The Last Trade (8 page)

3

Hong Kong

S
obieski hates to run, especially at 5
A.M.
, especially after a late night of gambling and betrayal on a barge, followed by an unfortunate visit to a stranger's bed, and on less than two hours of sleep.

But run she must. She finds that an early morning run is the best way to forget the night and transition between her conflicting selves. Sometimes it's a reward, other times a punishment.

Most days, she starts outside her apartment in Stanley Market, but this morning she decides to change things up and drives to the Wanchai District for a loop along Victoria Harbour. Predawn light tints the eastern horizon a surreal metallic blue as she breaks into her stride. No stretching, no visualizing. Just dive in and get it over with. Usually she listens to music while she runs. Most recently the Black Keys, Spoon, and the Felice Brothers, but her head is in no condition to listen to anything this morning.

The tide is in, and the brightening sky looks as if it will soon be relatively blue. Later, the tide will recede and the sun will rise up and bake the teeming streets, and the heat and smog and noise of Hong Kong will change everything. She rounds a bend in the path and sees the Star ferry chugging out for an early morning commuter run. The ferry reminds her of the ferry to Macau. When she first arrived in Hong Kong, she'd take the night ferry to the casinos in Macau, but now that she's found the barge, and several other local games, she doesn't have to travel. There's a moment while she's thinking about Macau and the barge and the Dutchman when she feels that she might lose her stomach, but after a while it passes and she's able to keep a decent pace. She's not far from the barge, and Patrick Lau's condominium is within sight, when her phone buzzes. She slows to a stop and looks at her watch, incredulously, before answering.

“Five oh-nine
A.M.
,” she says. “Just getting home?”

Michaud laughs. “If anyone else answered their phone breathing so heavily, at this time of day, I'd assume the most impure and obscene of scenarios were going down. But not my Sobieski.”

“Only obscenity I'm feeling right now is the fact that my morning run has once again been rudely interrupted.”

“How's the crowd at the market?”

“Changed it up,” she explains. “Doing the Harbourfront.”

“Patrick Lau's old stomping grounds.”

“Why not?”

“Thoughts?”

Sobieski pauses. In between gambling and screwing, her late night/early morning research into the life of Patrick Lau didn't reveal any single case-breaking discovery. But she did uncover enough bits and pieces to keep her intrigued.

“Nothing major. But a couple things I saw about his personal matters up to but not including whatever he did yesterday are worth looking into.”

“For instance?”

“Well, I did a secure credit check using the basic software on my laptop. Turns out Lau was in a lot worse shape than his coworkers or neighbors thought or were willing to admit.”

“Who isn't?

“Well,” she continues, “in addition to having problems making his monthly condo rent, Lau was more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars deep in debt, mostly the result of bad real estate deals and personal trades, overextended credit cards, and another thirty thousand dropped over the past twelve months on weekend junkets to Bangkok.”

“No doubt on sex vacations.”

“Homosexuals do all kinds of interesting things, Boss. Just like normal people. Except solitaire karaoke. That's too gay even for them.”

“So,” Michaud replies, “Lau had some debt issues.”

“Which begs the question: Who knew that he had a serious debt situation?”

“That's an odd phrase,” Michaud says. “‘Begs the question.'”

“Did he owe enough to get himself killed?” she wonders, before answering herself. “Banks may foreclose, but best I know they haven't taken to killing. And if it's criminal, really, why would you kill someone who owes you a large sum of money? Wouldn't killing the person who owes you money guarantee that you'd never see a cent of it?”

“I don't know,” replies Michaud. “No one's ever owed me a large sum of money. Listen, Sobes, it sounds like a funky homicide, but our job at TFI is—”

She cuts him off and completes the sentence, her departmental mission statement, for him. “. . . Terrorism and Financial Intelligence's twin aims are safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats.”

“None of which seems to fit the profile of the murder of Patrick Lau.”

“You didn't let me finish.”

“You sounded like you were.”

“It's five something in the morning. Pardon me if my PowerPoint skills aren't razor sharp.”

“What else?”

“From a TFI perspective, it's worth noting that Lau's group was responsible for buying up an inordinate amount of short paper yesterday. This came up in a basic at-home search. Not in one transaction, but most if not all for tech stocks.”

“Okay,” Michaud says. Now his voice is all business, no longer collegial. “What kind of tech?”

“Well, Apple, Dell, Cisco, and about a dozen others.”

