Rigged

by Ben Mezrich

  “Did someone say ‘orgy’?” the German banker butted in, and Seebeck gave him a smack across the cheek.

  “Focus, Hans. It’s way too early for orgies. Our young American friend has only been in Dubai for a few hours. We need to break him in slowly. Or maybe we need to break him in real fast. Real goddamn fast.”

  David assumed Seebeck was kidding about the orgies. But then he noticed that all five of the Euros were grinning at each other and nodding as if they’d just come to some unspoken conclusion.

  Seebeck clapped his hands together, then suddenly all five Europeans were heading back toward the gated entrance to the patio. David stared after them—then quickly rushed to catch up. “We’re leaving already? We just got here.”

  “Change of plans, New York. Just stick close—I promise you’re going to like this.”

  Considering they were leaving a pool party filled with Australian flight attendants, David couldn’t even begin to imagine what Seebeck had planned for them next.

  Crouching at the edge of a makeshift parking lot in the middle of the desert, staring at a pitch-black stretch of the Sheik Zayed Highway, his thighs starting to ache and the exhaustion from twenty-four hours of pure culture shock beginning to set in, David was starting to believe that his new expat guide had actually gone insane. They’d left a perfectly good pool party for this? Even though there were a dozen of the nicest luxury sports cars David had ever seen in his life parked behind them, and twice as many expats crouching alongside them, staring out at that blank highway, this was by no means a party. In fact, in the past ten minutes since they’d arrived in Seebeck’s Porsche—parking between a BMW 5 series convertible and what looked to be a souped-up Lotus—and taken their position in the sand, nobody had uttered a word. No explanations, no pleasantries, nothing.

  Finally, David couldn’t handle the silence any longer. He leaned close to Seebeck.

  “Man, what the hell are we waiting—”

  Seebeck suddenly held up a finger.

  “Shh. Here they come.”

  David stared at him, then turned back toward the highway. He didn’t see anything. They were so far from the center of the city, apart from their makeshift parking lot, that there were no signs of civilization. They could have been on the surface of the goddamn moon. So what the hell was Seebeck talking about—

  And then David heard it. At first it was just a low rumble, at the very edge of his hearing. Then the sound grew, getting louder and louder, turning from a rumble into a thunderous roar. David’s eyes widened—and suddenly, in the far distance, two sets of headlights flashed into view. The headlights were right next to each other, moving straight down the stretch of highway. Except “moving” wasn’t the right word. The lights were fucking flying, like two jets screeching along the highway right next to each other—and now the roar really was like jet engines, so loud that David could feel it in his chest.

  “Hold on!” Seebeck shouted, and a roar rose up from the gathered, crouching expats.

  Barely a second later, the two sets of headlights became two sleek, speeding blurs of metal, fiberglass, and rubber tires. Both cars were low to the ground, curved and polished, and futuristic—except that in that moment David recognized the two beautiful racing beasts from pictures he’d seen in magazines: a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari Modena, pitch-black with tinted windows, and a three-hundred-grand Lamborghini Diablo, bright green with backward-spinning silver hubcaps. The two cars sped by in a flash of sound and motion, barely inches from each other—and then, just as they’d come, they were gone.

  “Holy shit,” David said as the crowd of expats roared again.

  “Hell, yeah!” Seebeck shouted back. “Riley’s definitely taking that one. I think they’re doing about one-eighty. Fucking A, that Modena is a sweet ride. Riley’s bosses at SwissBank would have a shit fit if they knew how he was using his transportation ‘allowance’—to kick all our asses from one end of the Sheik Zayed to the other!”

  David shook his head.

  “You mean you all do this? Race your cars along this highway?”

  Seebeck smiled, shaking his head. “Hey, not everyone goes for the sports cars. And you can’t very well race a fucking Rolls, can you? But most of us have tried a little street race now and then. There’s nothing like driving a fast car really fast.”

