The Last Trade (19 page)

14

Berlin

S
obieski redials Michaud as she walks through the historic banking district in Berlin Mitte. The hotel doorman told her twenty minutes to the address listed for Siren Securities, but she aims to do it in ten.

She's on Pariser Platz, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, near the new Dresdner Bank and the DZ Bank building, the sweeping steel-and-glass atrium that was designed by Frank Gehry, and that she knows also functions as the central bank for Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken.

“How was your sleep?”

“Nonexistent. Are you going to send some—”

“Already sending agents to seek out Mr. Jameson in Philly and, yes, INTERPOL and our people are still looking for Ms. Luhabe, presumably in the Johannesburg area.”

“What about . . .”

“In addition to Nasseem Al Mar dead in the trunk of a car outside Dubai City, in Rio, another broker was just found dead at the base of an aqueduct outside the city. Kleber Valverde.”

Sobieski stops. “Shit.” She wonders if there's a way she could have prevented Valverde's death if she hadn't gone to the casino, or been preoccupied by her debts in Hong Kong, or was simply more dedicated, more skilled. “What kind of securities?”

“Advertising holding companies. World's biggest. And yes, shorts. And yes, staggered.”

She's in Gendarmenmarkt Square in front of one of the brownstone arches of KfW Banking Group, a well-preserved palace that is a rare remnant from the time of the kaisers. She doesn't know what to say.

“So, what do you think?”

“Think?”

“For starters,” Michaud wonders, “I still don't see why you kill them.”

“I think after Lau spoke out of school, the bad guys got spooked and wanted everyone associated with this killed. Sloppy? Yes. Unnecessary? Probably. But clearly whatever it is they're up to takes precedence over everything else, and they don't give a shit about who dies as long as they can't talk.”

Michaud exhales. “Four trades in four distant parts of the world, all U.S.-based stocks, all shorts, all out of a trading account in Philadelphia with a German firm acting as some kind of middle man. But this one, in Rio, it still has a Berlin connection, but not Siren. It still originated from a Philly account, but a different one. Different name.”

“They must have sensed that they were being tracked.”

“Or thought they were bailing before anyone picked up on them,” Michaud answers.

“Jesus,” she says, slowing down to check the addresses on the passing buildings. “Do we have any kind of motive or hypothesis or clue to where this is all going, whom or what might be the next target?”

“Does it ramp up to giving us foreknowledge of something bigger?” responds Michaud. “I'm already modeling possible targets, terrorist connections, and the securities in question, but there's not a whole lot connecting at this point. Additionally, the President and the head of every U.S. security agency have been briefed, and lots of smart people all around the world are trying to connect the same dots.”

“Advertising. Media. Tech,” Sobieski says. “All semi-related, but there's so many variables, to be across-the-board shorting all of them.”

“Maybe he's an evil genius Luddite.”

Sobieski smiles. “Tell that to the President. I'm sure he and the rest of the national security task force will be impressed.” She looks across the street. This is the place. A small, 1930s-era granite building just off the square. “Well,” she says, “this has been fun, as always, but I've gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Siren. I'm a stone's throw away.”

Michaud pauses.

“Boss?”

“I don't want you to go in until we get you some backup.”

“Backup? When?”

“This has become quite the thing, Sobes. Give me a few to pull together a team to do it right, and safely. This has taken on some scale.”

She looks at her watch and wonders how much time Michaud is talking about. She thinks of the time she wasted last night and what it may have cost Sawa Luhabe and this guy in Rio, and she wonders whose life or lives may be at the mercy of her next act of selfishness.

“This isn't just a numbers investigation anymore, Sobi. It's a serial, potentially mass homicide event.”

“Which means that every second counts, right?”

“Just sit tight. Keep an eye on the building and I'll get back to you in ten.”

* * *

He doesn't get back to her in ten. She thinks of what a ten-minute warning might have done for Luhabe, or Lau, or the guys in Dubai and Rio.

And since Michaud has broken his end of the promise for a rapid response, and she can't bear to think about how she'd feel if her failure to act on this led to another death, or something larger, she snaps closed her phone and strides across the street and up the short flight of steps and into the once and former home of Siren Securities.

