Then came the bucket, right over her head, duct-taped to her clothes, her breath echoing in her own ears. Darkness upon darkness. He might have said something to her but she could not tell what it was. She went limp with exhaustion, her clothes soaked with sweat. She felt the van door close again and the vehicle begin to move, and she was jolted backward along the hard metal floor, trussed, helpless, with no hope that anyone knew where she was.
30
"A wheelchair gigolo?"
"Yes, he only-you know-does it with women in wheel-chairs."
Connie lowered her voice into the phone. She didn't want anyone to hear her, including the house staff, who knew too much about her, anyway. "Old women?"
"No, no. Young, thirties, forties, maybe fifties."
"They pay him?"
"Well, yes. They pay him a lot, I heard. But they don't mind. It doesn't seem like much, considering."
"Considering what?" she asked.
"Considering how good he is! You'd be surprised how many women with money there are in New York City who are in wheelchairs. You know, from falls, back problems, multiple sclerosis… hundreds, anyway."
"I never see them, though."
"Most kind of hide. I've got one in my building. That's how I found out about him."
"And your friend, how often does he-?"
"Once a month, about. Her husband never touches her. Not in years."
"Did she tell you about what-oh, God, wait, just a moment." Connie listened for the sound of the men coming down from the roof. Her husband and the funny little Chinese man named Chen whom they'd just had to dinner were up on the terrace having drinks and smoking cigars. They'd been up there awhile already. What could they possibly be discussing now? It had been the absolutely worst dinner conversation ever-stilted and weird, mostly because the guy's English was so bad, not to mention his skills with a fork, with Bill acting as if the man was some kind of high-powered global chieftain. Well, sorry, she knew who all those guys were, especially the billionaires in Hong Kong and Singapore, and this guy didn't rate. Bill said some other men might join them later. She listened again, heard nothing.
"Sorry, go on," she said, "you were saying her husband never touches her and she and the gigolo guy do it and all that."
"The neighbor heard them one afternoon, heard her."
"Come on! Who is he?"
"Well, he's like this tall logger guy in a flannel shirt who lives outside the city. He's like maybe twenty-nine, thirty. Comes in for one week a month. Kind of just does everyone, then leaves."
"That's-isn't that kind of sick? Or weird?"
"Actually, I think it's sweet."
"Well, they do pay him."
"Sure, but he doesn't have to do this! I heard it all started because he used to deliver Christmas trees and firewood into the city each winter, just a regular job, and I guess one time it was a woman in a wheelchair and one thing led to, like, another."
"I say he's on a weirdo power trip."
"That's what I thought. Exactly. But I heard differently. He's supposed to be gentle. Firm but gentle. A lot of these women are in chronic pain, are very stiff in the joints, weird medical conditions, the spine… you can imagine some of the problems."
Connie felt an odd irritation and clicked her fingernails against the inlaid table she'd found in-well, wherever it had been, Portobello Road in London, Rue Jacob in Paris, maybe. "It's got to be-"
The bedroom intercom buzzed.
"Connie," barked her husband's voice. "When those guys get here, send them up to the roof. Right away."
"Yessir, Mr. Husbo." She clicked off, returned to the phone. "I was saying it's got to be a weird power trip thing."
"Connie, I'm telling you that's what I thought."
"Until-?"
"I saw him."
"What?" she gasped.
"I talked to him."
A gust of jealousy went through her. "You did?"
"He's nice. Very intelligent. Maybe even a little shy."
Why did this information torment her? "Does he, you know, do regular women?"
"That sounds kinda desperate, Connie."
"It is kinda desperate."
"What happened to that guy you had?"
"He started getting close to finding out about Bill, you know, how much money there was."
"What's, you know… going on with Bill?"
"Well, I do love him. But, you know… did I ever tell you he pisses in the tub every morning?"
"Oh-migod."
"As long he's interested in something, one of his ridiculous deals or why some billion-dollar company is not doing well, he's bearable. He's got one like that right now, tonight. I try to encourage him, you know, give him something to do! Otherwise I'd-"
"You'd be out buying a wheelchair!"
"Don't tell anyone else about this guy! I'm serious! Pretty soon New York magazine will do a story on him and everyone will know and it'll be ruined."
