Drummer In the Dark

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Details,” the newcomer pressed. “Good data is in the details.”

  “About a month ago, Hayek mentioned a concern about a hunter going after in-house data. He said there could be a tie-in to accusations leveled by one Graham Hutchings, former U.S. Congressman and now active vegetable. I set up a hunter-sniffer in the form of a closed-access website. When we were struck, I automatically inserted a virus that grants me ongoing access in the worst way.”

  “Your design?”

  “From the basement to the tower A/C. It zip-compresses all new files and ships them over every time she goes on-line.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “A definite keeper.” Colin tapped in the command, drew up the photo file he had downloaded early, and selected one of the lady on a sailboard. “Jackie Havilland. Orlando native. Twenties, single, great lines.”

  “So what do you call the virus?”

  “The cookie monster. On account of it’s a voracious feeder.”

  “Totally quantum. Plaudits, dude.” A fractional pause, then, “So what was in your latest download?”

  “Sorry,” Colin was firm here, meeting Burke’s glare head-on. “You want more, I need a direct okay from Mr. Hayek himself.”

  Again there was communication between the pair and on a frequency barred to Colin. Then the newcomer said, “This guy redefines clean.”

  Burke checked his watch. “I have to travel to Miami with Pavel.” He glowered at Colin. “Let me see if I can put this in a code you comprehend. The balcony is off limits. You go upstairs again, you leave here in little pieces. Are we clear on this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Burke left without another word. The deadhead rose to follow. At the cubicle’s entrance he turned, did a final scan, sniffed his disdain. “All these toys, you don’t have idea one which prize is worth pursuing.”

  Once certain they were gone, Colin slumped back into his seat and stared at the ceiling. Too many questions, too many dangers. A conflict vector had been established. A menacing course of off-line events.

  22

  Tuesday

  WYNN STOOD by the Hassler’s rooftop bar and searched the evening sky, not for a sign so much as a way out. He had slept hard and woken unrefreshed. The air remained compressed by all that loomed up ahead. His chest fought for breath and room to maneuver. He was certain that Sybel had brought him here for a purpose. And equally certain that whatever the purpose might be, he was going to hate it.

  The elevator doors opened, and Jackie stepped out. The failing light seemed to gather about her blond hair, encasing her in a brilliance not even the worst of his shadows could invade. “You look great.”

  “Thank you.” But her gaze was already captured by the world beyond the balcony. The ma"tre d’ greeted her with ill-disguised admiration. The waiters graced her with the glazed look of smitten Romeos. She seemed utterly unaware of the commotion she caused. Jackie passed through tables and lingering gazes without taking her eyes from the view. “This is incredible.”

  “Yes.” Hard as it was, Wynn could not help but accept a morsel from the day. Sunset painted the scene with strokes so gentle no imperfection could be found. But for Wynn, to look meant to see only his own tightly morose state, as though he viewed the golden world from a cage he had learned not to acknowledge. “Very nice.”

  Jackie took joy from everything—the menu, the meal, the very air. He observed her openly, knowing she was here yet elsewhere, too absorbed with the moment to be bothered by his gaze. Her skin seemed flawless, at least from the distance of casual acquaintance. Upon closer inspection, he could see a faint mist of freckles across the high-boned cheeks and ultrastraight nose. Tiny lines ran from her eyes, faintest indicators of her many secrets. Hers was a good face, with a gaze that saw all and expected nothing. Strength and goodness in a gentle form. Big wide-open green eyes, ready to accept whatever life gave with little more than a blink.

  Jackie refused dessert, accepted coffee, silently toasted the lingering twilight, and focused upon him. “Can we talk?”

  “If you like.”

  “Esther Hutchings is convinced you’re working for the enemy.”

  “I don’t know enough,” Wynn replied, “to even know who that is.”

  She set down her cup, toyed with her spoon. Waited.