A guard sitting behind a black laminate counter looks away from his computer screen, briefly considers her, and then turns away as she strides across the empty lobby. Inside the elevator she presses nine, then closes her eyes.

The ninth floor hallway is silent and empty. There's no sign or arrow pointing her toward the offices of Siren Securities. First she walks to her left, past doors for a photographer's studio, a literary agency, and an accountant, before hitting the dead end of the emergency stairway exit.

Heading back the other way, she passes signs for an attorney and a psychic before stopping in front of the door with no words on it. Just an illustration of a godlike woman hanging high on the mast of an ancient sailing ship. The Sirens,
from
Homer's
Odyssey
. And also, she realizes, the exact illustration that she and Mo saw on the killer's briefcase in the lobby surveillance video of Patrick Lau's Hong Kong condo.
Sloppy.

With an ear against the fake wood door, she takes a breath and listens. She hears nothing but the electric hum of the surrounding offices, the clicks and whirring of elevator cables rising and falling through the building's spine. But nothing on the other side of the door. No chattering people, easy listening music, or shuffling feet. No ringing phones, churning copy machines, or clattering keyboards this morning at Siren Securities.

She doesn't knock. She twists the brass knob, and to her amazement it turns. The door floats open and she takes three steps inside the small twenty – by twenty-foot unpartitioned space. It's obvious that the office has been abandoned and that no half-respectable financial services client has ever set foot here.

Despite this, as a formality, she calls, “Hello?”

Nothing.

Slowly she walks across the chipped and stained white Formica floor, looking left and right, then up at the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. All that is left of whatever operation existed here are two gray metal desks. One is against the window facing the Gate, accessorized by an open, empty one-drawer metal filing cabinet and a large, empty gray plastic garbage pail. The other desk, also stripped bare, is pressed into a corner near the door.

She swipes her foot at a clump of loose wires, one of several clusters of phone and USB lines and T1 cables snaking out of wall sockets and piled on the floor throughout the room. On the window desk, a heavy gray aluminum number that looks like a remnant of the Communist East Berlin era, sits a half-finished cup of cold coffee and yesterday's edition of the
Financial Times Deutschland
.

What tipped them off? she wonders, thumbing through the paper. Somehow they became spooked between yesterday and now, and they decided to close up the entire operation and move on. She turns the pages, looking for anything, perhaps a circled security in an agate column or news piece, or for a ripped out article the absence of which would provide a clue. But nothing.

The only way they could have found out, she surmises, is to have picked up on the fact that someone was tracking them online, perhaps Michaud or one of the agents he's placed to the case, or perhaps her. And to be able to do that, she thinks, their software must be far more sophisticated than anything we have.

She looks up and considers the clear blue Berlin sky, which is something she hadn't expected. She'd expected skies a hundred shades of gray, filled with factory particulate and drizzle. Grim men and women in trench coats traipsing through caverns of Cold War architecture. But she was wrong. The city, she thinks, is quite lovely. Of course, the fact that Marco Nello is still in it adds to its allure. For a moment she considers calling Michaud and telling him not to rush, that the place is empty. But they'll want to come anyway and take a more thorough look, and why piss him off? Why bother telling him that she's defied his orders?

What else? she thinks. What else can I do or look for in this office? This city? She's in the middle of this thought when a man's arms begin to wrap around her.

She reacts as if electrocuted. She ducks and squirms, flails her arms, and stomps hard with her left heel on the toes of his left foot before spinning to face him. Mid-twenties, blond, high cheekbones, tall, and model-thin. Not very strong or skilled at this sort of thing.

She attacks without hesitation, snapping off a left-left-right jab combination all aimed at his head, and that he manages to block. Then comes a spinning right leg kick aimed at his temple, that he does not see or block. The impact of the kick sends him careering sideways against the metal desk and onto the floor.

For an instant her survival instinct introduces the thought of running, but her competitive and responsible nature overrides and she knows that she must punish and subdue and arrest whoever this is.

