by Jace Killan
Junior motioned for Joaquin to go to his own apartment for the meeting.
“Want something to drink? Eat?” Joaquin went to the cupboard to retrieve a glass. His Latin side came out naturally. It would be rude to not offer something to guests in your home, even if you didn’t have anything and even if you didn’t like the visitor.
“Ceviche,” Junior said.
Joaquin shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t have any, but that sounds good.”
“I made some this morning. It’s in your fridge.”
So Junior had been in his apartment and no doubt snooped around.
Joaquin opened the fridge and pulled out the yellow ceramic bowl covered with plastic wrap. His mouth watered as he removed the plastic. The tomato cilantro aroma pried at his hunger. “You made this?” The colorful mix of red and green, reminded him of everything he loved about home and Christmas. He missed his mother. He looked closer. The ceviche was a mixture of cilantro, cucumber, tomatoes, yellow onion, and shrimp.
“Do I have tostada shells, too?” Joaquin asked.
“Your pantry.”
Joaquin snorted a soft laugh. He set the table for two and brought a jar of mayonnaise, tostada shells and the bowl of ceviche. Good thing Junior had made a big bowl. One tostada would only intrigue the appetite. Joaquin added a tostada shell to each plate. He slathered mayonnaise on the shells then spooned a healthy serving of ceviche on top.
“I remember eating these with my pops,” Joaquin said.
“He was a white guy, right?”
“Yeah.” Joaquin laughed. “But he loved the Mexican culture, and man, he could cook. Way better than my mom, but we’d never tell her that.”
Joaquin bit into the tostada; the juice ran down his chin. He held a napkin underneath to protect his pressed shirt and tie from any spillage.
Junior nodded, smiling with a mouthful. The guy actually smiled.
“Man, that’s good.” Joaquin took another bite.
“As good as your dad’s?”
“I’d never tell him that.” They both chuckled.
“So what’s this meeting about?” Joaquin asked, preparing the next round of ceviche tostadas.
“Guzman sent orders. Can you write this down?”
Joaquin retrieved his laptop and placed it at the side of his saucy plate.
Junior said, “Short Roxie Farms. Not a lot, maybe ten million.”
Joaquin typed in the note.
“Do a covered call on Delicious Brands.”
Joaquin had heard the company name before and typed it in the search engine. They owned a number of fast food chains.
Junior continued, “Buy a put on Good Food, at its current strike price.”
Good Food was Delicious Brands biggest competitor. They owned the burger franchise, Pete’s, among other chains. “Buy a naked put?” Joaquin said. That meant Guzman expected that the stock would drop.
Junior eyed him. “I see you’ve been studying. I don’t make the orders, just tell you what they say.”
“Okay. Anything else?” Joaquin lathered up another tostada.
“Yes. Offer thirty million for NovaBrand BioPharma.”
Joaquin remembered the biotech firm developing a treatment for anthrax. “I didn’t think that one was as...” He abandoned his commentary seeing that Junior wasn’t in the mood for analysis. “Okay.”
“And sign a Letter of Intent with Paramil Solutions. Ask for a sixty-day due diligence period.”
The company that could see through walls. Joaquin thought it a good buy, and a technology that deserved its day in the development world. “They will want a non-disclosure agreement.”
“Sign it and ask to see everything.”
By doing so, Guzman would also see everything. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. What if the technology got into the wrong hands? But the more he thought about it the less of a problem it seemed. What would a cartel boss know of radio beam technology? It was probably complicated stuff. Joaquin’s paranoia and hesitancy would get him into trouble. “What about the diabetic foot wound company?”
“Fund it. That’s a solid deal. The cancer company too.” The validation from Junior, or rather Guzman, caused a chill to crawl up his back. Joaquin was pretty good at this analysis stuff. And he expected, or at least he hoped that this new business venture wasn’t all dishonest. Real money could be made in the market everyday. He just had to know where to look.
