by Mike Cooper
They love that kind of stuff.
CHAPTER FIVE
Goldfinger’s booth was empty when I finally got back, close to four. A few leaves had blown into the garage, out of place on the oil-stained concrete, and I stepped on one walking out. The coffee cup and my note were both gone.
I’d catch him later. It’s not like he had a life outside the garage, particularly.
The day was still bright and warm, drawing out the strollers, the loiterers, the goof-offs, the students—everyone who didn’t have to be inside wasn’t. I walked back to my apartment at a meandering pace, enjoying the brilliant afternoon, the blue sky, the music from cars and windows and overamped headphones. Turning onto my block, I dodged a blader, glanced at a woman scooping up after her Labrador, heard a horn at the far intersection—
Trouble.
At a glance, she was a few years younger than me, maybe thirty. Light brown hair, cut short and stylish, and deep dark eyes. Average height, in a white T-shirt tucked into cargo pants over ballet flats. She had a faded courier bag on one shoulder and sunglasses pushed up above her forehead.
Perfectly normal for the neighborhood. The problem was, without training and practice, it’s more than difficult to stand and wait unobtrusively on a residential street. If you’re not moving, you stick out.
All the worse that she was watching my building, and when I caught her eye, she stepped off the curb to cross the street, straight toward me.
I looked away and kept moving.
“Mr. Cade? Silas Cade?” She came up to my side.
“Ayna ep hamam?” I said, glancing at her but not stopping.
“What?”
I shrugged. “Oreedu litr al-benzyn.”
That should have done it, but she just frowned and kept up as I turned the corner. “I have no idea where the restroom is,” she said. “And why do you need petrol?”
Fuck. I sighed again.
“Um…just practicing today’s phrases.”
“Well, your pronunciation is good, for Modern Standard. A little too textbook, maybe.”
She seemed determined to have a conversation. Halfway down the next block—far enough from the interception point to complicate any plans a contact team might have had—I stopped and faced her.
“What do you want?”
“I’m Clara Dawson.” She held out a hand. I shifted slightly, rebalancing my weight before taking it, but she just shook normally and let go. “Nice to meet you.”
She’d called me. Not Claire, Clara.
I said nothing, just looked at her. The moment stretched out.
“Your neighbor? Guy with tattoos on his head? Told me he saw you this morning, what you were wearing. So I waited.”
Well, I couldn’t order Gabriel not to talk about me.
“What do you want?” I said again.
She shrugged.
“What’s your connection to Thomas Marlett?”
“Who’s that?”
“A dead hedgie.”
Tough girl. “How’d you find me, Ms. Dawson?”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“Maybe, about now, you need to show me something.”
“What?”
“Official ID? A badge? Court papers?”
“You’re a suspicious man, Mr. Cade.” She grinned. “In both senses of the word. That must be why you were so hard to run down.”
I looked around. Parked cars, apparently empty. No panel vans. The pedestrians were all wearing shorts or flip-flops or tank tops. A post office truck drove down the street, but that was okay. They’re never used by law enforcement—the USPS is notorious for refusing to cooperate with other agencies.
“Who are you?”
“An independent researcher and reporter.”
“Ah.” That seemed possibly true.
“I’ve been working on Marlett for two months, but now that he’s dead, I need to get a story out, like, yesterday.” She made a serious face. “We can do it all on background if you want.”
“Oh?”
“Or I can publish what I know,” she said. “Including your name.”
A teenager went by on a skateboard, loud and oblivious.
Tough girl. “All right,” I said, and looked around the street once more. “How about we sit down at Amir’s?”
“Where’d you learn the Arabic?” I asked. I’d chosen a booth by the front window for us. Not coincidentally, the late afternoon sunlight coming through the glass was in Clara’s face. Also not coincidentally, I could see the street, the door and even through to the kitchen, past the end of Amir’s linoleum counter. The place was quiet, mostly empty before the dinner rush. Scratchy subcontinent pop drifted out from the dishwasher’s radio.
“Junior year in Cairo. You?”
The Defense Language Institute, but I didn’t feel like sharing my résumé. “I’d really like to know how you tracked me down, Clara.”
She drank some tea. “From Marlett’s phone records.”
“No way.” Not after all those warrantless-wiretapping lawsuits. The national security horse was long gone, but the barn door was locked up tight. “Pretexting’s dead.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“That you know how to con a pen register out of Ma Bell.”
Oops. I frowned.
“Hypothetically,” she said, “because we would never do something illegal, you’re right—customer service is too hard to social-engineer anymore. But hypothetically, I might have used a star-seventy-two scam.”
Aha. She tricked Marlett into forwarding his phone, and got the rebill delivered to some anonymized internet number. Clever. This time I tried to keep a poker face.
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like your research expertise is, ah, usefully esoteric.”
“Just legwork.” She flipped her hand dismissively. “Most of his numbers were easy to eliminate—obvious business calls, his attorney, car services, the executive jet timeshare, the country club. A few stood out, though.”
