The Last Trade (23 page)

11

Newark

H
is cell phone buzzes and he lurches awake. He sits up and scans the room, trying to remember where he is. When he is. The silent TV and the hotel décor don't help, but when he looks at the wall above the bed and sees the writing on the wall, the giant pages filled with data but still no story, he remembers.

He scrambles off the bed and grabs the phone on the desk beside the TV remote. “Mir?”

“Yup.”

He rubs his eyes, looks at the hotel clock radio flashing midnight. “What time is it, Mir?”

“Late. I don't know. Tomorrow late.”

“Are you all right?”

She blows the air out of her lungs, sniffles some back through her nose.

“What's going on, Mir? You crying?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you home? Because I can . . .”

“No,” Miranda answers. “I'm not home. I won't go back, and no, Drew, you can't.”

“Where are—”

She interrupts. “It's not important. I'm safe. For now. Okay?”

It's not okay, but Havens knows that voice. The topic is closed. “Tell me what happened, Mir.”

He listens to her fill, then slowly empty her lungs. “Should I start with the midday break-in at my house, what I've learned about Salvado, or the two men who forced their way into my car while I was parked in front of the apartment?”

“Awww, shit . . .” He paces toward the door, then back to the window. He touches the slender break in the curtains but leaves them closed.

“I'm fine.”

“Salvado's people?”

“I thought so at first. But now I'm pretty sure they only did the break-in.”

“Then who?”

“Cops, Drew. NYPD homicide detectives, wanting to talk to me about Danny Weiss and, of course, you.”

“I spoke to Rourke. They think I did it.”

“Of course they think you did it. How does it feel to be a person of interest?”

“Danny Weiss was right. Salvado's panicking because he knows I can hurt him. Otherwise there was no need to point the police to me.”

“Maybe they figured it on their own. They said without a doubt they can place you in Weiss's apartment the night he died. Phone records. Security camera at the nail salon next door. The cabbie who drove you there. All kinds of stuff, Drew.”

“I shouldn't have gotten you involved.”

“Then they asked if I'd seen you and I told them that I had.”

“You should have.”

“I mean, they found me half-asleep in my car, so who knows what else they know?”

“Don't lie on my behalf.”

“I told them I didn't know anything about Weiss, including the fact that he had been murdered. I said that you didn't mention him to me and that I was not at all happy to see you.”

“Did you tell them I stayed?”

“I did. I told them that you begged; said you were having some kind of emotional breakdown and had nowhere else to go. I said I let you stay on the couch. And when I got up this morning, you were gone; where, I have no idea.”

“No mention of Salvado?”

“By the police? Other than the fact that he's your famous boss and that they'd spoken to him and, they hinted, he ratted you out, and that he's promised his full cooperation and he's extremely saddened and upset by the loss of a young talent like Weiss . . . no. I wasn't going to get into it with them because I didn't think it would help. Because of who he is and because he's the one who has them locked in on you.”

He looks at the incomplete sheets of information covering the walls, trying to think of what to say, what to do next.

“My God, Drew, this is bad. Salvado is . . .”

“I'm going to fix this.”

“You can't
fix
this! This is much more than a mathematical problem. It's life. Death.
Criminals
, Drew. If you try to fix this, you're going to get killed. And, you know, I kind of don't want that to happen.”

“This is an encouraging development. The caring.”

She doesn't answer.

“I'm gonna be fine, Mir.”

“Well,” she begins, steeling herself, all business now. “Did you get my Dublin message?”

“I did. I was too late.”

“Well, I found out some things about your sociopath boss.”

“From his sociopath wife?”

“That, plus I took the info she gave me and did some digging.”

“And?”

“Your boy Salvado is more dangerous than you ever imagined.”

For the next ten minutes Miranda reveals what Deborah Salvado told her this afternoon, plus what she's since discovered. This includes revelations of incidents that occurred before Salvado's comeback as an all-American financial success story, most notably a series of on-campus antigovernment arrests in college, angry letters to the editor of the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
, and dozens of bitter and inflammatory antigovernment, anticorporate, anti-American quotes he made prior to his first go-round in the hedge business.

“The thing is,” Miranda explains, “back then, because he was just starting out, no one paid any attention. By the time he came back and got successful, everyone had forgotten his more radical views and locked in on what he was saying now that the money was starting to roll in.

“But,” she says, “something happened in that period just before he started The Rising, where he flipped the switch that changed him from hate to love, loss to profit, rabble rouser to patriot.”

“Greed defeated revenge,” Havens says. “Funny how no one cares about the past if there's money to be had in the present.”

“I think there's more,” Miranda offers. “Something that turned him into this monster.”

He has no reply.

“How bad do you think this might be?”

“Bad enough to kill a bunch of innocent people, to take down companies.”

