The Last Trade (5 page)

9

Hong Kong

C
ara Sobieski is spending her Monday afternoon happy hour in the same place she spends most happy hours, work permitting: kicking the hell out of something or someone. Heavy bags, in-structors, air.

Today she's taking more than giving, squared off in a ring with a professional Muay Thai kickboxer at Pyramid Gym on Connaught Road. The pro needed a sparring partner, an instructor pointed to “the pretty American,” and here she is, trying but not entirely succeeding at blocking a series of kicks and jabs. She takes a straight left to the jaw and has her feet stripped out from under her by a sweep kick, but she pops right back up and comes back at the pro for more. She blocks a right and sidesteps a straight left foot, but she doesn't see the straight right. It crashes against her headgear and rattles her brain. The pro follows with two quick lefts, and Sobieski tips back against the rope. In the second it takes the pro to glance at her trainer, as if to ask if she should continue the onslaught, Sobieski bounces forward off the rope as if it is electrified and slams a right uppercut just below the pro's ribs. She hears the breath gush out of her opponent as she rips off two more uppercuts with her left fist. Sobieski rears back with her left foot and starts to bring it forward, but the pro sidesteps it and lunges forward, wrapping her in a clinch. Sobieski fights the clinch like a trapped animal, frantically trying to punch and thrust and wriggle out of it. For a moment she loses track of where she is and whom she's fighting, and she's filled with so much rage that the room dims and spins and blurs.

The pro's trainer grabs her from behind and pulls her back, “Whoa . . . whoa!” he shouts. “Time! Time!” All at once she stops. The pro says something nasty to her through her mouth guard and gestures toward the bell.

“Didn't you hear the bell?” the trainer asks, leading Sobieski to her corner. Sobieski shakes her head. “After I got hit, I lost it. Tell her I'm sorry.”

The trainer nods. She looks for a stool to sit on before the next round. The trainer shakes his head. “She's done.”

Sobieski shrugs, climbs out of the ring, and walks back to the heaving bag she was hitting when they approached her. “You should do this for real,” the trainer tells her as she executes a flurry of punch-and-knee strike combinations. Sobieski is twenty-nine, lean, and compulsively fit. “She's nothing special,” he says, meaning the pro. “But I'm telling you, the way you responded to the pain . . . you can compete.”

Sobieski shakes her head and speaks without breaking the rhythm of her strikes. “I like my teeth. And this bump on my nose? Some find it funny looking, but I'm kind of fond of it, too.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I'm always here.” A few moments later Sobieski sees her phone flash and buzz on top of her gym bag. Usually she keeps it strapped to her arm during workouts, but she took it off before getting into the ring. Even in a gym, in the middle of a late day class in Hong Kong, she's always connected, always on. They said it would be like this when she left Treasury for the newly formed Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) task force, and they were right. She gives a final, crisp kick at an imaginary target, then steps away from the rest of the class to take the call in the hallway outside the studio.

“Sobieski.”

“Sorry to interrupt your kung fu marathon, Sobes, but you know how it goes.” It's her boss, Michaud, head of the Pan Asian Bureau of TFI.

Sobieski can barely hear him. The male voice in the background butchering Katy Perry's “California Gurls” is a clear giveaway that he's in a karaoke bar. “Doesn't sound like you're in an office, Chief.”

“One man's office is another man's prison,” Michaud replies. “What can I say, I was overcome by the urge to sing Sinatra, but now I'm not so sure.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So I just got a call from a senior tech inspector at Hong Kong PD. A friend. They've got a body they want us to look at, homicide in a high-rise near the convention center on the harbor.”

Sobieski looks back into the class, watching the instructor rapping with another woman, probably telling her that
she
can compete. She decides the guy's a perv, to be avoided, and that she's nothing special when it comes to martial arts. “And I should be interested in this because . . . ?”

“Securities trader. Twenty-nine. Single. Worked the U.S. desk at Hang Seng Bank.”

“Okay . . .”