After several more tostadas Joaquin cleaned up their ceviche brunch then made his way back to the office, full and tired. He wanted a cigarette. It had been twenty three days since he last smoked. He’d cut back on the patches too. They didn’t seem to do much for him anyway. He popped a piece of cinnamon gum in his mouth instead, overpowering then somehow blending with the cilantro aftertaste of the ceviche.
On the way across the street, he saw a white rose lying on the sidewalk. There had been a rose vendor nearby over the past few days who had probably dropped the flower. Joaquin snatched it up. Besides a crumpled petal that he removed, the rose looked to be in good shape. It would need water soon.
He carried it with him, into the building. He felt silly standing next to Bruce, the security guard in the elevator. At first he’d thought of putting it on his desk in a bottle of water. But when the elevator door opened to Northern’s lobby, he saw Kristin in a tight white dress that extenuated her red hair tied up in a secretary bun. She saw him too, flower and all. He smiled and gave it to her on his way to his office.
He didn’t wait for any chitchat. He gave no explanation. His eyes darted to the windows as he walked away. They faced the wrong direction for Junior to have seen the gesture. No doubt he’d take issue with it if he had. Joaquin glanced over his shoulder before entering his office. Kristin held up a cup hosting the rose. She smelled it and mouthed, “Thank you.”
At his desk, he researched the companies and reviewed his notes from Junior’s meeting. He knew that Guzman had plans to manipulate stock, but he couldn’t imagine what those plans entailed. He just hoped that nobody got hurt.
Or maybe Joaquin was overreacting and Guzman wanted to come clean, laundering money on the side, but making righteous cash on his dirty dollars.
Joaquin used his MacBook to Facetime his mom. He’d been away from home for nearly a month and had only spoken to her briefly a couple times.
It took him a second to make out the image filling his screen, completely dark at first then pinkish around the edges—a nostril.
“Hey, Jaqui,” Brooklyn said in a gruffly tone. She bounced away from the camera just enough for Joaquin to see her, black hair done up in ponytails. Then she quickly returned to show him an intimate view of her mouth.
“Oh, gross. Did you just lick the camera?”
“It tastes good,” she said. “Bye.” The call ended.
Joaquin shook his head chuckling to himself. He dialed again.
This time the image came across clear, though it only showed a white wall tattered with a few Beatles posters.
“Don’t look at me, I’m hideous,” Brooklyn said out of the camera’s view.
“I’m not calling you, loca. Why are you still there? Didn’t you graduate?"
“Yes. And I leave next week for Washington State. I got accepted with a full ride scholarship, I’ll have you know.”
“Is ma there?”
“What’s that? It cut out did you say congratulations? Oh, that’s nice of you. Thank you very much.”
“Congrats, really, now get mom.”
The camera spun settling on Brooklyn’s scowl. “Oh, I see. You don’t want to talk to me. Fine. I don’t care. It’s not like I sit around here all day just waiting, hoping for you to call, thinking that you want to talk with me, that you wanted to see how I am.”
Joaquin leaned into his camera. “Are you messing with me or what?”
“What?”
“Are you mess...”
“What,” she said again. “You asked, I answered.”
Joaqu
in threw his head back, suddenly exhausted from her antics. “Just get ma, please?”
“Fine!” She stomped out of the room and slammed the door, leaving Joaquin alone.
She had to be joking. Or maybe she was mental.
A minute later, Joaquin’s mom entered, smiling big.
They talked for a while of his apartment, food, the job, his nice clothing. Several questions she asked more than once. He’d need to call more often. Though he’d been locked up for years, she seemed to crave his attention and suggested several times that she missed him being away in such a big city.
Maybe she didn’t worry about him as much while in lockup. In theory he was safe. Now his world belonged to him. Little did she know that he had a three hundred pound babysitter right next door who kept better tabs on him than any warden.
Joaquin promised to call every week. She smiled at that.