  David shook his head again. His adrenaline was really going. It wasn’t just the cars—it was everything. On the ride over, Seebeck had described to him the ten-thousand-dollar-a-month apartments the expats were all renting—on company credit, of course. And then, on top of that, there were the girls—my God, David thought, there were so many girls. Not just the Australian flight attendants; even during the twenty-minute trip to the deserted stretch of highway, Seebeck had managed to introduce David to dozens of girls from so many different backgrounds. There were the staggeringly tall Russian models coming out of an after-hours party that one of Seebeck’s banking buddies was throwing two doors down from the Emirates Air condos. Then the half-dozen German and Polish blondes they’d run into outside of a falafel hut on their way to the drag strip.

  And now that the first race of the evening seemed to be over, the girls had started to arrive even here—a makeshift desert parking lot in the middle of fucking nowhere. Interspaced between the Porsches and BMWs and Ferraris, David counted at least twenty more girls who must have just arrived in the past few minutes, all of them model-beautiful and elegant, European, Eastern European, and Southeast Asian, mingling and flirting with the young men. In New York, girls like that would be around only if there were twenty bottles of Cristal lined up in the sand, but here the girls didn’t need champagne to light their way to the money. The very nature of this place seemed to be about money—and where there was money, there were always girls.

  “This is pretty amazing,” David said, watching a group of Italians in silk skirts who could easily have passed for swimsuit models chatting up a pair of bankers in suits. “It’s like New York or London—but times ten.”

  “Actually,” Seebeck responded, brushing sand off his slacks, “you’ll find this place is pretty unique. Not just the quality of the girls—which I’m sure you’ve noticed by now—but the way they behave.”

  He flicked a hand toward a group of seven more girls, stepping one at a time out of an oversize stretch limo that had just pulled into the parking lot. David noticed that the girls were all wearing long trench coats—which they quickly removed, revealing more miniskirts and tiny lace designer tops.

  “That about sums it up right there,” Seebeck continued. “In Khaled’s Dubai, those birds would keep themselves wrapped up and proper, but here in our Dubai it’s a very different story.”

  David watched as two of the girls grabbed one of the bankers—who couldn’t have been older than twenty-three, a skinny kid with glasses and slicked-back blond hair—and dragged him back toward the limo. The three of them landed on the backseat in a laughing heap, and as they shut the door behind them, David caught a quick glimpse of connected lips and intertwined limbs.

  “Are they—”

  “Hookers? No, actually. In this town, the hookers are much more refined. Those girls are tourists. I swear, this place is becoming more and more like Ibiza every week. Hard to believe you’re in the Middle East, isn’t it?”

  It was hard to believe this existed anywhere—let alone the Middle East. David stretched his legs as Seebeck and his friends started back toward their hundred-thousand-dollar cars. In his head, he was mulling over what he had seen—from the moment he’d arrived in the Dubai airport to the moment he’d watched those two maniacs race down the Sheik Zayed Highway.

  And somewhere in the midst of all that sat Khaled’s intriguing proposal. To open a branch of the Merc, here, in this crazy desert kingdom full of parties, expats, and race cars. To try to bring a truly Western, capitalistic market to a place of such juxtapositions, such dichotomies. Old and new, Arab and expat, religion and excess.

  Was Da
vid crazy enough to try to make Khaled’s proposal a reality? Because really, he’d have to be crazy to think that he and Khaled could pull off such a thing.

  Then again, listening to the dwindling roar of the Ferrari and the Lamborghini, watching the young Euros mingling together with the models and the hookers and the flight attendants, David wondered: when you’re standing in the middle of an asylum, aren’t you supposed to go a little crazy?

  Chapter 27

  It wasn’t until David was sitting in the first-class lounge in the Emirates Airline terminal twenty-four hours later, waiting to board his return flight, that he finally came to a decision on Khaled’s proposal. Although David’s resolve had been building throughout the past day—ever since Seebeck had brought him home from the final after-hours party at five in the morning—it wasn’t until he was sitting in a leather chair in the lavish airport lounge, sipping orange juice out of a crystal glass, that he saw the final sign—and it was something he simply could not ignore.

  “David fucking Russo. Now what the hell are you doing here?”

