The Banker's Dilemma: She promised him Paris in the spring

by Roman Klee

  He claimed that the role played by the Aaronberg lawyers in the scandal, almost got printed in the Manhattan Weekly. But the family blocked its publication by making a generous donation to a charity sponsored by the publisher’s owners.

  Nathan assumed his boss was already offering both parties private advice with the aim of turning them into clients. There was no need to guess who would benefit the most.

  “This could be a win-win for the Trust. And you know, we only back winners,” said Cunningham, staring hard at Nathan. Who nodded to acknowledge his boss’s words.

  To do otherwise, would put everything he was working for at risk once again. And at least the story distracted him from thinking too much about his upcoming ordeal.

  He was next to perform. Even though he had been reluctant at first, Nathan agreed to sing Brother (Sister) Can You Spare a Line? to the tune of Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

  Nathan took a deep bow and a deep breath; his voice held up better than he expected. And the table banging reached levels that had never been heard before at the St. Marks.

  He had scored a minor triumph, but he was determined not to let it go to his head.

  Δ = T –04,814,640

  It was not long after Andy Kissam decided to host the Solomon annual fundraiser at the New York Plaza, that his rallying cry became: If you ain’t givin’ … you ain’t receivin’. The get together for Manhattan’s social and business elite was to support the Food Bank of New York.

  Kissam was going from table to table, calling out the names on the place cards and then asking each guest in turn, how much they intended to donate to his chosen charity in the New Year. It did not look good to make a lower offer than the year before, and he came down hard on Solomon partners who tried to low-ball him.

  Fortunately, Nathan was at the back of the room, eager to make a discreet exit. He kept checking his watch. The text message said half-past nine. The woman he was sitting next to, noticed his impatience.

  “Have you got somewhere else to go, honey?” she asked in a mocking tone of voice, more or less accusing him of being a tight wad. The other dinner guests stared at him.

  Nathan just smiled, replying, “It’s my meds. I need to take them on the hour.”

  The woman looked away, clearly embarrassed. When the right moment came, Nathan left his seat and headed for the men’s room.

  He selected the stall furthest from the entrance as instructed. After securing the door, he removed the top of the cistern and looked inside. Stuffed next to the fill valve, was a plastic UPS mailing pouch that had been vacuum sealed. Nathan’s hands trembled as he retrieved it. He ripped the package open and several sheets of paper fell onto the floor; luckily it was not wet.

  He reached down to pick them up, but before reading their contents, he heard footsteps. Someone was getting into the stall next to him. Christ, how could this be happening?

  Nathan heard some heavy sniffing, as the occupant next door did a couple of lines of coke and flushed the toilet. Some kind of charity event this had turned into, thought Nathan. Then he redirected his attention to the mysterious documents he was holding, scarcely believing their contents.

  The first was an internal report from the S.E.C.. It listed the recommended action to take against Solomon Brothers following the discovery of a bugging device in the offices of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

  The bug had been placed inside a carved wooden image of the United States Great Seal, which adorned the boardroom where the Fed governors met to decide the direction of interest rates.

  Despite attempts by the people who planted the device to implicate rival firms, the FBI was not fooled. Their monitoring equipment detected that the device had been transmitting to a satellite dish, located within an off-site data protection facility in Westchester County. The place was used by Solomon. The signal was then relayed to the Lower Union Plaza office.

  Clearly anyone on Wall Street who could front run a Federal Reserve decision on interest rates, was in a position to make a killing in the fixed income and stock markets—taking on risk free leverage to boost profits.

  Nathan assumed no one wanted a repeat of the time when the Fed raised rates without giving Wall Street an advanced warning. On that occasion, everyone held identical long positions, especially in bond futures, because that’s where all the smart money was.

  Had Solomon’s traders and market makers known what the Fed planned to do beforehand, they could have adjusted their trading positions and made a massive profit for the Brothers, instead of massive losses.

  Nathan remembered that year as one when the firm lost several hundred million dollars a month, something had to be done to stop the flow of red ink. There were savage cuts on the equity and bond trading desks and the DPG was not immune from the shakeout.

  Getting inside the Fed might prevent a repeat performance, even if the strategy was very high risk and potentially politically explosive. The regulators had every reason to close the Brothers down permanently. That’s what would have happened to any other Wall Street operator. Except no action was taken.

  Nathan moved on to the next document, which contained information that truly startled him. He was holding The List—a record of the active Solomon partners’ annual salaries, plus their equity stakes in the firm. There were no prizes for guessing that Alva Grenelund’s pay packet at four million dollars was among the biggest.

  But she also had the largest slug of capital, at close to five percent. Together, this produced a total annual compensation package of over two hundred million dollars.

  Next there was an appendix, detailing what each inactive partner had been doing since leaving the firm.

  It read like a head hunter’s almanac of top jobs. Solomon partners joined private equity and hedge funds, law and accountancy firms, Federal government departments, the diplomatic corps, trades bodies and national broadcasting organizations.

