“Look at it this way. We caused our own problem,” Ariel said. “The very fact that this high frequency trading thing didn’t work out for Baldur quite as well as he expected, thanks to all the clever things you guys did to slow him down, is part of the reason he went looking for another, quicker approach. And it is why, once he figured out what I could do, he was so eager to see if he could use my talents to speed his own agenda along.”
“She’s right,” Eoin spoke up. “He virtually told me that. He—Ariel, I’m so sorry—he pretty much ordered me to get you on that boat that day, and then when you all had that freak accident he pretty much insisted I make sure that you showed up in Iceland. I probably shouldn’t have helped him as much as I did, but honestly you know how bad I need this job. I just thought that the man wanted a chance to seduce you. Nothing creepy, just a shot at it, you know. What was the harm?”
Ariel didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure how much Eoin knew about what Baldur had really done to her, or who had told him what, but until she had more facts she was in no mood to be forgiving.
“Okay, then maybe coming after Baldur right now for his HFT infractions only makes him desperate and more likely to hurt Ariel,” Toby said. Ariel nodded and handed him the shillelagh. “But if she helps him, he gets what he wants even faster.”
“Then why can’t we do it faster too?” Ariel asked. “I mean, I give Baldur what he wants for a few months, and you guys soak up all the extra you can get. You get to your tipping point way faster while you continue to slow him down. If you think you are actually going to get profits too big to hide, then find a way to send some of them on to the Red Cross or Doctor’s Without Borders or something.”
“I like that,” Cillian said, taking the shillelagh from Toby as a broad smile crossed his face in ways it did not often. “Why can’t we play with equity futures and options contracts, and do an even faster job of funding what we need, too? Toby and his group stay away from all of us not for a year but something less. If Ariel and Baldur make an effective enough team, we hit our tipping point even faster, and worst case we have to direct some money to doing some good in the here and now. Fund disaster relief and better soup kitchens and finding a cure for cancer. Whatever. It’s a great idea.”
He turned to Ariel, “We need to find a way to safely set you up as a barely coerced accomplice to Baldur, and then Jake and Brendan here need to find a way to use everything that you and Baldur do.”
“Ronan and I can help fund disaster relief, too,” Fergus said.
“Everyone is going to help with this one,” Eoin interjected. “Luckily the London office has always had very little clue about what goes on over here, so the five of us can make cutting into Baldur’s new profits our number one priority.”
“Six of us,” Ariel said.
Nell gave Ariel a hard look. “It’s a dangerous game you are going to be playing, and don’t pretend otherwise. It takes its toll. Don’t agree to this lightly.”
“I know,” Ariel said, “but there aren’t a lot of other good options, are there?” She added quietly. “The good news for me is that there is no chance that I’ll fall in love with Baldur and have to deal with the kind of consequences that you are. I’m so sorry for your situation, Nell.”
“It will be important that we stay a step ahead of Baldur. We need to know what he is thinking,” Brendan cautioned.
“I do talk to the man. I can help with that,” Jake said.
“And me even more so,” Eoin added. He gave Ariel a weak smile. “You should know that you and I will be playing a dangerous game together. He still thinks he’s got me scared enough to own me, and I’m going to let him believe that. It will be penance for me, the least I can do.”
“Okay, okay. You’ve convinced me. I can bury my study for a while,” Toby said with obvious regret. “I did such a great job of ramrodding it through, too. I will probably have to feed a little bit of the information from this meeting to those most closely involved with it, just to keep them from causing trouble. I promise that I’ll be very judicious about it.”
Nell looked at Ariel carefully. “You don’t have much experience acting. You are going to have to convince yourself that you’ve agreed to help Baldur, that deep down you want to be the richest woman who has ever lived. Can you find that inside?”
“Of course. We’ve all got that in us,” Ariel shrugged. “I can pretend that part of me is growing stronger.”
“So what do we think is Baldur’s next move? I know him too well to think he’s just sitting around playing card games until those option expire,” Eoin said. “Is he still trying to get into your pants, Ariel? No offense here, but you might have to play along.”
“It sounds more like he’s trying to get Mikkel into her pants,” Nell giggled. “According to Hulda, he sent her flowers on Mikkel’s behalf.”
“Well, that makes no sense,” Eoin muttered.
“Sure it does,” Brendan said. “I’d say that he’s decided that his best bet is to have someone nearby to threaten. Someone Ariel cares about and yet who is in Baldur’s sphere of influence.”
“Okay,” Eoin rolled his eyes and turned back to Ariel. “No offense, but if that’s the case are you willing to play along and let Mikkel in your pants?”
For the first time during the meeting Ariel turned a shade of bright red, and Cillian, Nell and Brendan all looked away and said nothing.
“I’m meeting Mikkel in Oslo in a few weeks,” Ariel almost whispered it.
“Oh. Right,” Eoin said. “Well then, it sounds like we need to be looking out for Mikkel’s safety as well as yours. But at least we have a plan.”
