The Last Trade (9 page)

6

Hong Kong

T
he Hong Kong satellite office of the U.S. Department of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence exists in anonymity in a white clapboard Colonial home close to the embassies on Garden Road. From the street it looks like the home of the consul general of any one of several dozen nations that have residences in the area, and not the hub of an elite global counterterrorism task force.

A small sign on the outer door reads:
DR. ROBERT MICHAUD, PODIATRIST.

Beneath it reads another:
CLOSED.

Inside, beyond the faux reception area, the entire first floor is open-plan, not unlike the layout of a San Francisco digital start-up. In the center of what was once the great room of a diplomat's home are four eight-foot-long farm-style tables covered with wires and cables that merge and snake down through a hole in the center and stretch along the floor down the hall to an air-conditioned pantry that now houses four decks of the world's most powerful servers.

Sobieski stands alone at the tables, unpacking her knapsack. Michaud comes out of the kitchen. He's holding two mugs of hot tea. He offers one to Sobieski. “Oolong,” he says proudly.

“Oh, boy,” she answers, accepting one of the mugs. “Oolong tea. How fancy. And rare. Being that we're in China and everything.”

Michaud smiles. His eyes are a mass of intersecting red lines, the cluttered flow charts of failing conglomerates. He's forty-five going on ninety, handsome in a past tense, post-divorce, pre-alcoholic kind of way. Sobieski catches a whiff of booze on his breath that the Mentos can't conceal. Sort of pathetic, but she knows she's in no position to judge, and can't help but admire the guy for coming straight to work from the karaoke bar. “Come,” Michaud says, jerking his neck toward the small parlor that has been transformed into his office.

“Check this out,” he says, leaning over the paper ruins of his desk and tapping the fingerprint-smudged screen of his computer monitor. He scrolls through a blur of screens, each filled with the data for more than a hundred transactions, each of which includes the call letters of the same dozen technology stocks. “Thousands of orders for the same handful of stocks. All short positions.”

Sobieski sips the tea, tries to hide the fact that it tastes surprisingly good. “Hang Seng Bank?”

Michaud nods. “Your boy Patrick Lau's trading account. Disturbingly easy to hack.”

“Did he have any similar action, any big positions on anything, before or after these?”

“Nothing. Over the past twelve months the guy was losing money in 3-D. Most of his real clients walked after the last crash. Or next to last. Hard to keep track. To tell you the truth, considering his overall lack of assets, clients, and trades, I don't know why they were still letting the dude in the building.”

“Anything on the buyer? Mr. Short?”

Michaud sips his tea and doesn't hide his distaste for it. He spits it back, puts the mug on his desk, and pushes it far away. “Nothing on the individual Mr. Short, but it looks like the order for all this stuff came out of, or at least passed through, some bullshit firm in Berlin.”

“What firm?”

“Siren Securities. Most likely a false front for some bad guys. We're looking into it.”

“Any news on the performance or outlook for those tech companies that would indicate why someone would lay down this heavy of a bet on their failures?”

“Other than the fact that everything I've read from the top tech analysts in the world leads me to believe that our mystery investor is absolutely nuts to short an entire sector that is all about digital content and technology, essentially the future of everything . . .”

“So, no theory?”

“Nope.”

Sobieski blows into her cup. “Unless they're gaming the market.”

“Or know something about the future of innovation that us common folk cannot begin to fathom.”

“Because if you want me to go to the States, to the San Francisco area, to look into some of these companies and, you know—”

Michaud cuts her off. “Not happening.”

She mock frowns. She knows there must be more. He must know something else; otherwise he wouldn't have called her in at this hour. “Then what?”

Michaud bangs his thick fingers on the keyboard then squints, awkwardly over-scrolling and over-correcting. “Here,” he says, jutting his chin at the monitor.

Sobieski leans forward. He drag and clicks the mouse several times, and the monitor flashes blue with a page of numerical transaction text, not unlike the pages they just viewed in Lau's account. “Starting yesterday morning, Dubai time, and continuing through late afternoon, a trader named Nasseem Al Mar went on a bit of a roll. In just over nine hours he booked more transactions, moved more money, and presumably made more money than he had in any one
month
since he started at this firm, Sayed Capital.”