“Your father would be so proud of you, Jaqui.”
He hoped so. And she didn’t know the half of what he’d really been up to.
32
Jared had been busy analyzing Joaquin’s requests that were more like demands. Mayhew gave Joaquin carte blanch on whatever he asked for.
“Do your due diligence,” Mayhew had told Jared, “but at the end of it, make sure it validates the positions he requests.”
Jared couldn’t figure out Joaquin. He seemed nice enough, and super bright though inexperienced, even rough at times. His thinking had mostly been spot on even if he didn’t have the right terminology down. The funniest exchange was when he compared stock options to buying cornbread. Joaquin was hungry to learn. Jared supposed that’s what mattered most. The kid would study and work and study some more. Jared estimated that Joaquin put in over ninety hours last week in the office, and there’d been evidence that he didn’t stop working when he got home.
Still, Jared couldn’t grasp his involvement in the firm. No, involvement wasn’t the right term—more like his power.
For whatever reason, Mayhew wanted to appease Joaquin’s people. Sure they had brought in over a half a billion, but they called more shots than any other client in the firm, maybe all of them put together. With no debate. To blindly make trades from a client’s request was reckless. To polish the due diligence data so that it matched those blind trades was asinine.
But a voice in the back of Jared’s mind told him to calm down and relax. He only worried because of what the last firm did to him. At Northern, there wouldn’t be any blowback. Mayhew was at risk, not him. The client requested it, due diligence happened, and the trades executed. If they wanted to live recklessly, how could he stop them?
Jared dialed the cell of Dr. Thomas Moore from Paramil Solutions.
“This is Tom.”
“Dr. Moore, Jared Sanderson of Northern Investments. How are you doing?”
“Good, Jared. We were excited to get your LOI.”
“Yes, that’s why I’m calling. You probably saw that it asked for 60 days due diligence and we were hoping to get moving on that end.”
“Of course. I did get your NDA back signed. Let me talk to Trevor and see where he is on getting the Dropbox set up for you.”
“That’d be great. My boss is on me, so I appreciate any attention you could give it.”
“I know how that goes. I’ll make sure you get it today. What if we schedule you a visit next week.”
“You’re in Reno?” Jared asked.
“That’s right. We can show you the technology and how it will apply in combat. We have an entire floor set up where we use the technology to play paintball. It makes for some interesting fun.”
“Sounds great. I can be there Thursday, would that work?”
“Terrific. I’ll have our secretary book you a flight and hotel.”
Next, Jared turned his attentions to some of the trades he needed to process before the markets closed. One shorted the stock of a farming conglomerate. The specificity of the trade seemed odd if not completely out of place. But Jared shrugged and executed the trade.
The following trade purchased put options of a company that owned a number of fast food brands. Jared noted that these puts were naked, meaning the fund didn’t already own the stock. If they exercised the puts, they’d need to purchase the stock first. A naked put position speculated that the stock would drop. Same as shorting a stock.
There were a dozen more trades that were straightforward stock purchases, typical transactions. A couple of these sold call options to cover the stock. A covered-call would limit upside but a good strategy to minimize risk.
Then a final transaction, the most bizarre of the day. In fact, he had never executed such a transaction in all his years of trading. Jared pulled up the price of the Euro, currently trading at $1.24.
He checked Northern’s margin availability to make sure it would cover the short position he made earlier and the one now. Mayhew had instructed Jared to short the Euro futures. Future trading was high risk, legalized gambling. To short a future was arguably the most risky of all market transactions.
The most anyone could lose after purchasing a stock would be all, one hundred percent. Shorting a stock meant selling it before buying. Someone could sell a stock trading at $10 a share, then at a later date be forced to purchase the stock. The price could rise to $100 a share or $1000 or more. In theory the transaction held infinite risk.
