The Last Trade

by James Conway

  That and the 1.1-billion-dollar price tag on the deal.

  Lau fixes himself a martini, Hendrick’s with a splash of olive juice, and plops down on his white leather sofa to take in the view and revel in his accomplishment. And why not? It’s only Monday. Just last night he was thinking he might have to move to a more affordable apartment at a less desirable address, perhaps share something with a roommate for the first time since he graduated college, and now he’s just completed the biggest deal of his twenty-nine-year-old life.

  At first he had begun to tell the voice on the other end the proper procedure for executing a transaction of this nature, but within seconds the voice was telling him, explaining the exact protocol, the account numbers, the complex series of wire transfers, and the way in which the transactions were to be divided, each for no more than ten thousand dollars U.S., and staggered, hundreds per hour over a twenty-four-hour period.

  This, Lau surmised, was to minimize the chances of the transaction showing up on whatever sophisticated tracking software the authorities are using these days. The FSA in London. The FBI, CIA, or Department of Treasury in the States, Hong Kong’s own Securities and Futures Commission—conventional wisdom says even the Russian mob has some modified bootleg version of the software, software that some say Bin Laden used to move and make money prior to 9/11.

  Not that Lau mentioned this to his client. He just knew, and he’s certain that his client knows even more. Besides, it wasn’t Lau’s job to moralize, recommend, or question. For this trade his job was all about the confirmation of numbers and the execution of a mandated procedure. Of course Lau had to alert his boss about a deal of this magnitude, but Emily Cheng, senior managing director, international equities, said exactly what he’d expected: “If the money comes through cleanly on the wire, and the account checks out, I don’t see why not.”

  “Don’t you wonder with something this big who it is, or even why?” Lau asked Cheng, seemingly out of curiosity but mostly to cover his ass. Because he wanted to make sure that if the deal came back to bite him, he wouldn’t be the only one to take the heat. “You’re not curious why someone wants to short U.S. tech stock now that it’s finally starting to come back? I mean, Apple alone, with or without Jobs . . .”

  Cheng shrugged. As Lau’s director, she’d make a nice under-the-radar commission on this as well. When the group performed well, she did well, so she wasn’t about to ask questions. “Like I said, if the transfer is good and the account is legit, for a billion-one, I don’t care if he’s taking a short on the Moon.”

  For the first time in months Lau allowed himself to flash the smile of a man about to make a killing.

  A quick credentials check confirmed that the transfer was good and the account was legit. Registered to the American trading account with JP Morgan Chase of one Rondell Jameson in the city of Philadelphia in the state of Pennsylvania. Who knew? Who knows? Lau thought. Maybe the guy actually exists. Then he did something that the caller had specifically said he was not to do. “If you tell anyone besides your manager, or if you inquire into or act on any of these securities in any way, there will be serious consequences.” Despite the warning, Lau went off-line almost immediately and looked into the stocks on his smart phone, linked to a personal trading account. As if they’d ever be able to find out, he thought, as he proceeded to lay down a matching series of shorts. Of course, for much less money. His credit line with this account was thirty thousand dollars U.S., thirty thousand dollars he didn’t have, but his gambler’s instincts told him that this was special, and if even part of it came to pass, he’d be set for years to come. So he defied the one rule his client insisted upon, and he got in on the action himself.

  After placing his personal trade, he did something he hadn’t done in months, something he had told himself he wouldn’t do again. He called his family back on the mainland. After a dozen rings someone picked up, grunted, and hung up. Most likely his father, he surmised, but it could have been any of them.

  Now, safely home with the deals in place, staring out at the first of the grand party yachts heading into the glittering harbor, Lau tries to forget about his family and manages to smile again.

  As soon as he finishes the first martini, he begins to wonder if he should fix a second, or if perhaps he should call some friends to have a bit of a celebration. Even if it is a bloody Monday. Even if, technically, he hasn’t yet received a cent for his effort. He doesn’t have to tell them about the magnitude of the transaction or the fact that he’s about to have a hell of a good week, but after months and months of lying low and avoiding almost all contact with the outside world, why not?