  He recognized it as the only chance he might ever have to convince her. “Do you want the sugar-coated version, or the truth?”

  “Hard and fast.”

  “Dianne, my wife, died from aggressive rheumatoid arthritis. It choked her to death. A terrible way to go. We’d been separated six weeks. She was preparing to file for divorce. Esther was her best friend. Dianne used to meet Esther once or twice a month, pour out all the details of our life together and describe just what a louse I was.”

  “Were you?”

  “Oh yeah.” He stopped while a waiter placed a candle on their table. Somewhere in the distance a church bell began to chime. The sound rose pure and courtly, shimmering in time to the candle’s flame. “My business had become a parasitic animal, a worm I swallowed one day at a time. It grew in my mind and my heart and it poisoned them both. I started thinking the most absurd things were true. Like how everybody was out to get me, and the only way forward was to get them first. Or how love was just another word for being weak. Lies became my only reality.”

  “But you got rich.”

  He stared out to where the world below was now enveloped by flickering lights, earthly reflections of the stars overhead. “That’s right. I did.”

  “So what happens now? I mean, here in Rome.”

  “You’ll have to ask Sybel. All I can say for certain is she’s brought me here for a reason.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “No idea.” Whatever conjecture he might have would only mock his lack of choices, the absence of personal mobility. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “How did Esther link up with you?”

  “My brother worked for the Hayek Group.”

  “The finance group that moved from New York down to Orlando, right? I remember reading about that.”

  The conversation’s turn hardened her gaze and tone both. “The proper term is hedge fund.”

  “Sounds like you know about them.”

  “I was a graduate student at UF in international finance. My area of study was the currency markets. Usually referred to as foreign exchange, forex for short.”

  “Your brother does currency work for Hayek?”

  “He did.” There was something more to Jackie’s wary tension than Esther Hutchings and any warning she might have passed on. Something so intensely personal it robbed the night of magic and flavor. Jackie sat across from him, awaiting his next question as she would a heavy blow.

  Yet Wynn had no intention of inflicting further pain on anyone, if that were possible. “Can you tell me anything about Hayek?”

  Her anxiety eased only a notch, as though disbelieving she would get off so easily. “Very secretive. A real powerhouse in the derivatives and forex trading worlds. The only time he’s ever been quoted was in a Journal article on the rise of U.S. hedge funds. He said, and I quote, ’Every trader is probing, looking for the opponent’s weak point. If you want to understand currency trading, study war. They are the same thing, only the blood on the trading floor remains unseen.’ That’s Hayek.”

  Wynn pushed his cup to one side. Leaned across the table. “I want you to do something for me. Pretend I’m telling you the truth. That I don’t want ever to be your enemy. That I don’t know a thing. And that I really do want to learn.” He stopped then, giving her a chance to back off, move away, brush off the appeal. Instead she simply gave him that wide-open look. Measuring. Cautious. Full-on alert. “Okay. Who is Hayek and how does he tie into all this?”

  “You’ll have to ask Esther.”

  “You know precisely how far that would get me.”

  Further guarded i
nspection, then, “All I have to go on are my own conjectures.”

  He moved back out of her space. “That’s fine.”

  “There is a growing sentiment among many economists and pundits that our banking system is on the verge of a very real crisis. Hedge funds like Hayek are what you might call the worst of the worst. A malignant vein pumping poison though the system.”

  She seemed to recognize his interest as genuine, for she revealed a hint of new energy, or perhaps one long submerged. “Hedge funds deal in any number of markets, but they specialize in foreign exchange and related derivatives. The problem with forex derivatives is precisely what appeals to these funds. No super-regulator. There is no body with the power to control the movement of funds. And so forex funds can get away with things that would have them screaming bloody murder in the world’s stock exchanges or standard banking markets. Like collusion, where insiders profit from the trading of supposedly secret information. Or operating on tiny margins, thus opening themselves and their investors to huge risks. They regularly assume market positions that anybody in their right mind would consider truly insane. In short, they whip exchange rates around just as much as they can.”

