d4

by Sherrie Cronin

  In a little more than two weeks he would have his first set of answers. It was true that many of the investments were moving in a favorable direction already, but it was also true that many of the choices would have been made by any keen investor, no psychic ability needed. It was the outliers that interested Baldur the most, and many of those had yet to turn favorable. In order for him to risk massive amounts of money on Ariel’s guidance, he decided that she would need to be over seventy-five percent accurate with the trades he would not have chosen himself.

  He now knew that he needed both her body and some level of cooperation from her mind, but she didn’t yet know about that last part. Knowledge was always power. Baldur figured that he had very little time to push Ariel and Mikkel into a relationship, or at least into enough of one that she might seriously consider working for Baldur on Mikkel’s behalf.

  Fear did wonders for pushing people together, Baldur thought. Perhaps this infatuation process could be accelerated if he could arrange for some sort of mild physical attack. Nothing that would do any permanent damage, of course, just a couple of hired thugs to keep Ariel scared and get her to turn instinctively to Mikkel.

  Once Baldur was firmly the bogeyman in her eyes, then he could surprise her with a very reasonable offer. He was pretty sure that psychologists called it negative reinforcement. Lead the subject to expect something awful, then promise them a less horrible outcome if they cooperate.

  If all went well, by late October Ariel would learn the good news that in return for giving Baldur only a small amount of her willing help, Mikkel would reap serious financial benefits. With no help from her, that silly space project of Mikkel’s was going to run into insurmountable problems. Baldur was sure that if he handled the next seven or eight weeks just right, then Ariel would make the desired choice. Once she helped him a little, his demands on her time and talents could continue to increase, at just a slow enough rate that she never balked.

  Realtors boast that location is all that matters. Not so, Baldur thought. It is the rate of change that is everything.

  Once his financial empire was firmly centered around Ariel and thriving to the degree that he expected, he could weigh his choices for ensuring her ongoing loyalty. A wife? A partner in the firm? Perhaps both, if she was that good. Mikkel would be disposable by then, and Baldur could calculate his next move after he determined what was in his own best interest given the situation.

  The next step was clearly upping the fear factor. Then there needed to be another romantic gesture on Mikkel’s part. The man had apparently made the wise choice to take credit for the flowers the first time around. Hopefully he would show the same good sense the second time.

  19. Summer Ends

  Mikkel and Ariel talked frequently now, and with each phone conversation the secrets between them began to evaporate. He was surprised to learn that Ariel had met Siarnaq, and had been close to him for a short time before they disagreed and parted ways. She kept the details sparse, but made sure that Mikkel knew about Siarnaq’s hatred of what he was doing.

  Mikkel told Ariel how he had lost contact with Siarnaq years ago, but had not realized how deeply he had hurt his younger cousin. “More than anything I didn’t want to believe what he was predicting,” Mikkel said. “I didn’t mean to insult him. I thought we just grew apart.”

  “It’s your current activities that really upset him,” she said. “He has no idea of what you are trying to accomplish or why. He’s working with Baldur now, only because he wants to desperately to stop you,” she said. “It is the cause of some of the many problems you’re having. You know, except for this misplaced hatred of you, he is otherwise a reasonable man. Mikkel, you could make your life easier if you would talk to him and at least try to explain.”

  “I wanted to bring him into this early on,” Mikkel said, “but Cillian hates the idea of having too many people in the know, and he thinks that Siarnaq has a vital role of his own to play. He didn’t want to take a chance on me screwing up Siarnaq’s zeal for what he is doing.”

  “That might have been a bad call,” Ariel said. “Looks like you’re getting far more trouble by leaving Siarnaq in the dark.”

  “I’ll fill Cillian in on what you’ve said, and unless he has some specific objection, I’ll find a way to talk to Siarnaq soon.”

