The Last Trade

by James Conway

  On the way up he reads the short note from Miranda. “She says she’s been trying to reach me. And that they took Salvado’s wife away this afternoon.”

  They don’t bother to knock. He inserts the key and swings open the door. He goes to the left, toward the bed and the sitting area, and Sobieski goes to the right, toward the bathroom. A moment later Sobieski joins him in the bedroom.

  “I have no idea,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Maybe she’ll come back.”

  “It’s what, three o’clock?” He lies back and closes his eyes. Miranda’s envelope is still in his left hand. He tries to think of where she might be but can only speculate on what happened to her.

  Sobieski doesn’t sit. She takes Havens’s computer out of his bag and plugs it into an outlet next to the desk. Then she takes Heinrich Shultz’s flash drive out of her pocket and plugs it into a USB port on the side of the laptop.

  While she waits for the computer to load, Havens stares at Miranda’s handwriting on the note and the outside of the envelope. He reaches inside and pulls out the pages. Fourteen in all. He stares at the first page for several seconds before moving on to the next and the next, allowing the breadth of information to register, and the hard data to inform the broader, increasingly troubling narrative.

  “Come here,” Sobieski says. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  His silence draws Sobieski away from the computer.

  “What?”

  He hands her the pages and says, “We have to stop this bastard.”

  “You think he has your . . . wife?”

  “One of his people has her. She knew someone was after her. That’s why she left this at the desk.”

  The information revealed in the first file of Heinrich Shultz’s drive is straightforward. It lists the details of the first four trades: Hong Kong, Dubai, Johannesburg, and Rio. “Dublin and Toronto happened after he was killed,” Sobieski explains. They go over the list of the specific securities bundled within each trade, the amounts, and the instructions for how the trades were to be executed. In smaller, sub-ten-thousand-dollar “Smurfed” batches, to avoid detection by American authorities. Shultz’s alias for the trades he executed was Homer.

  “As in Simpson?” Havens asks.

  “No. As in The Odyssey.”

  “Right.”

  “Check this out . . .” She opens another file, points to a block of text, and reads:

  10/17

  “don’t stay too long away from home, leaving

  your treasure there, and brazen suitors near;

  they’ll squander all you have or take it from you . . .”

  “The Odyssey?”

  “Very good. I Googled it. There are two more, all from the same book, and different from yours. I think these were activation cues for people in the trade cities to execute the traders because somehow their plan was compromised. For instance, I know that Lau in Hong Kong put down matching personal shorts out of his private account, and Al Mar placed calls to his broker brother-in-law, which must have pissed off the leaders of this enough to wipe out every loose end.”

  “Except Luhabe.”

  “This is true.”

  Havens leans in and reads:

  10/18

  “I stormed that place and killed the men who fought.

  Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,

  To make division, equal shares to all.”

  10/19

  “Stand clear, put up your sword;

  let me but taste of blood. I shall speak true.”

  To Sobieski, he says, “Siren/Ithaka Securities. Mr. Homer.”

  The guy who killed Patrick Lau in Hong Kong had a Siren Securities logo on his briefcase. An ancient illustration of a woman.

  Havens stands straight and reaches into his pocket. He pulls out the printout of Weiss’s whiteboard and hands it to Sobieski without looking at it. “This is the board I saw in Weiss’s apartment. He sent me the photo just before he was killed. Check out the unattached number sequences at the bottom of each page. I bet they match up to those passages. Chapter and page number.”

  “Book, more likely,” Sobieski corrects. “Book and line numbers.”

  “Right—”

  “Already doing it,” she interrupts, typing. Two clicks later they have their first answer: “Yup: Book three, lines 340 to 346. Exact match. Then: Tuesday, 10/18. Book 6, lines 88 to 90.”

  “So they were used to activate each trade. When the code for each passage appears, somewhere, execute the trade?”

  Sobieski nods. “Execute the trade, then the trader. Makes sense.”

