One Child (4 page)

Chapter

5

Kandahar, Afghanistan

The hunger never left. Never.

Kadir Hussein shuffled through the market, his mangled hand tucked under his tattered robe. His stomach contracted and he tasted acid in his back of his mouth. He swallowed it back and felt the burn in his throat. Three days without a proper meal was too long. Even for a belly used to going empty. Any food he had earned or begged had gone to the children. Aaqila and Danah had eaten and slept well, but Halima had refused to eat any rice or naan bread until her younger sisters were finished. Only scraps were left. Not enough to nourish a growing eleven year old girl.

Today would be better. Kadir had a chance to work and the pay was good. A crew from the Iranian Red Crescent was working on a new well in a small square located in the oldest section of Kandahar. They needed men to move bricks and mortar through the labyrinth of narrow streets by hand. They were paying three American dollars a day. More than he could hope to earn sweeping stalls in the market. Enough to buy some onions, rice and bread for the evening meal. Maybe there would be some for him after his daughters had eaten.

Maybe.

Halima was watching her sisters and he was confident they would be fine for the day by themselves. The Taliban never entered the town anymore. At least, not in force. Kadir knew they were among them, walking about with the impunity that came with having Pashtun heritage and speaking the language. It was almost impossible to tell who was Taliban until they let it be known. And that was usually by violence or cruelty. He didn't care if they shared the same street or the same water fountain. He only cared if they hurt him or his children.

When that happened, the hate surfaced.

It burned deep inside him, a simmering fire that would never be extinguished. Time healed some wounds, but not all. And there was one wound in him that would never fade into the past. It was far too deep, and penetrated beyond muscle and bone. It resided in a tiny space in his mind. The spot reserved for things too horrible - too unthinkable - to ever happen. Except to him. And countless thousands of other Afghans.

God how he hated the Taliban. But it hadn't started with them. It had started with the Russians.

Kadir rounded a corner, his robe brushing against a mud wall that had seen countless invaders enter Afghanistan. And the same number leave. He was only fourteen when the Russian army descended on Kabul and the nightmare began. In his mind, nothing worse could happen. He could still taste the diesel fumes from the tanks as they rumbled down his street, and when he closed his eyes to sleep, the soldiers were everywhere, their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders and cigarettes dangling from their lips.

They took what they wanted. At first it was the nicest homes and newest cars. But there was only so much luxury in Kandahar and after three years they were at his father's door. The family house held little of value. His father was a merchant in the Kabul Darwaza, a market filled with trinkets and second hand goods, and they lived a simple life. The soldiers didn't care. They smashed open the cupboards and kicked the furniture into worthless piles of splintered wood. They grabbed the meager bits of food and shattered the solitary window. When his brother told them to stop, they beat him with their rifle butts until he was unconscious and bleeding on the floor. He watched, his fists clenched, wanting to rip a rifle from their hands and kill them. His father sensed his thoughts and silently shook his head. Resistance meant death.

Three weeks after the first visit the soldiers returned. This time they simply took his father and left. One of their neighbors, a man who was in the favor of the commanding officer, discreetly inquired into the disappearance. He was told they had taken the elder Hussein to Pul-i Charkhi prison near Kabul. No charges were pending, but he was being held in a twelve by twelve cell with twenty-five other men. None of them were charged with a crime, but punishment was being doled out. Slowly, by some sort of diseased attrition, they vanished. One at a time. The jailer opened the cell door and called out a name. The man walked out the door and didn't come back. To the men inside, it was a sign that freedom was possible. That if their name was the one that passed over the jailer's lips, they would feel the sun on their face. That was true, but only for a moment. Then a single bullet in the back of their skull ended the misery.

Kadir had no idea how long his father survived in the dank, horrid space. It didn't matter. He had died at the hands of the Russians, and for that, he despised them. His older brother had left the family home and joined the mujahedeen before his father died and he too found a shallow grave in the cold, unforgiving hills. But the day the Russian soldiers raped and beat his mother to death was the grimmest day of his life. They had taken so much, and left nothing.