******
One of the larger investments that Baldur made with the early expirations was to write a large number of puts on the Swiss oilfield supply company Weatherford International Ltd. Writing puts is basically betting that a stock price will be above a certain level on the day the puts expire. It means you like the stock, or at least you like it better then the person you are betting against. If you are right, you get to pocket the money you got paid for placing the bet to begin with. If you are wrong, you have to buy the stock for the agreed upon price, when you could be buying it for less, maybe much less, because the other person is in fact buying it for less and then selling it to you on expiration day for an instant profit.
Baldur had been watching the stock drop since August, and feared that Ariel had been wrong about this one. Then on Friday, September 21, the Swiss stock exchange announced that it was investigating Weatherford for breaking the rules governing disclosure of how much stock its executives were buying and selling. The company’s stock dropped even further, and at a minute before the market closed it remained low enough for Baldur to face substantial losses as he was forced to pay a high price for a poorly performing investment. Then, with only seconds left in the trading day, the stock price shot back up, with over 12.6 million shares being traded and Baldur’s impressive profits now safe.
“There very well may have been a large order out there, but I can’t confirm that,” an analyst at Iberia Capital Partners LLC, was quoted as saying. “There have also been so many weird things going on with algorithm-driven trading that it’s almost impossible to tell exactly what may have happened.”
Baldur didn’t care. Whatever had happened, it meant that Ariel’s abilities to predict an unexpected event could be considerably more impressive then he had thought.
20. Autumn Begins
Ariel was headed home from the bus stop, annoyed to notice two guys following her. At least, they had mirrored every turn and loitered through every fake bit of window-shopping that she had tried. A plump, middle-aged Irish woman was doing much the same, only hanging back a little farther. Ariel was willing to bet that the latter was Nell, keeping her promise to watch over Ariel.
The two guys were probably in their late teens, skinny but tough-looking kids who seemed to be arguing with each other about what to do next. As Ariel turned onto the more des
erted street that held her bleak little apartment, they began to follow her more closely. She wished that she still carried mace in her purse.
Damn, what was this about? Baldur had gotten what he needed for now, and no one else had any reason to wish her harm. Was it just her bad luck to be the random target of an upcoming robbery or assault? No. She’d have seen something that bad coming—she was sure of it. So had Baldur sent these guys to scare her? That very idea pissed her off.
She’d spoke the truth when she told Mikkel that she wasn’t good at keeping to her assigned role in a cat and mouse game. Maybe it was time to change things up a little. She slowed down while she fumbled in her purse, carefully putting her keychain in her right fist and letting one key stick out between each pair of fingers. It wasn’t a formidable weapon, but if it appeared unexpectedly and was wielded with fury, it was a pair of makeshift claws that she was going to bet could do some damage to someone’s face.
As the young men caught up to her, she hunched forward in a fearful crouch that disguised the coiling motion her father had taught her years ago, when she had learned to play tennis against those bigger and stronger than she was.
She waited until they were right behind her, then turned and sprang like an angry cat, gouging the keys in her right fist into the flesh of one thug’s face while he screamed in pain. The other grabbed her left arm to pull her away and she jerked free, pulling against his thumb like she had been taught, and then went for a knee hard into his groin. This time she landed it perfectly.
As he screamed, she turned back to her first assailant, only to see the pudgy middle-aged woman clock him over the head with a huge purse that had to have been weighted with iron. As the first kid went down, the woman swung the purse like the weapon it was into the side of the face of the second boy, who was just starting to stand upright. He staggered backwards and fell to the ground.
“Care for a cup of tea at my place?” Ariel asked the woman.
“Only if tea is all you’ve got,” Nell’s voice answered. The women started to walk away fast, leaving the two dazed guys unsure as to whether they should follow. One of them said something, the other nodded, and they got up and walked away instead.
“You have got to make some better friends,” Nell said as Ariel reached to unlock her door. She stopped. There was a note taped over the keyhole.
“I let the florist in,” it said. Ariel thought it was signed by her landlord. Florist? Not again.
“Holy shit,” Nell said as they walked inside. There were flowers on the kitchen counter. There were flowers on the little blue wooden table. There were flowers on the coffee table, flowers by the bathroom sink, more by the bed, and there were even flowers on the floor. The place smelled like a hospital or a funeral home.
“This might be even creepier than getting attacked,” Nell muttered.
Ariel saw a card poking out of the largest arrangement, the one that was all white and filling her little table. Can’t wait to see you again. Mikkel, it said in a florist’s neat scrawl.
“Whoa. That man is smitten with you.” Nell shook her head.
“No. That man is too smart, and probably too frugal, to have done this. And he heard all about how I don’t particularly like flowers when that last bunch showed up at my office.”
“So who do we know that sends flowers for Mikkel?”
“I’m so glad that Hulda finally told you that the last bunch was from Baldur,” Ariel said. “I can’t believe that he was dumb enough to do this again.”
“From Baldur’s point of view, he thinks it worked so well last time that this should really do the trick.”