  “What about the others?”

  She searches online and then reads: “Rio: ‘A pity you have more looks than heart. You’d grudge a pinch of salt from your own larder to your own handy man. You sit here fat on others’ meat, and cannot bring yourself to rummage out a crust of bread for me.’”

  Then, “Dublin. Eighteen, 55 to 57: ‘So the great soldier took his bow and bent it for the bowstring effortlessly. He drilled the axeheads clean, sprang, and decanted arrows on the door sill, glared, and drew again. This time he killed Antinous.’”

  Then, “Toronto. Seventeen, 594 to 599: ‘A guest remembers all of his days that host who makes provisions for him kindly.’”

  They look at each other. “I get it. So there was a trade execution quote or clue that was somehow posted for the financial guy, then an assassination cue for the killer in each city. Somebody likes The Odyssey. But other than revolving around violent imagery, the quotes seem almost random. What about the one for tomorrow on your sheet? There’s only one number, twenty-two. No line numbers.”

  Sobieski scrolls through an online copy of The Odyssey. “The title of Book twenty-two,” she begins, “is ‘Death in the Great Hall.’”

  Havens rubs his eyes and looks at Miranda’s note again. If she ran, where else would she have gone? If someone has her, who? And where?

  “Shit is happening overseas,” Sobieski says. She’s standing, leaning over the laptop.

  “What shit?”

  “Copycat plays. People copying the other trades even more than before. Either they know what’s coming or they sense it and are going along for the ride.”

  “Where?”

  “Eastern Europe. Moscow. Georgia. Ukraine. Mumbai. Paris . . .” Then she pauses. “And . . . Hong Kong. Actually, most of it’s starting there.” Nello and Cheung have wasted no time sharing her inside information, she thinks.

  While Sobieski talks, Havens runs his fingers along the rest of the envelope.

  “All stocks?”

  “Yup, even NYCRE. Short money is moving on all of them. Money and chatter.”

  Havens thinks of Weiss. Thinks of 9/11 and the models he constructed the other night. How short money did indeed begin to move on airline, insurance, banking, and more than two dozen other securities in the days leading up to the attack. “Explain chatter.”

  “The volume and velocity that certain words and phrases appear in phone, cellular, and digital networks around the world. Sort of like the number one Twitter trending topics of the apocalypse.”

  “Trending the apocalypse,” Havens says. “If they’re onto it, and we’re onto it, is it safe to assume some good guys are as well?”

  Sobieski’s mouth forms a grim frown. “Knowing something is up and knowing what it is are two different things, right?”

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21

  1

  New York City, 6:13 A.M.

  As it turns out, the annals of financial history dislike more than just Mondays.

  As it turns out, fate was never particularly kind to the financial markets on Fridays, either. And, if one wants to get picky, Tuesdays, Wednes
days, and Thursdays haven’t been much different from the others.

  Havens knows this, because he checked. At one point, four years ago, he programmed a model that monitored the performance of every day in the history of the New York Stock Exchange and found that one was as likely to lose (or gain) everything on a Tuesday in April as a Monday in October. The only real trend, he had to admit, was that the biggest, most infamous crashes happened on autumn Mondays and Fridays. Watching Sobieski pore over the Salvado documents, Havens can’t help but wonder if the Hindenburg Omen was correct, and if today was destined to be one of those days.

  He tries Miranda’s phone again, but there’s still no answer. He checks his messages and e-mails, but nothing, only Rourke, checking in, wishing him well, offering his help. They continue to look for clues online, but they keep returning to the documents that Miranda left him. “This is nuts,” Havens says. “This is a guy who spent a million dollars on ads against building the mosque at Ground Zero.”

  Sobieski finishes, “and here we have a photo of him meeting with members of Tablighi Jamaat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s my job. That’s Taibur Rahman. Me knowing what terrorists look like is like you knowing who’s the chairman of the Fed. Or the shortstop for the Yankees. If Salvado’s not mujahideen, then he’s certainly comfortable hanging out with them and, presumably, financing them.”

