Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  Johnny couldn’t have known any more than I did about North American power plants, but utilities are capital-spending pigs, so the financial picture was clear enough. York must have had cash flow problems, and with credit markets barely thawed, they couldn’t borrow. That meant one option—a distress sale.

  “York’s stock went up thirty-four percent on the announcement of Marlett’s interest last week,” Johnny said. “But with Marlett dead, it fell right back down again. Someone was on the other side of that trade this morning. They probably needed a forklift to handle the bales of cash they earned.”

  “That was the motive.” My kind of story. “Someone killed Marlett to win the trade.”

  “Could be. Not provable, of course.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Nobody knows.” He frowned. “It was all small-lot, anonymous transactions.”

  “Wait a minute.” I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, especially when it’s about someone cheating the markets, but this didn’t seem like a proven case. “If they were all small trades, how do you know one person was behind them all?”

  “They were too even. A hundred shares here, fifty there, ten or fifteen trades a minute. I dunno. It just felt staged.”

  Well, Johnny was worth a hundred million and I wasn’t. I probably ought to respect his instincts.

  Out on the floor one of the traders must have hit the jackpot. He jumped out of his chair, pumping his hands in the air, yelling. The other guys threw wadded paper and staplers at him. I could see why Johnny had walled off his office with heavy glass.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Three names. Tell me what you think.”

  Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Shoot.”

  “Free association, now…Jeremy Akelman, Betsy Sills, Tom Marlett.”

  He looked blank.

  “Here’s a hint,” I said. “All three ran other people’s money, and they did so really, really badly.”

  “Sounds familiar…”

  “And now, they’re all down for the dirt nap.”

  He finally got it.

  “Three dead money managers! They’re connected? Shit.” Johnny laughed. “Deranged madman? Or are the peasants finally rising up?”

  “My new client would really prefer Door Number One.”

  “New client—no, forget I asked.” He knew I wouldn’t share the details anyway. “Do the police see it like that?”

  “No idea. Probably not—otherwise they’d have leaked it by now.”

  I knew what Johnny was thinking: How can I profit from this?

  “So you’re going to find the lunatic,” he said.

  “And persuade him to stop.”

  “Hell, plenty of people, they’d tell you, give him more ammunition.”

  “That’s kind of the problem, don’t you think?”

  Johnny drifted off in thought, staring half focused at his screens. Something caught his attention for a moment, and he tapped a few keys.

  Somewhere a day trader just got wiped out.

  “If you can’t stop him before he does it again,” Johnny said, “maybe you could let me know ahead of time?”

  So he could piggyback on to the killer’s trade. Right. “Don’t be a ghoul.”

  The bullpen had settled down, chairs returned to upright, traders at their desks again. Rain spattered silently on the window glass, the cityscape beyond dim and misty.

  “Hey.” I had a thought. “You pay attention. Ever heard of a financial blog called Event Risk?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything.” He went back to the keyboard, and a minute later had found Clara’s journalistic endeavor. “Interesting.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Contrarian.” He read for another minute, flicking down the posts. “Not macro, not trading tips. Analytics. He must have an accounting background—there’s a lot of balance sheet this, income statement that.”

  “She.”

  “Oh?” He clicked around until he found the About the Author page. “Whoa, you’re right. Look at those—”

  “Hey.”

  Johnny glanced over, grinning. “Friend of yours?”

  “She knows me.”

  “I was only going to say, look at those sources. Sounds like she was in the industry.”

  “Just journalism, far as I know.”

  “But hardly any snark. What does she see in you?”

  Johnny was already being pulled back to his trading. The blog disappeared, replaced by a set of charts. Inflection points blinked green and red on dense yellow pattern lines.

  I was lucky to get even ten minutes out of him while the exchanges were open.

  “See what happens on York,” I said as I got up to leave. “I’d sure like to know who had advance knowledge that Marlett was headed to the big trading room in the sky.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Johnny. “He’d be a good contact.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Leaving Johnny’s office, I had some free time. I’d caught him not long after the market opened, so it wasn’t even ten a.m. Rain had fallen earlier, and judging from the overcast would be falling again soon, but for now it was all drizzle and mist. The canyons of the financial district were gray. Here and there people stood in doorways, taking cigarette breaks.

  Walking along, I pulled out a cellphone. Oops, wrong one—brand new, and I hadn’t used it yet. I went through my pockets until I found the one whose number I’d given to Clara.

  “Hi, it’s Silas,” I said.

  Some garbled noise, not comprehensible as human speech.

  “Hey, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  This time her voice came back crisp. “No, I was brushing my teeth.”

  And she answers her phone? The life of a blogger. “You’re in the bathroom?”

  “Don’t ask what I’m wearing.”

  “I’ll use my imagination.” And I was, too. “Do me a favor, don’t flush while I can hear it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What’s up?”

  “I heard something you might want to look into. About Marlett’s business before he died.”

  “Yes?”

  “York Hydro.”

  “I know all about it.”

  “Did you check the stock activity yesterday?”