“Shorts?”

“Yup,” Michaud answers. “Close to a billion U.S.”

“Tech?”

Michaud shakes his head. “No, nothing on tech, which I take as a bit of relief, like, you know, maybe they're just planning on a widespread market dip.”

“What, then?”

“Well his client went short on a bunch of media plays, mostly old, traditional media. Broadcast. TV and newspapers. Publishing.”

“American?”

“Yup. Grade-A red, white, and blue.”

“So,” Sobieski responds, “someone isn't sky-high on the future of American old media, which doesn't exactly make him unique in the investment world.”

“But assuming it's the same person, you'd think if he's betting against old media, he'd have a more favorable take on the future, the tech sector that's supposed to be killing it.”

Sobieski says, “Yet he or she is equally bearish.”

“Assuming it's the same he or she.”

“Is Al Mar still alive?”

“So far, nothing has turned up that says he isn't.”

Sobieski stares at the screen. “Why kill Lau and not Al Mar?”

Michaud shrugs. “Why kill anyone, unless they represent, or did something to become too much of, a risk? Unless someone somewhere compromised their plan and they decided to eliminate further damage.” He picks up a single-page printout. “Here's his story: Nasseem Al Mar. Forty-four. Born wealthy, raised wealthy, slowly working his way to poverty. Wharton Grad. Usual financial services suspects, all in the Middle East. USB. Deutsche. And, fairly recently, Lehman, before . . .”

Sobieski bobs her head impatiently. She knows all too well about the demise of Lehman Brothers. The demise of all of them. Plus, she has to use the bathroom.

“. . . before Lehman blew up.”

“Right.”

“Then in '09, right after . . .”

“I know . . .”

Michaud continues, “. . . right after ‘The Crisis,' he moved to the seemingly legit Sayed Capital in Dubai, where he proceeded to have a career that, trade for trade, disgruntled client for disgruntled client, was like the mirror image of Patrick Lau's.”

“Gay?”

“No. Married with two teenage boys.”

“Just throwing it out there. Did—what's his name, Al Mar?—did he have a debt problem, too?”

“No. His hobbies are all about nice cars and prostitutes. He has accounts with four high-level escort agencies in the UAE and Dubai City.”

Sobieski clucks her tongue. “Lovely. So you want me to go where? Silicon Valley, the Sahara Desert? Undercover call girl?”

“Berlin.”

“Siren?”

Michaud answers with another series of mouse clicks. The home page for a firm called Siren Securities appears on the screen. “The orders for Patrick Lau's last trade and Nasseem Al Mar's last trade were both initiated electronically from the same server in Berlin, which at one time was linked to this same bullshit financial services company, Siren.”

He taps the screen. Sobieski looks more closely at the home page staff photo for Siren Securities, which is basically the default photo for every financial institution's home page, newsletter, and annual report: rich men in suits forcing smiles in front of a fountain at the base of a glass-and-steel tower. Beneath the logo is the phrase:

 

Square in your ship's path are Seirenes, crying

beauty to bewitch men coasting by;

woe to the innocent who hears that sound.

“
The Iliad
,” Michaud says.

“No.
The Odyssey
. Ulysses had his men strap him to the sail to resist the Sirens' temptation. Any other activity coming out of their Berlin server?”

Michaud stands and rolls his neck. “Nah.”

“Do you know who placed the orders with Siren? Where the trades initiated?”

“Yes and no. I saw that they came out of the U.S., but I can't be sure until my guy in D.C. gets in.”

Sobieski stares at him, waiting for an explanation.

“Here's the thing: Soon after I hacked into it, they went dark. I got what I could, but it's like its tracking software picked up on ours and shut down at the first sign of a breach. Which means whoever this is may have a version of ours . . . or something better.”

Sobieski starts to leave, then turns. “So, we're onto this because some Hong Kong PD pal of yours needed a favor?”

Michaud shrugs.

“And this pal, this ordinary Detective Mo, initiated contact? He sniffed out a potential global financial plot and just happened to ring you up?”

“Stranger things have happened, Sobes,” he replies, avoiding eye contact and pretending to call up a new screen.

