The Last Trade

by James Conway

  “The truth?”

  “I wish. All I have is a half-baked version of someone else’s conspiracy theory that I haven’t figured out and don’t necessarily believe, that contends that one of America’s most supportive and patriotic and beloved investors is somehow reverse gaming the financial markets, messing with some of the most powerful securities on the planet.”

  “What about Weiss’s theory?”

  “If I went forward with that as my story, I’d arrest me. Then I’d stick me in a mental hospital.”

  “So what are you going to do, disappear?”

  He leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs. “I’m going to do the thing I know best. I’m a quant. I’m going to put together the pieces—the data, the personal stuff, the global stuff—and figure out what he’s up to.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I’m going to bring him down.”

  “You really think that Salvado is killing people in, where did you say, China?”

  “And Weiss hinted at maybe something in Berlin.”

  “Because?”

  “I don’t know. But Weiss had a theory, and obviously knew something, and thought something very bad was about to happen, otherwise he’d still be alive.”

  Miranda rises and walks to his side of the room to straighten a folk art watercolor of an African-American man building a stone wall.

  “Weiss and now me, what we did, stumbling upon this stuff at this precise moment, was a fluke.”

  “You’ve said it a million times, Drew. There are no flukes in the financial world.”

  He stares at her. “Danny pointed me here. All I did was doubt the direction the fund had taken. I gave Danny the job of digging deeper. Not with the intention of uncovering some kind of deadly global plot. All I wanted to do was what every middle manager with an ego wants to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Prove his arrogant boss wrong.”

  Miranda tilts her head back and squints at a spot on the ceiling. “I don’t understand. Why would Danny give you such cryptic notes?”

  “It’s all he had. If he had answers, he’d have told me. I think he sensed he was in danger and unloaded these clues on me in hopes that I’d figure them out.”

  “Do you think he knew he was going to die?”

  “Not at first. Because I wasn’t responding, he used what he had to tease me, because he knew I couldn’t resist a puzzle.”

  She shakes her head.

  “What?”

  “Tonight wasn’t the first time Danny called me. Every month or so for the past year he’d check in, to tell me about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Tommy Rourke, too. They’d tell me they were worried about you and try to talk me into getting back together with you.”

  Havens doesn’t know what to say. She looks at the clock. Two-thirty in the morning. “Let’s check out the picture he sent you on my monitor. Then let’s see what that software’s all about.”

  9

  Hong Kong

  Sobieski meets Detective Mo in the lobby of the Commercial Crime Bureau at HKPD headquarters on Arsenal Street in Wanchai. Michaud asked her to give Mo an update of sorts. Said he was too hungover to have a face-to-face with him. Plus, she thinks, Michaud prefers working from the shadows.

  Sobieski doesn’t mind. Her flight to Berlin doesn’t leave until 4 P.M., and Mo’s a good contact for a foreign agent in Hong Kong.

  “You drive?”

  She shakes her head, looks down at her clothes. She’s still in her jogging tights, T-shirt, and shorts. “I walked from our place. Michaud called me in the middle of my morning run. I haven’t had a chance to change.”

  Mo gives her a look. “No complaints here.”

  “Better me than you in black tights, right?”

  Mo has no answer for this. He starts to walk and she follows. “So,” he says, “what do you have for me?”

  Sobieski looks around. “We were right. Lau was in a celebratory mood for a reason. He moved a ton of paper throughout the day. After sucking for the better part of a year.”

  Mo leads her into a small, windowless conference room with a round table, four chairs, and a twenty-seven-inch video monitor. “What else?”

  She sits in one of the chairs. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve discovered, he was in deep debt. Credit cards, landlord, the works.”

  “What security was he moving?”

  Sobieski pauses.

  Mo tilts his head toward the video monitor. “Let me guess: tech stocks.”

  “How’d you know?”

  He holds up Patrick Lau’s smart phone. “Before he looked up the restaurant, he made some moves on his personal trading account. Take a look.” He hands her a piece of paper. Sobieski gives it a quick read. Almost the identical set of trades he’d made earlier in the day for the client in Berlin, only for substantially less and made with his own money.

  “Wow,” she says. “Pretty much the same moves. The same shorts.”

  “Shorts?”

  “A bet that the security will fail.”

  He scratches his chin. “So Lau and his client are betting, essentially, that technology will fail?”

  “Right, at least these particular securities, short-term.”

  “And that’s what it is, right? Betting. Gambling. Only the casino is more dignified.”

  Sobieski looks at Mo. She’s heard the casino analogy dozens of times, but it never fails to unnerve her. “You say more dignified; but a lot of gamblers would beg to differ.”

  Mo asks, “Anything on the buyer?”

  “Not really. Other than the initial request and this other thing that came out of a middle man in Germany.”

  Mo squints and raises one brow. “What other thing?”

  She sighs. Okay, why not? “A second, similar series of puts—different securities but a similar sequence of shorts—middle man also out of Germany. Berlin. Executed by a firm out of Dubai.”

  “Did they kill the trader there, too?”

  “Dubai? No. Not that we can tell.”