"Won't tell, promise."
"You know how to meet this guy?"
"Sure. He comes by the building."
"When next? I want to-" She heard the building intercom buzzing. "Sorry, I got to go do this. Hold on."
The roof terrace was reached by a private elevator within their apartment. She'd insisted they put it in so that she didn't have to use the regular elevator, which, after all, had an operator in it all the time, and she liked to go up to the roof in a bathing suit to exercise or sunbathe. The intercom buzzed again and she opened the door and was surprised to see five men in business suits, each carrying a briefcase. One of them was that little old man named Elliot she'd met years ago.
"Must be quite a party you guys have planned," she noted as he politely shook her hand. "But I guess girls aren't invited."
Elliot smiled in distant amusement. "Your husband is a remarkable man," he said. "And I cherish his friendship."
"Bill is up on the roof with a certain Mr. Chen, who's here from China."
Elliot looked her in the eye. "Mrs. Martz, I can assure you we are very familiar with this Mr. Chen."
She took them inside the apartment and down the hall to the other elevator, watched them get in, then remembered-the wheelchair gigolo! — and hurried back to the phone.
31
Longest trip of her life. They'd lurched along some kind of avenue in Brooklyn-she could tell by the stop-and-go traffic, the honking and sirens-then made a turnoff across bumpy ground and then she heard a truck engine and smelled shit, a cosmic enveloping gust of it. Like the van was tunneling through a mountain of the stuff. Then the van stopped a few seconds later, a garage door of a building was slid upward, and the van pulled inside. Now she just waited. She had an uncomfortable feeling between her legs where his thumb had been, and she could smell her own sweat and fear. Her neck ached from the struggle. But it was the tape over her eyes that hurt most. It was stuck to her eyebrows and lashes, and every time she blinked, the tape pulled. She breathed through her nose, the sound of it in the plastic bucket close to her face. Tough to hear much else than that, but now she could feel the van's engine switch off, and she heard the van's front door open and close, then the side door slide open.
"All right," his voice came to her, low and mean and firm, "I'm taking you out. Don't fight me."
She wanted to fight but didn't have it in her.
"Nod your head to show me you understand."
She did this, the bucket hitting her chest.
She felt his big hands grab her like a piece of cargo and drag her awkwardly across the metal floor of the van.
Then he picked her up and flopped her over at the waist, his shoulder in her stomach. He was carrying her- down, she thought. She heard a creaking noise. A strange abrasive chemical smell filled her nostrils, sickened her.
He put her down on something, a bed or sofa.
"You're pretty light," he said. She didn't know what this meant. "Now hold still, I got to do something to you."
She tensed, expecting the
worst. But he was only wrapping something metal and heavy around her waist that settled against her hips. She heard a key click.
"I'm going to take off the bucket."
She felt the tugging of the tape at her clothes and hair, and when the bucket came off she no longer heard herself breathing through her nose.
His fingers touched her face and she started to struggle and cry.
"Hey! I'm just taking the tape off your mouth!"
She forced herself to be still. The chemical smell really bothered her, made her want to vomit, actually. Or maybe it was him-how close he was to her. She felt his fingernails picking at the end of the tape and the tape itself pulling away from her left cheek, her lips, then her right cheek. Stung as it was pulled away. She worked her face muscles a bit.
"Here's a bottle of water."
Something touched her lips. She shook her head violently.
He cuffed her. "Drink it. Don't be stupid."
She did, opening her mouth blindly, trying not to choke. It was regular water, so far as she could tell.
"All right," he began. "I know your name is Jin Li, however it gets pronounced. But who are you, anyway?"
She cleared her throat. She wished she could see him. "Why should I tell you?"
"Because I fucking told you to tell me!"
"Who are you?"
"Me?" He followed the question with a snort.
In that one word she heard an entire philosophy: a combative pride, utter disbelief that the universe so ignored him, and beneath that, the unmoored fury of self-hatred.
"Yeah, who are you?" she said brazenly.
"Me, I'm one who wins. That's what my name literally means, in fact."
"What is it?"
He hit her, hard. "I'm asking the questions. Don't forget that."