  Wynn was not the least disturbed by just how little he understood. If it was important, he could ask more later. For the moment, it was enough to watch her reveal this utterly new side of herself. “So why isn’t a watchdog agency established?”

  “Two reasons. First, because globalization means an increasingly porous economy. We live and breathe from exports and imports. People worry that any forex restriction would choke off the flow of goods.”

  “Would it?”

  “No.” She came back definite and hard. “This is all smoke and mirrors manufactured by lobbyists for the banking industry. The fact is, curbs on wild forex fluctuations would be good for business. But that brings up the other problem, which is, any regulating body would have to be international to be effective.”

  “I think I see.”

  “Sure you do. Any time people start talking about reining in the market’s excesses, the banks and their hired guns wave the red flag of international government. They start talking about American sovereignty, and financial meddling, and all the other buzz words that send Joe Q. Public into high-altitude orbit.” She stared unseeing at the night. “There used to be three carefully designated markets for currency exchange—cash, forwards, and futures. But those precisely drawn lines have been erased by the derivatives market. If currency futures have seen explosive growth, derivatives have gone off like a nuclear detonator. It’s an utterly unregulated market, and that is exactly how the banks want it to stay. They pay the K Street lobbyists huge bucks just to make sure no little surprise regulation is slipped into some bill. Regulation would slow things down and restrict new financial maneuvers. So for the moment at least, the best way to describe derivatives is, Anything goes.”

  But Wynn’s mind was snagged by the term, “K Street.”

  “That’s where the most powerful lobbyists dwell. Using that address is like planting a flag.” Her pace continued to accelerate, her mind clicking into a long-disused gear. The words became clipped and precise and trimmed to perfection. “Derivatives traders have poured unbelievable amounts into the pockets of Washington lobbyists, paying them to keep things free and easy. These funds make more money on trades than on holding. They often buy only because they think they can swiftly resell, tacking on their percentage as they do so. This tactic is called flipping, or washing. On a hectic day of derivatives trading, where the backroom lags three or four hours behind the traders, the floor may close without anyone knowing the fund’s actual position. They could be holding ten billion dollars in high risk D-mark futures they thought they had balanced against something else, only to discover that another trader sold their safety net ninety minutes earlier. They simply mark it down as what will be the next day’s first sale. To them it’s only paper. The fact that the existence of a medium-size bank, one that’s been around for a hundred years, might be destroyed because of this super-fast washing, means nothing. To them it’s only paper.”

  “Sorry, I’m playing catch-up here. Why do the traders care about Washington politics?”

  “They care because the lack of regulation is how they make their money. Today’s currency market is based on a ludicrous system of easy credit. Imagine the oldest, most stable company in the world going into a bank and saying, hey, I want to borrow ten billion dollars with nothing down. No collateral, no margin, just my good name. They’d escort him straight to the loony bin. Yet the funds do this in currency derivatives every day of the week. It’s standard practice.

  “The answer is to regulate the currency market just like all the others. This was the basis of my master’s thesis. All other markets require a margin up front and a clearing of all debts before the end of that business day. Simple. That way, the winners pay the losers every single night. They immediately know the status of everyone’s business. If someone is in trouble, at least the risk is restricted to one bad apple and not a total collapse of the banking system.”

  “But that’s not the case?”

  She looked at him, but he was not sure she actually recognized who he was. “Ever hear of Nick Leeson?”

  “No.”

  “He brought down one of the oldest banks in the world, Barings. Single-handedly. He traded over his limits on the Singapore and Tokyo exchanges. How? Because no system is in place to detect any fund’s end-of-day position.”

  He noted with admiration, “Your voice has changed.”

  She halted in the process of reaching for her glass. “What?”

  “The way you talk. It’s changed. You’re all charged up.”

  She left her glass where it was. “I think we’re done here.”