  Mo tries to whistle. “Wow.”

  “Of course,” she says. “We’re investigating to see if there’s a connection. We’re tracking big shorts, serial shorts that add up to big shorts, major movement on any U.S.-based stock, and of course, we’re looking to see if any other dead brokers turn up anywhere.”

  Mo clears his throat. “Why so many trades? Why not one big play?”

  “My guess,” Sobieski answers, “is it’s a form of what we call Smurfing. That’s when, if say a terrorist organization is transferring money into the states, or executing some kind of deal they don’t want the authorities to know about, they go just under the minimum currency total that shows up on our radar—TFI, Interpol, the FBI. In this case, they did it a lot.”

  “And got caught anyway,” Mo replies. “Why kill the broker?”

  “With Lau? My guess is maybe he blabbed in some way and someone didn’t like the breach. The risk he posed. Or maybe whoever’s behind this doesn’t want to even risk the possibility of a leak.”

  “Seems awfully extreme.”

  Sobieski half-nods. “Billion-dollar bets are awfully extreme, too.”

  “So this guy in Dubai, maybe he didn’t blab?”

  Sobieski thinks. “Sure, maybe.”

  “But if they know that we know about him, isn’t that the same thing? Same exposure? Same risk?”

  “If they know? Sure. But who’s to say anyone knows?”

  Mo switches tack: “So, if someone’s betting so big on the failure of a security, or securities, what makes them so sure it’s going to fail?”

  “For starters,” Sobieski answers, “for every put there has to be someone on t
he other side of the bet, willing to take it. A market-maker. But with this, either the investor has a hunch, has data that shows that something is likely or inevitable, or they may be intent on gaming the market.”

  “How so?”

  “By breaking the law. Misleading investors. Sabotaging the technology, like the trading software or using some sort of Spyware. Or creating an inciting incident that can make the security or the markets go kerplooey.”

  “Kerplooey?”

  She smiles. “I don’t think I need to translate. So what else do you have?”

  Mo pushes the on button on the monitor, revealing color bars and a monotone. “No match from ballistics, which, as I said, is not a surprise. No eyewitnesses in the lobby, the elevators, anywhere. No one even recalls seeing Lau coming home from work.” He picks up a remote, squints to read the buttons, and presses play. “But we have this.” On the monitor they watch grainy overhead surveillance footage from the lobby of Lau’s apartment building. Lau enters the front door and holds it open for a man in a suit with a briefcase who enters behind him. Lau’s head and body obscure most of the view of the man as they head toward the elevator.

  Sobieski leans closer and says, “Doesn’t look like they’re talking.”

  Mo shifts his chair toward to the monitor, adjusts his glasses. The footage, maybe seven seconds long, is looped and has started again. “No. I’d say they did not know each other, never saw each other before. One of our guys took a still photo, such as it is, over to the condo. So far no one in the building recognizes him either, which isn’t surprising since his head’s down and his face is turned away from the camera, a detail that I’m guessing he was aware of.”

  “Also,” Sobieski adds, “notice that he goes out of his way to avoid touching the door.”

  They watch the two men entering twice more, once in slow motion, before they see the image of the man in the suit exiting the lobby with his head down and facing the other way. “Five minutes and twenty-nine seconds later,” Mo observes.

  Looks to be about six-foot, she thinks. Anglo. European cut to the suit but hard to tell exactly, or what brand.

  On the third pass of the alleged killer’s exit from the lobby, Sobieski leans in from the other side of the monitor. “Do me a favor and pause when I tell you.” When the man comes closest to the camera, she says, “Now!”

  Mo hits fast forward by mistake. Then misses the frame. On the third try he stops on the image she’s requested. “Still can’t see his face.”

  “I know,” Sobieski says. “I’m looking at his shoulder bag. There’s some kind of logo stamped on the leather. Can you zoom?”

  Mo surprises even himself by being able to do just that. He racks the image up and to the right and zooms in on the brown leather bag. At a certain point when he gets too close, the image becomes pixilated and breaks up altogether, so he pulls back to the last spot where it’s viewable.

  “Looks like a drawing of a woman. A goddess or something.”

  Mo puts on his glasses and steps back to look from a different angle. “Ancient. Some kind of god maybe.”

  “And . . . is that the letter S in a sort of Greek typeface?”

  Mo shrugs. “We’ll look. Anything else?”

  Sobieski stands staring at the man who took the life of Patrick Lau. She’s thinking, What else?, when her phone buzzes. Michaud.

  “Yeah?”

  “Anything there?”

  She steps away from Mo. “Yeah. Sort of. I’ll tell you in a bit. What about you?”

  “I’m watching Johannesburg. Shorts. Media.”

  “More media?”

  “Yeah. But different. This time new.”

  “U.S.?”

  “Baseball. Hot dogs. New media. American as it gets. Initiated from guess where?”

  Sobieski looks at Mo, who is doing a bad job of pretending not to listen. “The birthplace of the Nazi party and my next stop?”

  “Exactly. Berlin. Just a different IP address.”

  “What about the trader?”

