by James Conway
“So that’s a link?”
“More like an anti-link.”
Miranda grunts. “Why would he publicly bet his career that something is going to be a major success and then privately bet that it will fail?”
Havens chews his lip. “Not just fail. Epic fail. For starters, if these plays do happen to fail, the people who hold the shorts stand to make much more money than those who have the much safer play on their success—including anyone associated with The Rising. The odds against this type of failure are much greater and the payoff that much higher.”
“Yet, hypothetically, he holds both positions.”
“One that he wants the world to know about and the other that he’d apparently kill to keep secret.”
“How does he know that they will fail?”
“I’m not sure. Nothing indicates that any of those companies or plays is in any kind of trouble. Me, I wouldn’t go heavily into any of them, one way or the other, but especially short.”
Miranda rises, glances at the window. “What if,” she begins, “Salvado knows that they’ll fail because he’s going to do something to make them fail?”
“Okay.”
“What if he’s placing these bets because he’s going to initiate some kind of action, some incident, that will set the failures in motion?”
Havens nods. “This, essentially, is Danny Weiss’s theory. The same way that Al-Qaeda supposedly gamed the market with twenty-eight trades prior to 9/11, Weiss felt that Salvado was going to game it. ‘This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.’ His last message to me.”
“Which would imply that there’s another four trades to come, and maybe four more killings to go with them.”
“Right,” Havens says. “But which trades, which traders, where, and what ‘event’ do they ramp up to?”
“And the reason that you think these transactions and these murders are happening in different countries is to dilute the focus and make them harder to link and track?”
Havens nods again, then something occurs to him. “So far he’s made these trades in three separate countries, right? Each with some kind of link to Germany. Berlin, which Weiss mentioned in his last text.”
Miranda squints, shakes her head less than an inch each way. She’s not making the connection. “And the fact that they’re all American assets, that’s what the Salvado connection is all about?”
“Yeah. But no. What I mean is, because they’re almost all U.S.-based, even if the market is being made overseas, they have to somehow be linked to an American trading account, opened by a genuine American human with a Social Security number and, in theory, a traceable name and address.”
“I’m sorry, but I still don’t get it. Why go to these extremes? Why do it at all? Why would a man worth, what, billions, risk everything to do something so criminal and horrible?”
Havens shrugs. He agrees. It makes no sense.
For another hour they look at the cryptic numbers and letters of Danny Weiss’s whiteboard. They look up passages from various editions of The Odyssey, but no airtight narrative emerges. No absolute explanation of what was and what’s next.
After one extended silence Havens points at the on-screen photo and asks, “Can you print me a few copies of this to take with me?”
“Sure. But where are you going?”
“Back to the city.”
“Drew. There’s not another train for hours. Why don’t you get some rest?”
He stares at the closed blinds, then he sees for the first time the picture on the end table across the room. In it he’s sleeping in a beach chair near the ocean’s edge in Montauk and Erin is sleeping with her arms wrapped around him and her head on his chest. Best and worst picture ever.
She follows his eyes to the photo. When she looks back, she sees that his eyes are closed and that his hands are trembling. Her right hand reaches out, floats away from her almost involuntarily, and rests on top of his. She stands. Still holding one of his hands, she grabs the other, and whispers, “I want to help.”
He shakes his head. A truck rumbles past. Its diesel churn rattles the windows. “I shouldn’t have come. You’re right. I came out of selfishness. Because I needed to . . . because I needed.”
She pulls, coaxes him to rise.
“Did you ever think it was because of the money? That if we had rejected it . . .”
“It wouldn’t have prevented anything.”
“So many good people lost so much while we . . . It’s as if . . .”
She shakes her head with conviction.
“If anything else happens to you, Mir, because of me . . .”
“Drew. Stop. Please stop.”
Standing, knees weak, hands still shaking in the warmth of hers, he looks at Miranda, the only woman he’s ever loved, the mother of his child, once and former and always wife, and he thinks about their bleak and raw bond, and the flawed and broken kind of love that only they could begin to understand, and which will not go away.
All the things that matter, far more than the machinations of Rick Salvado and the violent whims of the rich and power-mad, more than his own dire predicament, register in their embrace. Love. Death. Resentment. Hate. Fear. Mourning. Remorse. They feel the compacted emotions and memories of a marriage, from when he first met her waiting in the rain under the entrance to the Astor Place subway stop, a shy grade school English teacher in ripped jeans, with auburn hair covered by an Irish wool cap, studying for her master’s at night at NYU, to the recently wealthy former grade school teacher turned not-for-profit board member with impeccable blond processed hair, wearing a two-thousand-dollar pantsuit, punching him in the chest on the sidewalk outside the hospital that night.
She kisses him while his eyes are still closed. He pulls her tight against him and she digs her fingers into his back. She cries as she kisses and claws at him, at once punishing and rewarding, resenting and caressing.
They stumble into her room and make a different kind of love, flawed and broken, bleak and raw, regretting it before it happens and while it happens, yet not being able to control themselves, and not wanting it to end. Amazed that something so primal and desperate once produced a thing as beautiful as a child.