  He gets up and decides he’ll do both. He’ll have that second dirty Hendrick’s martini and celebrate. Perhaps at Nobu, or better, Hutong.

  Standing at his kitchen counter, Lau calls three friends in succession, but none of them answer. He leaves the same message for each: “Call me . . . I’m ready to have fun again.” Yet he can’t help thinking, Do they care? Have they moved on like everyone else in my life? Screw it—he uses one hand to scroll through his smart phone for a restaurant app to find the number for Hutong—I’ll celebrate alone. With the other he reaches for the Hendrick’s.

  The call to Hutong has started to go through when he hears the faintest metallic click behind him. He begins to turn, but a hand grabs the back of his neck and smashes his face down onto the counter. The phone drops to the floor as the barrel of a pistol presses against his temple.

  “What do you want?”

  “Who else did you tell?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The hand lifts his head off the stone countertop and smashes it back, cracking Lau’s left jawbone and knocking loose a canine and an incisor tooth. “You were specifically told not to tell anyone. Who else?”

  Lau groans, mumbles, “I told no one.”

  The hand raises Lau’s head, poised to smash it again. “Wait!” he says, spitting blood, the uprooted teeth still floating inside his mouth. “Okay. I made some trades. I took some positions, but I didn’t tell anyone, it was programmed. And my money, compared to the others’ . . .”

  “And who else?”

  “No one. My boss. I had to, but I told you that on the—”

  “Not me.”

  “Okay. I told the caller that I had to.”

  Pressing Lau’s face against the stone: “Who . . . else?”

  “No one. I called my friends. Please. Believe me.”

  “How can I believe someone who has failed to keep the only promise we’ve asked of him?”

  Lau begins to weep. “I made the trade because I was desperate. I was about to lose everything.”

  The hand loosens its grip on the back of his neck, but the pistol is still pressed against his forehead.

  “I can cancel it,” Lau says, somewhat brightening. “I’ll make the call, contact them right now.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Stand up, but don’t turn around.”

  Lau lifts his face off the counter and straightens. “I promise, I won’t tell another soul.”

  “This is correct,” the voice says. “You won’t.” The bullet enters through the base of Lau’s skull and exits through the floor-to-ceiling harbor-view window.

  His body stiffens, then goes slack all at once, and he pitches face-first toward the soon to be bloodstained white marble countertop as a squall of glass shards begins to float like snow through the Hong Kong twilight toward the warm asphalt of Harbour Street, seventeen stories below.

  On the counter next to him the light on his phone flashes with a message, a text with the heading URGENT from NYC.

  5

  New York City

  Weiss has a whiteboard on his living room wall that is covered with cities, dates, symbols, account numbers, quotations, and theories written in multic
olored markers. What Weiss doesn’t have is the type of mind that can pull it all together.

  His value at the fund and in life has always been his intuition and his tenacity. He has always made up for his limited natural gifts with passion and curiosity. At the fund they call him a digger. In high school football and baseball they called him a scrapper, someone who made up for his lack of natural ability with preparation and intensity. But on the field and at work that will only get you so far. Some people are naturals, and in sports and in the financial world, he’s never seen a person as naturally gifted as Drew Havens.

  At this point, Weiss feels he’s done enough digging and uncovered enough data to validate the hypotheses that something terrible is already happening in Hong Kong and Dubai and that something much worse is going to happen at the end of this week, to the Rising Fund and the U.S. economy. Now all he can do is assemble it all as best he can and give it to the only person he knows who can take it to the next level: Havens.