“Don't you know anyone with the police, Drew? The SEC? I'll go with you.”

“Whoever I know he knows better. Unless we can figure it all out, no one will believe it. Shit, we barely do. And it's more than just coming forward to say I'm innocent. If I do, I'll have to abandon this. Then no one will be around to try to stop it.”

“You can walk away.”

“It's going to be bad.”

“I bet if you told him, he'd let you walk.”

“Bad as in catastrophic. He already offered me the chance to walk. You really want me to walk away from that? For years I've screwed us up, Mir. This can't fix what was, but it's a chance for me to finally get something right.”

Neither speaks for a while. They used to do this when they first started dating, not speaking for minutes at a time in the middle of a phone conversation. And those silences were magical. He felt that he grew more connected to her with each passing second during those silences. Then, later, after Erin died, before the divorce, their phone conversations were also often punctuated by long silences, though of an entirely different type. It was as if the process was being reversed during those calls, their connection fraying more with each passing second. Now this. He wonders what type of silence this is.

“You promise you're safe, Mir?”

“I promise.”

He doesn't answer. Doesn't want to hang up.

“I'm gonna go now, Drew. We'll talk in the morning, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Mir?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where are you?”

At first she doesn't answer. Then, while smoothing the cool white top sheet on her queen bed in the Chelsea Hotel, she says, “I'm fine, Drew. I'm in a good place.”

12

Johannesburg

S
he follows the lead of strangers.

Luhabe uses the notes of Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens as a jumping off point and discovers enough to make her cry. The trades in Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, and now Dublin. All shorts. All out of Berlin. All except hers ending with the death of the trader. Somehow they didn't get her. Somehow, for the time being, she's managed to survive.

It's obvious that these are not random coincidences, but as hard as she tries to make a connection, she can't find a motive or any clue as to where this is all going, to what happens next.

It's after 9
P.M.
She slept through the afternoon and woke at 6:45 to see her brother sitting on her bed. They had a snack in her room, and clearly he wanted to talk, to have some sort of confessional moment with her, but even while freeloading in his gangster compound, she refused to indulge him. “I have work to do, Muntukayise,” she said.

“My name is Jolly.”

“I don't know any Jolly.”

“Yet you're willing to sleep under Jolly's roof, with the protection of Jolly's guns.”

“I have work to do.”

He reached out and stroked her cheek. “It is good to see you, sister. I hope you will stay and see that I am a better man than the people you work with, the criminals who hide behind the shields of corporate logos.”

When she runs out of leads she decides to make a list. A memo, called
What I Know Now
. She describes everything that has happened to her in the last forty-eight hours, from when she left for work Tuesday morning through all that she has discovered up until now. Of course, she leaves out the part about taking her family to Swaziland, and staying with her gangster brother here in Hillbrow. At the end of the note she cuts and pastes the e-mails that she has received from agent Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens.

After rereading it, she decides she should share it with them. Why not? She's researched both and they both appear to be who they said they are. She's typing the first address, Sobieski's, when she hears the initial gunshots in front of the house.

She rolls off the bed and rushes to her window. The armed guard in the back courtyard moves in a crouch along the edge of the concrete wall and then out of view, toward the front entrance.

Seconds later she hears more gunfire. The staccato bursts of automatic weapons. The roar of a shotgun blast. The same guard has scrambled back into the courtyard and stooped behind a stone barbecue chimney, when a single pistol shot tears into his hip and takes him down. She abandons the window and jogs to the door. Cups an ear to listen before opening it. Men shouting, also in bursts. Then more gunfire.

Inside the house the guns sound different. A deeper register, like guns that kill rather than toys.

Above the gunfire she hears the voice of her brother. He's at the base of the stairs.

“Come on!” he yells. “Come and get it!”

These people may think that they are gangsters, but they didn't know that they were raiding the house of the gangster Jolly Luhabe. She steps across the room and opens the door. Through the railing posts at the bottom of the stairs she sees his legs bending and straightening. When they straighten he reels off a burst of gunfire. When they bend he takes cover behind the stairway. “Jolly!” she calls.

“Go, sister!” he calls. “Back stair.” He looks up the stairs, and when he sees her, he smiles. Sensing that this will be the last she'll see of her brother, she smiles back.

“Jolly, come . . .”

“Go!” he yells. “You can't stay here after this. Go now!” He punctuates the last word with another machine gun burst.

As she heads back to the bed for the computer, she hears a wounded man groaning downstairs, she guesses in the living room. After a short volley, the groaning stops. Then, more gunfire from other parts of the house, inside and out.

She scrolls up to the top of the document and clicks on SEND. Then she quickly snaps shut the laptop and shoves it inside her bag. When her hand comes out of the bag it is holding her husband's gun.