7

Dubai

T
hree hours after his trek in the desert, the survivor pulls into the parking garage of his condominium in Ocean Heights. After the walk, he drove to the Festival City Mall and met his brother-in-law and a friend from his Lehman days for a drink on the top floor of the Intercontinental. One drink led to three, but he called his wife and she understood. Supper could wait. After the third drink he told both men everything he knew about the trades he made earlier in the day. Before he left the table, they were on their BlackBerrys, placing shorts of their own.

He gets out of his Mercedes and takes three steps toward the elevator before clicking the key remote to lock the door. A hand grabs his and twists his arm behind his back. The keys drop to the concrete. He bends forward as his wrist is shoved up the ridge of his spine between his shoulder blades. He doesn't resist.

“Come,” the man says in Arabic. Saudi, Al Mar surmises. The man turns him back toward the cars, then stops to pick up Al Mar's keys. As they walk, the man says, “Of course I have a gun, so . . .” Al Mar nods. No need to say more.

A second man, with a mustache, in a wrinkled black suit, is standing on the driver's side of Al Mar's Mercedes. The locks click open. Al Mar is shoved into the front passenger seat; the man who had grabbed him first, the one with the gun, gets in behind him. Al Mar closes his eyes. When he opens them, he sees the elevator doors to the garage begin to open. It's his daughter Risi. Most nights she watches for his car from their living room window, and lately his wife has allowed the six-year-old to come down to greet him on the elevator. Her eyes widen when she sees his car. When she doesn't see him driving, she tilts her head, confused. His heart feels as if it will burst. He checks to see if the others have seen Risi, but they are too busy watching him and settling into the unfamiliar car. As they begin to pull away, the girl steps forward. Al Mar looks at her, unsmiling, grim, his eyes wide and filled with tragic urgency. He stops her in her tracks with a glare and the slightest shake of his head. As only a father can with a daughter when he knows her life is at stake.

Within minutes they are away from the lights of the towers and the harbor, cruising slowly on an empty road. “Where are we going?”

From the back: “You know this road.”

Al Mar looks out the window. He does know this road. Oasis, the road on which he takes his walks. Then he looks at the driver. Of course, it's the man in the Mercedes that slowed as it passed him this afternoon. His instincts were right, only his timing was off.

“What do you want with me?”

“We would like to know if you've told anyone about your interaction with the Berlin client today.”

Al Mar blinks. “No. I was asked not to and I honored the request. I'm not—”

“Where were you this evening?”

“After my walk? I met friends at the Intercontinental.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I said that business is picking up.”

They pull over soon after the highway lights end. Al Mar recognizes the burned out frame of the deserted car. His turn-around marker. The man in the back gets out and opens Al Mar's door. The gun is out in the open now. A Sig Sauer P226 nine-millimeter.

It's clear to Al Mar that he is about to die. “If I kept my word, I don't understand . . .”

“I believe you.” The man with the gun guides him to the shell of the abandoned car. His hands rest on the chalky black sheet metal of the vehicle's roof. Things not meant to burn always smell the worst.

“Then why now as opposed to when you drove past me this afternoon?”

“Things changed. Someone who didn't know you existed has discovered that you do. And because of this I've been told, unfortunately, that you can't.”

“I give you my word, praise Allah. Please, call them and at least ask.”

The man pauses. “All right. Spread your hands and lay your head upon the roof while I check.”

Al Mar presses against the car. He opens his arms as wide as they can reach and lays his left cheek upon the charred roof, still warm from the afternoon sun. He's looking down the road, farther than he's yet walked, and thinking of the most profound joys and failures of his life, all of his own making, and of Risi, if she made it back to the flat, when the bullet tears into the flesh behind his right ear and exits through his left temple. His splayed arms rise once in a flapping motion, his legs spasm and then go slack. A jet of blood sprays from the notch behind his ear, then his legs give and he slides down the side of the car, folding over upon himself, onto the sand.

The shooter holsters the gun, then turns to the driver and motions him forward. He leans in through the nonexistent driver's side window of the abandoned car, pushes a button, and to his surprise the trunk clicks open. “Imagine that,” he says. “German engineering.”

He bends and stretches Al Mar's arms over his head. The driver grabs him by the shoes and they lift him up and drop him into what is left of the trunk.