The Last Trade (21 page)

5

Katonah, New York

T
his is not how Miranda had planned on spending her day.

Having lunch with a deposed billionairess. Digging around on behalf of her fugitive ex-husband. Rethinking everything about him and their marriage and divorce. And now this. Coming home to an apartment that has been visited by a stranger who may still be inside.

She knows someone has been here because she had left her
to do
list, a yellow legal pad, where she always did before going out, on the small oak table in the entry hall, next to a crystal vase of dried hydrangeas. Standing in the door frame, she takes a quick look into the apartment, scanning from left to right, and finally sees the yellow pad, facedown on the easy chair.

“Oh, shit,” she says, to no one and perhaps someone. “The mail.” Stepping backward out of the door and onto the front stoop, she wonders if Deborah Salvado had snitched on her so soon. And how could someone have gotten here so quickly? Or had someone been watching her long before this? She closes the door and walks slowly down the front path. At the mailbox she makes a show of inspecting each letter and piece of junk mail, in case someone is watching. Then she tilts her head back as if one of the envelopes has reminded her of something, shuts the mailbox door, clicks her key holder to unlock the Prius, and slides into the still-warm front seat.

She drives north on Bedford Road, then right onto Route 35, and then quickly onto the on-ramp for I-684 North. Looking into the rearview to see if anyone is tailing her, she drives as fast as the Prius can manage. She hops off the interstate after one exit and winds her way along a series of stone wall–lined, wooded back roads. She stops in the parking lot of a pizza joint in the village/train station of Croton Falls. She wants to call Drew again, but she doesn't want to upset him about the visitor at her apartment, and he's right, until this is resolved it's best if they stay apart.

At one point last night, he told her, “Money didn't ruin us. I did.” She didn't answer and wishes she had. You should have told him that a lot of things ruined us. Not just money, or the fund. A lack of judgment ruined us, she concludes. Allowing ourselves to be transfixed by a lifestyle that never should have been. The guilt, the self-loathing, the blaming—those were all collateral damage from the initial lack of judgment.

She opens her laptop and taps into one of the stores' wireless signals. You should have told him, she thinks, searching through the text of a poem nearly three thousand years old, that something that still exists cannot have been ruined. While seeking connections between past art and present evil, Homer and Salvado, scouring some twelve thousand lines written in dactylic hexameter, she can't help but note that for all of its focus on the epic adventures of Ulysses, it's the women of the story who make its most important and heroic choices. And that the ancient hero's homeward journey is not at all unlike the homeward journey Drew is in the midst of right now.

It begins to make sense in a cryptic, if not fully explicit way. Each of the first four passages from
The Odyssey
are somehow linked to one of the cities where a short occurred and an attempt was made on the trader's life. It's easy to find the link after the fact, when she knows both the city and the passage. But it's harder on upcoming days on which Weiss marked a passage but there is no information about the securities to be traded or the city. If she could find that out, the meaning of Weiss's glyphs for Thursday and Friday, perhaps she and Drew could save a life and find a way to catch Salvado in the act. The lines, from Book 24, refer to the “home of Ulysses.” She thinks of Troy, or Ithaka. She thinks of every major city in the Mediterranean, but then it occurs to her that perhaps they are referring to a different Ulysses. What if they mean the home of the other famous literary Ulysses—the great novel by James Joyce, set not in Troy or Ithaka, but Dublin?

* * *

A half block from her house she dims the lights and rolls to a stop. She turns off the car and looks across the street at her apartment. The porch light shines, probably turned on by Julia, the divorced older tenant upstairs who never has any visitors but says having the light on makes her feel safe. Otherwise the rest of the house, including Miranda's first-floor apartment, is dark.

She doesn't know what to do. At the very least she'd like to grab some things and leave. But she isn't sure if whoever was there earlier was looking for something or waiting for her. She wraps her arms around herself to fight the creeping night chill. Half the leaves are down, she notes, watching the silhouettes of backyard maples tilt in the breeze. In a few days they'll be empty. In ten minutes, she'll make a decision.

But first, she wants to close her eyes. They didn't sleep much last night. First talking. Then fighting the inevitable and then making love with an exhausting and exhilarating combination of ferocity, passion and rage, bliss and regret. Then reaching over and feeling the place he had just been.

Within minutes her head tilts back against the driver's seat. Soon after that a man's knuckles rap against her window. She's startled, but she doesn't scream. A tall, thin white man in jeans and a pullover sweatshirt bends to look at her. She reaches to turn the key, but the man is already opening her door. She lurches across the front seat to try to exit from the passenger side but stops when she sees a second man outside that door, bent at the waist, looking in.

The man on the driver's side asks, “Miranda Havens?”

No answer.

“We need to talk.”

Her eyes dart back at the second man, who is opening the passenger side door and getting in. She lowers her head and closes her eyes.

“About your husband.”

Have they killed him? she thinks. Or do they want me to tell them where he is so they can kill him later?

After moment she reopens her eyes and says to the steering wheel, “I don't have a husband.”