He gave thanks to Allah every day for the horrors his native country had inflicted on the Russian armies. Extreme temperatures, rugged and unforgiving terrain, and the incessant attacks by the mujahedeen. But of all the hardships that Afghanistan could throw at the Russians, their slow and inevitable slide into drug addiction was the worst. Hashish, laced with heroin and opium, cracked open the door, and once the soldiers had tasted the high of Afghanistan's poppy-derived drugs they couldn't get enough. It dulled the drudgery and enhanced the danger. It was no surprise to anyone when the Soviets turned their tanks around and slunk back to their own borders in February of 1989. But ten years of war had left a terrible scar - one and a half million Afghans dead and six million in exile.

Kadir's father was one of the faceless dead.

Three years of relative calm slipped by, then Kabul fell to the mujahedeen and that triggered two years of civil war. The country was tearing itself apart at the seams. Kabul was constantly under siege from one faction or another. Once the capital fell, the US and its allies forgot about the decade of misery the people had suffered under the Soviets and turned their backs on the Afghans. The country was left on its own to struggle with its demons. To Kadir, life with or without the Russians wasn't much different. The warlords who controlled the southern third of the country were merely other violent dictators sitting atop broken thrones. They exacted a heavy toll on the locals, and Kadir learned quickly to keep his head low and his voice even lower.

But neither the Russians nor the warlords could have prepared him for the brutality of the Taliban. They were in a class of their own when it came to hateful behavior. Kadir focused on the dusty road at his feet and forced any thought of the Taliban from his mind. Today was a good day and the black-turbaned monsters deserved no part of it.

The Old City was crowded, street vendors hawking everything from mobile phone cards to opium poppy scrapers. The odor of spicy
karai
was strong, the mutton and chili mixture available on almost every street corner. None of the vendors paid Kadir any attention. His shalwar kameez had frayed sleeves and was a glaring testament to his lack of money and low position in society. At one corner, three members of the Afghan National Police leaned against one of the low, stone buildings and he averted his gaze. They sucked on their cigarettes and watched him with disinterested eyes. He reached the square and walked tentatively across to an Iranian attired in western dress. The man smiled as Kadir approached.

"Kadir?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Can I see your identity card, please?" the man asked in fluent Pashto. His black hair was cut short and the Iranian Red Crescent insignia was embroidered on his shirt.

Kadir fumbled with his identification, keeping his right hand under his robe. He finally found it and passed it over. The man surveyed it closely, then handed it back.

"You are forty-five years old?" he asked. Kadir nodded and the man said. "Maybe that is too old for this work."

"There is nothing bad with me. I can work. Very hard."

"What's wrong with your hand?" he asked.

"Nothing," Kadir said. He showed the man his good hand.

"The other one. The one inside your shirt." He pointed. "Show me."

Kadir pulled his right hand from his shirt so it was visible.

The Red Crescent worker stared for a moment, then said, "How did this happen?"

The memories of the incident flooded his brain. The tall, heavily-bearded Talib accusing him of stealing an orange from a vendor's stall. He, muttering that he had done nothing wrong. That he was not a thief. The Talib had simply smiled and told him that he could take his punishment now or in the soccer stadium on Friday. Kadir knew that option. Every Friday afternoon thieves and adulterers were ushered onto the field in front of a somber crowd. The thieves were the lucky ones. They had one hand sliced off with a saber. The adulterers - almost always women - were not so fortunate. Screaming their innocence, they were put to death by volleys of stones thrown by young Taliban fighters. That most of them had been raped was an irrelevant detail.

Kadir told the Talib he would take the punishment on the spot. He put his hand on the rough stone road and closed his eyes. He felt the rifle butt hitting his hand, his fingers, his wrist. Crushing the bones into dust. He wanted to scream in pain but knew that one sound and he would die. He thought of his father and tried to remember his face. It had been fifteen years since the Russians had taken him from the house and dragged him through the dark streets to prison. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't conjure up an image. Only blackness.

Any tears he cried that day were not from the savage mutilation of his hand. They were tears of sorrow for the unjustified murder of his father.

Kadir looked down at his hand. "An accident," he said to the Iranian. "It was caught in a piece of machinery."

"Can you carry bricks?" the man asked.

"Yes," Kadir replied confidently. "For hours, without a break. I am very strong and work hard."

Kadir forced a brave face as the Iranian studied him. Three US dollars hung in the balance. A week of food for his children. Seconds ticked by. A fly landed on his face but he didn't flinch.

"Of course you can carry bricks," the man said with a gentle smile. He turned to a Pashtun standing to one side. "Kadir will be working with us today. Show him what to do."

