The Aspen Account (39 page)

“I can’t believe we’re going to watch the trading from this game room,” Joseph Stuttgart said.

“Can you think of a bigger game than this one?” Michael replied.

Cracking a brief smile, Seaton pressed a button beneath the arm of his chair. The windows that stretched across the eastern wall, with their spectacular view of the rising sun behind Denver’s skyline, slowly began to tint until they lost all translucence. A wall opened in the corner of the room, revealing a wet bar stocked with juices, an espresso machine, and alcohol. A projector in the ceiling fired up, displaying on the wall screen the early ramblings of a securities analyst in a pin-striped suit, mouthing muted words as green ticker symbols flowed below her in an endless stream of data. To the side of the projector screen, a second panel opened and lowered a custom-made Bloomberg display. A myriad of financial information and market data was displayed for X-Tronic’s stock.

“Five minutes till showtime,” Seaton announced. The clock on the display showed 09:25:08 EST. They could see “X-Tronic” listed in bold letters below the anchorwoman. 

“This is going to be the talk of the day across all the networks,” Joseph squeaked. “What are you hoping the floor price will be?”

“Twenty-five dollars?” Seaton asked, glancing at Michael.

“Twenty-five a share,” Michael confirmed.

Seaton walked to the center of the room, where a spider phone rested on a flat podium. The speakers on the phone came to life as he dialed a number.

“Fiduciary Wave Investors—this is Grant DeLarma speaking.”

“Grant, it’s Don. Are we ready to do this?”

“Good morning, Mr. Seaton. Yes, we’re ready. Everyone has been conferenced into the call.”

“How many?”

“We’ve got seven traders in total.”

“Good. Start by buying a million shares at ninety-seven dollars. We’ll see how long that holds.”

Michael looked up at the display. It was one minute before the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange. One minute before the fast-paced frenzy of the market began to ravage X-Tronic’s last stock price, quoted at the end of trading two days earlier at a hundred and two dollars per share.

The displayed changed to 09:30:00 EST. Muting the phone with a remote switch, Seaton turned to Michael and Joseph. “I want both of your advice as we go through this.” 

The two men nodded.

Suddenly, the price on the display began to drop:
one hundred, ninety-eight, ninety-two, eighty-six.

“My God!” Stuttgart exclaimed. “Our bids didn’t even slow it down!”

Seaton unmuted the phone. “Grant! Buy three million at eighty dollars!” Then he muted it again before turning back to Michael. “Still think we can control this?”

“We always knew it would drop fast at the beginning.”

Eighty-three, eighty-one, eighty, seventy-seven, sixty-eight.

Stuttgart, unable to keep still, paced the room. “Bastards! All the other investors are dropping the stock like it’s a disease. I told you they wouldn’t listen to your speech at the shareholders’ meeting. No one cares about the bloody company; they just want to protect their portfolios.”

“Grant! Seven million at sixty dollars!” Seaton said while fiddling with the remote.

The price dropped immediately to sixty per share and held for almost two minutes before continuing to drop.

“It’s still going down pretty fast,” Seaton said. Michael had no answer.

“Don, please—this is insane!” Joseph pleaded. “You can’t just throw away everything you’ve built up over the last thirty years!”

“Joseph! I’m trying to
save
what I’ve built over the past thirty years! Now, either help me analyze these prices or go!”

Fifty-four, forty-seven, forty-three . . . 

“Mr. Seaton,” Michael broke in, “buy fourteen million at thirty-seven dollars.”

Seaton nodded and gave the bid to Grant, who immediately relayed it to his team. The price dropped to thirty-seven . . . then thirty. All three men stared in suspense at the display as the number held at thirty dollars per share. For six minutes there was virtually no change in the price. Seaton broke a slight smile until he looked back and saw Michael slowly shake his head. He turned back to watch the display, realizing they were not out of danger. Then, eight minutes after the price had seemed to stabilize, it dropped to twenty-nine dollars per share . . . then twenty-eight.

“Christ! It’s going all the way to the bottom!” Stuttgart cried out.

“Michael?” Seaton asked.