6

Newark

O
nly three types of people pay cash at the Newark Hilton: someone about to have an affair, embark on an in-room drug binge, or commit suicide. Havens wonders which type the woman at reception thinks he is.

In the corridor heading to the elevator he sees an open conference room. It's set up for a morning function, more than a dozen long tables broken into three rows, dotted with brochures and water bottles, name tags laid out in alphabetical order.

Four types, he thinks. Terrorists pay cash, too.

Next to the podium in the front of the room is exactly what he was hoping for: an easel with a two-foot by three-foot sketchpad. He takes the pad and a black Magic Marker and heads up to his room on the sixth floor.

His window overlooks a dark and vast industrial wasteland. Factory stacks and warehouses beneath a pale green and yellow haze of particulate clouds. He pulls the curtains, bolt-locks the door, kicks off his shoes, and turns on CNBC with the sound muted. The “host” bounces around a set with rolled-up sleeves, a financial expert with the soul of a carny. It's no surprise that Salvado was a regular, a trusted “friend of the show.”

If enough people validate the reputations of enough people, everyone wins. Until, of course, they don't. Just ask the ratings experts.

He thinks of his late-night talk with Miranda. There is no mad or bad money, he thinks. Only mad or bad people with mad or bad intentions.

The markets were up today. Way up. Led by tech, supported by good job numbers, encouraging advance data out of Asia, and a somewhat stable liquid universe credit spread over benchmarks. It also doesn't hurt that no sovereign European nation appears to be on the brink of collapse today. He opens his laptop and gets onto the hotel wireless. While the home page loads, it occurs to him that he hasn't eaten all day. He calls room service and orders a cheeseburger and fries. Not the healthiest choice, but when someone is trying to kill you, cholesterol levels take a backseat to primal desire.

The first thing he checks is e-mail. There's a follow-up note from Rourke:

 

Dude, there's absolutely something to your theory. The big guy is in full sociopath mode. Ate a young trader alive in the big room today, made him leave in tears, fired without so much as a shoebox full of belongings. We need to talk ASAP. Be safe.—TR

Then there's this, from an anonymous sender on a Hotmail account. The subject heading is:
DUBLIN
.

 

I think a trade and a trader are about to be executed in Dublin, and here is why: The first passage about the Sirens activated the trading account at Siren in Berlin. The second passage about “brotherly” signaled which U.S. account to use in Philly. Each of the next three passages link in some way, often obscurely, to the place in which the trades took place that day. For instance, Wednesday, 11.106-7, mentions the beggar Iros, which is a pun on Iris, who is (I kid you not) the god of rainbows. South Africa = the Rainbow Nation. The passage that aligns with the Dubai (oil country) movement on Tuesday mentions “a golden cruse of oil.” For today, it mentions “the home of Ulysses,” which I believe is the home of my favorite novel, James Joyce's
Ulysses
, set in Dublin. Cryptic and obscure to be sure, clearly they're using a shared code, but it seems that cryptic and obscure work to their advantage for acts of this nature. I tried calling, but your phone, like mine, is a POS. Be safe and remember, words are our friends.—M

To avoid detection he tries to look into the Dublin activity without using Weiss's tracking software. If Salvado's people were to pick up his signal, surely someone would be at his door within the hour. Plus, now that he's familiar with their action patterns, it's not that difficult to hack.

In less than five minutes he has something. A firm out of Dublin called Celtic Tiger Redux. A middleman out of Berlin at a firm called Ithaka, with a link to a U.S. trading account out of Philly, presumably one of Chuck's skells. The Dublin trader's name is Dempsey, and the short activity this time is in the insurance sector, specifically and exclusively a U.S.-based company called CGI that, of course, the Rising Fund loves as a long. His next search is for the international calling code for Ireland.

7

Dublin

L
iam Dempsey believes that there is a fortune to be made in anxiety.

So it makes perfect sense that first thing each morning, rather than checking the major indexes that 99.9 percent of the financial world relies on, Dempsey goes right for his personally customized, self-titled Anxiety Index, a number derived from a complex combination of more than a dozen global indicators, each of which is a reflection of the world's most potentially catastrophic scenarios.

Considered are such things as Spanish debt, the London Interbank Overnight Index (LIBOR), the price of lumber, war dead in Afghanistan, Greek debt, the Baltic Dry Index (shipping), the price of oil, the number of and potential damages from natural disasters (earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, flooding) in play, Portuguese debt, political assassinations, credit default info for dozens of markets worldwide. And much, much more.

No one knows about the Anxiety Index except Dempsey, an anxious man who treats his condition not with meditation or prescription drugs, but by reveling in it and hoping to eventually leverage anxiety into some sort of spectacular personal financial gain.

One day he hopes that circumstances will prompt the Anxiety Index to climb above 9.0, that some doomsday sequence of acts or numbers will send it over the edge, serving as the canary in a coal mine indicating that everything will come crashing down, and that he will be among the very first to recognize its coming and exploit the situation. Dempsey has a plan in place for how to mine gold from a river of blood in a post–9.0 AI world. He calls it “Operation Higher Anxiety.”

