Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  Goldfinger’s stroke of genius was to get himself deputized. Because he’s not a “peace officer,” no matter how broadly defined, it wasn’t easy. The loophole he used came from Section 654 of New York County law, allowing sheriffs to deputize “agents of societies incorporated for the purpose of prevention of cruelty to animals.” It’s trivial to sign up with the New York SPCA. God knows how much the bribe was, but when he emerged from the smoky back room of the sheriff’s office, Goldfinger was now Deputy Dawg, and he’d parlayed that into a remote subscription to the FBI’s fingerprint repository.

  Over time his consulting dwindled away, ruined by too many missed court dates, fucked-up reports and incoherent, raging phone calls. The alcoholic’s usual trail of wreckage. But he kept a few clients like me—not choosy, off the record, cash paying.

  “Are you sure there are latents on here?” Goldfinger had removed the baton from its damp plastic bag, holding it gently with purple nitrile gloves. Sober, he was as good as anybody.

  “Mine, for sure. I’m more interested in the original owner’s.”

  “It’s not a half-hour job.” He looked up. “Tell you the truth, more like a day. They’re not fast, in Washington. And it’ll cost.”

  Ganderson was paying, but still. I sighed. “As soon as you can.”

  He opened it, slowly, and examined the entire length. “No blood.”

  “Not for lack of trying. They beat up a girl pretty good, but this didn’t come out until I arrived, and I took it away.”

  “Nice.”

  For a moment my chest had hollowed out. I wasn’t about to let Goldfinger know about Clara, but I shouldn’t have mentioned her.

  “If it’s there, you’ll find it,” I said.

  We agreed on a price, and I gave him a dead-drop email address—one I’d signed up for anonymously, and would use once. I always keep a few on tap, for convenience at times like this. I didn’t want to have to chase him down if he decided to go on a bender.

  When I left, Goldfinger was at his desktop vacuum chamber. The baton rested on two wire supports, to prevent further degradation of what prints might be there, and he had begun to fume it with cyanoacrylate. He looked comfortable, at home in his dank cinderblock cave.

  “What should I do with it when I’m done?” he asked.

  “Send me the results.”

  “No—the baton. Is it evidence?”

  Hardly. I’d completely mucked up the chain of custody. “I’m not building a court case,” I said. “Scrub it clean and sell it at the pawn shop.”

  Outside, the morning’s off-and-on rain had slowed. Puddles shifted and flowed, rippled by occasional drops, gray under a lowering sky. Still, after Goldfinger’s underground burrow, it felt like freedom. I set off for the Deaconess branch library, happy to walk the six blocks in open air.

  I wanted to check my email. As usual, the operative constraints of my profession—that sounds better than paranoia, doesn’t it?—turned a mundane task into a notable pain in the ass. Casual news reading is one thing, but I couldn’t access personal accounts on any of my mobiles. Not without throwing them away afterward, because none had proxy routers installed and I didn’t much trust the carriers anyway. Home had a laptop running up-to-date anonymizing software off encrypted memory, but that was too far in the other direction.

  So I had to rely on that fading memorial to the printed word, the public library.

  Deaconess was a small, vertical, brick-faced nonentity tucked between two apartment blocks. The tables were more than half filled, and I had a half hour wait for a computer. Browsing in the periodicals—for a small branch, they had a surprisingly well-stocked collection—I noticed the Post’s headline: “I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE: AVENGER TARGETS BANKSTERS.”

  Whether from Clara or not, the story had come to life. I wondered what the mood was like on Wall Street that morning.

  I finally got a computer around eleven. Too many job seekers and people who could no longer afford high-speed home internet, so the library terminals were always crowded. But there’s no better place to borrow a connection that no one’s paying attention to, and isn’t recorded, and therefore even if subpoenaed is useless to prosecutors on fishing expeditions.

  Librarians—the final defenders of our liberty.

  I ended up with a homeless guy on one side, checking out spring fashion at neimanmarcus.com, and a junior high-schooler researching homebuilt bongs. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be there long, just a few minutes to check my various addresses.

  A hectoring email from Ganderson: “CALL ME NOW!!!!!” I guess he’d seen the papers, or maybe even read Clara’s blog. Delete. Other useless messages, delete. Too much spam. Delete, delete, delete. A short message from Johnny—him I’d call back as soon as I could.

  And finally, the one I was really looking for: “doing better. out of hosp tonite 7 they say. pick me up?? -c”

  Absolutely. I sent back a simple “yup” and signed out.

  Somehow, Clara had won me over. She was a looker, no denying, and smart, too. But this is the big city—four million women to meet every day, and plenty of them are sharp. Certainly I’d never had to go far whenever the room began to seem too empty.

  Of course, few of them ever learned about the other half of my life. Maybe it was simply that Clara had been the first to get damn near all the way in. A relief, I had to admit, not to be constantly managing the lies and evasions and misdirection that made up my interaction with the civilian world.

  But it was more than that. Clear-eyed, independent and making her own way in a difficult world—I’m not much for introspection, but Clara reminded me of, well, myself.

  Minus all the deadly force stuff, presumably.

