Then the hacker came alive with the last post.
- Guest: A piece of advice. Get rid of Amelia’s phone as it does not seem to be the only wire on you. Pack your bags and get out of the way because you are about to receive a visit you might not like. RIGHT NOW.
Once again, the two looked at each other, without moving. Then Anders closed the computer and put it in his bag. The tension in the air was almost palpable, and Amelia panicked, looking around the room, but no one could give her an answer. Anders took her by the hand and just at that moment a big black SUV parked in front of the hotel.
‘Fortunately, we travel light,’ said Amelia, who at least had not left her bag in the room. They had all their belongings with them. Anders strode quickly towards the kitchen and out of a back door. ‘Wait here, I’ll get the car.’
‘They will see you.’
‘Don’t worry about me. It will take them five minutes to speak to the manager and invent an excuse, and then they will have to go up to our room. At that point, the game is set, they will start looking for us in the village. If I do not return in three minutes, start walking in that direction. And don’t look back.’
Amelia was going to argue, but Anders gave her his wristwatch. ‘Three minutes, then start walking.’
He pulled the hood over his head and left her; he disappeared around the corner in a flash.
Amelia stared at the watch, waiting at the back of the building; every now and then she turned toward the door with terror that someone would come out and surprise her. To hell with the three minutes, she thought, and she started running in the direction indicated by Anders.
She heard several gunshots echoing in what would otherwise be a quiet morning and began running faster. Her breath was fading, and she could feel the lactic acid building in her legs. Three hundred meters. Four hundred. Then the noise of a car approaching at high speed. She looked back and saw that it was the same car that they had used the night before; no black SUV in pursuit.
Anders stopped the car, and Amelia lost no time in jumping in.
‘What happened?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ was the only answer. They drove out of the village and headed for the countryside.
CHAPTER 28
‘Who’s in charge here?’ asked the Inspector Corrigan entering the police station in Brighton. A policeman at the entrance, engrossed in the computer, raised his head to regard his new visitor.
‘And who are you?’ he asked puffing. He still had a foot-high pile of reports to update and no time to lose, given the recent spate of petty crime.
‘Corrigan, Interpol,’ said the man taking out a badge and slapping it against the glass partition. The officer seemed to scrutinise the badge for an infinite time and then, reluctantly, took the phone.
‘Chief Superintendent Ross, please. Yes, I know … A guy from the Interpol … OK, thanks.’ After laying down the phone, the man looked up with renewed respect the for the gentleman who faced him and mumbled, ‘Follow me.’
Inspector Corrigan dragged one leg as if an old wound had begun to hurt against the humidity of the day. He sauntered behind the cop, with a slightly undulating pace. They climbed the stairs until they reached the first floor of the old brown building, and the policeman led him across corridors and through doors to Chief Superintendent Ross’ office. He knocked once and, receiving no answer, he did so a second time.
Ross shouted, ‘Come in!’ and the constable opened the door warily, knowing too well the superior officer didn’t welcome anything akin to work. Ross was on the phone and beckoned to the newcomer to sit on the chair in front of the desk. Once the conversation ended, he turned toward his guest.
‘How can I help you?’
Corrigan, who didn’t like to be kept waiting, pulled out a file from his briefcase and threw it on the desk. ‘Corrigan, Interpol. What steps you are taking to stop these guys?’
Taken aback, Ross lost no time flipping through the file. There were names, photographs, whole pages about a gang of crooks in London. He lingered for a moment on Marcus Splinter’s picture, a grizzled sixty-year-old man who could have been a 1950s actor. He had committed every sort of scam according to the information in the dossiers but had never been caught in the act. Other pictures were of seemingly ordinary people, except for a quite charming woman, Domino Gravis, and a young man, Anders Nilsson, who could pass for a model in one of those fashion magazines.
‘We’re actively looking for them,’ lied Ross, ‘but it’s no easy feat. I mean, we’re understaffed and …’
‘You’re not doing a damn thing! This is the truth. You settle for catching a few pickpockets or catching some car thief, but you let the big fish slip through the net.’
Ross, his pride wounded, threw in the towel. ‘How can we help you?’
‘They have a beachfront suite in a hotel, we believe they are trying for something big and their target is Bruno Mortcombe’s daughter, Amelia. As you know, she recently took possession of her father’s bank.’
‘Sure, I think I read something in the newspapers,’ he said trying to remember as much as possible. ‘Mortcombe Bank, the one behind Regency Square?’
‘Which, as you know, is a base for the Russian mafia for money laundering,’ continued Corrigan. Then, seeing the wonder on the Ross’s face, he asked, ‘But you don’t even know that? They launder millions under your nose, and you’re ignoring all this?’
‘For all I knew, the mob leaned on tax havens such as the Cayman …’
‘And now they’ve decided to slap you in the face right before your eyes,’ said Corrigan. ‘I need a team to work with. The primary focus is on Marcus Splinter and his clique of crooks. Here’s a warrant from Interpol that allows me to work with the local forces,’ he said passing a paper across the desk which he had removed from his inside jacket pocket. ‘Secondary objective will be to stop the Russian mafia operating in this country.’