“All American-based?”

“I don't have the list in the waistband of my shorts, but on first glance, yep . . .”

Michaud sighs. One thing that raises a red flag for Americans working in the prevention of financial terrorism is a massive short position, especially on American securities. Throw a murdered broker into the equation and the flag gets twice as big and red and flies five times higher. “Why didn't you call me sooner?”

Sobieski watches three small fishing boats head out for the waters of the South China Sea. She considers saying something about the fact that she didn't discover this until a little more than an hour ago, that it didn't seem particularly conclusive, and that she didn't immediately contact him because she imagined he was passed out or still in a bar, but she resists. “You're right,” she answers. “I should have.”

“How much of a short?”

“Hard to tell without getting on our system, but the best I could tell with the tools on hand is that Lau or someone in his group tried to Smurf it, executing a ton of shorts, none more than ten thousand dollars to stay under the tracking radar, totaling in the area of a billion dollars. Thousands of individual transactions. Micro-transactions. Whatever. Over a period of many hours.”

“Did you . . . ?”

Again, Sobieski finishes her boss's thought. “Was I able to discover in my bedroom at four-twenty-six this morning if any external, real-world circumstances may have triggered the position? No, not on the newswires or market trends or the individual company news feeds. If anything, whoever did this, they're in the distinct minority, betting so aggressively against this kind of blue chip tech. And no, I have no clue at this point about the identity of the investor or investors or if there's a deeper U.S. connection.”

“How long would it take you to get in here?”

Sobieski looks at her outfit. Black tights beneath a pair of charcoal running shorts and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt. “You're already in?”

“Just completed a solitaire version of the walk of shame.”

She sighs. “You know, it would be nice to be able to go to work in big people's clothes once in a while.”

“Ten minutes. You like tea. I'll brew some fancy tea for you.”

4

Dubai

N
obody walks outside in Dubai, which is why Nasseem Al Mar enjoys it so much.

He's heard all the jokes about mad dogs and Englishmen, and the warnings about the risks of exposure to the desert heat but, unlike mad dogs and Englishmen, he doesn't come out in the midday sun. He walks at dawn or, like today, after work, at dusk.

Al Mar, a forty-four-year-old broker who landed on his post-Lehman, post-collapse feet at Zayed Capital, no longer cares what the others think. In the past five years he's seen more excess and financial devastation than in the previous twenty. He's watched friends, clients, and family members make millions, spend more, then lose everything. He's seen this city and this country rise and soar and crash in a matter of months. All he cares about these days is surviving, and today was a good day, a day that makes walking through the desert on the outskirts of Dubailand doubly satisfying because of a complex yet lucrative series of trades he just finished executing.

Precisely at 9
A.M.
, just as the exchange opened for the day, he received a call from someone in Berlin representing an investor in the United States. The caller wanted to take a number of short positions on a series of predominantly U.S.-based media stocks and funds specializing in broadcast, film, music, and print. TV networks. Newspaper, book, and magazine publishing. Major motion picture studios. And music. Nothing unusual. After all, each of these so-called old-media industries is facing a series of technological, cultural, and economic challenges threatening its future. Indeed, every day someone seems to be predicting the death of one industry or another, so the aggressive short positions were nothing out of the ordinary.

However, what was unusual was the sheer volume of trades and the manner in which the caller wanted to execute them. Rather than going with one transaction per trade, he laid out an elaborate sequence that required the computerized executions of thousands of smaller trades, or micro-transactions, each for less than ten thousand dollars U.S.

As a brokerage exercise, it was one huge pain in the ass for Al Mar. But because of the relatively modest value of each individual trade, he didn't have to get his MD's approval. In essence, only Al Mar and his semi-anonymous client, whose transfers and credentials cleared without a hitch, would know the sum of the trades, which cumulatively totaled just under a billion dollars.

So it's a screen-weary yet soon-to-be well-compensated Nasseem Al Mar who is walking away from the ghost town periphery of his city in 101-degree, 6
P.M.
desert heat. He's left his black suit jacket on the front seat of the car and loosened his red tie, each part of the corporate uniform he and his fellow brokers wear every day. Even though they rarely if ever have face-to-face interactions with clients, the new MD insists on the formal dress code, says it reflects integrity and creates solidarity within the ranks, and puts their Western clientele at ease. Al Mar thinks, in addition to being bloody hot, the matching suits make them look like members of a football club. But whatever. He's a survivor. And if wearing a corporate uniform is part of the deal, so be it.