  Leaving the library, I had a positive bounce in my step.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Akelman wasn’t an accident,” Johnny said.

  “We knew that.”

  “But it wasn’t anarchists, either. Not the kind who despise personal property, anyhow.”

  I looked up from my burrito. “You know something, don’t you?”

  “If the government has any halfway-smart investigators, they’ll be on it too.”

  “So we can count that out. What’d you find?”

  We were outside, walking through Battery Park after buying lunch at the burrito cart parked across from MTA headquarters. The rain had stopped, replaced by another fine mist that dampened the tortilla no matter how I tried to keep it sheltered in its foil. The temperature hadn’t budged past forty. The park was nearly deserted, except for soggy tourists near the ferry terminal.

  “Akelman was a commodities trader,” Johnny said. “Specializing in obscure metals. Like you said, last spring he bought up all the neodymium he could find.”

  “High-tech motors.” I scoured my memory for details from the article or two I’d read at the time. “Disk drives.”

  “And lasers.” Johnny took a huge bite but kept talking. Kind of disgusting. “And that’s all I know, except that demand was strong and growing. Akelman could have come out quite nicely, but for the Chinese.”

  “Who announced a major new find in Inner Mongolia, about the same time.”

  “Right. Suddenly, supply wasn’t tight at all. The price plummeted. Akelman lost his shirt.” He was more than half done with his burrito already. “Or his investors did, anyway. They weren’t happy.”

  “That was months ago. Long before he got hit by a car.”

  “Not so long. But Akelman sold mostly to second-tier institutional investors—midwestern pension funds, small-school endowments, that sort of thing. Bad news for them, of course, but you wouldn’t expect a manager to jump up in a rage, drive two thousand miles, and run him over.”

  I rubbed my forehead, wet from the drizzle. “What are you telling me? It really was an accident?”

  “Maybe not.” Johnny fell silent for a moment while we passed one of the few other people in the park, a man in a Burberry raincoat glaring at his iPhone. “Akelman almost w
ent under, and he seems to have made one last, big gamble, trying to win back the table.”

  “On what?”

  “Cobalt.”

  I thought about that. “If he lost so much money on neodymium, he wouldn’t have had the scratch to take a big position—and a small position wouldn’t save him. I don’t see it.”

  “That’s true if he were buying the actual metal.” He paused. “Is cobalt really a metal? I don’t even know.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Not me. The point is, cobalt was over the counter only, until a couple of years ago. The London Metal Exchange introduced futures in 2010, and there’s a liquid market. That’s where the action took place.”

  “Aha.” Futures were simply a contractual promise to buy or sell product later—not the product itself. The advantage was leverage; using borrowed money as a multiplier, Akelman would have been able to place a dangerously large bet without having to stump up the entire purchase price at the beginning.

  “So he went long on cobalt.”

  “Very, very long.”

  “How do you know this?” The exchanges report aggregate trading data at almost real-time intervals, but the names of the traders are concealed behind high walls of secrecy.

  “It wasn’t easy. They don’t want people knowing this shit.”

  He wouldn’t tell me, of course. Probably he paid someone off. We all have our sources, our cloaks of mystery.

  “Okay, whatever. Akelman had bought up a huge stake in cobalt.” I stopped. “Wait a minute, I see where this is going.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When he died, unexpectedly—did his fund really have to close it out?”

  “Looks that way. Akelman Advisers, LLC, ran on the bone. No other partners, hardly any analytic staff, just a couple of accountants, a secretary and Akelman’s nephew, who’d taken a leave of absence from Carleton College last semester. When he died, no one was around to pick up the reins. They pretty much had to shut it down, and quick. Fiduciary duty. If it were the S&P 500, maybe they could have let it ride, but the cobalt was pure speculation. A huge liability if it tanked while nobody competent was in charge.”

  “They sold it all off? At once?”

  “Yeah.” Johnny shook his head. “At the opening bell, next business day. Every last contract, in one go. It started a minipanic, and cobalt went straight off the cliff.”

  I could see that. “Algos?”

  “Mostly.” Algorithmic trading, done entirely by computers at microsecond speeds, dominated every market now. Every program was different, conjured up by secretive teams of quant PhDs, but they had broad similarities. One was an extreme aversion to unusual or unexpected developments. When the Akelman fund’s sell orders hit, hundreds of microprocessors simultaneously took that as a sign that something was wrong in cobalt, and they all must have immediately issued their own exits.

  Not so long ago, human traders, yelling at each other in the pits, would have figured it out. Or at least not been so quick to pull the trigger. But those sepia-toned days are dead history.

  “I get the picture,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Johnny nodded. “Someone was short. In the previous forty hours, someone had bought a shitload of deep out-of-the-money puts. When Akelman died, someone made a fucking killing.” He choked briefly on his carnitas, and I realized he was laughing. “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Interesting, huh?”

  “You haven’t gotten to the useful part yet.”

  “Yeah, well, as to that—”

  “Wait. You don’t know who did it?”

  “Not exactly.” He finished his burrito and crumpled the wrapping. “Same as whoever profited off York when Marlett kicked the bucket. Small transactions, through the electronic markets. Hard to track. Option trades are easier to hide anyway, and they burned a lot of brush behind them.”