‘How come the mafia is not the primary goal?’
‘Because to catch them will take months, if not years, while Marcus Splinter is ready for a scam in a short period. If we can convince her to cooperate, then we will also have access to the data from the bank. Trust me, Amelia Mortcombe is the key.’ And then as if the thought had slipped into his head at that moment, he added,’ Obviously you can keep the credits for this operation if we are successful.’
‘Of course … of course … thanks. Maybe we should find a meeting room as a base of operations,’ said Ross looking around. His office was a modest one and although the idea of scoring big, seeing his face in the newspapers and on TV news attracted him, the idea of spoiling his daily routine he was dreading. No, a meeting room would be ideal; he would leave Corrigan to the bulk of the work and every so often he would go and monitor the developments. Keeping a fresh and detached mind, was his justification.
He accompanied Corrigan into a meeting room with a large oval table at it’s the centre; a blackboard on the wall near the window would serve to keep notes on the case. Then he called two constables and assigned them to Corrigan. If they were able to progress, he would be able to allocate more people.
‘Well,’ said Ross, ‘from this moment onward you will be working with Inspector Corrigan on this case; I want a daily report on how things are progressing and, of course, you know that my door is open. Whatever you need, let me know. Please keep Inspector Blake up to date, also.’ And having said that, he was happier than ever to return to the comfortable space of his own office. An investigation of that magnitude was not up his alley, Ross was bureaucratic by nature. Politics was his forte, getting the budget for the following year approved, doing end-of-year staff performance reviews, managing the crime statistics. But throwing himself into an investigation, no way, not if he could avoid it.
****
Corrigan updated the two officers on the case. He drew a team profile of Marcus Splinter and hung pictures and documents to the wall, along the side of the blackboard. A secretary had meanwhile brought some f
resh coffee into the meeting room. It would take hours to bring the two officers up to speed.
‘The most important thing is to convince Amelia Mortcombe to cooperate. Go to her office and summon her for tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I will pay a visit to Marcus Splinter.’
One of two officers rose his hand tentatively, as if still in a classroom, and asked, ‘Do you think it is going to be wise to announce yourself? You’ll put them on alert.’
Corrigan snorted. ‘Of course, that’s a possibility, but if they know we are breathing down their necks, we raise the tension, we force them to evaluate quickly instead of taking time to plan. And decisions taken by impulse are a recipe for disaster. No, we have to keep them under pressure.’ He poured a cup of steaming coffee, drank a sip, and placed his mug on a folder. In retracting his hand, a finger slammed against the cup handle toppling the contents across photographs and documents. ‘Jesus Christ!’ swore Corrigan. The two officers rushed to help with several paper towels, trying to stop the big patch of coffee that was spreading on the table. Several documents were irrevocably stained.
‘I have copies on my computer,’ said Corrigan as if to apologise. ‘OK, thanks for your help, I’m going to print new ones. You can go to Amelia Mortcombe in the meantime.’
The two officers stood up and left the office.
CHAPTER 29
Tim Whitley did not waste time. For half the afternoon he had called friends, implored favours, promised the impossible, but in the end, he had succeeded. A friend of a friend, for a fee, was ready to give up his reservation at one of the most renowned restaurants in Mayfair. In certain places, you had to call at least one month in advance, especially when it came to a two Michelin star, but he managed to succeed. Bringing Domino to an ordinary restaurant would have been a personal failure. The woman was charming, but if what Logan had said was true, she was also an ideal partner to enter into his new venture with fresh funds.
He sent a text message to Domino with the address of the restaurant and briefly imagined a life full of beautiful women, luxury yachts, Michelin star restaurants around the world, and a factory to make money in New Jersey, that would work for him twenty-four hours a day.
****
Whitley arrived early at the restaurant; he gave a fifty-pound note to the waitress to ignore the sudden change of names on the reservation. He also made arrangements to accompany Domino to his table when she arrived.
He ordered a bottle of Laurent Perrier Rosé. It was not the most expensive wine on the list, but the Perrier was for him the symbol of success. It was what Aunt Mary drank. The uncles had made money doing business in oil fields, having started with a simple candle factory. Over the years the company had flourished, and new contracts followed suit, the first oil deal had been to build a plant in the Mediterranean, and then others followed. At Christmas, Aunt Mary always carried a couple of crates of Laurent Perrier when she came to visit her family and the driver took care to transport them from the Bentley and bring them into the house. When Whitley had to celebrate something, he always did it with a bottle of Laurent Perrier Rosé, he didn’t care if there were other more expensive wines.
Domino arrived about ten minutes later, and the waitress led her up to Whitley’s table, who stood up upon the arrival of the guest.
‘I like this place,’ said Domino looking around. The restaurant, Amaze, was stylishly decorated, with dark wood and cream-coloured tables. It had the right atmosphere for Londoners who appreciated good food and were not afraid to spend more than necessary to prove it.
‘It seemed appropriate. If we do business together in the future, I would like to discuss it over lunch in a place like this.’