  Someone had helpfully highlighted names that were likely to be of interest to Nathan. First, Zenkō Takeshita.

  Nathan read that Zenkō quit Solomon to head up a secretive investment trust on Bermuda. The trust had invested in Solomon on two occasions, when the firm was close to failing.

  Now Nathan understood why he had been fired instead of Noboru Takeshita, Zenkō’s son—the guy was an untouchable.

  Next, Myron Salzman, Harvey Schleicher, Paul Castellano.

  Nathan knew they had all been partners at the Banderbilt Trust, but he never realized they started their careers at Solomon.

  He turned the page.

  And that was when he discovered that Antonio Orofino was once known as Tino Finegold—during his time as the senior partner of Solomon Brothers.

  Nathan was shocked. He had never suspected a connection between Solomon and Antonio—but here it was in black and white.

  According to the appendix, he headed up the firm when the bugging of the Federal Reserve took place.

  Naturally, there was no written document giving authorization, there were no recorded conversations, no emails, no proof of any illegal activity.

  Because no one got the top job in a firm like Solomon by leaving a paper trail of their mistakes for government regulators to dine out on at a later date.

  The appendix highlighted the acrimonious nature of Orofino’s departure. Breaking contractual agreements, he poached key traders to work at his hedge fund, and actively marketed the fund to Solomon’s top institutional clients.

  Someone had redacted a couple of names, using a thick black marker pen. Nathan sensed that the most important part of the document was contained behind at least one of those names—holding the paper up to the light made no difference.

  There was a message at the end saying: Redacted items to be revealed later. Nathan had no idea what the comment was supposed to mean, other than someone was playing a joke on him and he was not really in the mood fo
r games.

  Then he discovered a series of miscellaneous pages.

  An internal NSA report on the strength of the encryption algorithm deployed in a secret internal communications network, code named Greenspeak. Whenever a partner wanted to use it, they would say: We better speak to Al about that.

  Only the most important partners knew the PIN. Once logged on, they could exchange critical information and ideas they did not want stored on the firm’s servers.

  Nathan was well aware of how compliance rules had become ever more stringent. Copies of all emails sent by anyone in the firm, were stored in an electronic archive system. If there was ever an investigation by the S.E.C., the relevant emails had to be released and sometimes their contents (written in the heat of the moment) could prove incriminating and highly embarrassing—better get that profanity filter installed.

  By overriding the dreaded email audit trail, sensitive exchanges were prevented from entering the public domain and forming the basis of legal action. It also removed the undignified spectacle of rushing to destroy computer hard drives, while switching shredding machines to overdrive and running them around the clock.

  Nathan had never heard anyone at the firm hint at the existence of this network. Yet once again, if the S.E.C. found out, it could close the firm down before the end of the working day. Whatever it knew, no action was taken against Solomon Brothers.

  The final report was from the Protocol Code Unit. It summarized the outcome of an inquiry ordered by Alva Grenelund, into insider dealing at Solomon. They hired a private investigator, code named Greenleaf (who was officially added to the firm’s employment records as a new partner, in order to provide cover for his investigation).

  Rumors had been circulating about an insider trader ring that was placing the firm in a bad light. Grenelund wanted it stamped out. Greenleaf traced the leak to a board member, who was caught relaying details to his contacts about the firm’s forthcoming capital raising exercise, during a critical time for the Brothers. Nathan didn’t think the last report had any relevance.

  Later, when he showed some of the documents to Thom, (he kept to himself the list of Solomon partners) his friend quickly dismissed the story about the Federal Reserve bug, saying it was part of a smear campaign by one of Solomon’s jealous rivals.

  “Do you really think they needed to take the risk? They own the Fed these days anyway.”

  Now Nathan came to think about it, Thom was right about that.

  Δ = T –03,605,040

  The number of Budd Wright sightings was increasing at the rate of more than two a day. The latest placed the famous investor in Lisbon, Portugal. Then Hong Kong, Paris, Galilee, Rome, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Sun Valley, Taipei and Seoul.

  Nathan realized that this little game would continue up to Christmas Eve. Volatility would be all over the page—a welcome early Christmas present for options traders, just so long as they got their positions lined up the right way.

  Nathan smiled. It was like the old days back at Solomon when he sold highly complex derivatives, designed to make money for the firm at the expense of clients. The biggest commission generators liked to hunt out the less sophisticated investors, because these guys were flattered by an approach from Solomon and usually provided rich pickings.

  The system worked beautifully, because the Brothers’ math and physics geeks were the only people who really understood how to program their multi-fangled financial models and make the final price whatever they wanted it to be. One of the coefficients they used was labeled Omega. Nathan often heard traders call it the need for greed coefficient.

  Nathan’s own analysis broke down the Budd Wright conundrum into false positives, false negatives, true negatives, true positives. He called these the four super-positions—taking his inspiration from quantum mechanics, where a sub-atomic particle could be in two places at the same time.

