Rae and Wulf stood alone in the hallway of his palatial house, outside the door to his home office.
They had come in through the garage again, through the bustling kitchen, and then turned to go behind the grand staircase and back into the catacombs of the house. The honey-beige walls seemed so normal, nearly anonymous, but the sturdy oak door was locked.
Locked doors could hide things, even from his staff.
Wulf keyed a number into a beeping keypad installed on the wall beside the door.
Rae’s heart thudded under her breastbone, though she was trying to play it cool rather than gawking like a country hick. She had a bad feeling that she might be all a-gape and a-gawp at whatever he was going to show her.
It probably wasn’t going to be an artist’s studio full of beautiful paintings. Artists liked light, and they were deep in the house. The room inside probably had no windows, so no one would see what happened in there.
A slight tang of ozone tickled Rae’s nose, like something electrical in there was snapping.
Wulf rested his hand on the doorknob, pausing.
Rae wanted to tell him to open it already and get this over with.
Instead, he turned and wrapped his arms around her. His dark blue eyes were so serious as he looked back and forth between her eyes, searching. He said, “We have five days before we leave for Paris. I’ll tell you everything, but this is my stipulation: I want those five days. No matter what you decide at the end, I need those five days.”
Even though she had already promised to go with him.
“I have class this week.” She couldn’t be his beck-and-call girl when she had three mid-terms scheduled for the week before spring break.
“I’m cognizant of that. I won’t disrupt your education, now or ever. But, I ask of you, no matter what you see, no matter what you think, give me until Friday. Talk to me. Don’t run.”
His gravitas was creeping Rae out. “There aren’t, like, frozen heads or something in there, right?”
Wulf closed his eyes and pinched his nose like he was fighting off a headache. “No. No frozen heads. Good Lord, where do you come up with these things?”
Because he was acting like he had done something truly horrendous. “Well, you know, you see things online.”
“Compared to frozen heads, perhaps nothing will shock you. That would be quite a turn of events. One that I would welcome.” He shook his head and untangled his arms from her waist. “Frozen heads. Mon Dieu.”
He opened the door to a dark, airless room.
She had kind of thought his “home office” might be a euphemism for a home dungeon with spiked sex toys and leather masks, or worse, maybe some of the really depraved stuff that she had read about on the internet, but it looked more like a computerized secret world government headquarters.
Eight huge flat-screen televisions, stacked two high and four across, curved around a large horseshoe desk with one chair. Wan lights glowed in the ceiling.
After all that wind-up, the pitch was a desk?
It was a really nifty desk, but it was just a disappointing desk. “This is it?”
He said, “This is where I work.”
She said, “It looks like you could launch World War Three from here.”
Wulf nodded. “I’ve always thought the next world war would be fought with computers and commodities rather than conventional weapons, so you aren’t off the mark.” He held her hand and jiggled the mouse.
All eight screens illuminated, bathing the two of them in green light. Multicolored numbers poured down the screens like waterfalls of confetti.
“It looks like the Matrix,” she said.
He shrugged. “Sometimes it feels that way.”
“Show me.”
Wulf released her hand and sat at the tall office chair in the center of the desk. All the screens were within his reach. He touched the screens, and the numbers followed his fingers, even across several screens, like they were enormous touchscreen tablets. He zipped them around, arranging the three- or four-letter codes and numbers, while he typed with his left hand on a keyboard. “I work in here in the mornings, from about three o’clock, local time, until noon or two o’clock, when the New York exchanges close.”
“I thought The Devilhouse was your job.”
He switched hands, dragging strings of numbers across the screens to different sections, like the sorcerer’s apprentice conducting brooms and buckets. “The Devilhouse is a minor project that now yields a positive cash flow, so it is time to divest myself of it. I made eighty-two percent on the investment after five years, a tidy profit, but not my best by any measure.”
Rae watched the flickering numbers fly. “What do you do here? Buy stocks?”
“In a manner of speaking. I trade options, commodities, and futures in six different international markets. Watch. I sell this one, buy this one, all with a swipe or a click.”
Numbers changed colors as he touched them.
“It’s Sunday. Even I know that the stock market isn’t open on Sundays.”
“Monday pre-open futures in Hong Kong.”
“Oh.” So much for trying to look smart. She watched his hands fly over the screens and the lone keyboard. “What did you just do there?”
“Bought some call futures for tomorrow. It looks like a positive opening. I also bought back some options that I had sold on some stocks traded on this index.”
Rae blinked. The craze of numbers made her eyes hurt. “That sounds backward.”
“Indeed. In trading, the arrow of time flies both ways.”
Rae put her hands up beside her eyes like blinders. “That sounds insane.”
“Ah, then you’ve got it. Splendid.”