  “So what’s his motive? He’s a born-again radical Islamist?”

  “In a way, yes,” Sobieski says, handing him a copy of the news account of the events leading up to the suicide of Rick Salvado’s father. “Whether he’s radical Islam or not, his father’s failures gave him enough of a connection to pursue when he realized that amassing unthinkable wealth and getting disgustingly rich weren’t revenge enough.”

  Havens paces to the window and looks at the predawn street below. “I’m leaning toward tortured and insane versus ideological extremist, because this guy was the furthest from devout Muslim/Catholic/Jew I’d ever seen. Prostitutes. Drugs. Alcohol. Apparently the image of America’s most patriotic investor was cultivated as a diversion.”

  Sobieski shrugs. No male behavior will ever surprise her again.

  “Wait.” Havens bends close to the computer. “What if he wasn’t financing them, but they were the ones who have been financing him? What if someone in Chechnya was his guardian angel in 2002? Why not them, especially if they were willing to wait to call in their favor?”

  “Go on . . .”

  “What if, in 2001, when the market crashed and Salvado was disgraced and his shut-down Allegheny Fund was caught up in a fund mismanagement scandal, what if these people targeted him, approached him, and bailed him out? What if they gave him the money to start over again with the understanding that he would ultimately have to enact their financial will? I’ve always wondered how he got the money to come back after the NASDAQ bubble popped, but I never figured it out. He’s claimed it was the loyalty of his investors that gave him new life, but I never saw anything to support that.”

  Sobieski pulls out her phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling my boss. He has to know.”

  Michaud answers with a threat. “I’m talking to a dead person.”

  “Fine. I’m . . . Just hear me out.”

  “You know how much trouble I’m in? Enough that I may be fired, too.”

  “Five minutes. All I ask. Something big is going to go down.”

  “Four minutes, fifty-two seconds . . .”

  “And my friend’s wife, Miranda Havens, may have been kidnapped.”

  While Sobieski tells Michaud about Rick Salvado’s possible terrorist connection, and his curious counter-connection to the deadly trades, Havens paces the floor and glances at the door every time a floorboard creaks in the hall outside. He turns on the TV with the sound off. CNBC.

  It’s been a horrific night overseas. Hong Kong. Tokyo. Europe’s tanking. Bad. The futures are down. Why? He’s tempted to turn up the volume, but he knows it won’t matter. They don’t know, either. Back on the computer, he returns to the models he constructed last night and slugs in the latest factor, the NYCRE trade out of Toronto. Every number registers. He can and does track minute shifts in the markets, fractional shifts in obscure securities. He builds models in his head in real time, and already he can see it, the coming crash, the wave heading west, before the programs and the press and the rest of the world. But he can’t construct a model that will bring him to Miranda.

  He hears Sobieski telling Michaud, “He didn’t kill his coworker. . . . He’s not a bitter former employee. . . .” It takes him a second to realize that she’s talking about him. When she looks up, he smiles and waves at her. “Why do I know?” she continues. “Because he’s right here and, well, I’m alive.”

  Havens grabs a pen, and on the back of one of the photocopies he starts to scribble the names of the trades again. If there are outliers, he decides, it’s the insurance company CGI, and NYCRE, the New York landmark real estate firm. The other four, while not in the exact same industry, are in industries that often play together. New and old media, advertising and technology. He has a thought, but has to wait for Sobieski to get off the phone.

  “I know I don’t know what ‘event’ this is leading to,” she rants, banging her fist close to the open laptop. “And I know he’s the financial world’s flavor of the month. . . . Would you rather I wait until after the fact? Do you need me to scan and fax this stuff to you? Do you think I’m inventing this? That I blew off a flight to Hong Kong because I wanted to act out a giant conspiracy? What else do you need? Well, that’s not gonna happen. . . .”