He rolls twice on the floor and manages to rise to a sitting position. But she pursues, closing in on him and straight kicking him flush on the clavicle with the heel of her left foot, driving him back to the floor. Without hesitating she stabilizes her feet, regains her fighting balance, and rears back with her right foot. He rolls again and begins to rapidly crawl toward the door, this time thinking about escaping from this crazy woman rather than capturing her. But she pursues him again.

She's faster.

Her left foot connects with his right kidney and lifts him off the ground. He's collapsing face-first onto the floor, hands and legs sliding out in a palsied splay, as she sweeps her right foot around with the accumulated rage of twenty-nine frustrating years. A guttural, primal grunt accompanies the kick, directed at the young man's temple. But the instant before it lands, his right arm rises and does more than parry or deflect her foot. Through sheer luck he manages to grab her ankle as it whistles toward him. His fingers wrap tightly around the base of her shin and he rips and twists and yanks it toward his chest.

Cara Sobieski did not expect this. As her right leg is jerked away, her left comes out from under her. She's already planning her post-fall movements and the furious retaliatory combination of strikes and blocks she'll unleash upon him, when the back of her twenty-first-century head strikes the hard edge of the Cold War desk, rendering her unconscious before she hits the floor.

 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19
P.M.

1

Berlin

D
ays, hours, or minutes.

Sobieski doesn't know. She's on her stomach on the cold linoleum floor of what's left of Siren Securities. Her hands are tied behind her back with what? A belt? No. She wriggles her fingers and feels the soft, pliable plastic coating of wire and cables. The metallic edge of a USB slot. She sees more wires in a clump on the floor near a surge protector. It's starting to come back.

She closes and opens her eyes three, four times. Full minutes pass between each transition from dark to light. Unconsciousness and whatever this is. Pain and . . . more pain. Mumbling. A man's voice. She listens with her eyes closed. A man speaking in German.
The
man speaking in German. “
Ich bin
Shultz
.”
Ich bin.
She thinks of Kennedy at the wall.
Ich bin ein Berliner.

When the thin blond man materializes and sees that she is coming to, he pulls a chair closer, but not too close, sits and leans forward. In his right hand is a section of aluminum window blind rolled up tightly, grasped like a club.

“Don't try to escape.”

“You're lucky I slipped.”

“I am. Considering you fancy yourself some kind of cage fighter.” The man speaks in perfect formal British-tinged English. As a second language, Sobieski notes, but perfect.

“You know, you're in an insane amount of trouble.”

The man laughs nervously and tilts his head back. “Me?”

All at once she jerks and twists, trying to rise up to her feet. Though she's not successful, the man lurches back and scrambles away from her, holding the blinds in front of his chest in self-defense.

“Damn it!” he shouts. “Stay still. They'll be here shortly.”

“Who?”

“My employers. The people you were vandalizing.”

She lays her right cheek on the floor and tries to focus on him. Blue jeans. Gray pocket T-shirt. Black canvas sneakers. “Vandalizing?”

“Yes.”

“What is there to vandalize here?”

He lowers the blinds. “We shut down this operation because we anticipated a threat.”

“When?”

“Yester—Why should I tell you?”

She closes her eyes and takes a breath. Fine. Don't.

The man continues. “What did you mean to accomplish, breaking into our offices?”

Eyes back open. “I came here because your firm is linked to a series of highly questionable transactions that have been linked to serious crimes.”

“Crimes?”

“Murders. Don't play stupid.”

He walks three steps away, then turns to look down at her. “Preposterous. We are an international securities firm.”

She laughs derisively. “Right. And this is your plush and luxurious worldwide headquarters.”

“Tell me about the murders.”

“Sure. Let me up.”

He shakes his head. Not a chance.

“Okay,” she begins, squinting her eyes and trying to remember the facts. “Hong Kong, Monday, October 17. An order is placed with a broker named Patrick Lau, via a trading account in Philadelphia, linked to a man named Rondell Jameson. U.S. tech stocks, all shorts, thousands of micro transactions, presumably to avoid detection, each just under the total that would catch the eye of someone in Treasury or Homeland Security, or me, totaling nearly a billion dollars. The foreign middleman in the transaction? Siren Securities. Ring a bell?”