They both chose the tasting menu, ten small dishes allowing the guests to appreciate the chef’s style and why he deserved his Michelin stars.
‘Tim, there are things that I do not understand what you’re doing with this new company in the United States.’
‘Understandable, it’s not that simple. What are your concerns? I will try to explain to the best of my modest abilities.’
‘How did you start this venture, to begin with?’ asked Domino.
‘About the business in the USA? Simple, there are more and more stock exchanges now. There more stock exchanges, the more probabilities to find arbitrages.’
‘That would be, buy on a market at a lower price and sell at a higher value on another,’ said Domino, more to explain it to herself than to her dinner companion.
‘Exactly.’
‘But then these arbitrages cancel themselves out,’ she continued.
‘That is also correct.’
‘What you said today intrigued me when you said you try to work on orders from large investors. That is where I got lost. The market is the market, how do you know when one of those big investors place an order? I mean, many orders arrive every hour on the market, and nobody could possibly know who they belong to.’
‘In principle you’re right, no one should know. But investors must follow certain parameters. At first, they are investing in the bank’s dark pools, then they have to buy first on the market where the price is more favourable and finally on the other markets.’
‘What is a dark pool?’
‘Banks can buy and sell shares on the stock market, but they have to pay commission. So, they created these little domestic, in house stock markets. Let’s say a client A of the bank wants to sell 100 shares of Apple and client B in the same bank wants to buy it. There is no need to enter the order on the stock market. The bank matches these orders inside their dark pool, and they don’t have to pay commission.’
‘Seems beneficial, but I don’t see what use it has for someone else,’ said Domino.
‘The banks want to make money, and, in time, they opened these dark pools to the outside world, to those like us who do electronic transactions. This allows us to see in advance who enter orders. Then there are other things happening behind the scenes. Everyone thinks about electronic transactions as if they were immediate. People see on the screen, for example, Facebook’s stock at 107.1 dollars and they think that that’s the value of the share at that moment.’
‘And isn’t it?’
‘No, far from it. There are always changes, minimal fluctuations. Computers manage the stock exchange nowadays: the human eye can’t see beyond one-tenth of a second, a blink of an eye, but in the computer world we work with milliseconds, even lower values. In that world, it doesn’t matter what the human eye can see, computers are exchanging information at a speed which is difficult to understand. A millisecond makes all the difference in this world. Also, the data must travel from the bank to the stock exchange.’
‘But aren’t those transactions instantaneous?’
‘Far from it. Our data centre is right next to the building which houses the New Jersey Exchange. Orders coming from banks from New York always take a fraction of a second longer. Over time we’ve mapped all banks. We know how long it takes them to go to the NYSE, to the BATS, or any other markets. On each of the markets, each operator comes with a different delay, even though it’s milliseconds. It is all we need to beat them to the punch. Sell them what they want to buy and collect shares at lower prices even before their order has come into play.’
‘So, aren’t you exposed by buying all those shares in advance of an order?’
‘That’s one of the tricks. Finishing the day with zero shares, what we buy and what we sell must balance at the end of the day. Maybe we transact a million shares in one day but by balancing what we buy and sell, what remains is only the gain. Keep in mind that we don’t buy physical actions, there isn’t an exchange of shares on paper. It’s all electronic. So, if you buy a million shares of Hewlett Packard and then resell them on the same day, nothing is owed. You pay if you lose or gain if you win.’
Domino was not yet convinced. ‘But there is always the risk of chasing a wrong order, maybe you think there shall be a million shares ordered, and there isn’t.’
‘But why are the banks are not doing the same thing?’ insisted Domino.
‘Because they are greedy. Banks like to earn money, not spend it. Their programs to handle these things are slow and obsolete, created over time. Computer programs that changed so much over the years that they became inefficient; they should throw them away and write new ones. This involves investments they don’t want to make. If it works, and believe me when I tell you that banks still make a tonne of money, why change it? We have young people, Indian mathematicians who create amazing algorithms, young Russian programmers who care little about the money, but they take these challenges as if they were chess games, hackers who know everything about how to optimise systems but who wouldn’t be considered as employees by a bank. We reinvest most of the money, and once a year we give some nice bonuses to our own people. But then comes the time where we have to go full speed ahead. If we have enough liquidity, the real money will come, hundreds of millions. We’ll do it with or without you, even if with your capital things could be much easier and faster.’
The waiter arrived with the first course. The bottle of Laurent Perrier was already empty, so Whitley ordered another.
Domino, for once, saw the chance of making money, the amount of money that could sort her out for a lifetime. She could forget the everyday scams, running from the police, avoiding entire neighbourhoods for fear of being recognised by one of the scammed.
No, this Tim Whitley had bright ideas and a plan, it was just a matter of convincing Price about the deal of the century. Tim was also good looking despite his age, and Domino decided that perhaps they should remain friends after all. Just in case. He was a bit tipsy at that point, but Domino knew all the tricks to get him to stop drinking and get him to invite her to his house. Making sure that Whitley thought it had been his idea in the first place. A bonus, given that they were about to become partners in that enterprise.
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