Dollar Down

by Sam Waite

  It never had been rock.

  Still, there was that mustard seed of optimism. The messages at least might help Oddsson with his legal issues. I copied each onto a disk as I dug for the missing link, the mutation from tease into threat.

  One message may not have been either. Only snippets were recoverable. I doubted that Sabine's under-the-hood utility would have been able to find it at all.

  "...stolen samples...problem is what to do now...taped under the bedroom bureau...and the trades. Getting close. Don't..."

  The date was also recoverable. The message was received the day before Trevor disappeared, which meant it was sent after his mails had turned nasty. Was he making good on his threat to harm Sabine's career, accusing her of theft? Getting close to what? Don't do what?

  I jotted the message on paper and overwrote its remains with 0s three times. No one else would be reading it. Then I went to find Oddsson and give him the "good" news. Trevor had in fact sent threatening messages. Oddsson wanted a copy of my drive, so he would know what I had taken off Sabine's computer. When I left, he took my hand in both of his and congratulated me on a job well done. Not even my stated opinion that this was not yet a closed issue damped his gratitude.

  When I got back to Sabine's flat, I had a fax from Burroughs that described a foreign exchange trade. Considering what I'd learned from Oddsson and what I found on Sabine's computer, it might have been better to stop chasing financial rainbows. But curiosity had already sunk its claws.

  I reread the fax and then added a couple of lines to it.

  "Check the figures, Mumby. We know what you're doing and when you're going to do it."

  I sent a copy of the fax to McNulty with instructions for him to break into Mumby's house again and pin it to his wall.

  I still had Trevor's key. I took an evasive route just in case anyone was tracking me. The place was dark when I let myself inside. Nothing had been moved that I could see. The message on Sabine's computer had read "taped under the bedroom bureau." I went upstairs. When I turned on the light, I had a vision of Sabine standing there, blushing, holding a bracelet with an Arabic inscription. I felt under the bureau, then pulled it away from the wall and laid it on its side to check the bottom. There was nothing but a faint residue of adhesive near the right front corner. I imagined that Sabine's bracelet had been taped at that spot. She could easily have reached under the bureau and pulled off the tape just before I walked in on her. But why hide a bracelet that way, unless it was more than it seemed.

  I could ask Oddsson about it, but Alexandra might also know. I called. "How about dinner?"

  She said OK.

  We met at the same place where I'd commented on the faint imperfection of her skin. I vowed to leave her beauty out of the conversation this time, but it was difficult. She wore scant traces of makeup for the first time I'd seen. The thing that stirred was not the enhancement of her beauty—she didn't need it—but rather the tacit statement that she cared to impress. She might have put it on earlier for another reason. The gloss on her lips looked freshly applied.

  If I'd known, I'd have worn a tie, combed my hair. Mick "The Dapper" Sanchez.

  "Here," Alexandra laid an envelope on the table. "Sabine's secretary told me you asked her to look for any correspondence between her and Trevor. This is what she found."

  "Thanks, I saw Oddsson today. He let me check Sabine's computer at their home."

  "He told me he had already done that."

  "I looked at deleted files. They wouldn't show up ordinarily. I almost wish I hadn't."

  "Why?"

  "He said that Trevor had threatened Sabine. Some of the messages I found from Trevor support the accusation. That's a hard concept for me to deal with."

  I had expected a commiserating "me too" from Alexandra. All she did was nibble at her paté.

  When she spoke, her voice was scarcely audible. "Hard to deal with, yes, but I can't say I'm shocked. There was tension between them for a long time, or at least it seemed like a long time. Two or three weeks, I guess."

  "I thought tension was normal, clash of ideas, that sort of thing."

  "Professional tension is normal." Alexandra's frown cut thin lines around her eyes. "This was different. There was an aura of meanness that you don't normally sense with professional differences. I'm not saying I expected anything like this to happen. It's just that in retrospect, it is not inconceivable to me. The way Sabine lived her life—" Alexandra's eyes were again hazel lasers, burning into mine. "You could almost say it was inevitable."