“He’s an idiot. This day just keeps getting weirder,” Ariel complained. Her left wrist was starting to hurt and her right hand was swelling. No one had mentioned that even effective self-defense moves took their toll on the defender. “I think that I could find a wee bit of Irish whiskey to put into that tea,” she said in her best imitation of a Dubliner’s accent as she filled the kettle with water.
“Could you now, lass,” Nell laughed back. Soon the two of them were sipping their own version of Irish Breakfast tea, which they much preferred to the original.
******
Siarnaq did not want to talk to Mikkel. He ignored messages, and he didn’t answer his phone. He had spent years working up to the level of hatred that he now felt, and he had finally reached the point that anything at all that would make Mikkel even partially sympathetic was a threat to Siarnaq’s worldview. He wanted no part of it.
However, Mikkel would not quit trying. The messages, left by every conceivable means, only got more urgent. “You need to hear what I have to say.” “The very thing you are trying to do is at risk. Please. Call me.” And so on.
Mikkel sent messages by phone, by mail, by dogsled and by computer. He left messages with the answering service in Nuuk, with every single one of Siarnaq’s family members, and with local leaders in every village in Greenland. After a couple of weeks of increasing curiosity and questions from everyone he encountered, Siarnaq realized that the only way to regain his privacy was to meet with Mikkel. The coercion made him even angrier, but he would do what needed to be done.
They scheduled an appointment through a family member, and Siarnaq found himself glaring at Mikkel from across a table in the very same restaurant where he had once discovered how wondrous Ariel and her touch could be. The memory of what he had lost made him even angrier at his cousin.
“Speak,” he said.
Mikkel knew how firmly Siarnaq’s mind would be closed, at least at first. He’d had time to choose his words with care, and he was determined to use well the short time that Siarnaq would give him.
Siarnaq felt his mind open a sliver as he listened. So, his cousin did the bidding of another, an Irish man who saw the same future. The exact same future. Siarnaq felt some relief at discovering that he was not alone. This Irishman, who saw even further and knew even more, had cautioned Mikkel to let Siarnaq do what he must do without interfering. Siarnaq could accept that. Visions tended to work that way.
The rub came when Mikkel tried to explain that his own role did not interfere with Siarnaq’s plan. “That’s crazy,” Siarnaq declared. “You can’t put machines and computers and modern facilities up here and think that they’ll have no effect.”
Mikkel talked about the need for secrecy, spoke of the few Inuit who would be involved and the role they and their families had agreed to play in a bizarre bid for the survival of the species. “They interfere in no way. Cillian says that what you are doing is important, very important. What I do matters too. In the end, mine and yours will help each other, and that is possibly what will save us. You and I, we do not need to help each other now—in fact, it is better if we don’t even try. But we also need to not hurt each other.”
And so Siarnaq listened a little more, and for a little longer than he had planned. In the end he said words to Mikkel that he never thought he would say, “I’m sorry I misjudged you.”
Ariel had taught Siarnaq about the surprising relationship between touch and seeing the future. It wasn’t something Siarnaq would have discovered on his own, given that the people he touched had no part in the future that he saw. At least, no one had until now.
When he and Mikkel got up to say goodbye, having agreed to a truce, Siarnaq embraced his cousin, and he was surprised. As their skin touched, Siarnaq saw a possibility in which a mother was telling her child a story, and it was the tale of how long ago two cousins had helped save the world while working from the remotest reaches of the North. One led a movement amongst the local people while the other, a man named Mikkel Nygaard, had built something incredible in Greenland that had made the people and their land forever important.
So his cousin spoke the truth. Someday, Mikkel Nygaard and his legacy might be famous here, if Siarnaq could now find a way to change course and keep Baldur from destroying what Mikkel was doing.
******
Toby knew that he had his wo
rk cut out for him. Many of the most active members of y1 considered themselves watchdogs for fairness in the world economy. Some were very rich, some merely well off, and others struggling, but they all shared one thing in common. They believed that the rules governing money should be fair. Hard work and creativity needed to be rewarded, and those who would cheat or steal under any guise needed to be stopped.
HFT had bothered many of them from the get-go. In a totally fair world, HFT brought no one any advantage. Make stock trades as fast as you like, the stocks themselves still go up or down and half the time they will not do what you predict. However, those with money and power had been able to insist that the various electronic exchanges implement obscure and difficult to understand trading protocols that would handle split-second trades in such a way that those using HFT would have a slight advantage. Slight was all it took, when you had enough money from the start.
Once the suspicious watchdogs of y1 had honed in on the groups that relied heavily on HFT, Baldur had risen to the top as a man enjoying an uncanny amount of luck within a system that was already rigged in his favor. A physicist in y1 had apparently dubbed the group as “after jerks” and a few others had picked up the name as well. As members of y1 learned more about Baldur, opinions varied widely on how he was managing to turn good odds into such great ones. However, no one thought that Baldur was playing on anything approaching a fair playing field, and everyone wanted to see him stopped.
It was probably why Toby’s quickly assembled ad hoc study had met with so much cooperation and such a sense of urgency. These folks had worked hard to get done what needed to be done. Now, Toby had to slow their pace back to a crawl while he gave another group the chance to do what they needed to do.
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