11
Johannesburg
Sawa Luhabe has an hour.
The second-year broker at Rosehall Fund Managers, a private equity firm conveniently located across from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, taps on the wheel of her nine-year-old Toyota Celica, waiting for a light to change. Every day, while her partners sneak out to grab lunch in some upscale Sandton eatery, Luhabe hustles to her car and drives the eight kilometers back to her flat in Alexandra (Alex) township all, traffic permitting, to spend a precious half hour with her three-year-old daughter.
When she first started at Rosehall, one of Johannesburg’s oldest and most respected firms, Luhabe’s coworkers laughed at her for being in such a rush to leave the most affluent section of the city to visit one of its most impoverished and dangerous townships. In fact, they didn’t understand why Luhabe still lived in Alex at all.
But they weren’t black, female, and single. They hadn’t grown up in a shantytown or had to scratch and hustle their way out of an overcrowded grammar school to a university scholarship. They hadn’t worked forty-hour weeks and a series of unpaid internships at banks and brokerage houses while taking a full course load. And they had never met her daughter, Wendy. Sure, it would be easy to get a fancy condo in Sandton, and if her fortunes at the fund continue to rise, it won’t be a problem at all. But still, it would be an extravagance, and in many ways a betrayal.
She is torn. She wants her girl to grow up and appreciate the heritage and culture of Alexandra, and of her family, but she doesn’t want her to fall in with the wrong crowd, or worse, to die young, a victim of senseless street violence, as have
so many of Luhabe’s friends and extended family in Alexandra. Including her father, her brother, and her husband.
On the other hand, while a move to Sandton would be safer and more comfortable, she doesn’t want her daughter to be one of the only black faces in an enclave of material indulgence and white privilege. The final reason that Sawa Luhabe still lives in a modest home Alexandra and not Sandton is she can’t help but think that at any time someone or something will pull it all away from her: the job, the opportunity, the money. The future. Not an uncommon fear, she knows, for someone raised in a shack without a father, and whose husband was gunned down in the street three months after her wedding.
The light changes and the landscape transforms in a rush. One minute she’s passing the exclusive stores and restaurants of Nelson Mandela Square, and the next she’s making sure the windows are up and the door locks are down as she rolls through the crowded, trash – cluttered streets of Alex.
Plastic bags dangle from high wires like prayer flags. Men drinking home-brewed umqombothi, a traditional African beer, sit in front of tin-roofed squatter shanties, glaring until they see the color of her face. Then, unless they recognize her, their eyes shine with a different manner of resentment.
Luhabe is oblivious to any threat. For starters, it’s daylight, and she’s been passing through these neighborhoods as long as she can remember. It’s not as dangerous as it would be if say, she happened to be a white, drug-seeking stock broker visiting Alex after dark.
Normally she’d be anxious, but her Tuesday morning has been better than good. After the 8 A.M. call with the analysts, she spent the rest of the morning dealing with a money manager in Berlin representing an American client who was taking a number of short positions, each chopped into almost a thousand micro-transactions, all on American new media stocks. She’s never heard of some of the stocks, but then again just a couple of years ago she’d never heard of YouTube or Facebook or foursquare. Regardless, once she gets back to the office, once she checks on the progress of the ongoing transactions, she plans on looking into the numbers of the companies in play, the philosophy behind the mystery client’s picks, if not the mystery client himself. Despite the fact that the client requested that she not tell anyone about the moves, she feels obligated to look into them. She’s worked too hard to get here to have it all blow up over one client, no matter how wealthy he appears to be.
Plus, for Luhabe, every number tells a story, every transaction changes a life, and every moment is a new opportunity to learn.
She notices the white van trailing her when she’s within ten blocks of her house. Six blocks later, she follows her instincts and takes an abrupt left without using her signal. A peek in the mirror reveals the van breaking hard and making the same sharp left. Luhabe’s been followed before and robbed before, more times than she cares to remember. But never in the daylight, at lunchtime. Still, she knows that something is dangerous and odd about this van—perhaps they targeted her as a money mark coming out of Sandton?—so she responds accordingly.
At the next stop sign she taps the brakes, then races forward through another stop sign before swerving to the left. She’s already decided that she won’t go home for lunch this afternoon. In part because she was running late to begin with, but mostly because she’d never lead whomever this is anywhere near her home. She’ll call and let her mother know not to expect her as soon as she’s able to break away from the van, when she’s back on safer streets.
Before her wedding, when she first started working in Sandton, her husband-to-be bought her a gun. She doesn’t know what kind. Some kind of pistol. He wanted her to be able to protect herself. She responded with a tantrum, said that she would not carry a gun to work, and would not abide a gun in her house. He promised he’d take it back to the person from whom he’d bought it. But one day after his death, she found it in a bag with his soccer gear in their closet. Where it wasn’t going to do her very much good at this moment.