  Finally I’d thrown her. A pause stretched out for several seconds.

  “What are you saying?”

  “It went up, it went down…”

  “Damn.” A clatter and some air noise. She must have been sprinting through her apartment for the computer. “Something happened? You think people heard about the shooting and started looking for angles?”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you check and see what you think?”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “I’m going to work soon. I’ll follow up there.”

  “You have an office? I thought you said—”

  “I can’t sit around in my pajamas all day, wandering to the refrigerator and back.”

  “So where do you work?”

  “The Thatcher Athenaeum.”

  “A literary café?”

  She laughed. “More or less. Tell you what, why don’t you come over? I’ll see what I can find out about York, and you can tell me where the tip came from.”

  “Sure.” I took the address. It was off Third Avenue, near Gramercy Park. “That’s not far. When are you going to be there?”

  “Well…make it eleven-thirty.”

  “See you then.” I clicked off.

  After a minute I realized I was grinning, stupidly. I wiped my face back to a scowl and considered.

  That was an hour from now. Standing under a tree growing from an iron-fenced patch of dirt in the sidewalk, watching pedestrians and street traffic, was good, but not for sixty minutes.

  Fine. I could do some research of my own.

  I walked over to Broadway, then uptown until I found a coffee shop with free wi-fi advertised—and a bar right next door. The coffee shop was bright, with shiny chrome behind bi
g plate-glass windows. The bar was dark and gloomy, and its door-side chalkboard, barely readable from smudging and dust, advertised deep-fried wings and Stroh’s on tap.

  You can guess which one I entered.

  Settled at a table by the wall, a cup of burned java at hand, I opened my laptop and connected to the coffeeshop’s network. It was time to find out just how badly I’d been compromised by the intertubes.

  Like I’d choose the bar for the ambiance? No—I’d be happy sitting in either one, but this way I had an internet connection that was one more step concealed. You just can’t be too paranoid. Not in an age when Google has partnered with the NSA, when the carriers legally tap every kilobyte of traffic traversing their wires, when Acxiom aggregates every public scrap of data about you and sells it to anyone who asks. I don’t wear an aluminum-foil hat, but I don’t want my life recorded and available to anyone with an interest, either.

  And son of a bitch if Clara wasn’t right: the third hit on my voice box number had my name, right there. Good God.

  I clicked through, and discovered that some moron had put his entire address book online, using a cloud service called—no lie—GerbilWheel.com. Trawlers had found the database, which the owner had made public from either ignorance or carelessness or both, and converted it into an HTML list. Then cached it. Which mattered, because another five seconds revealed that GerbilWheel had gone bankrupt in 2010, and all formal records of its existence ended there.

  The address book list had no headers, and no supplemental detail, like the owner’s name. But it was clear enough from the database’s original URL:

  www.gerbilwheel.com/svcA7/users/profile/nleeson/08.1135DR.dat

  Nobby fucking Leeson.

  Bad memories washed up. Nobby Leeson was an ex-Marine rockhead I’d had the extremely poor judgment to take on as a partner in a job a few years ago. He tried to double-cross me, things went south, there was a sniper duel…well, the details don’t matter. Leeson was dead, and I thought I’d left his bad karma behind long ago. But now here he was, laughing at me from the grave.

  At least it was just my name. No address, no other detail, no job title—I was surprised Leeson didn’t fill in something like, “Silas Cade, Hitman Accountant—Attn. FBI!” But even the name was too much, as Clara’s sleuthing had revealed.

  I saved the file to my computer—I’d have to study it later, to see if Leeson the Fuckhead had recorded other useful data, like on my competitors—and ran through the remaining search results to see if there was anything else on me. Nothing, fortunately.

  Sipping the coffee, wincing a bit, I tried to think of any way to eliminate Leeson’s data trail. Unfortunately once something was on the internet it was basically there forever. Like a recent college grad discovering in job interviews that he really shouldn’t have posted all those hey-I’m-drunk! photographs on Facebook, I was trapped by the tenacious packrat permanence of the web.

  Maybe it was time to lose the phone number and switch to an anonymous email address hosted by some hacker haven in Russia or Moldova or something. Nobody really uses voicemail anymore, and IDTheft.com’s customer service couldn’t be any worse than Verizon’s. But then I’d have to advertise the new contact information…just thinking about the logistics, I finished the rest of the coffee without even noticing. Too daunting.

  I went to get a refill.

  “How’s the novel coming?” the bartender asked, pouring from a scorched glass pot.

  “What?”

  “Everyone in here with a computer, they’re working on a book.”

  “Oh.” I handed over a five and waved off the change he halfheartedly made to return. “Actually, I was looking at naked women.”

  He laughed, which meant I’d tipped too much. “At least you’re honest about it.”

  “This place doesn’t have a payphone, does it?”

  “Not for ten years. At least. What happened, lose your cellphone?”

  “Nah, I wanted to call my drug dealer.”

  This time he wasn’t sure if I was joking.

  “Just kidding.” I took the coffee back to my table, sat down and found the new throwaway. I had another appointment to set up.

