The Last Trade (3 page)

3

New York City

H
avens puts his phone back in his pocket as Salvado stands. Salvado straightens his tie and shouts over the house music, over the bluster of the men, the cackles of the play-for-pay women, and the primal roar of the dance floor below, “A toast!” He raises his just-filled flute of Cristal, and the rest of the table joins him, including the young, blond, Russian “model” who's been pawing at him since she was brought to the table. Watching the model, Havens can't help but think of Salvado's soon-to-be-ex-wife and kids and the speech that Salvado gave to him when he first started at The Rising, about the firm's unwavering commitment to fidelity and loyalty, to work and family.

“A toast to the long and the short of it. But . . . ,” Salvado pauses, “. . . but this time around, especially the god damn long!”

They drink and cheer, but Salvado, not yet finished, hushes them. “This has been one of our most difficult years. Many clients who have prospered greatly from our advice in the past have begun to grow skittish. Many more have publicly doubted us. Our confidence. But we have not wavered from our path and our vision. We have not let opinion dissuade us from doing what is right and what will ultimately be beneficial for us all. We're on an epic journey, an epic tale that is still being written, and when it's all over, it will be remembered as one of the great ones. To those who have stuck with us, and are poised to reap those rewards—sooner than later, I promise!—I salute you!”

After the cheers rise and fall, Salvado raises his hand to make one last salutation. “And finally I'd like to make a special shout-out, a toast to the man who a few years back got right what 99.9 percent of the financial world got wrong. The man who immersed himself in the data and saw the potential to make billions on the sub-prime misery of the masses and walked into my office one day with the numbers to prove it. This is the man who is getting it right all over again, readying us for another major event, guiding us to zig while the rest of the street zags: the Nostradamus of Numbers, the King of the Quants, and my pal, give it up for Mister Personality, Andrew Havens!”

Havens raises his glass, fakes a sip, and grimaces more than grins along with the applause. As he bends to sit back down, he knocks over his drink and the others laugh at his social ineptitude. While he reaches for a napkin to clean up his mess, his phone buzzes again.

This text reads:

 

Murder @ Hang Seng

4

Hong Kong

T
he financial world does not like Mondays.

Especially in the autumn. See Monday, October 28, 1929, October 19, 1987, and, of course, September 29, 2008.

No one is more aware of this than Patrick Lau, a twenty-nine-year-old trader who lost everything and then some in the fall of 2008. He lost his client's money, his employer's money, and, of course, his own. There had been warnings, but as is the case with so many people who have only enjoyed success, even in 2008 Lau felt that he was immune to failure. After the crash, he downsized his lifestyle, sold what he could, started over, and tried to hang on.

Up until a few hours ago even that was in question. When he left for work this morning, he was fairly sure that he'd have to move out of his apartment and perhaps leave Hong Kong and the financial services industry altogether. But now that all seems to be changing for the better.

Autumn Mondays and overwhelming personal debt be damned.

It's amazing how a random phone call from a complete stranger can change everything. Lau can't move beyond this thought as he walks through the door of a seventeenth-floor condominium in the Wanchai District of Hong Kong, a condo that he will not have to abandon after all. Amazing how one call from someone whose name he still doesn't and may never know can change a life, a career, and, in Lau's case, save the ass of a broker on the precipice of bankruptcy.

He glances out the living room window and thinks of the prospect of a born-again, amazing life as dusk falls upon the city. In the distance he can still make out the silhouette of Victoria Peak, and in every direction the rooftop lights of the towers that rim the harbor have begun flashing, illuminating the world beneath in a neon, Technicolor rainbow.

After so many bad ones, this has been a good day for Lau. Indeed, after a brutal couple of years it seems as if things are finally beginning to turn around. Of course, nothing like the millennial boom times with the coke and the raves and the spontaneous junkets to Bali and Phuket. But definitely better, especially on his small piece of real estate on the U.S. trading desk. Especially today.

Just after noon Lau received a phone call from a man at a firm called Siren Securities in Berlin, representing an American investor interested in taking a short position on a series of American-based tech stocks. Lau didn't typically take this kind of call seriously. Every day, especially since the crash, he's received similar inquiries from eccentrics and loons and amateurs without the funds or credentials to back up their claims. But there was something about this caller, the authority of the man's voice and the specificity of his intentions, that piqued Lau's curiosity.

That and the 1.1-billion-dollar price tag on the deal.

