by Powell, Mark
McCabe began to imagine the world’s entire salesmen population, guilty as charged with causing the loss of an old lady’s savings, magically morphed into white seal pups and forced to lie on the freezing ice fl oes of the North Pole, waiting for the angry mob, representing the public at large, to come and club them to death. And the big sad eyes of those salesmen could do little to abate the mob’s anger.
As he swivelled around in his chair, he could see out of the large windows that ran down the entire length of the Dealing Room: the streets below were fi lled with such people, not knowing how much they had lost. People that would, given half the chance, take up position on the ice fl oe with their clubs in hand.
In the past 24 hours, one of Wall Street’s oldest banks had collapsed.
Requests for funding from the bank’s sleepless, yet overpaid board members to fl ush their accounts had borne no fruit and the bank was left to the mercy of the asset-stripping vultures. In reality, the greedy board members were probably more worried about their bonus pool than the hundreds of staff beneath them who were now about to get their walking papers.
McCabe had received 15 calls himself that morning from the new jobless. But these were real people with mortgages, kids and debts, not the CEOs who, in McCabe’s opinion, should go into their garden quantum breach 290709.indd 14
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sheds, sit down in their rattan garden chairs, consider the families they had now impacted—the jobless fathers unable to feed their kids, the old ladies who had now lost their entire life savings—and dutifully blow their egotistic and supposedly well-educated brains out.
McCabe disliked with a passion the pompous ex-Ivy League consulting fi rm partners who now formed the upper management layers of many banks. He thought they were bloodsucking leeches constantly looking for a new host to feed upon, leeches that dropped off when full of blood on a body which had been bled to death. In fact, he had already seen a few of these walk in his front door, having been promised guaranteed bonuses and fat salaries, as if they knew any better than he did.
McCabe brought his fi st down hard on his desk. ‘Damn it! What’s happening to the world?’ As he turned back to his computer, he could see that the euro and the US dollar were also falling like stones, red arrows blinking at him as if it were not obvious what was going on.
And all around him, the panicked cries continued as he half-heartedly listened.
‘Oh Christ, I hear Bear Sterns is about to collapse!’ cried one trader, now standing in the middle of the fl oor like a dumbstruck ape. On hearing this, McCabe’s face drew taut. He wondered if his own bank would even last the day. It was like each bank was a domino lined up for a cheap trick: one fl ick and they all come crashing down. To make it worse, the fi nger that triggered the fall belonged to a kid who had no idea what he had just set in motion.
At 45, McCabe was already too old for this game. He could feel the burning acid in his stomach, and for the fi rst time in years, he felt helpless and very vulnerable. He could feel his hands clenching and his foot tapping the fl oor, a nervous reaction to the fact he knew he had just lost US$20-million off his own book and that was a position that would be hard to close out. It would take him at least a week or two to bring it back to a level position for the bank—if indeed he ever could.
It was entirely out of his control given the market conditions; it might quantum breach 290709.indd 15
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even cost him his job and that of his entire team. How could he live with that?
As the world around him seemed to rush past in a stream of moving bodies, he suddenly thought of his brother Steven, who was at Barings Securities in 1995 when a rogue trader brought it crashing to its knees.
He recalled his brother’s account of an incident that still brought a smile to his face.
Steven was standing in the plush marble foyer of the Cadogan Gardens Hotel in Chelsea, London. ‘Steven McCabe. You have a reservation for me,’ he had informed the desk manager, his tone direct, given he had just stepped off a long fl ight from New York. He then presented his corporate Amex card.
The rather tall manager had promptly spun a copy of The Sunday Times around on the counter with his bony fi ngers and smirked, ‘Will that be cash, sir?’
Not knowing anything about the collapse, his brother was taken aback and literally felt sick to his stomach when he glanced down at the newspaper. The headline jumped out at him and grabbed him around the throat: ‘Barings Collapsed—Rogue Trader.’ To this day, he still tells the story at dinner parties.
McCabe was not like his brother though; Steven was a banker through and through, the benefi ciary of a public school education.
After graduating from Durham University with honours, Steven had entered one of the City of London’s fi nest banks as a fresh graduate and had never looked back. His was a world of Saville Row suits and black, handmade Church’s shoes.
Mark was the family black sheep, always in trouble, and he had never liked to study. His parents, both proud people—his father was a wealthy landowner from the south of England, his mother a doctor who ran a surgery in the local village—favoured Steven; they were proud of his academic prowess. Mark was more the hooligan who mixed with the wrong crowd.
One time, his father had turned away one of Mark’s friends, Paul quantum breach 290709.indd 16
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Brown, when he had arrived at the house unannounced. His father had claimed that Paul, when last at their home, had stolen a £5 note out of his wallet. Paul, a small, spotty boy with ginger hair, was from the local council estate, scum as far as his father was concerned.
Steven’s friends, the sons of bankers and lawyers, were always warmly welcomed at the vast farmhouse. His mother often made them tea and cakes when she was not working in her surgery. They were not the social outcasts whom Mark mixed with.
But one thing Mark did learn that his brother did not: it doesn’t matter how much money one has. Mark was always welcome in the homes of his less affl uent friends and they shared everything. Aside from this, he also learnt how to fi ght; his fi sts became his particular source of pride.