Including, apparently, mine. Marlett had called two: the cellphone, which was a one-off, and my anonymous contact number, at the beginning. But neither should have brought her to my door—like I said, even Verizon doesn’t know it’s me using that voicemail box. I was torn between pretending I couldn’t understand what she was talking about, or immediately wringing out of her how she’d broken what I thought was an impenetrable firewall.
She laughed, apparently at the conflict playing out on my face. Jesus, was I such an open book?
“You did all that today?” I said.
“No. Over the last few days. Just backgrounding.” Totally illegal, but whatever. “This morning, though, when I heard he’d been killed, I realized the list might include potential leads.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I googled the numbers, and with one of them, your name came up.”
Holy shit. I stared.
Clara shook her head. “People will put anything on the internet nowadays.”
Could that be true? Had some idiot fucking client of mine gone and blogged about what a good job I’d done?
Amir came around the counter to drop off my plate of rice and beans. Also the jar of habanero sauce, and I didn’t even have to ask—which was nice, but, sadly, another sign I was becoming too familiar in the neighborhood.
“I’m surprised you never checked,” Clara said, buttering a corn muffin, left over from the morning. “Doesn’t everyone search themselves now and then?”
I guess I’m just not vain enough, but it was sure as hell going on the checklist now.
“Because I have nothing to hide,” I managed to say, “I would never think of it.”
“Well, if you’re curious, I didn’t find much. Actually, nothing but your name and the phone number, to start. Which is kind of odd.”
“Oh?”
“That’s a really thin digital trail, for, like, a real person.” She chewed on the muffin. “We wouldn’t be talking ri
ght now, in fact, if you hadn’t subscribed to some magazine under your real name. That got it into the public mailing databases.”
“I see.”
“A ten-dollar search.” More muffin disappeared. “Which I can write off.”
Myself, I’d stopped eating, the beans like cement in my throat.
You can’t live off the grid, not if you spend any time in society whatsoever. Who wants to emulate the Unabomber, in his isolated shack? Rather than go survivalist, all barter and paranoia, I’d simply tried to keep my vocational activities totally secret. Compartmented. The rest of my life I lived more or less normally, just like everyone else. Until now, it had worked.
The voicemail number was the only link between my two worlds. Clara had broken it open.
“What’s your story about?” I asked. I wasn’t interested, not anymore, but I had to pretend long enough to figure out whether this woman was a threat or not. “Is he really dead?”
“Four .338 rounds through the heart, two in the head. The houseboy found him on the doorstep at two in the morning.”
I squinted. “You know ballistics?”
“Nothing. But the Old Ridgefork cops were first on scene, and they aren’t as practiced as the troopers in message control.” She grinned. “I took a box of Boston Kremes down to their station this morning, and they rolled over like puppies.”
“Who did it?”
“A sniper. Didn’t you even look at your computer today? It’s on the news everywhere.”
“Sniper,” I said. “Uh-huh. Sure.”
Though to be honest, .338 was a sniper’s caliber, popularized in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was just hard to see its place in the leafy suburbs.
“They found where he was standing, a hundred and fifty yards across the road in the cemetery. Tripod marks, used bullets, I dunno.”
“Old Ridgefork isn’t exactly Mazar-el-Sharif.”
“And Marlett wasn’t exactly Taliban.” She finished the muffin, dusted crumbs onto the plate, held her cup in the air toward Amir. “Though his investors might have thought so.”
“Huh?”
“He burned through three-quarters of his capital in just four months. Seventy-eight percent, gone.”
She knew precisely what Johnny knew, and it was still a remarkable statistic. You really have to try to lose that much money. Russian penny stocks? Zimbabwean currency speculation? Marlett must have been a genius, in his way.
“In fact,” said Clara, “it’s possible that Marlett achieved the lowest return in the entire hedge fund universe.”
“So he hit the record book on his way out the door.” A thought occurred to me. “That ranking—who says?”
“Morningstar.”
A moment passed.
“Those numbers haven’t been released yet.” And until then they were treated like nuclear codes, or USDA crop statistics. Clara, whoever the hell she was, had some serious research skills indeed. “Not for last quarter.”
She winked. “That one took two boxes of donuts. Anyway, Marlett was right at the bottom. The absolute worst hedge fund in the country. His investors would have been better off pouring gasoline on their cash and tossing in a match.”
Nice. “Maybe you can write their next management letter.”
Amir came over with a kettle and refilled our cups. A customer wandered to the cash register at the end of the counter, and Clara waited until Amir had returned to ring him up.
“So you can see why I’m interested,” she said. “What was going to be a feature piece on a lousy money manager is now, like, investigative journalism. Marlett loses a boatload of money, and someone shoots him. Pissed-off investors, maybe? Financial vigilantes? Wall Street cratered the world economy not too long ago—are the little guys finally taking matters into their own hands?”
I’m not sure Marlett’s investors, who would have had to meet the SEC’s million-dollar net-worth threshold for hedge fund participation, could be accurately described as “the little guys.” But Clara had a point.
“People are angry,” I agreed. “I’ll give you that.”
“They had a right to be angry at Marlett.”
“Maybe.” I pushed beans around on my plate. “You know, every trade that Marlett lost money on had a counterparty. Someone else got rich off his bad picks.”