  I switched on the new phone. While it powered up, I noticed I was still carrying the mail I’d collected from the PO box yesterday, before the call from Clara. I uncrumpled the flyers and glossies and envelopes on the gritty table.

  The phone beeped ready, and I dialed.

  “Hey, Walter,” I said. “How’s the fishing?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “The fish?”

  While we talked, I sorted the mail. USPS service notice, cancer charity solicitation, credit card offer—I guess the financial crisis is solved, if they’re trying to sign me up again—Gall’s catalog, Shotgun Digest renewal…

  And a hand-lettered envelope. Addressed to Silas Cade.

  “Got to go,” I said, cutting Walter off. We’d already confirmed a time. He hung up.

  I never get personal mail.

  Even my foster parents, still in their same old house in New Hampshire. They have the address, and they never use it. I send them a Christmas card every year, but I do it through “letter from Santa” forwarding—mail a preaddressed envelope to North Pole, Alaska, in November, and they’ll postmark it “North Pole” and send it on. It’s for gullible children, of course, fooled by their duplicitous parents, but works great as a blind forwarding service. At least if you need to mail just one letter a year.

  Which is about right for keeping in touch with the people who raised me.

  I examined the envelope, found nothing suspicious and carefully tore it open from the bottom end. A plain sheet of paper, ink-jet printed.

  Hey Little Brother—

  You’re surprised, right?

  Because if you already heard, for sure you would of tracked me down. I know it.

  The state split us up when we were babies. Least you were a baby—I was one or two. Of course I don’t remember, but my family told me later. I ended up staying with them the whole way through. I guess that wasn’t how it went for you. New Hampshire DHHS gave me a little information—I had to hire a lawyer and file all these papers but they came through with the basics. I wrote to your last parents, and they gave me this address.

  Also they told me a little about you. CPA—how about that! And in Vegas, too. Guess I know what kind of accountant that makes you, huh? Working for the casinos. I was out there, few years back. But not too long. Back east is home for me.

  I fix cars, do a little welding, that kind of thing. Racing, sometimes, on the weekend—dirt track, kind of like you got out there. Not the Speedway, of course, more like Battle Mountain. I do all right. Got two alimonys to pay, though, you know how that goes.

  You and me should talk sometime. Catch up. We don’t have any other blood relatives, not that I heard about anyway. It’s just you and me.

  I looked for you on the google, I don’t know, computers aren’t my thing. You call me instead. I got some ideas.

  Your big brother,

  Dave Ellins

  Okay. Um.

  I put the paper down, drank off the coffee and read it again.

  A brother?

  He’d added contact details: an address in Pennsylvania, an email, a phone number. I checked an online map, found Derryville in the mountains east of Pittsburgh, near Latrobe. I also found Dave Ellins himself, on a local auto-racing website and some fan blogs. Dave raced cars, just like he said, on backcountry tracks. Photos showed his vehicle, which was low and dangerous looking, all custom metal and roll-bar framing, covered in dust.

  Did he really think I lived in Las Vegas? It was just a mail drop. If he knew anything more about me—anything at all—he’d be looking for angles.

  I had to wonder exactly what kind of “ideas” he was talking about.

  Of course, my first thought was: oh shit. Someone has tracked me down and is running some kind of scam, trying to lure me out. I admit I’ve ma
de a few enemies along the way—they all deserved what they got, naturally, but not everyone achieves satori about that sort of thing.

  But the blogs hadn’t just posted pictures of Dave’s cars, they showed the man himself. I clicked on several, staring at the slightly higher resolution.

  He looked just like me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Thatcher Athenaeum turned out to be a private library in a grandly maintained Beaux Arts building. Walking up from the subway, I noticed its obvious architecture from a block away. Closer, I could see a pair of ten-foot outer doors folded back, their wrought iron shiny in the drizzle. Overhead, the institution’s name was carved into an original lintel.

  I’d never heard of the place.

  Clara met me at the door and led me in, past the guard’s desk. Ceilings of plaster relief painted in gold soared above carved oak bookcases. High windows let in murky light, illuminating tables that looked as if they’d been taken from a sixteenth-century abbey. Three men and one woman sat apart from one another, at work, intent and quiet.

  “I have a spot on the mezzanine.” Clara kept her voice low. I noted the hair pushed behind her ears, small platinum studs, the curve of neck into shoulder.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How can you afford membership? I mean—”

  “No, you’re right. Even if I had the thirty thousand annual fee, I probably wouldn’t have made it through the screening.”

  “Old money, then.”

  “Old old. Family connections to the Astors would help.”

  “I see,” I said, not seeing. “They have a special category, then? Youthful charm and energy, something like that?”

  “I’m an employee.”

  “Ah.”

  Now it made sense. Hardly any bloggers made enough to live on, after all. Waiters used to be struggling actors; now most are struggling online entrepreneurs.

  A walkway ran around an upper level. We ascended a carved wooden stair in the corner. Clara had taken over one of the alcoves, books and papers overflowing an ancient desk and chair.