“It's a favor for a local detective. Detective Mo. Said that it looked like a professional hit, and that, combined with the nature of his job . . . Jesus, can you just check it out for me?”

* * *

Twenty-four minutes later Sobieski is standing inside Patrick Lau's condo. Hong Kong Police Department homicide detectives are scouring the rooms for clues. Lau is still facedown on the counter, blood darkening in an oval on the white marble top. Wind blasts through the opening where the floor-to-ceiling window was, lifting the drapes on a constant horizontal plane.

Staring at the kitchen counter, Sobieski tries but can't figure out how or why the rest of Lau's stiffening body is still standing. She's tempted to ask, but because this is not her purview or jurisdiction, she decides to keep her mouth shut and let HKPD Senior Tech Detective Hueng Mo initiate the talking.

It doesn't take Mo long. “Wow. Michaud said you were easy on the eyes, but—”

She cuts him off. “That's funny. Somehow he neglected to tell me you were an insecure, old-school perv.”

Mo steps back. He's a short, gap-toothed man of fifty-five, with thick black-and-white hair and a face of crooked lines and crevasses. “I apologize. He also said you were the most talented, dedicated, and honest agent he had.”

She stares at him with 5 percent less edge. Okay.

“So,” he says, “what do you think?”

Sobieski shrugs. “Something tells me he didn't accidentally bang his head mixing a proper martini.”

Mo nods. “They found the slug on the sidewalk. Long way down. Nine-millimeter. On its way to ballistics, though no one's holding their breath for a match.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Gay. Neighbor said his last partner broke up with him more than a year ago and he's lived like a hermit. So the salacious sex angle, sadly, isn't likely. Nor is robbery. For example,” Mo gestures with his chin toward the corpse, “they left that fake Rolex on his wrist. Plus an entire box of what in my humble opinion is extremely tacky jewelry on the nightstand.” With a ballpoint pen he holds up a golden ring. “Do people still wear pinky rings in the states?”

“That's a nipple ring,” Sobieski corrects him. “With all due respect.” Mo drops the ring as if it's radioactive. Sobieski looks at the front door. “What about the locks? Any sign of forced entry?”

Mo shakes his head. “Door was unlocked when security came up. Nothing out of the ordinary from the doorman, and we're already looking at the film from the lobby camera. So, no. But, again, who knows? You don't use a crowbar to break locks today. You use data, micro-tools. A polite knock.”

“Family?”

Mo jerks his head toward a middle-aged woman being interviewed near the front door. “Neighbor says maybe on the mainland, somewhere in Shanxi. But she says he never visited or spoke of them. I'm guessing he was ostracized back home because of his sexuality.”

Sobieski walks closer to the body. She notes the empty martini glass. Having an after work cocktail is nothing out of the ordinary, but it seems a bit much for someone all alone, on a Monday. “Why would someone want to execute a young trader? I mean he's far from broke, but he's not exactly Warren Buffett, either.”

“Warren who?”

Sobieski smiles. “Buffett. Like Li Ka-shing. A multi-multi-billionaire.”

Mo waves her off. “I was kidding. Even I know Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha. Anyway, Lau may have had money at one point, but not lately. Building manager says he barely made his rent the past three months.”

“You speak to his boss?”

Mo nods. “Next stop on my journey. Waiting for legal reps from their bank to okay it. Expecting a stonewall from them, but you're welcome to come.”

Sobieski watches two cops tracking large strips of yellow tape across the open window space. One of the drapes blows into the face of the second cop and he freaks, drops to the floor several feet from the window frame. “This is fascinating and all,” she says to Mo. “And it's a hell of a lot more interesting than spending eight hours breaking down funky natural gas numbers out of Chechnya, but really, I still don't get why I'm here.”

“Okay, this is why I called Michaud: A nobody trader is executed by a pro. I thought perhaps something might have shown up in the wires. The tracking programs. You know, the chatter.”

“And how do you know Michaud?” Sobieski asks, thinking, Please don't say karaoke.