"Thank you," Kadir said. He felt the tears coming and willed them to stop.

They didn't.

Chapter

6

Midtown Manhattan, New York City

Platinus Investments
was a monster.

Not a huge monster if you compared it to the other Wall Street firms in the number of people on the payroll or the total square footage of leased office space. Platinus stood out where it was important. On the profit/loss side of the ledger sheet. They made money. A lot of money. And more than half of it came from their High Frequency Trading division. The same division that
Carson
Grant assumed responsibility for on Thursday, July 29
th
.

It was familiar territory. He had worked in the HFT sector of Platinus for three years, first as a programmer, coding other mathematicians' works, then later, designing the algorithms. The algos, as they were called in the industry, fueled the lightning-fast computers that bought and sold hundreds of millions of shares every day on the US stock market exchanges. It was the algos that were crucial to trading in the high frequency world. If your program was one millisecond - one one-thousandth of a second - slower than the guy down the street, then you were the first loser in making the trade. They were the winner. And in the algo trading industry, you were first or you were out of business.

The computers were one of the keys. They had super-fast CPUs and weren't restricted by input-output at any stage of the game. They performed on a level that NASA dreamt of. Locating the computers close to the stock exchanges was another key. The time delay in transmitting signals across Manhattan at the speed of light was enough to add a millisecond to the data transfer. Platinus had their systems located immediately next to the NYSE and NASDAQ. Alongside their hardware were the supercomputers that churned out data for their main competition, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

But the computers were nothing without the algorithms. Programs that analyzed hundreds of thousands of offers to buy or sell and predicted which direction a stock was headed before it started down the road. Once the program anticipated what was going to happen, it jammed the market with thousands of orders that were withdrawn before they could be filled, providing further evidence of what other investors were willing to pay. Within a second, the algo sampled every bit of available data, correlated it against the numbers from the previous day's trading tape and determined exactly what was going to happen in the immediate future. And once they knew how things were going to play out, they pulled out their trump card. The thirty-millisecond delay.

Thirty milliseconds is far less than a blink of the eye, but it's enough time for the HFT algorithms to determine the direction a stock is going to move and send out buy and sell orders. The faster the system and its algos, the quicker it can flood the market with orders. All of this happens before non-HFT firms looking to sell are even aware of the buy orders from the other, slower traders. While the markets are supposed to be a level playing field, nothing could be further from the truth. The thirty-millisecond delay completely destroyed that myth. It gave the fast traders an advantage that simply could not be measured. If you were a firm that engaged in high frequency trading, and paid the exchange a fee, the delay was all yours. As was a rebate paid by the NASDAQ or the NYSE to the traders who brought the lion's share of their business to that particular exchange. It was nothing more than salt in the wounds suffered by the slower traders.

And it was unregulated. No laws existed to stop the HFT firms from paying the fee and accessing crucial information before the other 18,000 trading firms that played by the rules. The Securities and Exchange Commission was under fire from politicians like Senator Charles Schumer who was threatening to enact laws to bring fairness back to the business of trading stocks. But to date, nothing was in place. Which meant
Platinus Investments
was raking in cash faster than they could count it. Billions of dollars a year.

Billions. Unregulated.

It still amazed
Carson
Grant that something so fundamental could be so screwed up. Americans embraced democracy and capitalism, so long as everything was fair. Every American had the right to own a house, to start a business, to live the dream. Many chose the safe route and worked for a company, drew a wage and went home at five o'clock and forgot about the job. They were fine with the system, because no one was cheating. At least, they weren't getting caught. But
Carson
knew that assumption was absolutely false. Platinus, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the rest of the HFT firms were exploiting a loophole. Legally. But it was exploitation nonetheless. And it was very profitable.

It bothered him. But not enough to say anything. Or refuse his bi-weekly paycheck or yearly bonus.

Thursday, July 29
th
dawned sunny, and
Carson
caught a cab from his Soho apartment to the office. The subway was so crowded. So mundane. The taxi gave him time to think about his first day as the head of the HFT department at Platinus. He reached inside his suit pocket and withdrew the folded 8.5 x 11 sheet of white paper. An e-mail from William
Fleming
. It was simple and to the point.

Carson
,

Hope you enjoy your first day as division head. There is something I'd like you to look at immediately. Somebody is gaming us and we need to front-run them. Probably Goldman. Trim the algo. Beat them at their own game.