  Ariel told Mikkel how she wished that he was going to be able to attend the upcoming meeting between Cillian and Toby in Ireland, but they both agreed that Mikkel didn’t need to be there and could do more good tending to his own problems in Greenland. They comforted each other by comparing calendars again and finally settling on October 5 for their getaway together in Oslo. It was still four long weeks away, and that seemed so long to wait. The conversation ended the way conversations generally do between two people who are far away from each other and wish that they were sharing the same bed for the night.

  It was a meeting between two lions—men in the prime of their power, confident and passionate about their causes. Eoin watched them both, expecting to hear one growl softly and the other, perhaps, to respond with a roar.

  Cillian hadn’t come far for the meeting, in a physical sense, but he had in another manner. It was his way to have people come to him. It had not been lost on Eoin that under the guise of entertaining, Cillian always met in person on his home turf. To be sitting in a conference room in Dublin was a compromise, a physical sign that he was willing to cooperate.

  Across the table from him sat Toby, who had arrived this morning from Hawaii. Almost a full day in transit should have taken its toll, but Toby’s head of full thick dark hair was well kept and his tanned, relaxed demeanor appeared unshaken. Even his flowered shirt and khakis looked well pressed. He’d come a long way to plead his case in person, and he meant to do it well.

  Baldur could have sat at the same table, Eoin thought. For all his relative youth, Baldur shared the two older men’s sense of full confidence in who he was and what he wanted. But he wasn’t there of course, because he was the subject of today’s conversation.

  Eoin was well aware that he himself had almost not been invited. If Jake had not told Ariel about Eoin’s late-in-the-game conversion to doing what was right, Eoin knew that he probably would not even have been told that the meeting was occurring. Eoin looked around the rest of the table. Jake sat sprawled in his chair, taking up room for two people. Brendan looked serious as usual, scratching hair the color of butterfly wings as he wrote on a pad. Nell was amusing herself by joking with Fergus and Ronan about how hard it was to tell them apart.

  “I want to put a stop to this bastard and I want to do it now.” Toby stated it in a soft tone before the meeting even started.

  “As do I. But there are complicating factors that you need to fully understand,” Cillian responded in a stage whisper as the conference room door opened a crack. In came the creature destined to sit between these two lions and coerce them into an agreement. A small red fox, Eoin thought, one who could hold her own with two far more powerful beasts, and who was taking the lead for this meeting by virtue of the respect she had earned already from each side.

  As Ariel walked into the room everyone saw that she was holding a shillelagh, an Irish walking stick, in her hand.

  “Planning to beat us both into submission?” Cillian asked with a raised eyebrow as Ariel got herself settled.

  “Hardly,” she smiled back. “We have a lot of complicated issues to cover and you may have noticed that I’m so not so good at yelling over those louder and more determined to be heard. So,” she paused, looking for understanding, “I brought a talking stick.”

  Toby nodded. “Big with indigenous peoples of the North American Northwest.”

  “And others ranging from local West African leaders to the Boy Scouts,” Ariel said. She added to the rest of the room, “Point forward, the only people who can speak are the person holding the shillelagh, I mean the talking stick, or a person who has been given specific permission by the speaker to ask a question o
r insert a point of clarification. Does everybody understand?”

  Eoin, Jake, Brendan, Nell, Fergus and Ronan all nodded from their seats around the edges of the room.

  “Very well,” Ariel said. “Toby, you start. Say your piece and pass it on.”

  Toby took the shillelagh with a grin. He spoke eloquently about the important role that stocks have come to play in the world economy with the rise of the modern multinational corporation.

  “The wealthiest fraction of one percent now control about one third of the world's wealth, and that wealth is almost always tied to the investment industry. Members of this fraction of a percent are much more likely to have built their net worth from capital gains than from personally doing anything productive and this group has opportunities for making money that are not realistically available to everyone else. Our whole modern set-up is designed to reward investors, not workers and not those who merely save. Don’t get me wrong, this emphasis on investing has advantages for everybody, but it also has distinct disadvantages for everyone but these very few. High frequency trading has been on my radar for a while because of its capability for pushing the advantages further in favor of these few select wealthy investors.”