Michael gave a little sigh. “Can you buy fifty million at twenty-six?”

“You fucking bastard!” Joseph yelled. “Where do you get these numbers from? Don, you can’t listen to this guy anymore—he’s going to destroy you!”

“That taps me out, Michael. Are you sure?” Seaton asked. Michael nodded. The old man took a deep breath, ran his hand down his face, and relayed the bid to a baffled Grant DeLarma.

Twenty-seven, twenty-six . . .
Then it held. Five minutes went by as they watched and waited. Then another five minutes. Still it held at twenty-six.

“It’ll never hold,” Stuttgart said.

“It’ll hold,” Michael insisted.

Fifteen more minutes passed with no significant change. Then the price dropped to twenty-five.

Seaton slugged the couch in frustration. Stuttgart murmured a steady stream of profanity. Seaton looked at Michael with a lost expression. “I’ve done everything I can,” he confessed helplessly.

Michael lowered his gaze. He could not bear to make eye contact with either man. Once again he had overstepped his bounds. He had imposed himself on the personal lives of others, and they had suffered from trusting him. “If we had just gotten support from the other shareholders,” he spoke as an afterthought.

Joseph shook his head bitterly. “Why would they? They have nothing invested in the company other than capital. And their capital is liquid. What made you think that they would be willing to risk anything?”

Michael shook his head. “I’m sorry, Don. I truly thought the drop in market cap could be stopped.”

To Michael’s surprise, Seaton managed a faint smile. “I loved my company as much as anything. We did the right thing in trying. You have to believe that. I’m not sorry about the money I’ve lost. We did everything we could. That’s something to be proud of, Michael. At my age, self-respect is worth more than money.”

He looked at the old man in awe. Besides his father, he had never met a more honorable man in his life. In that moment, he realized that it hadn’t been greed that made Seaton a billionaire—it had been the man’s vision and passion. And now that same passion and absence of greed would cost the man most of his net worth.

“Hey!” Stuttgart yelled as he jabbed a finger at the screen.

Michael and Seaton turned to look at the Bloomberg data. The price had dropped to ten dollars. “How long has it been around that price?”

Seaton flipped through the panel to get a breakdown of the historic data for the past hour. “Nine minutes!” he answered. “You think it’s stabilizing?”

“I don’t know,” Michael replied. “But something else must have happened, because we sure haven’t placed any more orders.”

They unmuted the news channel screen and listened to the anchorwoman run through the events of the past hour. She highlighted how X-Tronic’s founder, Don Seaton, had been purchasing enormous quantities of shares of X-Tronic and now owned more than 65 percent of its common stock. She explained how a number of additional investors had become attracted to the stock after it had dropped to a fifteen-year low. There appeared to be a growing attraction to the stock through a number of different parallels: Mr. Seaton’s loyal dedication to the company was encouraging some investors to reevaluate the honesty of the company’s presentation outlining all available information related to the fraud, and as a result, X-Tronic was winning back a certain degree of trust. Investors were reevaluating the company’s prospects, and they were encouraged by Seaton’s aggressive purchasing of shares. Additional analysts were quoted as saying that if X-Tronic was able to get through the fraud proceedings without further damage and managed to turn around, in two to three years it could potentially climb to its previous value. There seemed to be a sense on the Street that X-Tronic’s stock price had taken the beating it deserved, but that now the company was slightly undervalued. One analyst praised Seaton’s foresight in purchasing vast amounts of the stock to prevent a detrimental panic that likely would have dropped the price to the floor, freezing trades permanently until the NYSE delisted the shares.

All three men watched the price and financial news the rest of the day. The panic seemed to have left the market. Seaton had lunch brought in as the three played games of Spanish billiards while keeping one eye on the screen. At the end of the day, the price had risen from its low of ten dollars to thirteen by the closing bell. Don Seaton had lost nearly eighty percent of his net worth—over seven billion dollars—in one day’s trading, but he had saved X-Tronic from collapse.