  Deep cut, Alexandra. Let's take this someplace else. "Did you and she talk about personal things?"

  "Of course. We were friendly. I didn't mean to imply otherwise."

  "The reason I ask, is about a piece of jewelry. Did you ever see or did she ever mention a blue-green bracelet. It had an Arabic inscription on it."

  "I certainly do, it was a recent acquisition that she was quite proud of. It's hundreds of years old and should have been in a museum, but she wore it as a simple accessory. Why do you ask?"

  "There was an inscription."

  "Yes, it was a line from a poem about the Alhambra, supposedly written by a prince for his lover."

  "And Sabine wanted to know the words."

  "She knew the words. She told them to me. I don't recall exactly, but the line was something about moonlight shining through latticework."

  "Trevor told her?"

  "Trevor? Why would he know?"

  I kept the circumstances of that supposition to myself. "She showed it to me and said she had lent it to Trevor to translate. He was studying Arabic."

  "Trevor didn't speak Arabic. If he was studying the language, it must have been a recent endeavor. He'd have to be quite a genius to translate the inscription, don't you think. As I say, it was hundreds of years old and was a line from a poem. That sounds to me rather like an inexperienced English conversation student translating Chaucer."

  Tough task, almost as tough as trying to figure out why Sabine had lied about the bracelet.

  I wanted to drop this topic cold. Despite my earlier vow to stick to business, I told Alexandra that her eye shadow enhanced the range of her iris's shifting hues, between emerald green and golden brown. She seemed genuinely pleased that I'd noticed. Mission accomplished. We managed to get through the rest of dinner with talk of Renaissance art and sixties movies. She thought the tough guys in film noir were sexy.

  I flexed a pec and tried not to smile much.

  We said good-bye outside the restaurant and walked away in separate directions. After a few paces, I glanced over my shoulder. When I did, our eyes met.

  She'd gone from hard ice to lukewarm and chatty. The backward glance was almost flirtatious. I can't say I minded, but it was puzzling. Maybe she'd just had a smooth day at the office.

  Chapter 15

  Voice mail from McNulty was waiting for me at Sabine's flat. I called him back.

  "What's up?"

  "Mumby, he's through the roof."

  "The fax?"

  "I reckon. I was watching his house. As soon as he got in, he made a call to someone named Tom. I don't know who that is. Either Tom was out of reach, or he just wasn't answering his phone. Mumby went into a rage, screaming for Tom to pick up. Your man has a foul mouth when he's angry."

  "Did he ever make contact?"

  "No, but he left a couple of messages. One said to call back immediately. The other said to meet him tomorrow after work. He said he would call Tom's office to confirm. I have the time and the place. Do you want me to be there?"

  "I want us both to be there."

  It might have been possible to catch an early flight or train, but I didn't want to risk it. The surest way to get to London in time was to drive. I dropped a razor, toothbrush and change of clothes into a sack, tossed it into Sabine's car and took off for the Chunnel.

  The highways were relatively clear this time of night. I looked through Sabine's music collection. It was a varied selecti
on, as I would've guessed. One CD stood out, Andre Segovia's rendition of "Capricho Diabolico," pristine clarity of classic guitar, perfect for a night drive and for focusing on creative mischief.

  It was early afternoon when McNulty arrived at my hotel. He knew London a lot better than I did, so we decided that I would go straight to the meeting place, while he waited outside Mumby's office. He would follow the banker in case there was a change of plans.

  There were none. McNulty showed up at the dark-wood paneled pub in central London. We made eye contact, and he nodded toward the banker. He took a seat close to Mumby's booth. I stayed at the bar near the door. A few minutes later, a man in his mid thirties joined Mumby. They kept their heads close together and held their hands beside their mouths when they talked. McNulty had sat close to try to hear, but he wasn't likely to get much.