Lau fixes himself a martini, Hendrick's with a splash of olive juice, and plops down on his white leather sofa to take in the view and revel in his accomplishment. And why not? It's only Monday. Just last night he was thinking he might have to move to a more affordable apartment at a less desirable address, perhaps share something with a roommate for the first time since he graduated college, and now he's just completed the biggest deal of his twenty-nine-year-old life.

At first he had begun to tell the voice on the other end the proper procedure for executing a transaction of this nature, but within seconds the voice was telling
him
, explaining the exact protocol, the account numbers, the complex series of wire transfers, and the way in which the transactions were to be divided, each for no more than ten thousand dollars U.S., and staggered, hundreds per hour over a twenty-four-hour period.

This, Lau surmised, was to minimize the chances of the transaction showing up on whatever sophisticated tracking software the authorities are using these days. The FSA in London. The FBI, CIA, or Department of Treasury in the States, Hong Kong's own Securities and Futures Commission—conventional wisdom says even the Russian mob has some modified bootleg version of the software, software that some say Bin Laden used to move and make money prior to 9/11.

Not that Lau mentioned this to his client. He just knew, and he's certain that his client knows even more. Besides, it wasn't Lau's job to moralize, recommend, or question. For this trade his job was all about the confirmation of numbers and the execution of a mandated procedure. Of course Lau had to alert his boss about a deal of this magnitude, but Emily Cheng, senior managing director, international equities, said exactly what he'd expected: “If the money comes through cleanly on the wire, and the account checks out, I don't see why not.”

“Don't you wonder with something this big who it is, or even why?” Lau asked Cheng, seemingly out of curiosity but mostly to cover his ass. Because he wanted to make sure that if the deal came back to bite him, he wouldn't be the only one to take the heat. “You're not curious why someone wants to short U.S. tech stock now that it's finally starting to come back? I mean, Apple alone, with or without Jobs . . .”

Cheng shrugged. As Lau's director, she'd make a nice under-the-radar commission on this as well. When the group performed well, she did well, so she wasn't about to ask questions. “Like I said, if the transfer is good and the account is legit, for a billion-one, I don't care if he's taking a short on the Moon.”

For the first time in months Lau allowed himself to flash the smile of a man about to make a killing.

A quick credentials check confirmed that the transfer was good and the account was legit. Registered to the American trading account with JP Morgan Chase of one Rondell Jameson in the city of Philadelphia in the state of Pennsylvania. Who knew? Who knows? Lau thought. Maybe the guy actually exists. Then he did something that the caller had specifically said he was not to do. “If you tell anyone besides your manager, or if you inquire into or act on any of these securities in any way, there will be serious consequences.” Despite the warning, Lau went off-line almost immediately and looked into the stocks on his smart phone, linked to a personal trading account. As if they'd ever be able to find out, he thought, as he proceeded to lay down a matching series of shorts. Of course, for much less money. His credit line with this account was thirty thousand dollars U.S., thirty thousand dollars he didn't have, but his gambler's instincts told him that this was special, and if even part of it came to pass, he'd be set for years to come. So he defied the one rule his client insisted upon, and he got in on the action himself.

After placing his personal trade, he did something he hadn't done in months, something he had told himself he wouldn't do again. He called his family back on the mainland. After a dozen rings someone picked up, grunted, and hung up. Most likely his father, he surmised, but it could have been any of them.

Now, safely home with the deals in place, staring out at the first of the grand party yachts heading into the glittering harbor, Lau tries to forget about his family and manages to smile again.

As soon as he finishes the first martini, he begins to wonder if he should fix a second, or if perhaps he should call some friends to have a bit of a celebration. Even if it is a bloody Monday. Even if, technically, he hasn't yet received a cent for his effort. He doesn't have to tell them about the magnitude of the transaction or the fact that he's about to have a hell of a good week, but after months and months of lying low and avoiding almost all contact with the outside world, why not?

He gets up and decides he'll do both. He'll have that second dirty Hendrick's martini
and
celebrate. Perhaps at Nobu, or better, Hutong.

Standing at his kitchen counter, Lau calls three friends in succession, but none of them answer. He leaves the same message for each: “Call me . . . I'm ready to have fun again.” Yet he can't help thinking, Do they care? Have they moved on like everyone else in my life? Screw it—he uses one hand to scroll through his smart phone for a restaurant app to find the number for Hutong—I'll celebrate alone. With the other he reaches for the Hendrick's.