Her head spun and she fell backward, expecting to be hit again. But she did not forget what he'd said, not for a moment.
"All right, I got some questions. Were you in that car with the Mexican girls?"
I don't want to be hit again, Jin Li thought.
"No."
He hit her again. "Yes, you were. Now I know you are a liar and now you know that I know it. Got that? Okay? Don't fuck with me, right? All right-the limousine. Who were the Chinese guys in the limousine looking for you?"
Oh, Jin Li thought, he knows things. I'm going to have to be careful about everything I say.
32
He didn't suspect yet. Still thought he was enjoying a social visit. Still thought this was a polite mating ritual between wealthy men. Brandy and cigars. Bragging about China's economy, its foreign-currency reserves, its deep-water navy, its planned moon shot. Well, this wasn't a mating ritual, but one of them was certainly going to get fucked. And it's not me, thought Martz. They were sitting out in teak lawn chairs, the Manhattan skyline blazing around them. Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the bridges to Brooklyn, the lighted windows far and near both intimate and grand. Even Chen, with his pumped-up self-importance, seemed impressed.
"How much does this kind of building cost?" Chen asked.
An amazingly ill-mannered question. "The whole building?" said Martz evenly. "Tough to answer."
"I am having-I have apartment in Time Warner Center."
"Yes, I hear those are very good." Martz made sure he didn't appear to be mocking Chen. "The best in the city."
The elevator doors opened. The men filed out, one by one, carrying their briefcases.
Chen, surprised, looked back at Martz. "Who are these people?"
"Friends of mine."
"Yes, I see." But Chen had risen in his seat, sensing trouble.
And at that, in the moment that changed the tone of the evening, Martz leaned forward and ever so gently pushed him back down.
Chen froze.
"My friend," said Martz, "we have now arrived at the part of the evening that is most meaningful to me."
Chen sat quietly, senses alert, hands gripping both arms of the chair. His bodyguards were sitting around in the aforementioned Time Warner building, drinking beer and watching American cable TV, probably. He'd let Martz send a car for him and hadn't wanted his men to come along. A mistake, he seemed to understand now, a mistake that a genuinely rich man in America would never make.
Martz turned back to him. "Chen, you are here tonight for only one reason. Through my company I am a major investor in a small, very promising drug manufacturer called Good Pharma." He beckoned to the translator, a slim Chinese-American doctoral student at Columbia University, to come join them. The other men sat at a table near the elevator opening up laptop computers. "Start translating everything I say. I don't want any misunderstandings. I want him to get to know your voice and I want you to get to know his."
The translator greeted Chen with formality. Chen's eyes cut back and forth between Martz and the other man.
Martz resumed. "My friend Hua here has worked for me for eight years. He knows your regional accent. He will translate. You have recently been trading in Good Pharma, short selling it and driving the price down. And by you, I mean you and all the Chinese investors you advise. Very impressive, except that you did this using stolen information."
The translator repeated this.
"I am listening," Chen said in English, as if looking for a chance to negotiate.
"Tonight, you are going to call your fellow investors in China, one by one, and tell them to buy Good Pharma when it starts trading at ten a.m. local Shanghai time. They are going to buy in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and everywhere else they do business."
"Why would they do that?"
"Because you will tell them to."
Chen shook his head. "That would not be enough."
"I suspect that you will make a convincing case."
"How?"
"Very simple. You will tell them that you have more inside information. Very good information that will make them a lot of money."
Chen said nothing.
"Hua will be sure that you tell them what you say you are telling them. In fact, we have a device here that creates a ten-second delay in spoken telephonic conversation. It was developed by radio stations for the purpose of blocking any accidental transmission of FCC-prohibited language." Martz pointed at the translator. "Got that? Did he understand that? This device is also used by unscrupulous traders to front-run major trades ordered over conventional telephone lines. It's illegal because it is so effective. Hua will listen to everything you say and if he feels that you aren't speaking exactly to them as we have instructed, then he'll hit a button on the unit and your voice will disappear.