Halfway down the hall to the back stairway she stops. Jolly is still shooting and shouting at the bottom of the main stairway. She carefully steps down three stairs during another exchange of gunfire. Jolly has moved behind the edge of a doorway and is still aiming at one or more assailants in the living room.

Jolly looks up and sees his sister again. His eyes widen and a smile begins to form until he sees her raise the pistol in his direction. He ducks as she squeezes off the first of nine shots. Three find their mark, one in the temple of the man who had come in through the back door and was about to kill her brother.

13

Berlin

T
his time, when Sobieski goes back to Siren, she brings her gun.

At first, the night guard isn't going to let her pass. He asks for ID and when she reaches for her badge, she realizes that she never got it back from Heinrich Schultz. One more thing to explain to Michaud once she goes back to Hong Kong for phase one of her worldwide mea culpa tour.

“I am a law enforcement agent of the United States. A cop. Police.” She tries to remember how to say it in German, but it's no use.

He shakes his head: “ID.”

She pulls a fifty-euro bill out of the front pocket of her jeans and slaps it on his podium. “Five minutes,” she says, holding up five fingers. “Okay?”

He takes the money, puts it in his own front pocket, and looks the other way.

After Nello left, with the names of the securities and her assurance that she would provide more, she went into the bathroom and vomited. Back in her room she sat naked on the hotel bed, the linens barely ruffled, and thought about suicide. It wouldn't have been for drama, or to show some guy that she meant it, or to get her family's attention. That's because there is no guy, and no family to give or withhold attention. It would be just you, she thought. You'd be doing it to punish you. To end you.

“Cheung sent you all this way just to follow me?”

Nello nodded. “He saw immense potential in you. Rightfully, it turns out.”

“What does he want?”

“Everything you know. What you owe him, in a sense, plus interest.”

“Or else?”

“Not sure. A gradual dismantling of your reputation and your life. Or a rather quick one.”

“What about the book?”

He gave her a blank look.

“On the plane. You managed to sit beside me and to have read the book in my hands?”

He shrugged. “I looked it up on the Internet while you were reading it. We had a lot of time. By the way, I thought it sucked.”

The door is still unlocked. She twists the knob, pushes it open, and flips on the overhead fluorescents. When she sees that the office is empty, she turns the lights back off, closes the door, and walks across the room. The glow of the surrounding buildings and streets provide enough light for her to see. On hands and knees she crawls the length of the bank of windows, dragging her left hand along the underside of the radiator cover.

Beneath the last window her fingers come to rest upon the electrical tape, and the lump beneath it. It doesn't take much to peel away one end of tape. Heinrich probably did the same almost every day. Since they searched him on the way out it was the only way he could have a hard copy of his transactions. She holds it up to the window for a better look. Red, small. Nothing special on the outside, but presumably powerful enough to take down a man, a company, or a government on the inside. She feels bad for Heinrich Shultz, but the son of a bitch had to know.

She walks back to her hotel along the night sidewalks of the financial district. She passes beneath the glass and steel towers and the ornate stone edifices that once housed royalty and are now home to the kings and queens of the financial kingdom. The progression makes sense, she thinks, which leads to another question: After monarchs and money, whom will we worship, to whom or what will we bow next?

In her coat pocket is her phone, which she has on mute. She doesn't want to hear from Michaud again, or Nello, or Cheung.

It's after 5
A.M.
when she walks back into the lobby of her hotel. At six she's scheduled to go to the airport to head back to Hong Kong and Michaud and judgment.

Packing takes minutes. Primarily because she never unpacked the little she brought to begin with. When she's finished, she sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her face. It's too late to sleep, too early to do much else. She never thought she'd want to, but she wishes she could cry. When her father got arrested when she was in high school, she wouldn't allow it. Wouldn't even allow it when her mother passed away. She didn't cry then and hasn't cried since.

She thinks of the piece-of-shit Nello reprimanding her for living her life to atone for the imperfections of another and thinks, Even a liar and a criminal can see it. She wonders, When will it be okay to walk away? When will it be all right to abandon a career in law enforcement and leave the financial world and her superhero revenge-and-reparation fantasy and move on to whatever it is that she was meant to do?

Soon, she tells herself. She can feel it. But not now. Not after compromising everything by giving away inside information to a man who is worse than a criminal. She could never move on or end it like this.

It's been more than four hours since she last checked her messages. Some kind of record. She scrolls through the contents of her inbox. Michaud. Michaud. Michaud. Marco. Michaud. Flight confirmation for tomorrow. Or today, really. Michaud. Marco.

Then this, less than an hour ago: Sawa Luhabe.

As soon as she finishes reading Luhabe's
What I Know Now
message, and Luhabe's suggestion that she immediately get in contact with this American quant analyst, she grabs her bag and leaves for the airport. In the cab en route she's already on the phone with the airlines, looking for the next flight to New York.