  While he’s watching files transfer from his desktop to his flash drive, the Spyware warning flashes again. He’s already reaching to pull out the flash drive when the entire desktop flashes black and then white and then off. After two attempts to reboot the computer, he gives up. Someone sent a digital bullet his way and killed everything on his hard drive and perhaps the flash as well. He’s still holding the flash when he hears the buzzer and the familiar clunk of the downstairs lobby door opening. Curious, he strides over to his front door. For a moment he considers bolting and locking it, but instead he opens it and listens. Instead of the clicking of a key through the tumblers he hears the second lobby door gently shaking in its jamb. Someone is picking the lock. As the second door creaks open, he eases out into the hall and quietly closes his door.

  He takes soft steps in his stockinged feet, heading upstairs toward the steel door that leads onto the roof, while the heavier footsteps start echoing upward from below. He pauses at the roof door and listens as the steps come closer. The footsteps cease, he’s sure, outside his apartment door.

  He hears his door open and close. Should’ve locked it. Should’ve done a lot of things, Weiss thinks, twisting the roof doorknob and slipping into the October night. He scans the roof, most recently the scene of a barbeque with friends from college, then walks toward the shelter of an air-conditioning unit and squats. After a moment he turns and looks over the edge at the alley seven floors down. A necklace of car lights winds up the FDR. A siren bleats heading uptown. Peeking back over the edge of the unit, eyes fixed on the closed steel door, he takes out his phone, calls up Havens’s name, and begins to text. He’s still texting as the door to the roof begins to swing open.

  6

  New York City

  They’re still applauding for him, but Havens has had enough.

  Enough of Salvado and enough of his supporting role in the creation myth that has been spread countless times to the financial press. He looks up as the bottle girl approaches. She sidles up alongside him and places her palm on his thigh. “So I was right,” she whispers, giving his quad a squeeze. “You are famous.”

  Havens removes the woman’s hand from his thigh and answers, “Not for long.”

  He’s still looking into her medicated eyes when his phone buzzes. Danny Weiss again. This time rather than simply reading and ignoring Weiss’s texts, he shuts the phone off. Havens and the bottle girl watch one of the Texans pass with a girl on each arm. She asks, “How come you don’t have a girl?”

  He watches a chaperone open a door for the Texan and the girls. The room beyond is empty and filled with red velvet couches, flat screens, and flowers. “Is that what you call that?” he tells the bottle girl. “No thanks.”

  “Your boss,” she says, “last week he was in there for three hours with three of them. I had the privilege of replenishing the champagne and politely declining to be number four.”

  Havens groans. Tommy Rourke approaches. Despite Havens’s re-nown as a quant, Rourke is still Salvado’s most valued employee, a bona fide rainmaker with a gift for bringing high-value clients, such as the Texans, into the fund and converting them into Believers. Rourke is also the person most responsible for discovering Havens, based upon the recommendation of a friend of a friend, and bringing him to Salvado’s attention.

  “What’s wrong with the King of Quants?”

  Havens smiles. Despite the fact that Rourke is all about image and has little understanding of numbers, he likes him, and sometimes wishes he had some of Rourke’s social skills. In the beginning, whenever someone made a comment about Havens’s antisocial, obsessive behavior, Rourke was always the first to stick up for him. Plus, during Havens’s darkest time, Rourke proved to be his most loyal and caring friend.

  “You know me, Rourkey.”

  Rourke smiles. “Good with the numbers . . . not so much with people.”

  Havens lifts his chin toward the room into which the Texan just vanished. “And even less so with whores.”

  Rourke tilts his head. “Oh, come on. I throw up in my mouth a little every time Rick pulls this shit, but you know you’re a rock star to these clients. They respect you.”

  “They respect an old story. An as told by legend that you and your boy Rick tell especially well. This new stuff, this so-called investment strategy that they’re being sold right now, you and I know it isn’t mine, isn’t close to true, and makes no sense.”

  Now Rourke’s smile slackens. “Jesus, Drew. This again?” For the last twelve months Salvado has been loading the Rising Fund with a disproportionate amount of pro-American investment positions. Although his fund made its name shorting sub-prime real estate, he’s now gone on record as being long on a broad array of American securities, specifically tech, advertising, old and new media stocks, commodities, and real estate. Almost exclusively American. Even the U.S. dollar.