He thinks about his wife. Maybe this windfall will relax her, because steady employment hasn't been enough. She's seen too many others fail. His brother. Her brothers, and her brother-in-law who disappeared after the crash and left her sister alone to raise four children. She wants a return to the golden times. This deal won't quite do that, but it's something. It's a decent start.

Briefly, he considered defying the client's request and putting some of his own money on some mirror shorts on a personal account, but he didn't. Couldn't. Not because he is afraid of retaliation, but because he has no money to invest. But, because he thought it would make his wife happy, just before leaving the office, Al Mar dialed his brother-in-law, who has some liquidity, and told him about his last trade. Not surprisingly, his brother-in-law, who is something of a gambler, jumped all over his information.

He walks to the burned-out wreck of a Mercedes. Stolen or abandoned, he thinks. Once the property of a fool, now owned by the desert. He turns around to begin his walk back to his car. Not a long walk, but a good walk. Enough to get the blood flowing, to clear the head. As he nears his car, he sees the shine of another vehicle approaching. In this stretch of the desert, when the light is right, one can see for miles. It takes more than a minute for the car to reach him. Another black Mercedes, same model as the wreck down the road.

When it's twenty yards away, Al Mar steps off the edge of the road. It's rare that one sees a pedestrian out here, plus the light is fading, so why take a chance? When the driver spots him, the car slows, almost to a stop. There is a moment when driver and pedestrian make eye contact, and it sends a shiver up Al Mar's spine. He's filled with the sensation that something is about to go terribly wrong, that he's made a mistake coming out here to this same spot day after day, that sooner or later he will be robbed or worse.

But then the driver, a middle-aged man with a mustache not unlike Al Mar's, turns back to the road and floors the gas. Al Mar stops and watches the car shrink in the twilight and the despair passes. The survivor lives another day.

5

New York City

T
he doors close behind him as he hops onto the last car of the last train to Katonah out of Grand Central. It's a local, filled with drunken concert – and club-goers and a handful of glassy-eyed men in suits for whom the demands of work have overtaken the importance of almost everything else. He sits on a cramped and stiff rear-facing jumper seat at the back of the car and attempts to prioritize what's happened and what he needs to do.

First, always first, Miranda. She told him she didn't pick up when Weiss called because she didn't recognize the number. She said his message was short and harried. He was upset that Havens had not returned his calls; he feared for his life; and he was certain that something horrible was about to happen. He said that the fund was involved, and that Havens was his last best hope to figure it out. When she called him back five minutes later, there was no answer.

Next, Weiss. Weiss was right. Havens had begun to ignore his messages. They'd joked about it several times. Weiss knew that Havens wasn't a great communicator, especially when it came to text messaging. The way Havens saw it, if he replied to one, it would open the floodgates. And Weiss, who Havens once said did not have an off button, would strive for constant contact. He looks around the train, then scrolls back through Weiss's messages, starting chronologically with two he read but chose to ignore while he was at the club:

 

– . . .wilt thou not be brotherly to us?

-Berlin. 12.42-6

After considering the first two, which still make no sense, he opens two more:

 

-Murder @ Hang Seng

-Help 3.338-9

Of course Havens is familiar with an institution the size of Hang Seng. But he has no relationship with the Hong Kong HQ'd bank or its employees.
Help
he clearly understands. That must have come soon after he walked away from Salvado at Elysian, just before Laslow got to Weiss. However, he has no idea what to make of the second part of Weiss's text:
3.338-9
. All that he can theorize is that Weiss knew he was in danger and had begun an information dump on him, one cryptic text at a time. The next and final text, sent less than a minute after
Help
, says:

 

This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.

Havens wonders what was going on when Weiss sent this, and why he's now seeing it for the first time. Was he hiding? Had he heard Laslow coming? Or was he simply jamming the night away, trying to find answers, scribbling explanations for his confounding world on a whiteboard and then dispatching them one text at a time, like messages in a bottle? In the end, it's obvious that he hid. What else could he do? Weiss had neither the skills nor the temperament of a fighter. At least not a physical fighter. But for an idea or a cause, he was as tenacious as they come, and Havens realizes that this message was Weiss's last punch in a fight whose outcome is yet to be determined.