  “I’m sorry I said anything.”

  But she was already rising to her feet. “We should be going.”

  “Jackie—”

  “We need to see about your sister, isn’t that what you said? Ask for the bill.”

  JACKIE WAS GRATEFUL for the driver’s cheerful chatter. She needed time to sort through the confusion. The day had obviously been too potent, a draft more stimulating than her system could handle. That was the only excuse for the closeness she had felt over dinner. And, if truth be known, still felt now.

  Even the streetlights seemed different here in Rome, turning old stone into theater backdrops, making artwork from shadows. As they crossed a bridge strung across mystic dusk, the hotel driver talked of how the Trastevere area had formerly housed Rome’s working poor. Now it was a place of nightlife and romance, he said, then leered until Wynn reminded him they were going to Sant’Egidio. But it was Wynn’s demeanor more than his words that finally silenced the young man.

  They left the car and followed a cobblestone alley to a night-washed piazza. Anywhere but Rome, the church she faced would have been preserved, vacuum packed, and turned into a museum. Here it merely anchored another square, this one without the attractions of a working fountain or Bellini statue. The church’s exterior was unadorned brick, a manifestation of poorer past centuries. The interior was a mosaic of battered grandeur. In this visual banquet of a city, it offered nothing extraordinary. Tourists did not come. Which was a good thing, Jackie decided. There would be no room for them.

  Jackie found the evening service remarkably moving, despite its simplicity. The church was meant to hold perhaps seven hundred people, but tonight contained well over a thousand. Black, Asian, Hispanic, Roman, Scandinavian blonds and the stylish backpackers of America—they all were present here. The Bible reading and the brief sermon were done in three languages. The prayers were sung chants, and translated on leaflets scattered among the benches. There was no priest in attendance. People from the assembly came up to lead various segments of the service, then resumed their seats. All in an orderly yet casual fashion.

  She knew Wynn was bitterly unhappy at being here. She also knew she had the capacity to help him. It was
hard, so very hard. But the night was too beautiful to do otherwise. She turned and waited for him to glance her way, then she smiled. Not with her mouth. With her heart. Showed him a glimpse of the joy she had found in this day. Though it left her naked and far too frightened for this public place, though she had to swiftly turn away, though her mind shrilled a lifetime of warning. Still she was glad she had done it. And gladder still when she sensed him relax a trifle. The night held that much power.

  After the service, Wynn stood by a side alcove and seemed uncertain what to do, until a smiling young woman no taller than a child approached. He showed no pleasure at her appearance. “Father Libretto isn’t here?”

  “He came and he left again. He sends you greetings.” She smiled at Jackie. “Hello, I am Anna.”

  “Jackie.”

  “Your first time at Sant’Egidio?”

  “Very first.”

  “You are most welcome.” Back to Wynn. “He has left you a message. Perhaps you wish to come with me?”

  “I’ll take it here.”

  “The message, it is confidential.”

  “Here is fine.”

  “Bene.” She tucked her hands into her shapeless sweater. “Your sister has already left.”

  “She’s gone back home?”

  Anna smiled. “In a sense. Yes.”

  The air whooshed out of him, as though the candles and the incense and this small quiet woman had combined to deliver a vicious blow. “You can’t be serious.”

  “The priest says, your sister gives to you the excuse to travel. Now you have two choices. Follow her, or return to safety and blindness.” She withdrew one hand long enough to pass over a slip of paper. “But to go forward means great risk. You understand?”

  23

  Tuesday

  THEY LEFT THE CHURCH, crossed the piazza, and caught a taxi back to the hotel. The streetlights painted Wynn’s face into lines as bleak and hard as night-cut stone. Jackie leaned against the taxi door and studied what even in despondency was a very handsome man. Darkly chiseled features, eyes like the melancholy clouds of pending gales. A man who would age well. But she had long since learned that good looks were not such great shakes. “Your sister’s not in Rome any more?”