~Bill

He tucked the memo back in his pocket and stared out the window as the congestion of Manhattan slipped past. One of the big players was running a faster algorithm and sniffing out the buy/sell orders from the slower traders quicker than Platinus. Then they were offering flash orders on a specific exchange for a few milliseconds, making them a poster, not a responder. Being a poster was a much better position to be in, especially if another trader jumped in and grabbed the order. If they did and a sale went through, the flash-order trader was in a position to receive the rebate. And although the rebates weren't huge, if a company had millions of them coming in every year, they were making serious money.

Bottom line was - another firm was making the money. Something
Fleming
wanted stopped immediately.

The cab pulled up in front of 1177 Avenue of the Americas.
Carson
paid the driver and took the elevator to the forty-sixth floor, one level below
Fleming
's private domain. The top of the financial food chain was coming into focus, and he liked what he saw. The elevator opened and he glanced about. It was different from the eighteenth floor, where he had been sequestered with nine other mid-level players in the HFT division. The eighteenth floor was where the algos were devised and written into computer code, and it was a bullpen-style office, with desks scattered around a central group of whiteboards. Here, on the forty-sixth floor, where the code was applied to the real world and turned into gains and losses, soft music played on the sound system and the floors were covered in thick carpet.

"Good morning, Mr. Grant." The woman was young, maybe twenty-five, and dressed conservatively in a white blouse and mid-length grey skirt. Her shoes were polished and her fingernails painted a light shade of blue, which matched her belt perfectly. "I'm Nadine Strang. Welcome to forty-six."

"Thanks."

"Your office is this way," she said, not extending her hand, nor expecting him to offer his. She pointed down a hallway to the right and started walking. "The coffee room is tucked in behind this false wall, but if you want anything, just call me and I'll bring it to you. We have a latte machine if you prefer. There are sandwiches, muffins and salads brought in every day. If you want lunch delivered from a local restaurant, let me know the day before and I'll put in the order."

They reached the end of the hall and Nadine continued into the corner office. The opposing wall looked north and had the same view of Central Park as William
Fleming
's. To the right of the door, the wall was fitted with ebony bookshelves.
Carson
glanced at the books and pictures that filled about half of the shelves. There were six pictures of
Nicki
and him and his math and physics texts were neatly arranged by category. He looked at Nadine and shrugged.

"We had everything moved up from eighteen last night," she said.

"Very efficient."

She smiled. "You have no idea."

"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a door on the wall to the left of the entrance.

"Your private bathroom."

Carson
walked across the soft carpet and poked his head through the doorway. It was far more than just a sink and toilet. An open closet butted up against the oversize shower. Three suits hung over polished shoes, with six shirts of varying colors next to them. He turned and looked at Nadine.

"These are mine?"

She nodded. "Mr.
Fleming
has a tailor who can custom fit suits from your image on the security camera. Overnight. Not really rocket science, but impressive."

"Very,"
Carson
said. He returned to the office and sat in the leather chair behind the desk. A flat screen monitor and a pad of paper with a pen were the only items on the surface. He looked out the bank of windows. The view of the park was stunning.

"Is there anything else?" Nadine asked.

"Yes,"
Carson
said. He slid the paper in front of him and jotted down six names. "Could you have these people meet me at nine tomorrow morning in the boardroom?" He handed her the sheet of paper. "We do have a boardroom on this floor, don't we?"

Another smile. "Yes, we do. I'll reserve it for you for nine o'clock tomorrow morning. How long will you need it for?"

"Probably one to two hours."

"I'll slot you in from nine to twelve. That way you won't have to worry about hurrying."

"Thank you."

Nadine disappeared into the hall and
Carson
leaned back in the chair. Yesterday he had walked into William
Fleming
's office, nervous and hopeful. Today, his dreams had gelled. The countless thousands of hours spent hunched over math and physics books at MIT. Stressing out at exam time. Eating poorly, driving a rusted-out Toyota with no spare tire. All memories now. This was his new reality. Forty-six floors above the congestion and noise of Manhattan. A million a year in salary and bonuses. This moment justified the rigor of seven years in one of the nation's most prestigious and demanding schools.

He reached out and dialed his home number. There was little doubt that his first call, from this new perch in his life, would be to the woman he loved.
Nicki
answered the phone and he smiled. He was happy. Truly happy. And that was something not everyone could say.