As they come out of the tunnels of Manhattan and creep across the bridge over the East River, Havens thinks of a conversation he had with Salvado and Rourke back in 2007. They had just realized, based upon Havens's findings, that they would make a killing by shorting the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market. They were talking in Salvado's office while he was being fitted by a tailor from Milan he'd had flown in on the Gulfstream VI.

“Why?” Havens asked. “Why can't we simply go forward to the authorities? The heads of the banks. The Fed. The people insuring this junk? Place our positions, sure. But why not give them a chance to minimize an epic fail? Why can't we simply go to the ratings people at S&P or Moody's, or the regulators? The goddamn SEC? And alert—no,
show
—them that this is all gonna blow up in the worst possible way—a ten-sigma event—if they don't do something about it. Lay out the models. The numbers. The inevitable result of the whole nightmare equation. Give people a chance to make the connections, recognize the deviations, and you know, unwind some of their most volatile positions. We'd be rich
and
heroes.”

Salvado's initial reaction was to laugh. Rourke didn't laugh. Rourke looked at Havens with enlightened, admiring eyes, then turned to Salvado. “You know, he has a point, Rick. I don't see why—”

Salvado cut Rourke off, dismissed him by addressing Havens only. “This is why I love you, Havens. And why you are going to need me to stop you from hearting away your hard-won money.”

Rourke couldn't help himself. “There's gonna be plenty to go around, regardless.”

Salvado stopped smiling. “Enough, Tommy. Please. In fact, do me a favor and get the fuck out of here. You are a words guy, a goddamn classical lit major, and because it involves something called numbers, this is way beyond your tiny, liberal arts–polluted intellect.” Rourke, humbled, stepped back, a symbolic departure, and remained silent. The tailor looked up. “And you,” Salvado told the tailor, “if you tell a soul about this conversation I will make a suit out of your fucking skin.” Finally he turned to Havens. “Our primary obligation is to our clients. We are here to maximize the return on their—and our—investments. Second, if we did tell those assholes, it wouldn't matter. None of them would understand. Certainly not the regulators. They understand law, not the machinery of the markets. And the ratings people? Hah! Might as well alert a hot dog vendor. You think they'd bite the hand that feeds them? The first ratings service to tell the truth about this shit is the first to see its market share plummet. Do you think people go to them for truth, or to validate their agenda? And the banks? I've told the heads of some of the biggest institutions in the world, and they are in complete, utter denial. Because they don't want to believe or don't have a clue. Screw them. Let 'em fail. And this: Why not us? Why not have the handful of hardworking people smart enough to figure it out be the ones to cash in on it?”

Havens replied, “I don't care about the banks either, Rick. But if these senior sub-prime tranches go to smithereens millions of innocent people . . . if we're even one quarter right, the global economy is going to go down with them.”

Salvado's response: a wink. Then, “No one's innocent. They all knew what they were getting into and didn't believe it would end. They all thought their 401(k)s were gonna double every year, and that they could day trade as well in 2008 as they could while the Internet bubble swelled. They thought they could buy homes twenty times their annual incomes and take vacations and buy flat screens with no assets and shit jobs. They aren't innocent. The banks aren't innocent. Paulson and the feds aren't innocent. The fools rating and insuring all of this aren't innocent. They all chose to ride it out and milk every last cent out of the system. Fuck them, Havens. Every last greedy one of them.”

Right then and there, Havens tells himself, just as he has told himself many times since that day,
You should have known
. You should have walked away. But you stayed because of the money, and because you stayed, your life changed all at once and then forever. Because you stayed, you lost your soul, your wife, your daughter, and now your friend and protégé. An idealistic young man is dead, all because you didn't walk away.

 

This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.

Which seven? Havens thinks. And to what end? The conductor passes, collecting and punching tickets, announcing the next stop of White Plains, nine stops from Miranda. Havens continues to stare at Weiss's final text and thinks of the long, rambling, paranoid, semi-lucid voice mail message Weiss left him on Friday. It was a diatribe against the U.S. financial system, the Rising Fund, and Rick Salvado, invoking everything from Area 51 to the Crash of 1929 to 9/11 and his twenty-eight trades theory. Initially, Havens had saved the message for the sole purpose of playing it back to Weiss once he sobered up, because the kid sounded out of it. On Saturday, frustrated by Havens's lack of a serious response, Weiss sent Havens a long e-mail on his personal account under the heading “28 Trades.” The e-mail was a more concise and linear version of the previous day's semi-hysterical phone message.