Mark McCabe was a complex, strong-willed, highly intelligent and very proud man. His charismatic charm could win over the most hardened of women, yet he had a distinct raw edge. Physically, he presented a powerful fi gure, his body toned and muscular. Standing six feet tall, he had piercing jade-green eyes and dark, rugged looks. His dark brown hair always looked like he had just climbed out of bed. To anyone that did not know him, he didn’t look his 45 years; more like 35
and extremely fi t. The savage scars that marked his body were the only visible clues to a torrid and secret past, his mind was still sharp and very quick. He dressed simply, always in blue jeans and a cotton shirt; he was not the polished, suited-and-booted banker his traditionalist bosses would have liked, but he made money, and that was all that mattered in the sycophantic banking world.
McCabe was a man who walked with a purpose, solid in his stance as if always ready to react to anything that caught him by surprise.
Some of his friends and workmates knew he had a dark past, aware that he had served in the elite British armed forces. But what he had seen or been involved with, no one could empathise with. To his mates, he was a loyal friend, one of the boys; at times he showed a deeply sensitive side to his character. Only he knew that the corporate image cloaked an quantum breach 290709.indd 17
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iron-hard, restless warrior that had once answered to a higher code, a code of secrecy and covert operations.
As he continued to observe the market meltdown, his nerves tight and on edge, McCabe began to wish again for his past, when life seemed more straightforward. Army days were certainly
more dangerous, he thought, his mind fl ashing back through the dark corners of his mind.
He rubbed the tip of his index fi nger on his left hand with the tip of his thumb, as he so often did when in deep thought. He could feel the numbness and tingling sensation on the tip of his fi nger as he rubbed, the result of a severed tendon in the days when he felt like more of a man and less like a corporate chicken forced to lay golden eggs.
A cold cup of coffee sat on the edge of his desk, just in front of a photograph of his eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth; she was his main reason for living. The coffee had a fi lm of sour milk on the surface; he had not even glanced at it when the pantry lady had placed it there at 7:00 a.m. that morning. McCabe always had time for her; she may have been old and hunched over, but McCabe respected her. Despite her years and having to still work to support her aged husband, now crippled with arthritis, she always smiled and treated McCabe to milk with his coffee. McCabe never complained about the fact her sense of smell had clearly faded, and the milk was so often sour.
As McCabe sat perched on the edge of his seat, the Dealing Room entered a different phase of weirdness. Suddenly, it was deathly quiet.
The market had almost stopped dead. No one, it seemed, wanted to play. No one was dealing. No one was selling. No one, it seemed, was willing to take any further risk. Most of the trades associated with the Wall Street icon’s collapse had by now been closed out and traders were just sitting around wondering what to do. It was as if a bomb had gone off and the only survivors were now emerging from the rubble, devoid of all their senses.
Ying Lee, a young and highly intelligent junior FX Options trader under McCabe’s mentorship, pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. She was a classy 26-year-old Singaporean willowy ‘babe’ with long, quantum breach 290709.indd 18
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raven-black hair and a smile that would melt steel. ‘Hey boss, good morning!’ she said, her smile radiating its warmth.
‘Nothing good about it, Ying. Have you not seen the news?’ McCabe bit back.
Ying sat motionless and stared at him, somewhat taken aback by his dark mood which was very out of character for McCabe. Normally he was a model of control. Ying was deeply worried about what she had come over to tell him. She would just have to risk another blunt response.
It must be this stupid market, making him crazy, she thought.
The day McCabe interviewed Ying she was seated in one of the glass meeting rooms on a sunny Monday morning, dressed in a sharp black suit, her long hair piled up on her head with a delicate pair of what looked like chopsticks crossed to hold it in place, sprouts of hair sticking out. Her long legs were crossed neatly over each other, angled out from under the table. Her high, black patent heels completed her sharp look. Beneath her deadly attractive Asian looks was a brain that ran on overdrive, a highly tuned fi nancial modelling machine that bordered on genius. A complex math calculation was to her nothing more than a few seconds of thought. It was the numbers that could not be reconciled that got her heart racing. When McCabe entered the room that day, he took an instant shine to her. Instinct told him she was real, a loyal and sharp girl who would go far. He hired her before the day was out.
As McCabe reclined in his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands resting behind his head, his nostrils fi lled with the scent of her perfume. He noticed it was ‘Pleasure’, his favourite scent on a woman. It descended around him like a mist and made the world seem calm for a few seconds. She beamed another big smile at him, and crossed her long legs, which sported a brand new pair of Jimmy Choo heels. Ying couldn’t resist spending her money on shoes.
‘We’re running a 20-million long position in euro. You want me to sell out, boss?’ Ying then held her breath, half preparing to run for it. McCabe turned sharply as if about to deliver a verbal torrent, then quantum breach 290709.indd 19
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something made him pause. His mind started to churn.