The call to Hutong has started to go through when he hears the faintest metallic click behind him. He begins to turn, but a hand grabs the back of his neck and smashes his face down onto the counter. The phone drops to the floor as the barrel of a pistol presses against his temple.

“What do you want?”

“Who else did you tell?”

“What are you talking about?”

The hand lifts his head off the stone countertop and smashes it back, cracking Lau's left jawbone and knocking loose a canine and an incisor tooth. “You were specifically told not to tell anyone. Who else?”

Lau groans, mumbles, “I told no one.”

The hand raises Lau's head, poised to smash it again. “Wait!” he says, spitting blood, the uprooted teeth still floating inside his mouth. “Okay. I made some trades. I took some positions, but I didn't tell anyone, it was programmed. And my money, compared to the others' . . .”

“And who else?”

“No one. My boss. I had to, but I told you that on the—”

“Not me.”

“Okay. I told
the caller
that I had to.”

Pressing Lau's face against the stone: “Who . . . else?”

“No one. I called my friends. Please. Believe me.”

“How can I believe someone who has failed to keep the only promise we've asked of him?”

Lau begins to weep. “I made the trade because I was desperate. I was about to lose everything.”

The hand loosens its grip on the back of his neck, but the pistol is still pressed against his forehead.

“I can cancel it,” Lau says, somewhat brightening. “I'll make the call, contact them right now.”

“That won't be necessary. Stand up, but don't turn around.”

Lau lifts his face off the counter and straightens. “I promise, I won't tell another soul.”

“This is correct,” the voice says. “You won't.” The bullet enters through the base of Lau's skull and exits through the floor-to-ceiling harbor-view window.

His body stiffens, then goes slack all at once, and he pitches face-first toward the soon to be bloodstained white marble countertop as a squall of glass shards begins to float like snow through the Hong Kong twilight toward the warm asphalt of Harbour Street, seventeen stories below.

On the counter next to him the light on his phone flashes with a message, a text with the heading
URGENT from NYC
.

5

New York City

W
eiss has a whiteboard on his living room wall that is covered with cities, dates, symbols, account numbers, quotations, and theories written in multicolored markers. What Weiss doesn't have is the type of mind that can pull it all together.

His value at the fund and in life has always been his intuition and his tenacity. He has always made up for his limited natural gifts with passion and curiosity. At the fund they call him a digger. In high school football and baseball they called him a scrapper, someone who made up for his lack of natural ability with preparation and intensity. But on the field and at work that will only get you so far. Some people are naturals, and in sports and in the financial world, he's never seen a person as naturally gifted as Drew Havens.

At this point, Weiss feels he's done enough digging and uncovered enough data to validate the hypotheses that something terrible is already happening in Hong Kong and Dubai and that something much worse is going to happen at the end of this week, to the Rising Fund and the U.S. economy. Now all he can do is assemble it all as best he can and give it to the only person he knows who can take it to the next level: Havens.

While he's watching files transfer from his desktop to his flash drive, the Spyware warning flashes again. He's already reaching to pull out the flash drive when the entire desktop flashes black and then white and then off. After two attempts to reboot the computer, he gives up. Someone sent a digital bullet his way and killed everything on his hard drive and perhaps the flash as well. He's still holding the flash when he hears the buzzer and the familiar clunk of the downstairs lobby door opening. Curious, he strides over to his front door. For a moment he considers bolting and locking it, but instead he opens it and listens. Instead of the clicking of a key through the tumblers he hears the second lobby door gently shaking in its jamb. Someone is picking the lock. As the second door creaks open, he eases out into the hall and quietly closes his door.

He takes soft steps in his stockinged feet, heading upstairs toward the steel door that leads onto the roof, while the heavier footsteps start echoing upward from below. He pauses at the roof door and listens as the steps come closer. The footsteps cease, he's sure, outside his apartment door.

He hears his door open and close. Should've locked it. Should've done a lot of things, Weiss thinks, twisting the roof doorknob and slipping into the October night. He scans the roof, most recently the scene of a barbeque with friends from college, then walks toward the shelter of an air-conditioning unit and squats. After a moment he turns and looks over the edge at the alley seven floors down. A necklace of car lights winds up the FDR. A siren bleats heading uptown. Peeking back over the edge of the unit, eyes fixed on the closed steel door, he takes out his phone, calls up Havens's name, and begins to text. He's still texting as the door to the roof begins to swing open.