It began with the contention that a number of unknown individuals with precise foreknowledge of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center had purchased an unusually large number of “put” options on a number of American holdings, including United and American Airlines. Weiss's theory, which he supported with confirmation from everyone from the Israeli Herzliya Institute for Counterterrorism to the Drudge Report, purported that there were twenty-eight such stocks, including insurance companies and U.S. financial institution holdings, in addition to the airline puts. Their bet, essentially, was that when the towers came down, the stocks would fall as well.

Havens got that far into the e-mail before stopping and hitting delete. The theory was too outrageous for him to take seriously. It reeked too much of the unsubstantiated cable news–brainwashed, rumor-mongering lunatic fringe that had hijacked the culture. He preferred the logic of facts and numbers to accusation and innuendo. The hypothetical made his brain hurt, and the theories that dealt with the fall of mankind made him want to curl up in a ball.

The next day, Sunday, Weiss called four times. On the fifth Havens picked up and agreed to meet him over drinks at Cipriani. Weiss showed up late, unshaven and dressed in a T-shirt, shredded jeans, and sandals. The hostess had to be coaxed into allowing him in. At the bar, sipping a neat Macallan, Havens said to Weiss, “I'm worried about you, Danny. All this
X-Files
stuff, what does any of this have to do with the current holdings of the Rising Fund?”

“You didn't finish the e-mail?”

“No.”

“Everything and nothing.”

“You're saying that Salvado had something to do with 9/11? The man who
Forbes
says paints his hedge red, white, and blue?”

“I'm saying . . .”

“Shit, in 2001 The Rising didn't even exist.”

“I'm saying that my findings tell me there's something similar going on. Another twenty-eight trade–type scenario that somehow involves, well, us.”

“Us?”

“Our boss. Our place of business.”

“Why would a billionaire risk throwing it all away for what . . . a few more billion?”

Weiss moved his face two inches from Havens's. As Weiss began to speak, Havens wasn't thinking conspiracy theory, but nervous breakdown. “Some, like you, only see numbers. Others only see stories. I see both. And as much as you refuse to recognize it, Drew, there's a narrative in the numbers. In fact there's a narrative to every trade. The world isn't a logical place. It operates on emotions; its stories are filled with greed and revenge as well as love and redemption. I don't know all of the components for his story, his true and absolute motive, but the parts that I've been exposed to so far are the stuff of tragedy. A real one.”

“I think you need to speak with someone, Danny.”

“The makeup of The Rising is just the beginning. For all I know it's a goddamn red herring.”

Havens grabbed Weiss by his narrow shoulders. “What do you want me to do, Danny? Go to the cops? Have 'em bust Rick, for what? Why don't you just follow me and quit?”

“I wish it was that easy. I don't know the answer yet, but I'm gonna find it. And when I do, I want you to believe me.”

That was the beginning. The scene in the apartment tonight—the body, the blood, and the board—was the end. He removes Danny Weiss's red flash drive from his front pocket and sticks it into a USB port on the side of his computer. He's hoping that it contains something that will make sense of this all, but instead, he sees that there is only one unmarked file on the drive. After he clicks, it takes more than five minutes for the software to load. The program appears without a logo or name or audio mnemonic. After a moment a search box appears. He types “The Rising” into the box and hits enter, but nothing happens because the Internet signal on the train fades in and out. Weiss recently mentioned that he'd gotten hold of an illegal, turbocharged piece of tracking/hacking software. Havens imagines that this is what he used to discover the clues that validated his theory and led to his death, and that Weiss wanted Havens to have it. He slips the drive into his sock and goes back to the last text message from Danny Weiss. This time he notices an icon attached to it. A tiny illustration of a camera, denoting a photo attachment.

He clicks on the icon and watches the photograph begin to appear, first as a pixilated blur and then more sharply defined and perfectly framed. He recognizes that it's the whiteboard from Danny Weiss's wall, but he can't enlarge it on the small screen. As he strains to read the tiny, blurred letters, he resolves himself, in honor of Danny Weiss, to figure this out. To validate the young man's life and hopefully save some others. To make order from chaos. And to teach himself something his brain is not programmed to do: to craft a narrative out of numbers. Staring at the postage stamp–sized picture of the board he saw in the dead man's apartment less than two hours ago he thinks, I believe you now, Danny.