But today, his index hovers just below 8, far from the fifty-two-week high of 8.3, when things exploded in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Or the 8.6 peak from when everything went down with AIG and Lehman and Bear Stearns and the U.S. sub-prime market. He was ready to implement Operation Higher Anxiety then, but somehow the world resisted. So for now he carries on as a trader, formerly of Citibank, formerly of Commerzbank, formerly of Sumitomo, and now hanging on by a thread with the upstart brokerage firm Tiger Redux, a not so subtle nod to Dublin's late 1990s boom days, when it was known as the Celtic Tiger.

Dempsey's last official act at Tiger Redux is fitting: a major short play against a global insurance giant. A quarter-billion-dollar bet on the failure of a company that makes billions insuring against the failure of others. The call came out of a Berlin middleman at a firm called Ithaka Investments, via a Morgan Stanley trading account in Philadelphia. Because of the number of firms involved and the specific set of instructions laid out by the caller (mostly involving the meted out placement of a number of transactions as opposed to one large, attention-gathering play, as well as a promise of confidentiality), it's complicated. But far from too complicated for a veteran, albeit one of modest success, such as Dempsey.

As he begins to set the transactions in motion, he can't help but wonder what the client knows. What horrible thing could have prompted someone to place a quarter-billion-dollar bet on the imminent decline, if not the fall, of one of the world's largest insurance conglomerates? And how will it affect the rest of the world and, of course, the Anxiety Index? So he defies a mandate from the client and digs deeper into the stock, looking for clues and a reason to get involved in its downfall.

At one o'clock he tells his desk mate O'Dell that he's heading out to grab a bite for lunch, but O'Dell barely acknowledges him. O'Dell is twenty-seven, eight years Dempsey's junior, and has all the answers. According to O'Dell, if you're thirty-five and still working a desk at the likes of Tiger Redux, you are not worth knowing, or long for the financial world. Halfway to the door Dempsey hears his phone ring. He stops, stares, and then walks on. He's hungry. He's having a good day. Whatever it is, he decides, can only botch it up.

Dublin's International Financial Services Centre is the home to some 430 financial services companies, including Tiger Redux, and more than fourteen thousand workers, many of whom are out on the sidewalks on this warm and cloudy Wednesday. Dempsey walks across the street and buys a take-out ham and cheese sandwich in a restored structure that was once a tobacco store.

On the way to his regular bench on the north bank of the River Liffey, Dempsey stops, as he does almost every day, to consider the life-sized line of forlorn figures of the bronze Famine Memorial. His family history is defined by famine and war, expatriation and wanting. To Dempsey, the sculptures of so many ruined individuals are timeless symbols of economic despair, and the bronze mangy dog straggling behind the others could be the mascot, the corporate logo for everything his Anxiety Index represents.

He passes the tourist pubs and ambles farther north along Custom House Quay. At a bench in a quiet space just beyond the Custom House, he takes a seat and looks at the slate gray chop of the river. The sandwich is forgettable, which is fine. Dempsey eats the same sandwich every day for a reason. He doesn't want choice. He wants to fill his stomach, and the brief thirty minutes before he goes back to his desk and his screens and his numbers.

Part of the reason he hasn't been more successful, he realizes, isn't a lack of financial acuity, but the lack of a personal touch with coworkers and clients. He's never been good at cold calls and client lunches and sucking up to his supervisors. What he's been good at is predicting failure, qualifying it and quantifying it and intuiting it.

And right now, Liam Dempsey senses a sort of epic failure, coursing through his entire being, a disaster meme pulsing through the industry, the culture, the moment, charged with stomach-churning electricity. He's not yet sure why, but this insurance stock feels charged with danger, ticking like a bomb in the center of a much larger environment. He stands, tosses his bag through the door flap of a garbage bin, and strolls to the waist-high iron rail atop the high stone wall that rises up the bank of the river. He leans out over the rail because he knows that's where he gets a signal strong enough to check on his transactions, his holdings, and the state of the Anxiety Index.

On his way back to the office he cuts through the same alley as always. The stranger jogs up from behind, catching his attention at the last second, but it is too late to run or fight or scream. He doesn't see or feel the seven-inch blade of the Ka-Bar military knife that slashes deep into his windpipe with a backhand swipe. He thinks it is a punch, or a shove. Dempsey briefly flails as he crumbles to the ground and sees the blood jetting from his neck onto the cold cobblestones. He realizes now that he wasn't punched, but he's incapable of making noise or resisting. He hears the footsteps of his assailant running back the way they came, and he hears air sucking through the wet hole that gapes across his neck. He's still grasping his phone, the small screen frozen on the latest numbers from the ascendant Anxiety Index, as he unfolds upon the stone, his blood already pooling and running down the lip of a storm drain, beginning a slow drift toward the city's edge and the entrance to the North Sea.