  A friendly hand came down on his shoulder, and David nearly dropped his orange juice. He looked up—and it took him a good minute to recognize the skinny kid in the pinstripe suit who was standing in the airport lounge next to him. The kid had thick glasses, pointy ears, and a really bad haircut, but he was smiling like he owned the world—and that smile was what gave him away.

  “Irwin Cutler,” David said, surprised. Then he stood and shook the kid’s hand. Cutler had been one of the top students who graduated with him at HBS; the son of a carpet king from St. Louis, Cutler was a double Crimson, having spent four years as a Harvard undergrad before entering the B-School. A bit of a geek, he was also one of the sharpest kids David had shared classes with—and now here he was, standing there in the firstclass lounge, wearing a suit that looked like it cost as much as David’s rent.

  “I could ask you the same question,” David continued, after they both sat back down. “What are you doing in Dubai?”

  “Mckinsey, baby. Actually, this is my third trip. And I saw Smitty last night, at Tangerine. He’s here full-time now. This place is ridiculous, isn’t it? Off the hook.”

  David raised his eyebrows. Smitty—Walter Smith Jr.—was Cutler’s roommate at HBS. If David was not mistaken, Smitty was an analyst at UBS, where his father was a partner. And he had moved to Dubai? Tangerine sounded familiar—but then, David had seen so much in the past twenty-four hours that some of his memories were already beginning to run together. His last day in Dubai had been amazing—but also a total whirlwind. After being woken up by the ubiquitous Arabic call to prayer that floated in through his hotel room’s open patio door, he’d toured a dozen construction sites in the rapidly growing International Financial Center. Lunch had been at the Dubai Four Seasons, and dinner at a nearby Thai place, followed by another night at another disco—this one a spectacularly modern complex with a laser light show on the ceiling and a fountain in the middle of the dance floor made to look like an active volcano, spitting plumes of fiery red liquid ten feet into the air.

  And from there things had gotten even wilder. Khaled had once again handed him off to Seebeck, who had taken him to three more after-hours parties. At about four in the morning, when David finally suggested that it was time to head back to the hotel, Seebeck had grinned and told him there was just one more stop to make.

  David had been surprised when Seebeck pulled his Porsche to a stop in front of what looked like a quiet oceanside mansion a few miles from the center of town. The place was too quiet for an after-hours party, and the austere front facade—marble pillars, wide front steps, detailed heavy wooden doors—didn’t look like the entrance to any club David had ever seen before. It wasn’t until Seebeck had slipped a shiny black plastic card into a slot by one of the pillars and the great wooden doors had swung inward that David realized what sort of place this was.

  The front hall of the mansion had been designed to look like some sort of Arabian oasis: a shimmering, egg-shaped wading pool took up most of the area, surrounded by a gold-tiled foyer decorated with palm trees, ivory-white benches, and woven, freestanding hammocks and swinglike chairs. Scattered about the foyer, David counted at least fifteen staggeringly beautiful women of varying ethnicities, dressed in elegant silk robes. Some were lounging on the hammocks, benches, and swings; others were standing around the wading pool, hands on hips, long bare legs extending out from beneath the swaths of silk.

  David had stared at the women in the opulent lobby—and it had slowly dawned on him what this mansion by the ocean was. Then he had turned to Seebeck, shaking his head. As tempting as the scene was, he knew instinctively that it was not for him.

  “I’m sorry, man. I think I really should be getting back to the hotel.”

  Seebeck had only shrugged. He had waved at the girls in the lobby, then led David back toward the car. The huge wooden doors shut behind them, and as Seebeck slid behind the steering wheel next to David, he offered a simple explanation.

  “Khaled asked me to show you everything, David—even the Dubai he doesn’t need to know about.”

  And David had understood. There were so many layers to this city; Dubai was truly unique, and in two days he had only scratched the surface. Khaled had arranged for Seebeck to take him around—although at first it had seemed a serendipitous arrangement—because he’d wanted David to understand: there was a good reason why Dubai was the fastest-growing city in the world, why businesses from all over were flocking there, why the expat community was thriving to such a degree.