  “In Johannesburg? It’s a woman. Junior player at a medium-sized firm.”

  Sobieski takes a breath. “Alive?”

  “We’re checking. That’s what I’m waiting to find out.”

  “Why don’t you send me there instead?”

  “We’re on it. We’ve already assigned people who are closer than a fourteen-hour flight away.”

  “Because with Lau, it didn’t happen until later that day . . . What time is it in Johannes—”

  “We’re on it, Sobes. We’re looking for her as we speak. Does Mo have anything for you?”

  “Looks like Lau’s killer is a man. They’ve got poor-quality video of him from the lobby security cam. Coming and going.”

  “That narrows things.”

  She asks, “You think the killer could be the same person?”

  “Not unless he has perfected the art of time travel,” Michaud says. “No way he covers that much ground—Hong Kong, Dubai, Jo’burg—in such a short period of time.”

  “Any word on the guy in Dubai?”

  “Yeah. Not dead, or alive. Now he’s missing. No one’s seen him for the last four hours.”

  Sobieski sighs. “Shit. So, Berlin?”

  “Ja-ja wunderbar. Unless you want to take a wild guess and go wherever in the world they’re gonna strike next.”

  10

  Katonah, New York

  In Miranda’s den, they sit looking at a computer monitor on top of a secretary desk. Even blown up on the larger, higher-resolution screen, the symbols on the photo of Weiss’s whiteboard are blurred and hard to comprehend. But Miranda click and drags her cursor over the faint images, a digital marker tracing over the curves and lines of the letters and numbers, turning the faint to bold and bringing the letters and numbers to life.

  What emerges is a chart of seven boxes, beginning on Saturday and ending on Friday.

  In the box for Saturday is the number sequence 12.42-6.

  There are two sequences for Sunday: MSPH366259 and the words brotherly to us?

  Under Monday are the numbers 3.340-6 and the word Tech?

  Under Tuesday, 6.88-90.

  Under Wednesday, 18.55-57

  Thursday, 17.594-9

  Friday’s numbers—9.11—are accompanied by two exclamation points—!!—written in red.

  Sloppily scrawled across the middle of the board, overlapping some of the numbers, is this passage: DH—The gods may love a man, but they can’t help him when cold death comes to lay him at his bier.

  DH, Havens thinks. He’s talking to me. He’s passing this off on me.

  When Miranda is done highlighting the faded numbers and letters, Havens says, “I have no idea what to do with these numbers. There’s no sequence, no discernible pattern. The only thing I recognize is this”—he points to the box for Saturday—“12.42-6. Weiss sent me that same note while I was at the club.” He pulls out his phone. Miranda leans over while he scrolls through. “First he wrote this: Wilt thou not be brotherly to us? The next was Berlin. 12.42-6. Then, Help 3.338-9.”

  Miranda types into the search box on her Internet browser while Havens sifts through his texts. “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “The gods may love a man, but they can’t help him when cold death comes to lay him at his bier.” She turns and looks at him. “You have to see more than numbers, Drew. Words matter when human beings are part of the equation.” She clicks search and bends closer. “And these words,” she continues, “are some of the oldest and most profound ever written. They’re from Book Three of The Odyssey, by Homer.”

  He stares at the words, then back at her, but she’s typing again: “Wilt thou not be brotherly to us?” She clicks, then taps at the onscreen result and nods. “Od
ysseus.”

  Havens straightens up and closes his eyes.

  She asks, “What was the number he wrote after he texted Help?”

  With eyes still closed, he recites, “3.338-9.” She types. “Yup. Book Three, Lines 338 to 339.” They both look at the other numbers on the chart. Then, “What’s the other one that he sent you, from Saturday?”

  “12.42-46,” he answers, again without having to look at the chart or his texts.

  She types, then waits. “This may not be totally accurate line for line, because there are a million versions of this, based upon the Latin and Greek translations, but the books and the general section should be close. Here:

  Square in your ship’s path are Seirenes, crying

  Beauty to bewitch men coasting by . . .

  He stares at the words. No answer for this. He thinks. “Type in this, ‘Murder at Hang Seng.’”

  “Please,” she says, an old issue between them.

  “Yes, please. ‘‘Murder at Hang Seng.’”

  Within seconds they find several news service accounts of Hang Seng trader Patrick Lau’s death, but little else. After a moment he hands over the flash drive and says, “It’s Danny’s software. God knows how or why he got it. Let’s search Lau and Hang Seng on this.”

  She looks at him.

  “Pretty please.”

  Within minutes they’re accessing Lau’s private e-mail accounts as well as all of his accounts at Hang Seng. Havens instantly recognizes the connection between the stocks that Lau moved and the holdings in the Rising Fund. Also, this: “Berlin,” which leads him to Siren Securities.

  After they hack into Siren, they discover the transactions involving new media stocks out of Dubai and, this morning, old media out of Johannesburg. All through Siren, all mirroring the holdings of the Rising Fund.

  “Whoever’s doing these plays,” Havens marvels, “it’s as if they read my mind, playing the opposite—total shorts—to Salvado’s longs.”