The Last Trade (22 page)

8

Berlin

Rushing along a foreign sidewalk, looking for a glimpse of Heinrich Shultz's blond head. The weight of multiple failures sucking the breath out of her. She's defied her boss, rejected a seemingly good man, lost consciousness, and lost a witness and/or suspect. She stops at a corner and looks in all four directions for a miracle. Bending at the waist, gasping from hyperventilation, she fights off a wave of nausea.

Outside of romance, she's not used to failure.

Her phone rings. Now fucking Michaud calls. She stares at the screen but doesn't answer. Until she fixes this, she can't. A cab passes. She considers flagging it, but where would she go? The only place to go, she realizes, is Heinrich's apartment. But where in Berlin is that? Prenz-something district, if he was telling the truth, and there's no reason to think he was. Plus, she doesn't even know his last name. Heinrich something from the Prenz-something district. Even Michaud would laugh.

She asks a passing woman to point her toward the gate, back toward her hotel. Within minutes, the central arch comes into view, and as she approaches she can't help but think of the Gate's history, the people who passed beneath, died before it, and railed at it, from Napoleon and Hitler to Reagan.

And, of course, Kennedy.
Ich bin ein Berliner!

Ich bin Schultz
. As clearly as she remembers Kennedy's classic sound bite, she remembers the voice that pulled her back to consciousness back in Siren's office. Heinrich's voice on the phone. Heinrich Schultz. She cups her phone in her palm and wonders what to do, whom to call. Michaud would be best, but she's not ready to admit failure and to face its consequences. The alert light is flashing. Someone sent a text while she was walking. Marco.

 

Dinner tonight?

Rather than text back, she calls Marco Nello.

“I thought I'd somehow blown it.”

“That's my job today,” she answers.

“What do you think? What do you feel like eating?”

“I can't. I'm having a really bad day.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Perhaps . . .”

“Marco, could you help me find an address here in Berlin?”

“Sure, anything.”

She tells him Heinrich Schultz's name and the partial neighbor-hood address. “Near Mitte?”

“Near Mitte . . . Prenzlauer Berg?”

“Yes.”

“Bohemian neighborhood, gradually succumbing to gentrification. Give me a few minutes.”

Two minutes later Marco Nello calls Sobieski with two addresses, the second of which is closer to Mitte. “Are you all right? You sound distressed.”

“Yes,” she answers. “I am distressed, but I'll be all right.”

“Will I see you later?”

“I don't know, Marco. That depends upon how this goes.”

“Call at any time, Cara. For anything. I'd love to see you.”

* * *

In the taxi en route to the first Heinrich Shultz address, Sobieski's phone rings three times. The first two are Michaud and the third is Marco. All three times she chooses not to answer, not to speak with the two men in her life who care about her more than anyone else. Her boss and a man she just met. She decides not to think about what that means.

The cab stops outside a quaint sidewalk café on Eberwalder Strasse. She pays the driver and gets out. The length of the entry level of the home in which this Heinrich Shultz lives is covered with a gorgeous mural of trees and flowers. The stone of the upper three floors is a vivid pink. Looking both ways at the colors and murals and gardens real and imagined, she thinks, even the lowest level of criminal lives in a cooler neighborhood than me.

The striking imagery of the building momentarily took her eye away from the crowd circling on the sidewalk. Some are running away from the gathering, others toward it. Every other person seems to be talking frantically into a phone. As she draws closer, the crowd parts enough for her to glimpse the narrow leg and then the white-blond hair. And then the blood.

Her phone rings. Hong Kong. Not Michaud, but Cheung the criminal. She doesn't pick up.

When she sees that it is Shultz, she steps back and covers her mouth with her left hand. Her phone rings again. Michaud, again.

She picks up this time.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Michaud . . . I had to go in. . . . It was empty and, well, he surprised me.”

“Who surprised you? I sent a six-man backup team to Siren. You couldn't wait fifteen minutes? What the hell were you thinking? Do you know how big this is?”

The crowd peels away from the body as the first policeman arrives.

“Let me go talk to the cops,” she tells Michaud.

“No,” he says.

“What?”

“Stay out of it.”

In the distance, Sobieski can make out the wail of an ambulance. While the police begin directing the crowd to push back, to give them room, a young woman bursts out of the front door of Shultz's apartment. Sobieski drops the phone from her ear to watch. Halfway to the body the young woman is intercepted by one of the cops. He wraps his arms around her. When he lifts her off the ground her feet thrash at everything and nothing.