Why the hell was he doing this, putting himself under such stress, and for what? Profi ts for a bank that in reality didn’t give a shit about how people felt, so long as the revenue line kept going up? Even if he did make his revenue target, his bosses would simply increase it the next quarter. It was like a fucking egg timer—just as the sand ran out, it fl ipped over and started all over again. It was only a matter of time before the regulators descended upon every bank and enforced stringent controls and lending policies with an iron fi st . Banking would never be the same again; making money in future would not be so easy. Perhaps this was a sign, a sign that he needed to call it quits and move on.
McCabe sat almost rock still, drifting off into deep thought, racing back to a wet and windy afternoon in May 2002 when he last felt really alive and free, not suffocating like now under an avalanche of long positions and falling profi ts.
McCabe was focused on the cracked shear bolt that had just broken off with a loud bang. A rock hidden in the grass must have hit the cutting edge of the 40-inch blade and caused the bolt to snap. This was nothing new to McCabe. The bolt, made of light steel, was designed to shear off when the blade hit a hard object, preventing the expensive mower blade from getting damaged. As he bent over the mower slung behind the tractor, the smell of freshly cut grass fi lled his nostrils.
To McCabe, being out in the fresh air was heaven. He could see swallows diving down, picking out the grasshoppers and other insects the mower had churned up. In the distance at the far end of the fi eld, a young deer had ventured out of the woods to eat the fresh shoots of grass, its ears pricked up, alert and listening for any signs of danger.
McCabe loved to observe the deer and wild boar that roamed the estate.
Their sense of awareness always made him smile and he appreciated the fi nely tuned instincts these animals had.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the deer turned and jumped quantum breach 290709.indd 20
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back into the woods. McCabe knew that it had seen or sensed something. He himself then strained his eyes and ears to see if he, too, could sense what had startled the deer. At that second he felt light raindrops on his face and knew that the black clouds approaching from the west would soon bring heavier rain and a thunderstorm. He was fully accustomed to reading the weather.
McCabe went back to his task and deftly worked the two spanners in his hands to thread and replace the broken bolt. One last yank and the bolt tightened against the nylon nut and all was secure. He placed the spanners back in the toolbox mounted on the left side of the tractor’s chassis and climbed back into the driving seat. The tractor was an old red Massey Ferguson 523 that had been used in the vineyards for the past 20 years. Despite the choking plumes of black diesel smoke it emitted, it was a true workhorse. As he lifted up the mower on the two hydraulic arms, he pulled off towards the barn located only a few hundred yards away.
Domaine de Vin was a small estate spanning 100 acres of arable land and forest, located in the Gers region of southwest France. The nearest large town was Agen, an hour away. McCabe had bought the place as an investment and for somewhere to escape, knowing he could always roam free and not be bothered by too many people. McCabe liked his own company, and often walked for hours in the woods, exploring the remains of old watermills along the streams that could be found dotted in amongst the forest. The house sat proudly in an open area of land surrounded by fi elds of sunfl owers, an oak forest, grape vines and a large lake situated to the southeast. Cork trees still grew in clumps around the estate. The local gypsies arrived each summer to harvest the bark to make corks for the Armagnac, the main product of the region. Wild boar and deer were frequent visitors to the lake as were the family of muskrats that lived in the reed beds. It was an idyllic place. McCabe felt at peace there.
On his way back t
o the barn, McCabe suddenly pressed his foot down hard on the brakes, sending him and the tractor lurching forward.
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The large treaded tyres bit hard into the soft wet soil, leaving dark ruts as they skidded. His ears had detected a sound, so familiar in fact it was one that triggered his senses into a state of alert, his head now frantically turning from side to side to pinpoint the source, his heart pounding in his chest, his body now taut as he jumped off the tractor.
Before he could fully focus, the Lynx AH 7 helicopter loomed up hard and fast behind him over the tree line on the edge of the fi eld to the west. The jet wash blew swirling rain downwards and stinging across his face as it passed overhead. McCabe’s eyes were now squinting in the rain to make out if it was a civilian or military helicopter. The Lynx banked around sharply and came in hard at the top of the fi eld, narrowly missing the spaghetti mix of phone lines which hung precariously on wooden poles. McCabe stood perfectly still as a dark fi gure jumped out and started towards him. The rain now driving hard into his face, he could only just make out the chiselled features of a man hidden within the blue anorak hood. No obvious weapon was in his hands, something McCabe always looked for.
As the fi gure drew closer, instinct kicked in: McCabe reached into his jacket pocket, amongst the string, toffee wrappers and old tissues and took a fi rm hold of his pocket knife. He always carried a knife when on the estate, just in case. His hand deftly extracted the four-inch, razor-sharp blade and held it up against the inside of his wrist. He was now ready to strike if the need arose. McCabe disliked strangers, especially ones who fl ew in by helicopter unannounced.
Slowly the stranger in the blue anorak drew closer, and McCabe did a double-take. He could now make out the face.
‘Good God alive,’ McCabe muttered to himself.
It was Brian Stowe. Stowe was a government man, an MI5 spook, but certainly not a typical grey ghost. His aggressive edge and lack of control often exposed his true identity, an identity more in line with a paid mercenary. His presence alone could make your blood run cold and the tiny hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Stowe now lived a life of deceit, his identity changing more often than his socks. He answered quantum breach 290709.indd 22