“So, you’re like an investment banker.”
“That’s an apt analogy.”
“So this is like a money market fund. This isn’t your money.”
He swiveled in the chair to face her. Green light glowed on the pale skin on one side of his face. Red light brightened the other.
He pulled her down to sit on his lap. She feared for the chair, but like everything in Wulf’s house, it was built from solid materials and had probably cost ten times what she thought it should.
He said, “It’s more like a hedge fund, but it’s all my money. Mine and my family’s. Most of our investments are illiquid, tied up in business partnerships and real estate like The Devilhouse, but I keep track of a good chunk of it in the markets, too.”
Rae had no way to measure what he was doing. She dodged. “I can’t imagine how much this computer set-up cost.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”
Impossible. “Holy cow!”
That was more than five years’ income for her father.
He had the grace to neither look arrogant or falsely modest. “It increased my efficiency by eleven percent, an enormous increase.”
Two hundred thousand dollars was enough to open Ray of Light, her dreamed-of autism clinic, all here, as a desk. “Oh my God.”
He smoothed the hair around her face. “It sounds more impressive than it is. Investments accumulate. It’s cliché, but it’s true: turning one hundred dollars into one hundred ten dollars is hard work, but turning a hundred million dollars into one hundred ten million is inevitable.”
She had seen his house and cars. She had known he was loaded, not that it mattered to her.
Actually, it did matter, just not in a good way.
Her family would have pronounced spending so much money on a desk as obscene, that people shouldn’t be allowed to have so much money because firefighters and teachers weren’t millionaires, even as her parents protested increasing tax rates on the highest income brackets because it penalized job creators.
Her family had dumped her, so Rae didn’t have to worry about their reaction to Wulf’s excessive amounts of cash.
Her own shock, however, verged on horror. She felt foolish and like she had made so many faux pas in front of him. “Wulf, are you like, a millionaire?”
Even though his house and cars and servants proved that he obviously was.
“I have enough money for anything I would want.” Again, he said it like a statement about the weather, very British.
Flippancy seemed like a good defense. “Except, like, buy an island or something.”
His smile widened, showing a little too much of his canine teeth. “Would you like an island?”
“No! Wulf, that’s weird. Don’t even say things like that.”
He leaned and began touching the screens behind her back. On the monitors, he tapped through some drop down menus. His long fingers flew across the glowing numbers like he was playing runs on a piano. The boards flashed like airplane flight displays adjusting themselves, but with Christmas-colored glowing digits on black. “You should know it all. I told you that I would show you, so I shall. The lower right-hand corner displays the total.”
Rae’s brain felt incapable of math just then. “What total?”
“The current net value for my personal trading assets, across all markets.”
Rae slid her gaze over the flickering screens, almost afraid of what the glowing number would be. Normal people never had so much money. Real people shouldn’t have so much money. Thus, Wulf was not normal and was not a person. He was a walking wallet or something. He might be stuffed with shredded-money wadding or bleed molten gold.
She had seen photographic evidence to the contrary.
He must despise her for how her family lived. She couldn’t believe that she had taken him to meet her parents on their dirt farm, never mind that they had surely disowned her.
She tracked through the flashing numbers on the multitude of screens and finally got to the lower, right corner.
The number down there had a lot of digits that flickered, fluctuating with trading values. The last five digits blurred, but several to the left shone steadily.
She couldn’t find a decimal point. “Am I looking at dollars, here?”
“Euros.”
“So that number there,” which had nine digits, which meant hundreds of millions, “is in Euros?”
“Yes. I tend to think in Euros.”
“I’m afraid to ask what it is in dollars.” The first number was an eight.
“I can convert it.” He flipped his fingers at the screen, conjuring, and the lower-right number climbed by thirty percent.
A billion. A billion with a B. A number that should be expressed with exponents. “Oh, my God.”
“There is more.” When he looked at her, green-lit numbers flashed over his blue eyes.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is my trading portfolio. As I said, my investments are primarily in land and partnerships. This number does not reflect those assets.”
“I don’t want to know.” She really didn’t want to know all this stuff.
“I totaled everything a few weeks ago for the end of the fiscal quarter. It came out to a tad over four billion.”
Billions with a B and an S. Billy-ions and billy-ions like stars in the sky. She sucked in a deep breath. “Euros or dollars?”
Not that it mattered. It was all too much. It was all too much money.
“Euros,” he said.
“But that’s your family’s money, right? Some type of a conglomerate? Like that family that owns most of Walmart or the Saudi families?”
“No. That’s an order of magnitude greater, if you include certain familial holdings.”
“Oh, my God.” Rae covered her face with her hands. “Why do you live in the Southwest? Why don’t you live in a castle in France or something?”