Finally the woman lets out a primal wail when she gets her first look at the still body of Heinrich Shultz, master hacker, licensed financial advisor, accomplice to terrorists, failed fugitive, and a man she must have loved.

9

Newark

D
empsey is not in, and no one knows how to reach him.

Havens hangs up, grabs the large pad, and tears off a page. He smooths the page's sticky back against the wall behind the bed. He removes a framed watercolor print of a beach scene from a hook and then affixes four more sheets along the same wall.

The burger arrives. He devours it with one hand and writes in black marker with the other. “HONG KONG” atop the first sheet, then “DUBAI” atop the second, “JOHANNESBURG” atop the third, “RIO” atop the fourth, and atop the fifth he writes “DUBLIN.” Next, on each sheet, he writes the date, the securities and approximate dollar value involved in the transaction, the name of the foreign/soon-to-be-murdered broker in that city, the name of the firm in Berlin that served as middle man, the name of the U.S.-based account that initiated the transactions, and the name of the U.S. citizen to whom the account supposedly belonged.

He rips off a sixth sheet, sticks it on the mirrored closet door, and writes “NOTES” atop it. Copying off Danny Weiss's whiteboard and Miranda's e-mail, he writes the corresponding book and line numbers from
The Odyssey
. Miranda's right: To figure this out, he'll need to be a human as well as a quant.

Rapidly, he scrawls a list of the sectors:

 

—TECH

—OLD MEDIA (publishing, TV, Hollywood, mags, newspapers)

—NEW MEDIA (social nets, digital entertainment, gaming, search, browser, etc.)

—ADVERTISING (agencies, holding co's, media buyers, etc.)

—INSURANCE (CGI)

Then he lists beneath the appropriate sector title the individual stocks that have been traded so far. There are dozens.

It's not difficult to make a connection between old and new media, technology and advertising. They're all, to some degree, in bed with one another, trying to figure out how to make a buck in a constantly evolving, digitized universe. Every day there's news of some new alliance between tech, entertainment, and branding. A slew of books have already been written about the age of convergence. But this insurance company's place on his wall makes no sense at all to Havens. What does CGI have to do with the others?

He does a search to see if there's a connection between one of the world's largest insurance companies and the other trades. Nothing. It doesn't insure any of the other companies or the buildings in which they are headquartered. Even the ad agency of record for CGI has nothing to do with the others.

Next he loses himself in data mining and model building, employing not just the considerable skills of the statistical arbitrage quant, but the skills of every type of relevant quant and theorist he knows. Normally his job is to determine the probable short-term success or failure of a security or sector, but in this instance it's about more than running numbers through a program and letting an algorithm determine the next step. This time he also must solve a behavioral problem. What does all of these trades and killings lead to? What goal, event, or catastrophe?

He strips down each trade and stock and looks at it in discrete and continuous time. He employs the tenets of basic probability theory, stochastic calculus, and builds and implements models in C++. He uses the martingale approach to analyze the effect of asset prices on the change of information flow, specifically how a piece of speculative or hypothetical information—for instance, a rumored terrorist act, or the death of a broker—can influence the price of an asset. Within two hours the walls and floor are littered with sheets covered with equations and notes.

An interesting pattern emerges. In addition to the Rising Fund longs and the huge matching international shorts, a growing supplemental short market has taken root. With each day, each ensuing trade/assault, the volume of the additional shorts placed on each security increases. At first gradually but now almost exponentially. Havens concludes that someone has been leaking information on the criminal end, and others around the world are copycatting the moves in smaller batches.

Next he turns to history. He takes the sequences that are occurring with these five stocks now and applies them to Weiss's historical models constructed to detect volatile stock movement before and after some of the worst disasters of recent times. The Mumbai shootings. The Bali nightclub bombing. The Spanish train bombing. The London Metro explosions. The attack on the USS
Cole
. The triple disaster in Japan. The first attack on the World Trade Center. And, of course, the last.

The most interesting irregularities occurred prior to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. According to the
9/11 Report
and analytics that have emerged since, in early September of 2001 five times as many shorts as normal were placed on stock for American Airlines, United Airlines, Boeing, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied more than twenty-two floors of the Trade Center. Havens tries to imagine if, assuming there was a connection, he could have predicted what was coming if he had had foreknowledge of the 2001 trades; if he could have gathered enough information and presented a strong enough case to prevent the terrorists from ever getting off the ground that day.