68

AS LUNCH HOUR interrupted the rhythm of work at Cooley and White, troops of accountants poured from the building for a midday pillaging of the nearby luncheonettes. The office grew quiet within minutes, and Michael soon found himself alone, sidling past the morning’s aftermath, careful not to brush against a tower of documents that rose precariously from his desk like a house of cards. Would he miss this? he wondered. Would he miss the thrill of living a secret life? The question haunted him, for although he had long yearned for freedom from his tormenting situation, he now realized that he might occasionally find himself missing the life of a senior auditor at one of the world’s top international accounting firms.

It had been two days since trading began for X-Tronic shares. In that time, he had been given notice that his last day at Cooley and White would be today. Even though he had earned his position at the firm through a fraudulent identity, he wasn’t being fired; indeed, the firm was in enough legal trouble from the X-Tronic case that it was in no position to battle the federal government over an ambiguous precedent for undercover agents. In the end, Cooley and White had given him two days to wrap up his affairs and any pending documentation for client engagements before his mutually agreed-upon departure from the firm. Ironically, his entire employment here had been a fraud, and he was not surprised they were forcing him out so soon after his true identity was revealed. And now the time had come for him to go.

He took a deep breath as he stepped onto the elevator for the last time.
Going down, please—thirty-seven floors to the next chapter of my life
. The car was packed. Hypnotized passengers stared at the video monitor’s advertisement blurbs, while Bloomberg took center stage with a breakdown of the market watch as the U.S. economy lurched forward in another fine day of trading. No bad news, most stocks happy, every investor counting down the hours to the day’s end. Michael was the only one not entranced by the media. He studied the tops of his shoes as a lost traveler might ponder a map. At last the chrome-plated doors slid open to a gleaming sea of black marble.

Out the doors and in the sunshine, he found himself moving through the outside square as fast as possible. No more strolling; he had momentum now. Contented urbanites grazed in the courtyard between the MCI and Bank of America buildings—the common ground between corporate giants. What a lovely day. How could the city stay so warm in the winter? Thin air, some said, as if that alone explained everything unique in the Mile High City.

He had survived the winter of his life.

*     *     *

On Monday morning, after a long phone conversation with Glazier over the weekend, Michael walked into the Denver District Office of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. True to its image, the office had a cold, gray interior, watched over by three security guards in white uniforms. A stone staircase ran from the corridor up to a second-floor mezzanine, which held a collection of artifacts worthy of any museum of economics, telling the history of the Federal Reserve and the impact its policies ultimately had on the U.S. economy.

“Your office is just down the hall,” said the midlevel economist who met him on the mezzanine and walked him through security.

Michael was feeling depressed. The phone call from Glazier had mapped out what his responsibilities—or lack thereof—for the Treasury Department would be for the next six months. Since he had chosen to expose himself as an undercover agent at the shareholders’ meeting, the department was limiting his responsibilities until all the indictments and legal proceedings involving X-Tronic had begun. So he had left the high-adrenaline world of corporate finance for a dull government bureaucracy.

They arrived at an open door to an office strewn with boxes.

“What’s this?” Michael asked.

“It’s your office.”

“What are those boxes?”

“Ah! You’ve been assigned to help with the Treasury’s Payment Application Modernization. Since we transferred our savings bond operations to Minneapolis and Pittsburgh last year, the Fed governors have assigned our branch with new initiatives. The Treasury is understaffed in this department, so you’ve been assigned to help out.”

“This isn’t what I do,” Michael protested. “I’m not a banker. I’m an investigative agent in the Financial Crimes Division.”

“That’s who you
were,
Mr. Chapman. You’ve been reassigned to this project until further notice. I’m not privy to any more information than that.” The economist looked around the room and nodded for show. “IT should stop by soon to set up your log-ins on our network. Also, Mr. Glazier said he would be stopping by this morning before his flight back to Washington. Until then, just make yourself at home.”

Half an hour later, an IT guy with an astonishingly large belly and a crisp beard gave Michael’s computer all the network access necessary to carry on the fight against inefficient payment applications. With all the department’s documentation available for exploration on the shared drive, the ex-agent and newbie banker, demoted by his superiors for pursuing their cause and achieving results beyond their control, found solitude in the World Wide Web and the countless articles examining the aftereffects of X-Tronic’s fraud: