly floating landmarks of
Museumsinsel
(Museum Island). “Anything else on the connection between Hong Kong, Dubai, and Johannesburg to this place?”

“That's what we're hoping you can help with.”

“I meant a connection between who's making these trades and to what end?”

“Right. We're constructing models to see. To see if there's a number or a logic pattern that links what has happened and what might happen next.”

“You think they're gaming the markets?”

Michaud laughs.

“I forgot,” she says. “You think everyone's gaming the markets.”

“It's just that most do it more peaceably. Most are content to ruin lives for profit. Not end them.”

“I was thinking,” Sobieski says. “If all three of these events revolved around U.S.-based securities, don't they each, at some level, have to be attached to U.S.-based trading accounts?”

“They do. And we're looking, but with this sort of account I'm not sure it'll lead to anything, because there's a million ways around it. For instance, all a bad guy needs is an American address and Social Security number to open an account, and it's almost impossible to police. Some underground players out of Russia and Israel have hundreds of accounts, and once you go after one of them, they just shut it down and move on to the next phony setup.”

“Which, presumably,” Sobieski, says, “is what my lead here in Berlin has already done.”

“If they've tracked that we're tracking them, absolutely. But you never know. Maybe they've left us a bone in Berlin, or in the States, with one of those accounts. Before we can figure out where or when the next trade or the next killing is going to occur, we have to learn everything we can about the last one. Right?”

“Yes, Boss.”

“Landlords, neighbors. Everything.”

“Right.”

“And Sobi . . .”

“Yes?”

“No crazy risks. As soon as you sense the slightest danger, the slightest funky vibe, you pull back, 'kay?”

“'kay.”

“And that guy on the plane . . .”

“Uh-huh.”

“You were way too good for him. I bet he had a wedding ring in his pants pocket.”

After she hangs up, she closes her eyes and tries to gather her thoughts. For a moment, thinking about the flight, and Nello—with whom she discussed her father, of all people—and the money she owes Cheung, and how she ended up in the back of a cab in Berlin, without love or family, she thinks she is going to cry. But she doesn't. She reaches into her jacket and runs her fingers along Marco Nello's business card but doesn't pull it out, more for his sake than hers.

“Would you like to see more sights, miss,” the driver says in broken English, “or would you like to go to your hotel?”

Sobieski looks at her phone, then back out the window. “Tell me,” she finally responds, “can you recommend a nice casino here in the city?”

5

New York City

H
avens cracks open the lobby door and peeks out. He always takes the stairwell in the Chelsea because it is filled with art, some modern masterpieces given to the proprietors in exchange for rent. But this time he took it because of Laslow. His hastily packed leather duffel is slung over his shoulder. He pats his front pocket to ensure that Weiss's flash drive is still there. He takes in the scene: the eclectic shapes and colors of the art, the full-time residents chatting, he imagines, about politics, art, coffee. Must be nice, he thinks.

Then he sees him.

Across the lobby, standing with his broad back to him, staring at Larry Rivers's
Dutch Masters
, to the left of the hotel's glass front doors, is the man with the shaved head who murdered Danny Weiss last night. Laslow. He's sure of it.

He steps back, eases the door closed, and continues downstairs to the basement. He wonders, How did he find me? Then he remembers the malware alert, the screen flashing off and on, and he concludes they must have tracked his IP address right back to the hotel's servers. The fire door opens on a laundry room filled with carts of soiled linens. A middle-aged Asian woman in front of a bank of washing machines stares at him with horrified eyes. If someone wanted to harm her down in this din, there's nothing she can do.

“Exit?” he asks, smiling, but the woman only stiffens and glares as he barrels past.

Coming into the light of an alley on the west side of the building, he pulls up his hood and lowers his head as he approaches the sidewalk of 23rd Street.

Zigzagging south and west with his head down, he wonders why Rick Salvado, a self-made multibillionaire, would want to kill anyone. He thinks of the Rick Salvado he'd heard of before he came to The Rising, the Rick Salvado who hired him, as compared to the man who is bent on killing him.

The Salvado he'd heard of was a fiercely independent investor, orphaned at a young age, who worked his way up from a commodities gopher to gigs at Merrill, Bear Stearns, Oppenheimer—before going out on his own. His first company, the now infamous Allegheny Fund, briefly made him a star and then, all at once, a villain, a government scapegoat for alleged trading improprieties during the NASDAQ dot-com bust and market collapse of 2001–02. His meltdown was public and the case against him was bitter and contentious. Somehow, amazingly, he didn't go to prison, but his fund went under and his reputation was seemingly destroyed.

All of which made his comeback all the more unlikely and remarkable. After paying his fines and eventually expressing his regrets, Salvado dedicated himself to helping to promote ethical and responsible trading practices. Plus, it didn't hurt that he still had a knack for making money and for self-promotion. Havens can still remember watching him on the business channels in his dark suit with the omnipresent American flag pin, dispensing wisdom, recommending winners, and cautioning against losers and market traps with the gusto of a vaudevillian, the passion of a televangelist.

Soon, instead of reading “Rick Salvado: Former Fund Manager” the title under his onscreen image began to read, “Rick Salvado: CEO, The Rising.” Not long after that Havens got the call while sitting in his windowless back office at Citi. What he remembers is that the initial call wasn't from a recruiter, or a human resources pro at The Rising.

The voice on the other end that day said, “Drew Havens, Rick Salvado at The Rising here. I've heard a helluva lot about you. How'd you like to get rich together?”

At 20th Street he climbs the stairs onto the High Line trail and walks south. At the 14th Street passage he stops in a semi-enclosed industrial space to listen to his latest favorite piece of art, a sound installation called
A Bell for Every Minute
. Every sixty seconds he hears the sound of a different bell recorded somewhere in New York City. School bells, church bells, and the New York Stock Exchange bell. It soothes him, listening not so much to sounds, but to the memories of other people and other times. As he looks westward across the roof of an abandoned meat packing plant, toward the Hudson and Jersey, the recently salvaged Coney Island Dreamland bell chimes a deep and haunting tone. He takes out his phone and pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket.

A different ringing now, a different tone. A call halfway around the world to a place he's never been, for a woman he's never met and who may very well already be dead.

“Rosehall, how may I help you?”

“Yes,” he says. “Sawa Luhabe, please.”

6

Witwatersrand, South Africa

W
endy is asleep. Finally.

Sawa Luhabe drives east, away from the twilight. Her mother is in the passenger seat, looking out at the East Rand and mouthing the words to a prayer Luhabe has never heard. Her mother knows that something has forced them to leave, but even after Luhabe tried to explain, the older woman didn't fully understand. Nonetheless, she followed. She's seen enough in her life to know when to run, when to second-guess, and when to pray.

Even Wendy knows, Luhabe tells herself. Just three years old, but she knew that something was wrong. Something different from the normal energy of the day; a less patient type of maternal sentiment. So, of course, Wendy cried. She didn't want to go. She didn't want to stay. She cried because she knew. Luhabe thinks this is not unlike when the girl acts up, claiming to miss the father she never met. Some kind of extra sense, rooted in the heart.

If traffic on the N-17 and her mother's seldom used 1997 Daewoo Cielo cooperates, she'll cover the 430 kilometers to her cousin's house in Swaziland in less than four and a half hours. She's chosen these relatives because of the distance from Jo'burg and because, to the best of her knowledge, she's never mentioned them to anyone at work.

She's tempted to call her oldest cousin to give her some warning, but she doesn't want to use her phone. This morning she would have thought it preposterous that someone might want to track her mobile phone calls, but now she thinks it's not only possible, it's likely. Plus, today the phone has been her undoing. First the call from the mystery client out of Berlin. Then, in her post-shooting absence, calls to the office from Hong Kong, the United States, and then more calls from Berlin. The last, she reasons, was to check if to see if she is still alive.

“Did you bring this upon yourself? Out of greed?”

“No, Mother. I did nothing to invite this. If I am guilty of anything, it's believing that something good could finally come our way.”

Her mother clucks her tongue. “Does this mean you will lose your job?”

“No. Unless the job brought this upon me.”

After a while, her mother turns to her and says, “You know I believe you. I think you are the strongest and most decent person I know.”

She crosses through the Oshoek border post, twenty-three kilometers from the Swazi capital. Abandoning the N-17, she takes a series of back roads to a small village that she has visited many times since her childhood. Her relatives—three cousins, their six children, and the home's owner, her mother's seventy-four-year-old sister—are standing in the dirt yard, as if someone alerted them to their arrival.

After they've eaten and Wendy has kissed her good night, thrilled to sleep alongside her big cousins in their bedroom, Luhabe goes out into the yard and sits on a folding chair next to her mother.

“You're leaving, aren't you?”

“Yes, Mother. It's for the best.”

“And this is what I would do, too. If it were my daughter.”

Driving west alone on the N-17, back into the country that she loves and hates, that amazes and repeatedly confounds her, she begins to cry. When the tears start to impede her vision, she reaches into her shoulder bag for a tissue. Before removing her hand from the bag, she extends her fingers and runs them along the barrel of her late husband's handgun.