“Friend of a friend. Once I gave him something he needed.”

Sobieski looks down and shifts her feet. This is a tricky subject. Chatter. Wire movement. Electronic surveillance. TFI agents are not allowed to discuss the existence or findings of their tracking software. Especially with foreigners, even with cops to whom your boss owes a favor. Most insiders know that someone in an agency such as TFI or the U.S. Department of Treasury has access to amazingly intuitive software that can track trades and communiqués and predict market shifts in real time—presumably the best of its kind. But the topic has been off-limits for agents to discuss ever since the post-9/11 debacle with the Promis software. Back then it was revealed that, rather than the software being used exclusively to fight terrorism, bootleg copies of Promis were turning up on the black market and being used
against
American interests, to facilitate terrorism.

“I know what you're thinking,” Mo says. “I've already spoken to agents at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. I imagine their stuff's not bad either, but they only find what
they're
looking for and don't play especially well with others. And unless the integrity of the exchange is threatened, I doubt they give a shit about the likes of me or Patrick Lau.”

“What bank was he at again?”

“Hang Seng. So far, to the extent that we can, we're seeing nothing out of the ordinary, no big moves. But who knows.”

“Any PCs in the house?” Sobieski asks.

Mo points at a small device on the counter. “Just his CrackBerry. We'll scan it as soon as they're done.”

Sobieski bends and looks closely at the phone's LED screen. Not a BlackBerry but the latest Motorola Droid. She sees the home page for Hutong. Hutong is one of the finest restaurants in all of Hong Kong. She knows this because the date who took her there two months ago made a point of telling her. Several times. And he was right. The food was amazing. But the date, like all of her dates these days, was a disaster.

Mo bends down next to her, points at the device. “Think he traded on that?”

She shrugs. Who knows? The data, if anything comes up, won't lie. That's easy. But the part that doesn't really involve her, the nuts and bolts of the homicide, is what has her thinking. “Forgive me if this sounds naïve, but is it normal for someone to go through this seemingly extensive ritual of fixing a fancy cocktail in a fancy glass like this when they're all alone, on a Monday?”

Mo looks at the empty martini glass, the high-end gin bottle, the stainless steel shaker, and the jar of olive juice on the counter. “Even though it's Monday,” he reasons, “some people like to come home and have a nice martini at the end of a long day. Me, I'm a whiskey guy. Small batch bourbon. Single malt scotch. I like good stuff, but to tell you the truth, if it's good I don't care if they serve it in a sippy cup.”

“Have you ever been to Hutong?”

Mo whistles. “Hutong on Peking Road? That's some good eating. I went once, two years ago in July.”

“What for?”

“Well, you eat at Hutong either if you're rich or for some kind of special occasion. I took my wife for our thirtieth wedding anniversary.”

She thinks of her date, who was neither rich nor special. “Did your wife like it?”

He thinks. “She liked the fact that we went more than the experience itself. She's not a fan of all that precious stuff.”

Sobieski smiles. “So how do you know Michaud again?”

Mo smiles and rolls a finger near his temple. “Your boss is a unique individual.”

“But . . .” A plainclothes in the hall near the bedroom door whistles for Mo. He holds up a finger to Sobieski and says, “I'll be right back.”

After Mo leaves, she takes one last look at Patrick Lau, her first up-close homicide victim, before they straighten him out, put him in a bag, and strap him onto a gurney. Staring at the screen of Lau's phone, she wonders who would want to kill a twenty-nine-year-old trader on the same day that he seemed intent on celebrating something?

Two Hong Kong EMTs stand on either side of Lau's corpse, deciding how they're going to handle this. Sobieski turns away as they begin the pre-hoist three-two-one countdown in Chinese.
San. Er. Yi!
Staring out the window at the city, lights refracting an eerie spectrum off a blanket of night smog, she decides that as a favor to Michaud and Mo, who seems like a decent enough cop, and also out of an admitted fascination with the crime, she'll give this some more thought. She'll accompany Mo to Patrick Lau's bank and see where that goes.