  “Clear cheating,” he continued, “such as insider trading, is banned the world over. However, Baldur has found a way to not only take advantage of this most lucrative slice of legally privileged trading, but he has found a way to cheat that has never been prohibited because most people don’t think that what he does is possible. It’s imperative that we prove otherwise and put a stop to the incredible rate at which he is quietly growing his wealth.”

  Toby started to awkwardly hand the shillelagh to Cillian—then he thought of something else and pulled it back.

  “Not to mention that a young lady that we’re all fond of may well be in danger thanks to Baldur, and that is why my study of high volume high frequency traders is going to be released in two weeks. Here,” he said to Cillian as he handed the shillelagh over for real.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Cillian said as he looked at the shillelagh bleakly.

  “Ariel has given me a little advance info. You can do the short version,” Toby said. Then he caught himself. “Oops.”

  “It’s okay,” Cillian chuckled. “Thanks for telling me. The short version it is.”

  The other eight in the room listened to Cillian’s story of two disparate men seeing the same dark future and of the third man persuaded to help find an alternative. The newcomers to the story, Ronan, Fergus and Jake, had been warned by Ariel to expect bizarre revelations and to hold their questions, but Ronan couldn’t resist muttering to Fergus, “When she says weird, she means weird.” Ariel glared and pointed to the shillelagh.

  Cillian had wanted to exclude at least Ronan and Fergus from this meeting, and possibly Jake, thinking once again that the fewer who were involved and in-the-know the better. Ariel had argued that each of the three held information that could be valuable. Jake knew specifics about Baldur’s company. Mikkel was not attending, so Ronan and Fergus could offer perspective on his investing.

  Now as Cillian described the plan to fund his various “save humanity” projects, he told of finding the niche of high frequency trading and funneling what he could in that direction while passing along as much money as he discretely could to Mikkel, who was able to invest with less scrutiny.

  Toby raised his hand and Cillian nodded. “So how did you find Baldur and figure out that you could follow his lead?”

  “When we started to research HFT, we learned of d4 and we were impressed. So we turned to Ullow to get us set up and going,” Cillian said. “There was some plain old dumb luck involved, I admit. We have come so much further than we would have otherwise, riding on the coattails of the very man you are compelled to shut down.”

  Toby started to talk, then stopped himself.

  “Yes, yes we know that he has to be stopped eventually,” Cillian said. “He’s an asshole who would drain all the world’s resources for himself and not think twice about it. We certainly don’t want Ariel harmed, either. But what this all comes down to is us asking why you can’t give us just another year. There’s a tipping point, financially, and once we get past it, the Mars settlement will happen without any need for pushing our investment strategies into any more grey areas. Then you can lock Baldur up for cheating in the world’s largest casino, and as far as I’m concerned you can throw away the key.”

  “There’s also a tipping point past which Baldur will control too much wealth to be stopped,” Toby answered, ignoring the talking stick protocol. Then he remembered and raised his hand. Cillian waved him on.

  “I’m confused about something,” Toby said. “If Baldur’s advantage comes from seeing seconds to minutes ahead, how in the world are you people piggybacking on what he does? You can’t see what he sees.”

  Eoin raised his hand at the same time that he started to talk. “It all has to go through Ullow hardware.” He turned to stare at Brendan. “Someone who is very good and has spare time on his hands must have found a way to send every single investment transaction Baldur makes straight on to Cillian and Mikkel.”

  “I did,” Brendan said. “And I slept like a baby after I did it.”

  “That’s why Mikkel needed every software enhancement that Baldur had,” Ronan shouted out like he had just discovered gold. “It made it easier for him to imitate Baldur if he had exactly the same enhancements.” Ariel cleared her throat pointedly and gestured to the stick.

  “Right. Sorry,” Ronan added.