  “A subpoena would pry a name out of the exchanges fast enough.”

  “Yeah? You got one of those?”

  “I mean, if the CFTC takes an interest, it won’t be secret for long.”

  “The FSA—the Exchange is in London.”

  I knew that. “Point is, I can’t believe the Riddler is whacking Wall Street whiz kids just for an edge on a long put. It’s too obvious. Trading records would lead straight back to him.”

  “The firm executing most of the trades was Whyte and Fairlee.”

  “So you did find out who it was!” I swear, Johnny could be a pain in the ass.

  “And the IB was Riverton Commodities.”

  “Well, shit, why didn’t you just say so? Game over.”

  “Not so fast. The trail stops there. The options were held in a street name.”

  “Oh.” For all record-keeping purposes, in other words, Riverton was listed as the nominee—even though the company was only serving as a broker for the actual owner. A convenience for the file clerks meant a solid wall of anonymity. “So all you’ve got is the broker.”

  “I looked Riverton up—they’re a small shop. One of thousands. You could try a phone call, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But even if you found a single entity profiting from the Akelman selloff, so what?” We passed a trash can, and Johnny tossed in his spent wrapper. “It doesn’t prove he killed anybody. It’s hardly even circumstantial.”

  Good point. “Hmm.”

  The mist had gradually turned to light rain, which was now threatening a downpour. I turned up my collar, once more wishing for a hat.

  “Still, if you’re right—” I started.

  “If?”

  “I need to know who these guys are. A pissed-off Bolshevik is one thing. Cold-blooded murder for a few points of alpha, that’s something else.”

  “Yeah.” Johnny didn’t seem to notice or mind that we were getting soaked. “It makes more sense, for one thing.”

  At the entrance to his building, we stopped under the awning before Johnny went inside.

  “You seem a little distracted today,” he said.

  “I do?”

  “Or not.” He shrugged.

  But he was right. Johnny watched the world around him far more closely than most people realized, and far more objectively than most people could manage. It might have been why he was such a good trader.

  Well, that and a totally ruthless need to win at all costs.

  “You got me,” I said.

  “What’s up? Besides the girl?”

  I just couldn’t keep secrets. Not from Johnny. I looked at him. “I have a brother,” I said.

  “No shit? Really? You’ve never mentioned him before.”

  “I didn’t know.” The letter was still in my pocket. “His name’s Dave. Separated at birth. He tracked me down through Children’s Services records.”

  “How about that.” Johnny thought about it, then grinned. “What’s he do? Sharpshooter? Pool shark? Puts out oil rig fires? With your genes—”

  “Auto mechanic. But, yeah…he races, too.”

  “I knew it. So, you talked to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  A woman in a trench coat walked out of the building, collar clutched against the rain, on her cellphone. Taxis splashed past in the street. Johnny must have sensed I didn’t feel like talking about it.

  “Hey, I forgot,” he said. “I meant to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  He laughed. “Right. That’s the question.”

  “Huh?”

  “Three of my guys came in to work with guns today.”

  “Real weapons? Don’t you have a policy on that?” I thought about the locker-room antics in Johnny’s bullpen. “No offense, but your traders seem to be at the wrong end of the impulse-control spectrum. Do you really want them waving pistols at one another?”

  “Oh, I made them lock up the guns before they started working. And they have legitimate permits. All you have to do is go down to One Police Plaza in a nice suit, show them proof of employment, and
you’re in.”

  “I hope this isn’t some kind of trend.” I zipped my wet jacket all the way up. “Life is going to be a lot more dangerous if every asshole banker who thinks he’s the Terminator now has the hardware to prove it.”

  “It’s the news, Silas. The guys are worried. They want to be ready if they end up in this avenger’s crosshairs.”

  As if Wall Street weren’t the OK Corral already. “So what do you want me to do about it—offer them a firearms safety refresher?”

  “Nah, I was hoping you could give me a recommendation.”

  “A rec—” I stopped. “Oh, Johnny. You too?”

  “They’re all carrying Glocks. The seventy-seven model or something. Is that a good one?”

  I sighed. “Seventeen. It’s not bad. You could kill your girlfriend with it, by accident, real easy.”

  It took a few minutes, but I think I persuaded him to hold off. Handguns ought to be left in the hands of professionals, not hyperactive testosterone-driven alpha dogs. Maybe Walter had the right idea—retiring to a fisherman’s shack on Little Torch Key was sounding better and better.

  “Keep on Akelman,” I said, in parting. “I need names.”

  “I’ll see what else I can dig up.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “But if you get to them first…” He hesitated. “Or if you just have some ideas even before you catch them, let me know, okay?”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Jesus, Johnny.” I shook my head. “I can’t let you front-run a murder-for-money scheme.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?”

  “I mean, if we try our best to stop them.” A thought occurred to him, and he pointed a finger at the air. “In fact, it would be better if you did prevent the next one.”

  “Of course it would.”

  “No, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Then we could just buy up the other side of their positioning trades—right before you shut them down! We make out like bandits. They lose everything, and go to jail.”