Wulf didn’t answer that one. He just wrapped his arms around her while she adjusted, or at least pretended that she could handle even the concept of such otherworldly sums of money.
“Why doesn’t everyone know? Why aren’t you on the cover of all the money magazines, every month?”
“Those magazines only pick up windfalls from IPOs or published holdings. It’s quite easy to be discreet with old money.”
“You’ve got so much money, more than enough money. Why are you still trading? How much more do you want?”
“The conventional answer to that question is, ‘All of it,’ but there’s more to it than that.” He bit his lower lip, a real bite this time where his teeth indented the soft skin under them so much that Rae put her hand on his arm to stop him from drawing blood.
He said, “There’s more to it.”
“You know, you don’t have to tell me everything. Just tell me the important stuff, hit the highlights, because I’m not sure that I want to know everything anymore.” Her breathy voice had a note of hysteria.
Wulf’s voice dropped even lower. “No one knows this. Not my family, not Frau Keller or Dieter or Yoshi. If this were known, they could push back. They could stop me. At worst, someone could take offense and come after me.”
“First frozen heads, and now you sound like a super-villain who’s planning to blow up Metropolis.”
He held both her hands in his. “I need your word that you won’t divulge this to anyone. You cannot hint. You cannot skirt the subject. You cannot smile knowingly. No matter what happens between us, it goes no farther.”
Foreboding weighed on her. “As long as it isn’t illegal or evil, I won’t tell anyone.”
Wulf nodded. “That’s fair.”
“Do I even want to know this?”
“I stop wars.”
Not computing. Not registering. “You do what?”
His tight lips barely moved, like he did not want to say those words. “Stop wars. I stop them from starting, or I turn them off.”
“So you, like, fly around the world and negotiate peace treaties? Wouldn’t people notice that?”
“That’s not how I do it. A few years ago, when I was writing my PhD thesis, a few unscrupulous traders crashed Iceland’s economy to profit on their short positions on the Icelandic Króna.”
The words jumbled and bumbled in her head and didn’t turn into a thought. “I didn’t understand that at all.”
Wulf said, “They bet against the value of the Króna, the Icelandic dollar. If the currency lost value, they made money. A few days later, a school chum and I were discussing the obscene amounts of money that were being made on positions buoyed by a civil war in an obscure African nation, mostly off commodities, guns, body bags, and the like. It occurred to me: What if I shorted war?”
“You can’t bet on a war. That’s unethical or something.”
“That’s not it. I use credit default swaps and commodities prices to suck the oxygen out of a war before it catches fire. I run up the prices on materiel. I soak up other investors’ liquidity and force them to double-down, which causes them to panic and run. I put downward pressure on the credit interest rates. If I need to, I call school chums who work at Goldman Sachs.”
Even Rae had heard of them. “Did you ever work for Goldman Sachs?”
Wulf said, “I am descended from pillaging robber barons and have been trained as cold-blooded assassin, but I would never work at Goldman Sachs.”
Rae frowned. “And that will stop a war?”
“All those guns and all those bullets are usually bought on credit with gold or diamonds for collateral. When I drive up the prices, it becomes very expensive to buy the guns and bullets to wage the war, plus the warlords cannot obtain credit because the very risky loans are saddled with abnormally depressed interest rates. No one will take the other side. Even a few points will make the loans unattractive to major lenders because tenths of a percent mean hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“And you can do that all from here, from this computer.”
“It’s not a glamorous way to prevent war. Building schools with one’s name on them and cutting ribbons is far more stylish and garners better publicity, if you like that sort of thing. Most of the time I can even turn a profit on it, though I can lose spectacularly, but if the war holds off, I count it as a win. I’m willing to lose a few hundred million dollars a year, depending on how many lives it saves. I trade to make it back.”
“And that’s what you use all this money for.”
“Plus I maintain a certain lifestyle. People depend on me for their livelihoods and eventual retirements.”
She blurted, “Couldn’t you just give it all away?”
“That’s an interesting response.” Wulf lifted one eyebrow and almost smiled. “To whom?”
“I don’t know. UNICEF. Oxfam. Wounded Warriors. Autism research. Anybody else.”
He lifted one blond eyebrow as he regarded her. “And what would that do?”
“Then they wouldn’t come after you,” she said, “because it’s the money, right? If you gave it all away, you’d be safe. You wouldn’t need guards with guns. You wouldn’t have to live in a fort with security cameras and lights blazing all night. They would leave you alone.”
“It’s not just the money.” He settled his arms around her.
She felt his lips brush her hair as the glowing numbers flashed in her eyes. “I don’t think I want to know anymore.”
His voice rumbled by her ear. “You need to know.”