  “You are correct,” Cillian said. “I’ve had Doyle watching me like a hawk, so I’ve been limited in how much I could do, but Mikkel managed to stay pretty well on top of things, snagging at least fifty percent of Baldur’s winning strategies while they were still in the money, and much of his success was due in part here to these two young blokes.”

  Ronan and Fergus both grinned. “Geez, we helped to save the world,” Fergus muttered.

  “I know, and I thought that we were just being snitches,” Ronan added.

  Ariel cleared her throat again. Toby raised his hand.

  “I still don’t get how you could get in place fast enough to mimic Baldur and his other people,” he said. “You had to know something about where they were and what they were doing and when any of them were likely to invest. I mean, you couldn’t be sitting by a computer all day every day, and you could hardly afford to imitate everything he did automatically without some human guidance.”

  Nell stood up and walked to Cillian. She reached out her hand for the shillelagh. “May I?”

  Cillian nodded and handed it to her.

  “I was wondering why you were here,” Eoin remarked.

  Nell gave him a sugary-sweet smile back. “I was wondering the same about you.”

  She took the stick and began to tell the group of Hulda, and how the woman had been recruited and persuaded two years ago by a fake fortune-teller she fancied to play the dangerous game of undercover asset.

  “Most of the people of Iceland felt royally ripped off by their own rich when the country itself went bankrupt in 2009. There is still a lot of anger—well, what passes for anger in Iceland. They are pretty calm people. Anyway, Hulda had no trouble helping an Irishwoman trying to bring Baldur down. She views him as a traitor to his own. She’s been more helpful than we ever asked, supplying us with just the kind of intel you talked about, Toby.”

  “That’s a rather impressive piece of spy craft,” Toby remarked to the actress. Nell shrugged.

  “It’s my problem that in the middle of it all, I learned to love her too, all the more for the risks she’s taken and the good that she’s done.” Nell raised her hands helplessly. “I can only hope that when she learns who I really am she’ll find a way to forgive me and maybe…” At this point the always composed Nell started to cry. The room full of men looked at each other in panic. Ariel rolled her eyes. She wasn’t particularly good at this either, but she
stood up to offer Nell comfort when Jake stepped in and gave Nell a giant bear hug.

  “Baldur’s an S.O.B. Nell, and I know so. Remember that I work for the man too. You did the right thing to risk so much to bring him down.”

  Nell nodded her appreciation and then laughed a little in embarrassment. “A good actress doesn’t lose it like that,” she said.

  Cillian gently took the stick out of Nell’s hands. “It is my plan to do right by Hulda when this is all over, and to do right by you, Nell, too. You have both played a dangerous game well. Toby, you might take some comfort from knowing that we, too, have watched Baldur’s wealth grow and we haven’t been passive about it. Mikkel’s main focus has been his operation in North Greenland, of course, but his secondary focus has been to slow Baldur down by sucking away as much as he could of the man’s ill-gotten profits.”

  “Okay,” Toby agreed, reaching for the shillelagh as he spoke. “I get that without you guys, Baldur would be well ahead of where he is now. His problem all along has been that his group tried to make their moves slowly, never taking too much at once so as not to draw attention. You two often sucked up the rest of the opportunity before he could get back to it. He must have assumed it was just the market adjusting, but in fact you slowed him down.”

  “And we can slow him down even more,” Ronan offered eagerly. “Maybe enough so that you can wait before your study gets all kinds of legal people looking at him and then looking at us too.”

  “We’ve done pretty well covering up our advantages,” Brendan remarked. “Any legal group is going to have a much a harder time pinning anything on the rest of us. Worst case we are guilty of spying on a competitor and copying his fraudulent strategies. How were we to know our competition was psychic? I mean, really?”

  “That sort of publicity would still make trouble for us,” Nell countered, reaching towards Toby to take back the shillelagh. He handed it over to her with obvious reluctance, but then Ariel waved her hands urgently and Nell passed the shillelagh on to her.