She glances in the rearview and sees the van dropping back. Stopping. To be safe, she makes another turn, a right down a street whose sidewalks are covered with bagged and unbagged refuse. Then another turn, a right onto a side road that runs parallel to the N-3 highway. She doesn’t remember being on this street before, but she’s fairly sure that if she hugs the highway it will take her back to Sandton. She comes to a complete stop at the next red light and takes a deep breath. No one will believe this in the office, and no one will think twice about it back in Alex, so why bother mentioning it to any of them?
Mom will be worried, she thinks. And Wendy will be disappointed. She wanted to perform a dance she’s been practicing. Luhabe leans across the passenger seat, reaching for her mobile with one eye trained on the light. Of course she won’t mention the van to them, either. She’ll simply tell them that she got caught up in the machinations of one of the biggest transactions of her career, which is true. And that perhaps as a result they’d soon be able to take a long weekend to visit Cape Town, or the relatives in Swaziland. It’s been too long since she’s taken them on vacation.
She’s still reaching for her phone when she sees the young man in the black woolen mask rounding the corner on the passenger side of the car. She knows instantly, before he locks in on her car, that the shooter is coming for her. As he drops into a firing stance, Luhabe rams her foot down onto the accelerator. Stretched halfway across the front seat, she drives blind, from memory, for her life.
Sawa Luhabe’s Toyota makes its way into the center of the intersection before the shooter locks in on his target and squeezes off a seventy-nine-bullet burst from a Tec-9 pistol on full-auto discharge.
The seemingly driverless car careers through the intersection and manages to swerve to the left onto a side street before crashing to a stop in a pile of bagged sidewalk trash. Smoke hisses from underneath the crumpled hood. Nothing else moves.
The gunman stares across the street at the silenced car for a moment, takes a half step toward it, then changes his mind. He lowers the pistol, turns, and runs back down the street from which he appeared.
Seconds later a young man on a fat-tired bicycle rolls to a stop alongside Luhabe’s car, leans to look inside the front seat, then continues on. He’s just curious, interested in neither the fate of the driver nor the gunman. In Alexandra, one of the worst townships in a country where more than fifty people are murdered every twenty-four hours, the scene is not out of the ordinary.
12
Hong Kong
Sobieski looks at the incoming number on her cell, doesn’t recognize it, and decides to let it ring. She’s standing in her sparsely furnished apartment, staring out its lone window at the bustling stalls of Stanley Market. Five seconds after the phone stops ringing, it starts again. Same number. What the hell.
“Who is this?”
“This is your friend on the barge.” She turns her back to the window and closes her eyes. Cheung.
“How’d you get—”
“How do you think? You think TFI has all the surveillance toys?”
She doesn’t answer. “What?”
“Your information was not exactly proprietary. Not particularly exclusive or at all valuable.”
“I see.”
“In fact, I look rather foolish now, after attempting to pass this off as some kind of inside—”
“We shouldn’t be discussing this. I can come—”
“No,” Cheung says with force. “You will not come anywhere near here until you have something substantial. And if you don’t, by the end of the week we will come to you.”
“I can’t do it. I’ll find a way. I can’t compromise myself like this.”
“Too late,” he answers. “You already have. On tape.”
After Cheung hangs up, Sobieski turns and looks at her leather duffel, packed for Berlin, and at her computer screen, tracking the latest activit
y initiated by Siren in Berlin and going down in Johannesburg.
13
Johannesburg
Sawa Luhabe’s Toyota Celica sits smoking and hissing beneath an overpass for the N-3. The hood is crushed in the front and humped up in the middle from the impact of the refuse pile. The sheet metal of the front and rear passenger-side doors is punctured by dozens of bullet holes. The passenger windows on both sides of the car are gone, reduced to scattered blue shards on the faded seats and floor mats.
Luhabe gets out and takes inventory of her trembling body. Nothing. Then she walks to the passenger side and gasps when she sees the damage. She looks around. Cars zip past on the highway overhead. Garbage is piled against the concrete abutment, plastic bags and newspapers pressed against a chain link fence whisper in the breeze.
You still can die, she thinks. They still can kill you. She gets back in the car, which she was afraid to turn off because who knows how much longer it will last, and shifts into reverse.
Common sense tells her to drive directly to the office in Sandton, but her street instincts tell her otherwise.
She surges backward, then jerks the gearshift into drive and heads toward the streets of Alex. Back toward her house. That was not a robbery, she assures herself. That was a hit. And unless it was mistaken identity, it had to do with work. The call this morning. The client. The odd and specific set of rules. You should have known, she tells herself. Anything that easy can’t be good. Anything that good can’t be true.
This you, of all people, should know.
En route, she calls her office. “Hello, Lucy, it’s Sawa. Have I had any calls?”
Her admin, a cheery young woman from Soweto, says, “Oh, yes, Miss Luhabe. One from your mother, who wants to know if she should still expect you. One from, believe it or not, a man in the United States. One from a man in Hong Kong and at least three from Berlin. Twice in the last five minutes.”
“What did he want?”