The man cocks his head. It's clear that he is familiar with the transaction but perhaps not so much with what happened next. “And?”

“
And
that evening in Hong Kong, soon after Patrick Lau got home from work, someone broke into his harbor-front condo and shot him in the head.”

The man sits back down. Scratches his chin. The blinds are at his side, in his loosening grip. “How do you know this?”

“I was at the crime scene when he was still facedown on his counter, blood dripping onto the floor.”

“In Hong Kong?”

“Yes. I can show you pictures if you'd like, once we get out of here.”

“And there's no chance this was a coincidence?”

She begins to speak more rapidly. “Next day. Tuesday. The second trade. Media stocks. Still shorts. Still huge money. This time instead of Hong Kong it was Dubai. This time instead of Patrick Lau the murdered broker's name was Naseem Al Mar at Zayeed Capital. And of course, Siren Securities, Berlin, Germany, was in the middle of it. They found Al Mar in a car trunk yesterday.”

He stares, silent, mouth open.

“I imagine your fingers were on the keyboard for that one, too.”

“I . . . we simply carry out the orders of others. Clients. Institutions. There's no way that—”

“Next came Johannesburg. New media shorts. Rosehall Fund. A woman broker named Sawa Luhabe. They riddled her car with bullets soon after.”

“Are you an assassin?”

“Then, yesterday, the same brutal, despicable shit in Rio.”

He paces away from, then back toward her. Dips his hands in and out of the pockets of his tight hipster jeans. “Who are you?”

“I work for the United States Terrorism and Financial Intelligence task force. I'm agent Cara Sobieski.”

His eyes widen further. For the first time Sobieski thinks he might not know anything about the murders. “If you don't believe me, check my ID. It's in my back pocket.”

While he hesitates, she presses. “When are your employers coming? When will they get here?”

“They're . . . on their way.” He shrugs. “I don't know . . . minutes?”

“Minutes. And you didn't know about the murders?”

He shakes his head, glances at her back pocket. “The orders come through and I process them.” As he speaks, he slowly bends and reaches toward her pocket. “Stay still.”

“Orders from whom?”

No answer.

“Listen,” Sobieski says, “what's your name?”

“My name is Heinrich.” He carefully removes the leather case from her pocket, flips it open, and sighs when he sees the badge. He's never heard of TFI, but it's obvious she's legit.

“And you know nothing about these murders, Heinrich?”

He shakes his head, afraid now, still staring at her badge.

“Then we absolutely have to get out of here, Heinrich.”

“But they—”

She interrupts. “They will kill us, Heinrich. When they come, of course they're going to kill me. But they're gonna kill you, too. Same as Lau in Hong Kong, Al Mar in Dubai, and whatever his name is—was—Valverde in Rio.”

“What about the woman in Jo'burg?”

“Last I heard, they haven't gotten her, but they're trying. She's a loose end and they're eliminating anyone who has touched this.”

As he continues to deliberate, tapping her badge against his palm, she says as convincingly as possible, “Heinrich!
You
are a loose end. They. Will. Kill. Us!”

Heinrich agonizes one more moment before deciding to believe her. He puts her badge in his back pocket, grabs her right elbow, and helps her to her feet. As they hustle toward the door, her hands still bound behind her back, he asks, “Do you have a gun?”

“Uh-uh. Not with me.”

They bound into the hall and jog toward the elevator bank. As Heinrich reaches to press the down button, Sobieski bumps his hand away with her hip. “Wait.” She gestures with her chin at the lights above the elevator.

It's rising . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .

Sobieski starts walking away from the elevator, in the opposite direction of the Siren office.

. . . 4 . . .

Heinrich follows.

They're too far away from the stairwell to make it in time. She stops outside the photography studio. “Quick, try this.” Heinrich rushes over and twists the knob, but it doesn't give. There's a bell to ring, but there's no time.

6 . . . 7 . . .

They scramble across the hall to the accountant's office. Heinrich twists the knob. No go.

8 . . .

Back across to the literary agency.

9 . . .

Heinrich twists.

Ding!

It opens at the same moment as the elevator doors.