  Mumby's guest was the first to leave the table. I headed toward the door in front of him and walked slowly. Without warning, I spun around as though I'd forgotten something. We bumped hard into each other. "Sorry, are you OK?" My hands were on his shoulders to steady him. More apologies, hands down his arms, then back to his shoulders.

  "I'm all right." There was a snarl to his voice. He kept trying to swat my hands away, too much touching from a strange man. McNulty brushed past and was out the door. I stepped back to let our boy leave, and then went to the bar to pick up a newspaper I'd purposely left there.

  Outside the pub, McNulty was shuffling at a drunken pace. He hadn't gotten far when he looked back and saw me headed his way. He was good. I didn't even see the drop, but I did see the black wallet on the sidewalk. I picked it up and opened it. A driver's license belonged to Tom Hall, so did some business cards. I took one and hoped Tom wouldn't miss it. First mailbox I came to, I stuffed in the wallet, which at fast count contained more than two hundred quid. I didn't need it now, but the fact that it was there made me feel more secure. If things didn't work out with investigations, at least I was learning a new trade, pickpocket assistant.

  I took the Underground back to my hotel. McNulty was waiting in the lobby.

  "Who's Tom?" was the first thing he said.

  "Last name's Hall. His card says he's the director of IT security for LIFFE."

  "Information technology chief, a wanker."

  "Yeah, why?"

  "He isn't a trader."

  I handed McNulty the business card.

  "He's young to be a director," he said. "He also has an odd job, doesn't he, considering the circumstances. I pinned your note to Mumby's wall, and he goes amok. It describes a foreign exchange trade, but he calls a computer specialist. Why would he do that? I had expected Tom to be a trader. No fit, is there?"

  "There might be. If you knew all the backdoors to the system, how much could you mess around with things? "

  "There's got to be safeguards to keep some loose cannon from rigging the market." McNulty said.

  "I don't know what they are, but you must be right. The likelihood he could overwrite real data and make the dollar appear to trade at a set level must be zero. But what if he could do something else, something more subtle."

  "Like what?"

  "Good question. There a pub around here? I need to loosen up a creative streak."

  McNulty pointed out that we were in London, which made the existence of a nearby pub not a likelihood but inevitable. We ordered pints of bitter. I drained off half my glass, before the brew started working its magic.

  "What if he wrote a program that could affect the timing of trades, so that they were executed in a sequence that would move the dollar in the direction he wanted. Stockbrokerages used to do something like that. Before the SEC cracked down, they regularly traded customer accounts ahead of or behind trades for their house accounts to maximize profits."

  "You think one lad can sit at home and write something like that?"

  "I read about a guy who did just that, except he wrote a program for high-frequency stock trading. He tested it, then gave the program money to play with and started chalking up earnings. I'm not a programmer, but one strikes me as no less complicated that the other."

  "He'd get caught."

  "What if he had a contingency? Foreign exchange is the biggest market on the planet. He scores and hightails it."

  "With Interpol all over his backside."

  "South America isn't a bad place for someone with more money than he could spend in a lifetime."

  McNulty didn't look impressed. "What's the tie-in with Paris?"

  I grunted and finished the pint. For a fabulously rich man with connections, even Venezuela could be a good spot. So could China. Both were safe from Interpol.

  "Do you think you could track Hall and bug his home?"

  McNulty's laugh was low. His eyes sparkled.

  On the drive back to Paris, I called Burroughs and told him the effect his fax about the trade had on Mumby. I also told him about Tom Hall. "Do you know him?"

  "No, but I probably know someone who does. I'll ask around. You said this guy Mumby was nervous about the fax. If something's going on, it would be fun to see Hall's face when he realizes I'm looking for him."

  "You said you didn't know him."

  "I don't. He knows me. Everybody in the trade knows me." He chuckled. "I invented the PetaGrid. So long, Sanchez."

  The PetaGrid was still a mystery to me, but I was glad Burroughs was on my side.

  When I got back to Sabine's flat, I went through her correspondence from Trevor. A lot of it was work related, but there were a few messages that were personal. None were threats similar to those I'd found on Sabine's computer, but one referred to Trevor's home near Monaco. The note invited Sabine to visit.