  She stares at the phone and then lays it down. Her five minutes with Michaud have apparently come to an end.

  “So, what else do we need?” he asks.

  “We need the ‘it.’ He said he’d look more closely at Salvado, but he’s not going to have anyone approach him unless we give him the ‘it.’ He needs the it that makes sense of the who, what, and why. What does it all lead up to? He’s been shamed. I’ve betrayed him and lied to him. I’ve been fired. You’re wanted for murder, and Rick Salvado was just on the cover of Businessweek waving a little American flag in front of the fucking bull on Wall Street. So we have to be convincing beyond a doubt.”

  “Okay.” Havens wants to tell her about his insurance and real estate hunch, but she’s not through talking.

  “Weiss’s note, do you have it?”

  He points to the desk. “Gave it to you.”

  “This lists a series of financial glyphs pointing to six securities, six trades, right?” Sobieski says, tapping a finger along the boxes for days of this week.

  “Correct.”

  “But his text, the note Weiss sent you the night he was killed, said seven, right?”

  Havens nods, quotes it: “This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.”

  With her right forefinger she draws a circle around the box for today’s date, Friday, empty except for the two red exclamation points. “Any thoughts on what goes here? What’s the seventh?”

  2

  New York City, 8:15 A.M.

  It commences in a brokerage house in Sydney, with a fifty-million-dollar U.S. short position laid against Transmediant! placed by a firm in Berlin called Iliad on behalf of a Philadelphia-based client account.

  Within minutes, dozens of other substantial but smaller shorts are placed on Transmediant!, from Tokyo to Mumbai, followed by many more even smaller positions heading east to west with the sun as markets open and others begin to close across the planet.

  The Transmediant! plays are shadowed, almost without fail, by tens of thousands of other shorts on the other six securities that were alluded to on Danny Weiss’s board. Most of the ancillary activity is originating in Hong Kong. And then, without a
ny tangible link or reason, besides the fact that investors are smelling the scent of blood in the waters of a particular industry, sector, or an entire market, there commences frenzied shorting and across-the-board selling, starting in Asia, then Europe.

  The Nikkei loses 5 percent in less than two hours of midday trading, London more than six before curbs kick in. Some exchanges and securities attribute their sell off to sovereign debt concerns or the bad set of numbers—employment, housing starts, confidence—du jour. But most of the panic, at first, never enters the human psyche. It’s the by-product of an unprecedented volume of automated trading spreading virally across multiple market centers, across tens of thousands of computers capable of dumping in milliseconds what once took days.

  Only when the cumulative effect begins to register with human beings, as the markets prep to open on the East Coast of the United States, does anxiety and fear begin to stir. Once awoken, that anxiety and fear spreads across the Atlantic like a tsunami. Like a plague. Like the fallout of a bomb.

  It’s no surprise that by the time Rick Salvado emerges from his limo in front of the New York Stock Exchange at 8:45 A.M., primed to ring the opening bell at 9:30 with Benjamin Krupp, the CEO of Transmediant!, and a phalanx of other executives and financial leaders attending the opening of the DAVOS WEST event uptown, his smiles are met with downward glances and panic-stricken frowns.

  One of Krupp’s PR guys waves Salvado over to their group and explains the situation. Less than an hour before the market is to open, exchange officials and others at the Fed are discussing whether to implement trading curbs or circuit breakers to slow the velocity of a potential economic catastrophe. They’re considering a one-hour trading halt in the cash market and a corresponding trading halt in the derivative markets, all of which are based on substantial movements in broad market indicators.

  What everyone is trying to figure out, the man explains, is just what has triggered the seemingly random substantial movements. There’s been no especially dismal set of jobs or production numbers released in the past twenty-four hours; no major corporation posted a significantly lower than expected earnings report; and despite what everyone is surmising, the major economies of most of the nations of the free world are, for the moment, relatively stable.