  Of course, on the heels of a recession, with the country’s leaders at one another’s throat, it’s been a popular position. And why not? Salvado was one of the few, thanks to Havens, to have gotten it right in 2008. And this time it doesn’t hurt that he’s betting big on American success rather than widespread collapse. It was an easy story for Rourke to use while prospecting, at least at first.

  One would think that Havens would be comfortable with his boss’s populist long position on the American economy. If anything, it would alleviate some of the guilt that has plagued him ever since they reaped fortunes off of economic ruin and the widespread woes of millions of Americans. But Salvado has been making less and less sense to Havens. As he’s been telling Rourke with increased passion and frequency, he believes that Salvado’s pro-American position is, at best, more of an investment philosophy than a strategy, let alone a numbers-based financial model.

  When Havens continued to question the increasingly one-dimensional position of the fund that had made him and so many others rich, he was gradually pushed aside during key internal meetings, relegated in recent months to less strategically important tasks. Ultimately he was moved up, replaced by other analysts who were more prone to see things Salvado’s way, more willing to bend their data to accommodate and promote their boss’s sketchy philosophy.

  If he hadn’t been so instrumental in the Rising Fund’s sub-prime legend, and featured so prominently in a number of bestselling books and articles about “The Crisis,” Havens is sure he’d have been shit-canned a long time ago and not pidgeonholed in the position of past-tense PR poster boy, rolled out like a museum piece for this sort of client-appeasing spectacle.

  But now he doesn’t care. It’s one thing to be right about an impending economic disaster, but even worse to predict bliss that will never happen and that the numbers just don’t substantiate.

  “So what are you gonna do?” Rourke asks over the music.

  Havens looks around once more. “Don’t worry. I’m not out to blast him in public. You guys
have been too good to me. But, between us, I’ve got to get out.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m fried, Tommy. You know I’m all or nothing with this stuff, and I can’t . . . I know you think I’m nuts, and, yeah, the money’s great, but I can’t work on something I don’t believe in and, worse, know is wrong.”

  Rourke looks at Salvado, who’s clinking champagne glasses with the second Texan. “You tell the big man yet?”

  Havens shakes his head. “You guys basically took me off the street and made me a rich man, and when everything went down with my—”

  Rourke interrupts. “With Miranda . . . I hear you. But that was between friends. Not work. You know, I have my questions, too, and I’m far from a numbers guy. Shit, I’m a goddamn Ivy League literature major. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I’m ready to move on, too. Get away from the ego that ate Wall Street and go someplace with Jenny and chill for a while. But because this is a tough time for him, for the fund in general, and he has been more than generous with us, we sort of owe—”

  This time Havens interrupts. “When everyone involved is rich, it’s tough to say you owe anyone anything. Listen, Tom: I’ve made a lot the last few years, more than I ever dreamed; but I’ve also lost more than I’d ever wish on anyone. I’m done.”

  Rourke puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You may be done with this, Drew, but I have a feeling you’re just beginning.”

  * * *

  Havens walks away from the table and heads down the short flight of stairs to the lounge. He orders a seltzer with lime and stares at the bank of TV screens suspended over the top shelf. Baseball play-offs. Monday night football. Aussie rules football. Two men beside him are discussing a spread. One man claims to have laid ten thousand on the Cowboys, giving the 49ers four points, and the Cowboys are up three in the fourth quarter. Havens is interested for a moment—he starts to sketch a model in his head about the probability of this douche bag winning, of the Cowboys coming back and beating the spread with 6:48 and two time-outs remaining—then he’s not. This is a problem. This is his problem, using the scalpel of mathematics to dissect the improbabilities of life. Over the course of his life it has intrigued, fascinated, and consumed him, ultimately to the brink of destruction. If not for his way with numbers, he would not have become rich as a direct result of the misfortune of others. If not for his way with numbers, he would still have a wife and a daughter and a life.