  His terminology was loosely derived from what a friend called, the quantum theory of passive/dynamic stock selection—never check to see how well your favorite stock is doing, because as soon as you do, the act of looking will cause the price to collapse!

  The situation was becoming so out of hand, Nathan suspected that someone was making latex masks to look like Budd Wright and then walking around airports hoping to get seen. It had started out as a joke, but now it was turning serious because there was a lot of money and a whole lot more ego resting on the outcome of where Budd Wright happened to be.

  But a more careful analysis of the sightings suggested they were not as random as they first appeared.

  Using online plane spotter discussion groups, Nathan and Thom devised a plan to obtain intel on where and when certain planes used by Wright’s company JetSet had landed or taken off. This was only a first step, because seeing a plane used by JetSet, did not mean Wright was on it.

  They also needed confirmation that he had been sighted, preferably with a picture or some other method of corroboration, like a tip off from a member of the cabin crew.

  After yet another false negative sighting of Wright in Lisbon, Nathan insisted they use a model. Starting from Venice, Nathan knew Wright was going to Zürich. The flight time was just over half an hour by private jet. (A few days after arriving, Carla had texted to say she and Budd would be staying in Switzerland for at least a month, now that Jade was joining them at a health spa.)

  Nathan’s model took account of distances, flight duration and time differences. When it indicated Wright was in two places at once, he knew they had at least one rogue sighting, which the model labeled a false negative, false positive or true negative, depending on how much info Nathan had fed the program.

  Now he could home in on the true positives.

  Nathan’s model forecast that there was a high probability Budd Wright would soon turn up, at a private airport in England.

  Δ = T –03,432,240

  Juan Betancourt was optimistic he would get the break he needed. He left his one-bedroom apartment and walked along Warsaw Road. It was the same routine—he hadn’t changed anything since going over to England.

  On the corner of Glebe Avenue, he’d seen the accident; a white Fiat Uno came out of nowhere at speed and killed a leather-clad motorcyclist. The police placed posters around the area, asking for eye witnesses to come forward. But Betancourt, who noticed the car had been driven by a man of Arabic origin, knew better than to volunteer information.

  It was the week before Christmas and his contact told him they wanted to make the New Year’s party go off with a bang. If his luck held up, their reward would be very much in this life and not in heaven.

  Betancourt arrived at the north-east perimeter gate of RAF Northolt. By now, the guards were used to seeing him. Since he worked in the commercial section as a janitor, the security clearance was less intrusive than for the high-security area. That was where royalty, VIPs, diplomats, CEOs and politicians, used their private planes to come in and out of the U.K. as they pleased.

  Betancourt often worked the weekend shift. It was the least busy, because commercial flights were restricted. Although, sometimes exceptions were made.

  And if anyone was going to benefit from an exception, then it would be JetSet; the company literally owned the skies over Northolt as far as take-off slots for private planes were concerned.

  The best times for the camera shy to use the airport, were late at night or very early in the morning. The roads were quietest and the cover of darkness made it more difficult for a casual observer to spot a celebrity coming or going. For a professional watcher, the time made no difference—night-vision sights made sure of that.

  Betancourt had studied the photos and watched plenty of videos. He worked out the route, from the time the plane touched down to when the bulletproof limo would draw up to whisk the VIP off to another location.

  There was not much of an opening, but there was a small one.

>   Next he had to work out how a personal protection officer might approach his job. How would he stop someone getting on the plane?

  On landing, a Border Agency official would check passports and sort out any visa issues. In the past, Betancourt was aware they didn’t check passengers arriving in the U.K. on private jets, but in recent months security had been stepped up.

  This presented an opportunity—but only if the assassin had a suicide mission in mind and only if he could carry a gun on him. Getting it through security would be difficult for sure.

  If he had someone working on the inside, instructed to leave a gun in a compartment near the front of the plane, the assassin could retrieve it later—that might work too.

  But it was risky and involved betting on an inside job. Unless they planted someone on the plane, there was a high risk the gun would be discovered during a routine security search.

  So Betancourt waited from his vantage point at the top of a stairwell, in a rarely used building overlooking the runway.

  Sure enough, at half-past-six precisely, a Gulfstream 650, on a direct flight from Zürich, appeared in the sky.

  The JetSet pilots received confirmation from the control tower to make their final descent and executed a textbook smooth landing—that extra time spent in the flight simulator, was now really paying dividends.

  The Gulfstream taxied along to Hangar 290.

  Finally, it had arrived; the plane Betancourt was waiting for. And it just so happened to be the most important plane to touch down at Northolt in a very long time. Because Darth Vader’s name was first on the passenger manifold.

  Then Betancourt had a moment of self-doubt.

  What if he was wrong? What if the real threat was the one he discounted as the least likely? He saw an official, who he assumed was from the Border Agency, walk out of the terminal building and onto the tarmac.