“True.” She put down her cup. “So what did you do for him?”
That was an abrupt transition. She’d had practice interviewing.
“Tax advice,” I said.
“Oh. You’re like, what, H&R Block for plutocrats?”
I counted to three. “I help out with certain arcane issues in estate planning and tax management. In Marlett’s case, well, I’m afraid client privilege survives his demise. But it wasn’t anything you’d find useful.”
We went back and forth for a few minutes. I could see Amir watching from his perch down the counter—watching Clara, probably. I wasn’t nearly as eye-catching.
“So who do you write for?” I asked, finally.
“Well,…” She hesitated, twisting a band of hair around one finger. It was the first uncertain gesture I’d seen her make. “I used to freelance articles to the financial press, but now I’m trying to publish an online weekly. Original analysis, investigations, sourced commentary. A finblog with depth.”
It’s not like I’ve heard many elevator pitches, but even to me that sounded weak. “How’s it going?”
“Slow.” Clara sighed, and looked directly at me. Her eyes were an unusually dark blue, and unblinking. “Real slow.”
“I think I’m getting the picture. Marlett’s your ticket to fame, right?”
“One good story is all it takes.”
“And Marlett’s got it all.”
She nodded. “Scandal, greed, a spectacular Wall Street crash and burn—and then the guy’s assassinated? By some sort of avenging ninja? Reporters would kill for this opportunity.”
“So to speak.”
She smiled. “I’m three-fourths there, because I’ve been working it so long already. If I get the entire story…that’s it, I’m made.”
We’d both finished our plates. The coffee cups were cold. Amir was in the kitchen, yelling cheerfully in some foreign language at the dishwasher, who kept interrupting him.
“I’m not part of your scoop,” I said. “I had some small business with Marlett, and it wasn’t interesting at all.” Clara started to talk, and I held up my hand. “No, I know you don’t believe me, even though it’s true. So here’s what we can do. I’ll help you dig up the real dirt.”
“And in exchange, I leave you out.”
“You don’t want to waste your time looking at me.” There was another entendre there, which I tried to ignore. “Just by convincing you not to, I’m helping you close in on the Pulitzer.”
“Pulitzer? That is so dead tree.”
“Well, then, synflood–level traffic monetization. Whatever you want.”
“Okay.” Clara held out her hand. This time her grip seemed warmer, and I admit I held it a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary. “Deal.”
“Good,” I said. “What’s it called?”
“What?”
“Your blog.”
“I like to think of it as a journal. ‘Blog’ sounds amateurish.”
“Sorry.”
“Event Risk.”
A phrase from bond-prospectus boilerplate. “I like that.”
“Thanks.”
I dropped a twenty on the table and we scooted out of the booth.
“Stay in touch,” she said.
“You, too.” I gave her the number of another of the so-far unused prepaid cellphones. “Those other digits—don’t use them.”
“Why not?”
“They won’t be working.”
“Uh-huh.” She gave me a knowing smile and started out.
“Hey,” I said. “I hope I hear before you write about it.”
“About what?”
“Whatever happens nex
t.” I held the door open for her. “It’s sure to be interesting.”
CHAPTER SIX
“A bandit,” said Johnny, generously giving me about a third of his attention. It was next morning, early in the business day. His eyes stayed on the five monitors—no, six, he’d added another flat-panel since I last visited—that were streaming market data, news, and blogosphere rants across his desk. “You were right—it was a great tip. And some fuckwad figured it out before me.”
“No way. Someone out there’s smarter than you?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? And early yesterday morning, several million richer, too.”
“I was thinking maybe you’d kick me back a finder’s fee.”
“Hah.” He looked up. “Marlett was on spec, huh?”
“Never mind.”
Johnny and I go way back. High school, believe it or not. He was baseball, I was football, we sat in the same AP classes—though that wasn’t saying much in small-town New Hampshire. His ticket out was UVM and a Wharton MBA. While I was learning how to jump out of airplanes and field-strip a .50-cal, Johnny was clawing his way from entry-level i-banking to, eventually, running his own hedge fund.
Who made the better choice is a topic for another day.
I’d come down to his Beaver Street offices, where he oversaw a floor-to-ceiling panorama of the East River skyline, a roomful of twentysomething traders, and three billion dollars of alternative-asset allocations. The traders all seemed to have ADHD. Johnny’s style was incremental: he could go in and out of positions in less than thirty seconds. Breakfast and lunch were catered every day, but the food mostly sat around getting cold, and the only consistent nourishment seemed to be cans of Red Bull and Jolt.
In these days of algorithmic technical strategies, it was all quaintly retro.
“I thought you said Marlett was down to fumes.” I tried to get comfortable in the cheap plastic chair Johnny provided his guests.
“He had one last deal going, it turns out—the York Hydro acquisition.” Johnny looked almost in pain. “I can’t believe I forgot about it.”
“Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Canadian electric generation. The Conservatives went on a privatization binge a few years ago. Carlyle and those guys snapped up the good ones, but some of the smaller utilities went straight to market—just in time for the world economy to collapse. No more liquidity, so they need a new buyer, bad. Marlett was actually on to something.”