"Furthermore, Mr. Phelps, one of the men at the table over there by the barbecue range, will be watching your voice on a stress analyzer, and if he feels that your voice sounds like you are lying, he will knock out the tones at the high end so that a stress analyzer on the other end, or the human ear, which in my opinion is just as good, will not hear any suspicious tones in your voice. Mr. Phelps had twenty-three years with the CIA and is well versed in these techniques. Mr. Phelps?" he called.
Phelps came and stood before Chen, with his hand out.
"You will now surrender your cell phones and electronic devices and so on."
Chen gave him two phones and a beeper.
"Please remain comfortable," Martz said. He got up to go see Elliot on the other side of the terrace.
"Everything okay?"
"Hi, Billy Martz. Yes, we're set up, more or less. I spent the day at the office getting everything ready." He had three screens open, powered off one of the waterproof exterior plugs that Connie used for her elliptical motion machine that she kept stored on the roof, spending hours climbing a little closer to heaven or wherever it was his wife ultimately planned to arrive.
"You have all your power, all your communications?"
"Yes."
"Is it technically very difficult?"
"This technology has been around for a while now. You want trick
y technology, go play around with stem cells."
"If you say so."
"Bill, you're turning into a fussy old man." Elliot smiled, patted him on the back. "You go do your thing and I'll do mine."
But he lingered, looking over all the equipment, amazed at how small it was, except for the large white transmission cone on a ten-foot telescoping tripod that had been hauled in and positioned earlier in the day. The key to a successful lift, Martz knew, now that almost everything electronic was traceable, was to move the communication not just from place to place, and from government jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but across technologies. Moving across each of these boundaries made it harder for any interested authorities to re-create the sequence of illegal communications. From what Martz understood, Elliot's men would, that evening, be communicating directly with a boat about one hundred feet offshore in New York Harbor. The mode was a digitally compressed and encrypted microwave beam, which required line-of-sight transmission and was effective only up to a few miles. Did not travel with the curvature of the earth. It couldn't be used on foggy or rainy nights, either. You shot it at a receiver the size of an umbrella, the beam a quarter inch wide. But it was absolutely untrackable. It was so good Citibank used one to shoot data from its famous headquarters on East Fifty-third Street to its back-office operations facility in Queens, built for that purpose in a line-of-site location on the other side of the East River. He watched the men go about their business. They'd spent hours checking and rechecking the transmission vector. The boat, papered with a Liberian registry, had a phone uplink to a private Dutch satellite network used only by shipping companies, and the data packets were in turn relayed and downlinked to a Greek shipyard that was owned by Elliot. The yard was filled with rusty tankers needing overhaul, but the fiber-optic cables running under and around them were state of the art. With this arrangement, Elliot could speak more or less untraceably to anyone in the world. The many legs of the communication degraded the sound quality and added a little delay, but not too much, perhaps four seconds.
But this was not all that Elliot did, not by any means. After all, anyone with a few million bucks and an antisocial personality could set up an untraceable mix-tech, global com-link. Mr. bin Laden, for example, among other miscreants. Elliot's real value, and the reason he was effectively paid millions of dollars for what amounted to perhaps seven or eight hours of service, was that he made things happen that otherwise could not; he provided capital and the smarts to leverage it to the greatest possible illegal effect. He and his tiny band of infidels had researched several thousand stock price surge patterns and painstakingly built a proprietary trading program that followed the documented natural arc of these surges using best-fit modeling within a field of scattershot data points. He then started to buy the stock in question and drive up the price, of course. But that was not all; once Elliot's trading gambit began, he didn't just slavishly recapitulate the curve with simplistic buying and occasional selling; instead he created it organically, he birthed it, which was to say that he used several thousand linked trading platforms that he empowered with randomizing block-size choosers and let run autonomously, giving the platforms a buy bias but also letting them react in real time and differentially to spontaneous market information. This meant that he allowed some of his trading platforms to make "bad" decisions, very much the way real flesh-and-blood traders did, getting in or out of a market surge too early or late. He also employed a mix of the patterns typically utilized by day traders, retail brokerages, private wealth managers, investment banks, and big institutional players such as pension fund managers and mutual fund companies. His platforms traded not just with and against all the legitimate traders in the market but blindly against each other as well. The result was not a simulation of a real stock surge but a real-life, real-time rise that was, from a statistical point of view, utterly legitimate.
The Finder Page 27