  But it wasn’t the mansion on the ocean or the discos or the restaurants or the beautiful girls trawling the streets and shopping malls that had sealed the deal for David; it was the geeky kid in the pinstripe suit sitting next to him in the first-class lounge— what he had already said and especially the bombshell he dropped next.

  “In two months,” Cutler added, grinning from pointy ear to pointy ear, “I’m also going to be living here full-time. Mckinsey is bringing over fifteen of us. Got us sweet apartments right by the beach.”

  And just like that, David’s decision was made. The smartest kid from his graduating class was moving to Dubai—sent by the top financial consulting firm in the world. And Cutler’s roommate, an HBS legacy whose father was a major player at the biggest bank in New York, was already living there.

  David knew exactly what that meant. Khaled could tell him stories about billion-dollar projects and economic free zones all he wanted—but the real evidence that the place was about to explode was right here in this first-class lounge.

  When the smart young kids start showing up, then it’s time to open your eyes.

  Dubai was happening. And David was right there, in the middle of it.

  “Well, you might be seeing a lot more of me,” David said, and Cutler grinned back at him.

  The decision had been made. Now all David had to do was head back to New York and somehow sell the idea of an oil exchange in the Middle East to a boardroom full of Italians and Jews.

  Chapter 28

  At that very moment, ten miles away, Khaled closed his eyes as the soft tones of a classical guitar ballad filled his brightly lit office. The music had been a gift from a classmate in Geneva, an Egyptian girl whose parents had worked for one of the studios that produced a few of the earlier films of Khaled’s father. Though Khaled was hardly a fan of Egyptian pop music, he had always found this particular CD soothing, especially the complicated guitar ballads at the end; it had become a habit of his to play this particular song over and over whenever he truly needed to think. As he did so, he tried not to dwell on the irony that his relationship with the CD had far outlasted his relationship with the Egyptian girl. Ironic—but not surprising considering that he’d never had a girlfriend, or even a real friendship, that had lasted more than a few months.

  Perhaps it was yet another symptom of his nomadic upbringing; you didn’t make friends on movie sets, and you had brie
f liaisons that almost always ended when the director yelled “Cut!” for the final time. And you didn’t keep girlfriends for very long when you moved from boarding school to boarding school, country to country, at the whim of a billionaire sheik. But you did learn how to read people—because you often had to make quick judgments if you were going to have any sort of relationships at all.

  Khaled opened his eyes and looked down at the photos and typewritten notes that were spread out across his glass desk. He had compiled the dossier over the past forty-eight hours—beginning even before David Russo had first boarded the plane in New York. He had similar dossiers on Nick Reston, Anthony Giovanni, and many of the other major players in the New York Mercantile Exchange, but Russo’s file was the only one that seemed important at the moment. Because at the moment it seemed that the success of Khaled’s idea lay in the hands of the fresh-faced young man.

  Khaled knew that his fantasy of a Dubai exchange was audacious; in fact, it had taken enormous effort just to convince the minister to let him invite a representative from the Merc to Dubai. And although the emir himself had tacitly allowed Khaled to continue forward—after Khaled had submitted a thirty-page proposal explaining why he felt such an exchange would benefit Dubai, to the continued glory of the ruling family—he knew his charge was tenuous at best. The river of distrust ran both ways, and there were stereotypes and emotions to overcome on both sides. Still, Khaled knew, with a certainty that grew every day, that the project was important—and indeed possible. But not without the Merc—and thus not without David Russo.

  Certainly, Khaled and the Ministry of Finance could attempt to open an energy exchange without the help of the Americans. They could throw money into the project until it grew roots. They could build a beautiful building with a state-of-the-art trading floor, bribe traders from London and even New York to come play—but Khaled had no doubt that such an exchange would end up a failure, no more significant than an indoor ski slope or a shopping mall. Because without the legitimacy that the Merc would bring to the Dubai exchange, the rest of the world would not take it seriously. Like so many other things in Dubai, it would be viewed as a curiosity—another of the emir’s whimsical creations.