Throw that risk in the mix of currency future trading, and you’d have blatant stupidity. But, Jared’s job wasn’t to question how the fund spent its money. He argued his position and Mayhew told him to execute the trades, so he did. But that night he wouldn’t sleep much. His mind would worry about the risk. And he’d curse Mayhew and Joaquin and whoever they were in bed with because of the lost sleep. And then he’d find out in the morning that they all slept fine.
Reno had to be one of the ugliest places Jared ever visited. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t care for the smell of cigarette smoke. And he couldn’t grasp how anyone would throw money at something with such low odds. They’d be better off just to randomly invest in a penny stock.
Luckily, he’d only be there one night. He crashed early and got up in time to find a nice café for breakfast. After eating he made his way to Paramil’s offices. They weren’t offices exactly, but several warehouses enclosed behind a tall chain link fence.
The guard out front motioned for Jared to park next to the third warehouse where two men in jeans and flip flops invited him inside a small but air-conditioned office. The two men introduced themselves as Dr. Thomas Moore and Dr. Richard Jenkins.
“Let me see your phone,” Jenkins asked.
Jared handed it over.
“This,” Dr. Moore pointed at the huge capsule in the corner, “is what we call the radio.” It looked like a Tylenol capsule stood upright, as tall as Jared.
Jenkins returned the phone. “Here’s our app. We’ll run through a few exercises so you can get a feel for the technology.”
“Soldiers would use their phones?” Jared asked.
Moore laughed. “No. We just use it because that’s technology everyone already has. No, if the DOD licensed with us, they could integrate the app into visors or scopes, whatever works. Even Drones could use it. But the app on this phone will give you some insight as to how it would function.”
Jared followed the men into a closet lined with flack jackets, headgear, and glock pistols altered to fire paint simunition, non-lethal ammo filled with paint.
Moore spoke on a radio, “Gather in warehouse for a game. We’ve got an investor looking for a good time.”
They suited Jared up and placed his phone in a protective case that attached to his forearm.
“Like a real life Pip Boy.”
The doctors seemed to miss the Fallout 4 reference. Jared didn’t hold that against them.
After showing Jared how to use and load the glock with simunition, the doctors escorted him into a warehouse. Walls scattered the warehouse forming into makeshift rooms, though they didn’t
have any ceilings, giving it a feel of an enormous maze. Each room varied in size and layout. Most held some kind of furniture and other props, mannequins, that sort of thing.
“Make it to the other side,” Moore said. “Don’t get shot, and you win a prize.”
The app showed eight others through the warehouse, identified by pulsing red dots. He illuminated green on the screen. The others didn’t have the app so they didn’t know where he crawled from room to room.
Jared made his way to a kitchen area and ducked behind a countertop waiting for one of the red dots to enter. Jared fired three times, his heart pounding in anticipation. One nicked the guy in the arm while the other two shots hit high on the wall behind.
The adrenalin rush about sent Jared on a shooting rampage throughout the warehouse. This had to be the funnest thing he’d ever done. A real life video game. Jared should’ve gone into law enforcement or the FBI, but instead he’d decided to go into finance. How lame.
Simmering down, Jared crouched and organized his plan of attack against the remaining seven hostiles. He made his way over two rooms and hid in a closet. The app showed him that another hostile entered the room though this one only held a knife. Jared didn’t wait for a better angle, he popped out of the closet and sent two rounds into the man’s chest.
Another hostile stepped from around the corner. He must’ve heard the shots and hurried from the couple rooms over where Jared had seen him before. He fired, nearly hitting Jared who returned fire, nailing the guy’s leg.
Jared retreated back to the kitchen and crouched again behind the counter, taking note of the others. Two crept close, one coming toward each entrance into the kitchen. The one to his left came quicker, so Jared hurried to that doorway, careful to step lightly. He popped his gun around the corner and fired down the hall. A grunt told him he’d landed the shot.
He ducked there, nodding to the man in black fatigues, covered in yellow paint. There he waited until the other passed by the doorway. Jared fired three times, hitting the man twice in the legs.