At the very least it will keep the demons at bay.

10

New York City

E
ven outside the club, gulping fresh autumn air, he looks for numbers.

To Havens the streets are a grid, a pattern, a series of probabilities waiting to be modeled. Go across the Park and down Fifth or take the subway? Is there a concert at the Garden? A visiting head of state? An accident? How far away is it? How fast can you get there?

He looks from the streets to the sky, a bigger grid, a never-ending pattern of stars and planets and galaxies, clusters of objects that defy logic but not numbers, and when he considers a fixed point in the heavens he can't help but think similar things. How far away is it? How fast can you get there?

There's a moment when he considers going back inside to Salvado and Rourke and the clients. Always the clients. But he can't do it. He passes the line of taxis and begins to walk. Because as much as he wants to get away from the club, he's in no rush to get back to his empty apartment.

After two blocks he reaches for his phone. He's forgotten that he turned it off. There are missed calls and messages from Weiss, but he ignores them as soon as he sees that he's also missed a call from Miranda. He stares at her number. Her numbers.

Once, near the end, Miranda told him that maybe they would have been able to stay together if she'd learned to communicate in numbers, rather than words. “Maybe if I'd had a Dow Jones ticker crawling cross my chest,” she told him. “The latest quarterly earnings from Cisco on my forehead. The ten-year Treasury note yield reflected in my eyes. Then maybe you would have paid attention.” He said it wouldn't have mattered. They would have been her numbers. And he only trusted his own.

As much as he wants to, he can't bring himself to call Miranda. Instead, as he continues walking south, he caves and decides to call Weiss. Perhaps it's because of the stress of the night, or of the last three hundred nights, or because he's lonely, or bored, or because Miranda called again. But Havens needs to talk to
someone
, and as loath as he is to admit it, sometimes he likes talking to Weiss, or at least hearing Weiss talk, because they're so different from each other.

He listens as Weiss's phone rings fourteen times. Strange. Usually, if Weiss doesn't pick up after four rings, it kicks over to his voice mail. He hangs up and tries again, but still no answer or opportunity to leave a message.

With the phone still in hand he decides that he can't go back to his apartment. When he left this morning, he felt that, as pathetic as it was, the apartment was distinctly his, the home of a wealthy but troubled loner, a divorcee with a thing for numbers.

But now it no longer feels that way; it feels like the living space of a stranger, and even the phrase “living space” is pushing it. When he's in his apartment, he feels more isolated than ever. But now, unlike most of the other times he's felt cut off from the rest of the world, he doesn't want to be. He doesn't want to be alone, or to lose himself in numbers. He wants to find himself in something else, anywhere else.

He stops and stares at the phone. At Miranda's numbers. And pushes call. What the hell.

“Thanks for returning my sixteen messages.” Miranda, half-asleep.

Havens grunts. “Twenty, actually. But who's counting?”

“You're an ass.”

“I am. But maybe my not calling you back the previous nineteen times was my way of showing I care, of sparing you.”

“What do you want, Drew?”

He looks west toward the apartments of Hell's Kitchen and then up to find a quarter moon hanging like an apostrophe over the Hudson. “Drew?”

“I told Salvado that I was gonna quit today. . . .”

“Quit? I'm . . . surprised, and happy for you. Proud, actually. But that place, it's all you know.”

“I should have left a long time ago.”

“I agree, but why now?”

“Besides the overwhelming, soul-crushing guilt?”

“Yeah.”

He pauses to frame his response. “The thing is, I found some . . . I've been finding some . . . inconsistencies.”

“I never trusted that bastard.”

“More illogical than illegal.”

“Give it time.”

“At first it was just conflicting investment philosophies, but now, I don't know. Weiss, this kid I work with . . .”

“I know Danny.”

“I asked him to look into it and now he suspects all sorts of crazy things.”

“You never know. What was the megalomaniac's response?”