Finally, exhausted, he flops onto the bed, closes his eyes, and thinks of Miranda and Danny Weiss and the five trades. And he wonders if there's to be a sixth, what will it be? What trader will die? And . . . why?

10

Berlin

“I
've been relieved of my duties.”

Marco Nello looks across the table at Sobieski. He had offered to take her to the finest restaurant in Berlin, anywhere she wanted. But here they are in a bakery at 9
P.M.
Not having dinner, having strudel. It's what she wanted.

“I have to go back to Hong Kong.”

He looks down.

“Not us. It's work.”

“Why don't you stay a few extra days here?”

She shakes her head. “I have to make things right.” She wants to tell him everything. That she went to a casino rather than get to know him, that she defied her boss, that she was assaulted as a result of her defiance, that a young man died this evening because she failed to properly do her job, and that somewhere in South Africa a woman might be dead—all because she lacked discipline and willpower. And whatever act of financial terrorism she's been investigating gets closer to happening by the minute.

Nello puts down his fork, holds up his hands. “You're right. I don't understand. And I'm guessing it's for the best that I don't. It was wrong of me to . . .”

“It wasn't wrong, Marco. It's just, right now,
I'm
what's wrong.”

“You take your job seriously, which I admire. And it seems that you've made some kind of mistake. But if it was unintentional, if your reasons were pure, they'll forgive you.”

“They may,” she answers. “I won't. Not when lives are on the line.”

“Look, without revealing state secrets, tell me what's going on.”

She takes a bite of strudel, stares at him, and decides to tell him about everything, except the gambling. She tells him about Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, and Johannesburg. Michaud and Mo, Lau, Al Mar, Valverde, and Sawa Luhabe. She tells him about Heinrich and Dublin, the shorts in U.S.-based new and old media, advertising and tech. Then, because it feels so good to have someone who cares to listen, she finds herself telling him why. Why she took this job. Why she can't stop caring about it. Why her father's fifteen-year-old actions still consume, drive, and haunt her. “In other words, why I'm really a deeply flawed, extremely poor choice for you to enter into a relationship with.”

Nello smiles. “We're all flawed.”

“What should I do?”

“Go to Hong Kong, do what you need to. If you don't, we'll never have a chance.”

“Really?”

“Then come back. Please. And stay for a while.”

She twists the corners of her napkin and thinks of past boyfriends who refused to put her priorities first. Maybe that's because they knew that no matter where they lived or how much they agreed to accommodate her, she would always put her job before everything. Why should Marco Nello be any different?

“Or,” he continues, “I can go to Hong Kong.”

“Really?”

“Sure. When you're ready, I can take some time and visit you.”

“Or,” she says, allowing a smile, “maybe we can go someplace else.”

* * *

The taxi stops in front of her hotel. They kiss briefly and hold each other close until the driver clears his throat.

“Do you want to come up?”

“Of course I do,” Nello answers. “But you're leaving when—dawn? And I imagine you want to work, to start your comeback.”

She opens the door, takes his hand, and pulls. “Come.”

He pulls her against him in the empty elevator and they kiss. As the doors slide open, they back out onto her floor, still kissing. He brushes his lips against the back of her neck while she fumbles with the key card and unlocks her door. Inside they attempt to undress each other but quickly lose patience and strip off their own clothes. In bed her intensity is all-consuming and her release is almost primal, charged with visceral desire and, for the first time in too long, pure romantic attraction. Not sadomasochistic punishment, or the alleviation of guilt, or escape.

She's on her stomach, sweating, catching her breath, when he rises and looks out the window. It's late, close to three in the morning. “You'll stay, won't you?”

He comes back and sits on the edge of the bed, looks at her, and traces the back of his left hand against her hair.

“What about Fiji?” she asks.

“Fiji?”

“Our trip. Rent a bungalow . . . surf . . . read.”

He puts on his underwear and reaches for his pants. “So,” he says, buttoning his pants, then grabbing his dress shirt, “why do you think they're making those short trades and killing those traders?”

She rises up on an elbow. “That's what we were trying to find out. They're obviously gaming the market, hoping that some event will happen naturally, or they'll make it happen so they can cash in.”

“You mentioned the categories, the—what do you call it—sectors they've shorted, but not the specific stocks. Do you know those?”

She sits up with her back against the headboard. “Yeah, Marco. Of course I do. Why?”

He buttons the last button on his shirt and looks for his suit jacket. Fully dressed, he turns to her with an expression on his face she hasn't seen before. “Because we have a mutual acquaintance who would very much like to know.”