Clawback (6 page)

It’s not like I’ve heard many elevator pitches, but even to me that sounded weak. “How’s it going?”

“Slow.” Clara sighed, and looked directly at me. Her eyes were an unusually dark blue, and unblinking. “Real slow.”

“I think I’m getting the picture. Marlett’s your ticket to fame, right?”

“One good story is all it takes.”

“And Marlett’s got it all.”

She nodded. “Scandal, greed, a spectacular Wall Street crash and burn—and then the guy’s
assassinated
? By some sort of avenging ninja? Reporters would
kill
for this opportunity.”

“So to speak.”

She smiled. “I’m three-fourths there, because I’ve been working it so long already. If I get the entire story…that’s it, I’m
made
.”

We’d both finished our plates. The coffee cups were cold. Amir was in the kitchen, yelling cheerfully in some foreign language at the dishwasher, who kept interrupting him.

“I’m not part of your scoop,” I said. “I had some small business
with Marlett, and it wasn’t interesting at all.” Clara started to talk, and I held up my hand. “No, I know you don’t believe me, even though it’s true. So here’s what we can do. I’ll help you dig up the real dirt.”

“And in exchange, I leave you out.”

“You don’t want to waste your time looking at me.” There was another entendre there, which I tried to ignore. “Just by convincing you not to, I’m helping you close in on the Pulitzer.”

“Pulitzer? That is so dead tree.”

“Well, then, synflood–level traffic monetization. Whatever you want.”

“Okay.” Clara held out her hand. This time her grip seemed warmer, and I admit I held it a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary. “Deal.”

“Good,” I said. “What’s it called?”

“What?”

“Your blog.”

“I like to think of it as a journal. ‘Blog’ sounds amateurish.”

“Sorry.”

“
Event Risk
.”

A phrase from bond-prospectus boilerplate. “I like that.”

“Thanks.”

I dropped a twenty on the table and we scooted out of the booth.

“Stay in touch,” she said.

“You, too.” I gave her the number of another of the so-far unused prepaid cellphones. “Those other digits—don’t use them.”

“Why not?”

“They won’t be working.”

“Uh-huh.” She gave me a knowing smile and started out.

“Hey,” I said. “I hope I hear before you write about it.”

“About what?”

“Whatever happens next.” I held the door open for her. “It’s sure to be interesting.”

“A
bandit,” said Johnny, generously giving me about a third of his attention. It was next morning, early in the business day. His eyes stayed on the five monitors—no, six, he’d added another flat-panel since I last visited—that were streaming market data, news, and blogosphere rants across his desk. “You were right—it was a great tip. And some fuckwad figured it out before me.”

“No way. Someone out there’s smarter than
you
?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? And early yesterday morning, several million richer, too.”

“I was thinking maybe you’d kick me back a finder’s fee.”

“Hah.” He looked up. “Marlett was on spec, huh?”

“Never mind.”

Johnny and I go way back. High school, believe it or not. He was baseball, I was football, we sat in the same AP classes—though that wasn’t saying much in small-town New Hampshire. His ticket out was UVM and a Wharton MBA. While I was learning how to jump out of airplanes and field-strip a .50-cal, Johnny was clawing his
way from entry-level i-banking to, eventually, running his own hedge fund.

Who made the better choice is a topic for another day.

I’d come down to his Beaver Street offices, where he oversaw a floor-to-ceiling panorama of the East River skyline, a roomful of twentysomething traders, and three billion dollars of alternative-asset allocations. The traders all seemed to have ADHD. Johnny’s style was incremental: he could go in and out of positions in less than thirty seconds. Breakfast and lunch were catered every day, but the food mostly sat around getting cold, and the only consistent nourishment seemed to be cans of Red Bull and Jolt.

In these days of algorithmic technical strategies, it was all quaintly retro.

“I thought you said Marlett was down to fumes.” I tried to get comfortable in the cheap plastic chair Johnny provided his guests.

“He had one last deal going, it turns out—the York Hydro acquisition.” Johnny looked almost in pain. “I can’t believe I forgot about it.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Canadian electric generation. The Conservatives went on a privatization binge a few years ago. Carlyle and those guys snapped up the good ones, but some of the smaller utilities went straight to market—just in time for the world economy to collapse. No more liquidity, so they need a new buyer, bad. Marlett was actually on to something.”

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.”

L
eaving 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 big 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