“Rick? First he said he'd get a team together to investigate, to get to the bottom of some of my findings. Then, as weeks passed, he told me to forget about it, that it wasn't something I should be concerned with. But I can't let things like that go. You know how I am with that stuff, Mir.”

She waits a few seconds before answering. “Yes. I do know. But is this why you're calling your ex-wife this late on a Monday?”

“You know it was never about the money. It was, you know, about figuring it out.”

“Bullshit. Money was always part of it, and in the end, what did you ever figure out?”

“The data. The logic.”

“Not every answer can be found in the data. You have a beautiful mind, and you've been wasting it serving the whims of a . . .”

“It was—”

“It was,” she interrupts, “what it was.”

He hears the click of another caller. He checks the number. Weiss.

“Let me guess,” she says. “It's work.”

“It's Weiss. He can wait.”

“Go ahead. Talk to him.”

“Mir, if someone would have told me how it was gonna end, I never would have put you through . . . I never would have put you through
me
.”

Even over the roar of the street he can hear her take a breath and slowly exhale. A year ago, just after their divorce and more than two years after their daughter died, Miranda met him at Magnolia's for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. It was his idea. He wanted to show her that he'd changed. That the job wasn't everything. Five minutes into the meeting his phone rang. She had arranged for his assistant to call him, to test to see if he had indeed changed. He ignored the first two rings. By the third ring he was checking the LED screen to identify the caller. When he saw that it was coming from the office, he reflexively raised a finger, pausing their talk, and answered it. Miranda was on her way out the shop door before their order was ready.

“If I'd have known . . . ,” he says now.

“Really, Drew? Well, since you
have
known, how different has it been? How different have
you
been? Best I can tell, you still work day and night. You still live for the numbers. You still don't socialize, unless it's with Salvado and his money monsters.”

“It's because no one . . .”

“It's because you
choose
not to. Have you been on a date since . . .”

“Since you left?”

“Yes.”

“Of course not.” Then, “Have you?”

She pauses, then sighs. “Drew, you've got to move on, and
engage
with the rest of the universe.”

He looks for the moon. The possessive apostrophe. The official punctuation of this night. Who will own it? Who will be owned by it? Somehow it's disappeared during their conversation and is hanging over someone else's night.

She continues. “People aren't going to always seek you out.”

But
you did
,
he thinks. You've sought me out twenty times
.
I have the messages to prove it. “You know, in two weeks, she'd have been . . .”

“Stop . . . Please . . .”

The line clicks with another call. Weiss again. Miranda says, “Why don't you go ahead and get that, Drew?”

“Because—”

“Get it,” she interrupts. Then, before hanging up, she says, “The rest of your life is calling.”

* * *

After she's gone, he stares at the city, but nothing registers. Not the surrounding buildings, the soft glow over the high-rises, or the darker universe above. This is how it has always been, since he was a child. One or two things mattered and everything else was an afterthought.

First it was birds. Every type in North America, then Asia, then Europe, and so on until, at age four, he had exhausted birds. Then it was Native American Indians. Every nation, every tribe, every ritual, cultural contribution, triumph, and atrocity they experienced. Then aircraft, from the Wright Brothers through the Space Shuttle. He needed to know more. He needed to know everything. He used to cry at night not because others mocked his obsessions (and they did), but because he knew he was different. The intense solitary focus, the need to know more and then everything, often at the expense of those who loved him most.

He was eleven when he discovered numbers. Mathematics. Statistics. Data. The markets. The global economy. When computers were added to the equation of his life, the change was exponential. Software enabled him to experience numbers as if they were music. He was the creator and conductor and fanatical audience of his own number music, which played out in an endless symphony. It was still a solitary obsession, but this time, because it was numbers and involved computers and, potentially, the making of money, people were more tolerant. No one thought that he was odd, or had an affliction, or suffered any kind of syndrome.

They thought he was gifted.

He redials Weiss's number, but again, no one answers. After twenty rings he clicks off and looks at his inbox. The only unopened file there is a text. Sent from Weiss, just before he shut off his phone at the club:

 

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