  I called Oddsson and asked to meet. He said anytime at my convenience. For me that meant immediately. A lawyer was with him when I arrived. I gave them the messages. After they looked through them, the lawyer spoke first.

  "I'd like to ask you for an affidavit regarding your investigation. Mr. Oddsson is still a suspect. The case against him is weak, but problematic. Mr. Oddsson can easily prove he was away when Ms. Duveau died. However, there was speculation that he might have hired someone.

  "The evidence you've gathered, I believe, will shift the focus of the investigation toward Trevor Jones, a spurned suitor. We turned over Ms. Duveau's computer to the police and they have determined that the notes were sent from Jones' computer."

  I personally could understand why a man might try to woo Sabine away from Oddsson, but I had difficulty seeing Trevor as a murderer. Still, the matter of extreme jealously, could not be ignored. "I'll give you an affidavit."

  "Good," the lawyer said. "Alexandra Roussel has also agreed. I'm glad that we will be avoiding the necessity for subpoenas." The lawyer's lips wriggled into a take-the-apple-Eve smile.

  Oddsson clapped his hands. "Let's have a drink." He pushed the cork out of a champagne bottle and poured three flutes. Raising his, he thanked me graciously.

  "That's all? Just like that?" I wanted to make sure.

  Oddsson blinked.

  The lawyer answered. "Mr. Oddsson can get back to his life. I would call that a successful conclusion."

  "That's good, but what about identifying the murderer?"

  "I think that's been done," the lawyer said. "Unfortunately, the weight of the killer's guilt, his suicide, has deprived the courts of judicial satisfaction."

  "Geir, what do you say?"

  He blinked twice. "You've seen the notes, Mick. He threatened her."

  Toward the end, the notes were scary. I had to admit that. "Still, there might be more to it. I've uncovered some things that bother me."

  Oddsson stopped blinking. His eyes had the same quizzical glint they had when I first saw him. "What sort of things?"

  Some he already knew, but I started from the top anyway. I told him about the Chinese paper on bitumen and the mystery bacteria that eats sulfur. About Trevor's foreign exchange trade and about Mumby. I didn't mention Bizet or Burroughs, but the lo
ose ends were evident.

  The lawyer asked coldly if I was angling for an extension on my fees. If I pushed he would—

  Oddsson waved him to silence.

  "Avenging angel," I said. "Remember?"

  "What do you want?"

  "According to Trevor's projections, the dollar crashes hard in ten days. That's how long I want. Some things are already in motion. I can't say what exactly. It would betray confidences."

  "In motion?" Oddsson's eyes were afire with anticipation. "And you think these things might have something to do with Sabine's death?"

  "Possibly, but right now I have no idea what it might be."

  "Is there a game afoot that I should know more about?" Oddsson's smile was almost predatory.

  I nodded, glad that he was a quick study.

  "In that case, you'd better have your ten days, hadn't you." He flashed a glance at the lawyer.

  Good-bye, gentlemen.

  * * * *

  I was going over copies of the correspondence from Trevor again, when Alexandra called. I hoped she was making good on her promise to invite me to dinner. Not the case.

  "I think someone broke into my apartment."

  "Have you called the police?"

  "No, I can't find anything missing. I don't know what I would tell them. My door was unlocked when I got home. I don't specifically remember locking it, but I've never left it open before. There are," her voice caught, "small things that seem out of place. It's just a feeling, nothing I can define. After what's happened, I can't...I'm terrified, Mick."

  It sounded like she had been crying. Maybe she had just been absentminded and forgot to lock the door, but that didn't change the fact that she was frightened. "Do you want me to come over?"

  My question was followed by a long pause. "Mick, would you mind if I packed some things and stayed there for a while. I've visited Sabine before. I know she has an extra room. I wouldn't get in your way. I usually leave early and get back late. If you prefer, I'll eat out."